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Title: Books and Authors
Author: Robert Lynd
Release date: March 11, 2024 [eBook #73139]
Language: English
Credits: Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOKS AND AUTHORS ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
Books and Authors
Books and Authors
By
Robert Lynd
Delight, the parent of so many virtues.
_Coleridge._
Let us enjoy, whenever we have an opportunity,
the delight of admiration, and perform the
duties of reverence.
_Landor._
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York & London
The Knickerbocker Press
1923
Copyright, 1923
by
Robert Lynd
[Illustration]
Made in the United States of America
To
H. M. TOMLINSON
PREFACE
TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
To write books about books has been spoken of as though it were a
parasitic industry. Undoubtedly, books about books are among the
least necessary of books. The world delighted in songs and epics and
histories for centuries before it paused to attend to a literary
critic. Even to-day, when men engage in the eternal discussion of the
books with which they would like to be left on a desert island, I do
not think a vote is ever given to a volume of criticism. The poet, the
essayist, the novelist, the biographer, the philosopher, are all safe
among the world’s best authors: the critic must be content if he is
given a place among the second-best. He is not a contributor to the
hundred best books; the most that he can claim is that no collection of
the thousand best books would be complete without him. Certainly, it is
difficult to imagine a well-chosen library of a thousand books without
a volume or two of literary criticism.
This may be because a thousand supremely good books have not yet been
written--a melancholy reflection when we think of all the ink and paper
that have been used since authorship began. I think, however, it is
also partly due to the fact that as human society becomes civilised,
books become more and more a necessary part of the environment of men
and women, so that we may say that on the whole it is more natural for
a civilised man to write a book about books than a book about birds or
butterflies. In a highly-developed civilisation, literature inevitably
takes literature as part of its subject-matter as it takes every other
great human interest. Even the historian ends by admitting authors
among his characters along with statesmen and soldiers, and in general
literature we have poems on poets, essays on essayists, biographies of
biographers, criticisms of critics, and novels about novelists. Writing
about writers, indeed, has become in our day an all but universal
practice, and it seems to me to stand in no more need of defence than
writing about tramps or travellers, about business-men or burglars.
There is, I admit, always a danger that a writer about writers
may become excessively professional. He may discuss writing as a
cotton-manufacturer would discuss the manufacture of cotton, telling
us a great deal about the mechanism of production and nothing about the
energies, sacrifices, and personal qualities that are the secret of
genius in business as in the arts. Criticism of this kind is important,
but its place is in a technical or professional treatise. Criticism,
in order to justify itself as a branch of literature, must subordinate
all such technical matter to philosophy or biography, or both,--must
associate ideas about literature with ideas about life, as Schopenhauer
did, or like Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold, must portray in an
author, not only an author, but a man.
Those critics who write about literature as though it were a cult for
the few instead of a normal human interest, confine themselves largely
to analysis--some of them to pretended analysis. They do not see that
the critic’s analysis is of value only if it leads to a synthesis.
There is no use in his taking to pieces what he sees as the genius of
Shakespeare if he cannot put it together again in such a way that it is
mirrored in the minds and imaginations of his readers as well as in his
own. It seems to me to be the positive task of criticism to create in
one’s own mind an image of a writer’s genius and then to try to clear
the minds of one’s readers so that the same image will be reflected in
theirs. We may fail; but that, at least, is what we are attempting to
do, or what we ought to be attempting to do.
ROBERT LYND.
LONDON, November, 1922.
CONTENTS
MORE OR LESS ANCIENT
PAGE
I.--HERRICK 3
II.--VICTOR HUGO 12
III.--MOLIÈRE 22
IV.--EDMUND BURKE 30
V.--KEATS 41
VI.--CHARLES LAMB 61
VII.--BYRON ONCE MORE 68
VIII.--SHELLEY 76
IX.--PLUTARCH’S ANECDOTES 84
X.--HANS ANDERSEN 93
XI.--JOHN CLARE 104
XII.--HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS 114
XIII.--A WORDSWORTH DISCOVERY 122
XIV.--THE POETRY OF POE 131
XV.--HAWTHORNE 140
XVI.--JONAH IN LANCASHIRE 149
INTERLUDE
THE CULT OF DULLNESS 159
MORE OR LESS MODERN
I.--MR. MAX BEERBOHM 171
II.--MR. ARNOLD BENNETT CONFESSES 188
III.--MR. CONRAD AT HOME 196
IV.--MR. WELLS AND THE WORLD 206
V.--MR. CLUTTON-BROCK 214
VI.--HENLEY THE VAINGLORIOUS 222
VII.--LORD ROSEBERY 230
VIII.--MR. VACHEL LINDSAY 237
IX.--MR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING 244
X.--MR. H. M. TOMLINSON 252
XI.--THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV 260
XII.--NIETZSCHE: A NOTE 268
XIII.--MR. T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC 277
XIV.--MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS’S DISLIKES 285
XV.--M. ANDRE GIDE MAKES A JOKE 293
FINALE
THE CRITIC 305
MORE OR LESS ANCIENT
I
HERRICK
Herrick was a gross and good-natured clergyman who had a double chin.
He kept a pet pig, which drank beer out of a tankard, and he and the
pig had probably a good many of the same characteristics. It would be a
libel on him to say that he was a pig, but it would not be a libel to
say that he was a pet pig.
His life, like the pet pig’s, was not real, and it certainly was not
earnest. He spent the best part of his youth mourning over the brevity
of life, and he lived till he was comfortably over eighty. He was an
Epicurean, indeed, in the vulgar sense of the word, whose dominant
theme was the mortality of pretty things. For Herrick gives us the
feeling that for him the world was a world of pretty things rather than
of beautiful things. He was the son of a goldsmith in Cheapside, and
himself served an apprenticeship to the trade. The effect of this may,
I think, be seen in his verse. His spiritual home always remained in
Cheapside rather than in the Church which he afterwards entered. He
enjoyed the world as though it were a street of shops. To read him is
to call at the florist’s and the perfumer’s and the milliner’s and the
jeweller’s and the confectioner’s and the vintner’s and the fruiterer’s
and the toy-seller’s. If he writes, as he proclaims, of bridegrooms
and brides, he does not forget the bride’s dress or the bride’s cake.
His very vision of Nature belittles it to the measure of “golden
Cheapside.” He begins _Fair Days_ with the lines:
Fair was the dawn; and but e’en now the skies
Show’d like rich cream, enspir’d with strawberries.
If he invites Phyllis to love him and live with him in the country, he
reduces the hills for her to the size of bric-à-brac:
Thy feasting-tables shall be hills
With daisies spread, and daffodils.
He was one of those happily constituted men who can get pleasure from
most things, and it is obvious that he got a great deal of pleasure
from his life in Devonshire, where he was Vicar of Dean Prior, till
he was ejected after the triumph of Cromwell in the Civil War. But
his heart was never in Devonshire. There is no mirror of Devonshire
in his verse. He was a censorious exile amid beauty of that sort, and
could have had all the flowers and country scenes he cared for within
an hour’s walk of the shop in Cheapside. He speaks in one of his poems
of “this loathed country-life,” and in the verses called _Dean-bourn,
a rude River in Devon, by which he sometimes dwelt_, he bids the river
farewell, and expresses the hope that he will never set eyes on its
“warty incivility” again:
To my content, I never should behold,
Were thy streams silver, or thy rocks all gold.
Rocky thou art, and rocky we discover
Thy men, and rocky are thy ways all over.
O men, O manners, now and ever known
To be a rocky generation!
A people currish, churlish as the seas,
And rude almost as rudest savages.
There is no missing the sincere unappreciativeness of these lines. The
best that he can say of Devon is not that it is beautiful but that he
wrote some good verses in it:
More discontents I never had
Since I was born than here,
Where I have been and still am sad,
In this dull Devonshire.
Yet justly too I must confess;
I ne’er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the Press
Than where I loathed so much.
It has been remarked that, even when he writes of fairies, he has in
mind, not the fairies of the West Country, but the fairies he brought
with him from Ben Jonson’s London. He is rich in the fancies of the
town-poet. For him Oberon walks through a grove “tinselled with
twilight,” and is led by the shine of snails. As for the cave in which
the Fairy King seeks Queen Mab:
To pave
The excellency of this cave,
Squirrels’ and children’s teeth late shed
Are neatly here enchequered.
_Oberon’s Feast_ again is a revel of fantastical dishes not from
nature, but from that part of the imagination that is a toy-shop:
A little moth
Late fattened in a piece of cloth:
With withered cherries; mandrake’s ears;
Moles’ eyes; to these, the slain stag’s tears;
The unctuous dewlaps of a snail;
The broke heart of a nightingale
O’ercome in music.
The very titles of many of his poems seem to have come straight from
the toy-shop. How charming some of them are:
_A ternary of Littles upon a pipkin of Jelly sent to a lady;
Upon a Cherrystone sent to the tip of the Lady Jemonia Walgrave’s ear;
Upon a black Twist, rounding the Arm of the Countess of Carlisle;
Upon Julia’s Hair, bundled up in a golden net;
To the Fever, not to trouble Julia;
Upon Lucia, dabbled in the Dew;
The Funeral Rites of the Rose!_
Most beautiful of all, perhaps, is the title of his most famous poem,
“Gather ye rosebuds,” which runs, _To the Virgins, to make much of
time_. Herrick’s small and delightful genius is as manifest in the
titles of his poems as in the poems themselves. All the perfume of
his verse is in such titles as _To live merrily, and to trust to Good
Verses_; _To Mistress Katherine Bradshaw the lovely, that crowned
him with Laurel_; _To the most virtuous Mistress Pot, who many times
entertained him_; and, especially, _To Daisies, not to shut so soon_.
Herrick appears in his poetry, if we leave out of consideration
the inferior religious verse in _Noble Numbers_, mainly in three
characters. He is the cheerful countryman, the praiser of his
mistresses, and the philosopher of the mortality of pretty things. As
for the first, he was too good a disciple of Horace not to be able to
play the part cheerfully and to smile among his animals and his beans:
A hen
I keep, which, creaking day by day,
Tells when
She goes her long white egg to lay.
A lamb
I keep (tame) with my morsels fed,
Whose dam
An orphan left him (lately dead) ...
A cat
I keep, that plays about my house,
Grown fat
With eating many a miching mouse.
As he writes down the list, he himself realises to what an extent his
life in the country is a life of make-believe among toys:
Which are
But toys to give my heart some ease:
Where care
Ne’er is, slight things do lightly please.
His mistresses are, however, a thing apart from this happy farmyard.
When he goes to the farmyard for a simile in praise of Julia, the
effect is amusing, but it is a little lower than love-poetry:
Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg,
Which is as white and hairless as an egg.
Some critics have doubted whether Herrick ever was actually in love.
They regard his Julias and Antheas and Lucias as but an array of Delf
shepherdesses that every poet of the day was expected to keep on his
table. This may be true of most of the ladies, but Julia seems real
enough. Herrick was obviously incapable of the passion of Keats or
Shelley or Browning, but we may take it that he had been enchained and
enchanted by the lady with the black eyes and the replica of his own
double chin:
Black and rolling is her eye,
Double-chinn’d, and forehead high;
Lips she has, all ruby red,
Cheeks like cream enclareted;
And a nose that is the grace
And proscenium of her face.
It is not a very attractive picture, and it is characteristic of
Herrick that he can paint Julia’s clothes better than he can paint her
face. It was an enchained and enchanted man who wrote those lines that
are far too well known to quote and far too charming to refrain from
quoting:
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me.
This is no figmentary picture. The songs to Julia--most of all, the
glorious _Night Piece_--are songs of experience. Herrick may not have
loved Julia well enough to marry her, even if she had been willing,
but he loved her well enough to write good verses. He could probably
have said farewell to any woman as philosophically as he said farewell
to sack. He was a cautious man, and a predestined bachelor. He was,
indeed, a man of no very profound feeling. There is no deep tide of
emotion making his verse musical. He knew love and he knew regret, but
not tragically. If he wept to see the daffodils haste away so soon,
we may be sure that he brushed away his tears at the sound of the
dinner-bell and forgot the premature death of the flowers in cheerful
conversation with his housekeeper, Prue. This does not mean that his
mood was insincere; it does not mean that in _To Daffodils_ he did not
give immortal and touching expression to one of the universal sorrows
of men. He comes nearer the grave music of poetry here than in any of
his other poems. But the _Memento mori_ that runs through his verses
is the _Memento mori_ of a banqueter, not of a sufferer. It is the
mournfulness of a heart that has no intention of breaking.
Herrick proved a true prophet in regard to the immortality of his
verse, though _Hesperides_ made no great stir when it was published
in 1648 and seems to have made no friends among critics till the end
of the eighteenth century. But he never gave a wiser estimate of the
quality of his work than those lines, in _When he would have his verses
read_, where he bids us:
In sober mornings do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse;
But when that men have both well drank and fed,
Let my enchantments then be sung or read....
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointment shine,
Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.
This is the muse at play. It is absurd to speak of Herrick as though
he were a great lyric poet. He is not with Shakespeare. He is not with
Campion. But he is a master of light poetry--of poetry under the rose.
II
VICTOR HUGO
It is easy to disparage Victor Hugo, but, in order to disparage him,
it is necessary to abstain from reading him. Take down his books
and begin to read, and, even if you do not agree with the verdict,
you will understand before long how it was that a generation or so
ago people used to regard Victor Hugo as one of the great names in
literature. It was only Swinburne, perhaps, who could describe him as
“the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare,” but this did
not seem an absurd exaggeration to the majority of readers at the time
it was written, and even a crabbed critic like Henley accepted him as
“plainly ... the greatest man of letters of his day.” His influence as
well as his reputation was enormous and extended far beyond France. He
was a great author for the great Russians. He was one of Dostoevsky’s
favourite writers, and _Notre Dame_ was one of the books that
influenced Tolstoy; even in his censorious old age Tolstoy admitted
_Les Misérables_ through the strait gate of the best literature in
_What is Art?_ and it seems likely, as Madame Duclaux suggests, that it
was at the back of his mind when he wrote _Resurrection_.
His greatest contemporaries, however, realised that Hugo was
a charlatan as well as a man of genius. Madame Duclaux quotes
Baudelaire’s comment, “Victor Hugo--an inspired donkey!” and his
assertion that the Almighty, “in a mood of impenetrable mystification,”
had taken genius and silliness in equal parts in order to compound the
brain of Victor Hugo. She also quotes Balzac’s criticism of the first
night of _Les Burgraves_:
The story simply does not exist, the invention is beneath contempt.
But the poetry--ah, the poetry goes to your head. It’s Titian
painting his fresco on a wall of mud. Yet there is in Victor Hugo’s
plays an absence of _heart_, which was never so conspicuous. Victor
Hugo is not _true_.
“Victor Hugo is not _true_.” That is the suspicion that constantly
trips one up whether one reads his books or his life. In literature, in
public life, in private life, he was not only amazing but an amazing
humbug. We see evidence of this in the story of his relations with his
wife and Juliette Drouet, his mistress, which Madame Duclaux tells
again so fairly and so well. Even while he was pursuing the mistress
across France, he would write fervently home to the wife: “Je t’aime!
Tu es la joie et l’honneur de ma vie!” Hugo possibly meant this when
he wrote it. He may have been lying to himself rather than to his
wife. His falseness lay in his readiness to whisper at each shrine
at which he worshipped that this was his only shrine. At the same
time, no sooner do we admit that Hugo was an impostor in love and in
literature than we begin to compare him with other impostors and to
note certain differences in him. His early idealism was not merely an
idealism of words. He was, until his marriage, as chaste as his nature
was passionate. He was after marriage a faithful husband till his wife
told him that she could no longer live with him as his wife. After he
fell in love with Juliette Drouet in 1833, we might describe him as
a high-minded bigamist, though he did not remain perfectly faithful
even in his bigamy. One thing, at least, is certain: both women loved
him till the end of their long lives. His dying wife wrote to him in
1868: “The end of my dream is to die in your arms.” And, when Juliette
Drouet was slowly dying of cancer, and both she and Hugo were between
seventy and eighty, she still insisted on nursing him at the hint of
the slightest cough or headache. “Did he but stir, she was there with
a warm drink or an extra covering. Every morning it was she who drew
the curtains from Victor Hugo’s window, roused the old man with a kiss
on the forehead, lit his fire, prepared the two fresh eggs that formed
his breakfast, read him the papers.” Had he been all false, he could
hardly have preserved the affection of these two rival and devoted
women through years of danger and exile till the ultimate triumph of
his fame. Madame Duclaux suggests, however, that he was a humbug even
on that early occasion on which, seeing that Sainte-Beuve was in love
with his wife, and that she in turn was attracted by Sainte-Beuve
he offered with romantic generosity to let his wife choose between
them and to abide by the result. Again, the fact that he insisted on
remaining friends with Sainte-Beuve through the affair is regarded as
evidence of his cunning determination to keep in with the reviewers at
all costs. Victor Hugo would probably be suspected of having been a
humbug, whatever he had done.
His self-importance is a continual challenge to our belief in him.
Madame Duclaux quotes Heine’s sneer: “Hugo is worse than an egoist,
he is a Hugoist,” and his device was the arrogant _Ego Hugo_. But at
least he had the courage of his self-importance. In 1851, at the time
of the _coup d’état_ of Louis Napoleon, when there was a price on his
head, Hugo was driving across Paris to a meeting of the Insurrectionary
Committee, and passed a group of officers on horseback:
The blood rushed to his head. He flung down the window of the cab,
tore his deputy’s scarf out of his pocket, and waving it wildly,
began to harangue the General:
“You, who are there, dressed in the uniform of a General, it is to
you that I speak, sir. You know who I am; I am a representative of
the nation: and I know who you are; you are a malefactor! And now
do you wish to know my name! My name is Victor Hugo!”
This was no doubt theatrical, and both his deeds and his words during
the reign of Napoleon the Little were those of a man consciously
playing the leading part. But the fact remains that at this crisis he
did risk everything and face twenty years’ exile for the sake of his
convictions. The last stanza of “Ultima Verba” in _Les Châtiments_ may
be rhetoric, but it is not empty rhetoric:
Si l’on n’est plus que mille, eh bien, j’en suis! Si même
Ils ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla:
S’il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième;
Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là.
There is an energy of fury in Hugo’s political verse that keeps it
alive even to-day, when Louis Napoleon, a charlatan without this
redeeming fury, has receded into such littleness that the eye scarcely
any longer perceives him. Hugo at times seems a painfully vocative
poet--the poet, not merely of the vocative singular, but of the
vocative plural. But there is always coursing through his verse a great
natural force, like that of the wind or the waves, that carries us
along as we read.
Hugo’s work, like his life, indeed, was the expression of what
Madame Duclaux calls “a powerful and a sensual nature, a prodigious
temperament.”
His barber complained that Hugo’s beard took the edge off any
razor. At forty he cracked the kernels of peaches with his teeth;
even in his old age ... he ate his oranges with the peel on and his
lobsters in their shell, “because he found them more digestible.”
His appetite (which was hungry, not greedy) alarmed the good Théo.
“You should see the fabulous medley he makes on his plate of all
sorts and conditions of viands: cutlets, a salad of white beans,
stewed beef and tomato sauce, and watch him devour them, very fast,
and during a long time.”
“Hugo is one of the forces of Nature!” cried Flaubert, “and there
circulates in his veins the sap of trees.”
This Gargantuan appetite expresses itself everywhere in his writings.
He was a Gargantua in regard to life as well as food. He devoured the
past like the present. He devoured politics, religion, the stage,
poetry, fiction, nature, grand-children. If he was a giant who
devoured, however, he was also a giant who created. He may not have the
accurate gift of observation on which we set so much store nowadays,
and he may depart so far from reality as to call an English sailor
in _L’Homme qui rit_ Tom-Jim-Jack. But, if he does not create for us
a world as real as Clapham Junction, he does create for us a world
as real as Æsop’s _Fables_. He is an inventor of myths and fables,
indeed. He no more attempts to imitate the surface of life than a
musician attempts to imitate the sounds of life. Like Dickens, he is a
great Gothic writer, who demands the right to people the work of his
hands with devil or imp or angel--with figures of pity or horror, of
laughter or tears. He does not possess Dickens’s comic imagination;
the fantastic and the ironic take the place of humour in his books.
But his work, like that of Dickens, is a gigantically grotesque pile
built on the ancient Christian affirmation of love. Literature in
our time may observe or ask questions: it seldom affirms. But I doubt
whether it even observes the essential heart of things with as sure an
eye as that of Hugo or Dickens. It does not penetrate with its pity to
that underworld of pain in which Cosette and Smike grow up, starved
and loveless. Hugo and Dickens were at least rescuers. They were not
mere sentimentalists: they had the imaginative sympathy that would not
let them rest in the presence of the miseries of life. They hated the
tyranny of men and the tyranny of institutions; they hated greed and
cruelty, and the iron door shut on children and on the helpless and the
suffering.
Hugo has dramatised this imaginative sympathy and hatred in novels
so mythical in substance that one might easily fall into the mistake
of regarding them as false. We must think of Jean Valjean and Javert
as figures in a morality play rather than in a psychological study
if we are to appreciate the greatness of _Les Misérables_. They were
created, not by God, but by Victor Hugo. But, if they have not at all
points psychological reality, they have at least legendary reality.
We can say the same of the characters in _Les Travailleurs de la mer_
and _L’Homme qui rit_. They all inhabit the world, not as it actually
is, but as it is transmuted in a legendary imagination. Unfortunately,
Hugo professes to write about real people and not about dragons, and
we constantly find ourselves applying psychological tests as we read
him. When Gilliatt drowns himself in _Les Travailleurs de la mer_ we
complain not only of the dubious psychology but of the mechanical
theatrical effect. Victor Hugo, we feel at such moments, was a great
“producer” rather than a great artist. He would, undoubtedly, had he
lived, have taken full advantage of the over-emphasis of the cinema. On
the other hand, the over-emphasis of which his critics complain is not
the over-emphasis of weakness straining after strength. It is rather an
overflow of the Gothic imagination. “His flat foot,” he tells us, of
a certain character, “was a vulture’s claw. His skull was low at the
top and large about the temples. His ugly ears bristled with hair, and
seemed to say: ‘Beware of speaking to the animal in this cave.’” His
style is essentially the exaggerated style. His genius is the genius
of exaggeration. Luckily, he exaggerates, not wholly in clouds, but
in carved gnomes and all manner of fantastic detail. He omits not a
comma from his dreams and nightmares. That is why his short sentences
and paragraphs still startle us into attention when we open one of
his novels. His imagination at least teems on every page--teems with
absurdities, perhaps, as well as with truth and beauty, but teems
always with interest. Madame Duclaux’s excellent biography should send
many readers back to the work of this magnificent and preposterous
legend-maker and lover of his fellow-men.
III
MOLIÈRE
The way of entertainers is hard. It is a good enough world for those
who entertain us no higher than the ribs, but to attempt to entertain
the mind is another matter. Comedy shows men and women (among other
things) what humbugs they are, and, as the greatest humbugs are
often persons of influence, the comic writer is naturally hated and
disparaged during his lifetime in some of the most powerful circles.
That Molière’s body was at first refused Christian burial may have
been due to the fact that he was an actor--in theory, an actor was
not allowed even to receive the Sacrament in those days unless he had
renounced his profession--but his profession of comic writer had during
the latter part of his life brought him into far worse disrepute than
his profession of comic actor. He was the greatest portrayer of those
companion figures, the impostor and the dupe, who ever lived, and, as a
result, every kind of impostor and dupe, whether religious, literary,
or fashionable, was enraged against him. That Molière was a successful
author is not disputed, but he never enjoyed a calm and unchallenged
success. He had the support of Louis XIV and the public, but the
orthodox, the professional and the highbrow lost no opportunity of
doing him an injury.
Molière was nearly forty-two when he produced _L’École des Femmes_. He
had already, as Mr. Tilley tells us, in his solidly instructive study,
“become an assured favourite with the public,” though _Les Précieuses
ridicules_ had given offence in the salons, and performances were
suspended for a time. With the appearance of _L’École des Femmes_ he
at length stood forth a great writer, and the critics began to take
counsel together. A ten months’ war followed, in the course of which he
delivered two smashing blows against his enemies, first in _La Critique
de l’École des Femmes_ and _L’Impromptu de Versailles_. Then “on May
12, 1664, he presented at Versailles the first three acts of Tartuffe.”
This began a new war which lasted, not merely ten months, but five
years. It was not until 1669 that Molière received permission to
produce in public the five-act play that we now know. The violence of
the storm the play raised may be gauged from the quotation Mr. Tilley
makes from Pierre Roullé’s pamphlet, in which Roullé called Molière “un
démon vêtu de chair et habillé en homme, un libertin, un impie digne
d’un supplice exemplaire.” Mr. Shaw himself never made people angrier
than Molière. Having held a religious hypocrite up to ridicule, Molière
went on to paint a comic portrait of a freethinker. He gave the world
_Dom Juan_, which was a great success--for a week or two. Suddenly, it
was withdrawn, and Molière never produced it again. Nor did he publish
it. It had apparently offended not only the clergy but the great
nobles, who disliked the exposure of a gentleman on his way to Hell.
It was, we may presume, these cumulative misfortunes that drove him
into the pessimistic mood out of which _Le Misanthrope_ was born. He
had now written three masterpieces for the purpose of entertaining
his fellows, and he was being treated, not as a public benefactor,
but as a public enemy. One of the three had been calumniated; one was
prohibited; the third had to be withdrawn. And, in addition to being
at odds with the world, he was at odds with his wife. He had married
her, a girl under twenty, when he himself was forty, and she apparently
remained a coquette after marriage. One could not ask for clearer
evidence of the sanity of Molière’s genius than the fact that he was
able to make of his bitter private and public quarrels one of the
most delightful comedies in literature. Alceste, it is true, with his
desire to quit the insincere and fashionable world and to retire into
the simple and secluded life, is said to be a study, not of Molière
himself, but of a misanthropic nobleman. But, though Molière may have
borrowed a few features of the nobleman’s story, he undoubtedly lent
the nobleman the soul of Molière. He had the comic vision of himself as
well as of the rest of humanity. He might mock the vices of the world,
but he could also mock himself for hating the world, in the spirit of
a superior person, on account of its vices. He could even, as a poet,
see his wife’s point of view, though he might quarrel with her as a
husband. Célimène, that witty and beautiful lady who refuses to retire
with Alceste into his misanthropic solitude, has had all the world in
love with her ever since. Molière, we may be sure, sympathised with her
when she protested:
La solitude effraye une âme de vingt ans.
Molière himself played the part of Alceste, and his wife played
Célimène. The play, we are told, was not one of his greatest popular
successes. As one reads it, indeed, one is puzzled at times as to why
it should be giving one such exquisite enjoyment. There is less action
in it than in any other great play. The plot never thickens, and the
fall of the curtain leaves us with nothing settled as to Alceste’s
and Célimène’s future. To write a comedy which is not very comic and
a drama which is not very dramatic, and to make of this a masterpiece
of comic drama, is surely one of the most remarkable of achievements.
It can only be explained by the fact that Molière was a great creator
and not a great mechanician. He gives the secret of life to his people.
His success in doing this is shown by the way in which men have argued
about them ever since, as we argue about real men and women. There are
even critics who are unable to laugh at Molière, so overwhelming is
the reality of his characters. Mr. Tilley quotes M. Donnay as saying,
“Aujourd’hui nous ne rions pas de Tartuffe ni même d’Orgon”; and even
Mr. Tilley himself, discussing _Le Malade imaginaire_, says that
we realise that Argan--Argan of the enemas--is “at bottom a tragic
figure.” Again, he sees a “tragic element” in the characterisation of
Harpagon in _L’Avare_, and, speaking of Alceste in _Le Misanthrope_,
he observes that, “though we may be sure that [Molière] fully realised
the tragic side of his character, it was not this aspect that he
wished to present to the public.” It seems to me that there is a good
deal of unreality in all this. It is as though the errors of men
were too serious things to laugh at--as though comedy had not its
own terrible wisdom and must not venture into the depths of reality.
Molière would probably have had a short way with those who cannot laugh
at _Tartuffe_, as Cervantes would have had a short way with those who
cannot laugh at _Don Quixote_. There is as much imagination--as much
sympathy, even, perhaps--in the laughter of the great comic writers
as in the tears of the sentimentalist. And Molière’s aim was laughter
achieved through an exaggerated imitation of reality. He was the poet
of good sense, and he felt that he had but to hold up the mirror of
good sense in order that we might see how absurd is every form of
egotism and pretentiousness. He took the side of the simple dignity of
human nature against all the narrowing vices, the anti-social vices,
whether of avarice, licentiousness, self-righteousness or preciosity.
He has written the smiling poetry of our sins. Not that he is indulgent
to them, like Anatole France, whose view of life is sentimental.
Molière’s work was a declaration of war against all those human beings
who are more pleased with themselves than they ought to be, down to
that amazing coterie of literary ladies in _Les Femmes savantes_,
concerning whose projected academy of taste one of them announces in
almost modern accents:
Nous serons par nos lois les juges des ouvrages;
Par nos lois, prose et vers, tout nous sera soumis;
Nul n’aura de l’esprit hors nous et nos amis;
Nous chercherons partout à trouver à redire,
Et ne verrons que nous qui sache bien écrire.
Molière has been accused of writing an attack on the higher
education of women in _Les Femmes savantes_. What we see in it
to-day is an immortal picture of those intellectual impostors of the
drawing-room--the not-very-intelligentsia, as they have been wittily
called--who exist in every civilised capital and in every generation.
The vanities of the rival poets, it is true, are caricatured rather
extravagantly, but the caricature is essentially true to life. This is
what men and women are like. At least, this is what they are like when
they are most exclusive and most satisfied with themselves. Molière
knew human nature. That is what makes him so much greater a comic
dramatist than any English dramatist who has written since Shakespeare.
Molière has been taken to task by many critics since his death. He has
been accused even of writing badly. He has been accused of padding,
incorrectness, and the use of jargon. He has been told that he should
have written none of his plays in verse, but all of them, as he wrote
_L’Avare_, in prose. All these criticisms are nine-tenths fatuous.
Molière by the use of verse gave comic speech the exhilaration of a
game, as Pope did, and literature that has exhilarating qualities of
this kind has justified its existence, whether or not it squares with
some hard-and-fast theory of poetry. If we cannot define poetry so as
to leave room for Molière and Pope, then so much the worse for our
definition of poetry. As for padding, I doubt whether any dramatist
has ever kept the breath of life in his speech more continuously than
Molière. His dialogue is not a flowing tap but a running stream. That
Molière’s language may be faulty I will not dispute, as French is
an alien and but half-known tongue to me. He produces his effects,
whatever his grammar. He has created for us a world, delicious even
in its insincerities and absurdities--a world seen through charming,
humorous, generous, remorseless eyes--a world held together by wit--a
world in which the sins of society dance to the ravishing music of the
alexandrine.
IV
EDMUND BURKE
Burke, we are told, was known as “the dinner-bell” because the House
of Commons emptied when he rose to speak. This is usually put down to
the uncouthness of his delivery. But, after all, there was nothing
in his delivery to prevent his indictment of Warren Hastings from so
affecting his hearers in places that, as Lord Morley writes, “every
listener, including the great criminal, held his breath in an agony
of horror,” and “women were carried out fainting.” I fancy Burke’s
virtues rather than his vices were at the bottom of his failure in the
House of Commons. He took the imagination of an artist into politics,
and he soared high above the questions of the hour among eternal
principles of human nature in which country gentlemen had only a very
faint interest. Not that he was a theoretical speaker in the sense of
being a doctrinaire. He had no belief in paper Utopias. His object
in politics was not to construct an ideal society out of his head
but to construct an acceptable society out of human beings as their
traditions, their environment, and their needs have moulded them. He
never forgot that actual human beings are the material in which the
politician must work. His constant and passionate sense of human nature
is what puts his speeches far above any others that have been delivered
in English. Even when he spoke or wrote on the wrong side, he was often
right about human nature. Page after page of his _Reflections on the
French Revolution_ is as right about human nature as it is wrong about
its ostensible subject. One might say with truth that, whatever his
ostensible subject may be, Burke’s real subject is always human nature.
If he was indignant against wrong in America or India or Ireland,
it was not with the indignation of a sentimentalist so much as of
a moralist outraged by the degradation of human nature. He loved
disinterestedness and wisdom in public affairs, and he mourned over the
absence of them as a Shakespeare might have mourned over the absence
of noble characters about whom to write plays. In his great _Speech at
Bristol_ he pilloried that narrow and selfish conception of freedom
according to which freedom consists in the right to dominate over
others. Burke demanded of human nature not an impossible perfection
but at least the first beginnings of magnanimity. Thus he loathed
every form of mean domination, whether it revealed itself as religious
persecution or political repression. He attacked both the anti-Catholic
and the anti-American would-be despots in the _Speech at Bristol_, and
his comment may serve for almost any “anti” in any age:
It is but too true that the love, and even the very idea, of
genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but too true that there
are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride,
perverseness and insolence. They feel themselves in a state of
thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined
in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on
their mercy. This desire of having some one below them descends to
those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler,
debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling
Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone
that the peer, whose footman’s instep he measures, is able to keep
his chaplain from a jail. This disposition is the true source of
the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the
American War. _Our_ subjects in America, _our_ colonies, _our_
dependants. This lust of party-power is the liberty they hunger and
thirst for; and this syren song of ambition has charmed ears that
one would have thought were never organised to that sort of music.
All through his life Burke set his face against what may be called the
lusts of human nature. As a Member of Parliament he refused to curry
favour with his constituents by gratifying their baser appetites.
In the farewell speech from which I have quoted, he has left us an
impassioned statement of his position:
No man carries farther than I do the policy of making government
pleasing to the people. But the widest range of this politic
complaisance is confined within the limits of justice. I would not
only consult the interest of the people, but I would cheerfully
gratify their humours. We are all a sort of children that must
be soothed and managed. I think I am not austere or formal in
my nature. I would bear, I would even myself play part in, any
innocent buffooneries to divert them. But I will never act the
tyrant for their amusement. If they will mix malice in their
sports, I shall never consent to throw them any living, sentient
creature whatsoever--no, not so much as a kitling--to torment.
Burke spent the greater part of his life summoning men to the
discipline of duty and away from anarchic graspings after rights.
George III’s war against America, as well as the French Revolution is
the assertion of a “right,” and Burke’s hatred of the war, as of the
Revolution, arose from his belief that the assertion of “rights,” not
for great public ends, but from ill-tempered obstinacy in clinging
to a theory, was no likely means of increasing the happiness and
liberties of human beings. He once received a letter from a gentleman
who declared that, even if the assertion of her right to tax America
meant the ruin of England, he would nevertheless say “Let her perish!”
All through the American War Burke saw that what prevented peace was
this sort of doctrinaire theory of the rights of England. In 1775 the
American Congress appointed a deputation to lay a petition before the
House of Commons. The Cabinet refused to receive an “illegal” body.
Penn brought over an “olive branch of peace” from Congress in the
same year, and again, holding fast to their theory of the rights of
Empire, ministers replied that Congress was an illegal body. Burke saw
the vital thing to decide between England and America was not some
metaphysical point in the disputed question of rights, but the means
by which two groups of human beings could learn to live in peace and
charity in the same world. I do not wish to suggest that he cared
nothing for the rights or wrongs of the quarrel. He was the impassioned
champion of right, in the noble sense of the word, beyond any other
statesman of his time. On the other hand, he detested the assertion of
a right for its own sake--the politics born of the theory that one has
the right (whether one is a man or a nation) to do what one likes with
one’s own. Burke saw that this is the humour of children quarrelling
in the nursery. “The question with me is,” he said, “not whether you
have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not
your interest to make them happy.” He regarded peace as almost an end
in itself, and he besought his fellow-countrymen not to stand upon
their rights at the cost of making peace impossible. “Whether liberty
be advantageous or not,” he told them during the war, “(for I know
it is a fashion to decry the very principle), none will dispute that
peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be
frequently bought by some indulgence of liberty.” Thus we find him all
through the war reminding his fellow-countrymen that the Americans
were human beings--a fact of a kind that is always forgotten in time
of war--and that the Anglo-American problem was chiefly a problem in
human nature. “Nobody shall persuade me,” he declared, drawing on his
knowledge of human nature, “when a whole people are concerned, that
acts of lenity are not means of conciliation.” Again, when he was told
that America was worth fighting for, his reply was: “Certainly it is,
if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them.” Though opposed
to the separation of America, he was in the end convinced that, if
the alternatives were separation and coercion, England was more likely
to gain a separate America than a bludgeoned America as a friend.
Addressing his former constituents, he said:
I parted with it as with a limb, but as a limb to save the body;
and I would have parted with more if more had been necessary:
anything rather than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war.
This mode of yielding would, it is said, give way to independency
without a war. I am persuaded from the nature of things, and from
every information, that it would have had a directly contrary
effect. But if it had this effect, I confess that I should prefer
independency without war to independency with it; and I have so
much trust in the inclinations and prejudices of mankind, and
so little in anything else, that I should expect ten times more
benefit to this kingdom from the affection of America, though under
a separate establishment, than from her perfect submission to the
Crown and Parliament, accompanied with her terror, disgust and
abhorrence. Bodies tied together by so unnatural a bond of union as
mutual hatred are only converted to their ruin.
There, again, you see the appeal to the “nature of things,” the use of
the imagination instead of blind partisan passion. He himself might
have called this distinguishing quality not imagination so much as a
capacity to take long views. He looked on the taking of long views as
itself a primary virtue in politics. He praised Cromwell and other
statesmen whom he regarded as great bad men because “they had long
views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and
not the destruction of their country.” Who, reading to-day his speeches
on America and India, can question that Burke himself possessed the
genius of the long view, which is only another name for imagination in
politics?
Mr. Murison’s admirable student’s edition of some of the writings of
Burke gives us examples of Burke not only during the American but
during the French period. He has called his book, indeed, not after
the _Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol_ or the _Speech at Bristol_,
but after the _Letter to a Noble Lord_, in which Burke defends himself
in the French period against the Duke of Bedford. Here, as during
the American War, we find him protesting against the introduction
of “metaphysical” disputes about rights into politics. During the
American War he had said, in regard to the question of rights: “I do
not enter into these metaphysical distinctions. I hate the very sound
of them.” Now, during the Revolution, he declared: “Nothing can be
conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician.
It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to
the frailty and passion of man.” Unfortunately, Burke himself was
something of a “metaphysician” in his attack on the French Revolution.
He wrote against France from prejudice and from theory, and his eye
is continually distracted from the facts of human nature to a paper
political orthodoxy. Even here, however, he did not forget human
nature, and, in so far as the French Revolution was false to human
nature--if the phrase is permissible--Burke has told the truth in
lasting prose.
His greatness as an artist is shown by the fact that he can move us to
silent admiration even when we disagree with him. There is plenty of
dull matter in most of his writings, since much of them is necessarily
occupied with the detail of dead controversies, but there is a tide of
eloquence that continually returns into his sentences and carries us
off our feet. We never get to love him as a man. We do not know him
personally as we know Johnson. He is a voice, a figure, not one of
ourselves. His eloquence is the eloquence of wisdom, seldom of personal
intimacy. He is not a master of tears and laughter, but, like Milton,
seems rather to represent a sort of impassioned dignity of human
nature. But what an imagination he poured into the public affairs of
his time--an imagination to which his time was all but indifferent
until he used his eloquence in support of (in Lord Morley’s phrase)
“the great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent
lives and never use their reason.” Even then, however, the imagination
survived, and, hackneyed though it is by quotation, one never grows
weary of coming on that great passage in which he mourns over the fate
of Marie Antoinette and the passing of the age of chivalry from Europe.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of
France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never
lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more
delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and
cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering
like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh,
what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate
without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream
when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic,
distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry
the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little
did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen
upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour
and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped
from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her
with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters,
economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe
is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that
generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that
dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept
alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse
of manly sentiments and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone,
that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt
a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated
ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice
itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
As we read these sentences we cease to ask ourselves whether Burke
was on the right or the wrong side in the French Revolution. We are
content that a great artist has spoken from the depths of his soul. He
has released the truth that is in him to the eternal enrichment of the
human race.
V
KEATS
1. THE VARIOUS KEATSES
Most men who write in praise of Shakespeare write in praise of
themselves. Shakespeare is their mirror. Respectable middle-aged
professors generally think of him as the respectable middle-aged man
of the Stratford bust. Mr. Frank Harris sees him as Mr. Frank Harris
with a difference. Mr. Charles Whibley imagines him as a Whibleyesque
Tory with a knotted whip ever ready for the back of democracy. After
reading _The John Keats Memorial Volume_, consisting of appreciations
in prose and verse from all manner of contributors, great and little,
one comes to the conclusion that most men interpret Keats in the
same easy-going way. Thus, Mr. Bernard Shaw notes that the poet of
the _Ode to a Nightingale_ and the _Ode on Melancholy_ was “a merry
soul, a jolly fellow, who could not only carry his splendid burthen
of genius, but swing it round, toss it up and catch it again, and
whistle a tune as he strode along,” and he discovers in three verses
of _The Pot of Basil_ “the immense indictment of the profiteers and
exploiters with which Marx has shaken capitalistic civilisation to its
foundations, even to its overthrow in Russia.” To Dr. Arthur Lynch, on
the other hand, Keats is primarily a philosopher, whose philosophic
principles “account for his Republicanism as well as for his criticisms
of poetry.” Mr. Arthur Symons takes an opposite view. “John Keats,”
he tells us, “at a time when the phrase had not yet been invented,
practised the theory of art for art’s sake.... Keats had something
feminine and twisted in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves ...
which it is now the fashion to call decadent.” To Sir Ian Hamilton (who
contributes a beautiful comment, saved by its passion from the perils
of high-flownness) Keats was the prototype of the heroic youth that
sacrificed itself in the war. Did he not once declare his willingness
to “jump down Etna for any great public good”; and did he not write:
The Patriot shall feel
My stern alarum and unsheath his steel?
And, if we dip into the thousands of other things that have been
written about Keats, including the centenary appreciations, we shall
find this personal emphasis on the part of the critic again and again.
Lord Houghton even did his best to raise Keats a step nearer in the
social scale by associating him with “the upper rank of the middle
class”--an exaggeration, however, which is no more inaccurate than the
common view that Keats was brought up on the verge of pauperdom. As a
matter of fact, Keats’s father was an ostler who married his employer’s
daughter, and his grandfather, the livery stable keeper of Finsbury
Pavement, left a fortune of £13,000. But it is not only with regard to
his birth that attempts to bring Keats into the fold of respectability
are common. His character, and the character of his genius, are
unconsciously doctored to suit the tastes of those who do not
apparently care for Keats as he actually was. The Keats who thrashed
the butcher is more important for them than the Keats who fell in love
with Fanny Brawne. They prefer canonising Keats to knowing him, and the
logical consequence of their attitude is that the Keats who might have
been means more to them than the Keats who was. I do not deny that a
great deal that is said about Keats on all sides is true: possibly most
of it is true. But much of it is true only as an argument. The manly
Keats is the true answer to the effeminate Keats, as the effeminate
Keats is the true answer to the manly Keats. The Keats who said: “I
think I shall be among the English poets after my death,” and the Keats
who was “snuffed out by an article” similarly answer one another;
and the Keats of _The Fall of Hyperion_ is the perfect critic of the
Keats of the _Ode on Indolence_, and _vice versa_. Keats was a score
of Keatses. He was luxurious and ascetic, heroic and self-indulgent,
ambitious and diffident, an artist and a thinker, vulgar and an
æsthete, perfect in phrase and gauche in phrase, melancholy and merry,
sensual and spiritual, a cynic about women and one of the great lovers,
a teller of heart-easing tales and a would-be redeemer. The perfect
portrait of Keats will reveal him in all these contradictory lights,
and we shall never understand Keats if we merely isolate one group of
facts, such as the thrashing of the butcher, or another group, such
as that he thought for a moment of abandoning _Hyperion_ as a result
of the hostile reviews of _Endymion_. Keats’s life was not that of a
planet beautifully poised as it wheels on its lonely errand. He was
a man torn by conflicting demons--a martyr to poetry and love and,
ultimately, to ideals of truth and goodness.
He bowed before altars that, even when he bowed, he seems to have
known were altars of the lesser gods. Not that he blasphemed the
greater gods in doing so. He believed that the altar at the foot of the
hill was a stage in the poet’s progress to the altar at the summit. As
he grew older, however, his vision of the summit became more intense,
and a greater Muse announced to him:
None can usurp this height
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are miseries and will not let them rest.
He was exchanging the worship of Apollo for the worship of Zeus and,
like Tolstoy, he seemed to condemn his own past work as a denial of the
genius of true art. Even here, however, Keats was still tortured by
conflicting allegiances, and it is on Apollo, not on Zeus, he calls in
his condemnation of Byron in _The Fall of Hyperion_:
Apollo! faded! O far-flown Apollo!
Where is thy misty pestilence to creep
Into the dwellings, through the door crannies
Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers
And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse?
Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.
But he was Zeus’s child, as he lay dying, and the very epitaph he left
for himself, remembering a phrase in _The Maid’s Tragedy_ of Beaumont
and Fletcher, “Here lies one whose name is writ in water,” was a last
farewell to an Apollo who seemed to have failed him.
The Keats who achieved perfection in literature, however, was Apollo’s
Keats--Apollo’s and Aphrodite’s. His odes, written out of a genius
stirred to its depths for the first time by his passion for Fanny
Brawne--he does not seem to have been subject to love, as most poets
are, in his boyhood--were but the perfect expression of that idolatry
that had stammered in _Endymion_. Keats in his masterpieces is still
the Prince breaking through the wood to the vision of the Sleeping
Beauty. He has not yet touched her into life. He almost prefers to
remain a spectator, not an awakener. He loves the picture itself more
than the reality, though he guesses all the while at the reality
behind. That, perhaps, is why men do not go to Keats for healing,
as they go to Wordsworth, or for hope, as they go to Shelley. Keats
enriches life rather with a sense of a loveliness for ever vanishing,
and with a dream of what life might be if the loveliness remained.
Regret means more to him than hope:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
The world at its most beautiful is for Keats a series of dissolving
pictures--of “fair attitudes” that only the artist can make immortal.
His indolence is the indolence of a man under the spell of beautiful
shapes. His energy is the energy of a man who would drain the whole cup
of worship in a beautiful phrase. His æsthetic attitude to life--as
æsthetic in its way as the early Pater’s--appears in that letter in
which he writes:
I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a
field-mouse peeping out of the withered grass--the creature hath
a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the
buildings of a city, and I see a Man hurrying along--to what? The
Creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.
In this very letter, no doubt, the disinterested philosopher as well
as the æsthete speaks, but it is Keats’s longing for philosophy, not
his philosophy itself, that touches us most profoundly in his greatest
work. Our knowledge of his sufferings gives his work a background of
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self
against which the exquisite images he wrought have a tragic and
spiritual appeal beyond that of any other poet of his kind. The Keats
we love is more than the Keats of the poems--more even than the Keats
of the letters. It is the Keats of these and of the life--that proud
and vehement spirit, that great-hearted traveller in the realms of
gold, caught in circumstances and done to death in the very temples
where he had worshipped.
2. THE ARTIFICER
It is an interesting fact that most of the writers who use words like
artificers have been townsmen. Milton and Gray, Keats and Lamb, were
all Londoners. It is as though to some extent words took the place of
natural scenes in the development of the townsman’s genius. The town
boy finds the Muse in a book rather than by a stream. He hears her
voice first, perhaps, in a beautiful phrase. It would be ridiculous to
speak as though the country-bred poet were uninfluenced by books or the
town-bred poet uninfluenced by bird and tree, by winds and waters. All
I suggest is that in the townsman the influence of literature is more
dominant, and frequently leads to an excitement over phrases almost
more intense than his excitement over things.
Milton was thus a stylist in a sense in which Shakespeare was not.
Keats was a stylist in a sense in which Shelley was not. Not that
Milton and Keats used speech more felicitously, but they used it more
self-consciously. Theirs, at their greatest, was the magic of art
rather than of nature. They had not, in the same measure as Shakespeare
and Shelley, the freedom of the air--the bird-like flight or the
bird-like song.
The genius of Keats, we know, was founded on the reading of books. He
did not even begin writing till he was nearly eighteen, when Cowden
Clarke lent him the treasures of his library, including _The Faëry
Queene_. The first of his great poems was written after reading
Chapman’s _Homer_, and to the end of his life he was inspired by works
of art to a greater degree than any other writer of genius in the
England of his time.
This may help to explain why he was, as Mr. John Bailey has pointed
out, the poet of stillness. Books, pictures, and Grecian urns are
still. They fix life for us in the wonder of a trance, and, if Keats
saw Cortes “silent upon a peak in Darien,” and
grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
and figure after figure in the same sculptured stillness, may this not
have been due to the fact that his genius fed so largely on the arts?
Keats, however, was the poet of trance, even apart from his stay in
the trance-world of the artists. One of his characteristic moods was
an ecstatic indolence, like that of a man who has tasted an enchanted
herb. He was a poet, indeed, whose soul escaped in song as on the
drowsy wings of a dream. He may be said to have turned from the fever
of life to the intoxication of poetry. He loved poetry--“my demon
poesy”--as a thing in itself, as, perhaps, no other poet equally great
has done. This was his quest: this was his Paradise. He prayed, indeed:
That I may die a death
Of luxury, and my young spirit follow
The morning sunbeams to the great Apollo
Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear
The o’erwhelming sweets, ’twill bring me to the fair
Visions of all places: a bowery nook
Will be elysium--an eternal book
Whence I may copy many a lovely saying
About the leaves and flowers--about the playing
Of nymphs in woods, and fountains; and the shade
Keeping a silence round a sleeping maid.
This was the mood in which he wrote his greatest work. At the same time
Keats was not an unmixed æsthete. He recognised from the first, as we
see in this early poem, “Sleep and Poetry,” that the true field of
poetry is not the joys of the senses, but the whole of human life:
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I may find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts.
Modern critics, reading these lines, are tempted to disparage the
work Keats actually accomplished in comparison with the work that he
might have accomplished, had he not died at twenty-five. They prefer
“The Fall of Hyperion,” that he might have written, to “The Eve of
St. Agnes,” the “Nightingale,” and the “Grecian Urn” that he did
write. They love the potential middle-aged Keats more than the perfect
youthful Keats.
This seems to me a perversity, but the criticism has value in reminding
us how rich and deep was the nature that expressed itself in the work
even of the young Keats. Keats was an æsthete, but he was always
something more. He was a man continually stirred by a divine hunger for
things never to be attained by the ecstasies of youth--for knowledge,
for truth, for something that might heal the sorrows of men. His nature
was continually at war with itself. His being was in tumult, even
though his genius found its perfect hour in stillness.
But it was the tumult of love, not the tumult of noble ideals, that led
to the production of his greatest work. Fanny Brawne, that beautiful
minx in her teens, is denounced for having murdered Keats; but she
certainly did not murder his genius. It was after meeting her that he
wrote the Odes and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Lamia” and “La Belle
Dame Sans Merci.” There has been too much cursing of Fanny. She may
have been the cause of Keats’s greatest agony, but she was also the
cause of his greatest ecstasy. The world is in Fanny’s debt, as Keats
was. It was Fanny’s Keats, in a very real sense, who wrote the immortal
verse that all the world now honours.
3. FANNY BRAWNE
“My dear Brown,” wrote the dying Keats, with Fanny Brawne in his
thoughts, in almost the last of his surviving letters, “for my sake,
be her advocate for ever.” “You think she has many faults,” he had
written a month earlier, when leaving England; “but, for my sake, think
she has none.” Thus did Keats bequeath the perfect image of Fanny
Brawne to his friend. And the bequest is not only to his friend but
to posterity. We, too, must study her image in the eyes of Keats, and
hang the portrait of the lady who had no faults in at least as good a
position on the wall with those other portraits of the flawed lady--the
minx, the flirt, the siren, the destroyer.
Sir Sidney Colvin, in his noble and monumental biography of Keats,
found no room for this idealised portrait. He was scrupulously fair
to Fanny Brawne as a woman, but he condemned her as the woman with
whom Keats happened to fall in love. To Sir Sidney she was not
Keats’s goddess, but Keats’s demon. Criticising the book on its first
appearance, I pointed out that almost everything that is immortal in
the poetry of Keats was written when he was under the influence of his
passion for Fanny Brawne, and I urged that, had it not been for the
ploughing and harrowing of love, we should probably never have had the
rich harvest of his genius. Sir Sidney has now added a few pages to
his preface, in which he replies to this criticism, and declares that
to write of Fanny Brawne in such a manner is “to misunderstand Keats’s
whole career.” He admits that “most of Keats’s best work was done after
he had met Fanny Brawne,” but it was done, he insists, “not because of
her, but in spite of her.” “At the hour when his genius was naturally
and splendidly ripening of itself,” he writes, “she brought into his
life an element of distracting unrest, of mingled pleasure and torment,
to use his own words, but of torment far more than of pleasure.... In
writing to her or about her he never for a moment suggests that he owed
to her any of his inspiration as a poet.... In point of fact, from
the hour when he passed under her spell he could never do any long or
sustained work except in absence from her.” Now all this means little
more than that Fanny Brawne made Keats suffer. On that point everybody
is agreed. The only matter in dispute is whether this suffering was a
source of energy or of destruction to Keats’s genius.
Keats has left us in one of his letters his own view of the part
suffering plays in the making of a soul. Scoffing at the conception
of the world as a “vale of tears,” he urges that we should regard it
instead as “the vale of soul-making,” and asks: “Do you not see how
necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence
and make it a soul?” Thus, according to his own philosophy, there is
no essential contradiction between a love that harrows and a love that
enriches. As for his never having suggested that he owed any of his
inspiration to his love for Fanny, he may not have done this in so many
words, but he makes it clear enough that she stirred his nature to the
depths for the first time and awakened in him that fiery energy which
is one of the first conditions of genius in poetry. “I cannot think of
you,” he wrote, “without some sort of energy--though _mal à propos_.
Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of
you would uncrystallise and dissolve me. I must not give way to it--but
turn to my writing again--if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your
lips are growing sweet again to my fancy--I must forget them.” Sir
Sidney would read this letter as a confession that love and genius
were at enmity in Keats. It seems to me a much more reasonable view
that in the heat of conflict Keats’s genius became doubly intense, and
that, had there been no struggle, there would have been no triumph. It
is not necessary to believe that Fanny Brawne was the ideal woman for
Keats to have loved: the point is that his love of her was the supreme
event in his life. “I never,” he told her, “felt my mind repose upon
anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment--upon no person but
you.” “I have been astonished,” he wrote in another letter, “that men
could die martyrs for religion--I have shuddered at it. I shudder no
more--I could be martyr’d for my religion--love is my religion--I could
die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its
only tenet.” And still earlier he had written: “I have two luxuries
to brood over in my walks--your loveliness and the hour of my death.
O, that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.... I
will imagine you Venus to-night and pray, pray, pray to your star like
a heathen.” It is out of emotional travail such as we find in these
letters that poetry is born. Is it possible to believe that, if Keats
had never fallen in love--and he had never been in love till he met
Fanny--he would have been the great poet we know?
I hold that it is not. Hence I still maintain the truth of the
statement which Sir Sidney Colvin sets out to controvert, that, while
Fanny “may have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man, she was his good
fairy as a poet.”
Keats’s misfortune in love was a personal misfortune, not a misfortune
to his genius. He was too poor to marry, and, in his own phrase, he
“trembled at domestic cares.” He was ill and morbid: he had longed
for the hour of his death before ever he set eyes on Fanny. Add to
this that he was young and sensual and as jealous as Othello. His own
nature had in it all the elements of tragic suffering, even if Fanny
had been as perfect as St. Cecilia. And she was no St. Cecilia. He had
called her “minx” shortly after their first meeting in the autumn of
1818, and described her as “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly,
fashionable and strange.” Even then, however, he was in love with her.
“The very first week I knew you,” he told her afterwards, “I wrote
myself your vassal.... If you should ever feel for man at the first
sight what I did for you, I am lost.” It is clear from this that his
heart and his head quarrelled about Fanny. At the same time, after
those first censures, he never spoke critically of her again, even to
his most intimate friends. Some of his friends evidently disliked Fanny
and wished to separate the lovers. He refers to this in a letter in
which he speaks angrily of “these laughers who do not like you, who
envy you for your beauty,” and writes of himself as “one who, if he
never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory.”
But Keats himself could not be certain that she was a saint. “My
greatest torment since I have known you,” he tells her, “has been the
fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid.” He is so jealous
that, when he is ill, he tells her that she must not even go into town
alone till he is well again, and says: “If you would really what is
called enjoy yourself at a party--if you can smile in people’s faces,
and wish them to admire you _now_--you never have nor ever will love
me.” But he adds a postscript: “No, my sweet Fanny--I am wrong--I do
not wish you to be unhappy--and yet I do, I must while there is so
sweet a beauty--my loveliest, my darling! Good-bye! I kiss you--O the
torments!” In a later letter he returns to his jealousy, and declares:
“Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to
Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’” He tells this fragile little
worldly creature that she should be prepared to suffer on the rack
for him, accuses her of flirting with Brown, and, in one of the most
painful of his letters, cries out:
I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in: Do not
write to me if you have done anything this month which it would
have pained me to have seen. You may have altered--if you have
not--if you still believe in dancing rooms and other societies as
I have seen you--I do not want to live--if you have done so I wish
the coming night may be my last. I cannot live without you, and
not only you, but _chaste you, virtuous you_.... Be serious! Love
is not a plaything--and again do not write unless you can do it
with a crystal conscience.
Poor Keats! Poor Fanny! That Fanny loved Keats is obvious. In this at
least she showed herself unworldly. She cannot have been dazzled by his
fame, for at that time he was to all appearance merely a minor poet who
had been laughed at. He was of humble birth, and he had not even the
prospect of being able to earn a living. Add to this that he was an all
but chronic invalid. Her love must, in the circumstances, have been a
very real and unselfish affair, and there is no evidence to suggest
that, for all her taste for dancing and for going into town, it was
fickle. Keats asked too much of her. He wished to enslave her as she
had enslaved him. He knew in his saner moments that he was unfair to
her. “At times,” he wrote, “I feel bitterly sorry that ever I made you
unhappy.” There was unhappiness on both sides--the unhappiness of an
engagement that could come to nothing. “There are,” as Keats mournfully
wrote, “impossibilities in the world.” It was Fate, not Fanny, that
wrecked the life of Keats. “My dear Brown,” he wrote near the end, “I
should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained
well.” That is not the comment a man makes on a woman whom he regards
as his destroying angel. Nor is it a destroying angel that Keats
pictures when he writes to Fanny: “You are always new. The last of your
kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last
movement the gracefullest. When you passed my window home yesterday, I
was filled with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the
first time.” Love such as this is not the enemy of poetry. Without it
there would be no poetry but that of patriots, saints and hermits. A
biography of Keats should not be a biography without a heroine. That
would be _Hamlet_ without Ophelia. Sir Sidney Colvin’s is a masterly
life which is likely to take a permanent place in English biographical
literature. But it has one flaw. Sir Sidney did not see how vital a
clue Keats left us to the interpretation of his life and genius in that
last despairing appeal: “My dear Brown, for my sake be her advocate for
ever.”
VI
CHARLES LAMB
Charles Lamb was a small, flat-footed man whose eyes were of different
colours and who stammered. He nevertheless leaves on many of his
readers the impression of personal beauty. De Quincey has told us
that in the repose of sleep Lamb’s face “assumed an expression almost
seraphic, from its intellectual beauty of outline, its childlike
simplicity, and its benignity.” He added that the eyes “disturbed
the unity of effect in Lamb’s waking face,” and gave a feeling of
restlessness, “shifting, like Northern lights, through every mode of
combination with fantastic playfulness.” This description, I think,
suggests something of the quality of Lamb’s charm. There are in his
best work depths of repose under a restless and prankish surface. He is
at once the most restful and the most playful of essayists. Carlyle,
whose soul could not find rest in such quietistic virtue as Lamb’s,
noticed only the playfulness and was disgusted by it. “Charles Lamb,”
he declared, “I do verily believe to be in some considerable degree
insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering
tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good
manners.” He wrote this in his Diary in 1831 after paying a visit to
Lamb at Enfield. “Poor Lamb!” he concluded. “Poor England, when such
a despicable abortion is named genius! He said: ‘There are just two
things I regret in England’s history: first, that Guy Fawkes’ plot did
not take effect (there would have been so glorious an _explosion_);
second, that the Royalists did not hang Milton (then we might have
laughed at them), etc., etc.’ _Armer Teufel!_”
Carlyle would have been astonished if he had foreseen that it would be
he and not Lamb who would be the “poor devil” in the eyes of posterity.
Lamb is a tragically lovable figure, but Carlyle is a tragically
pitiable figure. Lamb, indeed, is in danger of being pedestalled among
the saints of literature. He had most of the virtues that a man can
have without his virtue becoming a reproach to his fellows. He had most
of the vices that a man can have without ceasing to be virtuous. He
had enthusiasm that made him at home among the poets, and prejudices
that made him at home among common men. His prejudices, however, were
for the most part humorous, as when, speaking of L. E. L., he said:
“If she belonged to me I would lock her up and feed her on bread and
water till she left off writing poetry. A female poet, a female author
of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think.” He also denounced
clever women as “impudent, forward, unfeminine, and unhealthy in their
minds.” At the same time, the woman he loved most on earth and devoted
his life to was the “female author” with whom he collaborated in the
_Tales from Shakespeare_. But probably there did exist somewhere in
his nature the seeds of most of those prejudices dear to the common
Englishman--prejudices against Scotsmen, Jews, and clever women,
against such writers as Voltaire and Shelley, and in favour of eating,
drinking and tobacco. He held some of his prejudices comically, and
some in sober earnest, but at least he had enough of them mixed up in
his composition to keep him in touch with ordinary people. That is
one of the first necessities of a writer--especially of a dramatist,
novelist or essayist, whose subject-matter is human nature. A great
writer may be indifferent to the philosophy of the hour or even to
some extent to the politics of the hour, but he cannot safely be
indifferent to such matters as his neighbour’s love of boiled ham or
his fondness for a game of cards. Lamb sympathised with all the human
appetites that will bear talking about. Many noble authors are hosts
who talk gloriously, but never invite us to dinner or even ring for the
decanter. Lamb remembers that a party should be a party.
It is not enough, however, that a writer should be friends with our
appetites. Lamb would never have become the most beloved of English
essayists if he had told us only such things as that Coleridge “holds
that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings,” or
that he himself, though having lost his taste for “the whole vegetable
tribe,” sticks, nevertheless, to asparagus, “which still seems to
inspire gentle thoughts.” He was human elsewhere than at the table or
beside a bottle. His kindness was higher than gastric. His indulgences
seem but a modest disguise for his virtues. His life was a life of
industrious self-sacrifice. “I am wedded, Coleridge,” he cried, after
the murder of his mother, “to the fortunes of my sister and my poor
old father”; and his life with his sister affords one of the supreme
examples of fidelity in literary biography. Lamb is eminently the
essayist of the affections. The best of his essays are made up of
affectionate memories. He seems to steep his very words in some dye of
memory and affection that no other writer has discovered. He is one
of those rare sentimentalists who speak out of the heart. He has but
to write, “Do you remember?” as in _Old China_, and our breasts feel
a pang like a home-sick child thinking of the happiness of a distant
fireside and a smiling mother that it will see no more. Lamb’s work
is full of this sense of separation. He is the painter of “the old
familiar faces.” He conjures up a Utopia of the past, in which aunts
were kind and Coleridge, the “inspired charity-boy,” was his friend,
and every neighbour was a figure as queer as a witch in a fairy-tale.
“All, all are gone”--that is his theme.
He is the poet of town-bred boyhood. He is a true lover of antiquity,
but antiquity means to him, not merely such things as Oxford and a
library of old books: it means a small boy sitting in the gallery of
the theatre, and the clerks (mostly bachelors) in the shut-up South-Sea
House, and the dead pedagogue with uplifted rod in Christ’s Hospital,
of whom he wrote: “Poor J. B.! May all his faults be forgiven; and may
he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with
no _bottoms_ to reproach his sublunary infirmities.” His essays are a
jesting elegy on all that venerable and ruined world. He is at once
Hamlet and Yorick in his melancholy and his mirth. He has obeyed the
injunction: “Let us all praise famous men,” but he has interpreted it
in terms of the men who were famous in his own small circle when he was
a boy and a poor clerk.
Lamb not only made all that world of school and holiday and office a
part of antiquity; he also made himself a part of antiquity. He is
himself his completest character--the only character, indeed, whom he
did not paint in miniature. We know him, as a result of his letters,
his essays, and the anecdotes of his friends, more intimately even than
we know Dr. Johnson. He has confessed everything except his goodness,
and, indeed, did his reputation some harm with his contemporaries
by being so public with his shortcomings. He was the enemy of dull
priggishness, and would even set up as a buffoon in contrast. He earned
the reputation of a drunkard, not entirely deserved, partly by his
_Confessions of a Drunkard_, but partly by his habit of bursting into
singing “Diddle, diddle, dumpling,” under the influence of liquor,
whatever the company. His life, however, was a long, half-comic battle
against those three friendly enemies of man--liquor, snuff and tobacco.
His path was strewn with good resolutions. “This very night,” he wrote
on one occasion, “I am going to _leave off tobacco_! Surely there
must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be
realised.” The perfect anecdote of Lamb’s vices is surely that which
Hone tells of his abandonment of snuff:
One summer’s evening I was walking on Hampstead Heath with Charles
Lamb, and we talked ourselves into a philosophic contempt of our
slavery to the habit of snuff-taking, and with the firm resolution
of never again taking a single pinch, we threw our snuff-boxes
away from the hill on which we stood, far among the furze and
the brambles below, and went home in triumph. I began to be very
miserable, and was wretched all night. In the morning I was walking
on the same hill. I saw Charles Lamb below, searching among the
bushes. He looked up laughing, and saying, “What, you are come to
look for your snuff-box too!” “Oh, no,” said I, taking a pinch out
of a paper in my waistcoat pocket, “I went for a halfpennyworth to
the first shop that was open.”
Lamb’s life is an epic of such things as this, and Mr. Lucas is its
rhapsodist. He has written an anthological biography that will have a
permanent place on the shelves beside the works of Lamb himself.
VII
BYRON ONCE MORE
It will always be easy to take an interest in Byron because he was
not only a scamp but a hero--or, alternatively, because he was not
only a hero but a scamp. As a hero he can be taken seriously: as a
villain he can be taken comically. His letters, like _Don Juan_, reveal
him at their best chiefly on the comic side. He was not only a wit,
but an audacious wit, and there is a kind of audacity that amuses
us, whether in a guttersnipe or in a peer. Byron was a guttersnipe
in scarlet and ermine. He enjoyed all the more playing the part of
a guttersnipe, because he could play it in a peer’s robe. He was
obviously the sort of person who, if brought up in the gutter, would
be sent to a reformatory. Imagine a reformatory boy, unreformed and
possessed of genius, loosed on respectable society, and you will have
a picture of Byron. Not that Byron did not share the point of view of
respectable society on the most important matters. He had no sympathy
with the heresies of Shelley, whom he thought “crazy against religion
and morality.” He did not want a new morality, as Shelley did: he was
quite content with the old morality and the old immorality. He never
could have run away with a woman on principle. Love with him was not
a principle, but an appetite. He was a glutton who did not know where
to stop. He himself never pretended that it was the desire of the moth
for the star that was the cause of his troubles. He was an orthodox
materialist, as we may gather from one of his unusually frank letters
to Lady Melbourne, a lady in her sixties, to whom he ran with the tale
of every fresh amour, like a newsboy with the stop-press edition of
an evening paper. We find him at the age of twenty-five or so writing
to explain that he was sure to die fairly young. “I began very early
and very violently,” he wrote, “and alternate extremes of excess
and abstinence have utterly destroyed--oh, unsentimental word!--my
stomach, and, as Lady Oxford used seriously to say, a broken heart
means nothing but a bad digestion.” Byron, no doubt, enjoyed posturing,
whether he exposed a broken heart or a weak stomach. But, for a poet,
he undoubtedly lived and thought on the material plane out of all
proportion to his life and thought on the spiritual plane. He felt
much the same dread of a respectable woman as did the wicked young
æsthete of the ’nineties. When he was thinking of getting married, and
had his eye on Miss Milbanke, he wrote doubtingly to Lady Melbourne: “I
admired your niece, but she is engaged to Eden; besides, she deserves a
better heart than mine. What shall I do--shall I advertise?” About the
same time he was writing concerning women in general:
I am sadly out of practice lately; except a few sighs to a
gentlewoman at supper, who was too much occupied with ye _fourth_
wing of her _second_ chicken to mind anything that was not material.
If the wing of a chicken was not at least as immaterial as Byron’s
sighs, there must have been something amiss with the cooking. Byron’s
sighs to women were material enough, one fancies, to have been visible,
like a drayman’s breath on a frosty day.
The letters to Lady Melbourne reveal him in an extraordinary light,
even for an amorist. While attempting to arrange a match with Lady
Melbourne’s niece he fills the greater part of his letter to her with
the backwash of his intrigue with her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline
Lamb, and with stories of intrigues with various other ladies. Byron,
like many amorists, seems never to have realised that adventures are
to the adventurous in love as in other matters, but to have looked on
himself as a man pestered by women when he was only a man pestered by
ordinary greed and extraordinary opportunity. If he could not shift
the blame for his sins on to the woman, he would even shift it on to
her husband. “He literally provoked and goaded me into it,” he wrote
to Lady Melbourne, about the husband of Lady Frances Webster, at a
time when he seemed to be falling almost seriously in love with Lady
Frances. No one who cares for scandalous literature should miss these
letters in which Byron writes off to Lady Melbourne rapturous accounts
of every step in the wooing of the wife of his host. “I am glad they
amaze you,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne concerning the Websters;
“anything that confirms and extends one’s observations on life and
character delights me.” It does not appear to have occurred to him
that, amazing though the Websters were, they were but as copper to gold
compared to his own amazing self. Lady Frances, at least, would have
been considerably amazed if she had known that, every time she sighed,
the fat young poet who adored her heliographed the fact from Yorkshire
to London. In one of his letters he tells of a game of billiards
with his hostess, in the course of which he slipped a love-letter to
her. Just at that moment, “who should enter the room but the person
who ought at the moment to have been in the Red Sea, if Satan had any
civility”--in other words, Webster, his host and her husband. Even as
he is writing the description of the incident to Lady Melbourne, Byron
makes a parenthesis to tell her that Webster has again come into the
room (“I am this moment interrupted by the _Marito_, and write this
before him. He has brought me a political pamphlet in MS. to decipher
and applaud; I shall content myself with the last; oh, he is gone
again”). Ultimately, however, Byron spared Lady Frances--at least,
that is how he put it. He protested to Lady Melbourne that he loved
the lady and would have sacrificed everything for her, and that Lady
Melbourne wronged him to think otherwise. “I hate sentiment,” he told
her, “and, in consequence, my epistolary levity makes you believe me
as hollow and heartless as my letters are light.” The truth is, Byron
_was_, in many of his relations, heartless. He kissed and told, and he
enjoyed telling, at least, as much as he enjoyed kissing. He tells Lady
Melbourne, for instance, about the “exquisite oddity” of Lady Frances’s
letters--“the simplicity of her cunning and her exquisite reasons”:
She vindicates her treachery to [Webster] thus: after condemning
deceit in general, and hers in particular, she says: “But then
remember it is to deceive _un marito_, and to prevent all the
unpleasant consequences, etc., etc.”
It is clear that Lady Frances, though pure, shocked Byron, just as
Byron, though impure, shocks the average reader. She even besought him
to go on writing to her husband:
Again, she desires me to write to _him kindly_, for she believes he
cares for nobody but _me_!
Byron could never understand unconventional behaviour. “Is not all this
a comedy?” he asks Lady Melbourne.
Byron, as we read his letters and poems together, seems to lead the
double life of an actor. There is the Byron who stands in the middle
of the stage in the fierce light that beats upon a poet, and who
declaims--how gloriously!--:
The mountains look on Marathon--
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
And there is Byron behind the scenes--the Byron who might have been
invented by Mr. Shaw as an example of the moral irresponsibility of
the artistic temperament. It may be doubted whether any artist of the
first rank could have written such a letter as Byron wrote to Hobhouse
in 1818, announcing that his illegitimate daughter, Allegra, had been
brought out to Italy from England by Shelley. His reference to the
child runs:
Shelley has got to Milan with the bastard, and its mother; but
won’t send the shild, unless I will go and see the mother. I have
sent a messenger for the shild but I can’t leave my quarters, and
have “sworn an oath.” Between attorneys, clerks, and wives, and
children, and friends, my life is made a burthen.
Shelley, for his part, when he is writing to Byron to ask what he is
to do with the child (which has been left on his hands month after
month), never mentions it but with a delight at least equal to his
anxiety to get rid of it. “I think,” he tells Byron, “she is the most
lovely and engaging child I ever beheld.” Shelley’s letters to Byron
are the letters of a good man, but they are not good letters. They are
the formal utterances of an angel. Byron’s letters, on the other hand,
are good letters, though they are not the letters of a good man. They
are the informal utterances of a man possessed by a devil. But whether
he was as black as he painted himself it is impossible to be sure.
When little Allegra died at the age of five, he prepared an inscription
for her tomb ending with the verse: “I shall go to her, but she shall
not return to me.” If he had been all heartless, he could never have
written his greatest lyrics. His letters, for the most part, take us
into the comic recesses of his mind: perhaps this comic Byron is the
immortal Byron. But in the letters, as in the legend of his death and
in his poems, there are hints of that greater Byron whom Shelley tried
to summon into being--a Byron who would have been Byron with a touch
of Shelley--a nobler being a little more remote from the splendour of
Hell, a candidate for Paradise.
VIII
SHELLEY
Matthew Arnold has had a bad time of it during the Shelley centenary
celebrations. He has been denounced in nearly every paper in England,
as though, in his attitude to Shelley, he had shown himself to be a
malicious old nincompoop. As a matter of fact, Matthew Arnold talked a
great deal of common sense about Shelley, and, though he underestimated
his genius, how many of the overestimators of Shelley have even praised
him so nobly as he is praised in that unforgettable image--“a beautiful
and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”?
Yet these are the words with which Matthew Arnold’s critics quarrel
most angrily. It is not enough for them that he called Shelley a
beautiful angel. It is a compliment that few poets, few saints even,
have deserved. The partisans demand, however, it seems, that he shall
also be proclaimed an effectual angel. In one sense, of course, no
great poet is ineffectual. We might as well call a star ineffectual.
In a more limited sense, however, a great poet who is also a theorist
may be ineffectual, and Shelley, in whom the poet and the theorist are
all but inseparable, was undoubtedly ineffectual in this meaning of the
word.
He sang a philosophy of love, and one effect of his philosophy was the
suicide of Harriet Westbrook. He was, in this instance, ineffectual
in not being able to translate his theory into experience in such
a way that what was beautiful in theory would also be beautiful
in experience. Where a theory was concerned, he did not recognise
facts; he recognised only the theory. Thus, his theory that love is
“the sole law which should govern the moral world” led him in _Laon
and Cythna_ (later transformed into _The Revolt of Islam_) to make
the lovers brother and sister. This circumstance was, he declared,
“intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life.” It
was introduced “merely to accustom men to that charity and toleration
which the exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own has
a tendency to promote.” Who but an ineffectual angel would have thought
of dragging idealised incest into a work of art solely with a view to
the improvement of his readers’ morals? He did not wish his readers to
practise incest: he merely wished to make them practise charity.
Shelley, indeed, was a man always hastening towards an ideal world
which at the touch of experience turned into a mirage. His political,
like his ethical, theories had something mirage-like about them. He
was a prophet who was so absorbed in the vision of the Promised Land
that he had little thought to spare for the human nature that he was
trying to incite to make the journey. His own imagination travelled
fast as a ray of light, but he could not take human beings with him
on so swift a journey. Hence, if he has been effectual, he has been
so as an inspiration to the few. He has been ineffectual as regards
achieving the earthly paradise he foretold in _The Mask of Anarchy_ and
_Prometheus Unbound_.
It ought, then, to be possible to appreciate Shelley without abusing
Matthew Arnold. Every genius is limited, and we shall not admire the
genius the less but the more if we recognise its limitations so clearly
that we come to take them for granted. Thus, if we attempt to define
Shelley’s genius as a poet, we have to start by recognising that there
is a formless quality in most of his work when it is compared to
the work of Keats or Wordsworth. His poems do not seem to be quite
vertebrate--to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Their path is
as indeterminate as the path of the lark fluttering in the air. With
Keats we stand still to survey the earth. With Wordsworth we walk. But
Shelley, like his skylark, is a “scorner of the ground,” and our feet
do not always touch the earth when we are in his company. Even when he
journeys by land or water, he rushes us along as though the air were
the only element, and we are dizzied by the speed with which we are
carried from landscape to landscape. In _Alastor_, scene succeeds scene
faster than the eye can seize it.
Shelley, indeed, is the poet of metamorphosis. He loves the miraculous
change from shape to shape almost more than he loves any settled shape.
This aspect of his genius reveals itself most richly in “The Cloud.”
Here is the very music of the changing shape. “I change, but I cannot
die,” is the cloud’s boast:
For after the rain, when with never a stain,
The pavilion of heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
Shelley, too, could create these beautiful and unsubstantial shapes
from hour to hour, feeling that each was but a new metamorphosis of
universal beauty. “The Cloud” is the divine comedy of metamorphosis.
The “Hymn of Pan” is its tragedy:
I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the dædal Earth,
And of Heaven--and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth--
And then I changed my pipings--
Singing how down the vale of Menalus
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
Here Shelley is aware of the human dissatisfaction--a dissatisfaction
that many people feel when reading his poetry--with a life that is too
full of mirages and metamorphoses.
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
It is the confession of the ineffectual angel, who had sung:
Poets are on this cold earth,
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
In a cave beneath the sea.
Where light is, chameleons change!
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.
For this, too, had been a song of metamorphosis.
This love of metamorphosis may, from one point of view, be thought to
have limited Shelley’s genius, but it limited only to intensify. It
was this that enabled him to pass from wonderful image to wonderful
image without a pause in that immortal procession of similes in “The
Skylark.” Every poet has this gift to some extent--the gift by which
the metamorphosis of the thing into the image takes place--but Shelley
had it in disproportionate abundance because the world of images meant
so much more to him than did the world of experience. Not that he was
blind to the real world, as we see from his observation of rooks in the
morning sun in “The Euganean Hills”:
So their plumes of purple grain,
Starred with drops of golden rain,
Gleam above the sunlight woods,
As in silent multitudes
On the morning’s fitful gale
Through the broken mist they sail.
No naturalist could have been more accurate in his description than
this. Shelley, indeed, claimed for himself in the preface to _Laon and
Cythna_ that, in his imagery, he was essentially and supremely a poet
of experience:
I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and
the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger, which sports upon
the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden
the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc.
I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down
mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come
forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream
among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched
the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst
assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more
visible ravages of tyranny and war, and cities and villages reduced
to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked
inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds. I
have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient
Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to
me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the
sources from which the materials for the imagery of my Poem have
been drawn.
All this was true, but Shelley was too impatient of experience to rely
on it when there was a richer world of images at hand. Images--images
passing into each other--meant more to him than experience as he wrote
such lines as
My soul is an enchanted boat
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.
He said himself of the poet that
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aërial kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.
There was never another poet of whom this was so true as of himself.
Even when he writes
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,
or,
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown,
he seems to shed upon things a light brought from that haunted world.
There is more colour in Keats than in Shelley, but there is more light
in Shelley than in Keats. Did he not speak of the poet as “hidden in
the light of thought”? His radiance is different in kind from that of
any other poet. For it is the radiance of a world in which things are
not made of substances but of dreams--a world in which we walk over
rainbows instead of bridges and ride not upon horses but upon clouds.
IX
PLUTARCH’S ANECDOTES
Anecdotes, like most other forms of literary entertainment, have
been spoken ill of by grave persons, but seldom by the wise. “How
superficial,” wrote Isaac Disraeli, “is that cry of some impertinent
pretended geniuses of these times who affect to exclaim, ‘Give me no
anecdotes of an author, but give me his works!’ I have often found
the anecdotes more interesting than the works.” And he pointed out
that “Dr. Johnson devoted one of his periodical papers to a defence of
anecdotes.” The defence was hardly needed. The imagination of mankind
has by universal consent paid honour to the anecdote, and Montaigne is
supreme among essayists, and Plutarch among biographers, by virtue of
anecdotes as well as of wisdom. Plutarch himself has given the anecdote
its just praise in the opening paragraph of his life of Alexander,
when he explains: “It is not Histories I am writing, but Lives; and
in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of
virtue or vice--nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often
makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands
fell, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.” Hence the
general appetite for trifling facts about great men is not a mere
vice of gossips. It may help to preserve a detail which will give a
later man of genius a clue to a character--the character of a man or
the character of a book. The theory that we can criticise a poet more
profoundly by leaving aside the ordinary facts of his life as though
he had never existed in the flesh is an absurd piece of pedantry. The
life of Shelley throws a flood of light on the poetry of Shelley. It
contains in itself a profound criticism of the genius of Shelley--a
genius that was of the air rather than of the earth--a genius at once
noble and incongruous with the world in which men live.
Writers, however, may make a dozen different uses of anecdotes.
The anecdote may be anything from a jest to an awakening touch of
portraiture, and from that to a fable that reveals a piece of new
or old truth to the imagination. It is not open to dispute that the
great writers of anecdotes are not those who believe in anecdotes
for anecdotes’ sake. They are those who everywhere see signs and
connections, and for whom an anecdote is a pattern in little
suggesting a pattern of life itself. Plutarch speaks of himself as
looking for “the signs of the soul in men,” and the phrase gives some
notion of the moral and spiritual pattern into which his anecdotes are
woven.
I doubt if a more virtuous imagination ever applied itself to
literature. Plutarch’s unending quest was virtue, and no illustrious
man ever sat to him for a portrait without discovering to him virtues
that he would never have revealed to a scandalmonger such as Suetonius.
It was as though moral dignity were the chief of the colours on
Plutarch’s palette. He was fond of contrasting his heroes with one
another, but, even when he took for heroes men who were mortal enemies,
he would penetrate deep into the heart of each in search of some
hidden or imprisoned nobleness. He cannot paint an Alcibiades or a
Sulla as a model for children, but even in them he seems to perceive
and reverence a greatness of spirit in ruins--some brightness of charm
or courage beyond the scope of little men. No other writer except
Shakespeare has had the same power of setting before the imagination
characters that remain noble though undone by great vices. To do this
is, to some extent, in the common tradition of tragedy, but there
is in Shakespeare and Plutarch a certain sweetness and warmth of
understanding--something even more than an enthusiasm for the best
in full view and admission of the worst--unlike anything else in
literature. It was not an accident that Shakespeare drew so freely and
so confidently on Plutarch. The geniuses of the two men were akin.
Plutarch, no doubt, was more consciously ethical than Shakespeare,
but he was ethical not after the manner of the narrow propagandist,
but after the manner of the imaginative artist. He does not write of
model characters. He knows that there are no perfect human beings. He
recognises the goodness in bad men, and the badness in good men. No
biographer has been more keenly aware of the corruptibility of human
nature. Hence the characters in his Lives are real men, with not a
fault (and hardly the rumour of a fault) hidden. He will not bear
false witness for the sake of making great men appear better than they
are. He achieves the difficult feat of praising virtue without either
canting or lying. He is not afraid to hold the mirror up to nature and
to show us virtue fighting a doubtful battle in a corrupt and tragic
scene. He does not believe that the virtuous man is necessarily secure
either from corruption or defeat, but he believes that virtue itself
is secure from defeat. His recurrent theme is the Christian theme:
“Fear not them that kill the body.” He is the painter, not only of
illustrious lives, but of illustrious deaths. He feels a spectator’s
elation as he watches a noble fifth act. He obtains from the spectacle
of virtue impavid amid the ruins an æsthetic as well as an ethical
pleasure. If any man wishes to make a study of the æsthetics of
virtue, he will find abundant material in Plutarch. Plutarch writes of
the tragic hero as of a man playing a fine part finely. He delights
in the moving speeches, in the very gestures. He makes us conscious
of a rhythm of nobleness running through human life, as when he
describes the conduct of the Spartan women who fled with Cleomenes (the
quasi-Socialist king) to Egypt, and who were murdered by their cruel
hosts. He first wins our sympathies for the wife of Panteus, “most
noble and beautiful to look upon,” and tells us how she was but lately
married to Panteus, so that “their misfortunes came to them in the
heyday of their love.” He then describes how this great lady behaved
when she was overtaken by death in company with the mother and children
of the king:
She it was who now took the hand of Cratesicleia as she was led
forth by the soldiers, held up her robe for her, and bade her be
of good courage. And Cratesicleia herself was not one whit dismayed
at death, but asked one favour only, that she might die before
the children died. However, when they were come to the place of
execution, first the children were slain before her eyes, and then
Cratesicleia herself was slain, making but one cry at sorrows so
great: “O children, whither are ye gone?” Then the wife of Panteus,
girding up her robe, vigorous and stately woman that she was,
ministered to each of the dying women calmly and without a word,
and laid them out for burial as well as she could. And, finally,
after all were cared for, she arrayed herself, let down her robe
from about her neck, and suffering no one besides the executioner
to come near or look on her, bravely met her end, and had no need
of any one to array or cover up her body after death. Thus her
decorum of spirit attended her in death, and she maintained to the
end that watchful care of her body which she had set over it in
life.
That “decorum of spirit” is, for Plutarch, the finishing grace of the
noble life. And he summarises his creed in the triumphant comment on
the Spartan women: “So then, Sparta, bringing her women’s tragedy into
emulous competition with that of her men, showed the world that in the
last extremity Virtue cannot be outraged by Fortune.”
Catholic though Plutarch is, however, in his appreciation of virtue,
and gently though he scans his brother man--does he not forgive the
baseness of Aratus in the sentence: “I write this, however, not with
any desire to denounce Aratus, for in many ways he was a true Greek
and a great one, but out of pity for the weakness of human nature,
which, even in characters so notably disposed towards excellence,
cannot produce a nobility that is free from blame”?--in spite of
this imaginative understanding and sympathy, he has himself a rigid
and almost Puritanical standard of virtue. His ideal is an ideal of
temperance--of temperance in the pleasures of the body as well as in
the love of money and the love of glory. His Alexander the Great is
a figure of mixed passions, but he commends him most warmly on those
points on which he was temperate, as when the beautiful wife of Dareius
and her companions fell into his hands. “But Alexander, as it would
seem,” writes Plutarch, “considering the mastery of himself a more
kingly thing than the conquest of his enemies, neither laid hands
upon these women, nor did he know any other before marriage, except
Bersine.” As for the other women, “displaying in rivalry with their
fair looks the beauty of his own sobriety and self-control, he passed
them by as though they were lifeless images for display.” Again, when
Plutarch writes of the Gracchi, he praises them as men who “scorned
wealth and were superior to money,” and, if he loves Tiberius the
better of the two, it is because he was the more temperate and austere
and could never have been charged, as Caius was, with the innocent
extravagance of buying silver dolphins at twelve hundred and fifty
drachmas the pound. Agis, the youthful king of Sparta, who (though
brought up amid luxury) “at once set his face against pleasures” and
attempted to banish luxury from the State by restoring equality of
possessions, brings together in his person the virtues that inevitably
charm Plutarch. Like so many of the old moralists, Plutarch cries out
upon riches and pleasures as the great corrupters, and Agis, the censor
of these things, comes into a Sparta ruined by gold and silver as a
beautiful young redeemer. He dies, a blessed martyr, and his mother,
when she stands over his murdered body, kisses his face and cries: “My
son, it was thy too great regard for others, and thy gentleness and
humanity, which have brought thee to ruin, and us as well.” But, even
here, Plutarch does not surrender himself wholly to Agis. He will not
admit that Agis, any more than the Gracchi, was a perfect man. “Agis,”
he says, “would seem to have taken hold of things with too little
spirit.” He “abandoned and left unfinished the designs which he had
deliberately formed and announced owing to a lack of courage due to
his youth.” Plutarch’s heroes are men in whom a god dwells at strife
with a devil--the devil of sin and imperfection. He loves them in their
inspired hour: he pities them in the hour of their ruin. Thus he does
not love men at the expense of truth, as some preachers do, or tell
the truth about men at the expense of love, as some cynics do. His
imagination holds the reins both of the heart and of the mind. That is
the secret of his genius as a biographer.
X
HANS ANDERSEN
Almost the last story Hans Andersen wrote was a sentimental fable,
called “The Cripple,” which he intended as an apologia for his career
as a teller of fairy-tales. It is the story of a bed-ridden boy, the
son of a poor gardener and his wife, who receives a story-book as a
Christmas present from his father’s master and mistress. “He won’t
get fat on that,” says the father when he hears of so useless a gift.
In the result, as was to be expected, the book turns out to have a
talismanic effect on the fortunes of the family. It converts the father
and mother from grumblers into figures of contentment and benevolence,
so that they look as though they had won a prize in the lottery. It
is also indirectly the cause of little Hans recovering the use of his
legs. For, while he is lying in bed one day, he throws the book at the
cat in order to scare it away from his bird, and, having missed his
shot, he makes a miraculous effort and leaps out of bed to prevent
disaster. Though the bird is dead, Hans is saved, and we leave him to
live happily ever afterwards as a prospective schoolmaster. This, it
must be confessed, sounds rather like the sort of literature that is
given away as Sunday-school prizes. One could conceive a story of the
same kind being written by the author of _No Gains Without Pains_ or
_Jessica’s First Prayer_. Hans Andersen, indeed, was in many respects
more nearly akin to the writers of tracts and moral tales than to
the folklorists. He was a teller of fairy-tales. But he domesticated
the fairy-tale and gave it a townsman’s home. In his hands it was
no longer a courtier, as it had been in the time of Louis XIV, or a
wanderer among cottages, as it has been at all times. There was never
a teller of fairy-tales to whom kings and queens mattered less. He
could make use of royal families in the most charming way, as in those
little satires, “The Princess and the Pea” and “The Emperor’s New
Clothes.” But his imagination hankered after the lives of children such
as he himself had been. He loved the poor, the ill-treated, and the
miserable, and to illuminate their lives with all sorts of fancies.
His miracles happen preferably to those who live in poor men’s houses.
His cinder-girl seldom marries a prince: if she marries at all, it is
usually some honest fellow who will have to work for his living. In
Hans Andersen, however, it is the exception rather than the rule to
marry and live happily ever afterwards. The best that even Hans the
cripple has to look forward to is being a schoolmaster. There was never
an author who took fewer pains to give happy endings to his stories.
His own life was a mixture of sadness and the vanity of success. “The
Ugly Duckling” is manifestly the fable of his autobiography. Born
into the house of a poor cobbler, he was at once shy and ugly, and he
appears to have been treated by other children like the duckling which
“was bitten and pushed and jeered at” in the farmyard, and upon which
“the turkey-cock, who had been born with spurs, and therefore thought
himself an emperor, blew himself up like a ship in full sail and bore
straight down.” His father died early, and at the age of eleven Hans
ceased to go to school and was allowed to run wild. He amused himself
by devouring plays and acting them with puppets in a toy theatre which
he had built, till at the age of eighteen he realised that he must
do something to make a living. As he did not wish to dwindle into a
tailor, he left his home, confident that he had the genius to succeed
in Copenhagen. There his passion for the theatre led him to try all
sorts of occupations. He tried to write; he tried to act; he tried to
sing; he tried to dance. “He danced figure dances,” wrote Nisbet Bain,
“before the most famous _danseuse_ of the century, who not unnaturally
regarded the queer creature as an escaped lunatic.”
By his persistence and his ugliness, perhaps, as much as by the first
suggestions of his genius, he contrived at last to interest the manager
of the Royal Theatre, and, through him, the King; and the latter had
him sent off to school with a pension to begin his education all over
again in a class of small boys. Here, one can imagine, the “ugly
duckling” had a bad time of it, and the head master, a man with a
satirical tongue, seems to have been as merciless as the turkey-cock
in the story. Hans’s education and his unhappiness went on till he was
in his twenties, when he escaped and tried his hand at poetry, farce,
fantasy, travel-books and fiction. We hear very little of his novels
nowadays--in England at any rate; but we know how they were appreciated
at the time from some references in the Browning love-letters, within a
few years of their being published. The first of them appeared in 1835,
when the author was thirty, and a few months later an instalment of
the first volume of the fairy-tales was published. Andersen described
the latter as “fairy-tales which used to please me when I was little
and which are not known, I think.” The book (which began with “The
Tinder-Box” and “Little Claus and Big Claus”) was, apart from one
critic, reviewed unfavourably where it was reviewed at all. Andersen
himself appears to have been on the side of those who thought little of
it. His ambition was to write plays and novels and epics for serious
people, and all his life he was rather rebellious against the fame
which he gradually won all over Europe as a story-teller for children.
He longed for appreciation for works like _Ashuerus_, described by
Nisbet Bain as “an aphoristic series of historical tableaux from the
birth of Christ to the discovery of America,” and _To Be or Not to Be_,
the last of his novels, in which he sought to “reconcile Nature and the
Bible.”
We are told of his vexation when a statue was put up in Copenhagen,
representing him as surrounded by a group of children. “Not one of
the sculptors,” he declared, “seems to know that I never _could_
tell tales whenever anyone is sitting behind me, or close up to me,
still less when I have children in my lap, or on my back, or young
Copenhageners leaning right against me. To call me the children’s poet
is a mere figure of speech. My aim has always been to be the poet of
older people of all sorts: children alone cannot represent me.” It is
possible, however, that Andersen rather enjoyed taking up a grumpy pose
in regard to his stories for children. In any case he continued to
publish fresh series of them until 1872, three years before his death.
He also enjoyed the enthusiastic reception their popularity brought
him during his frequent travels in most of the countries of Europe
between England and Turkey. Nor did he object to turning himself into
a story-teller at a children’s party. There is a description in one of
Henry James’s books of such a party at Rome, at which Hans Andersen
read “The Ugly Duckling” and Browning “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,”
followed by “a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment,
with [W. W.] Story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes.”
Nor does Andersen seem to have thought too disrespectfully of his
fairy-tales when he wrote “The Cripple.”
Probably, however, even in his fairy-tales Hans Andersen has always
appealed to men and women as strongly as to children. We hear
occasionally of children who cannot be reconciled to him because of
his incurable habit of pathos. A child can read a fairy-tale like “The
Sleeping Beauty” as if it were playing among toys, but it cannot
read “The Marsh King’s Daughter” without enacting in its own soul the
pathetic adventures of the frog-girl; it cannot read “The Snow Queen”
without enduring all the sorrows of Gerda as she travels in search of
her lost friend; it cannot read “The Little Mermaid” without feeling
as if the knives were piercing its feet just as the mermaid felt when
she got her wish to become a human being so that she might possess
a soul. Even in “The Wild Swans,” though Lisa’s eleven brothers are
all restored to humanity from the shapes into which their wicked
step-mother had put them, it is only after a series of harrowing
incidents; and Lisa herself has to be rescued from being burned as
a witch. Hans Andersen is surely the least gay of all writers for
children. He does not invent exquisite confectionery for the nursery
such as Charles Perrault, having heard a nurse telling the stories
to his little son, gave the world in “Cinderella” and “Bluebeard.”
To read stories like these is to enter into a game of make-believe,
no more to be taken seriously than a charade. The Chinese lanterns
of a happy ending seem to illuminate them all the way through. But
Hans Andersen does not invite you to a charade. He invites you to put
yourself in the place of the little match-girl who is frozen to death
in the snow on New Year’s Eve after burning her matches and pretending
that she is enjoying all the delights of Christmas. He is more like a
child’s Dickens than a successor of the ladies and gentlemen who wrote
fairy-tales in the age of Louis XIV and Louis XV. He is like Dickens,
indeed, not only in his genius for compassion, but in his abounding
inventiveness, his grotesque detail, and his humour. He is never so
recklessly cheerful as Dickens with the cheerfulness that suggests
eating and drinking. He makes us smile rather than laugh aloud with his
comedy. But how delightful is the fun at the end of “Soup on a Sausage
Peg” when the Mouse King learns that the only way in which the soup can
be made is by stirring a pot of boiling water with his own tail! And
what child does not love in all its bones the cunning in “Little Claus
and Big Claus,” when Big Claus is tricked into killing his horses,
murdering his grandmother, and finally allowing himself to be tied in a
sack and thrown into the river?
But Hans Andersen was too urgent a moralist to be content to write
stories so immorally amusing as this. He was as anxious as a preacher
or a parent or Dickens to see children Christians of sorts, and he used
the fairy-tale continually as a means of teaching and warning them. In
one story he makes the storks decide to punish an ugly boy who had been
cruel to them. “There is a little dead child in the pond, one that has
dreamed itself to death; we will bring that for him. Then he will cry
because we have brought him a little dead brother.” That is certainly
rather harsh. “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” is equally severe. As a
result of her cruelty in tearing flies’ wings off and her wastefulness
in using a good loaf as a stepping-stone, she sinks down through the
mud into Hell, where she is tormented with flies that crawl over her
eyes, and having had their wings pulled out, cannot fly away. Hans
Andersen, however, like Ibsen in _Peer Gynt_, believes in redemption
through the love of others, and even the girl who trod on the loaf is
ultimately saved. “Love begets life” runs like a text through “The
Marsh King’s Daughter.” His stories as a whole are an imaginative
representation of that gospel--a gospel that so easily becomes mush
and platitude in ordinary hands. But Andersen’s genius as a narrator,
as a grotesque inventor of incident and comic detail, saves his gospel
from commonness. He may write a parable about a darning-needle, but
he succeeds in making his darning-needle alive, like a dog or a
schoolboy. He endows everything he sees--china shepherdesses, tin
soldiers, mice and flowers--with the similitude of life, action and
conversation. He can make the inhabitants of one’s mantelpiece capable
of epic adventures, and has a greater sense of possibilities in a pair
of tongs or a door-knocker than most of us have in men and women.
He is a creator of a thousand fancies. He loves imagining elves no
higher than a mouse’s knee, and mice going on their travels leaning
on sausage-skewers as pilgrims’ staves, and little Thumbelina, whose
cradle was “a neat polished walnut-shell ... blue violet-leaves were
her mattresses, with a rose-leaf for a coverlet.” His fancy never
becomes lyrical or sweeps us off our feet, like Shakespeare’s in _A
Midsummer Night’s Dream_. But there was nothing else like it in the
fairy-tale literature of the nineteenth century. And his pages are full
of the poetry of flights of birds. More than anything else one thinks
of Hans Andersen as a lonely child watching a flight of swans or storks
till it is lost to view, silent and full of wonder and sadness. Mr.
Edmund Gosse, in _Two Visits to Denmark_, a book in which everything
is interesting except the title, describes a visit which he paid to
Hans Andersen at Copenhagen in his old age, when “he took me out into
the balcony and bade me notice the long caravan of ships going by in
the Sound below--‘they are like a flock of wild swans’ he said.” The
image might have occurred to anyone, but it is specially interesting as
coming from the mouth of Hans Andersen, because it seems to express so
much of his vision of the world. He was, above all men of his century,
the magician of the flock of wild swans.
XI
JOHN CLARE
Mr. Arthur Symons edited a good selection of the poems of John Clare
a few years ago, and Edward Thomas was always faithful in his praise.
Yet Messrs. Blunden & Porter’s new edition of Clare’s work has meant
for most of its readers the rediscovery of a lost man of genius. For
Clare, though he enjoyed a “boom” in London almost exactly a hundred
years ago, has never been fully appreciated: he has never even been
fully printed. In 1820 he was more famous than Keats, who had the same
publisher. Keats’s 1820 volume was one of the great books of English
literature, but the public preferred John Clare, and three editions of
_Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery_ were sold between January
16 and the end of March. It was not that the public had discovered a
poet: it was merely that they had discovered an agricultural labourer
who was a poet. At the same time, to have been over-boomed was bound
to do Clare’s reputation harm. It raised hopes that his verse did
not satisfy, and readers who come to an author expecting too much are
apt in their disappointment to blame him for even more faults than he
possesses. It is obvious that if we are asked to appreciate Clare as
a poet of the same company as Keats and Shelley, our minds will be
preoccupied with the feeling that he is an intruder, and we shall be
able to listen to him with all our attention only when he has ceased to
challenge such ruinous comparisons. I do not know whether the critics
of 1820 gave more praise to Clare than to Keats. But the public did.
The public blew a bubble, and the bubble burst. Had Clare, instead
of making a sensation, merely made the quiet reputation he deserved,
he would not have collapsed so soon into one of the most unjustly
neglected poets of the nineteenth century.
In order to appreciate Clare, we have to begin by admitting that he
never wrote either a great or a perfect poem. He never wrote a “Tintern
Abbey” or a “Skylark” or a “Grecian Urn” or a “Tiger” or a “Red, Red
Rose” or an “Ode to Evening.” He was not a great artist uttering the
final rhythms and the final sentences--rhythms and sentences so perfect
that they seem like existences that have escaped out of eternity.
His place in literature is nearer that of Gilbert White or Mr. W. H.
Hudson than that of Shelley. His poetry is a mirror of things rather
than a window of the imagination. It belongs to a borderland where
naturalism and literature meet. He brings things seen before our
eyes: the record of his senses is more important than the record of
his imagination or his thoughts. He was an observer whose consuming
delight was to watch--to watch a grasshopper or a snail, a thistle or
a yellow-hammer. The things that a Wordsworth or a Shelley sees or
hears open the door, as it were, to still more wonderful things that
the poet has not seen or heard. Shelley hears a skylark, and it becomes
not only a skylark, but a flight of images, illumining the mysteries
of life as they pass. Wordsworth hears a Highland girl singing, and
her song becomes not only a girl’s song, but the secret music of far
times and far places, brimming over and filling the world. To Clare the
skylark was most wonderful as a thing seen and noticed: it was the end,
not the beginning, of wonders. He may be led by real things to a train
of reflections: he is never at his best led to a train of images. His
realism, however, is often steeped in the pathos of memory, and it is
largely this that changes his naturalism into poetry. One of the most
beautiful of his poems is called “Remembrances,” and who that has
read it can ever forget the moving verse in which Clare calls up the
playtime of his boyhood and compares it with a world in which men have
begun to hang dead moles on trees?
When from school o’er Little Field with its brook and wooden brig,
Where I swaggered like a man though I was not half so big,
While I held my little plough though ’twas but a willow twig,
And drove my team along made of nothing but a name,
“Gee hep” and “hoit” and “woi”--O I never call to mind
These pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind,
While I see little mouldiwarps hang sweeing to the wind
On the only aged willow that in all the field remains,
And nature hides her face while they’re sweeing in their chains
And in a silent murmuring complains.
The pity that we find in this poem is, perhaps, the dominant emotion
in Clare’s work. Helpless living things made the strongest appeal to
him, and he honoured the spear-thistle, as it had never been honoured
in poetry before, chiefly because of the protection it gave to the
nesting partridge and the lark. In “Spear Thistle,” after describing
the partridge, which will lie down in a thistle-clump,
and dust
And prune its horse-shoe circled breast,
he continues:
The sheep when hunger presses sore
May nip the clover round its nest;
But soon the thistle wounding sore
Relieves it from each brushing guest
That leaves a bit of wool behind,
The yellow-hammer loves to find.
The horse will set his foot and bite
Close to the ground lark’s guarded nest
And snort to meet the prickly sight;
He fans the feathers of her breast--
Yet thistles prick so deep that he
Turns back and leaves her dwelling free.
We have only to compare the detail of Clare’s work with the sonorous
generalisations in, say, Thomson’s _Seasons_--which he admired--to
realise the immense gulf that divides Clare from his eighteenth-century
predecessors. Clare, indeed, is more like a twentieth-century than an
eighteenth-century poet. He is almost more like a twentieth-century
than a nineteenth-century poet. He is “neo-Georgian” in his preference
for the fact in itself above the image or the phrase. The thing itself
is all the image he asks, and Mr. W. H. Davies in his simplest mood
might have made the same confession of faith as Clare:
I love the verse that mild and bland
Breathes of green fields and open sky,
I love the muse that in her hand
Bears flowers of native poesy;
Who walks nor skips the pasture brook
In scorn, but by the drinking horse
Leans o’er its little brig to look
How far the sallows lean across.
There is no poet, I fancy, in whose work the phrase, “I love,” recurs
oftener. His poetry is largely a list of the things he loves:
I love at early morn, from new-mown swath
To see the startled frog his route pursue;
To mark while, leaping o’er the dripping path,
His bright sides scatter dew,
The early lark that from its bustle flies
To hail his matin new;
And watch him to the skies:
To note on hedgerow baulks, in moisture sprent,
The jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn,
With earnest heed and tremulous intent,
Frail brother of the morn,
That from the tiny bents and misted leaves
Withdraws his timid horn,
And fearful visions weaves.
As we read Clare we discover that it is almost always the little things
that catch his eye:
Grasshoppers go in many a thrumming spring,
And now to stalks of tasselled sow-grass cling,
That shakes and swees awhile, but still keeps straight;
While arching ox-eye doubles with his weight.
Next on the cat-tail grass with farther bound
He springs, that bends until they touch the ground.
He is never weary of describing the bees. He praises the ants. Of the
birds, he seems to love the small ones best. How beautifully he writes
of the hedge-sparrow’s little song!:
While in a quiet mood hedge-sparrows try
An inward stir of shadowed melody.
There is the genius of a lover in this description. Here is something
finally said. Clare continually labours to make the report of his eye
and ear accurate. He even begins one of his _Asylum Poems_ with the
line:
Sweet chestnuts brown like soling leather turn;
and, in another, pursues realism in describing an April evening to the
point of writing:
Sheep ointment seems to daub the dead-hued sky.
His attempt at giving an exact echo of the blue-tit’s song--his very
feeble attempt--makes the success of one of his good poems tremble for
a moment in the balance:
Dreamers, mark the honey bee;
Mark the tree
Where the blue cap “_tootle tee_”
Sings a glee,
Sung to Adam and to Eve--
Here they be.
When floods covered every bough,
Noah’s ark
Heard that ballad singing now;
Hark, hark.
“_Tootle, tootle, tootle tee_”--
Can it be
Pride and fame must shadows be?
Come and see--
Every season owns her own;
Bird and bee
Sing creation’s music on;
Nature’s glee
Is in every mood and tone
Eternity.
Clare comes nearer an imaginative vision of life in this than in most
of his poems. But, where Shelley would have given us an image, Clare is
content to set down “_Tootle, tootle, tootle tee_.”
His poems of human life are of less account than his poems of bird
and insect life; but one of the most beautiful of all his poems, “The
Dying Child,” introduces a human figure among the bees and flowers. How
moving are the first three verses!:
He could not die when trees were green,
For he loved the time too well.
His little hands, when flowers were seen,
Were held for the bluebell,
As he was carried o’er the green.
His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee,
He knew those children of the spring:
When he was well and on the lea,
He held one in his hands to sing,
Which filled his heart with glee.
Infants, the children of the spring!
How can an infant die
When butterflies are on the wing,
Green grass, and such a sky?
How can they die at spring?
The writer of these lines was a poet worth rediscovering, and Messrs.
Blunden and Porter have given us a book in which we can wander at will,
peering into hedges and at the traffic of the grass, as in few even of
the great poets. Mr. Blunden has also written an admirable, though
needlessly pugnacious account of the life of The Green Man, as Clare
was called in Lamb’s circle because of his clothes. It is a story of
struggle, poverty, drink, a moment’s fame without money to correspond,
a long family, and the madness of a man who, escaping from the asylum,
ate “the grass on the roadside which seemed to taste something like
bread.” Knowing the events of his life, we read Clare’s poetry with all
the more intense curiosity. And, if we do not expect to find a Blake or
a Wordsworth, we shall not be disappointed. Certainly this is a book
that must go on the shelf near the works of Mr. Hudson.
XII
HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS
Herodotus is one of the oldest illustrations of the fact that a test of
good literature is its capacity to entertain us. There are two sorts
of writing--the entertaining and the dull--and the dull is outside
literature. This is a fact which, though it is perfectly obvious, tends
to be forgotten by many writers, even by many able writers, in every
century. Authors fall in love with their own ponderosity, forgetting
that a huge tome is too often a huge tomb. That is the explanation
of the long lives and the still longer histories that the publishers
and the authors of the nineteenth century loved. Biographies became
life-size, and histories rivalled in length the wars they chronicled.
A Victorian biographer appeared to think that he was performing more
ambitious work in writing a life of Milton in six volumes than if he
were to write it in one. Similarly, a historian instead of giving us
a Cromwell that the eye could take in as one absorbing figure, would
devote one volume to this bit of him and another to that, and would
leave us with a mass of information about his _disjecta membra_,
which we might or might not piece together, just as we pleased. This
was called scientific history. Its disciples forgot that history is
an art and that, like all other arts, whatever its ultimate object,
it should be subject to the law of entertainment. Nothing else will
keep history alive, except as a schoolbook or a source-book. An
inaccurate history that entertains will outlive an accurate history
that wearies. Herodotus did not cease to be read, even when he was
generally regarded as the father of lies. It is true that scholars no
longer regard him as a liar, and that Mr. Godley, in the preface to his
admirable translation in the Loeb Library, claims with Dr. Macan that
“the most stringent application of historical and critical methods to
the text of Herodotus leaves the work irrevocably and irreplaceably
at the head of European prose literature, whether in its scientific
or in its artistic character.” At the same time, even if we did not
know about the scientific value of Herodotus, his artistic value would
be indisputable. He was as indefatigably interested in the world as
Mr. Pepys was in himself, and he can infect us with the thrill of his
delightful curiosity.
Curiosity, on the other hand, implies interest in some sort of truth,
and the pursuit of some sort of truth seems to be an essential in
a book that is to entertain us permanently. The artist is moralist
as well as entertainer, and the truth that lies in him shapes
his work, whether he is Æschylus or Plato, Herodotus or Sallust.
Sallust’s _Jugurtha_, Professor Rolfe warns us in a preface to the
Loeb translation, “is rather like a historical novel of the better
class than like sober history” and the _Cataline_, we are told, “is
inaccurate in many of its details ... with inevitable distortion
of the facts.” Even so, both works are entertaining statements of
a great moral idea--the idea of the corruption of human nature by
success. Sallust, it may be argued, had the propagandist purpose of
attacking the corruption of the nobles rather than the moral purpose of
exhibiting the corruption of human nature, but he writes his history
with an amazing dramatic sense of the catastrophe that occurs even in
great souls. It occurred in the soul of Jugurtha, and in the soul of
Rome. “When Carthage, the rival of Rome’s sway, had perished root and
branch, and all seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow
cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs. Those who had found
it easy to bear hardship and dangers, anxiety and adversity, found
leisure and wealth, desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a
curse. Hence the lust for power, then for money, grew upon them; these
were, I may say, the root of all evils.” What is all literature but the
fable of such things? It may be an inspiring fable or a derisive fable,
a tragic fable or a comic fable, but in any event it cannot be good
literature unless it is an entertaining fable.
Herodotus, certainly, never forgets for long that history is a fable.
That wonderful anecdote of Gyges and the infatuated King who compelled
him to hide behind the door and to look on the Queen when she was
naked, with the result that the Queen on discovering him, ordered him
to kill the King and marry her or die himself, is not a mere unrelated
scene as from a ballet, but has its tragic signature five generations
later, when the power of Crœsus, the descendant of Gyges, is destroyed
and he is a prisoner in the camp of Cyrus. Crœsus, being unable to
understand how the disaster had happened, obtained permission from
Cyrus to send messengers to Delphi to enquire of the Oracle why it had
deceived him. And the priestess replied: “None may escape his destined
lot, not even a god. Crœsus hath paid for the sin of his ancestor of
the fifth generation: who, being of the guard of the Heraclidæ, was
led by the guile of a woman to slay his master, and took to himself
the royal state of that master, whereto he had no right.” We find in
pagan literature a sense of the divine government of the world that
is missing from the greater part of modern Christian literature. The
pagan historians, I think, have a profounder sense of sin and of the
sufferings that result from sin than most of the Christian historians.
Nowadays, we hesitate before allowing even Richard III or Judge
Jeffreys to have been a sinner. And, as we have found no substitute
for those ancient colours of vice and virtue, much of our history is
colourless and uninteresting. The sense of sin is of infinite value to
an artist, if only because it enables him to see how striking are the
contrasts that exist in every human being. He sees the great man as a
miserable sinner, and he sees him all the more truthfully for this.
He sees the beautiful woman as a miserable sinner, and he sees her
all the more truthfully for this. Aristotle, indeed, thought that it
was impossible to write great tragic literature except about a noble
character who was seen to be a sinner. It was probably never done till
the appearance of the Gospels, and I am not sure whether it has been
done since. Shakespeare had as compassionate a sense of the flaw in
human nature even at its greatest as the Greek dramatists and the
supreme Greek biographer.
There is, no doubt, a school of writers who have so keen a sense of the
flaws that they can see scarcely anything else. This is inimical to
art. Suetonius provides us with a feast of flaws, from which we rise
with the feeling that we have been dining on spiced and putrid dishes.
His was not a disinterested observation of human character. He was a
specialist in the vices. It is appalling to think what he would have
made of Sempronia, one of the many Roman ladies whom Catiline enticed
into his conspiracy. Sallust’s portrait of her is a masterpiece:
Now among these women was Sempronia, who had often committed many
crimes of masculine daring. In birth and beauty, in her husband
and children, she was abundantly favoured by fortune; well read
in the literature of Greece and Rome, able to play the lyre and
dance more skilfully than an honest woman need, and having many
other accomplishments which minister to voluptuousness. But there
was nothing which she held so cheap as modesty and chastity; you
could not easily say whether she was less sparing of her money or
her honour; her desires were so ardent that she sought men more
often than she was sought by them. Even before the time of the
conspiracy, she had often broken her word, repudiated her debts,
been privy to murder; poverty and extravagance combined had driven
her headlong. Nevertheless, she was a woman of no mean endowments;
she could write verses, bandy jests, and use language which was
modest, or tender, or wanton; in fine, she possessed a high degree
of wit and charm.
A miserable sinner, undoubtedly. How odious and how interesting!
But, even as gossips, how these ancient historians still keep their
hold on us! Herodotus is the father of nursery tales as well as of
moral tales. His account of Egypt in the second book of his history
may appeal to the anthropologist in some of us; it also appeals to
the child in all of us. He must have omitted thousands of the stories
that he heard on his travels, but he had a genius for finding room for
the interesting story. His pages are rich in attractive stories like
that which tells how Psammetichus decided whether the Egyptians or the
Phrygians were the oldest nation:
Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians deemed
themselves to be the oldest nation on earth.... Psammetichus,
being nowise able to discover by enquiry what men had first come
into being, devised a plan whereby he took two new-born children
of common men and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his
flock. He gave charge that none should speak any word in their
hearing; they were to lie by themselves in a lonely hut, and in
due season the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children
their milk and do all else needful. Psammetichus did this, and gave
this charge, because he desired to hear what speech would first
break from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct
babbling. And he had his wish; for, when the shepherd had done as
he was bidden for two years, one day as he opened the door and
entered, both the children ran to him, stretching out their hands
and calling “Bekos.” When he first heard this he said nothing of
it; but coming often and taking careful note, he was ever hearing
this same word, till at last he told the matter to his master,
and on command brought the children into the King’s presence.
Psammetichus heard them himself, and enquired to what language
this word “Bekos” might belong; he found it to be a Phrygian word
signifying bread. Reasoning from this fact the Egyptians confessed
that the Phrygians were older than they.
Scientific? Perhaps not. And yet science and art may embrace in the
recording of such stories as this. But it is in the museum of the arts,
not in that of the sciences, that Herodotus holds his immortal place.
He may not be the first of the scientific historians: he is certainly
the first of the European masters of the art of entertaining prose.
XIII
A WORDSWORTH DISCOVERY
A good many people were pleased--not without malice--when Professor
Harper discovered a few years ago that Wordsworth had an illegitimate
daughter. It was like hearing a piece of scandal about an archbishop.
As a matter of fact, the story, as Professor Harper tells it, is not a
scandal; it is merely a puzzle. The figures in the episode are names
and shadows: we know almost nothing as regards their feelings for each
other or what it was that prevented the lovers from marrying. Professor
Harper believes that Wordsworth has left a disguised version of the
story in _Vaudracour and Julia_. Wordsworth himself says of _Vaudracour
and Julia_ that “the facts are true,” and the main “facts” in the
poem are that the lovers wish to marry, cannot gain their parent’s
consent, and give way to passion, and that after this their parents,
instead of softening in their attitude, insist more harshly than ever
on keeping them apart. Wordsworth is vehement in his contention that
Vaudracour was no common seducer yielding to the lusts of the flesh,
and the suggestion is fairly clear that the youth thought he was taking
the only way to make marriage inevitable. Consider these lines, which
impute honourable motives, if not honourable conduct, to the lover:
So passed the time, till whether through effect
Of some unguarded moment that dissolved
Virtuous restraint--ah, speak it, think it, not!
Deem rather that the fervent youth, who saw
So many bars between his present state
And the dear haven where he wished to be
In honourable wedlock with his love,
Was in his judgment tempted to decline
To perilous weakness, and entrust his cause
To nature for a happy end of all;
Deem that by such fond hope the youth was swayed
And bear with their transgression, when I add
That Julia, wanting yet the name of wife,
Carried about her for a secret grief,
The promise of a mother.
These lines have an ethical rather than a poetical interest. Whether
Wordsworth, in writing them, was consciously or subconsciously
attempting his own moral justification, we do not know. But Professor
Harper has collected a number of facts that make it appear likely
that he was. Certainly, the story of Wordsworth and Marie-Anne Vallon
at Orleans in 1792, so far as we know it, might without violence be
dramatised as the story of Vaudracour and Julia.
Bear in mind, for example, the “many bars” that stood in the way of
Wordsworth’s marriage to Marie-Anne, or “Annette,” Vallon. They were
not, as in the poem, barriers of class, but they were the equally
insurmountable barriers of creed, both political and religious.
Wordsworth was a young Englishman, full of the ardour of the
Revolution, and a Protestant of so sceptical a cast that Coleridge
described him as a “semi-atheist.” Annette, for her part, was the child
of parents who were zealots in the cause of Royalism and Catholicism.
They must have regarded the coming of such a suitor as Wordsworth
with the same horror with which a reader of the _Morning Post_ would
learn that his daughter had fallen in love with a Catholic Sinn Feiner
or a Jewish Bolshevist. The position was even more bitter than this
suggests. The sectarian and political passions that raged in France
were more comparable to the passions of Orange Belfast than to any
that can be imagined in the atmosphere of modern England. Wordsworth
may well have appeared to these orthodox parents a representative
of Satan. He was the murder-gang personified. Nor, to make up for
this, was he even a good match. He was an exceedingly poor young man
who had just come of age. Add to this the fact that it was almost
impossible at the time for an orthodox Catholic and Royalist to
marry a Revolutionary sceptic. Marriage had become a State affair
under the Revolution, and no Catholic could permit his daughter to
go through a marriage ceremony that seemed to deny that marriage was
a sacrament. It is true that marriages could still be performed by
the clergy, but only by such clergy as accepted their position under
the new constitution as functionaries of the State. Republican clergy
of this kind would be regarded by the Vallon family as traitors and
scarcely better than atheists. Marriages celebrated by them would be
looked on as invalid--as mere licences to live in sin. Had Wordsworth
become a Catholic, or had he been of a compromising disposition, it
would have been easy enough to find a non-juring priest to perform the
ceremony. But it is unlikely that a priest, who was zealous enough to
face persecution rather than recognise the Republic, would have been
willing to marry one of his flock to a free-thinking revolutionary.
Respectability might urge that, when the lovers had already gone so
far, nothing remained but to make the best of it and permit them to
marry. Fanaticism, however, might well regard such a marriage as but
the adding of one sin to another. The Church itself, by marrying the
sinners, would make itself a partner in the sin. We have to reflect
how adamantine is the faith of the orthodox in order to understand
the “many bars” that hindered the marriage of Wordsworth and Annette.
Remembering this, we cannot dismiss as improbable Professor Harper’s
theory that Wordsworth abandoned Marie-Anne reluctantly, and that when
he settled in Blois, he did so because he had been driven away by her
relatives and yet desired to remain near her.
All we know of Wordsworth, and all the facts in Professor Harper’s
story, make it impossible to believe that he would willingly have
deserted Marie-Anne and his daughter. The baptism of the child was
entered in the registry of baptisms in the parish of Sainte-Croix,
“Williams Wordsodsth” in his absence being represented by a local
official. She was baptised Anne Caroline, and it was as Anne Caroline
Wordsworth, daughter of “Williams Wordsworth, landowner,” that she was
married in Paris about twenty-four years later. Wordsworth appears to
have kept constantly in touch with her and her mother in the meantime,
and, when peace was in sight in 1802, he and his sister Dorothy
determined to cross to France and see them. A meeting took place in
Calais. It was the preliminary to a marriage, but not to marriage with
Annette, who, indeed, never married, but went through life as Madame
Vallon. Two months after the Calais meeting Wordsworth married Mary
Hutchinson. That he had been deeply moved by the meeting with his child
rather than with her mother is suggested by the mood of the sonnet he
wrote at the time: “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.”
Professor Harper is of opinion that Wordsworth’s love for Marie-Anne
Vallon was an event of supreme importance in his life. He holds that
the facts he has discovered throw “light upon many of Wordsworth’s
poems.” I do not think that on this point he has proved his case. In
his two-volume life of Wordsworth, it may be remembered, he even goes
so far as to assign the “Lucy” of so many beautiful poems to a French
original. Lovers of a great poet are naturally led to speculate as to
the experiences out of which his poems grew. There is nothing of the
vice of Paul Pry in attempting thus to discover the sources of the
experiences the poet communicates in his verse. The theme of every
poet is the experiences that have moved his soul most profoundly.
And many, or most, of those experiences spring from his relations
with other human beings. At the same time, there is no evidence that
Wordsworth in his work was ever influenced by Marie-Anne Vallon as
Keats was influenced by Fanny Brawne. It is doubtful if any women every
really took the place of his sister in his heart. “She gave me eyes,
she gave me ears,” could be said only of Dorothy. It was the fire of
affection, not the fire of passion, that glowed in Wordsworth’s soul.
“Oh, my dear, dear sister!” he cried in one of his letters, “with what
transport shall I again meet you! With what rapture shall I again
wear out the day in your sight. So eager is my desire to see you that
all other obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running, or rather
flying, to my arms.” He was in life as in literature a devoted brother
rather than a devoted lover. Even Professor Harper can give no other
woman but Dorothy the position of presiding genius over his life and
work. This does not necessarily involve our acceptance of the common
theory that Dorothy was the original around whom the “Lucy” poems were
written. But, had Lucy been a Frenchwoman, Wordsworth would hardly have
written:
I travelled among unknown men
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor England did I know till then
What love I bore to thee....
Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
Beside an English fire.
To interpret this as a dramatisation of his early passion in France is
to strain probability.[1]
[1] I understand that Professor Harper disclaims what seemed to
me the obvious interpretation of a passage in his book.
Professor Harper, then, has discovered an interesting episode in
Wordsworth’s life, but I do not think he has discovered what may be
called a key episode. It may turn out to have had more influence on
Wordsworth’s destiny than at present appears. But we do not yet know
enough even about the circumstances to get any fresh light from it
either on his work or on his character.
As regards Annette, we learn from a letter of Dorothy’s, written in
1815, that she shared, and continued to share, the Royalist convictions
of her people. She often, Dorothy affirms, “risked her life in defence
of adherents to that cause, and she despised and detested Buonaparte.”
In 1820, Wordsworth, his wife, and Dorothy visited Paris and lived on
intimate terms with Annette, Caroline, and Caroline’s husband. They
even went to lodge in the same street. Of Caroline it was reported
earlier that “she resembles her father most strikingly.” For the rest,
Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, when writing his uncle’s
biography, said nothing about the matter. He cannot be accused of
having hidden anything of very great significance. The truth is now
out, and we know little more about Wordsworth than we knew before.
XIV
THE POETRY OF POE
“My first object (as usual) was originality,” said Poe, in discussing
the versification of “The Raven.” It is a remarkable fact that the
two great poets of America--Poe and Whitman--were two of the most
deliberately original poets of the nineteenth century--in English
at least. They were both conscious frontiersmen of poetry, drawn to
unmapped territories, settlers on virgin soil. This may help to explain
some of their imperfections. Each of them gives us the impression of a
genius rich but imperfectly cultivated. Different though they were from
each other, they resembled each other in a certain lack of the talent
of order, of taste, of “finish.” They were both capable of lapses from
genius into incompetence, from beauty into provincialism, to an unusual
degree. A contemporary critic said of Poe that he had not talent equal
to his genius. Neither had Whitman. In the greatest poets, genius and
talent go hand in hand. Poe seldom wrote a poem in which his mood seems
to have attained its perfect expression. His poetry does not get near
perfection even in the sense in which Coleridge’s fragments do. It
seems, as a rule, like a first sketch for greater things. His _Complete
Poems_, indeed, is one of the most wonderful sketch-books of a man of
genius in literature.
Poe himself attributed the defects of his work to lack of leisure
rather than to lack of talent. “Events not to be controlled,” he said
in the preface to the 1845 edition of his poems, “have prevented me
from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier
circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry
has been not a purpose but a passion, and the passions should be held
in reverence; they must not--they cannot at will be excited, with
an eye to the petty compensations, or the more petty commendations,
of mankind.” Other poets, however, who have lived in as bitter
circumstances as Poe, have written an incomparably greater body of good
poetry. There was in him some flaw that kept him, as a rule, from being
more than a great beginner. It may have been partly due to theatrical
qualities that he inherited from his actress mother. Again and again
he mingles the landscape of dreamland with the tawdry grandeur of
the stage. He takes a footlights view of romance when, having begun
“Lenore” with the lines----
Ah, broken is the golden bowl!--the spirit flown for ever!--
Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river
he continues:
And, Guy de Vere, hast _thou_ no tear?--weep now, or never more.
This, no doubt, was in tune with the fashionable romance of the day,
but Poe’s romantic conceptions at times were those of one who was
especially entranced by stage trappings. He made his heroines rich and
highborn as well as beautiful. In “Lenore” he cries:
Wretches, ye loved her for her wealth, and hated her for her pride!
In “The Sleeper” he speaks of:
The crested palls
Of her grand family funerals.
In “Annabel Lee” he made the very angels heroes of the green-room:
Her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me.
On the other hand, Poe’s theatricalism, though it explains some of the
faults of his poetry, leaves unexplained the fact that he has cast a
greater spell on succeeding poets than has even so great a theatrical
genius as Byron. Poe is one of those poets who are sources of poetry.
He discovered--though not without forerunners such as Coleridge--a
new borderland for the imagination, where death and despair had a new
strangeness. He seems to have reached it, not through mere fancy,
as his imitators do, but through experience. When he was a youth he
worshipped Mrs. Helen Stannard, the mother of one of his friends. She
went mad and died, and for some time after her death Poe used to haunt
her tomb by night, and “when the autumnal rains fell and the winds
wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest, and came away
most regretfully.” J. H. Ingram and other writers have found in these
“solitary churchyard vigils” the clue to “much that seems strange and
abnormal in the poet’s after life.” Love overshadowed by death, beauty
overshadowed by death, remained the recurrent theme of his verse. It is
the theme of his supreme poem, “Annabel Lee,” with its haunting close:
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Poe was a poet for whom life was darkened by experience and
illuminated only by visions. In the beginning, romance
loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and painted wing,
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake.
In time, however, this born day-dreamer can find no comfort in
day-dreaming:
Of late, eternal Condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky.
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings--
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away--forbidden things!--
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.
There is a terrible sincerity in Poe’s sense of the presence of death.
His vision of mortal men, at least, was not theatrical in its gloom:
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly--
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!
Poe and Whitman were both poets preoccupied with the thought of death,
but, whereas Whitman forced himself to praise it, Poe was in revolt
against it as the ultimate tyrant. He saw it as the one thing that
made dreadful those enchanted islands, those enchanted valleys, those
enchanted palaces in which, for him, so much of the beauty of the
world took refuge. He could not reconcile himself to a world that was
governed by mortality. There is the wistfulness of the exile from a
lost Paradise running through his verse. He is essentially a man for
whom the spiritual universe exists. His angels and demons may not
resemble the angels and demons of the churches--may, indeed, be little
more than formulæ in his dreamland. But they are at least the formulæ
of a poet into whose dreams has come the rumour of immortality. He
cannot believe that the City of Death, with its awful stillness, can
last for ever--that city where
Shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
He feels that somewhere Eldorado is to be found, as it is by the knight
who sought it:
And as his strength
Failed him at length
He met a pilgrim shadow--
“Shadow,” said he,
“Where can it be--
This land of Eldorado?”
“Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied--
“If you seek for Eldorado!”
It is true that his vision, whether of life or immortality, has
something of the incoherence of the landscape of his “Dreamland”:
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore.
If his imagination passes “out of space, out of time,” it is on the
wings of trance rather than of faith. At the same time, his dreams
would not have made so strong an appeal to generations of readers if
they had been mere sensational fancies, and had not seemed to wander
in a wider universe than we are conscious of in our everyday life.
They cannot be dismissed as the visions of a drugged man. They are the
questionings of a spirit.
It may be that, like some of the decadents of Europe, Poe was preyed
upon by a demon--that he was an outcast poet in whose sky was
The cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
But in the best of the decadents the soul survived; and if they have
a place in literature it is because they have left a record of the
travels of the prodigal soul in a far country. Poe, though not sharing
their decadence, is also the poet of a far country. That loveliest of
his poems (if we except “Annabel Lee”), “To Helen”--what is it but a
triumphant cry of return? Unlike “The Raven,” it is a poem that never
loses its beauty with repetition. “Annabel Lee” may be the fullest
expression of his genius, but “To Helen” is the most exquisite. Even to
write it down, hackneyed though it is, renews one’s delight:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er the perfumed sea,
The weary, way-born wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
Here, as nowhere else, Poe achieved coherent and consummate grace of
form. Here, if almost nowhere else, his talent was equal to his genius.
XV
HAWTHORNE
Hawthorne is the only American admitted into the English Men of Letters
Series. This may be partly accidental, and due to the fact that it was
possible to get so fine a critic as Henry James to write about him.
It also suggests, however, that in 1879 Hawthorne was held in higher
esteem than he is held to-day. There are several American writers
about whom we are nowadays more curious. Emerson does not soar at
quite such an altitude as he once did, but he is still an indubitable
figure of genius on the sunny side of the clouds. Thoreau, with the
challenge of his sardonic simplicity, will interest us so long as there
is a society to protest against. Poe, after we have refined him in
the fiercest fires of criticism, remains gold of the most precious.
Whitman holds us as the giant aborigine of democracy as well as the
rhapsodist of brotherhood and death. Washington Irving, on the other
hand, has disappeared except from the schoolbooks, and Oliver Wendell
Holmes has ceased to be read by people under fifty. Longfellow has
become an exiguous contributor to an anthology except in so far as he
is taught, like Irving, to schoolchildren, and Lowell is oftener quoted
by politicians than by critics of letters. There is no need to discuss
just now whether this waning of reputations is likely to be permanent.
It is enough to note that Hawthorne, though he has not waned to the
extent that Longfellow has, has ceased for most readers to be a star of
the first or second magnitude. How many critics would now place him,
as he was once placed, among the great masters of English prose? How
many editors of a series of lives of great writers would unhesitatingly
include in it a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne?
Hawthorne may nevertheless justly be regarded as a classic, and there
have been few writers whose short stories would bear re-reading so
well as Hawthorne’s three-quarters of a century after their first
appearance. The prose, as anyone may see by dipping into Mr. Carl van
Doren’s admirable selection from _Twice-told Tales_, _Mosses from an
Old Manse_, and _The Snow Image_, is beautiful prose, even if it falls
short of supreme greatness. It flows with a rhythm at once charming
and forceful. It is transparent, and through it we can see life as
Hawthorne’s imagination played on it like sunlight refracted through
water. He is a music-maker rather than a phrase-maker in his use of
words. Movement is more to him than metaphor, though he can combine
them attractively, as in the opening sentence of _The Seven Vagabonds_:
Rambling on foot in the spring of my life and the summer of the
year, I came one afternoon to a point which gave me the choice of
three directions.
You may turn Hawthorne’s pages almost at random, and you can scarcely
help noticing example after example of this characteristic rhythm of
his. It is noticeable even in such a simple narrative sentence as that
with which _The Artist of the Beautiful_ opens:
An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing
along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening
into the light that fell across the pavement from the window of a
small shop.
And, again, we find it in a meditative passage such as:
I saw mankind, in this weary old age of the world, either enduring
a sluggish existence amid the smoke and dust of cities, or, if
they breathed a purer air, still lying down at night with no hope
but to wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up
life, among the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that
had darkened the sunshine of to-day.
This all flows with something of the noble ease of hexameters, yet
without falling into the vices of pseudo-poetic prose. The mere sound
of his sentences gives Hawthorne’s prose a wonderful momentum that
keeps us interested even when at times we begin to wonder if his
subject-matter is quite as interesting as it ought to be. This grave
and equable momentum is one of his greatest technical qualities. It is
a quality that cannot be adequately illustrated in single sentences or
detached passages, because its success is not the success of occasional
felicities but of something sustained and pervasive. It may even be
imputed as a fault to Hawthorne that he can never, or almost never,
escape from the equable rhythm of his prose. He seldom ends a story
with the slightly different momentum due to an ending. It is not
merely, however, that his stories end quietly: he is like a rider who
rides beautifully but does not know how to dismount. He maintains his
graceful ease of motion until the last moment, and then he slides off
as best he can.
But it would be folly to regard Hawthorne’s rhythm as wholly--or even
mainly--a technical quality. The rhythm of prose is never that, and it
is in vain to play the sedulous ape to the great masters if nothing
but their style is imitated. It is not an accident that the greatest
English prose is to be found in the Bible. The rhythm of the greatest
prose seems at times the rhythm of the spirit of man as it contemplates
the life of men in the light of eternity. The rhythm to a Plato, a
Milton, a Sir Thomas Browne, is inevitably of a kind that a Jane Austen
or a Thackeray, with all their genius, could never achieve. It is the
echo of the emotion felt by men to whom time and place are fables with
another meaning besides that which appears on the surface. The realists
can never write the greatest prose, because to them the world they see
is not fabulous but a hard fact. The greatest writers all see the world
as fabulous. Their men and women are inhabited by angels or devils, or,
on a lower plane, have something of the nature of ghosts or fairies or
goblins. If Othello were not a fable as well as a man, he would be no
better than a criminal lunatic. If King Lear were not a fable as well
as man, he would be a subject for the psychoanalyst. Imagine either of
them as a modern Englishman, putting his case before a judge and jury,
and you will see how the artist, even though his characters as a rule
are characters such as may be found in reality, must remove them out
of and above reality into the region of fables in order to make them
permanently real to the imagination. Dickens turned Victorian England
into a myth peopled by goblins. Dostoievsky turned Russia into a myth
peopled by goblins and demons. It is not that they denied the reality
of the world before their eyes, but that they saw within it and about
it another world apart from which it had very little meaning.
Hawthorne was a writer extremely conscious of this second world within
and about the world. He had abandoned the Puritanical orthodoxy of
his people, but none the less he was haunted like them by a sense of
a second meaning in life beyond the surface meaning of the day’s work
and the day’s play. Many of his stories are stories in which, as in
_Young Goodman Brown_, everyday reality passes into fable and back
again as swiftly as though the two worlds were but different stages in
a transformation scene. His genius turned more naturally to allegory
than any other writer’s since Bunyan. This is generally counted a
defect, and, indeed, if, instead of alternating the everyday world with
the fabulous world, he had interwoven them in such a way that the world
never became less real on account of the fable it bore within it like
an inner light, Hawthorne would have been a greater writer. At the same
time, it is better that he should have sacrificed observation than that
he should have sacrificed imagination. He lived in an atmosphere in
which it must have been extraordinarily difficult to stand sufficiently
remote from everyday life to see it not merely with the eye but with
the imagination. To the eye, there must have been little enough of
fantasy in the narrow lives of the men and women about him. “Never
comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region,” he wrote of the
Custom-house in which he passed so many years and that made “such havoc
of his wits.” He had to transform his surroundings into a strange
land into which a bird of Paradise might enter. He did this by the
invention of a sort of moral fairyland, into which he could project
his vision of the mystery of human life. He often offends our sense
of reality, but he never leaves us in doubt of the reality of this
moral fairyland as the image of all he knew and felt about human life.
It is a Puritanical fairyland into which sin has come. But, strong
though his sense of sin is, Hawthorne does not always in his view of
sin agree with the Puritans. He is more Christian, and he condemns
the sin of self-righteousness more than the sins of the flesh.
Even so, his imagination is very close to that of the Puritans, who
believed in witches and in men possessed by the Devil. The difference
is that Hawthorne was inclined to believe that the good church-going
people were also witches and men possessed by the Devil. Unless I
misunderstand _Young Goodman Brown_, Hawthorne is here telling us how
he was tempted to believe this, and reproaching himself for having
given way to temptation. In _The Scarlet Letter_, the egoism of the
vengeful husband, not the adultery of the wife or the cowardice of the
minister who sins with her, is the unpardonable sin of the story. That
Hawthorne’s imaginative morality had the vehemence of genius is shown
by the fact that _The Scarlet Letter_ still holds us under its spell in
days in which moral values have subtly and swiftly changed. People are
no longer thrilled at the thought of a scarlet A on a woman’s breast;
they would scarcely be thrilled by the spectacle of a whole scarlet
alphabet hung round a woman’s neck like a collar. Yet Hawthorne’s novel
survives--a fable of the permanent and dubious warfare between good
and evil, in which good changes its shape into that of evil, and evil
is transmuted into good through suffering. His genius survives, like
that of Hans Andersen, because, not only does it carry the burden of
morality, but it is led on its travels by a fancy wayward and caressing
as the summer wind. He is the first prose myth-maker of America, and he
has left no successors in his kind.
XVI
JONAH IN LANCASHIRE
The author of _Patience_--the other _Patience_, I mean, not the Gilbert
opera--is beginning to be discovered even by the average reader. It is
not long since we had modernised versions of his two most remarkable
poems, _Pearl_ and _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_. Gaston Paris
describes the latter as “the jewel of English mediæval literature,”
and even among those who read idly for amusement it should become a
favourite book in Mr. Ernest Kirtlan’s easy rendering. Who the maker of
these poems was we know not. Editors have invented a personal history
for him, but other editors have ruthlessly pulled it to pieces. It was
suggested that he wrote the romance _Sir Gawayne_ in his gaudy youth.
Then, having lost a child, he composed in _Pearl_ a passionate lament
for her. Afterwards, in the evening of his life, he wrote _Patience_
as an expression of his submission to the will of God. Mr. Bateson
will have nothing to do either with this pathetic life-history or with
the chronology. He regards _Patience_ as the earliest of the poems,
and is of the opinion that _Pearl_, far from being a lament for a lost
child, is “largely a theological discussion in elegiac form.” One would
think there must be something seriously wrong in a poem about which a
dispute of the kind could rage among the interpreters. But this is not
necessarily so. No one denies that the _Song of Solomon_ is a great
poem, and yet men have quarrelled as to whether it should be read as
the holiest of symbolic poems or as an early masterpiece of the fleshly
school of literature. Coming to _Patience_ itself, I fancy that the man
who could discover personal confessions in it could discover personal
confessions in Euclid. I find it difficult to believe in the bereaved
father who turned for a lesson in resignation to the story of Jonah. It
is the homilist, not the tortured human being, who fishes in the Book
of Jonah for comfortable morals. _Patience_ is a sermon addressed to
other people, not to the poet’s own soul. Feeling this, one may allow
oneself to be amused by its quaintness as well as to admire the hue and
vigour of its narrative.
_Patience_ is the story of Jonah told by an original artist. Jonah
is here painted in English colours. He is the Jonah not of a
tragic-hearted Hebrew but of a familiar Lancashire man who wrote in a
Lancashire dialect at the time of Chaucer. Tertullian had written a
Latin poem on the same theme, and Mr. Bateson gives us the text of this
in an appendix, suggesting, as other scholars have done, that it is one
of the sources of _Patience_. The Jonah of Tertullian, however, is a
formal figure compared to the Jonah of the Englishman. Jonah in the old
Lancashire poem is a lithe and live fellow from the moment at which he
steps aboard the ship to make his escape from the perilous will of God.
Was neuer so joyful a Jue as Jonas was thenne,
we are told in a lively line at this point of the narrative. The storm
that follows is described with such a sense of reality that it has
been suggested that the poet himself must have experienced some such
tempest when making a pilgrimage to Compostella, “the favourite journey
of Englishmen at the time,” and a journey of the ancient popularity
of which we are still reminded in the streets of London once a year
when children set up their grottoes on the footpaths as an excuse for
begging pennies. Mr. Bateson attempts to bring home to us the desperate
circumstances of seafaring in the Middle Ages by quoting the statement
that “John of Gaunt, on one occasion, was tossing about in the Channel
for nine months, unable to land at Calais.” I confess I cannot believe
the story in this form, and we need no such incredible example to
enable us to realise the terrors of the storm that swept down on Jonah,
when the frightened sailors attempted to lighten the ship by throwing
overboard
Her bagges, and her feather-beddes, and her bryght wedes.
The introduction of the feather-beds into the narrative would alone be
a sufficient reason for welcoming the Lancashire version of the Jonah
story. The description of the panic-stricken sailors “glewing,” or
calling, on their very various gods (who included Fernagu, a French
giant) is another addition that pleases by its strangeness:
Bot vchon glewed on his god thet gayned hym beste;
Summe to Vernagu ther vouched avowes solemne,
Summe to Diana deuout, and derf Nepturne,
To Mahoun and to Mergot, the Mone and the Sunne.
Both in Tertullian and in _Patience_ Jonah is made not only to sleep
but to snore while the others pray during the storm. Tertullian puts it:
Sternentem inflata resonabat nare soporem.
The English poet writes still more vividly that Jonah lay in the bottom
of the boat,
Slypped vpon a sloumbe-slepe, and sloberande he routes.
A “freke,” or man, was sent to rouse him and to prepare him for the
casting of lots:
The freke hym frunt with his fot, and bede hym ferk up.
Then came the casting of the lots:
And ay the lote, vpon laste, lymped on Jonas.
The sailors immediately began to upbraid Jonah in masculine English:
What the deuel hest thou don, dotede wrech?
What seches thou on see, synful schrewe,
With thy lastes [crimes] so luther [evil] to lose vus vchone?
Soon after follows the decision to throw him overboard:
Now is Jonas the Jwe jugged to drowne.
“A wylde walteande whale” comes up opportunely to the side of the boat:
And swyftely swenged hym to swepe, and his swallow opened...,
With-outen towche of any tothe he tult in his throte.
In spite of his safe passage beyond the whale’s teeth, however, Jonah’s
plight was not an enviable one:
Lorde! colde was his cumfort, and his care huge.
The poet describes him as passing down the throat like a “mote in at a
minster door”:
He glydes in by the gills ...;
Ay, hele ouer hed, hourlande aboute,
Til he blunt [staggered] in a blok as brod as a halle;
And ther he festnes the fete, and fathmes about,
And stod up in his stomak, that stank as the deuel.
So realistic is the description of the whale’s inside that Mr. Bateson
thinks it likely that the poet had been listening to the stories
of whalers. He also endorses the poet’s view of the horrors of the
situation by quoting one writer who states that “the breath of the
whale is frequently attended by such an insupportable smell as to bring
on disorder of the brain.” If the whale made Jonah feel sick, however,
Jonah, according to the poet, had much the same effect on the whale. In
a moving two lines on the whale’s discomforts we are told:
For thet mote in his mawe made hym, I trowe,
Though hit lyttel were hym wyth, to wamel at his hert.
These two lines Mr. Bateson translates into colourless modern English:
“For the mote made him--though it were little as compared with him--to
feel sick,” and adds for our information that “the reader of whaling
stories will recall how frequently the whale suffers from dyspepsia!”
We need not follow the poet in detail through the rest of the
narrative, which is full of life-giving detail till the end. After God
had commanded the whale----
That he hym sput spakly vpon spare drye,
we see Jonah washing his muddy mantle on the beach and proceeding
with his message of doom to the “burgesses and bachelors” of Nineveh.
The gourd under which he sleeps becomes a “wodbynde” (some kind of
convolvulus): it is “hedera,” or ivy, in the Vulgate. Jonah’s delight,
as he lay under it--“so glad of his gay lodge”--is amusingly described.
He----
Lys loltrande ther-inne lokande to toune.
So contentedly did he “loll” there, indeed--“so blithe of his
wood-bine”--that he cared not a penny for any “diet” that day; and when
it “nighed to night” and “nappe hym bihoued,” he slept the sleep of
the just “vnder leues.” In his account of Jonah’s anger against God,
and God’s argument in favour of sparing Nineveh, the poet elaborates
as ever the Bible narrative, and the appeal for the right of the
inhabitants to live is tenderer than in the more concise original. God
pleads, for instance, for the “lyttel bairnes on barme (breast) that
neuer bale wrought,” and the reference to “much cattle” becomes:
And als ther ben doumbe bestes in the burgh many.
I do not suggest that _Patience_ is better than the Book of Jonah, or
as good, but that it has the vitality of an original work. The poet
has a personal knowledge of character--a sense of drama, and a sense
of life. Mr. Bateson’s edition of the poem was first published seven
years ago. He has now largely recast and rewritten it. I have taken
some liberties with his text in quoting it, slightly modernising
it in places. It is an edition for students of mediæval literature
rather than for the general reader. But with the help of its excellent
glossary others than scholars should be able to enjoy it if they are
prepared to take a little pains. And it is worth taking pains to become
acquainted with so vivid and robust a poet as the author of _Sir
Gawayne and the Green Knight_.
INTERLUDE
THE CULT OF DULLNESS
Many conflicting opinions were expressed on the occasion of the Keats
centenary, but everybody appeared to be unanimous on at least one
point--contempt for the critics who told Keats to go back to his
gallipots. We took it for granted that they were a very unusual sort
of critics, and that, if a Keats were born to-day, we should give him
a different sort of welcome. It is as though we had forgotten the
history of literary genius and of its first reception into a jealous
world. Human beings have naturally a profound respect for the great
man, but they respect him most when he is dead. A dead demigod is to
them infinitely better than a living lion. Their self-respect suffers
if they have to live in the same world with some young fellow that
overtops them. They feel, unconsciously, that by bringing him down
they are raising themselves up. The Greeks pretended that it was the
gods, and not themselves, who were jealous of human greatness, and they
called this jealousy Nemesis. I suspect, however, that it was human
beings who first felt this passion for equality. It is not in this
form a noble passion. It is a passion for being equal to the people
above us, not for being equal to the people below. This is the passion
that cannot forgive wit or beauty in a contemporary. Some men--the
finest--are entirely without it. Further, most of us yield to facts and
frankly recognise genius when there is no getting away from it. But
there always remains a company of the dull and the crabbed who believe
till the end that to disparage a good writer is to be, at least on this
point, superior to him. They are afraid that if the world welcomes
this wit and beauty it will have no welcome for their own dullness.
That is the secret fear that is a cause of a great deal of the worst
sort of bad criticism. There is a league of dullness constantly making
war on wit and beauty. Its malice is not deliberate: it is scarcely
intelligent enough to be deliberate. It is founded not on reason, but
on the instinct of self-defence.
It is difficult, I admit, to say how far the disparagement of good
writing is the result of mere stupidity and how far it is the result
of malignity. The longer one lives, the more one is amazed at the
incredible achievements of human stupidity.
Possibly, then, the critics who attempted to drag down Keats to the
level of bad writers were merely ordinary stupid human beings--good men
in the bosoms of their families, but fools anywhere else. They had,
after all, standards to which Keats did not conform. They had either
to abuse Keats or to trample on their standards--which would have
been like trampling on themselves. Keats himself, by the vehemence of
his attack on Pope and his followers, had provoked the controversial
spirit. He was to them a blasphemer in the temple, who had to be
punished at all costs. There is much the same reason, no doubt, for
the virulence with which the dull have assailed the wits in all ages.
Wit by its very nature is a declaration of war not only on dullness,
but on the dull orthodoxies, and the dull and the orthodox return bite
for blow. Molière brought great trouble on his head by being witty. He
held the mirror up to fools, and in answer the fools baited him. He had
not all the critics against him, but only all the stupid critics. That
is a distinction that should always be remembered in any discussion on
literary criticism. Many writers, wearied by the slings and arrows of
outrageous critics, have settled down into the easy conviction that
all criticism is a waste of words. Disraeli dismissed the whole brood
of critics in the saying that critics are those who have failed in
literature. This, of course, is a libel on a reputable art. The success
of such critics as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Gosse is literary success
as desirable as that of most poets or novelists. At the same time,
there is a half-truth in the saying of Disraeli. There is no critic
who does more injury to the reputation of his art than the embittered
failure--the man who has shouted in the world’s ear and has yet not
made himself heard. To speak to a deaf man makes some people angry:
to speak to a deaf world has the same effect on many writers. Nature
is kind, and she enables writers of this sort to deceive themselves
into thinking that their ill-natured egoism is a sort of divine anger
on behalf of great art. Their self-righteousness masks itself as
literary piety. Coleridge a hundred years ago noticed the irritability
of minor poets--“men of undoubted talents but not of genius,” whose
tempers are “rendered yet more irritable by their desire to _appear_
men of genius.” That is the irritation that is the cause of so much
bad criticism. The critic who feels irritated should begin to suspect
himself, and ask himself whether it is the excellences or the faults of
the work he is criticising that have put him in a temper. We are often
told in these days that criticism is too gentle. In a world in which
such a mass of criticism is being written it is difficult to sum up
the tendencies of the whole period in a phrase. There may be an excess
of unintelligent praise, but there is also, it seems to me, an excess
of unintelligent carping and ill-tempered denigration. The present age,
like Coleridge’s, might be described as “this age of personality, this
age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are
worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless
head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail.”
Not that even men of genius have always been just to each other. Byron
was unjust to Shakespeare and Keats: Keats was unjust to Pope. But we
do not demand sound criticism as a right from a great poet, who may
easily feel the partiality of a specialist. The meanness of the mean
critic is of quite another sort. He is a fox without a tail, who could
only feel important in a world of foxes without tails. He is always
in search of a standard according to which even he will have a chance
of seeming great. That is why in every generation good writers are
attacked and dull writers are exalted by this sort of critic. The cult
of the dull, of the mediocre, is necessary in order that he, too, may
win some reverence. The whole thing is, it seems to me, a pathetic
delusion. The critic may for a time organise fame for dull painters
and dull writers, and he may win a year’s or ten years’ praise by doing
so. But all the time he is losing that generous and disinterested
spirit which is one of the most precious possessions of the artist. The
ordinary writer sets out with the hope of qualifying for a place in the
temple of fame: he ends too often by merely qualifying for a place in
the _Dunciad_. He may be a man of one talent, which would serve well
enough if put to proper uses, but he prefers to hide it and to pretend
that it is ten, railing all the while at others on the ground that they
have only five. I used to think that it was un-Christian of the Founder
of Christianity to give the man with one talent so poor a name compared
to the man with five or the man with ten. But I have long since come
to see that in doing so he spoke out of a profound knowledge of human
nature. The man with one talent is the most likely of all to make no
use of it. He does not see that even his poverty may be turned into
riches, as is obvious when one remembers such Lilliputian and immortal
poets as Lovelace. He is blinded by a sense of his insignificance.
He has the false humility of the frog, which is not content to be a
first-rate frog but must try to swell itself into a bull.
The spectacle of the bad critic would be matter for pity were it not
that he has some influence on the immediate fate of good writers. He
cannot prevent the recognition of a Keats, but he can delay it. “Mr.
Hunt,” said _Blackwood’s_, “is a small poet, but he is a clever man.
Mr. Keats is a still smaller poet, and he is only a boy of pretty
abilities, which he has done everything in his power to spoil.... We
venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a
second time venture £50 upon anything he can write.” The attacks on
Keats, it has been contended, were animated by political rather than
literary rivalry. But, whatever their origin, they were a crime against
the spirit of disinterestedness, which is the holy spirit of criticism.
Niggardliness with praise is as shabby a vice as niggardliness with
money, and I have often noticed that the man who is a miser with the
one is a miser with the other. It is the most unattractive form of
selfishness. The critics, however, did not write down Keats: they
succeeded only in writing down themselves. And yet, every now and
then, we find someone clamouring for a return of the good old days of
_Blackwood’s_ and the _Quarterly_. Are our own days, then, lacking in
“foolish, trivial, almost ostentatiously dishonest” criticism? It would
be pleasant to think so. But I suspect that folly and dishonesty have
not disappeared but have merely changed their style. What is needed in
criticism to-day, as always, is the sympathetic imagination. A fool
with a sledge-hammer is of no service to literature. We need the comic
sense to laugh at folly, the moral sense to make war on cant. There is
no need for wrath in criticism except in presence of pretentiousness.
The pretentious is the grand enemy of literature as of religion. But in
regard to the small sins of literature, we may as well cultivate the
same tolerance that a good-natured man feels towards the small sins of
life. To be tolerant is not to resign either one’s moral or artistic
standards. The greatest moralists of the world have been the most
tolerant. Intolerance, indeed, is only a part of the general cult of
dullness. It would confine the arts to a coterie, and steal Shakespeare
himself from the world at large, on the ground that the world cannot
appreciate him. It would turn literature into a pedantic mystery, and
make an end of it as a noble entertainment. But, alas, intolerance and
dullness are immortal, and we shall always have a war between them, on
the one hand, and the Keatses and the Molières on the other. And the
Keatses and the Molières will go on writing, and it may be that they
would not be so firmly rooted if it were not for the fierce wind of
stupid words that so constantly assails them. All may be for the best.
Without dullness to contend against, beauty and wit might succumb to
Capua.
MORE OR LESS MODERN
I
MR. MAX BEERBOHM
1. THE STUDENT OF PERFECTION
Mr. Max Beerbohm generally leaves us with the impression that he has
written something perfect. He is, indeed, one of those writers to whom
perfection is all-important, not only on account of their method,
but on account of their subject matter. He is not a man engaged in
a Laocoon struggle with his imagination--a man desperately at grips
with a tremendous theme. He is more comparable to a laundress than
to Laocoon. His work has the perfection of a starched shirt-front,
which if it is not perfect is nothing. Mr. Beerbohm takes what may
be called an evening-dress view of life. One would not be surprised
to learn that he writes in evening dress. He has that air of good
conversation without intimacy, of deliberate charm, of cool and
friendly brilliance that always shows at its best above a shining and
expressionless shirt-front. He belongs to the world in which it is
good form to forget the passions, except for their funny side, and in
which the persiflage is more indispensable than the port. Not much good
literature has been written in this spirit in England. The masterpieces
of persiflage in English literature are, in verse, _The Rape of the
Lock_ and, in prose, _The Importance of Being Earnest_. Can anybody
name three other masterpieces in the same kind? Everyone who reads
_Seven Men_ can name one. It is called _Seven Men_.
Mr. Beerbohm is, in the opinion of some good critics, best of all as a
parodist. His _Christmas Garland_ contains the finest prose parodies
in the language. And, even outside his confessed parodies, he remains
a parodist in the greater part of his work. In _Seven Men_ he is both
a parodist of Henry James and a caricaturist of men of letters. Henry
James loved to take a man of letters as his hero: Mr. Beerbohm loves
to take a man of letters as a figure of fun. His men of letters have
none of that dignity with which they are invested in “The Death of
a Lion.” They are simply people to tell amusing stories about, as
monarchs and statesmen become at a dinner-table. This does not mean
that Mr. Beerbohm is not a devoted disciple of literature. There is
a novelist, Maltby, in one of his stories, who lives in the suburbs
and writes a successful novel about aristocratic life, and afterwards
writes an unsuccessful novel about suburban life. “I suppose,” he says,
explaining his failure, “one can’t really understand what one doesn’t
love, and one can’t make good fun without real understanding.” We may
reasonably take this as Mr. Beerbohm’s own apologia. He has a sincere
tenderness for this world he derides. In _A Christmas Garland_ he
protests his admiration for the victims of his parodies. And as we read
_Seven Men_ we feel sure that it is his extreme devotion to the world
of letters that leads him to choose it as the theme of his mockery.
When he writes of men of letters--especially of the exquisitely minor
men of letters--he is like a man speaking his own language in his own
country. When he wanders outside the world of authors he writes under
a sense of limitations, like a man venturing into a foreign tongue. In
_Seven Men_ the least remarkable of the five stories--though it, too,
would seem remarkable in any less brilliant company--is “James Pethel,”
the story of a financier, who lives for the sake of risks and who is
happiest when he is risking not only himself but those he loves--his
daughter, for instance, or a favourite author. The description of a
motor drive, on which he takes his wife and daughter and Mr. Beerbohm
in Normandy, with its many hair-breadth escapes, is an excellent piece
of comico-sensational literature. But the story reads like hearsay,
not like reminiscences of a man’s own world. One does not believe
that Pethel ever existed, or that he enjoyed drinking water in France
simply because there was a risk of typhoid. Even the motor drive is
not quite “convincing.” Or, perhaps, one should say that, while the
motor drive itself is immensely convincing, James Pethel’s state of
mind as he drives the car is not. Henry James might have made of him a
queer study in morbid psychology. Mr. Beerbohm has hardly raised him
above the level of a joke. It lacks the thrill of masterly and intimate
portraiture. “A. V. Laider” is another story with a non-literary theme.
It is, perhaps, the most refined example of leg-pulling in fiction. It
is one of those stories in which the reader is worked up to a moment
of intense horror only to be let down with mockery by the narrator.
Everything in it is perfectly done--the grey introduction at the rainy
seaside, the railway accident foreseen in the palms of several of
the passengers, and the final confession and comment. If not a man
of letters, A. V. Laider is at least a man of imagination, and Mr.
Beerbohm knows the type.
As to which of Mr. Beerbohm’s burlesque portraits of authors is the
best, opinions quite properly differ. The votes that “Savonarola”
Brown loses for the burlesque of his personality he wins back again
for the burlesque of his play. Brown was a dramatist who chose his
subject on a novel principle. He originally thought of writing a
tragedy about Sardanapalus, but on looking this up in the Encyclopædia
his eye fell on “Savonarola,” and what he read interested him. He did
not allow himself to be hampered, however, by historical facts, but
adopted the policy of allowing his characters to live their own lives.
In the result his blank-verse tragedy introduces us to most of the
famous and infamous figures in Italian history. Had Brown lived to
finish the fifth act, there is no doubt that he would have introduced
Garibaldi--perhaps even D’Annunzio--into his coruscating pageant.
He has certainly achieved the most distinguished list of _dramatis
personæ_ ever crowded into a brief play. The play as we now possess
it can hardly be described as a parody. At least, it is not a parody
on any particular play. It makes fun at the expense not only of the
worst writer of blank verse now living, but of Shakespeare himself. It
is like one of those burlesque operas that were popular thirty years
ago, and some of the speeches might have been stolen from _Julius Cæsar
Up-to-Date_. The opening scene introduces us not only to a Friar and
a Sacristan (wigged by Clarkson), but to Savonarola, Dante, Lucrezia
Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci, and St. Francis of Assisi. Savonarola,
on seeing Lucrezia, cries, “Who is this wanton?” St. Francis, with
characteristic gentleness, reproves him:
Hush, Sir! ’tis my little sister
The poisoner, right well-beloved by all
Whom she as yet hath spared.
The central interest of the play is the swaying intensity of the love
of the poisoner and Savonarola. In his passion Savonarola at one moment
discards the monkish frock for the costume of a Renaissance nobleman.
But the sight of his legs temporarily kills Lucrezia’s feeling for him.
She scornfully bids him:
Go pad thy calves!
Thus mightst thou just conceivably with luck
Capture the fancy of some serving-wench.
This being too much for him, they part in the mood of revenge, and,
after Lucrezia has made a desperate effort to force a poisoned ring
on him, they both find themselves in gaol. When the curtain rises on
Savonarola’s cell, he has been in prison three hours. “Imprisonment,”
says the stage direction, “has left its mark on both of them.
Savonarola’s hair has turned white. His whole aspect is that of a very
old, old man. Lucrezia looks no older than before, but has gone mad.”
How like nine-tenths of the prison scenes one has seen on the stage!
But never on the stage has one heard a prison soliloquy half so fine as
Savonarola’s, from its opening sentence:
Alas, how long ago this morning seems
This evening!--
down to its close:
What would my sire have said,
And what my dam, had anybody told them
The time would come when I should occupy
A felon’s cell? O the disgrace of it!--
The scandal, the incredible come-down!
It masters me. I see i’ my mind’s eye
The public prints--“Sharp Sentence on a Monk!”
What then? I thought I was of sterner stuff
Than is affrighted by what people think.
Yet thought I so because ’twas thought of me;
And so ’twas thought of me because I had
A hawk-like profile and a baleful eye.
Lo! my soul’s chin recedes, soft to the touch
As half-churn’d butter. Seeming hawk is dove,
And dove’s a gaolbird now. Fie, out upon ’t!
I do not think that anyone has produced a more unforgettable line of
heroic decasyllabic verse than:
The scandal, the incredible come-down!
Savonarola’s fame will be increased as a result of that exquisitely
inappropriate line. It is infinitely regrettable that Brown did not
live to write the fifth act of his masterpiece. Mr. Beerbohm has
attempted a scenario for a fifth act, and it contains many admirable
things. But Mr. Beerbohm lacks Brown’s “magnifical” touch, though he
does his best to imitate it in the lines in which he makes Lucrezia say
that she means:
To start afresh in that uncharted land
Which austers not from out the antipod,
Australia!
Good as this is, it seems just to verge on parody. It is grotesque
where Brown would have been moving. The play as a whole, however, will
find a place among the minor classics. It is far, far better than going
to the pantomime. It is as good as the pantomime ought to be.
“Maltby and Braxton” is something new in literature--a comic ghost
story. There are plenty of funny stories about ghosts that did
not exist. This is a funny story about a ghost that did exist. It
is a story of the jealousy of two novelists of the ’nineties, and
tells how one of them was pursued by the ghost of his jealous
rival to a week-end at a duchess’s. It is a nightmare seen
objectively--everybody’s nightmare.
In “Enoch Soames”--which is the masterpiece of the book--Mr. Beerbohm
fools, but he fools wisely. He never takes his eye off human nature.
He draws not only a caricature, but a man. The minor poet--the utterly
incompetent minor poet--has never before been drawn so brilliantly and
with so much intelligence as in “Enoch Soames.” The pretentiousness,
the inclination to disparage, the egotism, the affected habits and
beliefs--bad poets (and some less bad ones) have had them in all ages,
but the type has not before been collected and pinned in a glass case.
“Enoch Soames” is a perfect fable for egotists. It might be described
as a sympathetic exposure. One feels almost sorry for Soames as Mr.
Beerbohm subjects him to the terrible justice of the comic imagination.
“Enoch Soames” is a moral tale into which the Devil himself enters as a
character. Mr. Beerbohm made his reputation as an eccentric writer. In
this story he suggests an attitude the reverse of eccentric. Perhaps it
is that middle-age has descended on him. He has certainly added wisdom
to playfulness, and in the result has painted an imaginary portrait
which is as impressively serious as it is brilliantly entertaining.
2. “MAX” IN DANGER
Mr. Beerbohm is in danger of being canonised. Critics may quarrel
about him, but it is only because the wreaths get in the way of one
another, and every critic thinks that his should be on top. They have
even discovered that “Max” has a heart. “Max” may plead that it is
only a little one, but that will not save him. Some other critic will
discover that he has a message, and someone else will announce that he
has a metaphysic. In order to avert this unseemly canonisation--or, at
least, to keep it within the bounds of reason--one would like to adopt
the ungracious part of _advocatus diaboli_ and state the case against
“Max” in the strongest possible terms. But, alas! one finds that there
is nothing to say against him, except that he is not Shakespeare or Dr.
Johnson.
One of the charms of Mr. Beerbohm is that he never pretends to be what
he is not. He knows as well as anybody that he is not an oak of the
forest, but a choice bloom grown from seed in a greenhouse, and even
now lord of a pot rather than of a large garden. His art, at its best,
is praise of art, not praise of life. Without the arts, the world would
be meaningless to him. If he rewrote the plays of Shakespeare, he would
make Hamlet a man who lacked the will to write the last chapter of
a masterpiece, and Othello an author who murdered his wife because
her books sold better than his, and King Lear a tedious old epic poet
who perpetually recited his own verse till his daughters were able to
endure it no longer and locked him out for the night. Cordelia, for her
part, would be a sweet little creature, whose love for the old man was
stronger than her literary sense, and who would slip out of a window
and join him where he stamped up and down in the shrubbery, tripping
over the bushes, cursing her more fastidious sisters, and booming out
his bad verse to her and the rain. Mr. Beerbohm’s world is exclusively
populated by authors, save for a few painters, sculptors, actors,
musicians, and people who do not matter. One has to include the people
who do not matter, because otherwise one’s generalisation would not be
true.
Most people are agreed that Mr. Beerbohm’s recent work is his best.
Consider his last three books, then, and how little of them could
have come into existence, save in a world of authors. _A Christmas
Garland_, his masterpiece, is a book of prose parodies on authors.
_Seven Men_--yes, that, too, is his masterpiece--is a book in which
every character that one remembers is an author or, at least, a liar.
There were Enoch Soames with his poems, Ladbroke Brown with the
BEAU-tiful play (as Swinburne would have said) on Savonarola, and the
rival novelists of that adventurous week-end with the aristocracy. And
in his last book, _And Even Now_, we find once more a variegated human
comedy in which all the principal characters are authors and artists
or their works, and other human beings are only allowed to walk on as
supers. First of all we have “A Relic,” in which Mr. Beerbohm sees
a pretty lady in a temper, and a short, fat man waddling after her,
and determines to write a story about them. He does not write it, but
he writes a story about the story he did not write. Then comes “How
Shall I Word It?”--a joke about a “complete letter-writer” bought at
a railway bookstall. This is followed by “Mobled King,” describing a
statue to King Humbert, which, though erected, has never been unveiled
because the priests and the fishermen object, and concluding with a
wise suggestion that “there would be no disrespect, and there would be
no violence, if the bad statues familiar to London were ceremoniously
veiled, and their inscribed pedestals left just as they are.” Fourth
comes “Kolniyatch”--a spoof account of the “very latest thing” in
Continental authors. Few of us have read Kolniyatch in “the original
Gibrisch,” but Mr. Beerbohm’s description of his work and personality
makes it clear that he was an author compared with whom Dostoievsky and
Strindberg were serene and saccharine:
Of the man himself--for on several occasions I had the privilege
and the permit to visit him--I have the pleasantest, most sacred
memories. His was a wonderfully vivid and intense personality. The
head was beautiful, perfectly conic in form. The eyes were like two
revolving lamps, set very close together. The smile was haunting.
There was a touch of old-world courtesy in the repression of the
evident impulse to spring at one’s throat.
After this comes “No. 2, The Pines”--yes, this is Mr. Beerbohm’s
masterpiece, too. Everybody writes well about Swinburne, but Mr.
Beerbohm writes better than anybody else--better, if possible, even
than Mr. Lucas. What other writer could drive respect and mockery
tandem with the same delicate skill? Mr. Beerbohm sees the famous
Putney household not only with the comic sense, but through the eyes
of a literary youth introduced for the first time into the presence
of immortals. The Pines may be a Lewis-Carroll Wonderland, but it is
still a wonderland, as he recalls that first meal at the end of the
long table--“Watts-Dunton between us very low down over his plate, very
cosy and hirsute, and rather like the Dormouse at that long tea-table
which Alice found in Wonderland. I see myself sitting there wide-eyed,
as Alice sat. And, had the Hare been a great poet, and the Hatter a
great gentleman, and neither of them mad but each one only very odd and
vivacious, I might see Swinburne as a glorified blend of those two.”
“A Letter that Was Not Written,” again, is a comedy of the arts,
relating to the threatened destruction of the Adelphi. “Books within
Books” is a charming speculation on books written by characters in
fiction, not the least desirable of which, surely, was “Poments:
Being Poems of the Mood and the Moment”--a work that made a character
in a forgotten novel deservedly famous. The next essay, “The Golden
Drugget,” may seem by its subject--the beam of light that falls from an
open inn-door on a dark night--to be outside the literary-and-artistic
formula, but is it not essentially an argument with artists that the
old themes are best--that this “golden drugget” of light would somehow
make a better picture than Smithkins’ _Façade of the Waldorf Hotel by
Night, in Peace Time_? Similarly, “Hosts and Guests,” though it takes
us perilously near the borderland of lay humanity, is essentially a
literary causerie. Mr. Beerbohm may write on hosts and describe the
pangs of an impoverished host in one of the “more distinguished
restaurants” as he waits and wonders what the amount of the bill will
be; but the principal hosts and hostesses of whom he writes are Jael
and Circe and Macbeth and Old Wardle. “A Point to be Remembered by Very
Eminent Men,” the essay that follows, contains advice to great authors
as to how they should receive a worshipper who is to meet them for the
first time. The author should not, Mr. Beerbohm thinks, be in the room
to receive him, but should keep him waiting a little, though not so
long as Leigh Hunt kept young Coventry Patmore, who had been kicking
his heels for two hours when his host appeared “rubbing his hands and
smiling ethereally, and saying, without a word of preface or notice of
my having waited so long, ‘This is a beautiful world, Mr. Patmore!’”
There is no need to make the proof of the literary origins of “Max”
more detailed. The world that he sees in the mirror of literature
means more to Mr. Beerbohm than the world itself that is mirrored. The
only human figure that attracts him greatly is the man who holds the
mirror up. He does not look in his heart and write. He looks in the
glass and writes. The parts of nature and art, as Landor gave them,
will have to be reversed for Mr. Beerbohm’s epitaph. For him, indeed,
nature seems hardly to exist. For him no birds sing, and he probably
thinks that the scarlet pimpernel was invented by Baroness Orczy. His
talent is urban and, in a good sense, prosaic. He has never ceased to
be a dramatic critic, indeed, observing the men created by men (and
the creators of those men) rather than the men created by God. He is a
spectator, and a spectator inside four walls. He is, indeed, the last
of the æsthetes. His æstheticism, however, is comic æstheticism. If he
writes an unusual word, it is not to stir our imaginations with its
beauty, but as a kind of dandyism, reminding us of the care with which
he dresses his wit.
Within his own little world--so even the devil’s advocate would have
to end by admitting--Mr. Beerbohm is a master. He has done a small
thing perfectly, and one perfect quip will outlive ten bad epics. It is
not to be wondered at that people already see the first hint of wings
sprouting from his supremely well-tailored shoulders. He is, indeed,
as immortal as anybody alive. He will flit through eternity, not as an
archangel, perhaps, but as a mischievous cherub in a silk hat. He is
cherub enough already always to be on the side of the angels. Those who
declared that he had a heart were not mistaken. There is at least one
note of tenderness in the peal of his mockery. There is a spirit of
courtesy and considerateness in his writing, noticeable alike in “No.
2, The Pines,” and in the essay on servants. Thus, though he writes
mainly on the arts and artists, he sees in them, not mere figures of
ornament, but figures of life, and expresses through them clearly
enough--I was going to say his attitude to life. He is no parasite at
the table of the arts, indeed, but a guest with perfect manners, at
once shy and brilliant, one who never echoes an opinion dully, but is
always amusingly himself. That accounts for his charm. Perfect manners
in literature are rare nowadays. Many authors are either pretending
or condescending, either malicious or suspicious. “Max” has all the
virtues of egotism without any of its vices.
II
MR. ARNOLD BENNETT CONFESSES
Mr. Bennett is at once a connoisseur and a card. He not only knows
things but has an air of knowing things. He lets you know that he is
“in the know.” He has a taking way of giving information as though
it were inside information. He is the man of genius as tipster. In
_Things That Have Interested Me_ he gives us tips about painting,
music, literature, acting, war, politics, manners and morals. He never
hesitates: even when he is hinting about the future, he seems to do it
with a nod that implies, “You may take my word for it.” There was never
a less speculative author. Mr. Wells precipitates himself into eternity
or the twenty-first century in search of things that really matter. Mr.
Bennett is equally inquisitive, but he is inquisitive in a different
way and almost entirely about his own time. Where Mr. Wells speculates,
Mr. Bennett finds out, and, “when found, makes a note.” He gives one
the impression of a man with a passion for buttonholing experts. He
could interest himself for a time in any expert--an expert footballer
or an expert Civil Servant or an expert violinist or an expert
washerwoman. He likes to see the wheels of contemporary life--even the
smallest wheel--at work, and to learn the secrets of the machine. His
attitude to life is suggested by the fact that he has written a book
called _The Human Machine_, and that it is inconceivable that he should
write a book called _The Human Soul_. This is not to deny Mr. Bennett’s
vivid imaginative interest in things. It is merely to point out that it
is the interest not of a mystic but of a contemporary note-taker. That
is the circle within which his genius works, and it is a genius without
a rival of its kind in the literature of our time. He pursues his facts
with something of the appetite of a Boswell, though more temperately.
He has common sense where Boswell was a fool, however. Mr. Bennett,
finding that even a glass of champagne and, perhaps, a spoonful of
brandy taken regularly had the effect of clogging his “own particular
machine,” decided to drink no alcohol at all. Boswell might have taken
the same decision, but he could not have kept to it. Mr. Bennett, none
the less, is as fantastic in his common sense as was Boswell in his
folly. Each of them is a fantastic buttonholer. It is this element in
him that raises Mr. Bennett so high above all the other more or less
realistic writers of his time.
_Things That Have Interested Me_ is a book of confessions that could
have been written by no other living man. His style--perky, efficient,
decisive--is the echo of a personality. What other critic of the arts
would express his enthusiasm for great painting just like this?
It was fortunate for Turner that Girtin died early. He might have
knocked spots off Turner. And, while I am about the matter, I may
as well say that I doubt whether Turner was well advised in having
his big oil-paintings hung alongside of Claude’s in the National
Gallery. The ordeal was the least in the world too severe for them.
Still, I would not deny that Turner was a very great person.
Such a paragraph, with its rapid series of terse judgments, is
defiantly interesting. It is not only the “You may take it from me”
attitude that fascinates us: it is the “me” from whom you may take it.
It is an excited “me” as well as a cocksure “me.” Mr. Bennett is an
enthusiast, as you may see when, writing of Brabazon, he affirms:
In my opinion his “Taj Mahal” is the finest water-colour _sketch_
ever done. He probably did it in about a quarter of an hour.
Or, turning to literature, he will tell you:
Similarly will a bond be created if you ask a man where is the
finest modern English prose and he replies: “In _The Revolution in
Tanner’s Lane_.”
Mr. Bennett is always hunting the superlative. He wants the best of
everything, and he won’t be happy till he tells you where you can get
it. It is true that he says: “Let us all thank God that there is no
‘best short story.’” But that is only because there are several, and
Mr. Bennett, one suspects, knows them all. “I am not sure,” he says
on this point, “that any short stories in English can qualify for the
championship.” Yet I fancy the editor of a collection of the world’s
best short stories would have to consider a good deal of Mr. Conrad,
Mr. Wells’s _Country of the Blind_, and Mr. Bennett’s own _Matador of
the Five Towns_.
Mr. Bennett’s chase of the superlative is not confined to the arts.
He demands superlative qualities even in barbers. He has submitted
his head to barbers in many of the countries of Europe, and he gives
the first prize to the Italians. “Italian barbers,” he declares, “are
greater than French, both in quality and in numbers.” At the same
time, taking barbers not in nations but as individuals, he tells us:
“The finest artist I know or have known is nevertheless in Paris. His
life has the austerity of a monk’s.” Judging them by nations, he gives
Denmark a “highly commended”:
I like Denmark because there some of the barbers’ shops have a thin
ascending jet of water whose summit just caresses the bent chin,
which, after shaving, is thus laved without either the repugnant
British sponge or the clumsy splashing practised in France and
Italy.
He knows about it all: he knows; he knows. And, knowing so much, he
is in all the better position to censure a certain British barber who
parted his hair on the wrong side:
When he came back he parted my hair on the wrong side--sure sign
of an inefficient barber. He had been barbering for probably
twenty years and had not learnt that a barber ought to notice
the disposition of a customer’s hair before touching it. He was
incapable, but not a bad sort.
And Mr. Bennett, even though he is perilously near being a teetotaller,
can discourse to you as learnedly on drinks as on ways of getting your
hair cut. “Not many men,” he says, “can talk intelligently about drink,
but far more can talk intelligently about drink than about food.” He
himself is one of the number, as witness:
There was only one wine at that dinner, Bollinger, 1911, a wine
that will soon be extinct. It was perfect, as perfect as the
cigars.... We decided that no champagne could beat it, even if any
could equal it, and I once again abandoned the belief, put into me
by certain experts, that the finest 1911 champagnes were Krug and
Duc de Montebello.
One of the especial charms of Mr. Bennett as a writer is that he talks
about painters and barbers, about champagne and short stories, in
exactly the same tone and with the same seriousness, and measures them,
so far as one can see, by the same standard. Indeed, he discusses epic
poetry in terms of food.
All great epics are full of meat and are juicy side-dishes, if only
people will refrain from taking them as seriously as porridge.
_Paradise Lost_ is a whole picnic menu, and its fragments make
first-rate light reading.
To write like this is to give effect of paradox, even when one
is talking common sense. It is clear that Mr. Bennett does it
deliberately. He does it as an efficient artist, not as a bungler. He
fishes for our interest with a conscious _gaucherie_ of phrase, as when
he ends his reference to the novels of Henry James with the sentence:
“They lack ecstasy, guts.”
One of the most amusing passages in the book is that in which Mr.
Bennett leaves us with a portrait of himself as artist in contrast to
Henry James, the writer of “pot-boilers.” It hardly needs saying that
in doing this Mr. Bennett is making no extravagant claims for himself,
but is merely getting in a cunning retort to some of his “highbrow”
critics. The comparison between his own case and that of James refers
only to one point, and arises from the fact that James wrote plays with
the sole object of making money. On this Mr. Bennett comments:
Somebody of realistic temperament ought to have advised James that
to write plays with the sole object of making money is a hopeless
enterprise. I tried it myself for several years, at the end of
which I abandoned the stage for ever. I should not have returned to
it, had not Lee Mathews of the Stage Society persuaded me to write
a play in the same spirit as I was writing novels. It was entirely
due to him that I wrote _Cupid and Commonsense_. Since then I have
never written a play except for my own artistic satisfaction.
Nor, one feels, did he write even the casual jottings on life and the
arts in _Things that Have Interested Me_ for any other reason than that
it pleased him to do it. The jottings vary in quality from ephemeral
social and political comment to sharply-realised accounts of “things
seen,” vivid notes of self-analysis, confessions of the tastes and
experiences of an epicure of life with a strong preference for leaving
the world better than he found it. Mr. Bennett gives us here a jigsaw
portrait of himself. We can reconstruct it from the bits--a man shy and
omniscient, simple and ostentatious, Beau Nash from the Five Towns.
III
MR. CONRAD AT HOME
Mr. Conrad is nothing of a peacock. You may stare at him as long as
you like, but he will never respond with a sudden spread of gorgeous
vanities. He is more like some bird that takes on the protective
colouring of the earth and delights in avoiding rather than in
attracting the prying eye. Flatter him as you will; call him a phœnix
or a bird of paradise: he may be secretly pleased but he will only
croak gruffly in reply, “To have the gift of words is no such great
matter.” He does not know how to play up to our inquisitive admiration.
We may think, as when we take up _A Personal Record_, that now at
last we have caught him in a position in which he is bound to show us
his fine feathers. But it is a vain hope. Glimpses we get--amazing
glimpses--but never the near and detailed spectacle we desire. He
protests that he is no cynic, but is he sure that he does not find
a cynical amusement in tantalising our curiosity? Otherwise, would
he have written in the preface to _Notes on Life and Letters_ that
“perhaps it will do something to help towards a better vision of the
man, if it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back,
a little dusty (after the process of tidying-up), a little bowed, and
receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy, but
for other reasons that cannot be helped”? It may be that Mr. Conrad
can suggest more enticing mysteries by a portrait of a piece of an
author’s back than other writers can by a full-length representation,
showing the polish on the boots and the crease in the trousers. In art
the half (or very much less) is greater than the whole. Still, Mr.
Conrad’s principal object in showing us the back is that it may leave
us unsatisfied and speculating. He does not intend to satisfy us. It is
as though he had written on the title-page of his autobiography: “Thus
far and no further.”
At the same time, if he tells little about himself, he does not escape
giving himself away in his admiration for other men. He has an artistic
faith that breaks into his sentences as soon as he begins to talk of
Henry James or Maupassant or Turgenev. Not that he belongs to any
school in literature: he hates all references to schools. He becomes
sullenly hostile if anyone attempts to classify authors as romantics,
realists, naturalists, etc. Every great author is for him a man, not
a formula. He can hardly mention the word “formula” without disgust.
“No secret of eternal life for our books,” he declares, “can be found
among the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed
combination of drugs.” Again, “the truth is, that more than one kind of
intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas.” And once
more, in speaking of the good artist: “It is in the impartial practice
of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be
found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or
that particular method of technique or conception.” This may suggest
to the pedantic that Mr. Conrad has no critical standards, and he
certainly prefers to portray an author rather than to measure him with
a tape as if for a suit of clothes. And he is right; for to portray an
author truthfully is to measure him in a far profounder sense than can
be done with a tape run round his waist, and down the side of his leg.
Mr. Conrad’s quest is the soul of his author. If it be a noble soul, he
has a welcome for it, as Plutarch had in his biographies. He may not
agree with Maupassant’s deterministic view of life, but he salutes
Maupassant in passing with the remark: “The worth of every conviction
consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.” His
first demand of an author is truth--not absolute truth, but the truth
that is in him. “At the heart of fiction,” he declares, “even the least
worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found--if only the truth
of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels
of Dumas the father.”
Mr. Conrad, indeed, claims for fiction that it is nearer truth than
history, agreeing more or less on this point with Aristotle and
Schopenhauer:
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is
also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on
the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena,
whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print
and handwriting--on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer
truth. But let that pass. An historian may be an artist, too, and a
novelist is an historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder,
of human experience.
I confess I dislike this contention among the various literary
forms--poetry, fiction, history, biography, drama and essay--as to
which of them is nearest grace. It is not the form that seizes the
truth, but the imagination of the artist working through the form.
Imagination and the sense of life are as necessary to a good historian
as to a good novelist. Artists need not quarrel for precedence for any
particular art in a world in which all the great books that have so far
been written could be packed into a little room. At the same time, it
is well that a novelist should take his art as seriously as Aristotle
took the art of poetry. It often requires an exaggeration to bring
the truth into prominence. And, in any case, the exaggerations of the
novelists in this respect have as a rule been modest compared to the
exaggerations of the poets.
If Mr. Conrad is to be believed, however, the novelist is the rival,
not only of the historian, but of the moralist. He warmly denies that
he is a didactic writer, but at least he holds that in all great
fiction a moral is implicit that he who runs may read:
That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up,
is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple
built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no
other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every
success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation.
One would have to think hard in order to fit _Tristram Shandy_ and _The
Pickwick Papers_ into this--if the word is not forbidden--formula.
Perhaps it is a formula more applicable to tragic than to comic
writing. Mr. Conrad as critic often seems to be defining his own art
rather than the art of fiction in general. He knows what he himself
is aiming at in literature, and he looks for the same fine purpose
in his fellow-writers. We feel this when he requires of the novelist
“many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an
undying hope.” This, he declares, “is the God-sent form of trust in
the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth.”
“To be hopeful in an artistic sense,” he adds, “it is not necessary to
think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no
impossibility of its being made so.” There surely speaks the author of
_Youth_ and _Typhoon_. And the image of the same author may be seen in
the remark that “I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he”--the
novelist--“should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their
obscure virtues.” Mr. Conrad cannot escape from the shadow of his own
genius. It falls on every page of his criticism as fatally as any
formula, though more vividly. His protest against what has been called
“stylism” is simply the protest of one who did not approach the art of
literature through that door. He is praising not merely Maupassant but
his ideal self when he tells us:
His proceeding was not to group expressive words, that mean
nothing, around misty and mysterious shapes dear to muddled
intellects and belonging neither to earth nor to heaven. His vision
by a more scrupulous, prolonged and devoted attention to the
aspects of the visible world, discovered at last the right words
as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and
events.
That, no doubt, is how Mr. Conrad learned the art of writing, and
we may read autobiography into his praise of Maupassant again when
he says: “He stoops to no littleness in his art--least of all to
the miserable vanity of a catchy phrase.” But his appreciation of
Maupassant, though admirable in so far as it defines certain qualities
in his own and Maupassant’s work, is worded in a manner that savours of
intolerance of the work of many other good writers, from Shakespeare to
Dickens and, if one may include a more Lilliputian artist, Stevenson.
Thus he observes:
He will not be led into perdition by the seductions of sentiment,
of eloquence, of humour, pathos; of all that splendid pageant of
faults that pass between the writer and his probity on the blank
sheet of paper, like the glittering cortège of deadly sins before
the austere anchorite in the desert air of the Thebaïde.
Maupassant’s austerity may have been an excellent thing for Maupassant,
but to write like this is surely to reduce austerity to the level of a
formula. That “splendid pageant of faults” may well be the salvation of
another writer. We may admit that they remain faults unless they fit in
as organic parts of a writer’s work. But Maupassant was a smaller, not
a greater, writer in so far as he was unable so to fit them in.
It would be going too far to suggest, however, that Mr. Conrad merely
emphasises in other writers those qualities which he himself either
possesses or desires to possess. Most good portraits are double
portraits: they portray both the painter and the sitter. Mr. Conrad
always does justice to his sitter, as when he writes: “Henry James is
the historian of fine consciences,” or as when he says of Maupassant:
“It cannot be denied that he thinks very little. In him extreme energy
of perception achieves great results, as in men of action the energy
of force and desire.” At the same time, we read _Notes on Life and
Letters_ for the light it throws, not on this or that author or the
Polish question or the question of unsinkable ships, but on Mr. Conrad
himself. The essay on Anatole France, for instance, interests us mainly
because it reminds us that Mr. Conrad is as impatient of political
panaceas as of literary formulas. Remembering that Anatole France is
a Socialist, he observes characteristically: “He will disregard the
stupidity of the dogma and the unlovely form of the ideal. His art
will find its own beauty in the imaginative presentation of wrongs,
of errors, and miseries that call aloud for redress.” He commands the
artist to hope, but he clearly forbids anybody to hope too much. His
“Note on the Polish Problem” shows that during the war the most he
hoped for his country was an Anglo-French protectorate. Humanitarians
horrify him with their dreams. He hates impossibilism as he hates the
talk about unsinkable ships. But what he really hates most, both in
politics and in ships, is the blind worship of machinery. He looks on
Socialism, I fancy, as an attempt on the part of machine-worshippers
to build an unsinkable State--a monstrous political _Titanic_, defiant
of the facts of nature and fore-doomed to catastrophe. And how this
old master of a sailing-ship hates the _Titanic_! He has little that
is good to say, indeed, of any steam vessels, at least of cargo steam
vessels--“a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors
by an improved generation of dull mechanical toilers, conceited and
without grace.” Progress? He retorts: “The tinning of salmon was
‘progress.’” And yet, when he met the men of the merchant service
during the war, he had to admit that “men don’t change.” That is a fact
at once reassuring and depressing. It is reassuring to know that human
beings, if they avoid the sin of idolaters, can make use of machines
with reasonable safety. The machine, like the literary formula, is a
convenience. Even the Socialist State would be only a convenience.
It would in all probability be very little more alarming than a
button-hook or a lead pencil.
IV
MR. WELLS AND THE WORLD
Mr. Wells is in love with the human race. It is one of the rarest of
passions. It is a passion of which not even all imaginative men are
capable. It was, perhaps, the grandest of Shelley’s grand passions,
and it was the demon in William Morris’s breast. On the other hand, it
played a small part if any, in the lives of Shakespeare and Dickens.
Their kaleidoscopic sympathy with human beings was at the antipodes
from Shelley’s angelic infatuation with the human race. The distinction
has often been commented on. It is the difference between affection and
prophecy. There is no reason, I suppose, why the two things should not
be combined, and, indeed, there have been affectionate prophets both
among the religious teachers and among men of letters. But, as a rule,
one element flourishes at the expense of the other, and Charles Lamb
would have been as incapable of even wishing to write the _Outline of
History_ as Mr. Wells would be of attempting to write the _Essays of
Elia_.
Not that Mr. Wells gives us the impression that he loves men in general
more than Charles Lamb did. It seems almost as if he loved the destiny
of man more than he loves man himself. His hero is an anonymous
two-legged creature who was born thousands of years ago and has been
reincarnated innumerable times and who will go on being re-born until
he has established the foundations of order amid the original slime of
things. That is the character in history whom Mr. Wells most sincerely
loves. He means more to him than Moses or any of Plutarch’s men.
Plutarch’s men, indeed, are for the most part men who might have served
man but preferred to take advantage of him. Compare Plutarch’s and Mr.
Wells’s treatment of Cato the Elder and Julius Cæsar, and you will see
the difference between sympathy with individual men and passion for
the purpose of man. You will see the same difference if you compare
the Bible we possess with the new Bible of which Mr. Wells draws up
a syllabus in _The Salvaging of Civilisation_. The older book at the
outset hardly pauses to deal with man as a generalisation, but launches
almost at once into the story of one man called Adam and one woman
called Eve. Mr. Wells, on the other hand, would begin the human part of
his narrative with “the story of our race”:
How through hundreds of thousands of years it won power over
nature, hunted and presently sowed and reaped. How it learnt the
secrets of metals, mastered the riddle of the seasons, and took
to the seas. That story of our common inheritance and of our slow
upward struggle has to be taught throughout our entire community in
the city slums and in the out-of-the-way farmsteads most of all.
By teaching it, we restore again to our people the lost basis of a
community, a common idea of their place in space and time.
Mr. Wells’s attitude to men, it is clear, is primarily that of a
philosopher, while the attitude of the Bible is primarily that of a
poet. It remains to be seen whether a philosopher’s Bible can move the
common imagination as the older Bible has moved it. That it can move
and excite it in some degree we know. We have only to read the glowing
pages with which _The Salvaging of Civilisation_ opens in order to
realise this. Mr. Wells’s passion for the human group is infectious.
He expresses it with the vehemence of a great preacher. He plays, like
many great preachers, not on our sympathy so much as on our hopes and
fears. His book is a book of salvation and damnation--of warnings
to flee from the wrath to come, of prophecies of swords turned
into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks. He loves his ideal
group-man almost as Bunyan loved Christian. He offers him, it is true,
at the end of his journey, not Paradise, but the World-State. He offers
it to him, moreover, not as an individual but as a type. He bids men
be ready to perish in order that man may arrive at the goal. His book
is a call to personal sacrifice to the end, not of personal, but of
general salvation. That, however, is an appeal that has again and again
been proved effective in history. It is of the same kind as the appeal
of patriotism in time of war. “Who dies if England lives?” sang Mr.
Kipling. “Who dies if the World-State lives?” Mr. Wells retorts.
The question remains whether the ordinary man can ever be brought to
think of the world as a thing worth living and dying for as he has
often thought his country worth living and dying for. If the world were
attacked by the inhabitants of another planet, world-patriotism would
become a necessity of self-defence, and the peoples of the world would
be presented with the alternatives of uniting or perishing. Mr. Wells
believes, no doubt, that they are presented with these alternatives
already. But can they be made to realise this by anything but an
external enemy? It is external enemies that create and intensify
patriotism. Can human beings as a whole organise themselves against war
as the enemy with the same thoroughness with which Englishmen organised
themselves against Germany as the enemy? Mr. Wells obviously believes
that they can. But it is to the great religions, not to the great
patriotisms, that he looks for examples of how this can be done. He
recalls how the Christian religion spread in the first four centuries
and how the Moslem religion spread in the seventh century, and he
believes that these precedents “support a reasonable hope that such a
change in the minds of men, whatever else it may be, is a practicable
change.” His gospel of human brotherhood, indeed, is propounded as a
larger Christianity rather than as a larger patriotism. He realises,
however, the immensity of the difficulties in the way of the spread of
this gospel. He sees that the majority of men are still indifferent to
it. Unless they are in the vein for it, “it does not really interest
them; rather it worries them.” That is why he believes so ardently in
the need of a new Bible--a Bible of Civilisation--which will restore to
modern men “a sense of personal significance, a sense of destiny, such
as no one in politics or literature seems to possess to-day.” That is
why he scorns such a compromise and concession to the frailty of human
nature as a League of Nations and calls on men to turn their eyes from
all such conveniences and makeshifts and to concentrate on the more
arduous ideal of human unity. Of the League of Nations he writes:
The praise has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty
and what devotion can we expect this multiple association to
command? It has no unity--no personality. It is like asking a man
to love the average member of a woman’s club instead of loving his
wife.
For the idea of man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the
one order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not
for a miscellaneous assembly that will not mix--even in its name.
It has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations
formula.
Many people will agree with much of Mr. Wells’s scornful criticism of
the League of Nations. He is obviously writing the plainest common
sense when he declares that it has failed so far to solve the problem
of modifying the traditional idea of sovereign independence and the
problem of a super-national force that will be stronger than any
national force. The average statesman is still an Imperialist at heart,
even when he praises the League of Nations with his lips. He desires a
world-order that will confirm the present order of rival Empires rather
than a world-order that will supersede it. He desires to avert war, but
only if he may preserve all the conditions that make war inevitable.
Mr. Wells is impatient of all this as a treachery to the greatest ideal
that has come into the world in our time. On the other hand, I think
that the advocates of the League of Nations and not the advocates of
the World State are going the right way to propagate the sense of
world-unity that Mr. Wells desires. The League of Nations, whatever
its shortcomings, does make human nature a partner in its ideal. It
remembers the ordinary human being’s affection for his own country, and
does not treat it as a mere prejudice in the path. It realises that
the true victory of internationalism will be not as the destroyer of
individualism but as its counterweight. It used to be thought that a
man could not be loyal to both his church and his country unless the
Church were a State Church. Some Socialists have believed that the
family and the State were inevitable rivals. As a matter of fact, every
man is in a state of balance among conflicting loyalties--loyalty to
himself, to the family, to the school, to the Church, to the State, to
the world. The religion of the brotherhood of man must bow to this
fact, or it must fail. To ignore it is to be a doctrinaire--to fail,
that is, to bring home one’s doctrine to men’s business and bosoms. It
is to sit above the battle so far as the immediate issues with which
mankind is faced are concerned. Mr. Wells has rendered an immense
service to his time by compelling us to remember the common origin and
the common interests of mankind. He has invented a wonderful telescope
through which we can look back and see man struggling out of the mud
and can look forward and see him climbing a dim and distant pinnacle.
I am not sure, however, if he has pointed out the most desirable route
to the pinnacle--whether he does not expect us to reach it as the
crow flies instead of by winding roads and by bridges across the deep
rivers and ravines. He may take the view that, as man has learned to
fly mechanically, so he may learn to fly politically. One never knows.
The glorious feature of his prophetic writing, meanwhile, is its
driving-force. He is one of the few writers who have given momentum to
the idea of the world as one place.
V
MR. CLUTTON-BROCK
Mr. Clutton-Brock is a critic with an unusual equality of interests.
He seems to be the centre of an almost perfect circle, and literature,
painting, religion, philosophy, ethics, and education are the all but
equal radii that connect him with the circumference. Many writers have
been as versatile, but few have been as symmetrical. He has all his
gifts in due proportion. He is not more æsthetic than moral, or more
moral than æsthetic. His idealism and his intellect balance each other
exactly. His matter and his manner are twins. He produces on us the
effect of a harmony, not of a nature in conflict with itself. Had he
lived in the ancient world, he would probably have been a teacher of
philosophy. He has gifts of temper as well as powers of exposition and
understanding that make him a teacher even to-day, whether he will or
not. He does not speak down to us from the chair, but he is at our
elbows murmuring with exquisite restraint yet with an eagerness only
half-hidden the “nothing too much” of the Greeks, the “Beauty is Truth,
Truth Beauty” of Keats, the good news that the flesh and spirit are not
enemies but friends, and that the Earth for the wise man is not at odds
with Paradise.
Those who shrink from virtue as from a split infinitive sometimes
speak in disparagement of Mr. Clutton-Brock’s gifts. He is the head
of a table at which the virtues and the graces sit down side by side,
and they are dressed so much alike that it is not always easy to tell
which is which. He is always seeking, indeed, the point at which a
virtue passes into a grace, and he knits his brows over those extreme
differences that separate one from the other. The standard by which he
measures things in literature and in life is an ideal world in which
goodness and beauty answer one another in antiphonal music. His ideal
man is the _kalos k’ agathos_ of ancient Athens. He goes among authors
in quest of this part-song in their work. He misses it in the later
Tolstoy: he discovers it in Marvell and Vaughan. He is not to be put
off, however, with a forced and unnatural antiphony. He is critical
of the antiphony of body and soul that announces “All’s well!” in
Whitman’s verse. He finds in Whitman not organic cheerfulness but
functional cheerfulness--“willed cheerfulness,” he calls it. And he
says of Whitman with penetrating wisdom: “He was a man not strong
enough in art or in life to do without that willed cheerfulness; it
is for him a defence like irony, though a newer, more democratic,
more American defence.” He writes with equal wisdom when he says that
Whitman “has got a great part of his popularity from those who were
grateful to him for saying so firmly and so often what they wished to
believe.” But might not this be said of all poets of hope? Might it not
be said of Shelley and of Browning? I am not sure, indeed, that Mr.
Clutton-Brock does not do serious injustice to Whitman in exaggerating
the element of reaction in him against old fears as well as old forms.
His discovery of the secret of what is false in Whitman has partly
blinded him to the secret of what is true. Otherwise, how could he ask
us whether there is anything in _Leaves of Grass_ that moves us as we
are moved by Edgar Allan Poe’s _The Sleeper_? Can he have forgotten
_Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_, to name but one of Whitman’s
profoundly moving poems? Mr. Clutton-Brock does, indeed, end his essay
with fine if tempered praise of Whitman’s genius. But his essay as
a whole is a question-mark, expressing a doubt of something false,
something even “faked.”
His essay on Poe is more sympathetic. He finds in Poe, not a false
harmony, but a real discord--a pitiable discord. “There was a fatal
separation,” we are told, “between his intellect and his emotions,
except in a very few of his poems, because he could not value life or
human nature in comparison with the life and the nature of that other
planet for which he was homesick. So he exercised his intellect on
games, but with a thwarted passion which gives a surprising interest
and beauty even to his detective stories.” This is well said, but, as
we read the essay, we become aware of a curious ultra-fastidiousness
in Mr. Clutton-Brock--a lack of vulgarity, in the best sense of the
word. We see this in his attitude to Poe’s most popular work; he
dismisses _The Raven_ and _The Bells_ as “fit to be recited at penny
readings.” That certainly has been their fate, but it does not prevent
them from being masterpieces in their kind--the _jeux d’esprit_ of
a planet-struck man. They are not, however, we may admit, the poems
that reveal Poe as an inspired writer. It is a much more serious thing
for Mr. Clutton-Brock to omit _Annabel Lee_ from the list of the six
poems or so, on which Poe’s reputation as a poet rests. _Annabel
Lee_ is a work of genius, if Poe ever wrote a work of genius. _Helen,
Thy Beauty is to Me_--which has none of its faults--is the only one
of his poems that challenges its supremacy, perhaps successfully.
Mr. Clutton-Brock’s essay on the other hand, will be of service to
the general reader if it gives him the feeling that Poe is to be
approached, not as a hackneyed author, but as a writer of undiscovered
genius. He does not exaggerate the beauty of _The Sleeper_, though he
exaggerates its place in Poe’s work. The truth is, Poe is a neglected
poet. The average reader regards him as too well known to be worth
reading, and _The Sleeper_, _The City in the Sea_ and _Romance_ are
ignored because _The Bells_ has fallen into the hands of popular
reciters.
Mr. Clutton-Brock has the happy gift of taking his readers into the
presence of most of his authors in the spirit of discoverers. It is
not that he aims at originality or paradox. He is always primarily
in search of truth, even when he gets on a false scent. His essay on
Meredith is a series of interesting guesses at truth, some of which
are extremely suggestive, and some of which seem to me to miss the
mark. The most suggestive is the remark that _Love in the Valley_ is
not only written on “a theme that inspired the music of the first
folk-songs,” but that the verse itself has “for its underlying tune”
a folk-measure--the old Saturnian measure of the Romans. Macaulay, it
may be remembered, was startled to learn that his ballad of “brave
Horatius” was written largely in the Saturnian metre, and still more
startled when he was unable to find any perfect example of this metre
in English verse, except:
The Queen was in her parlour, eating bread and honey.
It comes as something of a shock to be told that the lines--
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star;
are musically akin to:
Lars Porsena of Clusium,
By the nine gods he swore.
And Mr. Clutton-Brock would be the last man to pretend that it is the
same music we find in both. Meredith’s variations on the old tune are,
he makes clear, as important a part of the music as is the old tune
itself. “It is folk-song with the modern orchestra like the symphonies
of Dvorák, and it combines a singing rhythm with sharpness and fullness
of detail as they had never before been combined in romantic poetry.”
Criticism like this is not merely a comment on technique; it is a guess
of the spirit, emphasising the primitive and universal elements which
make _Love in the Valley_ probably the most enduring of Meredith’s
works.
I do not think Mr. Clutton-Brock is so happy when he writes of Meredith
as a novelist. He goes too far when he suggests that Meredith’s
witty characters, or mouthpieces, are “always subsidiary and often
unpleasant,” like the wise youth in _Richard Feverel_. Meredith, he
declares, “does not think much of these witty characters that he cannot
do without.” He “would never make a hero more witty than he could help,
for he likes his heroes to be either men of action or delightful youths
whom too much cleverness would spoil. He himself was not in love with
cleverness, and never aimed at it.” This is only partly true. It is
partly true in regard to Meredith’s men, and not true at all in regard
to his women. _Diana of the Crossways_ alone is enough to disprove
it. Meredith’s heroes were conventions; his heroines were creations;
and he liked his creations to be witty. He loved wit as his natural
air. His _Essay on Comedy_ is a witty dithyramb in praise of wit. Mr.
Clutton-Brock seems to me to make another mistake in regard to Meredith
when he says that “if he had had less genius, less power of speech,
less understanding of men, he might have been an essayist.” As a matter
of fact, Merdith was too proud to be an essayist. There are no proud
essayists, though many vain ones. Mr. Belloc is the nearest thing to a
proud essayist that one can think of, and his pride is really only a
fascinating arrogance.
It will be seen that Mr. Clutton-Brock excites to controversy, as every
good critic who attempts a new analysis of an author’s genius must do.
Were there space, I should like to dispute many points in his essay,
“The Defects of English Prose,” in which, incidentally, he accepts the
current over-estimate of the prose--the excellent prose--of Mr. Hudson.
The purpose of criticism, however, is to raise questions as much as
to answer them, and this Mr. Clutton-Brock continually does in his
thoughtful analysis of the success and failure of great writers. He is
an expositor with high standards in life and literature, who worships
beauty in the temple of reason. His essays, though slight in form, are
rich in matter. They are fragments of a philosophy as well as comments
on authors.
VI
HENLEY THE VAINGLORIOUS
Henley was a master of the vainglorious phrase. He was Pistol with
a style. He wrote in order to be overheard. His words were sturdy
vagabonds, bawling and swaggering. “Let us be drunk,” he cried in one
of his _rondeaux_, and he made his words exultant as with wine.
He saw everywhere in Nature the images of the lewd population of
midnight streets. For him even the moon over the sea was like some old
hag out of a Villon ballade:
Flaunting, tawdry and grim,
From cloud to cloud along her beat,
Leering her battered and inveterate leer,
She signals where he prowls in the dark alone,
Her horrible old man,
Mumbling old oaths and warming
His villainous old bones with villainous talk.
Similarly, the cat breaking in upon the exquisite dawn that wakes the
“little twitter-and-cheep” of the birds in a London Park becomes a
picturesque and obscene figure:
Behold
A rakehell cat--how furtive and acold!
A spent witch homing from some infamous dance--
Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade
Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!
Or, again, take the description of the East Wind in _London
Voluntaries_:
Out of the poisonous East,
Over a continent of blight,
Like a maleficent influence released
From the most squalid cellarage of hell,
The Wind-fiend, the abominable--
The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light--
Comes slouching, sullen and obscene,
Hard on the skirts of the embittered night;
And in a cloud unclean
Of excremental humours, roused to strife
By the operation of some ruinous change,
Wherever his evil mandate run and range,
Into a dire intensity of life,
A craftsman at his bench, he settles down
To the grim job of throttling London Town.
This is, of its kind, remarkable writing. It may not reflect a
poetic view of life, but it reflects a romantic and humorous view.
Henley’s humour is seldom good humour: it is, rather, a sort of
boisterous invective. His phrases delight us like the oaths of some
old sea-captain if we put ourselves in the mood of delight. And how
extravagantly he flings them down, like a pocketful of money on the
counter of a bar! He may only be a pauper, behaving like a rich man,
but we, who are his guests for an hour, submit to the illusion and
become happy echoes of his wild talk.
For he has the gift of language. It is not the loud-sounding sea
but loud-sounding words that are his passion. Compared to Henley,
even Tennyson was modest in his use of large Latin negatives. His
eloquence is sonorous with the music of “immemorial,” “intolerable,”
“immitigable,” “inexorable,” “unimaginable,” and the kindred train
of words. He is equally in love with “wonderful,” “magnificent,”
“miraculous,” “immortal,” and all the flock of adjectival enthusiasm.
Here in this radiant and immortal street,
he cries, as he stands on a spring day in Piccadilly. He did not use
sounding adjectives without meaning, however. His adjectives express
effectively that lust of life that distinguishes him from other
writers. For it is lust of life, in contradistinction to love, that is
the note of Henley’s work. He himself lets us into this secret in the
poem that begins:
Love, which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb.
Again, when he writes of Piccadilly in spring, he cries:
Look how the liberal and transfiguring air
Washes this inn of memorable meetings,
This centre of ravishments and gracious greetings,
Till, through its jocund loveliness of length
A tidal-race of lust from shore to shore,
A brimming reach of beauty met with strength,
It shines and sounds like some miraculous dream,
Some vision multitudinous and agleam,
Of happiness as it shall be evermore!
The spectacle of life produced in Henley an almost exclusively physical
excitement. He did not wish to see things transfigured by the light
that never was on sea or land. He preferred the light on the wheels
of a hansom cab or, at best, the light that falls on the Thames
as it flows through London. His attitude to life, in other words,
was sensual. He could escape out of circumstances into the sensual
enchantments of the _Arabian Nights_, but there was no escape for him,
as there is for the great poets, into the general universe of the
imagination. This physical obsession may be put down in a measure
to his long years of ill-health and struggle. But even a healthy and
prosperous Henley, I fancy, would have been restless, dissatisfied,
embittered. For him most seas were Dead Seas, and most shores were
desolate. The sensualist’s “Dust and Ashes!” breaks in, not always
mournfully, but at times angrily, upon the high noon of his raptures.
He longs for death as few poets have longed:
Of art and drink I have had my fill,
he declares, and the conclusion of the whole matter is:
For the end I know is the best of all.
To his mother, to his sister, to Stevenson he writes this recurrent
message--the glad tidings of death to come. Man’s life is for him but a
child’s wanderings among the shows of a fair:
Till at last,
Tired of experience he turns
To the friendly and comforting breast
Of the old nurse, Death.
And in most of his poems on this theme it seems to be the peace of the
grave he desires, not an immortality of new experiences. There is one
moving poem, however, dedicating the “windlestraws” of his verse to his
wife in which a reference to their dead child suggests that he, too,
may have felt the hunger for immortality:
Poor windlestraws
On the great, sullen, roaring pool of Time
And Chance and Change, I know!
But they are yours, as I am, till we attain
That end for which we make, we two that are one:
A little exquisite Ghost
Between us, smiling with the serenest eyes
Seen in this world, and calling, calling still
In that clear voice whose infinite subtleties
Of sweetness, thrilling back across the grave,
Break the poor heart to hear:
“_Come, Dadsie, come?
Mama, how long--how long?_”
Sufferer and sensualist, Henley found in the affections some relief
from his savage unrest. It was affection that painted that masterly
sonnet-portrait of Stevenson in _Apparition_, and there is affection,
too, in that song in praise of England, _Pro Rege Nostro_, though much
of his praise of England, like his praise of life, is but poetry of
lust. Lust in action, unfortunately, has a way of being absurd, and
Henley is often absurd in his lustful--by which one does not mean
lascivious--poems. His _Song of the Sword_ and his _Song of Speed_ are
both a little absurd in their sheer lustfulness. Here we have a mere
extravagance of physical exultation, with a great deal of talk about
“the Lord,” who is--to the ruin of the verse--a figure of rhetoric and
phrase of excitement, and not at all the Holy Spirit of the religious.
Henley, indeed, was for the most part not a religious man but an
egoist. He saw his own shadow everywhere on the universe, like the
shadow of a crippled but undefeated lion. He saw himself sometimes with
pity, oftener with pride. One day he found his image in an “old, black
rotter of a boat” that lay stranded at Shoreham:
With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line,
That makes me think of legs and a broken spine.
But he preferred to think, as in the most famous of his poems, of his
“unconquerable soul,” and to enjoy the raree-show of life heroically
under the promise of death. To call this attitude vainglorious is not
to belittle it. Henley was a master in his own school of literature,
and his works live after him. His commixture of rude and civil phrase
may be a dangerous model for other writers, but with what skill he
achieves the right emphasis and witty magniloquence of effect! He
did not guess (or guess at) the secrets of life, but he watched the
pageant with a greedy eye, sketched one or two figures that amused or
attracted him, and cheered till his pen ought to have been hoarse. He
also cursed, and, part of the time, he played with rhymes, as if in an
interchange of railleries. But, in all circumstances, he was a valiant
figure--valiant not only in words but in the service of words. We need
not count him among the sages, but literature has also room for the
sightseers, and Henley will have a place among them for many years to
come.
VII
LORD ROSEBERY
Lord Rosebery’s oratory is the port at a banquet. It is a little
somnolent in its charm. Mr. Birrell has a better cellar of the livelier
French wines. But the Rosebery port is a wine without which no memorial
dinner can come to a perfect end. It is essentially the wine of memory.
It is used to moisten monumental effigies as champagne is used to
christen ships. As you read his two volumes of _Miscellanies_, you get
the impression that, wherever there is an effigy to be unveiled, you
will find Lord Rosebery present with his noble aspersion of words. I
do not know whether Lord Rosebery himself chooses what effigies he
will talk about or whether he has them chosen for him. It is difficult
to imagine a statue on which he would not talk admirably. He is the
greatest living showman of statues. Even when there is no statue to
be unveiled, but only a centenary to be commemorated, he usually sees
the great man in the posture of a statue--a little larger than life,
and with the sins and scandals discreetly slurred over. Hence it would
be in vain to look in his commemoration addresses for great character
studies or critical interpretations of genius. They are compliments,
not criticisms. They are spoken on behalf of all present. Lord
Rosebery’s art is the art of the funeral speech blended with the art of
the speech at a distribution of prizes. Of this difficult though minor
art he is an accomplished practitioner.
Hence it would be ridiculous to judge his addresses on Burns by the
same standards by which we judge the studies of Carlyle and Stevenson
and Henley on the same subject. Lord Rosebery’s speeches belong to
the literature of formalities, and it is their chief virtue that
they express the common view with brightness of emphasis, humour of
anecdote, and at times with a charming sentimental music of speech.
They say what everyone present would regard as the right thing to say,
and they say it very much better than anybody else on the platform
could say it. He is a spokesman, not a discoverer. His freshness is
that of a man who furnishes what is already known rather than of one
who adds to the stock of knowledge. That he has also the gifts of the
writer who can add to the stock of knowledge is shown by his humorous,
fascinating and amiable portrait of Lord Randolph Churchill. Here
he speaks for himself, not for the meeting. Lord Randolph is as real
to him as a character in fiction, with his spell, his impudence and
his disaster. As we read this story we feel that, if he cared, Lord
Rosebery might write a book of reminiscences, telling with detached
frankness the whole truth about himself and his great associates, which
would have an immortal place in English biographical literature. For
the present, however, we must be content that there should be someone
who can speak the general mind on Burns and Burke, on Oliver Cromwell
and Dr. Johnson, with a hint of majesty and a lulling charm.
Certainly, he reveals no secrets that are not open secrets about
his heroes. He is continually asking “What is his secret?” and the
answer is usually a little disappointing, a little exiguous in
surprise, when it comes. Thus he tells us that the secret of Burns
“lies in two words--inspiration and sympathy.” That is true, but it
leaves Burns smooth as a statue. Burns appeals to us surely, not
only through his inspiration and sympathy, but as the spirit of man
fluttering rebelliously, songfully, satirically, against the bars of
orthodoxy. Scotsmen revere him as the champion of human nature against
the Levites. His errors, no doubt, were as gross as those of the
Levites, but human nature turns affectionately to those who protest
on its behalf against tyranny, and Burns with all his sins, was a
liberator. When he comes to Burke, Lord Rosebery again asks, “What is
his secret?” “The secret of Burke’s character,” he says, “is this, in
my judgment--that he loved reform and hated revolution.” This, again,
leaves Burke with the eyes of a statue. We shall understand the secret
of Burke much better if we see him as a man who had far more passionate
convictions about the duties than about the rights of human beings. He
believed in good government and in good citizenship, but he was never
even touched by the Utopian dream of the perfectibility of man. Lord
Rosebery, indeed, brings the figures of the dead to life, not in his
interpretation of their secrets, but usually in some anecdote that
reminds us of their profound humanity.
His happiest speeches, as a result, are about great men whose private
lives have already been laid bare to all the world. When he has to
speak on Thackeray, whose life still remains half a secret, he devotes
more space to literary criticism, and Thackeray remains for the most
part an effigy hung with wreaths of compliments. It is the fashion
nowadays to speak ill of Thackeray, and Lord Rosebery’s extravagances
on the other side would tempt even a moderate man into disparagement.
He refers to Thackeray as “the giant whom we discuss to-day.” There
could not be a more inappropriate word for Thackeray than “giant.” One
might almost as well call Jane Austen a “giantess.” Charlotte Brontë,
as a young author coming under Thackeray’s spell, might legitimately
feel that she was in the presence of a Titan. But a man may be a Titan
to his contemporaries and yet be no Titan in the long line of great
authors. Thackeray, I am convinced, is greatly underestimated to-day,
but he will come back into his own only if we are prepared to welcome
him on a level considerably below that of the Titans--below Dickens and
Tolstoy, below even Sterne. Not that Lord Rosebery finds nothing to
censure in Thackeray. Though he remarks that _Vanity Fair_ “appears to
many of us the most full and various novel in the English language,”
he has no praise for “the limp Amelia and the shadowy Dobbin.” At
the same time, he turns aside his censures with a compliment. “The
blemishes of _Vanity Fair_ exalt the book,” he declares; “for what must
be the merits of a work which absolutely eclipse such defects?” It is
one of the perils of oratory that it leads men to utter sentences of
this kind. They mean little or nothing, but they have the ring of
amiability. On the other hand, Lord Rosebery makes no concession to
amiability in his criticism of _Esmond_. “The plot to me,” he says, “is
simply repulsive. The transformation of Lady Castlewood from a mother
to a wife is unnatural and distasteful to the highest degree. Thackeray
himself declared that he could not help it. This, I think, only
means that he saw no other than this desperate means of extricating
the story. I cannot help it, too. One likes what one likes, and one
dislikes what one dislikes.” An occasional reservation of this kind
helps to give flavour to Lord Rosebery’s compliments. It gives them
the air of being the utterances, not of a professional panegyrist, but
of a detached and impartial mind. Thus he begins his eulogy of Dr.
Johnson with a confession that Johnson’s own writings are dead for him
apart from “two poems and some pleasing biographies.” “Speaking as
an individual and illiterate Briton”--so he makes his confession. It
is as though the tide withdrew in order to come in with all the more
surprising volume.
One thing that must strike many readers with astonishment while
reading these speeches and studies is that an orator so famous for his
delicate wit should reveal so little delight in the wit of authors.
His enthusiasm is largely moral enthusiasm. We think of Lord Rosebery
as a _dilettante_, and yet the _dilettanti_ of literature and public
life make only a feeble appeal to him. He is interested in few but
men of strong character and men of action. His heroes are such men as
Cromwell and Mr. Gladstone. Is it that he is an ethical _dilettante_,
or is it that he is seeking in these vehement natures a strength of
which he feels the lack in himself? Certainly, as we read him, he casts
the shadow of a man who has almost all the elements of greatness except
this strength. He has been Prime Minister, he has won the Derby, he
has achievements behind him sufficient (one would imagine) to fill
three lives with success, and yet somehow we picture him as a brilliant
failure as we picture the young man who had great possessions. These
very _Miscellanies_ bear the stamp of failure. They are the praises of
famous men spoken from a balcony in the Castle of Indolence. They are
graceful and delightful. But they are haunted by a curious pathos, for
the eyes of the speaker gaze wistfully from where he stands towards the
path that leads to the Hill Difficulty and the pilgrims who advance
along it under heavy burdens to their perils and rewards.
VIII
MR. VACHEL LINDSAY
Mr. Lindsay objects to being called a “jazz poet”; and, if the name
implied that he did nothing in verse but make a loud, facetious, and
hysterical noise, his objection would be reasonable. It is possible
to call him a “jazz poet,” however, for the purpose not of belittling
him, but of defining one of his leading qualities. He is essentially
the poet of a worked-up audience. He relies on the company for the
success of his effects, like a Negro evangelist. The poet, as a rule,
is a solitary in his inspiration. He is more likely to address a star
than a crowded room. Mr. Lindsay is too sociable to write like that.
He invites his readers to a party, and the world for him is a round
game. To read “The Skylark” or the “Ode to a Nightingale” in the
hunt-the-slipper mood in which one enjoys “The Daniel Jazz” would be
disastrous. Shelley and Keats give us the ecstasy of a communion, not
the excitement of a party. The noise of the world, the glare, and the
jostling crowds fade as we read. The audience of Shelley or Keats is as
still as the audience in a cathedral. Mr. Lindsay, on the other hand,
calls for a chorus, like a singer at a smoking-concert. That is the
spirit in which he has written his best work. He is part entertainer
and part evangelist, but in either capacity he seems to demand not an
appreciative hush, but an appreciative noise.
It is clear that he is unusually susceptible to crowd excitement. His
two best poems, “Bryan, Bryan” and “The Congo,” are born of it. “Bryan,
Bryan” is an amazing attempt to recapture and communicate a boy’s
emotions as he mingled in the scrimmage of the Presidential election
of 1896. Mr. Lindsay becomes all but inarticulate as he recalls the
thrill and tumult of the marching West when Bryan called on it to
advance against the Plutocrats. He seems to be shouting like a student
when students hire a bus and go forth in masks and fancy dress to make
a noise in the streets. Luckily, he makes an original noise. He knows
that his excitement is more than he can express in intelligible speech,
and so he wisely and humorously calls in the aid of nonsense, which he
uses with such skill and vehemence that everybody is forced to turn
round and stare at him:
Oh, the long-horns from Texas,
The jay hawks from Kansas,
The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,
The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
The horned toad, prairie-dog, and ballyhoo,
From all the new-born states arow,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on.
The fawn, prodactyl, and thing-a-ma-jig,
The rakeboor, the hellangone,
The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,
The coyote, wild-cat, and grizzly in a glow,
In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West.
From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long--
Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
Ah--sharp was their song.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,
The long-horn calf, the buffalo, and wampus gave tongue.
In such a passage as this Mr. Lindsay pours decorative nonsense out of
a horn of plenty. But his aim is not to talk nonsense: it is to use
nonsense as the language of reality. As paragraph follows paragraph,
we see with what sureness he is piling colour on colour and crash on
crash in order that we may respond almost physically to the sensations
of those magnificent and tumultuous days. He has discovered a new sort
of rhetoric which enables him to hurry us through mood after mood of
comic, pugnacious and sentimental excitement. Addressed to a religious
meeting, rhetoric of this kind would be interrupted by cries of “Glory,
Hallelujah!” and “Praise de Lord!” Unless you are rhetoric-proof, you
cannot escape its spell. Isolated from its context, the passage I have
quoted may be subjected to cold criticism. It is only when it keeps its
place in the living body of the poem and becomes part of the general
attack on our nerves that it is irresistibly effective.
In “The Congo,” it is the excitement of Negroes--in their dances and
their religion--that Mr. Lindsay has set to words. As he watches their
revels, the picture suggests a companion-picture of Negroes orgiastic
in Africa, in the true Kingdom of Mumbo-Jumbo--a Negro’s fairy-tale of
a magic land:
Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes,
Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats,
Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine,
And tall silk hats that were red as wine.
And they pranced with their butterfly partners there,
Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair,
Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine sweet,
And bells on their ankles and little black feet.
But it is the grotesque comedy of the American Negro, not the fantasia
on Africa, that makes “The Congo” so entertaining a poem. The
description of the “fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room” has often
been quoted. There is the same feeling of “racket” in the picture of a
religious camp meeting:
A good old negro in the slums of the town
Preached at a sister for her velvet gown;
Howled at a brother for his low-down ways,
His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days;
Beat on the Bible till he wore it out
Starting the jubilee revival shout.
And some had visions as they stood on chairs,
And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs.
And they all repented, a thousand strong,
From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong,
And slammed on their hymn books till they shook the room
With “glory, glory, glory,”
And “Boom, boom, _Boom_.”
Whatever qualities Mr. Lindsay lacks, he has humour, colour and gusto.
When he writes in the tradition of the serious poets, as in “Abraham
Lincoln Walks at Midnight” and “Epilogue,” he is negligible: he is
only one of a thousand capable verse-writers. He is dependent on his
own idiom to a greater extent even than was Robert Burns. Not that his
work in rag-time English is comparable in other respects to Burns’s in
Scots. Burns’s themes were, apart from his comic verse, the traditional
themes of the poets--the aristocrats of the spirit. Mr. Lindsay is
a humorist and sentimentalist who is essentially a democrat of the
spirit--one of the crowd.
And, just as he is the humorist of the crowd, so is he the humorist of
things immense and exaggerated. His imagination is the playground of
whales and elephants and sea-serpents. He is happy amid the clangour
and confusion of a railway-junction. He rejoices in the exuberant and
titanic life of California, where:
Thunder-clouds of grapes grow on the mountains.
and he boasts that:
There are ten gold suns in California,
When all other lands have one,
For the Golden Gate must have due light
And persimmons be well done.
And the hot whales slosh and cool in the wash
And the fume of the hollow sea,
Rally and roam in the loblolly foam
And whoop that their souls are free.
Mr. Lindsay himself can whoop like a whale. He is a poet in search
of superlatives beyond the superlatives. He cannot find them, but he
at least articulates new sounds. As one reads him, one is reminded
at times of a child in a railway-train singing and shouting against
the noise of the engine and the wheels. The world affects Mr. Lindsay
as the railway-train affects some children. He is intoxicated by the
rhythm of the machinery. As a result, though he is often an ethical
poet, he is seldom a spiritual poet. That helps to explain why his
verse does not achieve any but a sentimental effect in his andante
movements. As his voice falls, his inspiration falls. In “The Santa Fé
Trail” he breaks in on the frenzy of a thousand motors with the still,
small voice of the bird called the Rachel Jane. He undoubtedly moves us
by the way in which he does this; but he moves us much as a sentimental
singer at a ballad concert can do. It is not for passages of this kind
that one reads him. His words at their best do not minister at the
altar: they dance to the music of the syncopated orchestra. That is Mr.
Lindsay’s peculiar gift. It would hardly be using too strong a word to
say that it is his genius.
IX
MR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING
There are those who gibe at _Punch_. There are also those who gibe at
those who gibe at _Punch_. The match is a fairly even one. _Punch_
is undoubtedly not as good as it used to be, but it is not quite so
certain that it is not as clever as it used to be. Very few people
realise that _Punch_ was once a good paper--that it was a good paper,
I mean in the Charles-Kingsley sense of the adjective. It began in
1841, as Mr. C. L. Graves prettily says, by “being violently and
vituperatively on the side of the angels.” If _Punch_ had kept pace
with the times it would, in these days, at the age of eighty, be
suspected of Socialism. Its championship of the poor against those
who prospered on the poverty of the poor was as vehement as a Labour
speech at a street-corner. One of the features of the early _Punch_ was
a “Pauper’s Corner,” in which “the cry of the people found frequent
and touching utterance.” It was in the Christmas number of _Punch_ in
1843 that Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” was first published. Mark Lemon,
the editor, insisted on publishing it, though all his colleagues were
opposed to him on the point. In the following years we find the same
indignant sense of realities expressing itself in Leech’s cartoon, “The
Home of the Rick Burner,” which emphasised the fact that the cause of
an outburst of incendiarism in Suffolk was the greed of the farmers
who underpaid their labourers. _Punch_ also took up the cause of the
sweated labourers in verse:
I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,
Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,
But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.
Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,
Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
Nor did _Punch_ shrink from looking a good deal higher than the fine
Old English Gentleman for his victims. He had a special, almost a Lloyd
Georgian, taste for baiting dukes. He attacked the Duke of Norfolk
with admirable irony for suggesting to the poor that they should eke
out their miserable fare by using curry powder. He made butts in turn
of the Duke of Marlborough, the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of
Sutherland, the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of Atholl. He did not
spare even the Duke of Wellington. “The old Duke,” he declared, “should
no longer block up the great thoroughfare of civilisation--he should be
quietly and respectfully eliminated.” It was in the same mood that the
Marquis of Londonderry was denounced both as a tyrannical coal-owner
and an enemy of the Queen’s English--“the most noble, but not the most
grammatical Marquis.” _Punch’s_ view of the House of Lords is expressed
with considerable directness in his scheme for reforming the Chamber,
which begins:
It is an indisputable truth that there can be no such thing as a
born legislator. As unquestionable is the fact that there may be a
born ass.
But your born ass may be born to your legislator’s office, and
command a seat in the house of legislators by inheritance, as in
not a few examples, wherein the coronet hides not the donkey’s ears.
This is not particularly brilliant. It is interesting not so much in
itself as because it is the sort of thing with which _Punch_ used
regularly to regale its readers. _Punch_ in those days was a paper
with a purpose. Its humour, like Dickens’s was to a certain extent a
missionary humour. _Punch_ saw himself as the rescuer of the underdog,
and, if he could not achieve his object comically, he was prepared to
do it angrily. He did not hesitate to fling his cap and bells rudely in
the face of royalty itself. He might be accused of vulgarity, but not
of being, as he has since become, the more or less complacent advocate
of Toby, the top-dog.
Mr. Graves seems to think that the change in the spirit of _Punch_ is
due to the mellowness that comes with increasing years. But the real
reason, I fancy, is that, while _Punch_ began under an editor whose
sympathies were with the bottom-dog, the sympathies of later editors
have been much more respectable. It is not that _Punch_ has lost the
fire of youth, but that it has lost the generosity of the Victorian
man of letters. It was, it may be admitted, easier to be generous in
those days. A Victorian could make himself the champion of the ill-used
poor without any feeling that he was assisting in bringing about a new
order in society. A middle-class Georgian who attaches himself to the
same cause cannot do so without realising that it is not a question of
patching an old suit of clothes, but of making a new and a better one.
The Victorian committed himself to charity. The Georgian has to commit
himself to the cold-blooded charity of equality. _Punch_, indeed, seems
to have begun to take alarm as soon as the Chartist movement made it
appear likely that the workers were going to demand, not sympathetic
treatment, but something like self-determination. By 1873, according
to Mr. Graves, “references to the champagne-habit among the miners
abound.” In a cartoon, “From the Coal Districts,” we are shown a lady
in a fruiterer’s saying, “I’m afraid I must give up the pineapple, Mr.
Green! Eight shillings is really too much!” She is interrupted by a
“successful collier” who bids the fruiterer, “Just put ’em up for _me_,
then, Master. ’Ere’s ’arf a sovereign; and look ’ere--yer may keep the
change if yer’ll _only tell us ’ow to cook ’un_.” _Punch_, as we know
it to-day, had been born.
It is interesting to trace the change in the temper of _Punch_, not
only in domestic, but in foreign, affairs. _Punch_ appears to have
given up his pacifism--or, as Mr. Graves calls it with reforming zeal,
his “pacificism”--as a result of his generous sympathy with insurgent
Italians and Hungarians. That was the thin end of the wedge. Having
once drawn the sword, _Punch_ found it even more enjoyable than drawing
cartoons. He drew it fiercely against the Russians in the Crimean War.
He drew it fiercely against the Indians in the Indian Mutiny. He drew
it on behalf of General Eyre after the negro outbreak in Jamaica. He
drew it against Lincoln in the American Civil War. Mr. Graves ought,
for historical reasons, to have reprinted _Punch’s_ parody on one of
Lincoln’s speeches. He is content, however, to describe it as “a truly
lamentable performance, in which the President claims dictatorial
powers, calls for whipcord to whip the rebels, abuses the ‘rotten old
world,’ talks with the utmost cynicism of the blacks, and in general
behaves like a vulgar buffoon.” Mr. Graves, with an impartiality which
cannot be too highly praised, reminds the _Punch_ of those days that
“the magnanimous Lincoln would never allow” the Southerners to be
called rebels in his presence--a significant reminder when we recall
how Mr. Lloyd George drew on the Lincoln parallel in defending his
treatment of the Irish. But, for the ironist, the most amusing of
all _Punch’s_ blunders in regard to foreign policy is the welcome he
offered to the birth of the German Navy in an article called “Bravo,
Bismarck!” “Britannia through her _Punch_,” he wrote, “rejoices to
weave among her naval azures a new shade--Prussian blue.” It is only
fair to say that _Punch_ was not consistent in his attitude to Germany.
But he has shown a curious capacity for backing the wrong horse--the
horse that seemed to “get away” at the start, but that was ultimately
disqualified by the stern judge, history. He gave up championing lost
causes and took to championing causes that would be lost a generation
later.
In the result, Mr. Graves, though a wit of distinction, has produced
in _Mr. Punch’s History of Modern England_ a book that is pathetic
rather than amusing. It is a cemetery of dead jokes--the offspring of
a little gentleman with a long nose who was cross more often than he
was funny. _Punch_, indeed, has been for the most part a grinner rather
than a wit. It has had, and still has, brilliant writers on its staff.
But its temper is not the temper of its most brilliant contributors.
Its attitude is that of the prosperous clubman who dislikes the advance
both of the new rich and of the old poor. It has undoubtedly made
itself the most successful comic paper in the world, but one sometimes
wonders whether it has done so as a result of allying itself with
comedy or of allying itself with success. Yet the fact remains that
other men have started rivals to _Punch_, and that they have not only
been not so successful as _Punch_ but not so comic. _Punch_ always
baits the hook of its odious politics with a reasonable amount of
comedy about things in general, and in the comedy of things in general,
even if we think it might be done still better, it has at least always
been ahead of its rivals. There have been men who have dreamed of a
_Punch_ that would bring the spirit of comedy to bear on all sides
impartially. There are others who have dreamed of bringing the spirit
of comedy to bear on the right side. One would not, perhaps, mind what
side _Punch_ was on if only it were a little more generous--if only
it purveyed the human comedy as a comedy, and not, as in the case of
working men, Irishmen, and non-Allied foreigners, as a sinister crook
melodrama.
X
MR. H. M. TOMLINSON
Mr. Tomlinson is a born traveller. There are two sorts of
travellers--those who do what they are told and those who do what they
please. Mr. Tomlinson has never moved about the world in obedience to a
guide-book. He would find it almost as difficult to read a guide-book
as to write one. He never echoes other men’s curiosity. He travels for
the purpose neither of information nor conversation. He has no motive
but whim. His imagination goes roaming; and, his imagination and his
temper being such as they are, he is out on his travels even if he gets
no farther than Limehouse or the Devonshire coast. He has, indeed,
wandered a good deal farther than Limehouse and Devonshire, as readers
of _The Sea and the Jungle_ know. Even in his more English volumes of
sketches, essays, confessions, short stories--how is one to describe
them?--he takes us with him to the north coast of Africa, to New York,
and to France in war time. But the English sketches--the description of
the crowd at a pit-mouth after an explosion in a coal mine, the account
of a derelict railway station and a grocer’s boy in spectacles--almost
equally give us the feeling that we are reading the narrative of one
who has seen nothing except with the fortunate eyes of a stranger. It
is all a matter of eyes. To see is to discover, and all Mr. Tomlinson’s
books are, in this sense, books of discoveries.
As a recorder of the things he has seen he has the three great gifts
of imagery, style and humour. He sees the jelly-fish hanging in the
transparent deeps “like sunken moons.” A boat sailing on a windy day
goes skimming over the inflowing ridges of the waves “with exhilarating
undulations, light as a sandpiper.” A queer Lascar on a creeping errand
in an East-end street “looked as uncertain as a candle-flame in a
draught.” How well again Mr. Tomlinson conveys to us in a sentence or
two the vision of Northern Africa on a wet day:
As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for sunlight.
They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white
walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the
styes. Their lissome and statuesque inhabitants become softened
and bent, and pad dejectedly through the muck as though they were
ashamed to live, but had to go on with it. The palms which look so
well in sunny pictures are besoms up-ended in a drizzle.
Mr. Tomlinson has in that last sentence captured the ultimate secret
of a wet day in an African village. Even those of us who have never
seen Africa save on the map, know that often there is nothing more
to be said. Mr. Tomlinson, however, is something of a specialist in
bad weather, as, perhaps, any man who loves the sea as he does must
be. The weather fills the world for the seaman with gods and demons.
The weather is at once the day’s adventure and the day’s pageant. Mr.
Conrad has written one of the greatest stories in the world simply
about the weather and the soul of man. He may be said to be the first
novelist writing in English to have kept his weather-eye open. Mr.
Tomlinson shares Mr. Conrad’s sensitive care for these things. His
description of a storm of rain bursting on the African hills makes
you see the things as you read. In its setting, even an unadorned and
simple sentence like----
As Yeo luffed, the squall fell on us bodily with a great weight of
wind and white rain, pressing us into the sea,
compels our presence among blowing winds and dangerous waters.
But, weather-beaten as Mr. Tomlinson’s pages are, there is more in them
than the weather. There is an essayish quality in his books, personal,
confessional, go-as-you-please. The majority of essays have egotism
without personality. Mr. Tomlinson’s sketches have personality without
egotism. He is economical of discussion of his own tastes. When he does
discuss them you know that here is no make-believe of confession. Take,
for instance, the comment on place-names with which he prefaces his
account of his disappointment with Tripoli:
You probably know there are place-names, which, when whispered
privately, have the unreasonable power of translating the spirit
east of the sun and west of the moon. They cannot be seen in print
without a thrill. The names in the atlas which do that for me are
a motley lot, and you, who see no magic in them, but have your own
lunacy in another phase, would laugh at mine. Celebes, Acapulco,
Para, Port Royal, Cartagena, the Marquesas, Panama, the Mackenzie
River, Tripoli of Barbary--they are some of mine. Rome should be
there, I know, and Athens, and Byzantium. But they are not, and
that is all I can say about it.
That is the farthest Mr. Tomlinson ever gets on the way towards
arrogance. He ignores Rome and Athens. They are not among the ports of
call of his imagination. He prefers the world that sailors tell about
to the world that scholars talk about. He will not write about--he
will scarcely even interest himself in--any world but that which he
has known in the intimacy of his imaginative or physical experience.
Places that he has seen and thought of, ships, children, stars, books,
animals, soldiers, workers--of all these things he will tell you with a
tender realism, lucid and human because they are part of his life. But
the tradition that is not his own he throws aside as a burden. He will
carry no pack save of the things that have touched his heart and his
imagination.
I wish all his sketches had been as long as “The African Coast.” It is
so good that it makes one want to send him travelling from star to star
of all those names that mean more to him than Byzantium. One desires
even to keep him a prisoner for a longer period among the lights of New
York. He should have written about the blazing city at length, as he
has written about the ferries. His description of the lighted ferries
and the woman passenger who had forgotten Jimmy’s boots, remains in the
memory. Always in his sketches we find some such significant “thing
seen.” On the voyage home from New York on a floating hotel it is the
passing of a derelict sailing ship, “mastless and awash,” that suddenly
recreates for him the reality of the ocean. After describing the
assaults of the seas on the doomed hulk, he goes on:
There was something ironic in the indifference of her defenceless
body to these unending attacks. It mocked this white and raging
post-mortem brutality, and gave her a dignity that was cold and
superior to all the eternal powers could now do. She pitched
helplessly head first into a hollow, and a door flew open under the
break of her poop; it surprised and shocked us, for the dead might
have signed to us then. She went astern of us fast, and a great
comber ran at her, as if it had just spied her, and thought she was
escaping. There was a high white flash, and a concussion we heard.
She had gone. But she appeared again far away, forlorn on a summit
in desolation, black against the sunset. The stump of her bowsprit,
the accusatory finger of the dead, pointed at the sky.
We find in “The Ruins” (which is a sketch of a town in France just
evacuated by the Germans) an equally imaginative use made of a key
incident. First, we have the description of the ruined town itself:
House-fronts had collapsed in rubble across the road. There is a
smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their eyes have
been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and their
walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have
avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has
dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the
dissolute.
And so on till we come to the discovery of a corn-chandler’s ledger
lying in the mud of the roadway. Only an artist could have made a
tradesman’s ledger a symbol of hope and resurrection on a shattered
planet as Mr. Tomlinson has done. He picks out from the disordered
procession of things treasures that most of us would pass with hardly
a glance. His clues to the meaning of the world are all of his own
finding. It is this that gives his work the savour and freshness of
literature.
As for clues to Mr. Tomlinson’s own mind and temper, do we not discover
plenty of them in his confessions about books? He is a man who likes
to read _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ in bed. Heine and Samuel Butler
and Anatole France are among his favourite authors. There is nothing
in his work to suggest that he has taken any of them for his models.
But there is a vein of rebellious irony in his writing that enables one
to realise why his imagination finds in Swift good company. He, too,
has felt his heart lacerated, especially in these late days of the
world’s corruption. His writing would be bitter, one feels, were it
not for the strength of his affections. Humanity and irony contend in
his work, and humanity is fortunately the winner. In the result, the
world in his books is not permanently a mud-ball, but a star shining
in space. Perhaps it is in gratitude for this that we find it possible
at last even to forgive him his contemptuous references to Coleridge’s
_Table-talk_--that cache of jewels buried in metaphysical cotton-wool.
XI
THE ALLEGED HOPELESSNESS OF TCHEHOV
A Russian critic has said that Tchehov had nothing to give his fellows
but a philosophy of hopelessness. He committed the crime of destroying
men’s faith in God, morals, progress, and art. This is an accusation
that takes one’s breath away. If ever there was a writer who had a
genius for consolation--a genius for stretching out a hand to his
floundering fellow-mortals--it was Tchehov. He was as active in service
as a professional philanthropist. His faith in the decency of men was
as inextinguishable as his doubt. His tenderness was a passion. He was
open-hearted to all comers. He never shut his door either on a poor
man needing medicine, or on a young man needing praise. He was equally
generous as author, doctor and reformer. He who has been represented
as a disbeliever in anything was no disbeliever even in contemporary
men of genius. His attitude to Tolstoy was not one of idolatry, but
it came as near being idolatrous as is possible for a clever man. “I
am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” he wrote in 1900. “If he were to die
there would be a big, empty place in my life.... I have never loved
any man as much as him. I am not a believing man, but of beliefs
I consider his the nearest and most akin to me.” In his gloomier
moods he thought little enough of the work either of himself or his
younger contemporaries. “We are stale,” he wrote; “we can only beget
gutta-percha boys.” But this was because he was on his knees before
everything that is greatest in literature. In a letter to his friend,
Suvorin, editor of the _Novoe Vremya_, he wrote:
The writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good,
and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important
characteristic--they are going towards something and summoning
you towards it, too, and you feel, not with your mind but with
your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost
of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination
for nothing. Some have more immediate objects--the abolition of
serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or
simply vodka, like Denis Davgdov; others have remote objects--God,
life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The
best of them are idealists, and paint life as it is, but, through
every life’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you
feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that
captivates you.
If this is the confession of an unbeliever, a philosopher of
hopelessness, we may reasonably ask for a new definition of belief.
Tchehov, indeed, was born with an impulse towards reverence and faith.
Though he denied that he was either a Liberal or a Conservative, he
excited himself about causes like a schoolboy revolutionary. He had
a religious sense of justice. He was ardently on Zola’s side during
the Dreyfus excitement. “Let Dreyfus be guilty,” he declared, “and
Zola is still right, since it is the duty of writers not to accuse,
not to persecute, but to champion even the guilty once they have
been condemned and are enduring imprisonment.... There are plenty of
accusers, persecutors, and gendarmes without them, and in any case
the rôle of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.” He quarrelled
with Suvorin for attacking Zola. “To abuse Zola when he is on his
trial--that is unworthy of literature.”
We find the same ardent reforming spirit running through the whole of
Tchehov’s life. At one time he is engrossed in a project for building
in Moscow a “People’s Palace,” with a library, reading-rooms, a
lecture-room, a museum, and a theatre. At another time, he is off
to the island of Saghalin to study with his own eyes the horrors of
the Siberian penal system. “My God,” he writes in the course of his
investigations, “how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for
the cold which deprives Siberia of the summer, and if it were not for
the officials who corrupt the peasants, Siberia would be the richest
and happiest of lands.” In another letter he looks forward to building
a school “in the village where I am a school-warden.” When a plague
of cholera breaks out, we find Tchehov once more living for others
with the same saintly unselfishness. At times, no doubt, he cursed the
cholera and he cursed his patients like a human being; but his cries
were the cries of an exhausted body; they were merely a proof of the
zeal that had worn him out. There is an attractive portrait of Tchehov
at this time in the biographical sketch that precedes the English
translation of his letters:
He returned home shattered and exhausted, but always behaved as
though he were doing something trivial; he cracked little jokes and
made everyone laugh as before, and carried on conversations with
his dachshund Quinine, about her supposed sufferings.
This may be consistent with the philosophy of despair. It is certainly
very unlike the practice of despair. But that Tchehov’s creed was the
opposite of a creed of despair may be seen in letter after letter. In
one letter he writes:
I believe in individual people. I see salvation in individual
personalities scattered here and there all over Russia--educated
people or peasants--they have strength though they are few.
In another letter he says:
Modern culture is only the first beginning of work for a great
future, work which will perhaps go on for tens of thousands of
years, in order that man may, if only in the remote future, come
to know the truth of the real God--that is not, I conjecture, by
seeking in Dostoievsky, but by clear knowledge, as one knows twice
two are four.
If one thing is obvious, it is that the writer of these sentences is an
enthusiast. Take him, again, when he is protesting against “trade-marks
and labels” for artists, and announcing his creed:
My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent,
inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom--freedom from
violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the
programme I would follow if I were a great artist.
In regard to literature, he believed not in the disheartening sort of
realism but in a temperate idealism, as we learn from an excellent
parable:
Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham only noticed that
his father was a drunkard, and completely lost sight of the fact
that he was a genius, that he had built an ark and saved the world.
Writers must not imitate Ham....
On the other hand, Tchehov was always alert to defend the practice of
honest realism in literature. He refused to admit that it is the object
of literature to “unearth the pearl from the refuse-heap”:
A writer is not a confectioner, not a provider of cosmetics, not
an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his sense
of duty and his conscience; having put his hand to the plough, he
mustn’t turn back, and however distasteful, he must conquer his
squeamishness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life. He is
just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper
correspondent, out of a feeling of fastidiousness or from a wish to
please his readers, would describe only honest mayors, high-minded
ladies, and virtuous railway contractors?
In Tchehov’s view, it is the duty of the artist to tell the truth
about his characters, not to draw morals from them. “The artist,”
he declares, “must not be the judge of his characters and of their
conversations, but merely an impartial witness.” The artist must, no
doubt, strive after some such impartiality as this. But the great
artist will never quite attain to it. Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tchehov
himself, all lavished affection on some of their characters and
withheld it from others.
On the other hand, the artist must be tolerant to a degree that
frequently shocks the orthodox moralist. He approaches individual men,
not as a censor, but as a recorder. Tchehov, writing to a friend from
his country estate, relates, for instance: “The village priest often
comes and pays me long visits; he is a very good fellow, a widower, and
has some illegitimate children.” To the stern moralist, a priest who is
a very good fellow with some illegitimate children is an unthinkable
paradox. To the artist it is a paradox that exists in nature: he
accepts it with a smile. It is not that Tchehov was indifferent to the
vices of the flesh. We find him writing on one occasion to a great
journalist: “Why do they write nothing about prostitution in your
paper? It is the most fearful evil, you know. Our Sobelev street is a
regular slave-market.”
Tchehov, indeed, like every great artist, was a man divided. He had
the artist’s passion for describing his fellow-men: he had also the
doctor’s passion for helping them. He was in a sense pulled in opposite
directions by these rival passions. Luckily, the tug-of-war, instead
of weakening, positively strengthened his genius. The great artist is
a reformer transformed. Shakespeare is sometimes held to have lived
aloof from the reformer’s temporary passions. But that repeated summons
to reconciliation in his plays is the _credo_ of a man who has plumbed
the great secret of the liberalism of his time and, equally, of ours.
Pity, tenderness, love, or whatever you choose to call it, is an
essential ingredient of the greatest genius, whether in reform or in
art. It is the absence of pity that is the final condemnation of most
of the literature, painting, and sculpture of our time. When pity is
exhausted, the best part of genius is exhausted, and there is little
but cleverness left. In Tchehov, more than in almost any other author
of recent years, truth and tenderness are united. He tells us the truth
even when it is most cruel, but he himself is kind. He often writes
like a doctor going his rounds in a sick world. But he cares for the
sick world. That is why his stories delight us as the synthetic golden
syrup of more optimistic authors never does.
XII
NIETZSCHE: A NOTE
“_And thus I wander alone like a rhinoceros._” Nietzsche writes in one
of his letters that he had discovered this “strong closing sentence”
in an English translation of the sacred books of the Buddhists and had
made it a “household word.” It is at once a grotesque and an apt image
of his isolation in a world of men and women. His solitude made him
perilous: it ultimately exalted his egoism into madness. There are few
more amazing passages in the annals of literature than those containing
the last letters between the mad Nietzsche and the mad Strindberg.
Nietzsche, signing himself “Nietzsche Cæsar,” wrote on New Year’s Eve,
1888:
I have appointed a meeting day of monarchs in Europe. I shall order
... to be shot.
Au revoir! For we shall surely see each other again.
On one condition only. Let us divorce.
Strindberg, writing on the same date and signing himself “The best, the
highest God,” began his letter to Nietzsche: “I will, I will be raving
mad,” and concluded it:
Meanwhile, let us rejoice in our madness. Fare you well and be true
to your
STRINDBERG
(The best, the highest God).
Nietzsche’s reply was:
MR. STRINDBERG:
Alas! ... no more! Let us divorce!
“THE CRUCIFIED.”
Dr. Oscar Levy, in his introduction to an English selection from
Nietzsche’s letters, vigorously objects to the emphasis that has
been laid by some critics on Nietzsche’s madness. It is a reasonable
protest, if the accusation is put forward in order to damage
Nietzsche’s fame as an artist among philosophers. Dr. Levy, however,
goes so far on the other side that he almost leaves us with a picture
of Nietzsche as a perfectly normal man with all the normal “slave
virtues.” “A good friend, a devoted son, an affectionate brother,
and a generous enemy”--“not the slightest trace of any lack of
judgment”--“perfectly healthy and lucid”--such are the phrases in
which the Nietzsche of these letters is portrayed. We are told that
“even the curious last letter to Georg Brandes still gives a perfect
sense.” Here is the letter:
TO THE FRIEND GEORG.
Having been discovered by you no trick was necessary for the others
to find me. The difficulty is now to get rid of me.
“THE CRUCIFIED.”
It would, I agree, be ridiculous to dwell on the madness at the close
of Nietzsche’s life, if such extravagant claims had not been made for
him by his followers. But the madness of Nietzsche is relevant enough
in a criticism of his philosophy, if we are asked to accept him as one
of the inspired guides to life.
Nietzsche himself was at once terrified and intoxicated by his sense
of his own abnormal difference from common men. He knew, in part of
his nature, that this aloofness was an evil. He craved for sympathy so
passionately at times that he cried to one of his friends: “The whole
of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even
with total strangers!” About the same time--it was in 1880--he wrote:
One ceases from loving oneself properly when one _ceases_ from
exercising oneself in love towards others, wherefore the
latter (the ceasing from exercising, etc.) ought to be strongly
deprecated. (This is from my own experience.)
Even before that, however he had definitely decided on the egocentric
life. Writing to a friend on the subject of marriage, he declared: “I
shall certainly not marry; on the whole, I hate the limitations and
obligations of the whole civilised order of things so very much that
it would be difficult to find a woman free-spirited enough to follow
my lead.” He was himself the measure by which he measured all the
values of life. “I am not quite satisfied with Nature,” he had said in
an early letter, “who ought to have given me a little more intellect
as well as a warmer heart.” But this mood of modesty did not last. At
that time, he saw in his egoism his greatest weakness. “One begins to
feel constantly as if one were covered with a hundred scars and every
movement were painful.” As his consciousness of his genius grew, every
scar and every pain seemed to him to bear witness, not to his egoism,
but to his greatness. He assures his sister in 1883 that he is grateful
even for his physical suffering because through it “I was torn away
from an estimate of my life-task which was not only false but a hundred
times too _low_.” He declares that he naturally belonged to “the
modest among men,” so that “some violent means were necessary in order
to recall me to myself.” He was unquestionably heroic in the way in
which he accepted all the miseries of his life as the natural lot of
a saviour of mankind. He boasted of his isolation and his sufferings
magnificently. No sooner, however, did the world begin to smile on him
than he began to boast on a more normal plane of delighted vanity. His
most attractive braggings were addressed to his mother. He wrote to her
from Turin:
Oh, if you only knew on what terms the foremost personages of the
world express their loyalty to me--the most charming women, a
_Madame la Princesse Tenichefl_ not by any means excepted. I have
genuine geniuses among my admirers--to-day there is no name that
is treated with as much distinction and respect as my own. You
see that is the feat--sans name, sans rank, and sans riches, I am
nevertheless treated like a little prince here, by everybody, even
down to my fruit-stall woman, who is never satisfied till she has
picked me out the sweetest bunch from among her grapes.
Grateful though he was for the practical admiration of the fruit-stall
woman, however he liked to pick and choose among his admirers. After
he had received an enthusiastic greeting from a coterie of Viennese
disciples, he wrote scornfully to his mother of “such adolescent
advances.” “I do not,” he declared, “write for men who are fermenting
and immature.” He sneered if he was praised; he was infuriated if he
was ignored. At one moment he would sneer at the barbarous Germans
who did not understand him. At another, he would show how deeply he
felt this want of appreciation in his own country for his “unrelenting
subterranean war against all that mankind has hitherto honoured and
loved.” Shortly before he went mad, he wrote to a friend:
... Although I am in my forty-fifth year and have published about
fifteen books (--among them that _non plus ultra_ “Zarathustra”),
no one in Germany has yet succeeded in producing even a moderately
good review of a single one of my works. They are now getting out
of the difficulty with such words as “eccentric,” “pathological,”
“psychiatric.” There have been evil and slanderous hints enough
about me, and in the papers both scholarly and unscholarly, the
prevailing attitude is one of ungoverned animosity--but how is it
that no one protests against this? How is it that no one feels
insulted when I am abused? And all these years no comfort, no drop
of human sympathy, not a breath of love.
He reproached even his sister for her want of understanding. “You
do not seem to be even remotely conscious,” he told her, “of
the fact that you are next of kin to the man and his destiny, in
which the question of millenniums has been decided--speaking quite
literally, I hold the Future of mankind in my hand.” It is because his
correspondence is so full of passages in this and similar moods that we
find in Nietzsche’s letters little of the intimacy that we expect in
good letters. It is as though he were suffering from an obsession about
his fame. Many of his letters are merely manifestoes about himself. He
was not greatly interested in other people or in the little ordinary
things that interest other people. His most enjoyable passages might
be described as outbursts, and towards the end of his life he chose as
his correspondents Strindberg and Brandes, who also had the genius of
outburst but in a less superb degree. It was Brandes who wrote to him
with regard to Dostoievsky:
He is a true and great poet, but a vile creature, absolutely
Christian in his way of thinking and living, and at the same time
quite _sadique_. His morals are wholly what you have christened
“Slave Morality.”
“Just what I think,” replied Nietzsche.
Not that the letters are without an occasional touch of fun. There is
a delightful early letter in which Nietzsche tells how, being invited
to meet Wagner, he ordered a dress suit. It was brought round to the
house just in time to allow him to dress. The old messenger, however,
brought not only the parcel but the bill, and presented it to Nietzsche:
I took it politely, but he declared he must be paid on delivery. I
was surprised, and explained that I had nothing to do with him as
the servant of my tailor, but that my dealings were with his master
to whom I had given the order. The man grew more pressing, as did
also the time. I snatched at the things and began to put them
on. He snatched them too and did all he could to prevent me from
dressing. What with violence on my part and violence on his, there
was soon a scene, and all the time I was fighting in my shirt, as I
wished to get the new trousers.
At last, after a display of dignity, solemn threats, the utterance
of curses on my tailor and his accomplice, and vows of vengeance,
the little man vanished with my clothes.
There is another amusing letter to his sister, in which he tells her
how, one Christmas Day at Nice, he drank too much:
Then your famous animal drank three quite large glasses of a sweet
local wine, and was just the slightest bit top-heavy; at least, not
long afterwards, when the breakers drew near to me, I said to them
as one says to a bevy of farmyard fowls, “Shsh! Shsh! Shshh!”
This incident is comically symbolic of much of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
It is hardly necessary to go into Dr. Levy’s defence of Nietzsche
against the charge that he was the “man who caused the war.” Dr. Levy
points out quite justly that Nietzsche was as severe a critic of
Prussians and Prussianism as any English leader-writer in war-time.
This, however, does not meet the point of the anti-Nietzscheans. What
they contend is that Prussianism is essentially the vulgar application
of the principles that underlie the Nietzschean philosophy. It is
obviously ridiculous to contend that Nietzsche caused the war. It
is arguable, however, that he was the supreme poet of the supreme
falsehood that is at the bottom of all unjust wars.
In any case, like Carlyle, he will probably survive as an artist rather
than as a teacher. And even men who detest his gospel will delight in
the lightning of his phrase as it shoots out of the thunder-clouds of
his imagination.
XIII
MR. T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC
Mr. Eliot, in his critical essays, is an undertaker rather than a
critic. He comes to bury Hamlet not to praise him. He has an essay on
“Hamlet and His Problems,” in which he assures us that, “so far from
being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic
failure.” Now, there are several things about _Hamlet_ that call for
explanation. But there is one thing that needs no explanation, and that
is its “artistic failure.” One might as well set out to explain why the
mid-Atlantic is shallow, why Mont Blanc is lower than Parliament Hill,
why Cleopatra was unattractive, why roses have an offensive smell. It
might be possible for a writer of paradoxes to amuse himself and us on
any of these themes. But Mr. Eliot is no dealer in paradoxes. He is a
serious censor of literature, who lives in the gloom of a basement,
and cannot believe in the golden pomp of the sun outside. It might
be unfair to say that what he is suffering from is literary atheism.
He has undoubtedly gods of his own. But he worships them in the dark
spirit of the sectarian, and his interest in them is theological
rather than religious in kind. He is like the traditional Plymouth
Brother whose belief in God is hardly so strong as his belief that
there are “only a few of us”--perhaps “only one of us”--saved. We see
the Plymouth-Brother mood in his reference to “the few people who talk
intelligently about Stendhal and Flaubert and James.” This expresses an
attitude which is intolerable in a critic of literature, and should be
left to the _précieuses ridicules_.
Mr. Eliot, however, does not merely say that _Hamlet_ is an artistic
failure and leave it at that. He goes on to explain what he means. He
believes that:
Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play
dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that
Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the
“intractable” material of the old play.
In so far as this is an attempt to explain the specifically new
Shakespearian emphasis in _Hamlet_, in contrast to those elements which
he borrowed from an earlier play, the first part of the assertion is
worth considering. But, as regards the completed play that we possess,
novelties, borrowings, and all, the entire sentence gives us merely a
false simplification. Shakespeare’s finished _Hamlet_ is a play dealing
with many things besides the effect of a mother’s guilt on her son. It
is a play dealing with the effect of a whole circle of ruinous events
closing in on a man of princely nature, who was a foreigner amid the
baseness that surrounded him. Shakespeare showed in _Hamlet_ that it
was possible, contrary to all the rules, to write a play which combined
the largeness of a biography with essential dramatic unity. Mr. Eliot,
however, clings to the idea that Shakespeare failed in _Hamlet_ because
he was divided in interest between the theme of the guilty mother and
other intractable stuff “that the writer could not drag to light,
contemplate, or manipulate into art.” Now, every great work of art is
like the visible part of an iceberg; it reveals less than it leaves
hidden. The greatest poem in the world is no more than a page from that
inspired volume that exists in the secret places of the poet’s soul.
There is no need to explain the mysteries that crowd about us as we
read _Hamlet_ by a theory of Shakespeare’s failure. To summon these
mysteries into the narrow compass of a play is the surest evidence of
a poet’s triumph. Let us see, however, how Mr. Eliot, holding to his
guilty-mother theme, attempts to explain the quality of Shakespeare’s
failure. He writes:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding
an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a
situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
_particular_ emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more
successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you
will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her
sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of
imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of
his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events,
these words were automatically released by the last event in the
series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy
of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is
deficient in _Hamlet_.
“Hamlet (the man),” he adds, “is dominated by an emotion which is
inexpressible, because it is in _excess_ of the facts as they appear.”
Mr. Eliot has a curious view of the things that justify violent
emotion. I should have thought that the murder of a father by his
usurping brother, the infidelity of a mother and a mistress, the use
of former companions to spy on him, the failure of all that had
once seemed honest and fair, plots to murder him, the suicide of his
beloved, might have caused considerable perturbation even in the soul
of a fish. If ever there was a play in which the emotion is not in
excess of the facts as they appear, that play is _Hamlet_. The emotion
is “in excess” only in the sense that it expresses for us not merely
the personal emotion of one man, but the emotions of generation after
generation of fine and sensitive spirits caught in the gross toils of
disaster. Hamlet is a universal type as well as an individual. In this
he resembles such a figure as Prometheus to a degree which cannot be
claimed for Lear or Macbeth or Othello. That, perhaps, is the real
mystery that has bewildered Mr. Eliot.
Mr. Eliot will have it, however, that Shakespeare, and not he himself,
is to blame for his bewilderment. He concludes his essay:
We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem
which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an
insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted
to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need
a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know
whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal
experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii, “Apologie de Raimond
Sebond.” We should have, finally, to know something which is by
hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which,
in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to
understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
Would it be possible to write a paragraph in which there was a greater
air of intellectual pursuit and a tinier reality of intellectual
achievement? It would not be easy to say more essentially irrelevant
things on a great subject. Mr. Eliot is like a man dissecting--and
dissecting with desperate earnestness--a corpse that isn’t there.
And his essays in praise have scarcely more of that vitality which is a
prerequisite of good criticism than his essays in blame. He obviously
admires Blake and Ben Jonson, but he leaves them as rigid and as cold
as though he were measuring them for their coffins. The good critic
communicates his delight in genius. His memorable sentences are the
mirrors of memorable works of art. Like the poet, he is something
of a philosopher, but his philosophy is for the most part implicit.
He is a light-bringer by means of quotation and aphorism. He may
destroy, but only in order to let in the light. His business among
authors is as glorious as was the business of Plutarch among men of
action. He may be primarily æsthetic, or primarily biographical, or
primarily expository; but in no kind of criticism can he reach more
than pedantry, unless he himself is a man of imagination, stirred by
the spectacle of the strange and noble passions of the human soul. He
knows that literature is not the game of a coterie, but is a fruit of
the tree of life, hanging from the same boughs as the achievements
of lovers and statesmen and heroes. There is so little truth in Mr.
Eliot’s statement that “a literary critic should have no emotions
except those immediately provoked by a work of art--and these ...
are, when valid, perhaps not to be called emotional at all,” that one
would be bound to tell ten times more truth merely by contradicting
it. The ideal critic would always be able to disentangle relevant from
irrelevant emotions as he studied a work of art; but in practice all
critics, save a few makers of abstract laws, are human, and the rich
personal experience of the critic enters into his work for good as well
as evil.
Mr. Eliot fails as a critic because he brings us neither light nor
delight. But this does not mean that he will always fail. He has some
of the qualities that go to the making of a critic. He has learning,
and he enjoys intellectual exercise. His essay on “Tradition and
the Individual Talent” shows that he is capable of ideas, though he
is not yet capable of expressing them clearly and interestingly.
Besides this, as one reads him, one is conscious of the presence of
a serious talent, as yet largely inarticulate, and wasting itself on
the splitting of hairs and metaphysical word-spinning. His failure at
present is partly a failure of generosity. If a critic is lacking in
generous responsiveness it is in vain for him to write about the poets.
The critic has duties as a destroyer, but chiefly in the same sense as
a gold-washer. His aim is the discovery of gold. Mr. Eliot is less of
a discoverer in this kind than any critic of distinction who is now
writing. Otherwise he could hardly have written the sort of attack
he writes on Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides, in
which he overlooks the one supreme fact that calls for a critic’s
explanation--the fact that Professor Murray alone among English
translators has (whether imperfectly or not) brought Euripides to birth
as an author for the modern world. Let Mr. Eliot for the next ten years
take as his patron saint the woman in the New Testament who found the
piece of silver, instead of Johannes Agricola in joyless meditation. He
will find her not only better company, but a wiser counsellor. He may
even find his sentences infected with her cheerful excitement, for want
of which as yet they can break neither into a phrase nor into a smile.
XIV
MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS’S DISLIKES
Mr. Norman Douglas has, in _Alone_, written a book of hatred
tempered with archæology and laughter. Luckily, there is very little
archæology and enough laughter to make the hatred enjoyable without
being infectious. It is not that Mr. Douglas does not like some of
his fellow-creatures. He likes heretics and jolly beggars. He liked
Ouida. But, if Mr. Douglas likes you, the danger is that he will
throw you at somebody else’s head. That is what he does with Ouida,
whom he glorifies as “the last, almost the last, of lady authors.” He
throws her at the head of the age in general--at “our anæmic and wooly
generation,” at “our actual womanscribes” with “their monkey-tricks and
cleverness,” at “our vegetarian world-reformers who are as incapable
of enthusiasm as they are of contempt, because their blood temperature
is invariably two degrees below normal,” and finally at an American
novelist described as “this feline and gelatinous New Englander.” That
gives a fair enough impression of Mr. Douglas’s attitude to the human
race as seen at close quarters.
He has in a measure justified his attitude by making an amusing book
of it. Mr. Douglas has a well-stored and alert mind, full of by-ways,
that makes for good conversation. As we read him we feel that we are
listening to the racy monologues of a traveller with a special gift for
pouring out the comedy of his discomforts in abusive form. He tells us
how he landed--“with one jump--in Hell,” which is his name for Siena in
winter. “I hate Viareggio at all seasons,” he tells us farther on, and
he describes the inhabitants as “birds of prey: a shallow and rapacious
brood.” At Pisa, when he arrives, “the Arno is the emblem of Despair
... like a torrent of liquid mud--irresolute whether to be earth or
water.” He finds a good landlady at Corsanico, but he immediately
remembers how he had “lived long at the mercy of London landladies and
London charwomen--having suffered the torments of Hell, for more years
than I care to remember, at the hands of those pickpockets and hags
and harpies and drunken sluts” ... “those London sharks and furies.”
At Rome the remembrance of a “sweet old lady friend” sets him thinking
also of her husband, “a worm, a good man in the worst sense of the
word,” “the prince of moralisers, the man who first taught me how
contemptible the human race may become”--“what a face: gorgonising in
its assumption of virtue”--“he ought to have throttled himself at his
mother’s breast.” The absence of mosquitoes and the fewness of the
flies at Rome reminds him again of his sufferings at the hands, so to
speak, of flies in other places. “One of the most cherished projects
of my life,” he declares, “is to assemble, in a kind of anthology, all
the invectives that have been hurled since the beginning of literature
against this loathly dirt-born insect, this living carrion, this blot
on the Creator’s reputation--and thereto add a few of my own.” The
noise of the Roman trams leads him, while lying in bed, to devote the
morning hours to “the malediction of all modern progress, wherein I
include, with firm impartiality, every single advancement in culture
which happens to lie between my present state and that comfortable
cavern in whose shelter I can see myself ensconced as of yore,
peacefully sucking somebody’s marrow, while my women, round the corner,
are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert,” after which he goes
on to denounce the telephone as “that diabolic invention” and the Press
for “cretinising” the public mind. At Olevana, it is the nightingale
that rouses him to imprecations:
One of them elects to warble in deplorably full-throated ease
immediately below my bedroom window. When this particular fowl
sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a veritable explosion:
an ear-rending, nerve-shattering explosion of noise.... It
is that blasted bird clearing its throat for a five-hours’
entertainment.... A brick. Methinks I begin to see daylight....
Mr. Douglas, it is only fair to say, explains that Italian nightingales
do not sing like English nightingales. But I fancy that Mr. Douglas
sat down, when he began these sketches, in the mood for writing comic
scarifications, and neither bird nor man, city nor river, was safe from
his harsh laughter. He hurls a pen where King Saul in similar mood
hurled a spear, and we must concede that he hurls it with force.
Even nightingales, however, do not infuriate him as Victorians and
Puritans do. When he writes angrily about nightingales you feel that
he is only being amusing. When he writes about Victorians, you realise
that he is positively white with anger. “It was not Nero ...” he
cries, “but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons
with the wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for
stealing a spoon.” And again: “What a self-sufficient and inhuman
brood were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare
of duty; a brood that has never been called by its proper name.” Mr.
Douglas, at any rate, has done his best. He even gives us “a nation of
canting shop-keepers,” but becomes more original with “hermaphrodite
middle-classes.” But his real objection is neither to Victorianism
nor to Puritanism; it is to Christianity, as we see when he writes of
self-indulgence:
Self-indulgence, I thought. Heavily fraught is that word; weighted
with meaning. The history of two thousand years of spiritual
dyspepsia lies embedded in its four syllables. Self-indulgence--it
is what the ancients blithely called “indulging one’s genius.”
Self-indulgence! How debased an expression nowadays. What a text
for a sermon on the mishaps of good words and good things. How all
the glad warmth and innocence have faded out of the phrase. What a
change has crept over us.
Mr. Douglas is frankly on the side of the pagans--not the real pagans
who were rather like ordinary Christians, but the modern pagans who
detest Christianity. This paganism is merely egoism in its latest form.
It is anti-human, as when Mr. Douglas exclaims:
Consider well your neighbour, what an imbecile he is.... The sage
will go his way, prepared to find himself growing ever more out of
sympathy with vulgar trends of opinion, for such is the inevitable
development of thoughtful and self-respecting minds.
Such is his creed, and in the result his laughter, though often
amusing, is never happy. There is the laughter of sympathy, which is
Shakespeare’s, and there is the laughter of antipathy, which is Mr.
Douglas’s. That is, perhaps, why his publishers say that his is “a book
for the fastidious in particular.” You could not say of Shakespeare
that he is “for the fastidious in particular.”
We must grant an author his point of view, however, and the fact
remains that, however we may differ from Mr. Douglas’s preaching, we go
on reading him with pleasure, protest and curiosity. He puts his life
into his sentences, and so he stamps with experience even such a piece
of topographical information as:
From here, if you are in the mood, you may descend eastward over
the Italian frontier, crossing the stream which is spanned lower
down by the bridge of St. Louis, and find yourself at Mortola
Superiore (try the wine) and then at Mortola proper (try the wine).
He is nearly always amusing about wine, whether it is good or bad. But
that is only one of his moods. He also talks to you as a naturalist, as
an archæologist, as a biologist, or will begin to make some odd book
that you are never likely to read live for you; he has discovered an
author called Ramage who is perhaps the most real and comical person of
whom he writes. There is a vein of cruelty or of selfishness in some of
the others who follow one another through his pages. The worst of them
is the “phenomenally brutal” sportsman who, along with Mr. Douglas,
gave a dead rat to a sow to eat:
She engulfed the corpse methodically, beginning at the end, working
her way through breast and entrails while her chops dripped with
gore, and ending with the tail, which gave some little trouble
to masticate, on account, of its length and tenuity. Altogether
decidedly good sport....
That is disgusting, but it is interesting. We may say the same of the
sardonic account of the way in which lizards are played with in Italy:
It is not very amusing to be either a snake or a lizard in Italy.
Lizards are caught in nooses and then tied by one leg and made to
run on the remaining three; or secured by a cord round the neck and
swung about in the air--mighty good sport, this; or deprived of
their tails and given to the baby or cat to play with; or dragged
along at the end of a string, like a reluctant pig that is led to
market. There are quite a number of ways of making a lizard feel at
home.
On the whole, one prefers to read Mr. Douglas on the subject of wine,
or on the rarity of the use of red things (wine excepted) in Italy, or
on the little flames that are supposed to be seen at night over the
graves in cemeteries. Mr. Douglas may be gross at times, but he is
never a bore. He gives us a meal of many courses, and allows none of
the courses to last too long. But it would be a more enjoyable meal if
we did not hear in the crabbed laughter of our host the undertones of
despair--the despair that comes of “considering your neighbour, what
an imbecile he is,” and failing to realise that in order to enjoy his
imbecility to the full you must first see him a little lower than the
angels. Cervantes did this. Dickens did it. Mr. Chesterton does it.
That is why they are not “for the fastidious in particular.”
XV
M. ANDRÉ GIDE MAKES A JOKE
Lady Rothermere does not measure her praise of M. Gide, whose
_Prometheus Illbound_ she has translated into English. His is “a mind,”
she declares, “which must be ranked among the greatest of the world’s
literature.” “Must” is a challenging word. Of how many contemporary
writers dare we use it in this sense? Dare we use it of Anatole France,
or Bergson, or Hardy, or Shaw, or d’Annunzio, or Croce? We should be
foolhardy, indeed, much as we rightly admire these authors, to put any
of them just yet into the pantheon that contains the images of Plato
and Shakespeare and Voltaire. Call no man happy till he is dead, says
an old proverb. It would be still wiser to call no man one of the
world’s greatest writers till he has been dead a hundred years. One
cannot, if one is a quite human being, judge one’s contemporaries with
the same impartial scrutiny with which one judges the mighty dead. The
great man gives to his own age much to which posterity is indifferent,
and gives to posterity much to which his own age may even be hostile.
Tennyson served his age as a giant, and he was accepted as a giant by
most of the fine critics of his age, from Edgar Allan Poe downwards.
If an occasional critic such as Edward FitzGerald came to have doubts
about Tennyson, it was because he himself stood monastically aloof
from the age. It is one of the functions of criticism, no doubt, to
separate the temporary from the immortal elements in the work of
contemporary writers. But this is one of the counsels of perfection
in criticism. The thing has never been infallibly done. Sainte-Beuve
was as ridiculous in writing about Balzac as Lamb was about Shelley.
Not that even posterity is capable of pronouncing what we call final
judgments. We have a way of turning to posterity in despair for a
true verdict on authors. Alas! posterity, though it has not the same
reasons for erroneous judgments, is (like ourselves) of a variable and
uncertain mind. Posterity has made strange blunders about Euripides,
about Ronsard, about Donne, about Pope. Good authors constantly have
to be rescued from the neglect of posterity. All we can be sure of
is that an author who appeals to a succession of generations has
given us something of the true gold of literature. Even if each new
generation to some extent re-estimates the world’s classics, it usually
leaves them secure in the position of classics. Or almost secure, for
who knows whether the world will not one day cease to read Lucian or
Virgil, or _The Pilgrim’s Progress_?
As for contemporary literature, how much of it is there that we dare
confidently add to the ranks even of the minor classics? One is sure
of a certain number of lyrics, notably those of Mr. Yeats. But in
prose one has to be more cautious. Prose, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
lamented the other day, has fallen upon styleless days, and without
style it is difficult to live for ever. Plutarch has survived with a
minimum of it, and so has Marcus Aurelius, and so has Balzac. But on
the whole, it must be admitted that most of the great writers, whether
in prose or poetry, wrote well. M. Gide, it must be admitted, writes
admirably, though not wonderfully. Lady Rothermere does not communicate
the delicacies of his style in _Prometheus Illbound_, but one could not
read even this translation without feeling that the author is a man
of skill and wit in words. I doubt, however, whether there is enough
style in it to give it a place on a shelf with the world’s important
books. Lady Rothermere does not assert, indeed, that _Prometheus
Illbound_ is itself a masterpiece. She claims for it only that it is
“the expression of the humorous side” of one of the world’s greatest
minds. The humour, it seems to me, is too elusive to proceed from a
great mind. Great minds, if they are humorous at all, are humorous in
such a way that the ordinary man can see at least a part of the joke.
M. Gide makes jokes for the favoured few. Many a man who is amused by
the jokes of Plato and of Gibbon will be merely bewildered by the jokes
of M. Gide. He enjoys the swift change of episode as Sterne does, but,
whereas Sterne always saves the situation by giving us comic human
beings passing across his haphazard stage, M. Gide does not create
human beings at all. Lady Rothermere admits that “his world is a world
of abstract ideas, under the action of which most of his characters
move as marionettes.” She quotes: “Time and space are the boards which,
with the help of our minds, have been set up by the innumerable truths
of the universe as a stage for their own performances. And there we
play our parts like determined, convinced, devoted, and voluptuous
marionettes.” This dilettante and purely intellectual attitude to life
is, I believe, impossible to a great mind. It is very tedious to hear
sentimental people repeating the platitude that “great thoughts come
from the heart”; but the platitude happens to be true. Shakespeare, it
may be replied, in some of his moods saw the world as a stage and an
“insubstantial pageant.” On the other hand, he never saw men and women
as marionettes. He was always interested in character, and M. Gide is
not. M. Gide is interested in problems. He is interested in ideas.
He is not interested in men and women. He is a philosopher at play.
Even when he introduces a tragic element into his work, as in _Le Roi
Candaule_, we feel that the whole thing is a game, an experiment. A
great deal of modern French literature makes one think of clever men
amusing themselves in a laboratory. The French are Epicureans of ideas.
They test creeds and philosophies and scepticisms with an exquisite
freshness of curiosity. They seek after truth itself as an amusement.
In no other nation can men talk so admirably of the universe while
smoking cigarettes. In England, if a man talks of God, he either lights
a pipe or stops smoking.
In _Prometheus Illbound_ M. Gide has lit a cigarette, a rather
fragrant cigarette, at the sun. There is perhaps something a little
disproportionate in the action, something, too, a little audacious;
but he does it, if the phrase is not too stale, with a fine gesture,
and as he puffs at it, the glow of his cigarette seems to throw a tiny
light on the immense problems of human existence. He is cosmic in his
interests, if Parisian in his manners. He has Zeus and Prometheus and
the eagle among his chief characters. Zeus, like M. Gide himself, is
an experimentalist. He evidently rules the universe for the sensations
with which it provides him. At least, when we find him walking along
the most famous of the Parisian boulevards, he has just made up his
mind to perform a perfectly gratuitous act--an act which not only
will bring no return but will have no motive. In this mood, he drops
a handkerchief in the street, and, when a thin gentleman named Cocles
gives it back to him, he invites him to write the address of anyone he
pleases on an envelope so that he may send a £20 note to him. The thin
gentleman writes the name of Damocles which he has seen by accident,
and Zeus strikes him on the face and disappears. He sends Damocles the
£20 note, however. Damocles becomes worried as to where the anonymous
note has come from and why. His good fortune, instead of satisfying
him, only raises problems in his mind. He does not know to whom he
owes it or what to do with it. The last we see of him, he is babbling
incoherent questions about it on his death-bed.
Some time before this, however, Prometheus has arrived, and dined with
Cocles and Damocles in a Paris restaurant. He finds Cocles discoursing
in perplexity on the meaningless blow he had received from the unknown
stranger, and he himself unwittingly becomes the cause of a second and
still more distressing accident to Cocles. The conversation having
turned on his eagle, Cocles and Damocles express their desire to see
it, and Prometheus calls it from afar, whereupon “bursting through the
window, it put out Cocles’ eye with one stroke with its wing, and then,
chirruping as it did so, tenderly indeed but imperiously, fell with a
swoop upon Prometheus’ right side. And Prometheus forthwith undid his
waistcoat and offered his liver to the bird.” For the moment, however,
we may leave Prometheus. The important event just now is the damage to
Cocles’ eye. Neither the undeserved blow nor the accident to his eye
ultimately causes misery as the undeserved £20 causes Damocles misery.
When he sees Damocles’ misery on his death-bed, Cocles comments: “There
you see the fate of a man who has grown rich by another’s suffering.”
“But is it true that you suffer?” Prometheus asks him. “From my eye
occasionally,” said Cocles, “but from the blow no more; I prefer to
have received it. It does not burn any more; it has revealed to me my
goodness. I am flattered by it; I am pleased about it. I never cease
to think that my pain was useful to my neighbour and that it brought
him £20.” “But the neighbour is dying of it,” said Prometheus.... It
is clear that M. Gide has not taken it as his province to justify the
ways of God to man. I fancy he suspects Zeus of having acted without
a motive on many previous occasions before the strange adventure of
the boulevard. He is also clearly amused by the workings of the human
conscience. If Damocles had not had a conscience, he would not have
died.
Cocles and Damocles, however, are only minor characters in this thin
fantastic story. Prometheus is the real hero, though the accidents do
not happen to him. He has only his eagle and his habit of lecturing
about it. But it is his lectures about his eagle that give the book its
meaning. His eagle is really a figure in an allegory--an allegory on a
new plan. In the old-fashioned allegory one was more conscious of what
the allegorical figures meant, than of the figures themselves. It was
as if the author had tied labels round their necks. M. Gide realizes
that we have got beyond such ancient simplicities. He consequently
gives his figures no labels, but bids us “Guess!” and we go on guessing
till the end of the story. He has constructed a puzzle, and, though we
do not know whether it is worth solving or not, he contrives to make us
immensely curious about it and immensely determined to solve it. Most
people, when they have read his story, will ask, “What does he mean?
What is this eagle of Prometheus?” Why does he first say that everyone
has an eagle and that one must nourish one’s eagle? And why does he in
the end kill his eagle and make a meal of it? And does M. Gide approve
of the last proceeding? I see that the majority of critics identify
the eagle with the human conscience. I think it is more than that. It
is everything that prevents man from resting satisfied with a pagan
philosophy of acceptance before the world’s beauty. It is that fury
in the human breast that makes men desire progress. It is the moral
consciousness of the race that leads men into profound self-denials and
profounder questionings. When Prometheus kills and eats his eagle, he
grows fat and cheerful. Does M. Gide then look back regretfully on the
moral history of mankind? On the contrary. The eagle was found to be
delicious, and at dessert they all drank his health. “‘Has he, then,
been useless?’ asked one. ‘Do not say that, Cocles!--his flesh has
nourished us. When I questioned him he answered nothing; but I eat him
without bearing him a grudge: if he had made me suffer less, he would
have been less fat; less fat he would have been less delectable.’ ‘Of
his past beauty, what is there left?’ ‘I have kept all his feathers.’”
“It is with one of them,” adds M. Gide, “that I write this little
book.” Yes, M. Gide is a moralist, though a gay one, and _Prometheus
Illbound_ is a tract. He, too, desires progress--even if it be progress
somewhere beyond and away from progress. His book is an amusing, though
not a very amusing, parable. It will appeal to those who prefer subtle
little thoughts to vehement great ones.
FINALE
THE CRITIC
People often forget that criticism, like poetry, is of many kinds.
The critics themselves are, perhaps, the worst transgressors in the
matter. They are divided into almost as many sects as the theologians,
and every sect but one regards its own standards as the very rules of
salvation. This would not matter so much if it did not lead to the
excommunication of all the critics who cannot subscribe to the same
creed. There is nothing more absurd in the history of literature than
the severities of the excommunicating sort of critic. A critic has
the right to condemn any work, critical or other, which is bad of its
kind. He has not the right to say that only his own kind of criticism
is good. There are as many ways of writing about books as of writing
about flowers. The poet reveals to us a different flower from the
flower of the botanist. Wordsworth’s “small celandine” is not seen
through the same eyes as the plant of which the botanist tells us: “The
lesser celandine is a species of _Ranunculus_ (_R. Ficarus_), a small
low-growing herb with smooth heart-shaped leaves and bright yellow
flowers about an inch across, borne each on a stout stalk springing
from a leaf-axil.” There is yet another sort of writer on flowers
whose work is a charming compound of poetry, science and any sort of
relevant gossip, whether philological or herbalist--who will inform us,
for instance, that _Ranunculus_ is a diminutive of _rana_, “a frog,”
which has the same damp, marshy haunts as the flower, and that Nicholas
Culpepper held that even to carry the plant about one’s body next the
skin helped to cure piles. These are but three out of scores of ways
of writing about flowers, and it is mere sectarianism to deny the
excellence of any of them.
It is, of course, open to the man of science to declare that Wordsworth
was not a botanist. It is possible, indeed, that Wordsworth did not
know that his “host of golden daffodils” belonged to the natural order
_Amaryllidaceæ_. This, however, would be to quarrel about words.
Wordsworth and the man of science alike give an honest report of the
flowers they have seen, and for my part I find Wordsworth’s report
the more interesting. It is much the same with books as with flowers.
The scientific critic shakes his head over the imaginative treatment
of books. His ideal critic would write about books in the spirit of
a Linnæus rather than of a Wordsworth. This, I think, is to take a
narrow view of criticism. Criticism is an art which has developed in
a score of different directions, and it is best to use the word in a
sense that includes them all. Criticism--good criticism, at least--is
almost any sort of good writing about books by a man or woman of taste.
Criticism, says the dictionary, is the art of judging. As a matter of
fact, criticism is something more than that. The good critic does a
great deal more than deliver judgments on books and authors. He may at
times play the part of the defending counsel rather than that of the
judge. There are occasions on which he makes no attempt to hide the
warmth of his feelings. He cannot announce a masterpiece as though a
summary of pros and cons expressed what it meant to him. That is why I
like to think of a critic as a portrait-painter rather than a judge.
The portrait-painter reveals the character of his subject. He does not
label or analyse it so much as set before us a synthesis of all the
most interesting things he has seen, felt and thought in observing
it. The judgment is always there, but it may be implicit rather than
explicit. The author sits to the critic for his portrait. Even the book
may be said--if we may put a slight constraint on language--to sit to
the critic for its portrait. In criticism the character-sketch of the
book or author is as important as any technical analysis. Criticism
is a magic mirror, in which a work of art is reflected with a new
emphasis and in new relations. The critic must bathe his subject in the
light of his own mind--his taste, his enthusiasm, his moral ideas, his
knowledge. Hence criticism is an extremely personal thing. It relates,
if one may adapt Anatole France’s famous phrase, the adventures of
masterpieces in the soul of the critic, or--to put it a little more
precisely--in the intellectual and imaginative world of the critic.
It is said that, if we adopt this view, we are denying the existence
of any standards in criticism. This is not so. One may believe in the
conscience while admitting that moral standards fluctuate. Similarly,
one may believe in the literary conscience while admitting that
literary standards fluctuate. There is an eternal difference between
good and evil, but what seems good to one generation may seem evil to
another, and it is possible to recognise the goodness of a man, such
as an Old Testament polygamist or a Scottish Sabbatarian, whose moral
standards are in conflict with ours. We can hold to our own moral
standards while realising that they are not the only conceivable moral
standards. There is, no doubt, a perfect moral standard somewhere,
but only a perfect spirit could perceive it. The rest of us can but
do our best, and we cannot even do that. Milton was right when he made
“all-judging Jove” the one supreme critic of literature. Meanwhile, the
standards of sublunar critics are but guesses. The critic who claims
that they are more is simply a dogmatist who climbs into a pulpit when
he should be going on a pilgrimage.
Brunetière accused Anatole France of having no standards, and it is
possible that Anatole France does not subscribe to any Thirty-nine
Articles of criticism. But if to have a conscience is to have
standards, and if taste is conscience in the æsthetic world, who can
deny that Anatole France has very fine literary standards indeed? It
is obvious that he all the time measures an author by the excellence
of all the authors he has loved, just as most of us get our standards
of character from the love and veneration we have felt for good men.
This love of excellence is indisputably the first of all the requisites
of a critic--love of excellence and acquaintance with excellence. The
critic’s first standard is his enthusiasm for the great writers. “By
‘poetry,’ in these pages,” says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in one of his
books of criticism, “I mean what has been written by Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare and some others.” It is an admirable definition. It puts
us in touch with the writer’s standards at once. It suggests, too, the
reflection that all the good critics have been men who agreed in the
main with posterity in regard to literature. They have accepted the
tradition. Even the revolutionary critics, such as Coleridge, have
accepted the tradition for the most part, while advancing on it. It is
scarcely possible for a man so whimsical or irreverent of the tradition
as Samuel Butler to be a good critic. Nor is the man who cannot enter
into the tradition that puts Homer and Dante and Shakespeare among
the greatest of the poets capable of criticising the free verse of
our own day. There is clearly, however, a danger in traditionalism.
To criticise not in the spirit but in the letter of the tradition is
to become a formalist, a pedant, and it is probable that the French
injured their literature in the seventeenth century by their too
literal respect for the Greeks. The critic must have respect for the
life of his own times as well as for the writings of the dead. He
cannot safely yield to the belief that great literature is a temple
that has already been built. If he does not know that creation is still
going on, he is little more than a guide to the ruins of classical
architecture.
The critic must be governed by his sense of life, both in men and in
books. The sense of the past alone is not enough. Even as he reads
Æschylus or Shakespeare, it is his sense of life, not his sense of
the past, that is the more important. Hence the best critics have
been men in whom the sense of life, which is the imaginative artist’s
sense, has been strong. They have been, for the most part, men who have
also attempted with some success other forms of literature--poets,
novelists, essayists, such as Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve, Lamb, Matthew
Arnold and Anatole France. The old sneer that the critics are men who
have failed in literature might almost be reversed, so far as the good
critics are concerned. The good critics are men who have succeeded in
literature.
A good critic tells us as interesting things about his subject as
Gilbert White tells us about a bird. It is essentially the same kind
of illuminated observation that enables Gilbert White to write well
about a blackcap and Anatole France to write well about Pierre Loti.
“With an exquisitely delicate skin,” we are told of Loti, “he feels
nothing deeply. While all the pleasures and sorrows of the world leap
around him like dancing girls before a Rajah, his soul remains empty
and depressed, indolent and unoccupied. Nothing has entered it. This
is an excellent disposition for the writing of pages which perturb
the reader.” To deny the possession of critical standards to a writer
whose work is full of imaginative criticism such as this is to speak
of standards as though they were a sort of plumbline existing entirely
outside the imagination of the critic. It is to fail to see that, as
Anatole France says, “every book has as many different aspects as it
has readers and a poem like a landscape, is transformed in all the eyes
that see it, in all the souls that conceive it.” It is the object of
the critic to enable us to share this magical transformation with him,
not to issue immutable decrees. Anatole France, it may be, exaggerates
the personal element in criticism at the expense of the traditional. He
compares himself to a man who goes about “placing rustic benches in the
sacred woods and near the fountains of the Muses.” “It demands neither
system nor learning,” he declares, “and only requires a pleasant
astonishment before the beauty of things. Let the village dominie, the
land surveyor, measure the road and set up the milestones!” This is
extravagant and fanciful, but it shows us at least the bright side of
the moon of criticism. The other side of the moon is useful, but it is
not the side that gives us light.
THE END
_A Selection from the
Catalogue of_
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
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The
Art of Reading
By
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
_8°_
Editor, novelist, poet, and critic, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is one of
the most versatile as well as distinguished living men of letters. His
are fresh viewpoints, opening up ever new possibilities of appreciation
for the reader at the same time that they educate his judgment.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
On the Art of Writing
By
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
In a fresh and untrammeled manner the author deals with the
craftsmanship as well as the content of letters. The scope of the
volume is indicated by the appended chapter titles: “The Practice of
Writing,” “On the Difference between Verse and Prose,” “Interlude,”
“On Jargon,” “On the Special Difficulty of Prose,” “On the Lineage of
English Literature,” “English Literature in our Universities.”
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
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Studies in Literature
Second Series
By
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A new collection of essays which demonstrates the author’s peculiar
ability to say something original about even the most threadbare
subject. J. C. Squire in The Observer (London) says: “The man is rare
who, with Sir Arthur’s combination of sense and sensibility, learning
and levity, love of the exquisite and sympathy with the normal, can
range over the whole field of ancient and modern literature and
vitalize whatever he touches.” This volume includes essays on Byron,
Shelley, Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and “The Victorian Age.”
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
Books and Folks
By
Edward N. Teall
“Writing after having had unusual experience with books and people, and
in a vein that is as creditable to the books as it must be pleasing to
the people, his treatise is of great value.”
_Evening Post_, July 9, 1921.
“In a time when so many literary counsellors are drawing attention to
the freakish, the rebellious writers, and to the ones who would pioneer
new styles and methods it is refreshing to have at hand a book that
speaks lovingly for the art of letters, the whole art, and for the
individual and unbiased appreciation.
“... The book is a most acceptable library companion. There’s no
pretense and no posing in all of its pages.”--_Oakland Tribune_, July
10, 1921.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York London
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Page 139: “way-born” should be “way-worn”.
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