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diff --git a/13764-0.txt b/13764-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..930b31d --- /dev/null +++ b/13764-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7716 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13764 *** + +THE ART OF LETTERS + +by + +ROBERT LYND + +New York + +1921 + + + + + + + +TO J.C. SQUIRE + +My Dear Jack, + +You were godfather to a good many of the chapters in this book when they +first appeared in the _London Mercury_, the _New Statesman_, and the +_British Review_. Others of the chapters appeared in the _Daily News_, the +_Nation_, the _Athenæum_, the _Observer_, and _Everyman_. Will it +embarrass you if I now present you with the entire brood in the name of a +friendship that has lasted many midnights? + +Yours, + +Robert Lynd. + +Steyning, + +30th August 1920 + + + + +CONTENTS + + I. MR. PEPYS + + II. JOHN BUNYAN + + III. THOMAS CAMPION + + IV. JOHN DONNE + + V. HORACE WALPOLE + + VI. WILLIAM COWPER + + VII. A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS + + VIII. THE OFFICE OF THE POETS + + IX. EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC + + X. GRAY AND COLLINS + + XI. ASPECTS OF SHELLEY + (1) THE CHARACTER HALF-COMIC + (2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST + (3) THE POET OF HOPE + + XII. THE WISDOM OF COLERIDGE + (1) COLERIDGE AS CRITIC + (2) COLERIDGE AS A TALKER + + XIII. TENNYSON: A TEMPORARY CRITICISM + + XIV. THE POLITICS OF SWIFT AND SHAKESPEARE + (1) SWIFT + (2) SHAKESPEARE + + XV. THE PERSONALITY OF MORRIS + + XVI. GEORGE MEREDITH + (1) THE EGOIST + (2) THE OLYMPIAN UNBENDS + (3) THE ANGLO-IRISH ASPECT + + XVII. OSCAR WILDE + +XVIII. TWO ENGLISH CRITICS + (1) MR. SAINTSBURY + (2) MR. GOSSE + + XIX. AN AMERICAN CRITIC: PROFESSOR IRVING BABBIT + + XX. GEORGIANS + (1) MR. DE LA MARE + (2) THE GROUP + (3) THE YOUNG SATIRISTS + + XXI. LABOUR OF AUTHORSHIP + + XXII. THE THEORY OF POETRY + +XXIII. THE CRITIC AS DESTROYER + + XXIV. BOOK REVIEWING + + + + +THE ART OF LETTERS + + + + +I.--MR. PEPYS + + +Mr. Pepys was a Puritan. Froude once painted a portrait of Bunyan as an +old Cavalier. He almost persuaded one that it was true till the later +discovery of Bunyan's name on the muster-roll of one of Cromwell's +regiments showed that he had been a Puritan from the beginning. If one +calls Mr. Pepys a Puritan, however, one does not do so for the love of +paradox or at a guess. He tells us himself that he "was a great Roundhead +when I was a boy," and that, on the day on which King Charles was +beheaded, he said: "Were I to preach on him, my text should be--'the +memory of the wicked shall rot.'" After the Restoration he was uneasy lest +his old schoolfellow, Mr. Christmas, should remember these strong words. +True, when it came to the turn of the Puritans to suffer, he went, with a +fine impartiality, to see General Harrison disembowelled at Charing Cross. +"Thus it was my chance," he comments, "to see the King beheaded at White +Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King +at Charing Cross. From thence to my Lord's, and took Captain Cuttance and +Mr. Shepley to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters." Pepys was +a spectator and a gourmet even more than he was a Puritan. He was a +Puritan, indeed, only north-north-west. Even when at Cambridge he gave +evidence of certain susceptibilities to the sins of the flesh. He was +"admonished" on one occasion for "having been scandalously overserved with +drink ye night before." He even began to write a romance entitled _Love a +Cheate_, which he tore up ten years later, though he "liked it very well." +At the same time his writing never lost the tang of Puritan speech. +"Blessed be God" are the first words of his shocking Diary. When he had to +give up keeping the Diary nine and a half years later, owing to failing +sight, he wound up, after expressing his intention of dictating in the +future a more seemly journal to an amanuensis, with the characteristic +sentences: + + Or, if there be anything, which cannot be much, now my amours to + Deb. are past, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, + to add, here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand. + + And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as + to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts + that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me. + +With these words the great book ends--the diary of one of the godliest and +most lecherous of men. + +In some respects Mr. Pepys reminds one of a type that is now commoner in +Scotland, I fancy, than elsewhere. He himself seems at one time to have +taken the view that he was of Scottish descent. None of the authorities, +however, will admit this, and there is apparently no doubt that he +belonged to an old Cambridgeshire family that had come down in the world, +his father having dwindled into a London tailor. In temperament, however, +he seems to me to have been more Scottish than the very Scottish Boswell. +He led a double life with the same simplicity of heart. He was Scottish in +the way in which he lived with one eye on the "lassies" and the other on +"the meenister." He was notoriously respectable, notoriously hard-working, +a judge of sermons, fond of the bottle, cautious, thrifty. He had all the +virtues of a K.C.B. He was no scapegrace or scallywag such as you might +find nowadays crowing over his sins in Chelsea. He lived, so far as the +world was concerned, in the complete starch of rectitude. He was a pillar +of Society, and whatever age he had been born in, he would have accepted +its orthodoxy. He was as grave a man as Holy Willie. Stevenson has +commented on the gradual decline of his primness in the later years of the +Diary. "His favourite ejaculation, 'Lord!' occurs," he declares, "but once +that I have observed in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least +five times in '63; after which the 'Lords' may be said to pullulate like +herrings, with here and there a solitary 'damned,' as it were a whale +among the shoal." As a matter of fact, Mr. Pepys's use of the expression +"Lord!" has been greatly exaggerated, especially by the parodists. His +primness, if that is the right word, never altogether deserted him. We +discover this even in the story of his relations with women. In 1665, for +instance, he writes with surprised censoriousness of Mrs. Penington: + + There we drank and laughed [he relates], and she willingly suffered + me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there + long. Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as + a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought she + could have suffered it by her former discourse with me; so modest + she seemed and I know not what. + +It is a sad world for idealists. + +Mr. Pepys's Puritanism, however, was something less than Mr. Pepys. It was +but a pair of creaking Sunday boots on the feet of a pagan. Mr. Pepys was +an appreciator of life to a degree that not many Englishmen have been +since Chaucer. He was a walking appetite. And not an entirely ignoble +appetite either. He reminds one in some respects of the poet in Browning's +"How it strikes a Contemporary," save that he had more worldly success. +One fancies him with the same inquisitive ferrule on the end of his stick, +the same "scrutinizing hat," the same eye for the bookstall and "the man +who slices lemon into drink." "If any cursed a woman, he took note." +Browning's poet, however, apparently "took note" on behalf of a higher +power. It is difficult to imagine Mr. Pepys sending his Diary to the +address of the Recording Angel. Rather, the Diary is the soliloquy of an +egoist, disinterested and daring as a bad boy's reverie over the fire. + +Nearly all those who have written about Pepys are perplexed by the +question whether Pepys wrote his Diary with a view to its ultimate +publication. This seems to me to betray some ignorance of the working of +the human mind. + +Those who find one of the world's puzzles in the fact that Mr. Pepys +wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant no +other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains unnecessarily. +Pepys was not the first human being to make his confession in an empty +confessional. Criminals, lovers and other egoists, for lack of a priest, +will make their confessions to a stone wall or a tree. There is no more +mystery in it than in the singing of birds. The motive may be either to +obtain discharge from the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store up +the very echoes and last drops of pleasure. Human beings keep diaries for +as many different reasons as they write lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy, +the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure. +The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the world +made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in the +early days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write in +cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common +prudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret and +solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. He had discovered a +room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see the +respectable man liberated. He no longer needs to be on his official +behaviour, but may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind the +safety of shorthand. And how he takes advantage of his opportunities! He +remains to the end something of a Puritan in his standards and his public +carriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from the sty of +Epicurus, naked and only half-ashamed. He never, it must be admitted, +entirely shakes off his timidity. At a crisis he dare not confess in +English even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad French with a blush. +In some instances the French may be for facetiousness rather than +concealment, as in the reference to the ladies of Rochester Castle in +1665: + + Thence to Rochester, walked to the Crowne, and while dinner was + getting ready, I did then walk to visit the old Castle ruines, + which hath been a noble place, and there going up I did upon the + stairs overtake three pretty mayds or women and took them up with + me, and I did _baiser sur mouches et toucher leur mains_ and necks + to my great pleasure; but lord! to see what a dreadfull thing it is + to look down the precipices, for it did fright me mightily, and + hinder me of much pleasure which I would have made to myself in the + company of these three, if it had not been for that. + +Even here, however, Mr. Pepys's French has a suggestion of evasion. He +always had a faint hope that his conscience would not understand French. + +Some people have written as though Mr. Pepys, in confessing himself in his +Diary, had confessed us all. They profess to see in the Diary simply the +image of Everyman in his bare skin. They think of Pepys as an ordinary man +who wrote an extraordinary book. To me it seems that Pepys's Diary is not +more extraordinary as a book than Pepys himself is as a man. Taken +separately, nine out of ten of his characteristics may seem ordinary +enough--his fears, his greeds, his vices, his utilitarian repentances. +They were compounded in him, however, in such proportion as to produce an +entirely new mixture--a character hardly less original than Dr. Johnson or +Charles Lamb. He had not any great originality of virtue, as these others +had, but he was immensely original in his responsiveness--his capacity for +being interested, tempted and pleased. The voluptuous nature of the man +may be seen in such a passage as that in which, speaking of "the +wind-musique when the angel comes down" in _The Virgin Martyr_, he +declares: + + It ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that + it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love + with my wife. + +Writing of Mrs. Knipp on another occasion, he says: + + She and I singing, and God forgive me! I do still see that my nature + is not to be quite conquered, but will esteem pleasure above all + things, though yet in the middle of it, it has reluctances after my + business, which is neglected by my following my pleasure. However, + musique and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is. + +Within a few weeks of this we find him writing again: + + So abroad to my ruler's of my books, having, God forgive me! a mind + to see Nan there, which I did, and so back again, and then out + again to see Mrs. Bettons, who were looking out of the window as I + came through Fenchurch Streete. So that, indeed, I am not, as I + ought to be, able to command myself in the pleasures of my eye. + +Though page after page of the Diary reveals Mr. Pepys as an extravagant +pleasure-lover, however, he differed from the majority of pleasure-lovers +in literature in not being a man of taste. He had a rolling rather than a +fastidious eye. He kissed promiscuously, and was not aspiring in his +lusts. He once held Lady Castlemaine in his arms, indeed, but it was in a +dream. He reflected, he tells us, + + that since it was a dream, and that I took so much real pleasure in + it, what a happy thing it would be if when we are in our graves (as + Shakespeare resembles it) we could dream, and dream but such dreams + as this, that then we should not need to be so fearful of death, as + we are this plague time. + +He praises this dream at the same time as "the best that ever was dreamt." +Mr. Pepys's idea of Paradise, it would be seen, was that commonly +attributed to the Mohammedans. Meanwhile he did his best to turn London +into an anticipatory harem. We get a pleasant picture of a little +Roundhead Sultan in such a sentence as "At night had Mercer comb my head +and so to supper, sing a psalm and to bed." + + * * * * * + +It may seem unfair to over-emphasize the voluptuary in Mr. Pepys, but it +is Mr. Pepys, the promiscuous amourist; stringing his lute (God forgive +him!) on a Sunday, that is the outstanding figure in the Diary. Mr. Pepys +attracts us, however, in a host of other aspects--Mr. Pepys whose nose his +jealous wife attacked with the red-hot tongs as he lay in bed; Mr. Pepys +who always held an anniversary feast on the date on which he had been cut +for the stone; Mr. Pepys who was not "troubled at it at all" as soon as he +saw that the lady who had spat on him in the theatre was a pretty one; Mr. +Pepys drinking; Mr. Pepys among his dishes; Mr. Pepys among princes; Mr. +Pepys who was "mightily pleased" as he listened to "my aunt Jenny, a poor, +religious, well-meaning good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty"; +Mr. Pepys, as he counts up his blessings in wealth, women, honour and +life, and decides that "all these things are ordered by God Almighty to +make me contented"; Mr. Pepys as, having just refused to see Lady +Pickering, he comments, "But how natural it is for us to slight people out +of power!"; Mr. Pepys who groans as he sees his office clerks sitting in +more expensive seats than himself at the theatre. Mr. Pepys is a man so +many-sided, indeed, that in order to illustrate his character one would +have to quote the greater part of his Diary. He is a mass of contrasts and +contradictions. He lives without sequence except in the business of +getting-on (in which he might well have been taken as a model by Samuel +Smiles). One thinks of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimes +as the most innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal and +snobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and a +grateful heart. He felt that God had created the world for the pleasure of +Samuel Pepys, and had no doubt that it was good. + + + + +II.--JOHN BUNYAN + + +Once, when John Bunyan had been preaching in London, a friend +congratulated him on the excellence of his sermon. "You need not remind me +of that," replied Bunyan. "The Devil told me of it before I was out of the +pulpit." On another occasion, when he was going about in disguise, a +constable who had a warrant for his arrest spoke to him and inquired if he +knew that devil Bunyan. "Know him?" said Bunyan. "You might call him a +devil if you knew him as well as I once did." We have in these anecdotes a +key to the nature of Bunyan's genius. He was a realist, a romanticist, and +a humourist. He was as exact a realist (though in a different way) as Mr. +Pepys, whose contemporary he was. He was a realist both in his +self-knowledge and in his sense of the outer world. He had the acute eye +of the artist which was aware of the stones of the street and the crows in +the ploughed field. As a preacher, he did not guide the thoughts of his +hearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. He recalled them from +orthodox abstractions to the solid earth. "Have you forgot," he asked his +followers, "the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, +where God did visit your souls?" He himself could never be indifferent to +the place or setting of the great tragi-comedy of salvation. When he +relates how he gave up swearing as a result of a reproof from a "loose and +ungodly" woman, he begins the story: "One day, as I was standing at a +neighbour's shop-window, and there cursing and swearing after my wonted +manner, there sat within the woman of the house, who heard me." This +passion for locality was always at his elbow. A few pages further on in +_Grace Abounding_, when he tells us how he abandoned not only swearing but +the deeper-rooted sins of bell-ringing and dancing, and nevertheless +remained self-righteous and "ignorant of Jesus Christ," he introduces the +next episode in the story of his conversion with the sentence: "But upon a +day the good providence of God called me to Bedford to work at my calling, +and in one of the streets of that town I came where there were three or +four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, talking about the things of +God." That seems to me to be one of the most beautiful sentences in +English literature. Its beauty is largely due to the hungry eyes with +which Bunyan looked at the present world during his progress to the next. +If he wrote the greatest allegory in English literature, it is because he +was able to give his narrative the reality of a travel-book instead of the +insubstantial quality of a dream. He leaves the reader with the feeling +that he is moving among real places and real people. As for the people, +Bunyan can give even an abstract virtue--still more, an abstract vice--the +skin and bones of a man. A recent critic has said disparagingly that +Bunyan would have called Hamlet Mr. Facing-both-ways. As a matter of fact, +Bunyan's secret is the direct opposite of this. His great and singular +gift was the power to create an atmosphere in which a character with a +name like Mr. Facing-both-ways is accepted on the same plane of reality as +Hamlet. + +If Bunyan was a realist, however, as regards place and character, his +conception of life was none the less romantic. Life to him was a story of +hairbreadth escapes--of a quest beset with a thousand perils. Not only was +there that great dragon the Devil lying in wait for the traveller, but +there was Doubting Castle to pass, and Giant Despair, and the lions. We +have in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ almost every property of romantic +adventure and terror. We want only a map in order to bring home to us the +fact that it belongs to the same school of fiction as _Treasure Island_. +There may be theological contentions here and there that interrupt the +action of the story as they interrupt the interest of _Grace Abounding_. +But the tedious passages are extraordinarily few, considering that the +author had the passions of a preacher. No doubt the fact that, when he +wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_, he was not definitely thinking of the +edification of his neighbours, goes far towards explaining the absence of +commonplace arguments and exhortations. "I did it mine own self to +gratify," he declared in his rhymed "apology for his book." Later on, in +reply to some brethren of the stricter sort who condemned such dabbling in +fiction, he defended his book as a tract, remarking that, if you want to +catch fish, + + They must be groped for, and be tickled too, + Or they will not be catch't, whate'er you do. + +But in its origin _The Pilgrim's Progress_ was not a tract, but the +inevitable image of the experiences of the writer's soul. And what wild +adventures those were every reader of _Grace Abounding_ knows. There were +terrific contests with the Devil, who could never charm John Bunyan as he +charmed Eve. To Bunyan these contests were not metaphorical battles, but +were as struggles with flesh and blood. "He pulled, and I pulled," he +wrote in one place; "but, God be praised, I overcame him--I got sweetness +from it." And the Devil not only fought him openly, but made more subtle +attempts to entice him to sin. "Sometimes, again, when I have been +preaching, I have been violently assaulted with thoughts of blasphemy, and +strongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth before the +congregation." Bunyan, as he looked back over the long record of his +spiritual torments, thought of it chiefly as a running fight with the +Devil. Outside the covers of the Bible, little existed save temptations +for the soul. No sentence in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is more suggestive +of Bunyan's view of life than that in which the merchandise of Vanity Fair +is described as including "delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, +husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, +silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." It is no wonder +that one to whom so much of the common life of man was simply Devil's +traffic took a tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, and +applied to himself, on account of his love of strong language, Sunday +sports and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strong +if he had committed all the crimes of the latest Bluebeard. He himself, +indeed, seems to have become alarmed when--probably as a result of his own +confessions--it began to be rumoured that he was a man with an unspeakable +past. He now demanded that "any woman in heaven, earth or hell" should be +produced with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage. "My +foes," he declared, "have missed their mark in this shooting at me. I am +not the man. I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all the +fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they +be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would still be alive and +well." Bunyan, one observes, was always as ready to defend as to attack +himself. The verses he prefixed to _The Holy War_ are an indignant reply +to those who accused him of not being the real author of _The Pilgrim's +Progress_. He wound up a fervent defence of his claims to originality by +pointing out the fact that his name, if "anagrammed," made the words: "NU +HONY IN A B." Many worse arguments have been used in the quarrels of +theologians. + +Bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of countenance, +quick of eye, and mild of speech. His mildness of speech, I fancy, must +have been an acquired mildness. He loved swearing as a boy, and, as _The +Pilgrim's Progress_ shows, even in his later life he had not lost the +humour of calling names. No other English author has ever invented a name +of the labelling kind equal to that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman--a character, +by the way, who does not appear in the first edition of _The Pilgrim's +Progress_, but came in later as an afterthought. Congreve's "Tribulation +Spintext" and Dickens's "Lord Frederick Verisopht" are mere mechanical +contrivances compared to this triumph of imagination and phrase. Bunyan's +gift for names was in its kind supreme. His humorous fancy chiefly took +that form. Even atheists can read him with pleasure for the sake of his +names. The modern reader, no doubt, often smiles at these names where +Bunyan did not mean him to smile, as when Mrs. Lightmind says: "I was +yesterday at Madam Wantons, when we were as merry as the maids. For who do +you think should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-flesh, and three or four +more, with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth, and some others?" Bunyan's +fancifulness, however, gives us pleasure quite apart from such quaint +effects as this. How delightful is Mr. By-ends's explanation of the two +points in regard to which he and his family differ in religion from those +of the stricter sort: "First, we never strive against wind and tide. +Secondly, we are always most zealous when Religion goes in his silver +slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, +and the people applaud him." What a fine grotesque, again, Bunyan gives us +in toothless Giant Pope sitting in the mouth of the cave, and, though too +feeble to follow Christian, calling out after him: "You will never mend +till more of you be burnt." We do not read _The Pilgrim's Progress_, +however, as a humorous book. Bunyan's pains mean more to us than the play +of his fancy. His books are not seventeenth-century grotesques, but the +story of his heart. He has written that story twice over--with the gloom +of the realist in _Grace Abounding_, and with the joy of the artist in +_The Pilgrim's Progress_. Even in _Grace Abounding_, however, much as it +is taken up with a tale of almost lunatic terror, the tenderness of +Bunyan's nature breaks out as he tells us how, when he was taken off to +prison, "the parting with my wife and four children hath often been to me +in the place as the pulling the flesh from the bones ... especially my +poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the +thoughts of the hardship I thought my poor blind one might go under would +break my heart to pieces!" At the same time, fear and not love is the +dominating passion in _Grace Abounding_. We are never far from the noise +of Hell in its pages. In _Grace Abounding_ man is a trembling criminal. In +_The Pilgrim's Progress_ he has become, despite his immense capacity for +fear, a hero. The description of the fight with Apollyon is a piece of +heroic literature equal to anything in those romances of adventure that +went to the head of Don Quixote. "But, as God would have it, while +Apollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this +good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and caught +it, saying: 'Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy! when I fall I shall +arise'; and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back, +as one that had received a mortal wound." Heroic literature cannot surpass +this. Its appeal is universal. When one reads it, one ceases to wonder +that there exists even a Catholic version of _The Pilgrim's Progress_, in +which Giant Pope is discreetly omitted, but the heroism of Christian +remains. Bunyan disliked being called by the name of any sect. His +imagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of a +seventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily not a +Baptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to +Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from +sinking into a pulpit generalization. + + + + +III.--THOMAS CAMPION + + +Thomas Campion is among English poets the perfect minstrel. He takes love +as a theme rather than is burned by it. His most charming, if not his most +beautiful poem begins: "Hark, all you ladies." He sings of love-making +rather than of love. His poetry, like Moore's--though it is infinitely +better poetry than Moore's--is the poetry of flirtation. Little is known +about his life, but one may infer from his work that his range of amorous +experience was rather wide than deep. There is no lady "with two pitch +balls stuck in her face for eyes" troubling his pages with a constant +presence. The Mellea and Caspia--the one too easy of capture, the other +too difficult--to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are addressed, are +said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love. But he has buried +most of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead language. His +English poems do not portray him as a man likely to die of love, or even +to forget a meal on account of it. His world is a happy land of song, in +which ladies all golden in the sunlight succeed one another as in a +pageant of beauties. Lesbia, Laura, and Corinna with her lute equally +inhabit it. They are all characters in a masque of love, forms and figures +in a revel. Their maker is an Epicurean and an enemy to "the sager sort": + + My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love, + And, though the sager sort our deeps reprove, + Let us not weigh them. Heav'n's great lamps do dive + Into their west, and straight again revive. + But, soon as once is set our little light, + Then must we sleep our ever-during night. + +Ladies in so bright and insecure a day must not be permitted to "let their +lovers moan." If they do, they will incur the just vengeance of the Fairy +Queen Proserpina, who will send her attendant fairies to pinch their white +hands and pitiless arms. Campion is the Fairy Queen's court poet. He +claims all men--perhaps, one ought rather to say all women--as her +subjects: + + In myrtle arbours on the downs + The Fairy Queen Proserpina, + This night by moonshine leading merry rounds, + Holds a watch with sweet love, + Down the dale, up the hill; + No plaints or groans may move + Their holy vigil. + + All you that will hold watch with love, + The Fairy Queen Proserpina + Will make you fairer than Dione's dove; + Roses red, lilies white + And the clear damask hue, + Shall on your cheeks alight: + Love will adorn you. + + All you that love, or lov'd before, + The Fairy Queen Proserpina + Bids you increase that loving humour more: + They that have not fed + On delight amorous, + She vows that they shall lead + Apes in Avernus. + +It would be folly to call the poem that contains these three verses one of +the great English love-songs. It gets no nearer love than a ballet does. +There are few lyrics of "delight amorous" in English, however, that can +compare with it in exquisite fancy and still more exquisite music. + +Campion, at the same time, if he was the poet of the higher flirtation, +was no mere amorous jester, as Moore was. His affairs of the heart were +also affairs of the imagination. Love may not have transformed the earth +for him, as it did Shakespeare and Donne and Browning, but at least it +transformed his accents. He sang neither the "De Profundis" of love nor +the triumphal ode of love that increases from anniversary to anniversary; +but he knew the flying sun and shadow of romantic love, and staged them in +music of a delicious sadness, of a fantastic and playful gravity. His +poems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little insincere. They are +the compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. He exaggerates the +burden of his sigh, the incurableness of his wounded heart. But beneath +these conventional excesses there is a flow of sincere and beautiful +feeling. He may not have been a worshipper, but his admirations were +golden. In one or two of his poems, such as: + + Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; + Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet, + +admiration treads on the heels of worship. + + All that I sung still to her praise did tend; + Still she was first, still she my song did end-- + +in these lines we find a note of triumphant fidelity rare in Campion's +work. Compared with this, that other song beginning: + + Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow, + Though thou be black as night, + And she made all of light, + Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow-- + +seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines. Others of the songs +hesitate between compliment and the finer ecstasy. The compliment is +certainly of the noblest in the lyric which sets out-- + + When thou must home to shades of underground, + And, there arriv'd, a new admired guest, + The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round, + White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest, + To hear the stories of thy finisht love + From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move; + +but it fades by way of beauty into the triviality of convention in the +second verse: + + Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, + Of masks and revels which sweet youth did make, + Of tourneys and great challenges of knights, + And all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake: + When thou hast told these honours done to thee, + Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murther me. + +There is more of jest than of sorrow in the last line. It is an act of +courtesy. Through all these songs, however, there is a continuous expense +of beauty, of a very fortune of admiration, that entitles Campion to a +place above any of the other contemporaries of Shakespeare as a writer of +songs. His dates (1567-1620) almost coincide with those of Shakespeare. +Living in an age of music, he wrote music that Shakespeare alone could +equal and even Shakespeare could hardly surpass. Campion's words are +themselves airs. They give us at once singer and song and stringed +instrument. + +It is only in music, however, that Campion is in any way comparable to +Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the nonpareil among song-writers, not merely +because of his music, but because of the imaginative riches that he pours +out in his songs. In contrast with his abundance, Campion's fortune seems +lean, like his person. Campion could not see the world for lovely ladies. +Shakespeare in his lightest songs was always aware of the abundant +background of the visible world. Campion seems scarcely to know of the +existence of the world apart from the needs of a masque-writer. Among his +songs there is nothing comparable to "When daisies pied and violets blue," +or "Where the bee sucks," or "You spotted snakes with double tongue," or +"When daffodils begin to peer," or "Full fathom five," or "Fear no more +the heat o' the sun." He had neither Shakespeare's eye nor Shakespeare's +experiencing soul. He puts no girdle round the world in his verse. He +knows but one mood and its sub-moods. Though he can write + + There is a garden in her face, + Where roses and white lilies grow, + +he brings into his songs none of the dye and fragrance of flowers. + +Perhaps it was because he suspected a certain levity and thinness in his +genius that Campion was so contemptuous of his English verse. His songs he +dismissed as "superfluous blossoms of his deeper studies." It is as though +he thought, like Bacon, that anything written for immortality should be +written in Latin. Bacon, it may be remembered, translated his essays into +Latin for fear they might perish in so modern and barbarous a tongue as +English. Campion was equally inclined to despise his own language in +comparison with that of the Greeks and Romans. His main quarrel with it +arose, however, from the obstinacy with which English poets clung to "the +childish titillation of rhyming." "Bring before me now," he wrote, "any +the most self-loved rhymer, and let me see if without blushing he be able +to read his lame, halting rhymes." There are few more startling paradoxes +in literature than that it should have been this hater of rhymes who did +more than any other writer to bring the art of rhyme to perfection in the +English language. The bent of his intellect was classical, as we see in +his astonishing _Observations on the Art of English Poesy_, in which he +sets out to demonstrate "the unaptness of rhyme in poesy." The bent of his +genius, on the other hand, was romantic, as was shown when, desiring to +provide certain airs with words, he turned out--that seems, in the +circumstances, to be the proper word--"after the fashion of the time, +ear-pleasing rhymes without art." His songs can hardly be called +"pot-boilers," but they were equally the children of chance. They were +accidents, not fulfilments of desire. Luckily, Campion, writing them with +music in his head, made his words themselves creatures of music. "In these +English airs," he wrote in one of his prefaces, "I have chiefly aimed to +couple my words and notes lovingly together." It would be impossible to +improve on this as a description of his achievement in rhyme. Only one of +his good poems, "Rosecheek'd Laura," is to be found among those which he +wrote according to his pseudo-classical theory. All the rest are among +those in which he coupled his words and notes lovingly together, not as a +duty, but as a diversion. + +Irish critics have sometimes hoped that certain qualities in Campion's +music might be traced to the fact that his grandfather was "John Campion +of Dublin, Ireland." The art--and in Campion it was art, not +artlessness--with which he made use of such rhymes as "hill" and "vigil," +"sing" and "darling," besides his occasional use of internal rhyme and +assonance (he rhymed "licens'd" and "silence," "strangeness" and +"plainness," for example), has seemed to be more akin to the practices of +Irish than of English poets. No evidence exists, however, as to whether +Campion's grandfather was Irish in anything except his adventures. Of +Campion himself we know that his training was English. He went to +Peterhouse, and, though he left it without taking a degree, he was +apparently regarded as one of the promising figures in the Cambridge of +his day. "I know, Cambridge," apostrophized a writer of the time, +"howsoever now old, thou hast some young. Bid them be chaste, yet suffer +them to be witty. Let them be soundly learned, yet suffer them to be +gentlemanlike qualified"; and the admonitory reference, though he had left +Cambridge some time before, is said to have been to "sweet master +Campion." + +The rest of his career may be summarized in a few sentences. He was +admitted to Gray's Inn, but was never called to the Bar. That he served as +a soldier in France under Essex is inferred by his biographers. He +afterwards practised as a doctor, but whether he studied medicine during +his travels abroad or in England is not known. The most startling fact +recorded of his maturity is that he acted as a go-between in bribing the +Lieutenant of the Tower to resign his post and make way for a more pliable +successor on the eve of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. This he did on +behalf of Sir Thomas Monson, one of whose dependants, as Mr. Percival +Vivian says, "actually carried the poisoned tarts and jellies." Campion +afterwards wrote a masque in celebration of the nuptials of the murderers. +Both Monson and he, however, are universally believed to have been +innocent agents in the crime. Campion boldly dedicated his _Third Book of +Airs_ to Monson after the first shadow of suspicion had passed. + +As a poet, though he was no Puritan, he gives the impression of having +been a man of general virtue. It is not only that he added piety to +amorousness. This might be regarded as flirting with religion. Did not he +himself write, in explaining why he mixed pious and light songs; "He that +in publishing any work hath a desire to content all palates must cater for +them accordingly"? Even if the spiritual depth of his graver songs has +been exaggerated, however, they are clearly the expression of a charming +and tender spirit. + + Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore, + Never tired pilgrim's limbs affected slumber more, + Than my wearied sprite now longs to fly out of my troubled breast. + O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest. + +What has the "sweet master Campion" who wrote these lines to do with +poisoned tarts and jellies? They are not ecstatic enough to have been +written by a murderer. + + + + +IV.--JOHN DONNE + + +Izaak Walton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of almost +seraphic beauty. When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said that +the age had brought forth another Pico della Mirandola. As a young man in +his twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his secret marriage +with his patron's niece--"for love," says Walton, "is a flattering +mischief"--purchased at first only the ruin of his hopes and a term in +prison. Finally, we have the later Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul's +represented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of his own images, as +"always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none; +carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticing +others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives." The picture is +all of noble charm. Walton speaks in one place of "his winning +behaviour--which, when it would entice, had a strange kind of elegant +irresistible art." There are no harsh phrases even in the references to +those irregularities of Donne's youth, by which he had wasted the fortune +of £3,000--equal, I believe, to more than £30,000 of our money--bequeathed +to him by his father, the ironmonger. "Mr. Donne's estate," writes Walton +gently, referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, "was the +greatest part spent in many and chargeable travels, books, and dear-bought +experience." It is true that he quotes Donne's own confession of the +irregularities of his early life. But he counts them of no significance. +He also utters a sober reproof of Donne's secret marriage as "the +remarkable error of his life." But how little he condemned it in his heart +is clear when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne and his wife +"with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their +sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than the +banquets of dull and low-spirited people." It was not for Walton to go in +search of small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the +world--him whose grave, mournful friends "strewed ... with an abundance of +curious and costly flowers," as Alexander the Great strewed the grave of +"the famous Achilles." In that grave there was buried for Walton a whole +age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety and beauty. More than +that, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an inimitable +Christian. He mourns over "that body, which once was a Temple of the Holy +Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust," and, as he +mourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "But I shall see it +reanimated." That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed three hundred +years after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan, +this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his +biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his _Songs and +Sonnets_ and _Elegies_ rather than in his _Divine Poems_. We find, in some +of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with +the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the +temptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but for +experience--experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. He +has left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at one +period of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic, immoderate desire of +human learning and languages." Faust in his cell can hardly have been a +more insatiate student than Donne. "In the most unsettled days of his +youth," Walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond the +hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him +out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study; +though he took great liberty after it." His thoroughness of study may be +judged from the fact that "he left the resultance of 1,400 authors, most +of them abridged and analyzed with his own hand." But we need not go +beyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning that he had made +his own. He was versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. He +subdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. Nine +Muses were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He called +in to their aid Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and the +springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the +library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works +of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom London +may almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime. I do not +think his verse or correspondence contains a single reference to +Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later. +The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded with +interest and even friendship was Ben Jonson. Jonson's Catholicism may have +been a link between them. But, more important than that, Jonson was, like +Donne himself, an inflamed pedant. For each of them learning was the +necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the +classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to +a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was, I think, because +Donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the Renaissance, loving the +proud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, that +he found it easy to abandon the Catholicism of his family for +Protestantism. He undoubtedly became in later life a convinced and +passionate Christian of the Protestant faith, but at the time when he +first changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious +convert. He wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had +liberated from dogma-worship. Nor did he ever lose this rationalist +tolerance. "You know," he once wrote to a friend, "I have never imprisoned +the word religion.... They" (the churches) "are all virtual beams of one +sun." Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such +wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines: + + To adore or scorn an image, or protest, + May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way + To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; + To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill, + Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will + Reach her, about must and about must go; + And what the hill's suddenness resists win so. + +This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a +theologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not from +ardent faith. + +It is all in keeping with one's impression of the young Donne as a man +setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge and +experience. He travels, though he knows not why he travels. He loves, +though he knows not why he loves. He must escape from that "hydroptic, +immoderate" thirst of experience by yielding to it. One fancies that it +was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596 +and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit, for he +himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something to +do with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions of +storm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes: + + Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain, + Or to disuse me from the queasy pain + Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst + Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first. + +In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted most +interest in recent years--the Donne who experienced more variously than +any other poet of his time "the queasy pain of being beloved and loving." +Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing more than in +love. As a youth he leaves the impression of having been an Odysseus of +love, a man of many wiles and many travels. He was a virile neurotic, +comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mind +even more than of the body. His sensibilities were different as well as +less of a piece, but he had something of Baudelaire's taste for hideous +and shocking aspects of lust. One is not surprised to find among his poems +that "heroical epistle of Sappho to Philaenis," in which he makes himself +the casuist of forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, are +for the most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him more +of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his +genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne +and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more +frequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must be +admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. _Go +and Catch a Falling Star_ is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in +disparagement of women. In several of the _Elegies_, however, he throws +away his lute and comes to the satirist's more prosaic business. He writes +frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences: + + Whoever loves, if he do not propose + The right true end of love, he's one that goes + To sea for nothing but to make him sick. + +In _Love Progress_ he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography of a +woman's body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the beautiful +seems almost beastly. In _The Anagram_ and _The Comparison_ he plays the +Yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses in insulting two +of them. In _The Perfume_ he relates the story of an intrigue with a girl +whose father discovered his presence in the house as a result of his using +scent. Donne's jest about it is suggestive of his uncontrollable passion +for ugliness: + + Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought + That his own feet, or breath, that smell had brought. + +It may be contended that in _The Perfume_ he was describing an imaginary +experience, and indeed we have his own words on record: "I did best when I +had least truth for my subjects." But even if we did not accept Mr. +Gosse's common-sense explanation of these words, we should feel that the +details of the story have a vividness that springs straight from reality. +It is difficult to believe that Donne had not actually lived in terror of +the gigantic manservant who was set to spy on the lovers: + + The grim eight-foot-high iron-bound serving-man + That oft names God in oaths, and only then; + He that to bar the first gate doth as wide + As the great Rhodian Colossus stride, + Which, if in hell no other pains there were, + Makes me fear hell, because he must be there. + +But the most interesting of all the sensual intrigues of Donne, from the +point of view of biography, especially since Mr. Gosse gave it such +commanding significance in that _Life of John Donne_ in which he made a +living man out of a mummy, is that of which we have the story in +_Jealousy_ and _His Parting from Her_. It is another story of furtive and +forbidden love. Its theme is an intrigue carried on under a + + Husband's towering eyes, + That flamed with oily sweat of jealousy. + +A characteristic touch of grimness is added to the story by making the +husband a deformed man. Donne, however, merely laughs at his deformity, as +he bids the lady laugh at the jealousy that reduces her to tears: + + O give him many thanks, he is courteous, + That in suspecting kindly warneth us. + We must not, as we used, flout openly, + In scoffing riddles, his deformity; + Nor at his board together being set, + With words nor touch scarce looks adulterate. + +And he proposes that, now that the husband seems to have discovered them, +they shall henceforth carry on their intrigue at some distance from where + + He, swol'n and pampered with great fare, + Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair. + +It is an extraordinary story, if it is true. It throws a scarcely less +extraordinary light on the nature of Donne's mind, if he invented it. At +the same time, I do not think the events it relates played the important +part which Mr. Gosse assigns to them in Donne's spiritual biography. It is +impossible to read Mr. Gosse's two volumes without getting the impression +that "the deplorable but eventful liaison," as he calls it, was the most +fruitful occurrence in Donne's life as a poet. He discovers traces of it +in one great poem after another--even in the _Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's +Day_, which is commonly supposed to relate to the Countess of Bedford, and +in _The Funeral_, the theme of which Professor Grierson takes to be the +mother of George Herbert. I confess that the oftener I read the poetry of +Donne the more firmly I become convinced that, far from being primarily +the poet of desire gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet of +frustrated love. He is often described by the historians of literature as +the poet who finally broke down the tradition of Platonic love. I believe +that, so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of a +Platonic lover among the English poets. He was usually Platonic under +protest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether he finally overcame the +more consistent Platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic of _The +Ecstasy_ we have no means of knowing. If he did, it would be difficult to +resist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue to be his +passionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love was Anne More, +whom he afterwards married. If not, we may look for her where we will, +whether in Magdalen Herbert (already a young widow who had borne ten +children when he first met her) or in the Countess of Bedford or in +another. The name is not important, and one is not concerned to know it, +especially when one remembers Donne's alarming curse on: + + Whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows + Who is my mistress. + +One sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover real people +in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift's Stella and Vanessa, and +his relations to them. It is enough for us to feel, however, that these +poems railing at or glorying in Platonic love are no mere goldsmith's +compliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford. +Miracles of this sort are not wrought save by the heart. We do not find in +them the underground and sardonic element that appears in so much of +Donne's merely amorous work. We no longer picture him as a sort of Vulcan +hammering out the poetry of base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. He +becomes in them a child Apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him. +He makes music of so grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonder +at all the critics who have found fault with his rhythms--from Ben Jonson, +who said that "for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging," down to +Coleridge, who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots," and described +him as "rhyme's sturdy cripple." Coleridge's quatrain on Donne is, without +doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne rode +no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a master, even +if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an encyclopædia +in his saddle-bags. + +Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he also +remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue each +other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two +beautiful poems, _The Relic_ and _The Funeral_, addressed to the lady who +had given him a bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells what will +happen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton discovered with + + A bracelet of bright hair about the bone. + +People will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of lovers + + To make their souls at the last busy day + Meet at the grave and make a little stay. + +Bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics--the relics of a Magdalen +and her lover. He conjectures with a quiet smile: + + All women shall adore us, and some men. + +He warns his worshippers, however, that the facts are far different from +what they imagine, and tells the miracle seekers what in reality were "the +miracles we harmless lovers wrought": + + First we loved well and faithfully, + Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why; + Difference of sex no more we knew + Than our guardian angels do; + Coming and going, we + Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals; + Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals, + Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free: + These miracles we did; but now, alas! + All measure, and all language I should pass, + Should I tell what a miracle she was. + +In _The Funeral_ he returns to the same theme: + + Whoever comes to shroud me do not harm + Nor question much + That subtle wreath of hair that crowns my arm; + The mystery, the sign you must not touch, + For 'tis my outward soul. + +In this poem, however, he finds less consolation than before in the too +miraculous nobleness of their love: + + Whate'er she meant by it, bury it with me, + For since I am + Love's martyr, it might breed idolatry, + If into other hands these relics came; + As 'twas humility + To afford to it all that a soul can do, + So, 'tis some bravery, + That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you. + +In _The Blossom_ he is in a still more earthly mood, and declares that, if +his mistress remains obdurate, he will return to London, where he will +find a mistress: + + As glad to have my body as my mind. + +_The Primrose_ is another appeal for a less intellectual love: + + Should she + Be more than woman, she would get above + All thought of sex, and think to move + My heart to study her, and not to love. + +If we turn back to _The Undertaking_, however, we find Donne boasting once +more of the miraculous purity of a love which it would be useless to +communicate to other men, since, there being no other mistress to love in +the same kind, they "would love but as before." Hence he will keep the +tale a secret: + + If, as I have, you also do, + Virtue attir'd in woman see, + And dare love that, and say so too, + And forget the He and She. + + And if this love, though placed so, + From profane men you hide, + Which will no faith on this bestow, + Or, if they do, deride: + + Then you have done a braver thing + Than all the Worthies did; + And a braver thence will spring, + Which is, to keep that hid. + +It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it is +useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love. His +poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no other +English poet--not even, perhaps, Browning's--does. He was by destiny the +complete experimentalist in love in English literature. He passed through +phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase of the +love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect marriage. In +his youth he was a gay--but was he ever really gay?--free-lover, who sang +jestingly: + + How happy were our sires in ancient time, + Who held plurality of loves no crime! + +But even then he looks forward, not with cynicism, to a time when he + + Shall not so easily be to change dispos'd, + Nor to the arts of several eyes obeying; + But beauty with true worth securely weighing, + Which, being found assembled in some one, + We'll love her ever, and love her alone. + +By the time he writes _The Ecstasy_ the victim of the body has become the +protesting victim of the soul. He cries out against a love that is merely +an ecstatic friendship: + + But O alas, so long, so far, + Our bodies why do we forbear? + +He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not the +enemy but the companion of the soul: + + Soul into the soul may flow + Though it to body first repair. + +The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater +intellectual vehemence: + + So must pure lovers' souls descend + T' affections and to faculties, + Which sense may reach and apprehend, + Else a great Prince in prison lies. + To our bodies turn we then, that so + Weak men on love reveal'd may look; + Love's mysteries in souls do grow + But yet the body is the book. + +I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate +verse--verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne's genius--was a +mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been +pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. His +greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of +the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in the +history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his +meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered +dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been less of a frustrated +lover, less of a martyr, in whom love's + + Art did express + A quintessence even from nothingness, + From dull privations and lean emptiness, + +much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been +written. + +One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne's +genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with some +unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange them +in chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea that has +bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant +_Anniversary_, and but a page or two before the _Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's +Day_. Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to the +Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for the +enrichment of his genius. Such a poem as _The Canonisation_ can be +interpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne More, +who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love. It is, in +either case, written in defence of his love against some who censured him +for it: + + For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love. + +In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot be +measured by the standards of the vulgar: + + We can die by it, if not live by love, + And if unfit for tombs or hearse + Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; + And, if no piece of chronicle we prove, + We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; + As well a well-wrought urn becomes + The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs, + And by these hymns all shall approve + Us canoniz'd by love: + + And thus invoke us: "You whom reverend love + Made one another's hermitage; + You to whom love was peace, that now is rage; + Who did the whole world's soul contract and drove + Into the glasses of your eyes + (So made such mirrors, and such spies, + That they did all to you epitomize), + Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above + A pattern of your love!" + +According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the beautiful +verses beginning: + + Sweetest love, I do not go + For weariness of thee; + +as well as the series of _Valedictions_. Of many of the other love-poems, +however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the occasion. All that +we can say with confidence when we have read them is that, after we have +followed one tributary on another leading down to the ultimate Thames of +his genius, we know that his progress as a lover was a progress from +infidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness to deep and enduring +passion. The image that is finally stamped on his greatest work is not +that of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist of love. It is true that +there is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to have led even Sir Thomas +Browne to think of Donne's verse rather as a confession of his sins than +as a golden book of love. Browne's quaint poem, _To the deceased Author, +before the Promiscuous printing of his Poems, the Looser Sort, with the +Religious_, is so little known that it may be quoted in full as the +expression of one point of view in regard to Donne's work: + + When thy loose raptures, Donne, shall meet with those + That do confine + Tuning unto the duller line, + And sing not but in sanctified prose, + How will they, with sharper eyes, + The foreskin of thy fancy circumcise, + And fear thy wantonness should now begin + Example, that hath ceased to be sin! + And that fear fans their heat; whilst knowing eyes + Will not admire + At this strange fire + That here is mingled with thy sacrifice, + But dare read even thy wanton story + As thy confession, not thy glory; + And will so envy both to future times, + That they would buy thy goodness with thy crimes. + +To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is as much +divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of the religious +ones. Donne's last word as a secular poet may well be regarded as having +been uttered in that great poem in celebration of lasting love, _The +Anniversary_, which closes with so majestic a sweep: + + Here upon earth we are kings, and none but we + Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be. + Who is so safe as we, where none can do + Treason to us, except one of us two? + True and false fears let us refrain; + Let us love nobly, and live, and add again + Years and years unto years, till we attain + To write three-score: this is the second of our reign. + +Donne's conversion as a lover was obviously as complete and revolutionary +as his conversion in religion. + +It is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate religion. +When his marriage with Sir George More's sixteen-year-old daughter brought +him at first only imprisonment and poverty, he summed up the sorrows of +the situation in the famous line--a line which has some additional +interest as suggesting the correct pronunciation of his name: + + John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone. + +His married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries due to +ill-health, debt and thwarted ambition, seems to have been happy beyond +prophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his wife died in childbed, +after having borne him twelve children, a religious crisis resulted that +turned his conventional churchmanship into sanctity. His original change +from Catholicism to Protestantism has been already mentioned. Most of the +authorities are agreed, however, that this was a conversion in a formal +rather than in a spiritual sense. Even when he took Holy Orders in 1615, +at the age of forty-two, he appears to have done so less in answer to any +impulse to a religious life from within than because, with the downfall of +Somerset, all hope of advancement through his legal attainments was +brought to an end. Undoubtedly, as far back as 1612, he had thought of +entering the Church. But we find him at the end of 1613 writing an +epithalamium for the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is a curious +fact that three great poets--Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion--appear, +though innocently enough, in the story of the Countess of Essex's sordid +crime. Donne's temper at the time is still clearly that of a man of the +world. His jest at the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower, +is the jest of an ungenerous worldling. Even after his admission into the +Church he reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess of +Bedford, in trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no more +than £30 to pay his debts. The truth is, to be forty and a failure is an +affliction that might sour even a healthy nature. The effect on a man of +Donne's ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory of +his dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a +long family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous. To +such a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were to +Swift. One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing less +and less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in them some +volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through the bars and +sung above the ground. Donne and Swift were morbid men suffering from +claustrophobia. They were pent and imprisoned spirits, hating the walls +that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush them. In his poems +and letters Donne is haunted especially by three images--the hospital, the +prison, and the grave. Disease, I think, preyed on his mind even more +terrifyingly than warped ambition. "Put all the miseries that man is +subject to together," he exclaims in one of the passages in that luxuriant +anthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has made from the _Sermons_; +"sickness is more than all .... In poverty I lack but other things; in +banishment I lack but other men; but in sickness I lack myself." Walton +declares that it was from consumption that Donne suffered; but he had +probably the seeds of many diseases. In some of his letters he dwells +miserably on the symptoms of his illnesses. At one time, his sickness +"hath so much of a cramp that it wrests the sinews, so much of tetane that +it withdraws and pulls the mouth, and so much of the gout ... that it is +not like to be cured.... I shall," he adds, "be in this world, like a +porter in a great house, but seldomest abroad; I shall have many things to +make me weary, and yet not get leave to be gone." Even after his +conversion he felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details of his +ill-health. Those amazing records which he wrote while lying ill in bed in +October, 1623, give us a realistic study of a sick-bed and its +circumstances, the gloom of which is hardly even lightened by his odd +account of the disappearance of his sense of taste: "My taste is not gone +away, but gone up to sit at David's table; my stomach is not gone, but +gone upwards toward the Supper of the Lamb." "I am mine own ghost," he +cries, "and rather affright my beholders than interest them.... Miserable +and inhuman fortune, when I must practise my lying in the grave by lying +still." + +It does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by wretchedness +and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily corruptions was often +tempted, by "a sickly inclination," to commit suicide, and that he even +wrote, though he did not dare to publish, an apology for suicide on +religious grounds, his famous and little-read _Biathanatos_. The family +crest of the Donnes was a sheaf of snakes, and these symbolize well enough +the brood of temptations that twisted about in this unfortunate +Christian's bosom. Donne, in the days of his salvation, abandoned the +family crest for a new one--Christ crucified on an anchor. But he might +well have left the snakes writhing about the anchor. He remained a tempted +man to the end. One wishes that the _Sermons_ threw more light on his +later personal life than they do. But perhaps that is too much to expect +of sermons. There is no form of literature less personal except a leading +article. The preacher usually regards himself as a mouthpiece rather than +a man giving expression to himself. In the circumstances what surprises us +is that the _Sermons_ reveal, not so little, but so much of Donne. Indeed, +they make us feel far more intimate with Donne than do his private +letters, many of which are little more than exercises in composition. As a +preacher, no less than as a poet, he is inflamed by the creative heat. He +shows the same vehemence of fancy in the presence of the divine and +infernal universe--a vehemence that prevents even his most far-sought +extravagances from disgusting us as do the lukewarm follies of the +Euphuists. Undoubtedly the modern reader smiles when Donne, explaining +that man can be an enemy of God as the mouse can be an enemy to the +elephant, goes on to speak of "God who is not only a multiplied elephant, +millions of elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied world, a +multiplied all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite many times over; +nay (if we may dare to say so) a multiplied God, a God that hath the +millions of the heathens' gods in Himself alone." But at the same time one +finds oneself taking a serious pleasure in the huge sorites of quips and +fancies in which he loves to present the divine argument. Nine out of ten +readers of the _Sermons_, I imagine, will be first attracted to them +through love of the poems. They need not be surprised if they do not +immediately enjoy them. The dust of the pulpit lies on them thickly +enough. As one goes on reading them, however, one becomes suddenly aware +of their florid and exiled beauty. One sees beyond their local theology to +the passion of a great suffering artist. Here are sentences that express +the Paradise, the Purgatory, and the Hell of John Donne's soul. A noble +imagination is at work--a grave-digging imagination, but also an +imagination that is at home among the stars. One can open Mr. Pearsall +Smith's anthology almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passage +which gives us a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror and +hope that was Donne's contribution to the art of prose. Listen to this, +for example, from a sermon preached in St. Paul's in January, 1626: + + Let me wither and wear out mine age in a discomfortable, in an + unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my + bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth with the beggary + of mine age; let me wither in a spittle under sharp, and foul, and + infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth + with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if God withdraw not his + spiritual blessings, his grace, his patience, if I can call my + suffering his doing, my passion his action, all this that is + temporal, is but a caterpillar got into one corner of my garden, + but a mildew fallen upon one acre of my corn: the body of all, the + substance of all is safe, so long as the soul is safe. + +The self-contempt with which his imagination loved to intoxicate itself +finds more lavish expression in a passage in a sermon delivered on Easter +Sunday two years later: + + When I consider what I was in my parents' loins (a substance + unworthy of a word, unworthy of a thought), when I consider what I + am now (a volume of diseases bound up together; a dry cinder, if I + look for natural, for radical moisture; and yet a sponge, a bottle + of overflowing Rheums, if I consider accidental; an aged child, a + grey-headed infant, and but the ghost of mine own youth), when I + consider what I shall be at last, by the hand of death, in my grave + (first, but putrefaction, and, not so much as putrefaction; I shall + not be able to send forth so much as ill air, not any air at all, + but shall be all insipid, tasteless, savourless, dust; for a while, + all worms, and after a while, not so much as worms, sordid, + senseless, nameless dust), when I consider the past, and present, + and future state of this body, in this world, I am able to + conceive, able to express the worst that can befall it in nature, + and the worst that can be inflicted on it by man, or fortune. But + the least degree of glory that God hath prepared for that body in + heaven, I am not able to express, not able to conceive. + +Excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final beauty which +we expect in a work of art; and the reader of Donne's _Sermons_ in their +latest form will be wise if he comes to them expecting to find beauty +piecemeal and tarnished though in profusion. He will be wise, too, not to +expect too many passages of the same intimate kind as that famous +confession in regard to prayer which Mr. Pearsall Smith quotes, and which +no writer on Donne can afford not to quote: + + I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, + and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and + his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, + for the whining of a door. I talk on, in the same posture of + praying; eyes lifted up; knees bowed down; as though I prayed to + God; and, if God, or his Angels should ask me, when I thought last + of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that + I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I + cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of + to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a + light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my + brain troubles me in my prayer. + +If Donne had written much prose in this kind, his _Sermons_ would be as +famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the +Apostles. + +Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose +personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousand +bays and creeks and river-mouths, to the same degree as the personality +that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of John Donne. It is +a mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies only intermittently in +the sun. A fog hangs around its coast, and at the base of its most radiant +mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp. There are +jewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its surface, and by +miners in the dark. It is richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals +and curious ornaments than in flowers. The shepherd on the hillside seldom +tells his tale uninterrupted. Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal +deities that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo +of these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even +as he looks at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. The +chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is, no +doubt, Walton's story of the last days of Donne's life that makes us, as +we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this ghostly +apparition. Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of his death, +dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his head and +feet," and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with so much of +the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face," +while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral monument. He then had +the picture placed at his bedside, to which he summoned his friends and +servants in order to bid them farewell. As he lay awaiting death, he said +characteristically, "I were miserable if I might not die," and then +repeatedly, in a faint voice, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done." At the +very end he lost his speech, and "as his soul ascended and his last breath +departed from him he closed his eyes, and then disposed his hands and body +into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that +came to shroud him." It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral +monument almost uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great +Fire, and no other monument in the cathedral escaped. Among all his +fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last +fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a +fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight +days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently +egoistic amid its worship, as in the verse: + + Whilst my physicians by their love are grown + Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie + Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown + That this is my south-west discovery, + _Per fretum febris_, by these straits to die. + +Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God. +Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, but +none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places, +now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of the +first man in a new found land. + + + + +V.--HORACE WALPOLE[1] + + [1] _Letters of Horace Walpole_; Oxford University Press, 16 vols., + 96s. _Supplementary Letters_, 1919; Oxford University Press, 2 + vols., 17s. + + +Horace Walpole was "a dainty rogue in porcelain" who walked badly. In his +best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he +"tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he wrote when he was +just under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dab-chick's." A lady +has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on +tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his feet were not swollen with +the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on +a silver penny." He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with +his unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not +particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk +stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an +impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a +beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a +china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded +everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not +be helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence +of the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was +more likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an empire. His +most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime +ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George +II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand--You love +laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That +represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh all +the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written a +letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, begging +Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's hand. His attitude +to the Court he described to George Montagu as "mixing extreme politeness +with extreme indifference." His politeness, like his indifference, was but +play at the expense of a solemn world. "I wrote to Lord Bute," he informed +Montagu; "thrust all the _unexpecteds, want of ambition, +disinterestedness, etc._, that I could amass, gilded with as much duty, +affection, zeal, etc., as possible." He frankly professed relief that he +had not after all to go to Court and act out the extravagant compliments +he had written. "Was ever so agreeable a man as King George the Second," +he wrote, "to die the very day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?" +"For my part," he adds later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will always +be a favourite; he tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the +late Prince of Wales's death, and to-day of the King's." It is not that +Walpole was a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toy +republican who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind +their backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of +Beau Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a public +display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatest +private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the great, +as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the thoughts of +the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, Conway, "and even laugh +to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill will on the subjects +I mention." His letters are for the most part those of a good-natured man. + +It is not that he was above the foible--it was barely more than that--of +hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own, but he never +could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His ridicule of the Duke +of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the baiting of a mean and +treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling out," and whose mouth was +"tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity of +the Duke, as when he describes him going to Court on becoming Prime +Minister in 1754: + + On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the + first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the + yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When + the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the + King's feet, sobbed, and cried, "God bless your Majesty! God + preserve your Majesty!" and lay there howling, embracing the King's + knees, with one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was + _luckily_ in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with, + "For God's sake, gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!" + endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made + him roar with pain. + +The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description of +George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is +introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture: + + He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, + and flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him + with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the + better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass + to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping + his eyes with the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; + and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself + weighed down, and turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle + standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble. + +Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his +persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball at +Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful old +creature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and spied" +his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense carried on +in stage whispers. There was never a more loyal son than Horace Walpole. +He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at Sir Robert's tomb. + +At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a +family inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of men and women +outside the circle of his affections. It was his first instinct to +disparage. He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at the +first time of meeting her, as "an old blind débauchée of wit." His +comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a vein +of satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, of +Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he found +"silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts." Boswell's +_Tour of the Hebrides_ was "the story of a mountebank and his zany." +Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing to the criticism +of Gray in the _Lives of the Poets_. He would not even, when Johnson +died, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter asking for a subscription +was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell, and Reynolds. "I would not +deign to write an answer," Walpole told the Miss Berrys, "but sent down +word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief, +that I would not subscribe." Walpole does not appear in this incident the +"sweet-tempered creature" he had earlier claimed to be. His pose is that +of a schoolgirl in a cutting mood. At the same time his judgment of +Johnson has an element of truth in it. "Though he was good-natured at +bottom," he said of him, "he was very ill-natured at top." It has often +been said of Walpole that, in his attitude to contemporary men of genius, +he was influenced mainly by their position in Society--that he regarded an +author who was not a gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author. +This is hardly fair. The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was +Gray, the son of a money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley +Montagu any more than Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it was +more likely to be owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an +aristocratic distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowest +of low life. It was certainly Fielding's Bohemianism that disgusted him. +He relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and found +him "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some +cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth." +Horace Walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an author who did +not know how to sup decently. If he found Boswell's _Johnson_ tedious, it +was no doubt partly due to his inability to reconcile himself to Johnson's +table manners. It can hardly be denied that he was unnaturally sensitive +to surface impressions. He was a great observer of manners, but not a +great portrayer of character. He knew men in their absurd actions rather +than in their motives--even their absurd motives. He never admits us into +the springs of action in his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was too +studied a believer in the puppetry of men and women to make them more than +ridiculous. And unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself +admirably to his love of caricature. His account of the vanity of Gibbon, +whose history he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in +playing with an egoistic author as with a trout: + + You will be diverted to hear that Mr. Gibbon has quarrelled with + me. He lent me his second volume in the middle of November. I + returned it with a most civil panegyric. He came for more incense. + I gave it, but, alas, with too much sincerity! I added, "Mr. + Gibbon, I am sorry _you_ should have pitched on so disgusting a + subject as the Constantinopolitan History. There is so much of the + Arians and Eumonians, and semi-Pelagians; and there is such a + strange contrast between Roman and Gothic manners, and so little + harmony between a Consul Sabinus and a Ricimer, Duke of the palace, + that though you have written the story as well as it could be + written, I fear few will have patience to read it." He coloured; + all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles; he + screwed up his button mouth, and rapping his snuff-box, said, "It + had never been put together before"--_so well_ he meant to add--but + gulped it. He meant _so well_ certainly, for Tillemont, whom he + quotes in every page, has done the very thing. Well, from that hour + to this I have never seen him, though he used to call once or twice + a week; nor has he sent me the third volume, as he promised. I well + knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person, but + thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably. + +"So much," he concludes, "for literature and its fops." The comic spirit +leans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of human nature, +and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only a breach of his +code, but an invitation to his contempt. "You know," he once wrote, "I +shun authors, and would never have been one myself if it obliged me to +keep such bad company. They are always in earnest and think their +profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and reverence learning. I +laugh at all these things, and write only to laugh at them and divert +myself. None of us are authors of any consequence, and it is the most +ridiculous of all vanities to be vain of being _mediocre."_ He followed +the Chinese school of manners and made light of his own writings. "What +have I written," he asks, "that was worth remembering, even by myself?" +"It would be affected," he tells Gray, "to say I am indifferent to fame. I +certainly am not, but I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to +acquire it. The greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they +are, as you say, incorrect when they were commonly written with people in +the room." + +It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole was +merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He had a +sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence of +Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his own +writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the poets. He +felt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was diffident +both for his times and for himself. So difficult do some writers find it +to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him that they ask us to +regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence. They do not +realize that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was an +enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion. His airs and +graces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure in wearing a +mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable, and only withdrew into, the +similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes into his tub, through +philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who are tolerable are those +whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our interest in character is largely +an interest in contradictions of this kind. The beau capable of breaking +into excitement awakens our curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a +humane action, the Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the +pacifist in a rage of violence. The average man, whom one knows +superficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. That +is why we find him dull. The characters who interest us in history and +literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the +formulae we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They give us +pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to me +absurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only real +thing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels among +the Alps with Gray down to his senile letters to Hannah More about the +French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity +of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his +sensations like an æsthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant +at a fire as George Selwyn at an execution." If he cared for the crownings +of kings and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in +the fireworks and illuminations. + +He had the keen spirit of a masquerader. Masquerades, he declared, were +"one of my ancient passions," and we find him as an elderly man dressing +out "a thousand young Conways and Cholmondeleys" for an entertainment of +the kind, and going "with more pleasure to see them pleased than when I +formerly delighted in that diversion myself." He was equally an enthusiast +in his hobbies and his tastes. He rejoiced to get back in May to +Strawberry Hill, "where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in +bloom." He could not have made his collections or built his battlements in +a mood of indifference. In his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself a +Goth-intoxicated man. As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result may have +been a ridiculous mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce +it. Walpole's own description of his house and its surroundings has an +exquisite charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "It is a +little plaything house," he told Conway, "that I got out of Mrs. +Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in +enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges: + + "A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd, + And little finches wave their wings in gold." + +He goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful properties: + + Two delightful roads that you would call dusty supply me continually + with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as barons of the exchequer + move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham-walks bound my prospect; + but, thank God, the Thames is between me and the Duchess of + Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and + Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical + moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's + when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind. + +It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into playing +with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is in this spirit +that he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses and +sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared at +the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom has consisted in forming a +baby-house full of playthings for my second childhood." That explains why +one almost loves the creature. Macaulay has severely censured him for +devoting himself to the collection of knick-knacks, such as King William +III.'s spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend Walpole as a +collector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a +mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself +quite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up +Magna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the warrant for the +execution of King Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who +can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway: +"Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my +new divine closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of +Pembroke and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and +ended: "I never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old ward-robe +there still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and +Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good-night." He +laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends. +"As to snuff-boxes and toothpick cases," he wrote to the Countess of +Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year." +Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded in +the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a +spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself as a +master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and the +goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley fishing +in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin and a +tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese method." This +was in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who "carried a dozen +to town t'other day in a decanter." Walpole is similarly amused by the +spectacle of himself as a planter and gardener. "I have made great +progress," he boasts, "and talk very learnedly with the nursery-men, +except that now and then a lettuce runs to seed, overturns all my botany, +and I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering +shrub. Then the deliberation with which trees grow is extremely +inconvenient to my natural impatience." He goes on enviously to imagine +the discovery by posterity of a means of transplanting oaks of a hundred +and fifty years as easily as tulip-bulbs. This leads him to enlarge upon +the wonders that the Horace Walpole of posterity will be able to possess +when the miraculous discoveries have been made. + + Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds, + tatne tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to + see all that is doing in China, and a thousand other toys, which we + now look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would + laugh in our face for staring at. + +Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself, it is +impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that the wolf +carried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels, or the more +imperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to prevent from +biting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with Madame du Deffand +herself "grows the greater favourite the more people he devours." "T'other +night," writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand afterwards bequeathed +the dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's face, and I thought +would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting her finger. She was +terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand, who has too much parts +not to see everything in its true light, perceiving that she had not +beaten Tonton half enough, immediately told us a story of a lady whose dog +having bitten a piece out of a gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a +great fright, cried out, 'Won't it make him sick?'" In the most attractive +accounts we possess of Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the +breakfast-table, drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient +porcelain of Japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (now +grown almost too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and +afterwards going to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to +the squirrels in the garden. + +Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was an +excitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet or the +prospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de l'Enclos at +Strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of Anne Boleyn, or +Ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes." What is not +generally realized is that he was also a high-strung and eager spectator +of the greater things. I have already spoken of his enthusiasm for wild +nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is true he grew weary of +them. "Such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such uncomely inhabitants." "I +am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if I had eat them," he groaned +in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was at least as genuine as the +fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves only that there were two +Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic enthusiasms was insincere. +He was a devotee of romance, but it was romance under the control of the +comic spirit. He was always amused to have romance brought down to +reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of Scots, he said: "I believe I +have told you that, in a very old trial of her, which I bought for Lord +Oxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Take +sentiments out of their _pantaufles_, and reduce them to the infirmities +of mortality, what a falling off there is!" But see him in the +picture-gallery in his father's old house at Houghton, after an absence of +sixteen years, and the romantic mood is upper-most. "In one respect," he +writes, speaking of the pictures, "I am very young; I cannot satiate +myself with looking," and he adds, "Not a picture here but calls a +history; not one but I remember in Downing Street or Chelsea, where queens +and crowds admired them." And, if he could not "satiate himself with +looking" at the Italian and Flemish masters, he similarly preserved the +heat of youth in his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. "When," he wrote, during +his dispute with Voltaire on the point, "I think over all the great +authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and English (and I know no +other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew." +One is astonished to find that he was contemptuous of Montaigne. "What +signifies what a man thought," he wrote, "who never thought of anything +but himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?" +This sentence might have served as a condemnation of Walpole himself, and +indeed he meant it so. Walpole, however, was an egoist of an opposite kind +to Montaigne. Walpole lived for his eyes, and saw the world as a masque of +bright and amusing creatures. Montaigne studied the map of himself rather +than the map of his neighbours' vanities. Walpole was a social being, and +not finally self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know +himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by +Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. Like +Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his +literary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple as regards +Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the other hand, how +foolish it is to regard him as being critically a fashionable trifler. + +Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything Dionysiac +in his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to say that he was a +man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves. Capricious in +little things, he was faithful in great. His warmth of nature as a son, as +a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in tolerance and liberty, is so +unfailing that it is curious it should ever have been brought in question +by any reader of the letters. His quarrels are negligible when put beside +his ceaseless extravagance of good humour to his friends. His letters +alone were golden gifts, but we also find him offering his fortune to +Conway when the latter was in difficulties. "I have sense enough," he +wrote, "to have real pleasure in denying myself baubles, and in saving a +very good income to make a man happy for whom I have a just esteem and +most sincere friendship." "Blameable in ten thousand other respects," he +wrote to Conway seventeen years later, "may not I almost say I am perfect +with regard to you? Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?" +"I am," he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincere +to friends of above forty years." In his friendships he was more eager to +give than to receive. Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making him +her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit her again. +Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving pleasure and +for his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. The earliest of his +published letters was until recently one written at the age of fourteen. +But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of Walpole letters, +recently published, has been able to print one to Lady Walpole written at +the age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a delightful sort of +child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend, or a pet: + + Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop papa + is wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens like + there pla things vary wall + + and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray + give my Duty to papa. + HORACE WALPOLE. + + and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all + wall. and Mrs. Selwyn has sprand her Fot and givs her Sarves to you + and I dind ther yester Day. + +At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship--the +"Triumvirate," as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and the +"Quadruple Alliance," in which one of his fellows was Gray. The truth is, +Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being loved. "One +loves to find people care for one," he wrote to Conway, "when they can +have no view in it." His friendship in his old age for the Miss +Berrys--his "twin wifes," his "dear Both"--to each of whom he left an +annuity of £4,000, was but a continuation of that kindliness which ran +like a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt) through his +long life. And his kindness was not limited to his friends, but was at the +call of children and, as we have seen, of animals. "You know," he explains +to Conway, apologizing for not being able to visit him on account of the +presence of a "poor little sick girl" at Strawberry Hill, "how courteous a +knight I am to distrest virgins of five years old, and that my castle +gates are always open to them." One does not think of Walpole primarily as +a squire of children, and certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp +with the young, there was little in him of a Dickens character. But he was +what is called "sympathetic." He was sufficient of a man of imagination to +wish to see an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims, +chimney-sweepers." So far from being a heartless person, as he has been at +times portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist. +This was shown in his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a great +terror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all dogs found +in the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of Strafford: + + In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the + Russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the + innocents--one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear, + good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! how can anybody + hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees the English, who desire + no better than to be halloo'd to blood--one day Samuel Byng, the + next Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs! + +As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after writer +that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them mainly for +gossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great fight for good +causes while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he the temper of a +ruler of men. But as a commentator on politics and a spreader of opinion +in private, he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious, +humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events. His detestation of the +arbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion. He detested it +alike in a government and in a mob. He loathed the violence that compassed +the death of Admiral Byng and the violence that made war on America. He +raged against a public world that he believed was going to the devil. "I +am not surprised," he wrote in 1776, "at the idea of the devil being +always at our elbows. They who invented him no doubt could not conceive +how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of +a fiend. Don't you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he +would have been invented on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy has +a poor chance with me," he wrote a little later in regard to America, +"when my warmth is stirred--and yet I know that an angry old man out of +Parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal." +The war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed +over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all but the +unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened into +contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but it is a +pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty +larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his comment +on the Wilkes riots, when he declares: + + I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the + destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that + terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power--which cowards call out for as + protection, and knaves are so ready to grant. + +Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them with an +aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance was that +which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It was of the +mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory: "They were, as +George Montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you might have stroked +them_." When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out in +Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the French with the +hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce the +Bolshevists. He called them "_inferno-human_ beings," "that atrocious and +detestable nation," and declared that "France must be abhorred to latest +posterity." His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may +be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They +are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier +age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in +Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried +angrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics never +got beyond an angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of +him: + + The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my + being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow + of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the + chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat, + and pulling off his hat, said, "Mr. Walpole, what would you please + to have us do next?" It is impossible to describe to you the + confusion into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down into the + box, and have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse. + +There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank down +into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might save +the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and his +friends. + +This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist. He was +a connoisseur of great actions, not a practicer of them. At Strawberry +Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health with the aid of +iced water and by not wearing a hat when out of doors to compose the +greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared in English. Had he +written his letters for money we should have praised him as one of the +busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have thought of blaming him +for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from wine. Possibly he had the +constitution for neither. His genius was a genius, not of Westminster, but +of Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry Hill that one finally prefers to +see him framed, an extraordinarily likeable, charming, and whimsical +figure. He himself has suggested his kingdom entrancingly for us in a +letter describing his return to Strawberry after a visit to Paris in 1769: + + I feel myself here like a swan, that after living six weeks in a + nasty pool upon a common, is got back into its own Thames. I do + nothing but plume and clean myself, and enjoy the verdure and + silent waves. Neatness and greenth are so essential in my opinion + to the country, that in France, where I see nothing but chalk and + dirty peasants, I seem in a terrestrial purgatory that is neither + town or country. The face of England is so beautiful, that I do not + believe Tempe or Arcadia were half so rural; for both lying in hot + climates, must have wanted the turf of our lawns. It is unfortunate + to have so pastoral a taste, when I want a cane more than a crook. + We are absurd creatures; at twenty I loved nothing but London. + +Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among correspondents. +One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men of a deeper and more +imaginative tenderness. But how incomparable he is as an acquaintance! How +exquisite a specimen--hand-painted--for the collector of the choice +creatures of the human race! + + + + +VI.--WILLIAM COWPER + + +Cowper has the charm of littleness. His life and genius were on the +miniature scale, though his tragedy was a burden for Atlas. He left +several pictures of himself in his letters, all of which make one see him +as a veritable Tom Thumb among Christians. He wrote, he tells us, at +Olney, in "a summerhouse not much bigger than a sedan-chair." At an +earlier date, when he was living at Huntingdon, he compared himself to "a +Thames wherry in a world full of tempest and commotion," and congratulated +himself on "the creek I have put into and the snugness it affords me." His +very clothes suggested that he was the inhabitant of a plaything world. +"Green and buff," he declared, "are colours in which I am oftener seen +than in any others, and are become almost as natural to me as a parrot." +"My thoughts," he informed the Rev. John Newton, "are clad in a sober +livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants"; but +his body was dressed in parrot's colours, and his bald head was bagged or +in a white cap. If he requested one of his friends to send him anything +from town, it was usually some little thing, such as a "genteelish +toothpick case," a handsome stock-buckle, a new hat--"not a round slouch, +which I abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair"--or a +cuckoo-clock. He seems to have shared Wordsworth's taste for the last of +these. Are we not told that Wordsworth died as his favourite cuckoo-clock +was striking noon? Cowper may almost be said, so far as his tastes and +travels are concerned, to have lived in a cage. He never ventured outside +England, and even of England he knew only a few of the southern counties. +"I have lived much at Southampton," boasted at the age of sixty, "have +slept and caught a sore throat at Lyndhurst, and have swum in the Bay of +Weymouth." That was his grand tour. He made a journey to Eastham, near +Chichester, about the time of this boast, and confessed that, as he drove +with Mrs. Unwin over the downs by moonlight, "I indeed myself was a little +daunted by the tremendous height of the Sussex hills in comparison of +which all I had seen elsewhere are dwarfs." He went on a visit to some +relations on the coast of Norfolk a few years later, and, writing to Lady +Hesketh, lamented: "I shall never see Weston more. I have been tossed like +a ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me." Who but +the little recluse of a little world could think of Norfolk as a far +country and shake with alarm before the "tremendous height" of the Sussex +downs? + +"We are strange creatures, my little friend," Cowper once wrote to +Christopher Rowley; "everything that we do is in reality important, though +half that we do seems to be push-pin." Here we see one of the main reasons +of Cowper's eternal attractiveness. He played at push-pin during most of +his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom. +He trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad with +thinking about Heaven and Hell. He sought in the infinitesimal a cure for +the disease of brooding on the infinite. His distractions were those not +of too light, but of too grave, a mind. If he picnicked with the ladies, +it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come. He was gay, +but on the edge of the precipice. + +I do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to trifling. +Even in the days when he was studying law in the Temple he dined every +Thursday with six of his old school-fellows at the Nonsense Club. His +essays in Bonnell Thornton and Coleman's paper, _The Connoisseur_, written +some time before he went mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, lead +one to believe that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might have +equalled or surpassed Addison as a master of light prose. He was something +of the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during his first years in a +solicitor's office, as we gather from the letter in which he reminds Lady +Hesketh how he and Thurlow used to pass the time with her and her sister, +Theodora, the object of his fruitless love. "There was I, and the future +Lord Chancellor," he wrote, "constantly employed from morning to night in +giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law." Such was his +life till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two. He +had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as a +schoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at St. +Margaret's rolled towards him and struck him on the leg. Again, in his +chambers in the Middle Temple, he suffered for a time from religious +melancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems of +George Herbert. Even at the age of twenty-three he told Robert Lloyd in a +rhymed epistle that he "addressed the muse," not in order to show his +genius or his wit, + + But to divert a fierce banditti + (Sworn foe to everything that's witty) + That, in a black infernal train, + Make cruel inroads in my brain, + And daily threaten to drive thence + My little garrison of sense. + +It was not till after his release from the St. Alban's madhouse in his +thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures +on the ruins of the old. He now set himself of necessity to the task of +creating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in his +brighter moments, a sort of Epicurean of evangelical piety. He was a +damned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still +deeper in the process. His round of recreation, it must be admitted, was +for the most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seeker +quail worse than any inferno of miseries. Only a nature of peculiar +sweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and hymns +in which Cowper learned to be happy in the Unwins' Huntingdon home. +Breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and nine. Then, "till eleven, we +read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of +those holy mysteries." Church was at eleven. After that he was at +liberty to read, walk, ride, or work in the garden till the three o'clock +dinner. Then to the garden, "where with Mrs. Unwin and her son I have +generally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea-time." After tea +came a four-mile walk, and "at night we read and converse, as before, till +supper, and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon; and +last of all the family are called to prayers." In those days, it may be, +evangelical religion had some of the attractions of a new discovery. +Theories of religion were probably as exciting a theme of discussion in +the age of Wesley as theories of art and literature in the age of cubism +and _vers libre_. One has to remember this in order to be able to realize +that, as Cowper said, "such a life as this is consistent with the utmost +cheerfulness." He unquestionably found it so, and, when the Rev. Morley +Unwin was killed as the result of a fall from his horse, Cowper and Mrs. +Unwin moved to Olney in order to enjoy further evangelical companionship +in the neighbourhood of the Rev. John Newton, the converted slave-trader, +who was curate in that town. At Olney Cowper added at once to his +terrors of Hell and to his amusements. For the terrors, Newton, who seems +to have wielded the Gospel as fiercely as a slaver's whip, was largely +responsible. He had earned a reputation for "preaching people mad," and +Cowper, tortured with shyness, was even subjected to the ordeal of leading +in prayer at gatherings of the faithful. Newton, however, was a man of +tenderness, humour, and literary tastes, as well as of a somewhat savage +piety. He was not only Cowper's tyrant, but Cowper's nurse, and, in +setting Cowper to write the Olney Hymns, he gave a powerful impulse to a +talent hitherto all but hidden. At the same time, when, as a result of the +too merciless flagellation of his parishioners on the occasion of some +Fifth of November revels, Newton was attacked by a mob and driven out of +Olney, Cowper undoubtedly began to breathe more freely. Even under the eye +of Newton, however, Cowper could enjoy his small pleasures, and we have an +attractive picture of him feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons every +morning on the gravel walk in the garden. He shared with Newton his +amusements as well as his miseries. We find him in 1780 writing to the +departed Newton to tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener. +"I draw," he said, "mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and +dab-chicks." He represents himself in this lively letter as a Christian +lover of baubles, rather to the disadvantage of lovers of baubles who are +not Christians: + + I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and + viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth--what + are the planets--what is the sun itself but a bauble? Better for a + man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a + brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be + able to say, "The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!" Their + eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have + been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine + estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian + garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse + upon them with ten times more. I am pleased with a frame of four + lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be + worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute's + gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I + have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it + air, I say to myself: "This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me + for the present; I must leave it soon." + +In this and the following year we find him turning his thoughts more and +more frequently to writing as a means of forgetting himself. "The +necessity of amusement," he wrote to Mrs. Unwin's clergyman son, "makes me +sometimes write verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, a +gardener; and has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with ... +surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance of it +two months ago." His impulse towards writing verses, however, was an +impulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning imagination. "I have +no more right to the name of poet," he once said, "than a maker of +mouse-traps has to that of an engineer.... Such a talent in verse as mine +is like a child's rattle--very entertaining to the trifler that uses it, +and very disagreeable to all beside." "Alas," he wrote in another letter, +"what can I do with my wit? I have not enough to do great things with, and +these little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at the +subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke. I must do with it as I do +with my linnet; I keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and then +set open the door, that he may whisk about the room a little, and then +shut him up again." It may be doubted whether, if subjects had not been +imposed on him from without, he would have written much save in the vein +of "dear Mat Prior's easy jingle" or the Latin trifles of Vincent Bourne, +of whom Cowper said: "He can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so +exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws that one would suppose +him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes." + +Cowper was not to be allowed to write, except occasionally, on magpies and +cats. Mrs. Unwin, who took a serious view of the poet's art, gave him as a +subject _The Progress of Error_, and is thus mainly responsible for the +now little-read volume of moral satires, with which he began his career as +a poet at the age of fifty in 1782. It is not a book that can be read with +unmixed, or even with much, delight. It seldom rises above a good man's +rhetoric. Cowper, instead of writing about himself and his pets, and his +cucumber-frames, wrote of the wicked world from which he had retired, and +the vices of which he could not attack with that particularity that makes +satire interesting. The satires are not exactly dull, but they are lacking +in force, either of wit or of passion. They are hardly more than an +expression of sentiment and opinion. The sentiments are usually sound--for +Cowper was an honest lover of liberty and goodness--but even the cause of +liberty is not likely to gain much from such a couplet as: + + Man made for kings! those optics are but dim + That tell you so--say, rather, they for him. + +Nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of such an +attack on the "pleasant-Sunday-afternoon" kind of pastor as is contained +in the lines: + + If apostolic gravity be free + To play the fool on Sundays, why not we? + If he the tinkling harpsichord regards + As inoffensive, what offence in cards? + +These, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best in the +moral satires; but the latter is worth quoting as evidence of the way in +which Cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a rather narrow creed. +The satires are hardly more than denominational in their interest. They +belong to the religious fashion of their time, and are interesting to us +now only as the old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. The +subject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere almost +always remains evangelical. The Rev. John Newton wrote a preface for the +volume, suggesting this and claiming that the author "aims to communicate +his own perceptions of the truth, beauty and influence of the religion of +the Bible." The publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of the +piety of the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the first +edition. Cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal his +pious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this reason +opened the book, not with _The Progress of Error_, but with the more +attractively-named _Table Talk_. "My sole drift is to be useful," he told +a relation, however. "... My readers will hardly have begun to laugh +before they will be called upon to correct that levity, and peruse me with +a more serious air." He informed Newton at the same time: "Thinking myself +in a measure obliged to tickle, if I meant to please, I therefore affected +a jocularity I did not feel." He also told Newton: "I am merry that I may +decoy people into my company." On the other hand, Cowper did not write +_John Gilpin_ which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a man +using wit as a decoy. He wrote it because it irresistibly demanded to be +written. "I wonder," he once wrote to Newton, "that a sportive thought +should ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that it +should gain admittance. It is as if harlequin should intrude himself into +the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state." Harlequin, +luckily for us, took hold of his pen in _John Gilpin_ and in many of the +letters. In the moral satires, harlequin is dressed in a sober suit and +sent to a theological seminary. One cannot but feel that there is +something incongruous in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had "found +occasion towards the close of my last poem, called _Retirement_, to take +some notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments, and to +direct the means by which they might be made useful as well as agreeable." +This might serve well enough as a theme for a "letter to the editor" of +_The Baptist Eye-opener_. One cannot imagine, however, its causing a +flutter in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses. + +Cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a letter-writer. +The interest of his verse is chiefly historical. He was a poet of the +transition to Wordsworth and the revolutionists, and was a mouthpiece of +his time. But he has left only a tiny quantity of memorable verse. Lamb +has often been quoted in his favour. "I have," he wrote to Coleridge in +1796, "been reading _The Task_ with fresh delight. I am glad you love +Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not +call that man my friend who should be offended with the 'divine chit-chat +of Cowper.'" Lamb, it should be remembered, was a youth of twenty-one when +he wrote this, and Cowper's verse had still the attractions of early +blossoms that herald the coming of spring. There is little in _The Task_ +to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of literary +history. Like the Olney Hymns and the moral satires it was a poem written +to order. Lady Austen, the vivacious widow who had meanwhile joined the +Olney group, was anxious that Cowper should show what he could do in blank +verse. He undertook to humour her if she would give him a subject. "Oh," +she said, "you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any; +write upon this sofa!" Cowper, in his more ambitious verse, seems seldom +to have written under the compulsion of the subject as the great poets do. +Even the noble lines _On the Loss of the Royal George_ were written, as he +confessed, "by desire of Lady Austen, who wanted words to the March in +_Scipio_." For this Lady Austen deserves the world's thanks, as she does +for cheering him up in his low spirits with the story of John Gilpin. He +did not write _John Gilpin_ by request, however. He was so delighted on +hearing the story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and the +next day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad. +"Strange as it may seem," he afterwards said of it, "the most ludicrous +lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that +saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all." "The grinners at +_John Gilpin_," he said in another letter, "little dream what the author +sometimes suffers. How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!" +It was the publication of _The Task_ and _John Gilpin_ that made Cowper +famous. It is not _The Task_ that keeps him famous to-day. There is, it +seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good letters +than there is in the entire six books of _The Task_. One has only to read +the argument at the top of the third book, called _The Garden_, in order +to see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written. Here is the +argument in full: + + Self-recollection and reproof--Address to domestic happiness--Some + account of myself--The vanity of many of the pursuits which are + accounted wise--Justification of my censures--Divine illumination + necessary to the most expert philosopher--The question, what is + truth? answered by other questions--Domestic happiness addressed + again--Few lovers of the country--My tame hare--Occupations of a + retired gentleman in the + garden--Pruning--Framing--Greenhouse--Sowing of flower-seeds--The + country preferable to the town even in the winter--Reasons why it + is deserted at that season--Ruinous effects of gaming and of + expensive improvement--Book concludes with an apostrophe to the + metropolis. + +It is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic happiness and +apostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of room here for Virgilian +verse if Cowper had had the genius for it. Unfortunately, when he writes +about his garden, he too often writes about it as prosaically as a +contributor to a gardening paper. His description of the making of a hot +frame is merely a blank-verse paraphrase of the commonest prose. First, he +tells us: + + The stable yields a stercoraceous heap, + Impregnated with quick fermenting salts, + And potent to resist the freezing blast; + For, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf, + Deciduous, when now November dark + Checks vegetation in the torpid plant, + Expos'd to his cold breath, the task begins. + Warily therefore, and with prudent heed + He seeks a favour'd spot; that where he builds + Th' agglomerated pile his frame may front + The sun's meridian disk, and at the back + Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge + Impervious to the wind. + +Having further prepared the ground: + + Th' uplifted frame, compact at every joint, + And overlaid with clear translucent glass, + He settles next upon the sloping mount, + Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure + From the dash'd pane the deluge as it falls. + +The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper +does not survive the test. Had _The Task_ been written in couplets he +might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it +is, he is merely ponderous--a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy +shell of eloquence. In the fragment called _Yardley Oak_ he undoubtedly +achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not +think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet. +He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write +it. "I reckon it," he wrote in 1781, "among my principal advantages, as a +composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen +years, and but one these thirteen years." So mild was his interest in his +contemporaries that he had never heard Collins's name till he read about +him in Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Though descended from Donne--his +mother was Anne Donne--he was apparently more interested in Churchill and +Beattie than in him. His one great poetical master in English was Milton, +Johnson's disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence. He was +probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education. He +described himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later +years, as "a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of +them are your brother Chester's." The passages I have quoted give, no +doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper's indifference to literature. +His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters. +But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature +as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Though +Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer +into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical +reservations. "I should not have chosen to have been the original author +of such a business," he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth +book of the _Iliad_, "even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow. Time +has wonderful effects. We admire that in an ancient for which we should +send a modern bard to Bedlam." It is hardly to be wondered at that his +translation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of +Vincent Bourne's _Jackdaw_ has. + +Cowper's poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because +it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius. +It brought him one of the best of his correspondents, his cousin, Lady +Hesketh, and it gave various other people a reason for keeping his +letters. Had it not been for his fame as a poet his letters might never +have been published, and we should have missed one of the most exquisite +histories of small beer to be had outside the pages of Jane Austen. As a +letter-writer he does not, I think, stand in the same rank as Horace +Walpole and Charles Lamb. He has less wit and humour, and he mirrors less +of the world. His letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothing +charm. Cowper's occupations amuse one, while his nature delights one. His +letters, like Lamb's, have a soul of goodness--not of mere virtue, but of +goodness--and we know from his biography that in life he endured the +severest test to which a good nature can be subjected. His treatment of +Mrs. Unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its way +as Lamb's treatment of his sister. Mrs. Unwin, who had supported Cowper +through so many dark and suicidal hours, afterwards became palsied and +lost her mental faculties. "Her character," as Sir James Frazer writes in +the introduction to his charming selection from the letters,[2] "underwent +a great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness in +ministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought but for +his welfare, now became querulous and exacting, forgetful of him and +mindful, apparently, only of herself. Unable to move out of her chair +without help, or to walk across the room unless supported by two people, +her speech at times almost unintelligible, she deprived him of all his +wonted exercises, both bodily and mental, as she did not choose that he +should leave her for a moment, or even use a pen or a book, except when he +read to her. To these demands he responded with all the devotion of +gratitude and affection; he was assiduous in his attentions to her, but +the strain told heavily on his strength." To know all this does not modify +our opinion of Cowper's letters, except is so far as it strengthens it. It +helps us, however, to explain to ourselves why we love them. We love them +because, as surely as the writings of Shakespeare and Lamb, they are an +expression of that sort of heroic gentleness which can endure the fires of +the most devastating tragedy. Shakespeare finally revealed the strong +sweetness of his nature in _The Tempest_. Many people are inclined to +over-estimate _The Tempest_ as poetry simply because it gives them so +precious a clue to the character of his genius, and makes clear once more +that the grand source and material of poetry is the infinite tenderness of +the human heart. Cowper's letters are a tiny thing beside Shakespeare's +plays. But the same light falls on them. They have an eighteenth-century +restraint, and freedom from emotionalism and gush. But behind their +chronicle of trifles, their small fancies, their little vanities, one is +aware of an intensely loving and lovable personality. Cowper's poem, _To +Mary_, written to Mrs. Unwin in the days of her feebleness, is, to my +mind, made commonplace by the odious reiteration of "my Mary!" at the end +of every verse. Leave the "my Marys" out, however, and see how beautiful, +as well as moving, a poem it becomes. Cowper was at one time on the point +of marrying Mrs. Unwin, when an attack of madness prevented him. Later on +Lady Austen apparently wished to marry him. He had an extraordinary gift +for commanding the affections of those of both sexes who knew him. His +friendship with the poet Hayley, then a rocket fallen to earth, towards +the close of his life, reveals the lovableness of both men. + + [2] _Letters of William Cowper_. Chosen and edited by J.G. Frazer. + Two vols. Eversley Series. Macmillan. 12s. net. + +If we love Cowper, then, it is not only because of his little world, but +because of his greatness of soul that stands in contrast to it. He is like +one of those tiny pools among the rocks, left behind by the deep waters of +ocean and reflecting the blue height of the sky. His most trivial actions +acquire a pathos from what we know of the _De Profundis_ that is behind +them. When we read of the Olney household--"our snug parlour, one lady +knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted"--we feel +that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance. On +another day, "one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, +with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock." It is a +game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of +belonging to the pious English upper-middle classes. The poet, inclined to +be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is "to walk ten times in a day +from the fireside to his cucumber frame and back again," is busy enough on +a heavenly errand. With his pet hares, his goldfinches, his dog, his +carpentry, his greenhouse--"Is not our greenhouse a cabinet of +perfumes?"--his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not only +constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all the +terrors of Hell. He is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one slough +of despond only to fall waist-deep into another. This strange creature who +passed so much of his time writing such things as _Verses written at Bath +on Finding the Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-glass almost dried +in the Sun, Lines sent with Two Cockscombs to Miss Green_, and _On the +Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch_, stumbled along under a load of +woe and repentance as terrible as any of the sorrows that we read of in +the great tragedies. The last of his original poems, _The Castaway_, is an +image of his utter hopelessness. As he lay dying in 1880 he was asked how +he felt. He replied, "I feel unutterable despair." To face damnation with +the sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare and saintly +accomplishment. It gives him a place in the company of the beloved authors +with men of far greater genius than himself--with Shakespeare and Lamb and +Dickens. + +Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion +that of all the English poets "the one who, but for a stroke of madness, +would have become our English Horace was William Cowper. He had the wit," +he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness." As for the wit, I doubt +it. Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five words +long." Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was +never a master of the Horatian phrase. Such phrases of his--and there are +not many of them--as have passed into the common speech flash neither with +wit nor with wisdom. Take the best-known of them: + + "The cups + That cheer but not inebriate;" + + "God made the country and man made the town;" + + "I am monarch of all I survey;" + + "Regions Cæsar never knew;" and + + "England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!" + +This is lead for gold. Horace, it is true, must be judged as something +more than an inventor of golden tags. But no man can hope to succeed +Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pass +into golden tags. This, I know, is a matter not only of style but of +temper. But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs from +Horace. Horace mixed on easy terms with the world. He enjoyed the same +pleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties. He was a man of the +world above all other poets. Cowper was in comparison a man of the +parlour. His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat, +even if he had been neither mad nor pious. He was the very opposite of a +worldling. He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, "of a very +singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed +with." While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: "If I +was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and God forbid I +should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions with any saint in +Christendom." Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost +certainly have been a Deist. Cowper was very nearly a Methodist. The +difference, indeed, between them is fundamental. Horace was a pig, though +a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon. + +This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a Horace +_manqué_, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as a +letter-writer. It may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroying +his real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew. He +unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose. He +wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the +file on his poems. "To touch and retouch," he once wrote to the Rev. +William Unwin, "is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others +would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good +writing, especially in verse. I am never weary of it myself." Even if we +count him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his +fastidiousness of composition was wasted. He acquired in the workshop of +verse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiar +prose. It is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers of +English will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which he +recounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed +wonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of +his stomach by Lady Hesketh's gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at +the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash Dr. +Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinated +tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as: + + I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical + save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our + birds and fowls please me without one exception. I should not + indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up + in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a + common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer. + +Here he is no missfire rival of Horace or Milton or Prior, or any of the +other poets. Here he has arrived at the perfection for which he was born. +How much better he was fitted to be a letter-writer than a poet may be +seen by anyone who compares his treatment of the same incidents in verse +and in prose. There is, for instance, that charming letter about the +escaped goldfinch, which is not spoiled for us even though we may take +Blake's view of caged birds: + + I have two goldfinches, which in the summer occupy the greenhouse. + A few days since, being employed in cleaning out their cages, I + placed that which I had in hand upon the table, while the other + hung against the wall; the windows and the doors stood wide open. I + went to fill the fountain at the pump, and on my return was not a + little surprised to find a goldfinch sitting on the top of the cage + I had been cleaning, and singing to and kissing the goldfinch + within. I approached him, and he discovered no fear; still + nearer, and he discovered none. I advanced my hand towards him, and + he took no notice of it. I seized him, and supposed I had caught a + new bird, but casting my eye upon the other cage perceived my + mistake. Its inhabitant, during my absence, had contrived to find + an opening, where the wire had been a little bent, and made no + other use of the escape it afforded him, than to salute his friend, + and to converse with him more intimately than he had done before. I + returned him to his proper mansion, but in vain. In less than a + minute he had thrust his little person through the aperture again, + and again perched upon his neighbour's cage, kissing him, as at the + first, and singing, as if transported with the fortunate adventure. + I could not but respect such friendship, as for the sake of its + gratification had twice declined an opportunity to be free, and + consenting to their union, resolved that for the future one cage + should hold them both. I am glad of such incidents; for at a pinch, + and when I need entertainment, the versification of them serves to + divert me.... + +Cowper's "versification" of the incident is vapid compared to this. The +incident of the viper and the kittens again, which he "versified" in _The +Colubriad_, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. His quiet +prose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which +was the deepest need of his nature. He made a full confession of himself +only to his friends. In one of his letters he compares himself, as he +rises in the morning to "an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the +ooze and mud of melancholy." In his most ambitious verse he is a frog +trying to blow himself out into a bull. It is the frog in him, not the +intended bull, that makes friends with us to-day. + + + + +VII.--A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS + + +Voltaire's criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only one +fault. It does not fit Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is the single +dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable. "He was a +savage," said Voltaire, "who had imagination. He has written many happy +lines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada." Had this +been said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning), or +Cyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps there +was something in it. Again, Voltaire's boast that he had been the first to +show the French "some pearls which I had found" in the "enormous dunghill" +of Shakespeare's plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably have +been said by an anthologist who had made selections from Dekker or +Beaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under Elizabeth and James +except William Shakespeare. One reads the average Elizabethan play in the +certainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practically +five acts high. There are, perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from +Shakespeare's that are as great as his third-best work. But there are no +_Hamlets_ or _Lears_ among them. There are no _Midsummer Night's Dreams_. +There is not even a _Winter's Tale_. + +If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans in +general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespeare +his claim would have been just. Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire's +vanity. He did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans as +a patron: he regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated by +the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb probably +looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in this as wide of +the mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise has made famous among +virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have +been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. Everyone goes to the +Elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long +succession of sleeping beauties. The average man retires disappointed from +the quest. He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be +disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man can +read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb's enthusiasm, however, who never +could have read them with his own. + +One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse's books, he took down +Lamb's _Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets_, and, turning to Mr. +Gosse, said, "That book taught me more than any other book in the +world--that and the Bible." Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other +men's enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, the +Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb. He had not, as Lamb +had, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had the Elizabethan love of +phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave. Swinburne +had none of this rich taste in speech. He used words riotously, but he did +not use great words riotously. He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb was +carefully extravagant. He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a +beautiful noise. Nor was this the only point on which he was opposed to +Lamb and the Elizabethans. He differed fundamentally from them in his +attitude to the spectacle of life. His mood was the mood not of a +spectator but of a revivalist. He lectured his generation on the deadly +virtues. He was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than to +entertain the bar-parlour. Lamb himself was little enough of a formal +Puritan. He felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had been +clipped by the descendants of the Puritans. He did not scold, however, but +retired into the spectacle of another century. He wandered among old plays +like an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle. +Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much for +saying things. As a result, a great deal of his verse--and still more of +his prose--has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life. + +His posthumous book on the Elizabethans is liveliest when it is most +argumentative. Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting the +Elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion. His +style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable for +intimate conversation. He writes in superlatives that give one the +impression that he is furious about something or other even when he is +being fairly sensible. His criticism has thus an air of being much more +insane than it is. His estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both far +more moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading. He out-Lambs +Lamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious +excess when he says of Brome: + + Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able competitor in + their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as + Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris. + +Brome, I think, is better than this implies. Swinburne is not going many +miles too far when he calls _The Antipodes_ "one of the most fanciful and +delightful farces in the world." It is a piece of poetic low comedy that +will almost certainly entertain and delight any reader who goes to it +expecting to be bored. + +It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the average +reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointed +in them. He must not expect to find them giants on the Shakespeare scale. +Better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetry +rather than for the genius of separate plays. Of most of them it may be +said that their age is greater than they--that they are glorified by their +period rather than glorify it. They are figures in a golden and teeming +landscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their noble +circumstances. + +They are less great individually than in the mass. If they are giants, few +of them are giants who can stand on their own legs. They prop one another +up. There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that are +individually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by +Wordsworth is. The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious +possession than the plays. The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets +by destiny and dramatists by accident. It is conceivable that the greatest +of them apart from Shakespeare--Marlowe and Jonson and Webster and +Dekker--might have been greater writers if the English theatre had never +existed. Shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as in poetry. +Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. _The Alchemist_ is a brilliant +heavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another of +Jonson's songs. As for Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the +excellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy +which survive in his dialogue, his _Sweet Content_ is worth all the purely +dramatic work he ever wrote. + +One thing that differentiates the other Elizabethan and Jacobean +dramatists from Shakespeare is their comparative indifference to human +nature. There is too much mechanical malice in their tragedies and too +little of the passion that every man recognizes in his own breast. Even so +good a play as _The Duchess of Malfi_ is marred by inadequacy of motive on +the part of the duchess's persecutors. Similarly, in Chapman's _Bussy +d'Ambois_, the villains are simply a dramatist's infernal machines. +Shakespeare's own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy of +motive--the casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and in +part the revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act of _King Lear_ +as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in the +other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. _Othello_ breaks +free from mechanism of Plot in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer of +the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was +Gulliver among the Lilliputians. + +Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan dramatists +again. Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying flat, and it was +natural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately on +pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world. The modern reader, +accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wish +that they were lying flat again. Most of the Elizabethans deserve neither +fate. They should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals, +but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees--resting against the +base of Shakespeare's colossal statue. + +Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of +Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have +added to one's enjoyment of them. His _Chapman_ gives us a portrait of a +character. Several of the chapters in _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_, +however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than +the summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature. Even +Mr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in his _Life of Swinburne_, +described one of the chapters as "unreadable." The book as a whole is not +that. But it unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fog +rather than by the full light of day. + + + + +VIII.--THE OFFICE OF THE POETS + + +There is--at least, there seems to be--more cant talked about poetry just +now than at any previous time. Tartuffe is to-day not a priest but a +poet--or a critic. Or, perhaps, Tartuffe is too lively a prototype for the +curates of poetry who swarm in the world's capitals at the present hour. +There is a tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it on +the world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing. In medicine, +as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into which the members +can retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate. In the same way, the +theologians took possession of the temple of religion and refused +admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. This +largely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority over +other men. Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit--joyless and +domineering. Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is a +denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons. +All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of +the immortal souls against the superior persons. Religion, the reformers +have proclaimed, is the common possession of mankind. Christ came into the +world not to afford a career to theological pedants, but that the mass of +mankind might have life and might have it more abundantly. + +Poetry is in constant danger of suffering the same fate as religion. In +the great ages of poetry, poetry was what is called a popular subject. The +greatest poets, both of Greece and of England, took their genius to that +extremely popular institution, the theatre. They wrote not for pedants or +any exclusive circle, but for mankind. They were, we have reason to +believe, under no illusions as to the imperfections of mankind. But it was +the best audience they could get, and represented more or less the same +kind of world that they found in their own bosoms. It is a difficult thing +to prove that the ordinary man can appreciate poetry, just as it is a +difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man has an immortal soul. But +the great poets, like the great saints, gave him the benefit of the doubt. +If they had not, we should not have had the Greek drama or Shakespeare. + +That they were right seems probable in view of the excellence of the poems +and songs that survive among a peasantry that has not been de-educated in +the schools. If the arts were not a natural inheritance of simple people, +neither the Irish love-songs collected by Dr. Douglas Hyde nor the Irish +music edited by Moore could have survived. I do not mean to suggest that +any art can be kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet, +the singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily alive +without the popular audience. Tolstoy's use of the unspoiled peasant as +the test of art may lead to absurdities, if carried too far. But at least +it is an error in the right direction. It is an affirmation of the fact +that every man is potentially an artist just as Christianity is an +affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially a saint. It is also +an affirmation of the fact that art, like religion, makes its appeal to +feelings which are shared by the mass of men rather than the feelings +which are the exclusive possession of the few. Where Tolstoy made his +chief mistake was in failing to see that the artistic sense, like the +religious sense, is something that, so far from being born perfect, even +in the unspoiled peasant, passes though stage after stage of labour and +experience on the way to perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed: +he is not an artist in the flower. He may pass all his life without ever +coming to flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universal +potentiality of beauty. Tolstoy's most astounding paradox came _to_ +nothing more than this--that art exists, not for the hundreds of people +who are artists in name, but for the millions of people who are artists in +embryo. + +At the same time, there is no use in being too confident that the average +man will ever be a poet, even in the sense of being a reader of poetry. +All that one can ask is that the doors of literature shall be thrown open +to him, as the doors of religion are in spite of the fact that he is not a +perfect saint. The histories of literature and religion, it seems likely, +both go back to a time in which men expressed their most rapturous +emotions in dances. In time the inarticulate shouts of the +dancers--Scottish dancers still utter those shouts, do they not?--gave +place to rhythmic words. It may have been the genius of a single dancer +that first broke into speech, but his genius consisted not so much in his +separateness from the others as in his power to express what all the +others felt. He was the prophet of a rapture that was theirs as much as +his own. + +Men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order to +liberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember things. Poetry +has a double origin in joy and utility. The "Thirty days hath September" +rhyme of the English child suggests the way in which men must have turned +to verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial +wisdom, of legend and narrative. Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from his _New +Study of English Poetry_, would deny the name of poetry to all verse that +is not descended from the choric dance. In my opinion it is better to +recognize the two lines, as of the father and the mother, in the pedigree +of poetry. We find abundant traces of them not only in Hesiod and Virgil, +but in Homer and Chaucer. The utility of form and the joy of form have in +all these poets become inextricably united. The objection to most of the +"free verse" that is being written to-day is that in form it is neither +delightful nor memorable. The truth is, the memorableness of the writings +of a man of genius becomes a part of their delight. If Pope is a +delightful writer it is not merely because he expressed interesting +opinions; it is because he threw most of the energies of his being into +the task of making them memorable and gave them a heightened vitality by +giving them rhymes. His satires and _The Rape of the Lock_ are, no doubt, +better poetry than the _Essay on Man_, because he poured into them a still +more vivid energy. But I doubt if there is any reasonable definition of +poetry which would exclude even Pope the "essayist" from the circle of the +poets. He was a puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they are +to-day, of all shapes and sizes. + +Unfortunately, "poetry," like "religion," is a word that we are almost +bound to use in several senses. Sometimes we speak of "poetry" in +contradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry. +Similarly, "religion" would in one sense include the Abode of Love as +opposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the Abode of +Love as opposed to the religion of St. James. In a common-sense +classification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind of literature +written in verse or in rhythms akin to verse. Sir Thomas Browne may have +been more poetic than Erasmus Darwin, but in his best work he did not +write poetry. Erasmus Darwin may have been more prosaic than Sir Thomas +Browne, but in his most famous work he did not write prose. Sir Henry +Newbolt will not permit a classification of this kind. For him poetry is +an expression of intuitions--an emotional transfiguration of life--while +prose is the expression of a scientific fact or a judgment. I doubt if +this division is defensible. Everything that is literature is, in a sense, +poetry as opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a great +deal of work that is preponderantly the result of observation and +judgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly imaginative. +Poetry is a house of many mansions. It includes fine poetry and foolish +poetry, noble poetry and base poetry. The chief duty of criticism is the +praise--the infectious praise--of the greatest poetry. The critic has the +right to demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a noble +transfiguration of life. Swinburne transfigures life in _Anactoria_ no +less than Shakespeare transfigures it in _King Lear_. But Swinburne's is +an ignoble, Shakespeare's a noble transfiguration. Poetry may be divine or +devilish, just as religion may be. Literary criticism is so timid of being +accused of Puritanism that it is chary of admitting that there may be a +Heaven and a Hell of poetic genius as well as of religious genius. The +moralists go too far on the other side and are tempted to judge literature +by its morality rather than by its genius. It seems more reasonable to +conclude that it is possible to have a poet of genius who is nevertheless +a false poet, just as it is possible to have a prophet of genius who is +nevertheless a false prophet. The lover of literature will be interested +in them all, but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to the +fact that the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well as +aesthetically, great. If Shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of the +Elizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the greatest; +it is also because he had a soul incomparably noble and generous. Sir +Henry Newbolt deals in an interesting way with this ennoblement of life +that is the mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox +code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the +path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate +egotism. + +The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treats +poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must be +able to meet the challenge to its right to exist. The extreme moralist +would deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to make +men more moral. The hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure. The +greatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of the +extreme moralist or of the hedonist. Poetry exists for the purpose of +delivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure. It exists for the +purpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this +scene of wonder, beauty and terror. It is consonant both with the world of +good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and an +enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth and +heaven. Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost always +fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away so +resolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula. +Poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by the +home-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world. But it must always use +the life we live as the material of its joyous vision. It is born of our +double attachment to Earth and to Paradise. There is no formula for +absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it in +the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. It is open to +question whether + + There is a fountain filled with blood + +expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as + + And now my heart with pleasure fills + And dances with the daffodils. + +There are many details on which one would like to join issue with Sir +Henry Newbolt, but his main contentions are so suggestive, his sympathies +so catholic and generous, that it seems hardly worth while arguing with +him about questions of scansion or of the relation of Blake to +contemporary politics, or of the evil of anthologies. His book is the +reply of a capable and honest man of letters to the challenge uttered to +poets by Keats in _The Fall of Hyperion_, where Moneta demands: + + What benfits canst thou, or all thy tribe + To the great world? + +and declares: + + None can usurp this height ... + But those to whom the miseries of the world + Are misery, and will not let them rest. + +Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold that here +Keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. But how noble is +Keats's dissatisfaction with himself! It is such noble dissatisfaction as +this that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs. Poetry and +religion--the impulse is very much the same. The rest is but a +parlour-game. + + + + +IX.--EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC + + +So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost forgotten +how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. It was not merely +that he was popular in England, where his satires, _The Love of Fame, the +Universal Passion_, are said to have made him £3,000. He was also a power +on the Continent. His _Night Thoughts_ was translated not only into all +the major languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. It was +adopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France. Even his +_Conjectures on Original Composition_, written in 1759 in the form of a +letter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that has +lasted till our own day. A new edition of the German translation was +published at Bonn so recently as 1910. In England there is no famous +author more assiduously neglected. Not so much as a line is quoted from +him in _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. I recently turned up a fairly +full anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has +room for Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not been +allowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. I look round my +own shelves, and they tell the same story. Small enough poets stand there +in shivering neglect. Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have all been +thought worth keeping. But not on the coldest, topmost shelf has space +been found for Young. He scarcely survives even in popular quotations. The +copy-books have perpetuated one line: + + Procrastination is the thief of time. + +Apart from that, _Night Thoughts_ have been swallowed up in an eternal +night. + +And certainly a study of the titles of his works will not encourage the +average reader to go to him in search of treasures of the imagination. At +the age of thirty, in 1713, he wrote a _Poem on the Last Day_, which he +dedicated to Queen Anne. In the following year he wrote _The Force of +Religion, or Vanquish'd Love_, a poem about Lady Jane Grey, which he +dedicated to the Countess of Salisbury. And no sooner was Queen Anne dead +than he made haste to salute the rising sun in an epistle _On the Late +Queen's Death and His Majesty's Accession to the Throne_. Passing over a +number of years, we find him, in 1730, publishing a so-called Pindaric +ode, _Imperium Pelagi; a Naval Lyric_, in the preface to which he declares +with characteristic italics: "_Trade_ is a very _noble_ subject in itself; +more _proper_ than any for an Englishman; and particularly _seasonable_ at +this juncture." Add to this that he was the son of a dean, that he married +the daughter of an earl, and that, other means of advancement having +failed, he became a clergyman at the age of between forty and fifty, and +the suggested portrait is that of a prudent hanger-on rather than a fiery +man of genius. His prudence was rewarded with a pension of £200 a year, a +Royal Chaplaincy, and the position (after George III.'s accession) of +Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager. In the opinion of Young +himself, who lived till the age of 82, the reward was inadequate. At the +age of 79, however, he had conquered his disappointment to a sufficient +degree to write a poem on _Resignation_. + +Readers who, after a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined to look +satirically on Young as a time-server, oily with the mediocrity of +self-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read his _Conjectures on +Original Composition_ for the first time. It is a bold and masculine essay +on literary criticism, written in a style of quite brilliant, if +old-fashioned, rhetoric. Mrs. Thrale said of it: "In the _Conjectures upon +Original Composition_ ... we shall perhaps read the wittiest piece of +prose our whole language has to boast; yet from its over-twinkling, it +seems too little gazed at and too little admired perhaps." This is an +exaggerated estimate. Dr. Johnson, who heard Young read the _Conjectures_ +at Richardson's house, said that "he was surprised to find Young receive +as novelties what he thought very common maxims." If one tempers Mrs. +Thrale's enthusiasms and Dr. Johnson's scorn, one will have a fairly just +idea of the quality of Young's book. + +It is simply a shot fired with a good aim in the eternal war between +authority and liberty in literature. This is a controversy for which, were +men wise, there would be no need. We require in literature both the +authority of tradition and the liberty of genius to such new conquests. +Unfortunately, we cannot agree as to the proportions in which each of them +is required. The French exaggerated the importance of tradition, and so +gave us the classical drama of Racine and Corneille. Walt Whitman +exaggerated the importance of liberty, and so gave us _Leaves of Grass_. +In nearly all periods of literary energy, we find writers rushing to one +or other of these extremes. Either they declare that the classics are +perfect and cannot be surpassed but only imitated; or, like the Futurists, +they want to burn the classics and release the spirit of man for new +adventures. It is all a prolonged duel between reaction and revolution, +and the wise man of genius doing his best, like a Liberal, to bring the +two opponents to terms. + +Much of the interest of Young's book is due to the fact that in an age of +reaction he came out on the revolutionary side. There was seldom a time at +which the classics were more slavishly idolized and imitated. Miss Morley +quotes from Pope the saying that "all that is left us is to recommend our +productions by the imitation of the ancients." Young threw all his +eloquence on the opposite side. He uttered the bold paradox: "The less we +copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more." "Become a +noble collateral," he advised, "not a humble descendant from them. Let us +build our compositions in the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients, +but not with their materials. Thus will they resemble the structures of +Pericles at Athens, which Plutarch commends for having had an air of +antiquity as soon as they were built." He refuses to believe that the +moderns are necessarily inferior to the ancients. If they are inferior, it +is because they plagiarize from the ancients instead of emulating them. +"If ancients and moderns," he declares, "were no longer considered as +masters, and pupils, but as hard-matched rivals for renown, then moderns, +by the longevity of their labours, might one day become ancients +themselves." + +He deplores the fact that Pope should have been so content to indenture +his genius to the work of translation and imitation: + + Though we stand much obliged to him for giving us an Homer, yet had + he doubled our obligation by giving us--a Pope. He had a strong + imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had + two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard + the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks before his + decease. + +For ourselves, we hold that Pope showed himself to be as original as needs +be in his epistles to Martha Blount and Dr. Arbuthnot. None the less, the +general philosophy of Young's remarks is sound enough. We should reverence +tradition in literature, but not superstitiously. Too much awe of the old +masters may easily scare a modern into hiding his talent in a napkin. +True, we are not in much danger of servitude to tradition in literature +to-day. We no longer imitate the ancients; we only imitate each other. On +the whole, we wish there was rather more sense of the tradition in +contemporary writing. The danger of arbitrary egoism is quite as great as +the danger of classicism. Luckily, Young, in stating the case against the +classicists, has at the same time stated perfectly the case for +familiarity with the classics. "It is," he declares, "but a sort of noble +contagion, from a general familiarity with their writings, and not by any +particular sordid theft, that we can be the better for those who went +before us," However we may deride a servile classicism, we should always +set out assuming the necessity of the "noble contagion for every man of +letters." + +The truth is, the man of letters must in some way reconcile himself to the +paradox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival of the ancients. +Young is optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to surpass them. +In the mechanic arts, he complains, men are always attempting to go beyond +their predecessors; in the liberal arts, they merely try to follow them. +The analogy between the continuous advance of science and a possible +continuous advance in literature is perhaps, a misleading one. Professor +Gilbert Murray, in _Religio Grammatici_, bases much of his argument on a +denial that such an analogy should be drawn. Literary genius cannot be +bequeathed and added to as a scientific discovery can. The modern poet +does not stand on Shakespeare's shoulders as the modern astronomer stands +on Galileo's shoulders. Scientific discovery is progressive. Literary +genius, like religious genius, is a miracle less dependent on time. None +the less, we may reasonably believe that literature, like science, has +ever new worlds to conquer--that, even if Æschylus and Shakespeare cannot +be surpassed, names as great as theirs may one day be added to the roll of +literary fame. And this will be possible only if men in each generation +are determined, in the words of Goldsmith, "bravely to shake off +admiration, and, undazzled by the splendour of another's reputation, to +chalk out a path to fame for themselves, and boldly cultivate untried +experiment." Goldsmith wrote these words in _The Bee_ in the same year in +which Young's _Conjectures_ was published. I feel tolerably certain that +he wrote them as a result of reading Young's work. The reaction against +traditionalism, however, was gathering general force by this time, and the +desire to be original was beginning to oust the desire to copy. Both +Young's and Goldsmith's essays are exceedingly interesting as +anticipations of the romantic movement. Young was a true romantic when he +wrote that Nature "brings us into the world all Originals--no two faces, +no two minds, are just alike; but all bear evident marks of separation on +them. Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we are Copies?" Genius, he +thinks, is commoner than is sometimes supposed, if we would make use of +it. His book is a plea for giving genius its head. He wants to see the +modern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil, staking out a claim +in the perfectly virgin field of his own experience. He cannot teach you +to be a man of genius; he could not even teach himself to be one. But at +least he lays down many of the right rules for the use of genius. His book +marks a most interesting stage in the development of English literary +criticism. + + + + +X.--GRAY AND COLLINS + + +There seems to be a definite connection between good writing and +indolence. The men whom we call stylists have, most of them, been idlers. +From Horace to Robert Louis Stevenson, nearly all have been pigs from the +sty of Epicurus. They have not, to use an excellent Anglo-Irish word, +"industered" like insects or millionaires. The greatest men, one must +admit, have mostly been as punctual at their labours as the sun--as fiery +and inexhaustible. But, then, one does not think of the greatest writers +as stylists. They are so much more than that. The style of Shakespeare is +infinitely more marvellous than the style of Gray. But one hardly thinks +of style in presence of the sea or a range of mountains or in reading +Shakespeare. His munificent and gorgeous genius was as far above style as +the statesmanship of Pericles or the sanctity of Joan of Arc was above +good manners. The world has not endorsed Ben Jonson's retort to those who +commended Shakespeare for never having "blotted out" a line: "Would he had +blotted out a thousand!" We feel that so vast a genius is beyond the +perfection of control we look for in a stylist. There may be badly-written +scenes in Shakespeare, and pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but with +all this there are enchanted continents left in him which we may continue +to explore though we live to be a hundred. + +The fact that the noble impatience of a Shakespeare is above our +fault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy patience of +good writing. An Æschylus or a Shakespeare, a Browning or a Dickens, +conquers us with an abundance like nature's. He feeds us out of a horn, of +plenty. This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first +order. The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than +abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. Who does not +agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been a +better poet if he had learned: + + The last and greatest art--the art to blot? + +Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of Gray's than +all the poetical works of Southey? If voluminousness alone made a man a +great writer, we should have to canonize Lord Lytton. The truth is, +literary genius has no rule either of voluminousness or of the opposite. +The genius of one writer is a world ever moving. The genius of another is +a garden often still. The greatest genius is undoubtedly of the former +kind. But as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall, +much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to cultivate +their gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult of creation, to +delight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and quiet thought. + +Gray and Collins were both writers who labored in little gardens. Collins, +indeed, had a small flower-bed--perhaps only a pot, indeed--rather than a +garden. He produced in it one perfect bloom--the _Ode to Evening_. The +rest of his work is carefully written, inoffensive, historically +interesting. But his continual personification of abstract ideas makes the +greater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in a +graveyard. He was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his own day. He +seems academic to ours. His work is that of a man striking an attitude +rather than of one expressing the deeps of a passionate nature. He is +always careful not to confess. His _Ode to Fear_ does not admit us to any +of the secrets of his maniacal and melancholy breast. It is an +anticipation of the factitious gloom of Byron, not of the nerve-shattered +gloom of Dostoevsky. Collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what he +does not really think. He glorifies fear as though it were the better part +of imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the lines: + + O thou whose spirit most possessed, + The sacred seat of Shakespeare's breast! + By all that from thy prophet broke + In thy divine emotions spoke: + Hither again thy fury deal, + Teach me but once, like him, to feel; + His cypress wreath my meed decree, + And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee! + +We have only to compare these lines with Claudio's terrible speech about +death in _Measure for Measure_ to see the difference between pretence and +passion in literature. Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew +about fear. Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob +off a disease on us as an accomplishment. What perpetually delights us in +the _Ode to Evening_ is that here at least Collins can tell the truth +without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the +world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of +personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into +imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up +his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon +expressing any other man's experiences but his own when he described how +the + + Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, + With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, + Or where the beetle winds + His small but sullen horn. + +He speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the liberty of a +new mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed before. As far as all +the rest of his work is concerned, his passion for style is more or less +wasted. But the _Ode to Evening_ justifies both his pains and his +indolence. As for the pains he took with his work, we have it on the +authority of Thomas Warton that "all his odes ... had the marks of +repeated correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets." As for his +indolence, his uncle, Colonel Martin, thought him "too indolent even for +the Army," and advised him to enter the Church--a step from which he was +dissuaded, we are told, by "a tobacconist in Fleet Street." For the rest, +he was the son of a hatter, and went mad. He is said to have haunted the +cloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and to +have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls during the +playing of the organ. The Castle of Indolence was for Collins no keep of +the pleasures. One may doubt if it is ever this for any artist. Did not +even Horace attempt to escape into Stoicism? Did not Stevenson write +_Pulvis et Umbra_? + +Assuredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as Collins +was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the Castle of +Indolence a happy place. "Low spirits," he wrote, when he was still an +undergraduate, "are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, +go to bed with me, make journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits, +and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me." The +end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses on +the drowning of Horace Walpole's cat) that his indolent melancholy was not +without its compensations. He was a wit, an observer of himself and the +world about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of the +essay. Further, he was Horace Walpole's friend, and (while his father had +a devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness +into which he could always retire. "I do not remember," Mr. Gosse has said +of Gray, "that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of +any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed." +This delicious sentence contains an important criticism of Gray. Gray was +a poet of the sheltered life. His genius was shy and retiring. He had no +ambition to thrust himself upon the world. He kept himself to himself, as +the saying is. He published the _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_ in 1751 +only because the editors of the _Magazine of Magazines_ had got hold of a +copy and Gray was afraid that they would publish it first. How lethargic a +poet Gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began the _Elegy_ as +far back as 1746--Mason says it was begun in August, 1742--and did not +finish it until June 12, 1750. Probably there is no other short poem in +English literature which was brooded over for so many seasons. Nor was +there ever a greater justification for patient brooding. Gray in this poem +liberated the English imagination after half a century of prose and +rhetoric. He restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an +individual soul. Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at least, +assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into English +literature. But poetic diction was in use long before Gray. He is +remarkable among English poets, not for having succumbed to poetic +diction, but for having triumphed over it. It is poetic feeling, not +poetic diction, that distinguishes him from the mass of eighteenth-century +writers. It is an interesting coincidence that Gray and Collins should +have brought about a poetic revival by the rediscovery of the beauty of +evening, just as Mr. Yeats and "A.E." brought about a poetic revival in +our own day by the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight. Both schools of +poetry (if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillness +of the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from the +tyrannical prose of common day. There have been critics, including Matthew +Arnold, who have denied that the _Elegy_ is the greatest of Gray's poems. +This, I think, can only be because they have been unable to see the poetry +for the quotations. No other poem that Gray ever wrote was a miracle. _The +Bard_ is a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric. But the _Elegy_ is more +than this. It is an autobiography and the creation of a world for the +hearts of men. Here Gray delivers the secret doctrine of the poets. Here +he escapes out of the eighteenth century into immortality. One realizes +what an effort it must have been to rise above his century when one reads +an earlier version of some of his most famous lines: + + Some village Cato (----) with dauntless breast + The little tyrant of his fields withstood; + Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest; + Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood. + +Could there be a more effective example of the return to reality than we +find in the final shape of this verse? + + Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast + The little tyrant of his fields withstood; + Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest, + Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. + +It is as though suddenly it had been revealed to Gray that poetry is not a +mere literary exercise but the image of reality; that it does not consist +in vain admiration of models far off in time and place, but that it is as +near to one as one's breath and one's country. Not that the _Elegy_ would +have been one of the great poems of the world if it had never plunged +deeper into the heart than in this verse. It is a poem of beauty and +sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as Cromwell and +Milton. Here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means to the +imagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and its +regrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze. Perhaps the poem +owes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily, +though a homily transfigured. But then does not _Hamlet_ owe a great part +of its popularity to the fact that it is (among other things) a great +blood-and-thunder play with duels and a ghost? + +One of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that Gray, having +written so greatly, should have written so little. He spoke of himself as +a "shrimp of an author," and expressed the fear that his works might be +mistaken for those of "a pismire or a flea." But to make a mystery of the +indolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who was +blessed with more fastidiousness than passion, is absurd. To say perfectly +once and for all what one has to say is surely as fine an achievement as +to keep restlessly trying to say it a thousand times over. Gray was no +blabber. It is said that he did not even let his mother and his aunts know +that he wrote poetry. He lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy. He +stood aside from life. He would not even take money from his publishers +for his poetry. No wonder that he earned the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who +said of him to Boswell, "Sir, he was dull in his company, dull in his +closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many +think him great." Luckily, Gray's reserve tempted him into his own heart +and into external nature for safety and consolation. Johnson could see in +him only a "mechanical poet." To most of us he seems the first natural +poet in modern literature. + + + + +XI.--ASPECTS OF SHELLEY + + +(1) THE CHARACTER HALF-COMIC + +Shelley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to portray. It is +easy enough to attack him or defend him--to damn him as an infidel or to +praise him because he made Harriet Westbrook so miserable that she threw +herself into the Serpentine. But this is an entirely different thing from +recapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine +anecdotes that are told of him. These for the most part leave him with an +air of absurdity. In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and +again to one's sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see the +kerb or who walks into a wall. He was indeed drunken with doctrine. He +lived almost as much from doctrine as from passion. He pursued theories as +a child chases butterflies. There is a story told of his Oxford days which +shows how eccentrically his theories converted themselves into conduct. +Having been reading Plato with Hogg, and having soaked himself in the +theory of pre-existence and reminiscence, he was walking on Magdalen +Bridge when he met a woman with a child in her arms. He seized the child, +while its mother, thinking he was about to throw it into the river, clung +on to it by the clothes. "Will your baby tell us anything about +pre-existence, madam?" he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistful +look. She made no answer, but on Shelley repeating the question she said, +"He cannot speak." "But surely," exclaimed Shelley, "he can if he will, +for he is only a few weeks old! He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, but +it is only a silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of +speech in so short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible." The woman, +obviously taking him for a lunatic, replied mildly: "It is not for me to +dispute with you gentlemen, but I can safely declare that I never heard +him speak, nor any child, indeed, of his age." Shelley walked away with +his friend, observing, with a deep sigh: "How provokingly close are these +new-born babes!" One can, possibly, discover similar anecdotes in the +lives of other men of genius and of men who thought they had genius. But +in such cases it is usually quite clear that the action was a jest or a +piece of attitudinizing, or that the person who performed it was, as the +vulgar say, "a little above himself." In any event it almost invariably +appears as an abnormal incident in the life of a normal man. Shelley's +life, on the other hand, is largely a concentration of abnormal incidents. +He was habitually "a bit above himself." In the above incident he may have +been consciously behaving comically. But many of his serious actions were +quite as comically extraordinary. + +Godwin is related to have said that "Shelley was so beautiful, it was a +pity he was so wicked." I doubt if there is a single literate person in +the world to-day who would apply the word "wicked" to Shelley. It is said +that Browning, who had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt the +same regard for Shelley after reading the full story of his desertion of +Harriet Westbrook and her suicide. But Browning did not know the full +story. No one of us knows the full story. On the face of it, it looks a +peculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when she is about to +become a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of +£1,000 a year to make an annual allowance of only £200 to a deserted wife +and her two children. Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love. +A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in +order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. At the end of +three years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides this, she had an +intolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated. Harriet's sister, it is +suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops +instead of supporting Shelley's exhortations to her that she should +cultivate her mind. "Harriet," says Mr. Ingpen in _Shelley in England_, +"foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whose +advice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed upon +Shelley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensive +clothes." We cannot help sympathizing a little with Harriet. At the same +time, she was making a breach with Shelley inevitable. She wished him to +remain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even +to pretend to "live up to him" any longer. As Mr. Ingpen says, "it was +love, not matrimony," for which Shelley yearned. "Marriage," Shelley had +once written, echoing Godwin, "is hateful, detestable. A kind of +ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most +despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its +energies." Having lived for years in a theory of "anti-matrimonialism," he +now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which had +always seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love. This, too, at a +time when he had found in Mary Godwin a woman belonging to the same +intellectual and spiritual race as himself--a woman whom he loved as the +great lovers in all the centuries have loved. Shelley himself expressed +the situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peacock: +"Everyone who knows me," he said, "must know that the partner of my life +should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a +noble animal, but she can do neither." "It always appeared to me," said +Peacock, "that you were very fond of Harriet." Shelley replied: "But you +did not know how I hated her sister." And so Harriet's marriage-lines +were, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a scrap of paper. That Shelley +did not feel he had done anything inconsiderate is shown by the fact that, +within three weeks of his elopement with Mary Godwin, he was writing to +Harriet, describing the scenery through which Mary and he had travelled, +and urging her to come and live near them in Switzerland. "I write," his +letter runs-- + + to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least + find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be + always dear--by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured. + From none can you expect this but me--all else are unfeeling, or + selfish, or have beloved friends of their own, as Mrs. B[oinville], + to whom their attention and affection is confined. + +He signed this letter (the Ianthe of whom he speaks was his daughter): + + With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most affectionately + yours, S. + +This letter, if it had been written by an amorist, would seem either +base or priggish. Coming from Shelley, it is a miracle of what can only be +called innocence. + +The most interesting of the "new facts and letters" in Mr. Ingpen's book +relate to Shelley's expulsion from Oxford and his runaway match with +Harriet, and to his father's attitude on both these occasions. Shelley's +father, backed by the family solicitor, cuts a commonplace figure in the +story. He is simply the conventional grieved parent. He made no effort to +understand his son. The most he did was to try to save his respectability. +He objected to Shelley's studying for the Bar, but was anxious to make him +a member of Parliament; and Shelley and he dined with the Duke of Norfolk +to discuss the matter, the result being that the younger man was highly +indignant "at what he considered an effort to shackle his mind, and +introduce him into life as a mere follower of the Duke." How unpromising +as a party politician Shelley was may be gathered from the fact that in +1811, the same year in which he dined with the Duke, he not only wrote a +satire on the Regent _à propos_ of a Carlton House fête, but "amused +himself with throwing copies into the carriages of persons going to +Carlton House after the fête." Shelley's methods of propaganda were on +other occasions also more eccentric than is usual with followers of dukes. +His journey to Dublin to preach Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the +Union was, the beginning of a brief but extraordinary period of propaganda +by pamphlet. Having written a fivepenny pamphlet, _An Address to the Irish +People_, he stood in the balcony of his lodgings in Lower Sackville +Street, and threw copies to the passers-by. "I stand," he wrote at the +time, "at the balcony of our window, and watch till I see a man _who looks +likely_; I throw a book to him." Harriet, it is to be feared, saw only the +comic side of the adventure. Writing to Elizabeth Hitchener--"the Brown +Demon," as Shelley called her when he came to hate her--she said: + + I'm sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. We + throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pass in + the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is + done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman's + hood and cloak. She knew nothing of it, and we passed her. I could + hardly get on: my muscles were so irritated. + +Shelley, none the less, was in regard to Ireland a wiser politician than +the politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid or fanciful prose in +his _Address_ when he described the Act of Union as "the most successful +engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland." +Godwin, with whom Shelley had been corresponding for some time, now became +alarmed at his disciple's reckless daring. "Shelley, you are preparing a +scene of blood!" he wrote to him in his anxiety. It is evidence of the +extent of Godwin's influence over Shelley that the latter withdrew his +Irish publications and returned to England, having spent about six weeks +on his mission to the Irish people. + +Mr. Ingpen has really written a new biography of Shelley rather than a +compilation of new material. The new documents incorporated in the book +were discovered by the successors to Mr. William Whitton, the Shelleys' +family solicitor, but they can hardly be said to add much to our knowledge +of the facts about Shelley. They prove, however, that his marriage to +Harriet Westbrook took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and +that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holds +that they also prove that Shelley "appeared on the boards of the Windsor +Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama." But we have only William +Whitton, the solicitor's words for this, and it is clear that he had been +at no pains to investigate the matter. "It was mentioned to me yesterday," +he wrote to Shelley's father in November, 1815, "that Mr. P.B. Shelley was +exhibiting himself on the Windsor stage in the character of Shakespeare's +plays, under the figured name of Cooks." "The character of Shakespeare's +plays" sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he was talking +about, unless he was referring to allegorical "tableaux vivants" of some +sort. Certainly, so vague a rumour as this--the sort of rumour that would +naturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to +the bad--is no trustworthy evidence that Shelley was ever "an actor in +Shakespearean drama." At the same time, Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiastic +praise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add an +indispensable book to the Shelley library. I wish that, as he has to some +extent followed the events of Shelley's life until the end, he had filled +in the details of the life abroad as well as the life in England. His book +is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography with +gaps. He writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of facts +rather than of a psychologist. One has to create one's own portrait of +Shelley out of the facts he has brought together. + +One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Shelley--a +student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of +Shelley's letters as well as for the biography--referring to Shelley again +and again as "Bysshe." Shelley's family, it may be admitted, called him +"Bysshe." But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who +brought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biography +over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow +express two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great +extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley wrote _The Skylark_ +and _Pan_ and _The West Wind_. It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat old +woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpen +quotes Peacock's account of this characteristic illusion: + + He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to + swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled + over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands arms, + and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from + smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by + a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation + existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this + singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of + lightning. + +Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous. +After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, +one has to read _Prometheus_ again in order to recall that divine song of +a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Shelley. + + +(2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST + +Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice. +In an introduction to Medwin's _Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_ he begins by +frankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point of +controversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is. "Last +century," he declares, "produced a plethora of bad books that were +valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value. Medwin's +distinction is that he left two bad books which were and still are +valuable, but whether the _Byron Conversations_ and the _Life of Shelley_ +should be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two +worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry." Medwin, +we may admit, even if he was not the "perfect idiot" he has been called, +would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met Shelley or Byron. +But he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or +near it, a little gilded by their rays. He was not, Mr. Forman contends, +the original of the man who "saw Shelley plain" in Browning's lyric. None +the less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us. A +relative of Shelley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years in +Italy, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannot +help lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a +treasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in +the history of English literature. + +Shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland, +continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth. +Here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of the +age of science: he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not only +in chemistry, but in life and in politics. At school, he and his solar +microscope were inseparable. Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we +are told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin's father, but his own +father sent it back with a note saying: "I have returned the book on +chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton." During his life at +University College, Oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued. + + His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to premise + nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He had + inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had + seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he + should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his + furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids--more than one + hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of + combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor + had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a + crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents, + for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of + truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot. + +The same eagerness of discovery is shown in his passion for kite-flying as +a boy: + + He was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place made an electrical + one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw lightning + from The clouds--fire from Heaven, like a new Prometheus. + +And his generous dream of bringing science to the service of humanity is +revealed in his reflection: + + What a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially + in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will + furnish them with a constant supply! + +Shelley's many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth naturally led him early +to invade theology. From his Eton days, he used to enter into +controversies by letter with learned divines. Medwin declares that he saw +one such correspondence in which Shelley engaged in argument with a bishop +"under the assumed name of a woman." It must have been in a somewhat +similar mood that "one Sunday after we had been to Rowland Hill's chapel, +and were dining together in the city, he wrote to him under an assumed +name, proposing to preach to his congregation." + +Certainly, Shelley loved mystification scarcely less than he loved truth +itself. He was a romanticist as well as a philosopher, and the reading in +his childhood of novels like _Zofloya the Moor_--a work as wild, +apparently, as anything Cyril Tourneur ever wrote--excited his imagination +to impossible flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to study +the effects of this ghostly reading in Shelley's own work--his forgotten +novels, _Zastrossi_, and _St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian_--but we can see +how his life itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. Many of +his recorded adventures are supposed to have been hallucinations, like the +story of the "stranger in a military cloak," who, seeing him in a +post-office at Pisa, said, "What! Are you that d--d atheist, Shelley?" and +felled him to the ground. On the other hand, Shelley's story of his being +attacked by a midnight assassin in Wales, after being disbelieved for +three-quarters of a century, has in recent years been corroborated in the +most unexpected way. Wild a fiction as his life was in many respects, it +was a fiction he himself sincerely and innocently believed. His +imaginative appetite, having devoured science by day and sixpenny romances +by night, still remained unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mix +up reality and make-believe past all recognition for its next dish. +Francis Thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when he +noted what a complete playfellow Shelley was in his life. When he was in +London after his expulsion from the University, he could throw himself +with all his being into childish games like skimming stones on the +Serpentine, "counting with the utmost glee the number of bounds, as the +flat stones flew skimming over the surface of the water." He found a +perfect pleasure in paper boats, and we hear of his making a sail on one +occasion out of a ten-pound note--one of those myths, perhaps, which +gather round poets. It must have been the innocence of pleasure shown in +games like these that made him an irresistible companion to so many +comparatively prosaic people. For the idea that Shelley in private life +was aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely false one. As +Medwin points out, in referring to his school-days, he "must have had a +rather large circle of friends, since his parting breakfast at Eton cost +£50." + +Even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the fascination +of that boyish figure with the "stag eyes," so enthusiastically in pursuit +of truth and of dreams, of trifles light as air and of the redemption of +the human race. "His figure," Hogg tells us, "was slight and fragile, and +yet his bones were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much +that he seemed of low stature." And, in Medwin's book, we even become +reconciled to that shrill voice of his, which Lamb and most other people +found so unpleasant. Medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portrait +of Shelley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable +materials for such a portrait--in descriptions, for instance, of how he +used to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would +get so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, "Mary, have I +dined?" More important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, is +the account of how Medwin saw him, "after threading the carnival crowd in +the Lung' Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair, +overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that +sensual and unintellectual crowd." Some people, on reading a passage like +this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig is +a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and +imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his +own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English +history. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On the +other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not even +such an innocent egoism as Thoreau's. He was always longing to give +himself to the world. In the Italian days we find him planning an +expedition with Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of +being burnt alive for sacrilege. He has often been denounced for his +heartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not judge +him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently. But +it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through the +marriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that he +so long endured Harriet's sister as the tyrant of his house, and that he +neglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they were +consistent with his deserting her for another woman. This may seem a +_bizarre_ defence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Shelley +behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done, +given the same principles and the same circumstances. He was a man who +never followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as most +men do in their love affairs. He fought a difficult fight all his life in +a world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluter +of Society. Whatever mistakes we may consider him to have made, we can +hardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans. + + +(3) THE POET OF HOPE + +Shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age. He is the poet of hope, as +Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom. He has been charged with being +intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which the +future is intangible and unearthly. He is no more unearthly than the +skylark or the rainbow or the dawn. His world, indeed, is a universe of +skylarks and rainbows and dawns--a universe in which + + Like a thousand dawns on a single night + The splendours rise and spread. + +He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music. He is unearthly +in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element. We lose +to some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering among +stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried day +of some wonder-strewn cave. There are other great poets besides Shelley +who have had a vision of the heights and depths. Compared with him, +however, they have all about them something of Goliath's disadvantageous +bulk. Shelley alone retains a boyish grace like David's, and does not seem +to groan under the burden of his task. He does not round his shoulders in +gloom in the presence of Heaven and Hell. His cosmos is a constellation. +His thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turns +even the long agony of Prometheus into joy. There is no other joy in +literature like Shelley's. It is the joy not of one who is blind or +untroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the +unselfish, has learned + + ... to hope till Hope creates + From its own wreck the thing it contemplates. + +To write like this is to triumph over death. It is to cease to be a victim +and to become a creator. Shelley recognized that the world had been bound +into slavery by the Devil, but he more than anyone else believed that it +was possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the first +intention of God. + + In the great morning of the world, + The Spirit of God with might unfurled + The flag of Freedom over Chaos. + +Shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the past of +God. He lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will sacrifice the +perfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect yesterday. He was the devoted +enemy of that dark spirit of Power which holds fast to the old greed as to +a treasure. In _Hellas_ he puts into the mouth of Christ a reproof of +Mahomet which is a reproof to all the Carsons and those who are haters of +a finer future to-day. + + Obdurate spirit! + Thou seest but the Past in the To-come. + Pride is thy error and thy punishment. + Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds + Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops + Before the Power that wields and kindles them. + True greatness asks not space. + +There are some critics who would like to separate Shelley's politics from +his poetry. But Shelley's politics are part of his poetry. They are the +politics of hope as his poetry is the poetry of hope. Europe did not adopt +his politics in the generation that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the +result is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred years +later. Every generation rejects Shelley; it prefers incredulity to hope, +fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when the logic of +its common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as even the wildest orgy +of idealism could not have produced. Shelley must, no doubt, still seem a +shocking poet to an age in which the limitation of the veto of the House +of Lords was described as a revolutionary step. To Shelley even the new +earth for which the Bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed an +extravagant demand. He was almost the only English poet up to his own time +who believed that the world had a future. One can think of no other poet +to whom to turn for the prophetic music of a real League of Nations. +Tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his passion +was not for that but for the British Empire. He had the craven fear of +being great on any but the old Imperialist lines. His work did nothing to +make his country more generous than it was before. Shelley, on the other +hand, creates for us a new atmosphere of generosity. His patriotism was +love of the people of England, not love of the Government of England. +Hence, when the Government of England allied itself with the oppressors of +mankind, he saw nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would have +arraigned a German or a Russian Government in the same circumstances. + +He arraigned it, indeed, in the preface to _Hellas_ in a paragraph which +the publisher nervously suppressed, and which was only restored in 1892 by +Mr. Buxton Forman. The seditious paragraph ran: + + Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon + the part which those who presume to represent them will have played + in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which + it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the war of + the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those + ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, + called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common + enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a + mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth + are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, + nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and + she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that + destiny which tyrants foresee and dread. + +It is nearly a hundred years since Shelley proclaimed this birth of a new +race throughout Europe. Would he have turned pessimist if he had lived to +see the world infected with Prussianism as it has been in our time? I do +not think he would. He would have been the singer of the new race to-day +as he was then. To him the resurrection of the old despotism, foreign and +domestic, would have seemed but a fresh assault by the Furies on the body +of Prometheus. He would have scattered the Furies with a song. + +For Shelley has not failed. He is one of those who have brought down to +earth the creative spirit of freedom. And that spirit has never ceased to +brood, with however disappointing results, over the chaos of Europe until +our own time. His greatest service to freedom is, perhaps, that he made it +seem, not a policy, but a part of Nature. He made it desirable as the +spring, lovely as a cloud in a blue sky, gay as a lark, glad as a wave, +golden as a star, mighty as a wind. Other poets speak of freedom, and +invite the birds on to the platform. Shelley spoke of freedom and himself +became a bird in the air, a wave of the sea. He did not humiliate beauty +into a lesson. He scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as a +spirit-- + + Singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought + To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. + +His politics are implicit in _The Cloud_ and _The Skylark_ and _The West +Wind_, no less than in _The Mask of Anarchy_. His idea of the State as +well as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant +imagination of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the +strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a Book of Revelation. + +It is impossible to say whether he might not have been a greater poet if +he had not been in such haste to rebuild the world. He would, one fancies, +have been a better artist if he had had a finer patience of phrase. On the +other hand, his achievement even in the sphere of phrase and music is +surpassed by no poet since Shakespeare. He may hurry along at intervals in +a cloud of second-best words, but out of the cloud suddenly comes a song +like Ariel's and a radiance like the radiance of a new day. With him a +poem is a melody rather than a manuscript. Not since Prospero commanded +songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the +_Hymn of Pan_ and _The Indian Serenade_. _The Cloud_ is the most magical +transmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language. +Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen. But he sees things, +as it were, musically. + + My soul is an enchanted boat + Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float + Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing. + +There is more of music than painting in this kind of writing. + +There is no other music but Shelley's which seems to me likely to bring +healing to the madness of the modern Saul. For this reason I hope that +Professor Herford's fine edition of the shorter poems (arranged for the +first time in chronological order) will encourage men and women to turn to +Shelley again. Professor Herford promises us a companion volume on the +same lines, containing the dramas and longer poems, if sufficient interest +is shown in his book. The average reader will probably be content with Mr. +Hutchinson's cheap and perfect "Oxford Edition" of Shelley. But the +scholar, as well as the lover of a beautiful page, will find in Professor +Herford's edition a new pleasure in old verse. + + + + +XII.--THE WISDOM OF COLERIDGE + + +(1) COLERIDGE AS CRITIC + +Coleridge was the thirteenth child of a rather queer clergyman. The Rev. +John Coleridge was queer enough in having thirteen children: he was +queerer still in being the author of a Latin grammar in which he renamed +the "ablative" the "quale-quare-quidditive case." Coleridge was thus born +not only with an unlucky number, but trailing clouds of definitions. He +was in some respects the unluckiest of all Englishmen of literary genius. +He leaves on us an impression of failure as no other writer of the same +stature does. The impression may not be justified. There are few writers +who would not prefer the magnificent failure of a Coleridge to their own +little mole-hill of success. Coleridge was a failure in comparison not +with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius. His +imperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god. Charles Lamb summed up the +truth about his genius as well as about his character in that final +phrase, "an archangel a little damaged." This was said at a time when the +archangel was much more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum; +but even then Lamb wrote: "His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its +ancient glory." Most of Coleridge's great contemporaries were aware of +that glory. Even those who were afterwards to be counted among his +revilers, such as Hazlitt and De Quincey, had known what it was to be +disciples at the feet of this inspired ruin. They spoke not only of his +mind, but even of his physical characteristics--his voice and his hair--as +though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia. +Even as a boy at Christ's Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the +"casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with +admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the _speech_ and +the _garb_ of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and +sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus ... or +reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar--while the walls of the old Grey +Friars re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity-boy!_" + +It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we should +constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of his +contemporaries. _Christabel_ and _Kubla Kahn_ we could read, no doubt, in +perfect enjoyment even if we did not know the author's name. For the rest, +there is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that, +if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might +persuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull +flappings and slitherings of a penguin. His genius is intermittent and +comes arbitrarily to an end. He is inspired only in fragments and +aphorisms. He was all but incapable of writing a complete book or a +complete poem at a high level. His irresponsibility as an author is +described in that sentence in which he says: "I have laid too many eggs in +the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and +ostrich oblivion." His literary plans had a ludicrous way of breaking +down. It was characteristic of him that, in 1817, when he projected a +complete edition of his poems, under the title _Sibylline Leaves_, he +omitted to publish Volume I. and published only Volume II. He would +announce a lecture on Milton, and then give his audience "a very eloquent +and popular discourse on the general character of Shakespeare." His two +finest poems he never finished. He wrote not by an act of the will but +according to the wind, and when the wind dropped he came to earth. It was +as though he could soar but was unable to fly. It is this that +differentiates him from other great poets or critics. None of them has +left such a record of unfulfilled purposes. It is not that he did not get +through an enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in Mr. +Chesterton's poem, he "went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head," and in +the end he did not get to Birmingham. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives an +amusing account of the way in which _Biographia Literaria_ came to be +written. Originally, in 1815, it was conceived as a preface--to be "done +in two, or at farthest three days"--to a collection of some "scattered and +manuscript poems." Two months later the plan had changed. Coleridge was +now busy on a preface to an _Autobiographia Literaria, sketches of my +literary Life and Opinions_. This in turn developed into "a full account +(_raisonné_) of the controversy concerning Wordsworth's poems and theory," +with a "disquisition on the powers of Association ... and on the generic +difference between the Fancy and the Imagination." This ran to such a +length that he decided not to use it as a preface, but to amplify it into +a work in three volumes. He succeeded in writing the first volume, but he +found himself unable to fill the second. "Then, as the volume obstinately +remained too small, he tossed in _Satyrane_, an epistolary account of his +wanderings in Germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gave +the whole painfully to the world in July, 1817." It is one of the ironies +of literary history that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in +literature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the +haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the +"shaping imagination," should himself have given us in his greatest book +of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. It is but +another proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what is +called technique, genius almost can. Coleridge, in spite of his +formlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in English about +literature. His place is that of an oracle among controversialists. + +Even so, _Biographia Literaria_ is a disappointing book. It is the porch, +but it is not the temple. It may be that, in literary criticism, there can +be no temple. Literary criticism is in its nature largely an incitement to +enter, a hint of the treasures that are to be found within. Persons who +seek rest in literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written upon +the walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing. It is +extremely easy to invent ten such commandments--it was done in the age of +Racine and in the age of Pope--but the wise critic knows that in +literature the rules are less important than the "inner light." Hence, +criticism at its highest is not a theorist's attempt to impose iron laws +on writers: it is an attempt to capture the secret of that "inner light" +and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. It is also an +attempt to define the conditions in which the "inner light" has most +happily manifested itself, and to judge new writers of promise according +to the measure in which they have been true to the spirit, though not +necessarily to the technicalities, of the great tradition. Criticism, +then, is not the Roman father of good writing: it is the disciple and +missionary of good writing. The end of criticism is less law-giving than +conversion. It teaches not the legalities, but the love, of literature. +_Biographia Literaria_ does this in its most admirable parts by +interesting us in Coleridge's own literary beginnings, by emphasizing the +strong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty animosities of +little ones, by pointing out the signs of the miracle of genius in the +young Shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of Wordsworth from a +hundred extravagances of theory and practice. Coleridge's remarks on 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"--should be written up on the study walls of +everyone commencing author. His description, too, of his period as "this +age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the +meanest insects are worshipped with sort of Egyptian superstition if only +the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the +tail," conveys a warning to writers that is not of an age but for all +time. Coleridge may have exaggerated the "manly hilarity" and "evenness +and sweetness of temper" of men of genius. But there is no denying that, +the smaller the genius, the greater is the spite of wounded self-love. +"Experience informs us," as Coleridge says, "that the first defence of +weak minds is to recriminate." As for Coleridge's great service to +Wordsworth's fame, it was that of a gold-washer. He cleansed it from all +that was false in Wordsworth's reaction both in theory and in practice +against "poetic diction." Coleridge pointed out that Wordsworth had +misunderstood the ultimate objections to eighteenth-century verse. The +valid objection to a great deal of eighteenth-century verse was not, he +showed, that it was written in language different from that of prose, but +that it consisted of "translations of prose thoughts into poetic +language." Coleridge put it still more strongly, indeed, when he said that +"the language from Pope's translation of Homer to Darwin's _Temple of +Nature_ may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too +faithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no better reason +than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose." +Wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against the meretricious garb of +mean thoughts, wished to deny verse its more splendid clothing altogether. +If we accepted his theories we should have to condemn his _Ode_, the +greatest of his sonnets, and, as Coleridge put it, "two-thirds at least of +the marked beauties of his poetry." The truth is, Wordsworth created an +engine that was in danger of destroying not only Pope but himself. +Coleridge destroyed the engine and so helped to save Wordsworth. Coleridge +may, in his turn, have gone too far in dividing language into three +groups--language peculiar to poetry, language peculiar to prose, and +language common to both, though there is much to be said for the division; +but his jealousy for the great tradition in language was the jealousy of a +sound critic. "Language," he declared, "is the armoury of the human mind; +and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its +future conquests." + +He, himself, wrote idly enough at times: he did not shrink from the +phrase, "literary man," abominated by Mr. Birrell. But he rises in +sentence after sentence into the great manner, as when he declares: + + No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a + profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy + of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, + language. + +How excellently, again, he describes Wordsworth's early aim as being-- + + to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite + a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's + attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the + loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. + +He explains Wordsworth's gift more fully in another passage: + +It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought, the fine +balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying +the objects observed, and, above all, the original gift of spreading the +tone, the _atmosphere_, and with it the depth and height of the ideal +world, around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the +common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the +sparkle and the dew-drops. + +Coleridge's censures on Wordsworth, on the other hand, such as that on +_The Daffodil_, may not all be endorsed by us to-day. But in the mass they +have the insight of genius, as when he condemns "the approximation to what +might be called _mental_ bombast, as distinguished from verbal." His +quotations of great passages, again, are the very flower of good +criticism. + +Mr. George Sampson's editorial selection from _Biographia Literaria_ +and his pleasant as well as instructive notes give one a new +pleasure in re-reading this classic of critical literature. The +"quale-quare-quidditive" chapters have been removed, and Wordsworth's +revolutionary prefaces and essays given in their place. In its new form, +_Biographia Literaria_ may not be the best book that could be written, but +there is good reason for believing that it is the best book that has been +written on poetry in the English tongue. + + +(2) COLERIDGE AS A TALKER + +Coleridge's talk resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. It +moves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. When Dr. +Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. His +sentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bully +even more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comic +characters in literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the same +company as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention of +a Scottish humourist named Boswell. "Burke," we read in Coleridge's _Table +Talk_, "said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in +talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life." +Coleridge's conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression +of personality. He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than +struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. At his best, +he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says: "To most +men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only +the track it has passed." He can give us in a sentence the central truth +of politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is good +in Socialism in a score or so of words: + + That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism + of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy + of the man. + +And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in the +sentence: + + Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels + of error, lest you get your brains knocked out. + +"I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner," said Coleridge, and he +explained that he did not mean by this "an arguer." He was a discoverer of +order, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist. He sought after +principles, whether in politics or literature. He quarrelled with Gibbon +because his _Decline and Fall_ was "little else but a disguised collection +of ... splendid anecdotes" instead of a philosophic search for the +ultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire. Coleridge himself +formulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a time +when we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vast +boxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations. He said: + + The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire--which is not to + be found in all Gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words: + the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the + _national_ character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a + nation. + +One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however. He was a seer with his +head among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait, +stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses. He himself +boasted in a delightful sentence: + + For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance--that, with all my + gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head + of a mountain in blue air and sunshine. + +It is to be feared that Coleridge's "gastric and bowel distempers" had +more effect on his head than he was aware of. Like other men, he often +spoke out of a heart full of grievances. He uttered the bitterness of an +unhappily married dyspeptic when he said: "The most happy marriage I can +picture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind +woman." It is amusing to reflect that one of the many books which he +wished to write was "a book on the duties of women, more especially to +their husbands." One feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism of +the great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather than +making an impersonal statement of truth. "How can a tall man help thinking +of his size," he asked, "when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoe +beside him?" The personal note that occasionally breaks in upon the +oracular rhythm of the _Table Talk_, however, is a virtue in literature, +even if a lapse in philosophy. The crumbs of a great man's autobiography +are no less precious than the crumbs of his wisdom. There are moods in +which one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts. It is pleasant to +hear Coleridge boasting; "The _Ancient Mariner_ cannot be imitated, nor +the poem _Love_. _They may be excelled; they are not imitable._" One is +amused to know that he succeeded in offending Lamb on one occasion by +illustrating "the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and the +predominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of Lamb +and himself." It is amusing, too, to find that, while Wordsworth regarded +_The Ancient Mariner_ as a dangerous drag on the popularity of _Lyrical +Ballads_, Coleridge looked on his poem as the feature that had sold the +greatest number of the copies of the book. It is only fair to add that in +taking this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously: + + I was told by Longmans that the greater part of the _Lyrical + Ballads_ had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of the + _Ancient Mariner_, concluded that it was a naval song-book, or, at + all events, that it had some relation to nautical matters. + +Of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in _Table Talk_ as +one would like. At the same time, there are one or two which throw light +on the nature of Coleridge's imagination. We get an idea of one of the +chief differences between the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry of +Wordsworth when we read the confession: + + I had the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim + one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but + where I saw them I mostly forget. + +The nephew who collected Coleridge's talk declared that there was no man +whom he would more readily have chosen as a guide in morals, but "I would +not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads." The +author of _Kubla Khan_ asserted still more strongly on another occasion +his indifference to locality: + + Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact but harmonious + opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called + up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations, + just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the + swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I + believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking + more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. + Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the + battle, in Herodotus, as anyone can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay on + a man who lived in past time: I thought of adding another to it on + one who lived not _in time_ at all, past, present, or future--but + beside or collaterally. + +Some of Coleridge's other memories are of a more trifling and amusing +sort. He recalls, for instance, the occasion of his only flogging at +school. He had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be taken on as an +apprentice. The shoemaker, "being an honest man," had at once told the +boy's master: + + Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I + answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I + hated the thought of being a clergyman. "Why so?" said he. + "Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said I, "I am an infidel!" + For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me--wisely, as I + think--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have + gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I + laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly. + +Among the reminiscences of Coleridge no passage is more famous than that +in which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane near Highgate one +day, a "loose, slack, not well-dressed youth" was introduced to him: + + It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. + After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said: "Let me + carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" + "There is death in that hand," I said to ----, when Keats was gone; + yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself + distinctly. + +Another famous anecdote relates to the time at which Coleridge, like +Wordsworth, carried the fires of the French Revolution about him into the +peace of the West Country. Speaking of a fellow-disciple of the liberty of +those days, Coleridge afterwards said: + + John Thelwall had something very good about him. We were once + sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him: + "Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!" "Nay! + Citizen Samuel," replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man + forget that there is any necessity for treason!" + +Is there any prettier anecdote in literary history? + +Besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the _Table +Talk_, however, there are a great number of opinions which show us +Coleridge not as a seer, but as a "character"--a crusty gentleman, every +whit as ready to express an antipathy as a principle. He shared Dr. +Johnson's quarrel with the Scots, and said of them: + + I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very + disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The + Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the + English. + +He had no love for Jews, or Dissenters, or Catholics, and anticipated +Carlyle's hostility to the emancipation of the negroes. He raged against +the Reform Bill, Catholic Emancipation, and the education of the poor in +schools. He was indignant with Belgium for claiming national independence. +One cannot read much of his talk about politics without amazement that so +wise a man should have been so frequently a fool. At the same time, he +generally remained an original fool. He never degenerated into a mere +partisan. He might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was not taken +in by reactionary leaders. He was no more capable than Shelley of +mistaking Castlereagh for a great man, and he did not join in the +glorification of Pitt. Like Dr. Johnson, he could be a Tory without +feeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully Ireland. Coleridge, +indeed, went so far as to wish to cut the last link with Ireland as the +only means of saving England. Discussing the Irish question, he said: + + I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from + the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with + the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by + the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from + our association with Ireland.... Mr. Pitt has received great credit + for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be + discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he + effected it made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled + against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the + Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill! + And what next? + +When one thinks of the injury that the subjection of Ireland has done the +English name in America, in Russia, in Australia, and elsewhere in quite +recent times, one can hardly deny that on this matter Coleridge was a +sound prophet. + +It is the literary rather than the political opinions, however, that will +bring every generation of readers afresh to Coleridge's _Table Talk_. No +man ever talked better in a few sentences on Shakespeare, Sterne, and the +tribe of authors. One may not agree with Coleridge in regarding Jeremy +Taylor as one of the four chief glories of English literature, or in +thinking Southey's style "next door to faultless." But one listens to his +_obiter dicta_ eagerly as the sayings of one of the greatest minds that +have interested themselves in the criticism of literature. There are +tedious pages in _Table Talk_, but these are, for the most part, concerned +with theology. On the whole, the speech of Coleridge was golden. Even the +leaden parts are interesting because they are Coleridge's lead. One wishes +the theology was balanced, however, by a few more glimpses of his lighter +interests, such as we find in the passage: "Never take an iambus for a +Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha +are my favourite names for women." What we want most of all in table talk +is to get an author into the confession album. Coleridge's _Table Talk_ +would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it not for the fact +that he occasionally came down out of the pulpit and babbled. + + + + +XIII.--TENNYSON: A TEMPORARY CRITICISM + + +If Tennyson's reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallen +before hostile criticism: it has merely faded through time. Perhaps there +was never an English poet who loomed so large to his own age as +Tennyson--who represented his contemporaries with the same passion and +power. Pope was sufficiently representative of his age, but his age meant, +by comparison, a limited and aristocratic circle. Byron represented and +shocked his age by turns. Tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to the +educated middle-class men and women of his time as the family clergyman. +That is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did to them. That he +was ahead of his age on many points on which this could not be said of the +family clergyman one need not dispute. He was a kind of "new theologian." +He stood, like Dean Farrar, for the larger hope and various other +heresies. Every representative man is ahead of his age--a little, but not +enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people. It may +be objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and that +he should be judged not by his message but by his song. But his message +and his song sprang from the same vision--a vision of the world seen, not +_sub specie æternitatis_, but _sub specie_ the reign of Queen Victoria. +Before we appreciate Tennyson's real place in literature, we must frankly +recognize the fact that his muse wore a crinoline. The great mass of his +work bears its date stamped upon it as obviously almost as a copy of _The +Times_. How topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in +_Locksley Hall:_ + + Then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so young. + And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. + And I said "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, + Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee." + +One would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of Tennyson's +genius. I think, however, they may be fairly quoted as lines suggesting +the mid-Victorian atmosphere that clings round all but his greatest work. +They bring before our minds the genteel magazine illustrations of other +days. They conjure up a world of charming, vapid faces, where there is +little life apart from sentiment and rhetoric. Contrast such a poem as +_Locksley Hall_ with _The Flight of the Duchess_. Each contains at once a +dramatization of human relations, and the statement of a creed. The human +beings in Browning's poem, however, are not mere shadows out of old +magazines; they are as real as the men and women in the portraits of the +masters, as real as ourselves. Similarly, in expressing his thought, +Browning gives it imaginative dignity as philosophy, while Tennyson writes +what is after all merely an exalted leading article. There is more in +common between Tennyson and Lytton than is generally realized. Both were +fond of windy words. They were slaves of language to almost as great an +extent as Swinburne. One feels that too often phrases like "moor and fell" +and "bower and hall" were mere sounding substitutes for a creative +imagination. I have heard it argued that the lines in _Maud_: + + All night have the roses heard + The flute, violin, bassoon; + +introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ball-room orchestra +merely for the sake of euphony. The mistake about the bassoon is a small +one, and is, I suppose, borrowed from Coleridge, but it is characteristic. + +Tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he was +generally accepted as being. He was an artist of lines rather than of +poems. He seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring full-armed from the +imagination as the great poems of the world do. He built them up +haphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels. They are full of sententious +padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher's +vacuous babbling in his sleep, as so much of Wordsworth is; it is the +word-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, or +things. Let us admit at once that when Tennyson is word perfect he takes +his place among the immortals. One may be convinced that the bulk of his +work is already as dead as the bulk of Longfellow's work. But in his great +poems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect form, and expressed +it perfectly. He did this in _Ulysses_, which comes nearer a noble +perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. One can imagine the +enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson +is as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines +hackneyed for us by much quotation: + + The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: + The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep + Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, + 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. + Push off, and sitting well in order smite + The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds + To sail beyond the sunset and the baths + Of all the western stars, until I die. + It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; + It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, + And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. + +There, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makes +Browning's people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy illustrating an +old story. One of the most beautiful lines Tennyson ever wrote: + + The horns of Elfland faintly blowing, + +has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of the world's +romance. + +Tennyson's art at its best, however, and in these two instances is art +founded upon art, not art founded upon life. We used to be asked to admire +the vivid observation shown in such lines as: + + More black than ashbuds in the front of March; + +and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that Tennyson had a quick eye +for the facts of nature. But such lines, however accurate, do not make a +man a poet. It is in his fine ornamental moods that Tennyson means most to +our imaginations nowadays--in the moods of such lines as: + + Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost. + +The truth is, Tennyson, with all his rhetoric and with all his prosaic +Victorian opinions, was an æsthete in the immortal part of him no less +than were Rossetti and Swinburne. He seemed immense to his contemporaries, +because he put their doubts and fears into music, and was master of the +fervid rhetoric of the new gospel of Imperialism. They did not realize +that great poetry cannot be founded on a basis of perishable doubts and +perishable gospels. It was enough for them to feel that _In Memoriam_ gave +them soothing anchorage and shelter from the destructive hurricanes of +science. It was enough for them to thrill to the public-speech poetry of +_Of old sat Freedom on the Heights_, the patriotic triumph of _The Relief +of Lucknow_, the glorious contempt for foreigners exhibited in his +references to "the red fool-fury of the Seine." Is it any wonder that +during a great part of his life Tennyson was widely regarded as not only a +poet, but a teacher and a statesman? His sneering caricature of Bright as +the "broad-brimmed hawker of holy things" should have made it clear that +in politics he was but a party man, and that his political intelligence +was commonplace. + +He was too deficient in the highest kind of imagination and intellect to +achieve the greatest things. He seldom or never stood aloof from his own +time, as Wordsworth did through his philosophic imagination, as Keats did +through his æsthetic imagination, as Browning did through his dramatic +imagination. He wore a poetical cloak, and avoided the vulgar crowd +physically; he had none of Browning's taste for tea-parties. But Browning +had not the tea-party imagination; Tennyson, in a great degree, had. He +preached excellent virtues to his time; but they were respectable rather +than spiritual virtues. Thus, _The Idylls of the King_ have become to us +mere ancient fashion-plates of the virtues, while the moral power of _The +Ring and the Book_ is as commanding to-day as in the year in which the +poem was first published. + +It is all the more surprising that no good selection from Tennyson has yet +appeared. His "complete works" contain so much that is ephemeral and +uninspired as to be a mere book of reference on our shelves. When will +some critic do for him what Matthew Arnold did for Wordsworth, and +separate the gold from the dross--do it as well as Matthew Arnold did it +for Wordsworth? Such a volume would be far thinner than the Wordsworth +selection. But it would entitle Tennyson to a much higher place among the +poets than in these years of the reaction he is generally given. + + + + +XIV.--THE POLITICS OF SWIFT AND SHAKESPEARE + + +(1) SWIFT + +There are few greater ironies in history than that the modern +Conservatives should be eager to claim Swift as one of themselves. One +finds even the _Morning Post_--which someone has aptly enough named the +_Morning Prussian_--cheerfully counting the author of _A Voyage to +Houyhnhnms_ in the list of sound Tories. It is undeniable that Swift wrote +pamphlets for the Tory Party of his day. A Whig, he turned from the Whigs +of Queen Anne in disgust, and carried the Tory label for the rest of his +life. If we consider realities rather than labels, however, what do we +find were the chief political ideals for which Swift stood? His politics, +as every reader of his pamphlets knows, were, above all, the politics of a +pacifist and a Home Ruler--the two things most abhorrent to the orthodox +Tories of our own time. Swift belonged to the Tory Party at one of those +rare periods at which it was a peace party. _The Conduct of the Allies_ +was simply a demand for a premature peace. Worse than this, it was a +pamphlet against England's taking part in a land-war on the Continent +instead of confining herself to naval operations. "It was the kingdom's +misfortune," wrote Swift, "that the sea was not the Duke of Marlborough's +element, otherwise the whole force of the war would infallibly have been +bestowed there, infinitely to the advantage of his country." Whether Swift +and the Tories were right in their attack on Marlborough and the war is a +question into which I do not propose to enter. I merely wish to emphasize +the fact that _The Conduct of the Allies_ was, from the modern Tory point +of view, not merely a pacifist, but a treasonable, document. Were anything +like it to appear nowadays, it would be suppressed under the Defence of +the Realm Act. And that Swift was a hater of war, not merely as a party +politician, but as a philosopher, is shown by the discourse on the causes +of war which he puts into the mouth of Gulliver when the latter is trying +to convey a picture of human society to his Houyhnhnm master: + + Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of + them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of + them pretends to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with + another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war + is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes + because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things + which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight + till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable + cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been + wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence or embroiled by factions + among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war with our + nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a + territory of land that would render our dominions round and + complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people + are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or + make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from + their barbarous way of living. + +There you have "Kultur" wars, and "white man's burden" wars, and wars for +"places of strategic importance," satirized as though by a +twentieth-century humanitarian. When the _Morning Post_ begins to write +leaders in the same strain, we shall begin to believe that Swift was a +Tory in the ordinary meaning of the word. + +As for Swift's Irish politics, Mr. Charles Whibley, like other +Conservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential Nationalism +by suggesting that Swift was merely a just man righteously indignant at +the destruction of Irish manufactures. At least, one would never gather +from the present book that Swift was practically the father of the modern +Irish demand for self-government. Swift was an Irish patriot in the sense +in which Washington was an American patriot. Like Washington, he had no +quarrel with English civilization. He was not an eighteenth-century Sinn +Feiner. He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism was +Colonial Nationalism. As such he was the forerunner of Grattan and Flood, +and also, in a measure, of Parnell and Redmond. While not a Separatist, he +had the strongest possible objection to being either ruled or ruined from +London. In his _Short View of the State of Ireland_, published in 1728, he +preached the whole gospel of Colonial Nationalism as it is accepted by +Irishmen like Sir Horace Plunkett to-day. He declared that one of the +causes of a nation's thriving-- + + ... is by being governed only by laws made with their own consent, + for otherwise they are not a free people. And, therefore, all + appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment, to + another country are so many grievous impoverishments. + +He said of the Irish: + + We are in the condition of patients who have physic sent to them by + doctors at a distance, strangers to their constitution and the + nature of their disease. + +In the _Drapier's Letters_ he denied the right of the English Parliament +to legislate for Ireland. He declared that all reason was on the side of +Ireland's being free, though power and the love of power made for +Ireland's servitude. "The arguments on both sides," he said in a passage +which sums up with perfect irony the centuries-old controversy between +England and Ireland, were "invincible": + + For in reason all government without the consent of the governed is + slavery. But, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue + one single man in his shirt. + +It would be interesting to know how the modern Tory, whose gospel is the +gospel of the eleven men well armed, squares this with Swift's passionate +championship of the "one single man in his shirt." One wishes very +earnestly that the Toryism of Swift were in fact the Toryism of the modern +Conservative party. Had it been so, there would have been no such thing as +Carsonism in pre-war England; and, had there been no Carsonism, one may +infer from Mr. Gerard's recent revelations, there might have been no +European war. + +Mr. Whibley, it is only fair to say, is concerned with Swift as a man of +letters and a friend, rather than with Swift as a party politician. The +present book is a reprint of the Leslie Stephen lecture which he delivered +at Cambridge a few months ago. It was bound, therefore, to be +predominantly literary in interest. At the same time, Mr. Whibley's +political bias appears both in what he says and in what he keeps silent +about. His defence of Swift against the charge of misanthropy is a defence +with which we find ourselves largely in agreement. But Mr. Whibley is too +single-minded a party politician to be able to defend the Dean without +clubbing a number of his own pet antipathies in the process. He seems to +think that the only alternative to the attitude of Dean Swift towards +humanity is the attitude of persons who, "feigning a bland and general +love of abtract humanity ... wreak a wild revenge upon individuals." He +apparently believes that it is impossible for one human being to wish well +to the human race in general, and to be affectionate to John, Peter and +Thomas in particular. Here are some of Mr. Whibley's rather wild comments +on this topic. He writes: + + We know well enough whither universal philanthropy leads us. The + Friend of Man is seldom the friend of men. At his best he is + content with a moral maxim, and buttons up his pocket in the + presence of poverty. "I _give_ thee sixpence! I will see thee + damned first!" It is not for nothing that Canning's immortal words + were put in the mouth of the Friend of Humanity, who, finding that + he cannot turn the Needy Knife Grinder to political account, give + him kicks for ha'pence, and goes off in "a transport of Republican + enthusiasm." Such is the Friend of Man at his best. + +"At his best" is good. It makes one realize that Mr. Whibley is merely +playing a game of make-believe, and playing it very hard. His indictment +of humanitarians has about as much, or as little, basis in fact as would +an indictment of wives or seagulls or fields of corn. One has only to +mention Shelley with his innumerable personal benevolences to set Mr. +Whibley's card-castle of abuse tumbling. + +With Mr. Whibley's general view of Swift as opposed to his general view of +politics, I find myself for the most part in harmony. I doubt, however, +whether Swift has been pursued in his grave with such torrential malignity +as Mr. Whibley imagines. Thackeray's denigration, I admit, takes the +breath away. One can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift's +writings or his life. Of course he had done so, but his passion for the +sentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a genius of +saturnine realism such as Swift's. The truth is, though Swift was among +the staunchest of friends, he is not among the most sociable of authors. +His writings are seldom in the vein either of tenderness or of merriment. +We know of the tenderness of Swift only from a rare anecdote or from the +prattle of the _Journal to Stella_. As for his laughter, as Mr. Whibley +rightly points out, Pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of Swift as +laughing and shaking in Rabelais's easy chair. Swift's humour is +essentially of the intellect. He laughs out of his own bitterness rather +than to amuse his fellow-men. As Mr. Whibley says, he is not a cynic. He +is not sufficiently indifferent for that. He is a satirist, a sort of +perverted and suffering idealist: an idealist with the cynic's vision. It +is the essential nobleness of Swift's nature which makes the voyage to the +Houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature. There are +people who pretend that this section of _Gulliver's Travels_ is almost too +terrible for sensitive persons to read. This is sheer affectation. It can +only be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terrible +for sensitive persons to live! + + +(2) SHAKESPEARE + +Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-poster. He +plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on Fox's House of +Commons but on Shakespeare's Theatre. He is apparently interested in men +of genius chiefly as regards their attitude to his electioneering +activities. Shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person who +would have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in New +Place than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as "Vote for +Podgkins and Down with the Common People" or "Vote for Podgkins and No +League of Nations." Mr. Whibley thinks Shakespeare was like that, and so +he exalts Shakespeare. He has, I do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but that +has made no difference, He would clearly have taken much the same view of +Shakespeare if he had never read him. To be great, said Emerson, is to be +misunderstood. To be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by Mr. +Whibley. + +I do not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single out the +chapter on "Shakespeare: Patriot and Tory" as the most representative in +his volume of _Political Portraits_. It would be unjust if one were to +suggest that Mr. Whibley could write nothing better than this. His +historical portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever +illustrator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits. Those essays in +which he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most +successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer. His +studies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and Melbourne are all of them +good entertainment. If I comment on the Shakespeare essay rather than on +these, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author's +skill as a portrait-painter is put to the test. Here he has to depend +almost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of +human nature. Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes to +quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or a +pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words. Mr. Whibley, I fear, +comes badly off from the test. One does not blame him for having written +on the theme that "Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also." It +would be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study of Shakespeare on +these lines. Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare to +offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Tory +should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him. There is +every reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it +is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of +touch. Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, +especially the second. The proof of Shakespeare's Toryism, for instance, +which he draws from _Troilus and Cressida_, is based on a total +misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about the +necessity of observing "degree, priority and place." Mr. Whibley, plunging +blindly about in Tory blinkers, imagines that in this speech Ulysses, or +rather Shakespeare, is referring to the necessity of keeping the democracy +in its place. "Might he not," he asks, "have written these prophetic lines +with his mind's eye upon France of the Terror or upon modern Russia?" Had +Mr. Whibley read the play with that small amount of self-forgetfulness +without which no man has ever yet been able to appreciate literature, he +would have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but +of the aristocracy against which Ulysses--or, if you prefer it, +Shakespeare--inveighs in this speech. The speech is aimed at the self-will +and factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to Agamemnon. If there are +any moderns who come under the noble lash of Ulysses, they must be sought +for not among either French or Russian revolutionists, but in the persons +of such sound Tories as Sir Edward Carson and such sound patriots as Mr. +Lloyd George. It is tolerably certain that neither Ulysses nor Shakespeare +foresaw Sir Edward Carson's escapades or Mr. Lloyd George's insurbordinate +career as a member of Mr. Asquith's Cabinet. But how admirably they sum up +all the wild statesmanship of these later days in lines which Mr. Whibley, +accountably enough, fails to quote: + + They tax our policy, and call it cowardice; + Count wisdom as no member of the war; + Forestall prescience, and esteem no act + But that of hand; the still and mental parts-- + That do contrive how many hands shall strike, + When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure + Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight-- + Why, this hath not a finger's dignity. + They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war: + So that the ram, that batters down the wall, + For the great swing and rudeness of his poise, + They place before his hand that made the engine, + Or those that with the fineness of their souls + By reason guide his execution. + +There is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to the soul of +the author of the _Letters of an Englishman_. + +Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp the +point of _Troilus and Cressida_. He blunders with equal assiduity in +regard to _Coriolanus_. He treats this play, not as a play about +Coriolanus, but as a pamphlet in favour of Coriolanus. He has not been +initiated, it seems, into the first secret of imaginative literature, +which is that one may portray a hero sympathetically without making +believe that his vices are virtues. Shakespeare no more endorses +Coriolanus's patrician pride than he endorses Othello's jealousy or +Macbeth's murderous ambition. Shakespeare was concerned with painting +noble natures, not with pandering to their vices. He makes us sympathize +with Coriolanus in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to his +better nature, in his death; but from Shakespeare's point of view, as from +most men's the Nietzschean arrogance which led Coriolanus to become a +traitor to his city is a theme for sadness, not (as apparently with Mr. +Whibley) for enthusiasm. "Shakespeare," cries Mr. Whibley, as he quotes +some of Coriolanus's anti-popular speeches, "will not let the people off. +He pursues it with an irony of scorn." "There in a few lines," he writes +of some other speeches, "are expressed the external folly and shame of +democracy. Ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not even the +courage of its own opinions." It would be interesting to know whether in +Mr. Whibley's eyes Coriolanus's hatred of the people is a sufficiently +splendid virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor. That good Tories +have the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often enough in +regard to the Ulster trouble before the war. It may be doubted, however, +whether Shakespeare was sufficiently a Tory to foresee the necessity of +such a gospel in _Coriolanus_. Certainly, the mother of Coriolanus, who +was far from being a Radical, or even a mild Whig, preached the very +opposite of the gospel of treason. She warned Coriolanus that his triumph +over Rome would be a traitor's triumph, that his name would be "dogg'd +with curses," and that his character would be summed up in history in one +fatal sentence: + + The man was noble, + But with his last attempt he wiped it out, + Destroyed his country, and his name remains + To the ensuing age abhorr'd. + +Mr. Whibley appears to loathe the mass of human beings so excessively that +he does not quite realize the enormity (from the modern point of view) of +Coriolanus's crime. It would, I agree, be foolish to judge Coriolanus too +scrupulously from a modern point of view. But Mr. Whibley has asked us to +accept the play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as such +in order to discover what Mr. Whibley means. + +But, after all, Mr. Whibley's failure as a portrait-painter is a failure +of the spirit even more than of the intellect. A narrow spirit cannot +comprehend a magnanimous spirit, and Mr. Whibley's imagination does not +move in that large Shakespearean world in which illustrious men salute +their mortal enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of + + He was the noblest Roman of them all. + +The author who is capable of writing Mr. Whibley's character-study of Fox +does not understand enough about the splendour and the miseries of human +nature to write well on Shakespeare. Of Fox Mr. Whibley says: + + He put no bounds upon his hatred of England, and he thought it not + shameful to intrigue with foreigners against the safety and credit + of the land to which he belonged. Wherever there was a foe to + England, there was a friend of Fox. America, Ireland, France, each + in turn inspired his enthusiasm. When Howe was victorious at + Brooklyn, he publicly deplored "the terrible news." After Valmy he + did not hesitate to express his joy. "No public event," he wrote, + "not excepting Yorktown and Saratoga, ever happened that gave me so + much delight. I could not allow myself to believe it for some days + for fear of disappointment." + +It does not seem to occur to Mr. Whibley that in regard to America, +Ireland, and France, Fox was, according to the standard of every ideal for +which the Allies professed to fight, tremendously right, and that, were it +not for Yorktown and Valmy, America and France would not in our own time +have been great free nations fighting against the embattled Whibleys of +Germany. So far as Mr. Whibley's political philosophy goes, I see no +reason why he should not have declared himself on the side of Germany. He +believes in patriotism, it is true, but he is apparently a patriot of the +sort that loves his country and hates his fellow-countrymen (if that is +what he means by "the people," and presumably it must be). Mr. Whibley has +certainly the mind of a German professor. His vehemence against the +Germans for appreciating Shakespeare is strangely like a German +professor's vehemence against the English for not appreciating him. "Why +then," he asks, + + should the Germans have attempted to lay violent hands upon our + Shakespeare? It is but part of their general policy of pillage. + Stealing comes as easy to them as it came to Bardolph and Nym, who + in Calais stole a fire-shovel. Wherever they have gone they have + cast a thievish eye upon what does not belong to them. They hit + upon the happy plan of levying tolls upon starved Belgium. It was + not enough for their greed to empty a country of food; they must + extract something from its pocket, even though it be dying of + hunger.... No doubt, if they came to these shores, they would feed + their fury by scattering Shakespeare's dust to the winds of + heaven. As they are unable to sack Stratford, they do what seems to + them the next best thing: they hoist the Jolly Roger over + Shakespeare's works. + + Their arrogance is busy in vain. Shakespeare shall never be theirs. + He was an English patriot, who would always have refused to bow the + knee to an insolent alien. + +This is mere foaming at the mouth--the tawdry violence of a Tory +Thersites. This passage is a measure of the good sense and imagination Mr. +Whibley brings to the study of Shakespeare. It is simply theatrical +Jolly-Rogerism. + + + + +XV.--THE PERSONALITY OF MORRIS + + +One thinks of William Morris as a man who wished to make the world as +beautiful as an illuminated manuscript. He loved the bright colours, the +gold, the little strange insets of landscape, the exquisite craftsmanship +of decoration, in which the genius of the medieval illuminators expressed +itself. His Utopia meant the restoration, not so much of the soul of man, +as of the selected delights of the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages. His +passion for trappings--and what fine trappings!--is admirably suggested by +Mr. Cunninghame Graham in his preface to Mr. Compton-Rickett's _William +Morris: a Study in Personality_. Morris he declares, was in his opinion +"no mystic, but a sort of symbolist set in a medieval frame, and it +appeared to me that all his love of the old times of which he wrote was +chiefly of the setting; of tapestries well wrought; of needlework, rich +colours of stained glass falling upon old monuments, and of fine work not +scamped." To emphasize the preoccupation of Morris with the very +handiwork, rather than with the mystic secrets, of beauty is not +necessarily to diminish his name. He was essentially a man for whom the +visible world existed, and in the manner in which he wore himself out in +his efforts to reshape the visible world he proved himself one of the +great men of his century. His life was, in its own way, devotional ever +since those years in which Burne-Jones, his fellow-undergraduate at +Oxford, wrote to him: "We must enlist you in this Crusade and Holy Warfare +against the age." Like all revolutions, of course, the Morris revolution +was a prophecy rather than an achievement. But, perhaps, a prophecy of +Utopia is itself one of the greatest achievements of which humanity is +capable. + +It is odd that one who spilled out his genius for the world of men should +have been so self-sufficing, so little dependent on friendships and +ordinary human relationships as Morris is depicted both in Mr. Mackail's +biography and Mr. Compton-Rickett's study. Obviously, he was a man with +whom generosity was a second nature. When he became a Socialist, he sold +the greater part of his precious library in order to help the cause. On +the other hand, to balance this, we have Rossetti's famous assertion: +"Top"--the general nickname for Morris--"never gives money to a beggar." +Mr. Mackail, if I remember right, accepted Rossetti's statement as +expressive of Morris's indifference to men as compared with causes. Mr. +Compton-Rickett, however, challenges the truth of the observation. "The +number of 'beggars,'" he affirms, "who called at his house and went away +rewarded were legion." + + Mr. Belfort Bax declares that he kept a drawerful of half-crowns + for foreign anarchists, because, as he explained apologetically: + "They always wanted half-a-crown, and it saved time to have a stock + ready." + +But this is no real contradiction of Rossetti. Morris's anarchists +represented his life's work to him. He did not help them from that +personal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a penny +to a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtle +distinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the important +fact about Morris that--to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett--"human nature in the +concrete never profoundly interested him." Enthusiastic as were the +friendships of his youth--when he gushed into "dearests" in his +letters--we could imagine him as living without friends and yet being +tolerably happy. He was, as Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, like a child +with a new toy in his discovery of ever-fresh pursuits in the three worlds +of Politics, Literature and Art. He was a person to whom even duties were +Pleasures. Mr. Mackail has spoken of him as "the rare distance of a man +who, without ever once swerving from truth or duty, knew what he liked and +did what he liked, all his life long." One thinks of him in his work as a +child with a box of paints--an inspired child with wonderful paints and +the skill to use them. He was such a child as accepts companions with +pleasure, but also accepts the absence of companions with pleasure. He +could absorb himself in his games of genius anywhere and everywhere. "Much +of his literary work was done on buses and in trains." His poetry is +often, as it were, the delightful nursery-work of a grown man. "His best +work," as Mr. Compton-Rickett says, "reads like happy improvisations." He +had a child's sudden and impulsive temper, too. Once, having come into his +studio in a rage, he "took a flying kick at the door, and smashed in a +panel." "It's all right," he assured the scared model, who was preparing +to fly; "it's all right--_something_ had to give way." The same violence +of impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion, when he was +staying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to his hostess's +curtains, and tore them down during the night. His judgments were often +much the same kind of untempered emotions as he showed in the matter of +the curtains--his complaint, for example, that a Greek temple was "like a +table on four legs: a damned dull thing!" He was a creature of whims: so +much so that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, "Unstable as water, +thou shalt not excel," flung at him. He enjoyed the expression of +knock-out opinions such as: "I always bless God for making anything so +strong as an onion!" He laughed easily, not from humour so much as from a +romping playfulness. He took a young boy's pleasure in showing off the +strength of his mane of dark brown hair. He would get a child to get hold +of it, and lift him off the ground by it "with no apparent inconvenience." +He was at the same time nervous and restless. He was given to talking to +himself; his hands were never at peace; "if he read aloud, he punched his +own head in the exuberance of his emotions." Possibly there was something +high-strung even about his play, as when, Mr. Mackail tells us, "he would +imitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to a +chair and, after a sullen pause, coming down with a soft, heavy flop." It +seems odd that Mr. John Burns could say of this sensitive and capricious +man of genius, as we find him saying in Mr. Compton-Rickett's book, that +"William Morris was a chunk of humanity in the rough; he was a piece of +good, strong, unvarnished oak--nothing of the elm about him." But we can +forgive Mr. Burns's imperfect judgment in gratitude for the sentences that +follow: + + There is no side of modern life which he has not touched for good. + I am sure he would have endorsed heartily the House and Town + Planning Act for which I am responsible. + +Morris, by the way, would have appreciated Mr. Burns's reference to him as +a fellow-craftsman: did he not once himself boast of being "a master +artisan, if I may claim that dignity"? + +The buoyant life of this craftsman-preacher--whose craftsmanship, indeed, +was the chief part of his preaching--who taught the labourers of his age, +both by precept and example, that the difference between success and +failure in life was the difference between being artisans of loveliness +and poor hackworkers of profitable but hideous things--has a unique +attractiveness in the history of the latter half of the nineteenth +century. He is a figure of whom we cannot be too constantly and vividly +reminded. When I took up Mr. Compton-Rickett's book I was full of hope +that it would reinterpret for a new generation Morris's evangelistic +personality and ideals. Unfortunately, it contains very little of +importance that has not already appeared in Mr. Mackail's distinguished +biography; and the only interpretation of first-rate interest in the book +occurs in the bold imaginative prose of Mr. Cunninghame Graham's +introduction. More than once the author tells us the same things as Mr. +Mackail, only in a less life-like way. For example, where Mr. Mackail says +of Morris that "by the time he was seven years old he had read all the +Waverley novels, and many of Marryat's," Mr. Compton-Rickett vaguely +writes: "He was suckled on Romance, and knew his Scott and Marryat almost +before he could lisp their names." That is typical of Mr. +Compton-Rickett's method. Instead of contenting himself with simple and +realistic sentences like Mr. Mackail's, he aims at--and certainly +achieves--a kind of imitative picturesqueness. We again see his taste for +the high-flown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that "a common +bond unites all these men--Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris. They +differed in much; but, like great mountains lying apart in the base, they +converge high up in the air." The landscape suggested in these sentences +is more topsy-turvy than the imagination likes to dwell upon. And the +criticisms in the book are seldom lightning-flashes of revelation. For +instance: + + A more polished artistry we find in Tennyson; a greater + intellectual grip in Browning; a more haunting magic in Rossetti; + but for easy mastery over his material and general diffusion of + beauty Morris has no superior. + +That, apart from the excellent "general diffusion of beauty," is the kind +of conventional criticism that might pass in a paper read to a literary +society. But somehow, in a critic who deliberately writes a book, we look +for a greater and more personal mastery of his authors than Mr. +Compton-Rickett gives evidence of in the too facile eloquence of these +pages. + +The most interesting part of the book is that which is devoted to +personalia. But even in the matter of personalia Mr. Cunninghame Graham +tells us more vital things in a page of his introduction than Mr. +Compton-Rickett scatters through a chapter. His description of Morris's +appearance, if not a piece of heroic painting, gives us a fine grotesque +design of the man: + + His face was ruddy, and his hair inclined to red, and grew in waves + like water just before it breaks over a fall. His beard was of the + same colour as his hair. His eyes were blue and fiery. His teeth, + small and irregular, but white except upon the side on which he hew + his pipe, where they were stained with brown. When he walked he + swayed a little, not like (_sic_) a sailor sways, but as a man who + lives a sedentary life toddles a little in his gait. His ears were + small, his nose high and well-made, his hands and feet small for a + man of his considerable bulk. His speech and address were fitting + the man; bold, bluff, and hearty.... He was quick-tempered and + irritable, swift to anger and swift to reconciliation, and I should + think never bore malice in his life. + + When he talked he seldom looked at you, and his hands were always + twisting, as if they wished to be at work. + +Such was the front the man bore. The ideal for which he lived may be +summed up, in Mr. Compton-Rickett's expressive phrase, as "the +democratization of beauty." Or it may be stated more humanly in the words +which Morris himself spoke at the grave of a young man who died of +injuries received at the hands of the police in Trafalgar Square on +"Bloody Sunday." "Our friend," he then said: + + Our friend who lies here has had a hard life, and met with a hard + death; and, if society had been differently constituted, his life + might have been a delightful, a beautiful, and a happy one. It is + our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that + such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a + beautiful and happy place. + +There you have the sum of all Morris's teaching. Like so many fine artists +since Plato, he dreamed of a society which would be as beautiful as a work +of art. He saw the future of society as a radiant picture, full of the +bright light of hope, as he saw the past of society as a picture steeped +in the charming lights of fancy. He once explained Rossetti's indifference +to politics by saying that he supposed "it needs a person of hopeful mind +to take disinterested notice of politics, and Rossetti was certainly not +hopeful." Morris was the very illuminator of hope. He was as hopeful a man +as ever set out with words and colours to bring back the innocent +splendours of the Golden Age. + + + + +XVI.--GEORGE MEREDITH + + +(1) THE EGOIST + +George Meredith, as his friends used to tell one with amusement, was a +vain man. Someone has related how, in his later years, he regarded it as a +matter of extreme importance that his visitors should sit in a position +from which they would see his face in profile. This is symbolic of his +attitude to the world. All his life he kept one side of his face hidden. +Mr. Ellis, who is the son of one of Meredith's cousins, now takes us for a +walk round Meredith's chair. No longer are we permitted to remain in +restful veneration of "a god and a Greek." Mr. Ellis invites us--and we +cannot refuse the invitation--to look at the other side of the face, to +consider the full face and the back of the head. He encourages us to feel +Meredith's bumps, and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel can +continue for five minutes the pretence of being an Olympian. He becomes a +human being under a criticizing thumb. We discover that he had a genius +for imposture, an egoist's temper, and a stomach that fluttered greedily +at the thought of dainty dishes. We find all those characteristics that +prevented him from remaining on good terms first with his father, next +with his wife, and then with his son. At first, when one reads the full +story of Meredith's estrangements through three generations, one has the +feeling that one is in the presence of an idol in ruins. Certainly, one +can never mistake Box Hill for Olympus again. On the other hand, let us +but have time to accustom ourselves to see Meredith in other aspects than +that which he himself chose to present to his contemporaries--let us begin +to see in him not so much one of the world's great comic censors, as one +of the world's great comic subjects, and we shall soon find ourselves back +among his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a new +passion of interest in the figure-in-the-background of the complex human +being who wrote them. + +For Meredith was his own great subject. Had he been an Olympian he could +not have written _The Egoist_ or _Harry Richmond_. He was an egoist and +pretender, coming of a line of egoists and pretenders, and his novels are +simply the confession and apology of such a person. Meredith concealed the +truth about himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in his +novels. He made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought he +was a cousin of Queen Victoria's or at least a son of Bulwer Lytton's. It +was only in _Evan Harrington_ that he told the essentials of the truth +about the tailor's shop in Portsmouth above which he was born. Outside his +art, nothing would persuade him to own up to the tailor's shop. Once, when +Mr. Clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, Meredith told him to put +"near Petersfield" as his place of birth. The fact that he was born at +Portsmouth was not publicly known, indeed, until some time after his +death. And not only was there the tailor's shop to live down, but on his +mother's side he was the grandson of a publican, Michael Macnamara. +Meredith liked to boast that his mother was "pure Irish"--an exaggeration, +according to Mr. Ellis--but he said nothing about Michael Macnamara of +"The Vine." At the same time it was the presence not of a bar sinister but +of a yardstick sinister in his coat of arms that chiefly filled him with +shame. When he was marrying his first wife he wrote "Esquire" in the +register as a description of his father's profession. There is no +evidence, apparently, as to whether Meredith himself ever served in the +tailor's shop after his father moved from Portsmouth to St. James's +Street, London. Nothing is known of his life during the two years after +his return from the Moravian school at Neuwied. As for his hapless father +(who had been trained as a medical student but went into the family +business in order to save it from ruin), he did not succeed in London any +better than in Portsmouth, and in 1849 he emigrated to South Africa and +opened a shop in Cape Town. It was while in Cape Town that he read +Meredith's ironical comedy on the family tailordom, _Evan Harrington; or +He Would be a Gentleman_. Naturally, he regarded the book (in which his +father and himself were two of the chief figures) with horror. It was as +though George had washed the family tape-measure in public. Augustus +Meredith, no less than George, blushed for the tape-measure daily. +Probably, Melchizedek Meredith, who begat Augustus, who begat George, had +also blushed for it in his day. As the "great Mel" in _Evan Harrington_ he +is an immortal figure of genteel imposture. His lordly practice of never +sending in a bill was hardly that of a man who accepted the conditions of +his trade. In _Evan Harrington_ three generations of a family's shame were +held up to ridicule. No wonder that Augustus Meredith, when he was +congratulated by a customer on his son's fame, turned away silently with a +look of pain. + +The comedy of the Meredith family springs, of course, not from the fact +that they were tailors, but that they pretended not to be tailors. Whether +Meredith himself was more ashamed of their tailoring or their +pretentiousness it is not easy to decide. Both _Evan Harrington_ and +_Harry Richmond_ are in a measure, comedies of imposture, in which the +vice of imposture is lashed as fiercely as Molière lashes the vice of +hypocrisy in _Tartuffe_. But it may well be that in life Meredith was a +snob, while in art he was a critic of snobs. Mr. Yeats, in his last book +of prose, put forward the suggestion that the artist reveals in his art +not his "self" (which is expressed in his life), but his "anti-self," a +complementary and even contrary self. He might find in the life and works +of Meredith some support for his not quite convincing theory. Meredith was +an egoist in his life, an anti-egoist in his books. He was pretentious in +his life, anti-pretentious in his books. He took up the attitude of the +wronged man in his life; he took up the case of the wronged woman in his +books. In short, his life was vehemently pro-George-Meredith, while his +books were vehemently anti-George-Meredith. He knew himself more +thoroughly, so far as we can discover from his books, than any other +English novelist has ever done. + +He knew himself comically, no doubt, rather than tragically. In _Modern +Love_ and _Richard Feverel_ he reveals himself as by no means a laughing +philosopher; but he strove to make fiction a vehicle of philosophic +laughter rather than of passionate sympathy. Were it not that a great +poetic imagination is always at work--in his prose, perhaps, even more +than in his verse--his genius might seem a little cold and +head-in-the-air. But his poet's joy in his characters saves his books from +inhumanity. As Diana Warwick steps out in the dawn she is not a mere +female human being undergoing critical dissection; she is bird-song and +the light of morning and the coming of the flowers. Meredith had as great +a capacity for rapture as for criticism and portraiture. He has expressed +in literature as no other novelist has done the rapturous vision of a boy +in love. He knew that a boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet. _Love +in a Valley_ is the incomparable music of a boy's ecstasy. Much of +_Richard Feverel_ is its incomparable prose. Rapture and criticism, +however, make a more practical combination in literature than in life. In +literature, criticism may add flavour to rapture; in life it is more than +likely to destroy the flavour. One is not surprised, then, to learn the +full story of Meredith's first unhappy marriage. A boy of twenty-one, he +married a widow of thirty, high-strung, hot and satirical like himself; +and after a depressing sequence of dead babies, followed by the birth of a +son who survived, she found life with a man of genius intolerable, and ran +away with a painter. Meredith apparently refused her request to go and see +her when she was dying. His imaginative sympathy enabled him to see the +woman's point of view in poetry and fiction; it does not seem to have +extended to his life. Thus, his biography is to a great extent a +"showing-up" of George Meredith. He proved as incapable of keeping the +affection of his son Arthur, as of keeping that of his wife. Much as he +loved the boy he had not been married again long before he allowed him to +become an alien presence. The boy felt he had a grievance. He +said--probably without justice--that his father kept him short of money. +Possibly he was jealous for his dead mother's sake. Further, though put +into business, he had literary ambitions--a prolific source of bitterness. +When Arthur died, Meredith did not even attend his funeral. + +Mr. Ellis has shown Meredith up not only as a husband and a father, but as +a hireling journalist and a lark-devouring gourmet. On the whole, the poet +who could eat larks in a pie seems to me to be a more shocking "great man" +than the Radical who could write Tory articles in a newspaper for pay. At +the same time, it is only fair to say that Meredith remains a sufficiently +splendid figure in. Mr. Ellis's book even when we know the worst about +him. Was his a generous genius? It was at least a prodigal one. As poet, +novelist, correspondent, and conversationalist, he leaves an impression of +beauty, wit, and power in a combination without a precedent. + + +(2) THE OLYMPIAN UNBENDS + +Lady Butcher's charming _Memoirs of George Meredith_ is admittedly written +in reply to Mr. Ellis's startling volume. It seems to me, however, that it +is a supplement rather than a reply. Mr. Ellis was not quite fair to +Meredith as a man, but he enabled us to understand the limitations which +were the conditions of Meredith's peculiar genius. Many readers were +shocked by the suggestion that characters, like countries, must have +boundaries. Where Mr. Ellis failed, in my opinion, was not in drawing +these as carefully as possible, but in the rather unfriendly glee with +which, one could not help feeling, he did so. It is also true that he +missed some of the grander mountain-peaks in Meredith's character. Lady +Butcher, on the other hand, is far less successful than Mr. Ellis in +drawing a portrait which makes us feel that now we understand something of +the events that gave birth to _The Egoist_ and _Richard Feverel_ and +_Modern Love_. Her book tells us nothing of the seed-time of genius, but +is a delightful account of its autumn. + +At the same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular fallacy +about Meredith. Meredith, like most all the wits, has been accused of +straining after image and epigram. Wit acts as an irritant on many people. +They forget the admirable saying of Coleridge: "Exclusive of the abstract +sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of +aphorisms; and the greatest of men is but an aphorism." They might as well +denounce a hedge for producing wild roses or a peacock for growing tail +feathers with pretty eyes as a witty writer for flowering into aphorism, +epigram and image. Even so artificial a writer as Wilde had not to labour +to be witty. It has often been laid to his charge that his work smells of +the lamp, whereas what is really the matter with it is that it smells of +the drawing-room gas. It was the result of too much "easy-goingness," not +of too much strain. As for Meredith, his wit was the wit of an abounding +imagination. Lady Butcher gives some delightful examples of it. He could +not see a baby in long robes without a witty image leaping into his mind. +He said he adored babies "in the comet stage." + +Of a lady of his acquaintance he said: "She is a woman who has never had +the first tadpole wriggle of an idea," adding, "She has a mind as clean +and white and flat as a plate: there are no eminences in it." Lady Butcher +tells of a picnic-party on Box Hill at which Meredith was one of the +company. "After our picnic ... it came on to rain, and as we drearily +trudged down the hill with cloaks and umbrellas, and burdened with our tea +baskets, Mr. Meredith, with a grimace, called out to a passing friend: +'Behold! the funeral of picnic!'" + +If Meredith is to some extent an obscure author, it is clear that this was +not due to his over-reaching himself in laborious efforts after wit. His +obscurity is not that of a man straining after expression, but the +obscurity of a man deliberately hiding something. Meredith believed in +being as mysterious as an oracle. He assumed the Olympian manner, and +objected to being mistaken for a frequenter of the market-place. He was +impatient of ordinary human witlessness, and spoke to his fellows, not as +man to man, but as Apollo from his seat. This was probably a result of the +fact that his mind marched much too fast for the ordinary man to keep pace +with it. "How I leaped through leagues of thought when I could walk!" he +once said when he had lost the power of his legs. Such buoyancy of the +imagination and intellect separated him more and more from a world in +which most of the athletics are muscular, not mental; and he began to take +a malicious pleasure in exaggerating the difference that already existed +between himself and ordinary mortals. He dressed his genius in a +mannerism, and, as he leaped through his leagues of thought, the flying +skirts of his mannerism were all that the average reader panting +desperately after him could see. Shakespeare and the greatest men of +genius are human enough to wait for us, and give us time to recover our +breath. Meredith, however, was a proud man, and a mocker. + +In the ordinary affairs of life, Lady Butcher tells us, he was so proud +that it was difficult to give him even trifling gifts. "I remember," she +says, "bringing him two silver flat poached-egg spoons from Norway, and he +implored me to take them back with me to London, and looked much relieved +when I consented to do so!" He would always "prefer to bestow rather than +to accept gifts." Lady Butcher, replying to the charge that he was +ungrateful, suggests that "no one should expect an eagle to be grateful." +But then, neither can one love an eagle, and one would like to be able to +love the author of _Love in a Valley_ and _Richard Feverel_. Meredith was +too keenly aware what an eagle he was. Speaking of the reviewers who had +attacked him, he said: "They have always been abusing me. I have been +observing them. It is the crueller process." It is quite true, but it was +a superior person who said it. + +Meredith, however, among his friends and among the young, loses this air +of superiority, and becomes something of a radiant romp as well as an +Olympian. Lady Butcher's first meeting with him took place when she was a +girl of thirteen. She was going up Box Hill to see the sun rise with a +sixteen-year-old cousin, when the latter said: "I know a madman who lives +on Box Hill. He's quite mad, but very amusing; he likes walks and +sunrises. Let's go and shout him up!" It does Meredith credit that he got +out of bed and joined them, "his nightshirt thrust into brown trousers." +Even when the small girl insisted on "reading aloud to him one of the +hymns from Keble's _Christian Year_," he did not, as the saying is, turn a +hair. His attachment to his daughter Mariette--his "dearie girl," as he +spoke of her with unaffected softness of phrase--also helps one to +realize that he was not all Olympian. Meredith, the condemner of the +"guarded life," was humanly nervous in guarding his own little daughter. +"He would never allow Mariette to travel alone, even the very short +distance by train from Box Hill to Ewell; a maid had always to be sent +with her or to fetch her. He never allowed her to walk by herself." One +likes Meredith the better for Lady Butcher's picture of him as a "harassed +father." + +One likes him, too, as he converses with his dogs, and for his +thoughtfulness in giving some of his MSS., including that of _Richard +Feverel_, to Frank Cole, his gardener, in the hope that "some day the +gardener would be able to sell them" and so get some reward for his +devotion. As to the underground passages in Meredith's life and character, +Lady Butcher is not concerned with them. She writes of him merely as she +knew him. Her book is a friend's tribute, though not a blind tribute. It +may not be effective as an argument against those who are bent on +disparaging the greatest lyrical wit in modern English literature. But it +will be welcomed by those for whom Meredith's genius is still a bubbling +spring of good sense and delight. + + +(3) THE ANGLO-IRISH ASPECT + +Meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel than _Celt and Saxon_. +It is only a fragment of a book. It is so much a series of essays and +sharp character-sketches, however, that the untimely fall of the curtain +does not greatly trouble us. There is no excitement of plot, no gripping +anxiety as to whether this or that pair of lovers will ever reach the +altar. Philip O'Donnell and Patrick, his devoted brother, and their +caricature relative, the middle-aged Captain Con, all interest us as they +abet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as they discuss +their native country or the temperament of the country which oppresses it; +but they are chiefly desirable as performers in an Anglo-Irish fantasia, a +Meredithian piece of comic music, with various national anthems, English, +Welsh, and Irish, running through and across it in all manner of guises, +and producing all manner of agreeable disharmonies. + +In the beginning we have Patrick O'Donnell, an enthusiast, a Celt, a +Catholic, setting out for the English mansion of the father of Adiante +Adister to find if the girl cannot be pleaded over to reconsider her +refusal of his brother Philip. He arrives in the midst of turmoil in the +house, the cause of it being a hasty marriage which Adiante had +ambitiously contracted with a hook-nosed foreign prince. Patrick, a +broken-hearted proxy, successfully begs her family for a miniature of the +girl to take back to his brother, but he falls so deeply in love with her +on seeing the portrait that his loyalty to Philip almost wavers, when the +latter carelessly asks him to leave the miniature on a more or less public +table instead of taking it off to the solitude of his own room for a long +vigil of adoration. + +In the rest of the story we have an account of the brothers in the London +house of Captain Con, the happy husband married to a stark English wife of +mechanical propriety--a rebellious husband, too, when in the sociable +atmosphere of his own upper room, amid the blackened clay pipes and the +friendly fumes of whiskey, he sings her praises, while at the same time +full of grotesque and whimsical criticisms of all those things, Saxon and +more widely human, for which she stands. There is a touch of farce in the +relations of these two, aptly symbolized by the bell which rings for +Captain Con, and hastens him away from his midnight eloquence with Patrick +and Philip. "He groaned, 'I must go. I haven't heard the tinkler for +months. It signifies she's cold in her bed. The thing called circulation +is unknown to her save by the aid of outward application, and I'm the +warming-pan, as legitimately as I should be, I'm her husband and her +Harvey in one.'" + +It is in the house of Captain Con, it should be added, that Philip and +Patrick meet Jane Mattock, the Saxon woman; and the story as we have it +ends with Philip invalided home from service in India, and Jane, a victim +of love, catching "glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious, +rose-enfolded, foreign." There are nearly three hundred pages of it +altogether, some of them as fantastic and lyrical as any that Meredith +ever wrote. + +As one reads _Celt and Saxon_, however, one seems to get an inkling of the +reason why Meredith has so often been set down as an obscure author. It is +not entirely that he is given to using imagery as the language of +explanation--a subtle and personal sort of hieroglyphics. It is chiefly, I +think, because there is so little direct painting of men and women in his +books. Despite his lyricism, he had something of an X-ray's imagination. +The details of the modelling of a face, the interpreting lines and looks, +did not fix themselves with preciseness on his vision enabling him to pass +them on to us with the surface reality we generally demand in prose +fiction. + +It is as though he painted some of his men and women upon air: they are +elusive for all we know of their mental and spiritual processes. Even +though he is at pains to tell us that Diana's hair is dark, we do not at +once accept the fact but are at liberty to go on believing she is a fair +woman, for he himself was general rather than insistently particular in +his vision of such matters. In the present book, again, we have a glimpse +of Adiante in her miniature--"this lighted face, with the dark raised eyes +and abounding auburn tresses, where the contrast of colours was in itself +thrilling," "the light above beauty distinguishing its noble classic lines +and the energy of radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the +eyes"--and, despite the details mentioned, the result is to give us only +the lyric aura of the woman where we wanted a design. + +Ultimately, these women of Meredith's become intensely real to us--the +most real women, I think, in English fiction--but, before we come to +handshaking terms with them, we have sometimes to go to them over bogs and +rocky places with the sun in our eyes. Before this, physically, they are +apt to be exquisite parts of a landscape, sharers of a lyric beauty with +the cherry-trees and the purple crocuses. + +Coming to the substance of the book--the glance from many sides at the +Irish and English temperaments--we find Meredith extremely penetrating in +his criticism of John Bullishness, but something of a foreigner in his +study of the Irish character. The son of an Irishwoman, he chose an +Irishwoman as his most conquering heroine, but he writes of the race as +one who has known the men and women of it entirely, or almost entirely, in +an English setting--a setting, in other words, which shows up their +strangeness and any surface eccentricities they may have, but does not +give us an ordinary human sense of them. Captain Con is vital, because +Meredith imagined him vitally, but when all is said and done, he is +largely a stage-Irishman, winking over his whiskey that has paid no +excise--a better-born relative of Captain Costigan. + +Politically, _Celt and Saxon_ seems to be a plea for Home Rule--Home Rule, +with a view towards a "consolidation of the union." Its diagnosis of the +Irish difficulty is one which has long been popular with many intellectual +men on this side of the Irish Sea. Meredith sees, as the roots of the +trouble, misunderstanding, want of imagination, want of sympathy. It has +always seemed curious to me that intelligent men could persuade themselves +that Ireland was chiefly suffering from want of understanding and want of +sympathy on the part of England, when all the time her only ailment has +been want of liberty. To adapt the organ-grinder's motto, + + Sympathy without relief + Is like mustard without beef. + +As a matter of fact, Meredith realized this, and was a friend to many +Irish national movements from the Home Rule struggle down to the Gaelic +League, to the latter of which the Irish part of him sent a subscription a +year or two ago. He saw things from the point of view of an Imperial +Liberal idealist, however, not of a Nationalist. In the result, he did not +know the every-day and traditional setting of Irish life sufficiently well +to give us an Irish Nationalist central figure as winning and heroic, even +in his extravagances, as, say, the patriotic Englishman, Neville +Beauchamp. + +At the same time, one must be thankful for a book so obviously the work of +a great abundant mind--a mind giving out its criticisms like flutters of +birds--a heroic intellect always in the service of an ideal liberty, +courage, and gracious manners--a characteristically island brain, that was +yet not insular. + + + + +XVII--OSCAR WILDE + + +Oscar Wilde is a writer whom one must see through in order to appreciate. +One must smash the idol in order to preserve the god. If Mr. Ransome's +estimate of Wilde in his clever and interesting and seriously-written book +is a little unsatisfactory, it is partly because he is not enough of an +iconoclast. He has not realized with sufficient clearness that, while +Wilde belonged to the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better than +second-rate as anything else. Consequently, it is not Wilde the beau of +literature who dominates his book. Rather, it is Wilde the +egoistic,--æsthetic philosopher, and Wilde the imaginative artist. + +This is, of course, as Wilde would have liked it to be. For, as Mr. +Ransome says, "though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, he +preferred to think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams." +Indeed, so much was this so, that it is even suggested that, if _Salomé_ +had not been censored, the social comedies might never have been written. +"It is possible," observes Mr. Ransome, "that we owe _The Importance of +Being Earnest_ to the fact that the Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from +playing _Salomé_ at the Palace Theatre." If this conjecture is right, one +can never think quite so unkindly of the Censor again, for in _The +Importance of Being Earnest_, and in it alone, Wilde achieved a work of +supreme genius in its kind. + +It is as lightly-built as a house of cards, a frail edifice of laughter +for laughter's sake. Or you might say that, in the literature of farce, it +has a place as a "dainty rogue in porcelain." It is even lighter and more +fragile than that. It is a bubble, or a flight of bubbles. It is the very +ecstasy of levity. As we listen to Lady Bracknell discussing the +possibility of parting with her daughter to a man who had been "born, or +at least bred, in a handbag," or as we watch Jack and Algernon wrangling +over the propriety of eating muffins in an hour of gloom, we seem somehow +to be caught up and to sail through an exhilarating mid-air of nonsense. +Some people will contend that Wilde's laughter is always the laughter not +of the open air but of the salon. But there is a spontaneity in the +laughter of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ that seems to me to +associate it with running water and the sap rising in the green field. + +It is when he begins to take Wilde seriously as a serious writer that one +quarrels with Mr. Ransome. Wilde was much better at showing off than at +revealing himself, and, as the comedy of showing off is much more +delightful than the solemn vanity of it, he was naturally happiest as a +wit and persifleur. On his serious side he ranks, not as an original +artist, but as a popularizer--the most accomplished popularizer, perhaps, +in English literature. He popularized William Morris, both his domestic +interiors and his Utopias, in the æsthetic lectures and in _The Soul of +Man under Socialism_--a wonderful pamphlet, the secret of the world-wide +fame of which Mr. Ransome curiously misses. He popularized the cloistral +æstheticism of Pater and the cultural egoism of Goethe in _Intentions_ and +elsewhere. In _Salomé_ he popularized the gorgeous processionals of +ornamental sentences upon which Flaubert had expended not the least +marvellous portion of his genius. + +Into an age that guarded respectability more closely than virtue and +ridiculed beauty because it paid no dividend came Wilde, the assailant of +even the most respectable ugliness, parrying the mockery of the meat tea +with a mockery that sparkled like wine. Lighting upon a world that +advertised commercial wares, he set himself to advertise art with, as +heroic an extravagance, and who knows how much his puce velvet +knee-breeches may have done to make the British public aware of the +genius, say, of Walter Pater? Not that Wilde was not a finished egoist, +using the arts and the authors to advertise himself rather than himself to +advertise them. But the time-spirit contrived that the arts and the +authors should benefit by his outrageous breeches. + +It is in the relation of a great popularizer, then--a popularizer who, for +a new thing, was not also a vulgarizer--that Wilde seems to me to stand to +his age. What, then, of Mr. Ransome's estimate of _Salomé_? That it is a +fascinating play no lover of the pageantry of words can deny. But of what +quality is this fascination? It is, when all is said and done, the +fascination of the lust of painted faces. Here we have no tragedy, but a +mixing of degenerate philtres. Mr. Ransome hears "the beating of the wings +of the angel of death" in the play; but that seems to me to be exactly the +atmosphere that Wilde fails to create. As the curtain falls on the broken +body of _Salomé_ one has a sick feeling, as though one had been present +where vermin were being crushed. There is not a hint of the elation, the +liberation, of real tragedy. The whole thing is simply a wonderful piece +of coloured sensationalism. And even if we turn to the costly sentences of +the play, do we not find that, while in his choice of colour and jewel and +design Flaubert wrought in language like a skilled artificer, Wilde, in +his treatment of words, was more like a lavish amateur about town +displaying his collection of splendid gems? + +Wilde speaks of himself in _De Profundis_ as a lord of language. Of +course, he was just the opposite. Language was a vice with him. He took to +it as a man might take to drink. He was addicted rather than devoted to +language. He had a passion for it, but too little sense of responsibility +towards it, and, in his choice of beautiful words, we are always conscious +of the indolence as well as the extravagance of the man of pleasure. How +beautifully, with what facility of beauty, he could use words, everyone +knows who has read his brief _Endymion_ (to name one of the poems), and +the many hyacinthine passages in _Intentions_. But when one is anxious to +see the man himself as in _De Profundis_--that book of a soul imprisoned +in embroidered sophistries--one feels that this cloak of strange words is +no better than a curse. + +If Wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its bejewelled +slave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because there is so much +laughter as well as language in _Intentions_ that I am inclined to agree +with Mr. Ransome that _Intentions_ is "that one of Wilde's books that most +nearly represents him." Even here, however, Mr. Ransome will insist on +taking Wilde far too seriously. For instance, he tells us that "his +paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths." How horrified Wilde would have been +to hear him say so! His paradoxes are a good deal more than truths--or a +good deal less. They helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many of +them were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion. Mr. Ransome's +attitude on the question of Wilde's sincerity seems to me as impossible as +his attitude in regard to the paradoxes. He draws up a code of artistic +sincerity which might serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of which +every great artist is a living denial. But there is no room to go into +that. Disagree as we may with many of Mr. Ransome's conclusions, we must +be grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and ambitious study of +one of the most brilliant personalities and wits, though by no means one +of the most brilliant imaginative artists, of the nineteenth century. + + + + +XVIII.--TWO ENGLISH CRITICS + + +(1) MR. SAINTSBURY + +Mr. Saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift of sending +the reader post-haste to the works he criticizes. His _Peace of the +Augustans_ is an almost irresistible incitement to go and forget the +present world among the poets and novelists and biographers and +letter-writers of the eighteenth century. His enthusiasm weaves spells +about even the least of them. He does not merely remind us of the genius +of Pope and Swift, of Fielding and Johnson and Walpole. He also summons us +to Armory's _John Buncle_ and to the Reverend Richard Graves's _Spiritual +Quixote_ as to a feast. Of the latter novel he declares that "for a book +that is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being +ponderous, _The Spiritual Quixote_ may, perhaps, be commended above all +its predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great Four +themselves." That is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scattered +through _The Peace of the Augustans_. After reading the book, one can +scarcely resist the temptation to spend an evening over Young's _Night +Thoughts_ and one will be almost more likely to turn to Prior than to +Shakespeare himself--Prior who, "with the eternal and almost unnecessary +exception of Shakespeare ... is about the first to bring out the true +English humour which involves sentiment and romance, which laughs gently +at its own, tears, and has more than half a tear for its own +laughter"--Prior, of whom it is further written that "no one, except +Thackeray, has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit of +_Ecclesiastes_." It does not matter that in a later chapter of the book it +is _Rasselas_ which is put with _Ecclesiastes_, and, after _Rasselas_, +_The Vanity of Human Wishes_. One does not go to Mr. Saintsbury as an +inspector of literary weights and measures. His estimates of authors are +the impressions of a man talking in a hurry, and his method is the method +of exaggeration rather than of precise statement. How deficient he is in +the sense of proportion may be judged from the fact that he devotes +slightly more space to Collins than to Pope, unless the pages in which he +assails "Grub Street" as a malicious invention of Pope's are to be counted +to the credit of the latter. But Mr. Saintsbury's book is not so much a +thorough and balanced survey of eighteenth-century literature as a +confession, an almost garrulous monologue on the delights of that +literature. How pleasant and unexpected it is to see a critic in his +seventies as incautious, as pugnacious, as boisterous as an undergraduate! +It is seldom that we find the apostolic spirit of youth living in the same +breast with the riches of experience and memory, as we do in the present +book. + +One of the great attractions of the eighteenth century for the modern +world is that, while it is safely set at an historical distance from us, +it is, at the same time, brought within range of our everyday interests. +It is not merely that about the beginning of it men began to write and +talk according to the simple rules of modern times. It is rather that +about this time the man of letters emerges from the mists of legend and +becomes as real as one's uncle in his daily passions and his train of +little interests. One has not to reconstruct the lives of Swift and Pope +from a handful of myths and references in legal documents. There is no +room for anything akin to Baconianism in their regard. They live in a +thousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well be an +agnostic about Mr. Asquith as about either of them. Pope was a champion +liar, and Swift spun mystifications about himself. But, in spite of lies +and Mystifications and gossip, they are both as real to us as if we met +them walking down the Strand. One could not easily imagine Shakespeare +walking down the Strand. The Strand would have to be rebuilt, and the rest +of us would have to put on fancy dress in order to receive him. But though +Swift and Pope lived in a century of wig and powder and in a London +strangely unlike the London of to-day, we do not feel that similar +preparations would be needed in their case. If Swift came back, one can +without difficulty imagine him pamphleteering about war as though he had +merely been asleep for a couple of centuries; and Pope, we may be sure, +would resume, without too great perplexity, his attack on the egoists and +dunces of the world of letters. But Shakespeare's would be a return from +legendary Elysian fields. + +Hence Mr. Saintsbury may justly hope that his summons to the modern random +reader, no less than to the scholar, to go and enjoy himself among the +writers of the eighteenth century will not fall on entirely deaf ears. At +the same time, it is only fair to warn the general reader not to follow +Mr. Saintsbury's recommendations and opinions too blindly. He will do well +to take the author's advice and read Pope, but he will do very ill to take +the author's advice as regards what in Pope is best worth reading. Mr. +Saintsbury speaks with respect, for instance, of the _Elegy on an +Unfortunate Lady_--an insincere piece of tombstone rhetoric. "There are +some," he declared in a footnote, "to whom this singular piece is Pope's +strongest atonement, both as poet and man, for his faults as both." It +seems to me to be a poem which reveals Pope's faults as a poet, while of +Pope the man it tells us simply nothing. It has none of Pope's wit, none +of his epigrammatic characterization, none of his bewigged and powdered +fancies, none of his malicious self-revelation. Almost the only +interesting thing about it is the notes the critics have written on it, +discussing whether the lady ever lived, and, if so, whether she was a Miss +Wainsbury or a lady of title, whether she was beautiful or deformed, +whether she was in love with Pope or the Duke of Buckingham or the Duc de +Berry, whether Pope was in love with her, or even knew her, or whether she +killed herself with a sword or by hanging herself. One can find plenty of +"rest and refreshment" among the conjectures of the commentators, but in +the verse itself one can find little but a good example of the technique +of the rhymed couplet. But Mr. Saintsbury evidently loves the heroic +couplet for itself alone. The only long example of Pope's verse which he +quotes is merely ding-dong, and might have been written by any capable +imitator of the poet later in the century. Surely, if his contention is +true that Pope's reputation as a poet is now lower than it ought to be, he +ought to have quoted something from the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ or _The +Rape of the Lock_, or even _The Essay on Man_. The two first are almost +flawless masterpieces. Here Pope suddenly becomes a star. Here he gilds +his age and his passions with wit and fancy; he ceases to be a mere rhymed +moralist, a mechanician of metre. Mr. Saintsbury, I regret to see, +contends that the first version of _The Rape of the Lock_ is the best. One +can hardly forgive this throwing overboard of the toilet and the fairies +which Pope added in the later edition. We may admit that the gnomes are a +less happy invention than the sylphs, and that their introduction lets the +poem down from its level of magic illusion. But in the second telling the +poem is an infinitely richer and more peopled thing. Had we only known the +first version, we should, no doubt, have felt with Addison that it was +madness to tamper with such exquisite perfection. But Pope, who foolishly +attributed Addison's advice to envy, proved that Addison was wrong. His +revision of _The Rape of the Lock_ is one of the few magnificently +successful examples in literature of painting the lily. + +One differs from Mr. Saintsbury, however, less in liking a different +garden from his than in liking a different seat in the same garden. One +who is familiar as he is with all the literature he discusses in the +present volume is bound to indulge all manner of preferences, whims and +even eccentricities. An instance of Mr. Saintsbury's whims is his +complaint that the eighteenth-century essays are almost always reprinted +only in selections and without the advertisements that appeared with them +on their first publication. He is impatient of J. R. Green's dismissal of +the periodical essayist as a "mass of rubbish," and he demands his +eighteenth-century essayists in full, advertisements and all. "Here," he +insists, "these things fringe and vignette the text in the most +appropriate manner, and so set off the quaint variety and the +other-worldly character as nothing else could do." Is not the author's +contention, however, as to the great loss the Addisonian essay suffers +when isolated from its context a severe criticism on that essay as +literature? The man of letters likes to read from a complete _Spectator_ +as he does from a complete Wordsworth. At the same time, the best of +Addison, as of Wordsworth, can stand on its own feet in an anthology, and +this is the final proof of its literary excellence. The taste for +eighteenth century advertisements is, after all, only literary +antiquarianism--a delightful indulgence, a by-path, but hardly necessary +to the enjoyment of Addison's genius. + +But it is neither Pope nor Addison who is ultimately Mr. Saintsbury's idol +among the poets and prose-writers of the eighteenth century. His idol of +idols is Swift, and next to him he seems most wholeheartedly to love and +admire Dr. Johnson and Fielding. He makes no bones about confessing his +preference of Swift to Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière. Swift does +not at once fascinate and cold-shoulder him as he does to so many people. +Mr. Saintsbury glorifies _Gulliver_, and wisely so, right down to the last +word about the Houyhnhnms, and he demands for the _Journal to Stella_ +recognition as "the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous +and absolutely genuine autobiography." His ultimate burst of appreciation +is a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called +Saintsburyese--not because of any obscurity in it, but because of its +oddity of phrase and metaphor: + + Swift never wearies, for, as Bossuet said of human passion + generally, there is in this greatest master of one of its most + terrible forms, _quelque chose d'infini_, and the refreshment which + he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest froth of pure + nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger to the most drastic + restoratives--the very strychnine and capsicum of irony. + +But what, above all, attracts Mr. Saintsbury in Swift, Fielding and +Johnson is their eminent manliness. He is an enthusiast within limits for +the genius of Sterne and the genius of Horace Walpole. But he loves them +in a grudging way. He is disgusted with their lack of muscle. He admits of +the characters in _Tristrom Shandy_ that "they are ... much more +intrinsically true to life than many, if not almost all, the characters of +Dickens," but he is too greatly shocked by Sterne's humour to be just to +his work as a whole. It is the same with Walpole's letters. Mr. Saintsbury +will heap sentence after sentence of praise upon them, till one would +imagine they were his favourite eighteenth-century literature. He even +defends Walpole's character against Macaulay, but in the result he damns +him with faint praise quite as effectively as Macaulay did. That he has an +enviable appetite for Walpole's letters is shown by the fact that, in +speaking of Mrs. Toynbee's huge sixteen-volume edition of them, he +observes that "even a single reading of it will supply the evening +requirements of a man who does not go to bed very late, and has learnt the +last lesson of intellectual as of other enjoyment--to enjoy _slowly_--for +nearer a month than a week, and perhaps for longer still." The man who can +get through Horace Walpole in a month of evenings without sitting up late +seems to me to be endowed not only with an avarice of reading, but with an +avarice of Walpole. But, in spite of this, Mr. Saintsbury does not seem to +like his author. His ideal author is one of whom he can say, as he does of +Johnson, that he is "one of the greatest of Englishmen, one of the +greatest men of letters, and one of the greatest of _men_." One of his +complaints against Gray is that, though he liked _Joseph Andrews_, he "had +apparently not enough manliness to see some of Fielding's real merits." As +for Fielding, Mr. Saintsbury's verdict is summed up in Dryden's praise of +Chaucer. "Here is God's plenty." In _Tom Jones_ he contends that Fielding +"puts the whole plant of the pleasure-giver in motion, as no +novel-writer--not even Cervantes--had ever done before." For myself, I +doubt whether the exaltation of Fielding has not become too much a matter +of orthodoxy in recent years. Compare him with Swift, and he is +long-winded in his sentences. Compare him with Sterne, and his characters +are mechanical. Compare him with Dickens, and he reaches none of the +depths, either of laughter or of sadness. This is not to question the +genius of Fielding's vivid and critical picture of eighteenth-century +manners and morals. It is merely to put a drag on the wheel of Mr +Saintsbury's galloping enthusiasm. + +But, however one may quarrel with it, _The Peace of the Augustans_ is a +book to read with delight--an eccentric book, an extravagant book, a +grumpy book, but a book of rare and amazing enthusiasm for good +literature. Mr. Saintsbury's constant jibes at the present age, as though +no one had ever been unmanly enough to make a joke before Mr. Shaw, become +amusing in the end like Dr. Johnson's rudenesses. And Mr. Saintsbury's one +attempt to criticize contemporary fiction--where he speaks of _Sinister +Street_ in the same breath with _Waverley_ and _Pride and Prejudice_--is +both amusing and rather appalling. But, in spite of his attitude to his +own times, one could not ask for more genial company on going on a +pilgrimage among the Augustans. Mr. Saintsbury has in this book written +the most irresistible advertisement of eighteenth-century literature that +has been published for many years. + + +(2) MR. GOSSE + +Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are the two kings of Sparta among English +critics of to-day. They stand preeminent among those of our contemporaries +who have served literature in the capacity of law-givers during the past +fifty years. I do not suggest that they are better critics than Mr. +Birrell or Sir Sidney Colvin or the late Sir E.T. Cook. But none of these +three was ever a professional and whole-time critic, as Mr. Gosse and Mr. +Saintsbury are. One thinks of the latter primarily as the authors of books +about books, though Mr. Gosse is a poet and biographer as well, and Mr. +Saintsbury, it is said, once dreamed of writing a history of wine. One +might say of Mr. Gosse that even in his critical work he writes largely as +a poet and biographer, while Mr. Saintsbury writes of literature as though +he were writing a history of wine. Mr. Saintsbury seeks in literature, +above all things, exhilarating qualities. He can read almost anything and +in any language, provided it is not non-intoxicating. He has a good head, +and it cannot be said that he ever allows an author to go to it. But the +authors whom he has collected in his wonderful cellar unquestionably make +him merry. In his books he always seems to be pressing on us "another +glass of Jane Austen," or "just a thimbleful of Pope," or "a drop of '42 +Tennyson." No other critic of literature writes with the garrulous gusto +of a boon-companion as Mr. Saintsbury does. In our youth, when we demand +style as well as gusto, we condemn him on account of his atrocious +English. As we grow older, we think of his English merely as a rather +eccentric sort of coat, and we begin to recognize that geniality such as +his is a part of critical genius. True, he is not over-genial to new +authors. He regards them as he might 1916 claret. Perhaps he is right. +Authors undoubtedly get mellower with age. Even great poetry is, we are +told, a little crude to the taste till it has stood for a few seasons. + +Mr. Gosse is at once more grave and more deferential in his treatment of +great authors. One cannot imagine Mr. Saintsbury speaking in a hushed +voice before Shakespeare himself. One can almost hear him saying, "Hullo, +Shakespeare!" To Mr. Gosse, however, literature is an almost sacred +subject. He glows in its presence. He is more lyrical than Mr. Saintsbury, +more imaginative and more eloquent. His short history of English +literature is a book that fills a young head with enthusiasm. He writes as +a servant of the great tradition. He is a Whig, where Mr. Saintsbury is an +heretical old Jacobite. He is, however, saved from a professorial +earnestness by his sharp talent for portraiture. Mr. Gosse's judgments may +or may not last: his portraits certainly will. It is to be hoped that he +will one day write his reminiscences. Such a book would, we feel sure, be +among the great books of portraiture in the history of English literature. +He has already set Patmore and Swinburne before us in comic reality, and +who can forget the grotesque figure of Hans Andersen, sketched in a few +lines though it is, in _Two Visits to Denmark_? It may be replied that Mr. +Gosse has already given us the best of his reminiscences in half a dozen +books of essay and biography. Even so, there were probably many things +which it was not expedient to tell ten or twenty years ago, but which +might well be related for the sake of truth and entertainment to-day. Mr. +Gosse in the past has usually told the truth about authors with the +gentleness of a modern dentist extracting a tooth. He keeps up a steady +conversation of praise while doing the damage. The truth is out before you +know. One becomes suddenly aware that the author has ceased to be as +coldly perfect as a tailor's model, and is a queer-looking creature with a +gap in his jaw. It is possible that the author, were he alive, would feel +furious, as a child sometimes feels with the dentist. None the less, Mr. +Gosse has done him a service. The man who extracts a truth is as much to +be commended as the man who extracts a tooth. It is not the function of +the biographer any more than it is that of a dentist to prettify his +subject. Each is an enemy of decay, a furtherer of life. There is such a +thing as painless biography, but it is the work of quacks. Mr. Gosse is +one of those honest dentists who reassure you by allowing it to hurt you +"just a little." + +This gift for telling the truth is no small achievement in a man of +letters. Literature is a broom that sweeps lies out of the mind, and +fortunate is the man who wields it. Unhappily, while Mr. Gosse is daring +in portraiture, he is the reverse in comment. In comment, as his writings +on the war showed, he will fall in with the cant of the times. He can see +through the cant of yesterday with a sparkle in his eyes, but he is less +critical of the cant of to-day. He is at least fond of throwing out saving +clauses, as when, writing of Mr. Sassoon's verse, he says: "His temper is +not altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments must tend to relax the +effort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when conducted +with so much honesty and courage." Mr. Gosse again writes out of the +official rather than the imaginative mind when, speaking of the war poets, +he observes: + + It was only proper that the earliest of all should be the Poet + Laureate's address to England, ending with the prophecy: + + Much suffering shall cleanse thee! + But thou through the flood + Shall win to salvation, + To Beauty through blood. + +Had a writer of the age of Charles II. written a verse like that, Mr. +Gosse's chortles would have disturbed the somnolent peace of the House of +Peers. Even if it had been written in the time of Albert the Good, he +would have rent it with the destructive dagger of a phrase. As it is, one +is not sure that Mr. Gosse regards this appalling scrap from a bad hymnal +as funny. One hopes that he quoted it with malicious intention. But did +he? Was it not Mr. Gosse who early in the war glorified the blood that was +being shed as a cleansing stream of Condy's Fluid? The truth is, apart +from his thoughts about literature, Mr. Gosse thinks much as the +leader-writers tell him. He is sensitive to beauty of style and to +idiosyncrasy of character, but he lacks philosophy and that tragic sense +that gives the deepest sympathy. That, we fancy, is why we would rather +read him on Catherine Trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings, than on +any subject connected with the war. + +Two of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Gosse's _Diversions of a Man +of Letters_ are the essay on Catherine Trotter and that on "the message of +the Wartons." Here he is on ground on which there is no leader-writer to +take him by the hand and guide him into saying "the right thing." He +writes as a disinterested scholar and an entertainer. He forgets the war +and is amused. How many readers are there in England who know that +Catherine Trotter "published in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr. +Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox," and that +"she was then fourteen years of age"? How many know even that she wrote a +blank-verse tragedy in five acts, called _Agnes de Cestro_, and had it +produced at Drury Lane at the age of sixteen? At the age of nineteen she +was the friend of Congreve, and was addressed by Farquhar as "one of the +fairest of her sex and the best judge." By the age of twenty-five, +however, she had apparently written herself out, so far as the stage was +concerned, and after her tragedy, _The Revolution in Sweden_, the theatre +knows her no more. Though described as "the Sappho of Scotland" by the +Queen of Prussia, and by the Duke of Marlborough as "the wisest virgin I +ever knew," her fame did not last even as long as her life. She married a +clergyman, wrote on philosophy and religion, and lived till seventy. Her +later writings, according to Mr. Gosse, "are so dull that merely to think +of them brings tears into one's eyes." Her husband, who was a bit of a +Jacobite, lost his money on account of his opinions, even though--"a +perfect gentleman at heart--'he always prayed for the King and Royal +Family by name.'" "Meanwhile," writes Mr. Gosse, "to uplift his spirits in +this dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the +Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print. He reminds +us of Dr. Primrose in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and, like him, Mr. +Cockburn probably had strong views on the Whistonian doctrine." Altogether +the essay on Catherine Trotter is an admirable example of Mr. Gosse in a +playful mood. + +The study of Joseph and Thomas Warton as "two pioneers of romanticism" is +more serious in purpose, and is a scholarly attempt to discover the first +symptoms of romanticism in eighteenth-century literature. Mr. Gosse finds +in _The Enthusiast_, written by Joseph Warton at the age of eighteen, "the +earliest expression of full revolt against the classical attitude which +had been sovereign in all European literature for nearly a century." He +does not pretend that it is a good poem, but "here, for the first time, we +find unwaveringly emphasized and repeated what was entirely new in +literature, the essence of romantic hysteria." It is in Joseph Warton, +according to Mr. Gosse, that we first meet with "the individualist +attitude to nature." Readers of Horace Walpole's letters, however, will +remember still earlier examples of the romantic attitude to nature. But +these were not published for many years afterwards. + +The other essays in the book range from the charm of Sterne to the +vivacity of Lady Dorothy Nevill, from a eulogy of Poe to a discussion of +Disraeli as a novelist. The variety, the scholarship, the portraiture of +the book make it a pleasure to read; and, even when Mr. Gosse flatters in +his portraits, his sense of truth impels him to draw the features +correctly, so that the facts break through the praise. The truth is Mr. +Gosse is always doing his best to balance the pleasure of saying the best +with the pleasure of saying the worst. His books are all the more vital +because they bear the stamp of an appreciative and mildly cruel +personality. + + + + +XIX.--AN AMERICAN CRITIC: PROFESSOR IRVING BABBITT + + +It is rather odd that two of the ablest American critics should also be +two of the most unsparing enemies of romanticism in literature. Professor +Babbitt and Mr. Paul Elmer More cannot get over the French Revolution. +They seem to think that the rights of man have poisoned literature. One +suspects that they have their doubts even about the American Revolution; +for there, too, the rights of man were asserted against the lust of power. +It is only fair to Professor Babbitt to say that he does not defend the +lust of power. On the contrary, he damns it, and explains it as the +logical and almost inevitable outcome of the rights of man! The steps of +the process by which the change is effected are these. First, we have the +Rousseaus asserting that the natural man is essentially good, but that he +has been depraved by an artificial social system imposed on him from +without. Instead of the quarrel between good and evil in his breast, they +see only the quarrel between the innate good in man and his evil +environment. They hold that all will be well if only he is set free--if +his genius or natural impulses are liberated. "Rousseauism is ... an +emancipation of impulse--especially of the impulse of sex." It is a gospel +of egoism and leaves little room for conscience. Hence it makes men +mengalomaniacs, and the lust for dominion is given its head no less than +the lust of the flesh. "In the absence of ethical discipline," writes +Professor Babbitt in _Rousseau and Romanticism_, "the lust for knowledge +and the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, compared +with the third main lust of human nature--the lust for power. Hence the +emergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac." +In the result it appears that not only Rousseau and Hugo, but Wordsworth, +Keats, and Shelley, helped to bring about the European War! Had there been +no wars, no tyrants, and no lascivious men before Rousseau, one would have +been ready to take Professor Babbitt's indictment more seriously. + +Professor Babbitt, however, has a serious philosophic idea at the back of +all he says. He believes that man at his noblest lives the life of +obligation rather than of impulse; and that romantic literature +discourages him in this. He holds that man should rise from the plane of +nature to the plane of humanism or the plane of religion, and that to live +according to one's temperament, as the romanticists preach, is to sink +back from human nature, in the best sense, to animal nature. He takes the +view that men of science since Bacon, by the great conquests they have +made in the material sphere, have prepared man to take the romantic and +boastful view of himself. "If men had not been so heartened by scientific +progress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen to +Rousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good." Not that +Professor Babbitt looks on us as utterly evil and worthy of damnation. He +objects to the gloomy Jonathan-Edwards view, because it helps to +precipitate by reaction the opposite extreme--"the boundless sycophancy of +human nature from which we are now suffering." It was, perhaps, in +reaction against the priests that Rousseau made the most boastful +announcements of his righteousness. "Rousseau feels himself so good that +he is ready, as he declares, to appear before the Almighty at the sound of +the trump of the Last Judgment, with the book of his _Confessions_ in his +hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race, 'Let a +single one assert to Thee if he dare: "I am better than that man."'" +Rousseau would have been saved from this fustian virtue, Professor Babbitt +thinks, if he had accepted either the classic or the religious view of +life: for the classic view imposes on human nature the discipline of +decorum, while the religious view imposes the discipline of humility. +Human nature, he holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting "No." +Virtue is a struggle within iron limitations, not an easy gush of feeling. +At the same time, Professor Babbitt does not offer us as a cure for our +troubles the decorum of the Pharisees and the pseudo-classicists, who bid +us obey outward rules instead of imitating a spirit. He wishes our men of +letters to rediscover the ethical imagination of the Greeks. "True +classicism," he observes, "does not rest on the observance of rules or the +imitation of modes, but on an immediate insight into the universal." The +romanticists, he thinks, cultivate not the awe we find in the great +writers, but mere wonder. He takes Poe as a typical romanticist. "It is +not easy to discover in either the personality or writings of Poe an atom +of awe or reverence. On the other hand, he both experiences wonder and +seeks in his art to be a pure wonder-smith." + +One of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the romanticists +unduly praise the ignorant--the savage, the peasant, and the child. +Wordsworth here comes in for denunciation for having hailed a child of six +as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us, +praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom +from sin. The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush +of wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He +begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character. +He tries all sorts of false gods--nature-worship, art-worship, +humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As regards the last of +these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation +of the ass, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. "Medical men have +given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of +their own family and gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis). But Rousseau +already exhibits this 'psychosis.' He abandoned his five children one +after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for his +dog." As for the worship of nature, it leads to a "wise passiveness" +instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle +in pantheistic reveries. "In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts to a sort +of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination." Professor +Babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts Arcadianism. He perceives the +mote of Arcadianism even in "the light that never was on sea or land." He +has no objection to a "return to nature," if it is for purposes of +recreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or "a +substitute for philosophy and religion." He denounces, indeed, every kind +of "painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort." He admires the +difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity or +fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having. + +On points of this kind, I fancy, he would have had on his side Wordsworth, +Coleridge, Browning, and many of the other "Rousseauists" whom he attacks. +Professor Babbitt, however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of the +nineteenth century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics, +are to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientific +complacency. "The nineteenth century," he declares, "may very well prove +to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries." He +admits the immense materialistic energy of the century, but this did not +make up for the lack of a genuine philosophic insight in life and +literature. Man is a morally indolent animal, and he was never more so +than when he was working "with something approaching frenzy according to +the natural law." Faced with the spectacle of a romantic spiritual sloth +accompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even intellectual energy, +the author warns us that "the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery +is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the +discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature." He sees a +peril to our civilization in our absorption in the temporal and our +failure to discover that "something abiding" on which civilization must +rest. He quotes Aristotle's anti-romantic saying that "most men would +rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner." He feels that in +conduct, politics, and the arts, we have, as the saying is, "plumped for" +the disorderly manner to-day. + +His book is a very useful challenge to the times, though it is a dangerous +book to put in the hands of anyone inclined to Conservatism. After all, +romanticism was a great liberating force. It liberated men, not from +decorum, but from pseudo-decorum--not from humility, but from +subserviency. It may be admitted that, without humility and decorum of the +true kind, liberty is only pseudo-liberty, equality only pseudo-equality, +and fraternity only pseudo-fraternity. I am afraid, however, that in +getting rid of the vices of romanticism Professor Babbitt would pour away +the baby with the bath water. + +Where Professor Babbitt goes wrong is in not realizing that romanticism +with its emphasis on rights is a necessary counterpart to classicism with +its emphasis on duties. Each of them tries to do without the other. The +most notorious romantic lovers were men who failed to realize the +necessity of fidelity, just as the minor romantic artists to-day fail to +realize the necessity of tradition. On the other hand, the +classicist-in-excess prefers a world in which men preserve the decorum of +servants to a world in which they might attain to the decorum of equals. +Professor Babbitt refers to the pseudo-classical drama of +seventeenth-century France, in which men confused nobility of language +with the language of the nobility. He himself unfortunately is not free +from similar prejudices. He is antipathetic, so far as one can see, to any +movement for a better social system than we already possess. He is +definitely in reaction against the whole forward movement of the last two +centuries. He has pointed out certain flaws in the moderns, but he has +failed to appreciate their virtues. Literature to-day is less noble than +the literature of Shakespeare, partly, I think, because men have lost the +"sense of sin." Without the sense of sin we cannot have the greatest +tragedy. The Greeks and Shakespeare perceived the contrast between the +pure and the impure, the noble and the base, as no writer perceives it +to-day. Romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values. On the +other hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism. In the great +books of the world, in _Isaiah_ and the Gospels, the best elements of both +the classic and the romantic are found working together in harmony. If +Christ were living to-day, is Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himself +would not have censured the anthophilpsychosis of "Consider the lilies of +the field"? + + + + +XX.--GEORGIANS + + +(1) MR. DE LA MARE + +Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song. His genius is scarcely +more than a rill. But how the rill shines! How sweet a music it makes! +Into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populous +with birds! It seems at times as though it were a little fugitive stream +attempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of reality +and to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places. There never were shyer songs +than these. + +Mr. de la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease with +experience as Browning and Whitman. He has no cheers or welcome for the +labouring universe on its march. He is interested in the daily procession +only because he seeks in it one face, one figure. He is love-sick for +love, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of the +common world. Like the lover in _The Tryst_, he dreams always of a secret +place of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and +space we know: + + Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come, + There, out of all remembrance, make our home: + Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair, + Hollowed by Noah's mouse beneath the chair + Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound, + Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound. + Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea + Would lease a lost mermaiden's grot to me, + There of your beauty we would joyance make-- + A music wistful for the sea-nymph's sake: + Haply Elijah, o'er his spokes of fire, + Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre, + Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space, + Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace, + Where two might happy be--just you and I-- + Lost in the uttermost of Eternity. + +This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the waltz-songs of +the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for +an impossible loneliness. Mr. de la Mare touches our hearts, however, not +because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully +turns back from them to the bitterness of reality: + + No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep + Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep. + Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man + Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can. + +These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of +phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare's peculiar vice as a poet) suggests +something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in _Motley_. +The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the +shadow of death. + +Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare's book is, as we have +said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He triumphantly announces +that, if he were to begin to write of earth's wonders: + + Flit would the ages + On soundless wings + Ere unto Z + My pen drew nigh; + Leviathan told, + And the honey-fly. + +He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a "thing of light," in a bush +without realizing that-- + + All the throbbing world + Of dew and sun and air + By this small parcel of life + Is made more fair. + +He bids us in _Farewell_: + + Look thy last on all things lovely + Every hour. Let no night + Seal thy sense in deathly slumber + Till to delight + Thou have paid thy utmost blessing. + +Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare's melancholy. His +sorrow is idealist's sorrow. He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover. + +We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the outbreak of +the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of +elation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world. + + Now each man's mind all Europe is, + +he cries, in the first line in _Happy England_, and, as he remembers the +peace of England, "her woods and wilds, her loveliness," he exclaims: + + O what a deep contented night + The sun from out her Eastern seas + Would bring the dust which in her sight + Had given its all for these! + +So beautiful a spirit as Mr. de la Mare's, however, could not remain +content with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and heroism of dying men. +In the long poem called _Motley_ he turns from the heroism to the madness +of war, translating his vision into a fool's song: + + Nay, but a dream I had + Of a world all mad, + Not simply happy mad like me, + Who am mad like an empty scene + Of water and willow-tree, + Where the wind hath been; + But that foul Satan-mad, + Who rots in his own head.... + +The fool's vision of men going into battle is not a vision of knights of +the Holy Ghost nobly falling in the lists with their country looking on, +but of men's bodies-- + + Dragging cold cannon through a mire + Of rain and blood and spouting fire, + The new moon glinting hard on eyes + Wide with insanities! + +In _The Marionettes_ Mr. de la Mare turns to tragic satire for relief from +the bitterness of a war-maddened world: + + Let the foul scene proceed: + There's laughter in the wings; + 'Tis sawdust that they bleed, + But a box Death brings. + + How rare a skill is theirs + These extreme pangs to show, + How real a frenzy wears + Each feigner of woe! + +And the poem goes on in perplexity of anger and anguish: + + Strange, such a Piece is free, + While we spectators sit, + Aghast at its agony, + Yet absorbed in it! + + Dark is the outer air, + Coldly the night draughts blow, + Mutely we stare, and stare, + At the frenzied Show. + + Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroud + Of deep, immutable blue-- + We cry, "The end!" We are bowed + By the dread, "'Tis true!" + + While the Shape who hoofs applause + Behind our deafened ear, + Hoots--angel-wise--"the Cause"! + And affrights even fear. + +There is something in these lines that reminds one of Mr. Thomas Hardy's +black-edged indictment of life. + +As we read Mr. de la Mare, indeed, we are reminded again and again of the +work of many other poets--of the ballad-writers, the Elizabethan +song-writers, Blake and Wordsworth, Mr. Hardy and Mr. W.B. Yeats. In some +instances it is as though Mr. de la Mare had deliberately set himself to +compose a musical variation on the same theme as one of the older masters. +Thus, _April Moon_, which contains the charming verse-- + + "The little moon that April brings, + More lovely shade than light, + That, setting, silvers lonely hills + Upon the verge of night"-- + +is merely Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" turned into +new music. New music, we should say, is Mr. de la Mare's chief gift to +literature--a music not regular or precise or certain, but none the less a +music in which weak rhymes and even weak phrases are jangled into a +strange beauty, as in _Alexander_, which begins: + + It was the Great Alexander, + Capped with a golden helm, + Sate in the ages, in his floating ship, + In a dead calm. + +One finds Mr. de la Mare's characteristic, unemphatic music again in the +opening lines of _Mrs. Grundy_: + + Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot, + Stumble not, whisper not, smile not, + +where "foot" and "not" are rhymes. + +It is the stream of music flowing through his verses rather than any +riches of imagery or phrase that makes one rank the author so high among +living poets. But music in verse can hardly be separated from intensity +and sincerity of vision. This music of Mr. de la Mare's is not a mere +craftsman's tune: it is an echo of the spirit. Had he not seen beautiful +things passionately, Mr. de la Mare could never have written: + + Thou with thy cheek on mine, + And dark hair loosed, shalt see + Take the far stars for fruit + The cypress tree, + And in the yew's black + Shall the moon be. + +Beautiful as Mr. de la Mare's vision is, however, and beautiful as is his +music, we miss in his work that frequent perfection of phrase which is +part of the genius of (to take another living writer) Mr. Yeats. One has +only to compare Mr. Yeats's _I Heard the Old, Old Men Say_ with Mr. de la +Mare's _The Old Men_ to see how far the latter falls below verbal mastery. +Mr. Yeats has found the perfect embodiment for his imagination. Mr. de la +Mare seems in comparison to be struggling with his medium, and contrives +in his first verse to be no more than just articulate: + + Old and alone, sit we, + Caged, riddle-rid men, + Lost to earth's "Listen!" and "See!" + Thought's "Wherefore?" and "When?" + +There is vision in some of the later verses in the poem, but, if we read +it alongside of Mr. Yeats's, we get an impression of unsuccess of +execution. Whether one can fairly use the word "unsuccess" in reference to +verse which succeeds so exquisitely as Mr. de la Mare's in being +literature is a nice question. But how else is one to define the peculiar +quality of his style--its hesitations, its vaguenesses, its obscurities? +On the other hand, even when his lines leave the intellect puzzled and the +desire for grammar unsatisfied, a breath of original romance blows through +them and appeals to us like the illogical burden of a ballad. Here at +least are the rhythms and raptures of poetry, if not always the beaten +gold of speech. Sometimes Mr. de la Mare's verse reminds one of +piano-music, sometimes of bird-music: it wavers so curiously between what +is composed and what is unsophisticated. Not that one ever doubts for a +moment that Mr. de la Mare has spent on his work an artist's pains. He has +made a craft out of his innocence. If he produces in his verse the effect +of the wind among the reeds, it is the result not only of his artlessness, +but of his art. He is one of the modern poets who have broken away from +the metrical formalities of Swinburne and the older men, and who, of set +purpose, have imposed upon poetry the beauty of a slightly irregular +pulse. + +He is typical of his generation, however, not only in his form, but in the +pain of his unbelief (as shown in _Betrayal_), and in that sense of +half-revelation that fills him always with wonder and sometimes with hope. +His poems tell of the visits of strange presences in dream and vacancy. In +_A Vacant Day_, after describing the beauty of a summer moon, with clear +waters flowing under willows, he closes with the verses: + + I listened; and my heart was dumb + With praise no language could express; + Longing in vain for him to come + Who had breathed such blessedness. + + On this fair world, wherein we pass + So chequered and so brief a stay, + And yearned in spirit to learn, alas! + What kept him still away. + +In these poems we have the genius of the beauty of gentleness expressing +itself as it is doing nowhere else just now in verse. Mr. de la Mare's +poetry is not only lovely, but lovable. He has a personal possession-- + + The skill of words to sweeten despair, + +such as will, we are confident, give him a permanent place in English +literature. + + +(2) THE GROUP + +The latest collection of Georgian verse has had a mixed reception. One or +two distinguished critics have written of it in the mood of a challenge to +mortal combat. Men have begun to quarrel over the question whether we are +living in an age of poetic dearth or of poetic plenty--whether the world +is a nest of singing-birds or a cage in which the last canary has been +dead for several years. + +All this, I think, is a good sign. It means that poetry is interesting +people sufficiently to make them wish to argue about it. Better a +breeze--even a somewhat excessive breeze--than stagnant air. It is good +both for poets and for the reading public. It prevents the poets from +resting on their wings, as they might be tempted to do by a consistent +calm of praise. It compels them to examine their work more critically. +Anyhow, "fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil," and a reasonable +amount of sharp censure will do a true poet more good than harm. It will +not necessarily injure even his sales. I understand the latest volume of +_Georgian Poetry_ is already in greater demand than its predecessor. + +It is a good anthology of the poetry of the last two years without being +an ideal anthology. Some good poets and some good poems have been omitted. +And they have been omitted, in some instances, in favour of inferior work. +Many of us would prefer an anthology of the best poems rather than an +anthology of authors. At the same time, with all its faults, _Georgian +Poetry_ still remains the best guide we possess to the poetic activities +of the time. I am glad to see that the editor includes the work of a woman +in his new volume. This helps to make it more representative than the +previous selections. But there are several other living women who are +better poets, at the lowest estimate, than at least a quarter of the men +who have gained admission. + +Mr. W.H. Davies is by now a veteran among the Georgians, and one cannot +easily imagine a presence more welcome in a book of verse. Among poets he +is a bird singing in a hedge. He communicates the same sense of freshness +while he sings. He has also the quick eye of a bird. He is, for all his +fairy music, on the look-out for things that will gratify his appetite. He +looks to the earth rather than the sky, though he is by no means deaf to +the lark that + + Raves in his windy heights above a cloud. + +At the same time, at his best, he says nothing about his appetite, and +sings in the free spirit of a child at play. His best poems are songs of +innocence. At least, that is the predominant element in them. He warned +the public in a recent book that he is not so innocent as he sounds. But +his genius certainly is. He has written greater poems than any that are +included in the present selection. _Birds_, however, is a beautiful +example of his gift for joy. We need not fear for contemporary poetry +while the hedges contain a poet such as Mr. Davies. + +Mr. de la Mare does not sing from a hedge. He is a child of the arts. He +plays an instrument. His music is the music of a lute of which some of the +strings have been broken. It is so extraordinarily sweet, indeed, that one +has to explain him to oneself as the perfect master of an imperfect +instrument. He is at times like Watts's figure of Hope listening to the +faint music of the single string that remains unbroken. There is always +some element of hope, or of some kindred excuse for joy, even in his +deepest melancholy. But it is the joy of a spirit, not of a "super-tramp." +Prospero might have summoned just such a spirit through the air to make +music for him. And Mr. de la Mare's is a spirit perceptible to the ear +rather than to the eye. One need not count him the equal of Campion in +order to feel that he has something of Campion's beautiful genius for +making airs out of words. He has little enough of the Keatsian genius for +choosing the word that has the most meaning for the seeing imagination. +But there is a secret melody in his words that, when once one has +recognized it, one can never forget. + +How different the Georgian poets are from each other may be seen if we +compare three of the best poems in this book, all of them on similar +subjects--Mr. Davies's _Birds_, Mr. de la Mare's _Linnet_, and Mr. +Squire's _Birds_. Mr. Squire would feel as out of place in a hedge as +would Mr. de la Mare. He has an aquiline love of soaring and surveying +immense tracts with keen eyes. He loves to explore both time and the map, +but he does this without losing his eyehold on the details of the Noah's +Ark of life on the earth beneath him. He does not lose himself in vaporous +abstractions; his eye, as well as his mind, is extraordinarily +interesting. This poem of his, _Birds_, is peopled with birds. We see them +in flight and in their nests. At the same time, the philosophic wonder of +Mr. Squire's poem separates him from Mr. Davies and Mr. de la Mare. Mr. +Davies, I fancy, loves most to look at birds; Mr. de la Mare to listen to +birds; Mr. Squire to brood over them with the philosophic imagination. It +would, of course, be absurd to offer this as a final statement of the +poetic attitude of the three writers. It is merely an attempt to +differentiate among them with the help of a prominent characteristic of +each. + +The other poets in the collection include Mr. Robert Graves (with his +pleasant bias towards nursery rhymes), Mr. Sassoon (with his sensitive, +passionate satire), and Mr. Edward Shanks (with his trembling +responsiveness to beauty). It is the first time that Mr. Shanks appears +among the Georgians, and his _Night Piece_ and _Glow-worm_ both show how +exquisite is his sensibility. He differs from the other poets by his +quasi-analytic method. He seems to be analyzing the beauty of the evening +in both these poems. Mrs. Shove's _A Man Dreams that He is the Creator_ is +a charming example of fancy toying with a great theme. + + +(3) THE YOUNG SATIRISTS + +Satire, it has been said, is an ignoble art; and it is probable that there +are no satirists in Heaven. Probably there are no doctors either. Satire +and medicine are our responses to a diseased world--to our diseased +selves. They are responses, however, that make for health. Satire holds +the medicine-glass up to human nature. It also holds the mirror up in a +limited way. It does not show a man what he looks like when he is both +well and good. It does show a man what he looks like, however, when he +breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of +making a beast of himself. It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them +with a purpose. It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a +hospital for incurables. To write satire is an act of faith, not a +luxurious exercise. The despairing Swift was a fighter, as the despairing +Anatole France is a fighter. They may have uttered the very Z of +melancholy about the animal called man; but at least they were +sufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw themselves into +defeated causes. + +It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankind +of the disease of war. It is a good sign, however, that satires on war +have begun to be written. War has affected with horror or disgust a number +of great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years. The +tragic indictment of war in _The Trojan Women_ and the satiric indictment +in _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ are evidence that some men at least saw +through the romance of war before the twentieth century. In the war that +has just ended, however--or that would have ended if the Peace Conference +would let it--we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on the +part of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers. Ballads have +survived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier +left to beg: + + You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg, + You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg, + You ought to be put in a bowl to beg-- + Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you! + +But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itself +neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on the +right of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen who +themselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant. +Soldiers--or some of them--see that wars go on only because the people who +cause them do not realize what war is like. I do not mean to suggest that +the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not +themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be no +fighting at all. The people who cause wars, however, are ultimately the +people who endure kings, statesmen and journalists of the exploiting and +bullying kind. The satire of the soldiers is an appeal not to the +statesmen and journalists, but to the general imagination of mankind. It +is an attempt to drag our imaginations away from the heroics of the +senate-house into the filth of the slaughter-house. It does not deny the +heroism that exists in the slaughter-house any more than it denies the +heroism that exists in the hospital ward. But it protests that, just as +the heroism of a man dying of cancer must not be taken to justify cancer, +so the heroism of a million men dying of war must not be taken to justify +war. There are some who believe that neither war nor cancer is a curable +disease. One thing we can be sure of in this connection: we shall never +get rid either of war or of cancer if we do not learn to look at them +realistically and see how loathsome they are. So long as war was regarded +as inevitable, the poet was justified in romanticizing it, as in that +epigram in the _Greek Anthology:_ + + Demætia sent eight sons to encounter the phalanx of the foe, and + she buried them all beneath one stone. No tear did she shed in her + mourning, but said this only: "Ho, Sparta, I bore these children + for thee." + +As soon as it is realized, however, that wars are not inevitable, men +cease to idealize Demætia, unless they are sure she did her best to keep +the peace. To a realistic poet of war such as Mr. Sassoon, she is an +object of pity rather than praise. His sonnet, _Glory of Women_, suggests +that there is another point of view besides Demætia's: + + You love us when we're heroes, home on leave, + Or wounded in a mentionable place. + You worship decorations; you believe + That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace. + You make us shells. You listen with delight, + By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. + You crown our distant ardours while we fight, + And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed. + + You can't believe that British troops "retire" + When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run, + Trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood. + _O German mother dreaming by the fire,_ + _While you, are knitting socks to send your son_ + _His face is trodden deeper in the mud._ + +To Mr. Sassoon and the other war satirists, indeed, those stay at home and +incite others to go out and kill or get killed seem either pitifully +stupid or pervertedly criminal. Mr. Sassoon has now collected all his war +poems into one volume, and one is struck by the energetic hatred of those +who make war in safety that finds expression in them. Most readers will +remember the bitter joy of the dream that one day he might hear "the +yellow pressmen grunt and squeal," and see the Junkers driven out of +Parliament by the returned soldiers. Mr. Sassoon cannot endure the +enthusiasm of the stay-at-home--especially the enthusiasm that pretends +that soldiers not only behave like music-hall clowns, but are incapable of +the more terrible emotional experiences. He would like, I fancy, to forbid +civilians to make jokes during war-time. His hatred of the jesting +civilian attains passionate expression in the poem called _Blighters_: + + The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin + And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks + Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din; + "We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!" + + I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls, + Lurching to rag-time tunes, or "Home, sweet Home,"-- + And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls + To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume. + +Mr. Sassoon himself laughs on occasion, but it is the laughter of a man +being driven insane by an insane world. The spectacle of lives being +thrown away by the hundred thousand by statesmen and generals without the +capacity to run a village flower-show, makes him find relief now and then +in a hysteria of mirth, as in _The General_: + + "Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said + When we met him last week on our way to the Line, + Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, + And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. + "He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack + As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. + * * * * * + But he did for them both by his plan of attack. + +Mr. Sassoon's verse is also of importance because it paints life in the +trenches with a realism not to be found elsewhere in the English poetry of +the war. He spares us nothing of: + + The strangled horror + And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead. + +He gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of the +trenches. His book is in its aim destructive. It is a great pamphlet +against war. If posterity wishes to know what war was like during this +period, it will discover the truth, not in _Barrack-room Ballads_, but in +Mr. Sassoon's verse. The best poems in the book are poems of hatred. This +means that Mr. Sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry. His +poems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary +poems of Shelley. They are utterances of pain rather than of vision. Many +of them, however, rise to a noble pity--_The Prelude_, for instance, and +_Aftermath_, the latter of which ends: + + Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,-- + The night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? + Do you remember the rats; and the stench + Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,-- + And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? + Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?" + + Do you remember that hour of din before the attack-- + And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then + As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? + Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back + With dying eyes and lolling heads,--those ashen-grey + Masks of the lad who once were keen and kind and gay? + + _Have you forgotten yet?..._ + _Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget._ + +Mr. Sitwell's satires--which occupy the most interesting pages of +_Argonaut and Juggernaut_--seldom take us into the trenches. Mr. Sitwell +gets all the subjects he wants in London clubs and drawing-rooms. These +"free-verse" satires do not lend themselves readily to quotation, but both +the manner and the mood of them can be guessed from the closing verses of +_War-horses_, in which the "septuagenarian butterflies" of Society return +to their platitudes and parties after seeing the war through: + + But now + They have come out. + They have preened + And dried themselves + After their blood bath. + Old men seem a little younger, + And tortoise-shell combs + Are longer than ever; + Earrings weigh down aged ears; + And Golconda has given them of its best. + + They have seen it through! + Theirs is the triumph, + And, beneath + The carved smile of the Mona Lisa, + False teeth + Rattle + Like machine-guns, + In anticipation + Of food and platitudes. + Les Vieilles Dames Sans Merci! + +Mr. Sitwell's hatred of war is seldom touched with pity. It is arrogant +hatred. There is little emotion in it but that of a young man at war with +age. He pictures the dotards of two thousand years ago complaining that +Christ did not die-- + + Like a hero + With an oath on his lips, + Or the refrain from a comic song-- + Or a cheerful comment of some kind. + +His own verse, however, seems to me to be hardly more in sympathy with the +spirit of Christ than with the spirit of those who mocked him. He is moved +to write by unbelief in the ideals of other people rather than by the +passionate force of ideals of his own. He is a sceptic, not a sufferer. +His work proceeds less from his heart than from his brain. It is a clever +brain, however, and his satirical poems are harshly entertaining and will +infuriate the right people. They may not kill Goliath, but at least they +will annoy Goliath's friends. David's weapon, it should be remembered, was +a sling, with some pebbles from the brook, not a pea-shooter. + +The truth is, so far as I can see, Mr. Sitwell has not begun to take +poetry quite seriously. His non-satirical verse is full of bright colour, +but it has the brightness, not of the fields and the flowers, but of +captive birds in an aviary. It is as though Mr. Sitwell had taken poetry +for his hobby. I suspect his Argonauts of being ballet dancers. He enjoys +amusing little decorations--phrases such as "concertina waves" and-- + + The ocean at a toy shore + Yaps like a Pekinese. + +His moonlight owl is surely a pretty creature from the unreality of a +ballet: + + An owl, horned wizard of the night, + Flaps through the air so soft and still; + Moaning, it wings its flight + Far from the forest cool, + To find the star-entangled surface of a pool, + Where it may drink its fill + Of stars. + +At the same time, here and there are evidences that Mr. Sitwell has felt +as well as fancied. The opening verse of _Pierrot Old_ gives us a real +impression of shadows: + + The harvest moon is at its height, + The evening primrose greets its light + With grace and joy: then opens up + The mimic moon within its cup. + Tall trees, as high as Babel tower, + Throw down their shadows to the flower-- + Shadows that shiver--seem to see + An ending to infinity. + +But there is too much of Pan, the fauns and all those other ballet-dancers +in his verse. Mr. Sitwell's muse wears some pretty costumes. But one +wonders when she will begin to live for something besides clothes. + + + + +XXI.--LABOUR OF AUTHORSHIP + + +Literature maintains an endless quarrel with idle sentences. Twenty years +ago this would have seemed too obvious to bear saying. But in the meantime +there has been a good deal of dipping of pens in chaos, and authors have +found excuses for themselves in a theory of literature which is impatient +of difficult writing. It would not matter if it were only the paunched and +flat-footed authors who were proclaiming the importance of writing without +style. Unhappily, many excellent writers as well have used their gift of +style to publish the praise of stylelessness. Within the last few weeks I +have seen it suggested by two different critics that the hasty writing +which has left its mark on so much of the work of Scott and Balzac was a +good thing and almost a necessity of genius. It is no longer taken for +granted, as it was in the days of Stevenson, that the starry word is worth +the pains of discovery. Stevenson, indeed, is commonly dismissed as a +pretty-pretty writer, a word-taster without intellect or passion, a +juggler rather than an artist. Pater's bust also is mutilated by +irreverent schoolboys: it is hinted that he may have done well enough for +the days of Victoria, but that he will not do at all for the world of +George. It is all part of the reaction against style which took place when +everybody found out the æsthetes. It was, one may admit, an excellent +thing to get rid of the æsthetes, but it was by no means an excellent +thing to get rid of the virtue which they tried to bring into English art +and literature. The æsthetes were wrong in almost everything they said +about art and literature, but they were right in impressing upon the +children of men the duty of good drawing and good words. With the +condemnation of Oscar Wilde, however, good words became suspected of +kinship with evil deeds. Style was looked on as the sign of minor poets +and major vices. Possibly, on the other hand, the reaction against style +had nothing to do with the Wilde condemnation. The heresy of the +stylelessness is considerably older than that. Perhaps it is not quite +fair to call it the heresy of stylelessness: it would be more accurate to +describe it as the heresy of style without pains. It springs from the idea +that great literature is all a matter of first fine careless raptures, and +it is supported by the fact that apparently much of the greatest +literature is so. If lines like + + Hark, hark! the lark at Heaven's gate sings, + +or + + When daffodils begin to peer, + +or + + His golden locks time hath to silver turned, + +shape themselves in the poet's first thoughts, he would be a manifest fool +to trouble himself further. Genius is the recognition of the perfect line, +the perfect phrase, the perfect word, when it appears, and this perfect +line or phrase or word is quite as likely to appear in the twinkling of an +eye as after a week of vigils. But the point is that it does not +invariably so appear. It sometimes cost Flaubert three days' labour to +write one perfect sentence. Greater writers have written more hurriedly. +But this does not justify lesser writers in writing hurriedly too. + +Of all the authors who have exalted the part played in literature by +inspiration as compared with labour, none has written more nobly or with +better warrant than Shelley. "The mind," he wrote in the _Defence of +Poetry_-- + + The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible + influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory + brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a + flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the + conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its + approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its + original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the + greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration + is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry + that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble + shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the + greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to + assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour + and study. + +He then goes on to interpret literally Milton's reference to _Paradise +Lost_ as an "unpremeditated song" "dictated" by the Muse, and to reply +scornfully to those "who would allege the fifty-six various readings of +the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_." Who is there who would not agree +with Shelley quickly if it were a question of having to choose between his +inspirational theory of literature and the mechanical theory of the arts +advocated by writers like Sir Joshua Reynolds? Literature without +inspiration is obviously even a meaner thing than literature without +style. But the idea that any man can become an artist by taking pains is +merely an exaggerated protest against the idea that a man can become an +artist without taking pains. Anthony Trollope, who settled down +industriously to his day's task of literature as to bookkeeping, did not +grow into an artist in any large sense; and Zola, with the motto "Nulle +dies sine linea" ever facing him on his desk, made himself a prodigious +author, indeed, but never more than a second-rate writer. On the other +hand, Trollope without industry would have been nobody at all, and Zola +without pains might as well have been a waiter. Nor is it only the little +or the clumsy artists who have found inspiration in labour. It is a pity +we have not first drafts of all the great poems in the world: we might +then see how much of the magic of literature is the result of toil and how +much of the unprophesied wind of inspiration. Sir Sidney Colvin recently +published an early draft of Keats's sonnet, "Bright star, would I were +stedfast as thou art," which showed that in the case of Keats at least the +mind in creation was not "as a fading coal," but as a coal blown to +increasing flame and splendour by sheer "labour and study." And the poetry +of Keats is full of examples of the inspiration not of first but of second +and later thoughts. Henry Stephens, a medical student who lived with him +for time, declared that an early draft of _Endymion_ opened with the line: + + A thing of beauty is a constant joy + +--a line which, Stephens observed on hearing it, was "a fine line, but +wanting something." Keats thought over it for a little, then cried out, "I +have it," and wrote in its place: + + A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. + +Nor is this an exceptional example of the studied miracles of Keats. The +most famous and, worn and cheapened by quotation though it is, the most +beautiful of all his phrases-- + + magic casements, opening on the foam + Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn-- + +did not reach its perfect shape without hesitation and thinking. He +originally wrote "the wide casements" and "keelless seas": + + the wide casements, opening on the foam + Of keelless seas, in fairy lands forlorn. + +That would probably have seemed beautiful if the perfect version had not +spoiled it for us. But does not the final version go to prove that +Shelley's assertion that "when composition begins, inspiration is already +on the decline" does not hold good for all poets? On the contrary, it is +often the heat of labour which produces the heat of inspiration. Or rather +it is often the heat of labour which enables the writer to recall the heat +of inspiration. Ben Jonson, who held justly that "the poet must be able by +nature and instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind," took care to +add the warning that no one must think he "can leap forth suddenly a poet +by dreaming he hath been in Parnassus." Poe has uttered a comparable +warning against an excessive belief in the theory of the plenary +inspiration of poets in his _Marginalia_, where he declares that "this +untenable and paradoxical idea of the incompatibility of genius and _art_" +must be "kick[ed] out of the world's way." Wordsworth's saying that poetry +has its origin in "emotion recollected in tranquillity" also suggests that +the inspiration of poetry is an inspiration that may be recaptured by +contemplation and labour. How eagerly one would study a Shakespeare +manuscript, were it unearthed, in which one could see the shaping +imagination of the poet at work upon his lines! Many people have the +theory--it is supported by an assertion of Jonson's--that Shakespeare +wrote with a current pen, heedless of blots and little changes. He was, it +is evident, not one of the correct authors. But it seems unlikely that no +pains of rewriting went to the making of the speeches in _A Midsummer +Night's Dream_ or Hamlet's address to the skull. Shakespeare, one feels, +is richer than any other author in the beauty of first thoughts. But one +seems to perceive in much of his work the beauty of second thoughts too. +There have been few great writers who have been so incapable of revision +as Robert Browning, but Browning with all his genius is not a great +stylist to be named with Shakespeare. He did indeed prove himself to be a +great stylist in more than one poem, such as _Childe Roland_--which he +wrote almost at a sitting. His inspiration, however, seldom raised his +work to the same beauty of perfection. He is, as regards mere style, the +most imperfect of the great poets. If only Tennyson had had his genius! If +only Browning had had Tennyson's desire for golden words! + +It would be absurd, however, to suggest that the main labour of an author +consists in rewriting. The choice of words may have been made before a +single one of them has been written down, as tradition tells us was the +case with Menander, who described one of his plays as "finished" before he +had written a word of it. It would be foolish, too, to write as though +perfection of form in literature were merely a matter of picking and +choosing among decorative words. Style is a method, not of decoration, but +of expression. It is an attempt to make the beauty and energy of the +imagination articulate. It is not any more than is construction the +essence of the greatest art: it is, however, a prerequisite of the +greatest art. Even those writers whom we regard as the least decorative +labour and sorrow after it no less than the æsthetes. We who do not know +Russian do not usually think of Tolstoy as a stylist, but he took far more +trouble with his writing than did Oscar Wilde (whose chief fault is, +indeed, that in spite of his theories his style is not laboured and +artistic but inspirational and indolent). Count Ilya Tolstoy, the son of +the novelist, published a volume of reminiscences of his father last year, +in which he gave some interesting particulars of his father's energetic +struggle for perfection in writing: + + When _Anna Karénina_ began to come out in the _Russki Vyéstnik_ [he + wrote], long galley-proofs were posted to my father, and he looked + them through and corrected them. At first, the margins would be + marked with the ordinary typographical signs, letters omitted, + marks of punctuation, and so on; then individual words would be + changed, and then whole sentences; erasures and additions would + begin, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass + of patches, quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to + send it back as it stood because no one but my mother could make + head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions, + and erasures. + + My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out + afresh. + + In the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled + together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and + everything ready, so that when "Lyóvotchka" came down he could send + the proof-sheets out by post. + + My father would carry them off to his study to have "just one last + look," and by the evening it was worse than before; the whole thing + had been rewritten and messed up once more. + + "Sonya, my dear, I am very sorry, but I've spoilt all your work + again; I promise I won't do it any more," he would say, showing her + the passages with a guilty air. "We'll send them off to-morrow + without fail." But his to-morrow was put off day by day for weeks + or months together. + + "There's just one bit I want to look through again," my father + would say; but he would get carried away and rewrite the whole + thing afresh. There were even occasions when, after posting the + Proofs, my father would remember some particular words next day and + correct them by telegraph. + +There, better than in a thousand generalizations, you see what the +artistic conscience is. In a world in which authors, like solicitors, must +live, it is, of course, seldom possible to take pains in this measure. +Dostoevsky used to groan that his poverty left him no time or chance to +write his best as Tolstoy and Turgenev could write theirs. But he at least +laboured all that he could. Novel-writing has since his time become as +painless as dentistry, and the result may be seen in a host of books that, +while affecting to be fine literature, have no price except as +merchandise. + + + + +XXII.--THE THEORY OF POETRY + + +Matthew Arnold once advised people who wanted to know what was good poetry +not to trouble themselves with definitions of poetry, but to learn by +heart passages, or even single lines, from the works of the great poets, +and to apply these as touchstones. Certainly a book like Mr. Cowl's +_Theory of Poetry in England_, which aims at giving us a representative +selection of the theoretical things which were said in England about +poetry between the time of Elizabeth and the time of Victoria, makes one +wonder at the barrenness of men's thoughts about so fruitful a world as +that of the poets. Mr. Cowl's book is not intended to be read as an +anthology of fine things. Its value is not that of a book of golden +thoughts. It is an ordered selection of documents chosen, not for their +beauty, but simply for their use as milestones in the progress of English +poetic theory. It is a work, not of literature, but of literary history; +and students of literary history are under a deep debt of gratitude to the +author for bringing together and arranging the documents of the subject in +so convenient and lucid a form. The arrangement is under subjects, and +chronological. There are forty-one pages on the theory of poetic creation, +beginning with George Gascoigne and ending with Matthew Arnold. These are +followed by a few pages of representative passages about poetry as an +imitative art, the first of the authors quoted being Roger Ascham and the +last F.W.H. Myers. The hook is divided into twelve sections of this kind, +some of which have a tendency to overlap. Thus, in addition to the section +on poetry as an imitative art, we have a section on imitation of nature, +another on external nature, and another on imitation. Imitation, in the +last of these, it is true, means for the most part imitation of the +ancients, as in the sentence in which Thomas Rymer urged the +seventeenth-century dramatists to imitate Attic tragedy even to the point +of introducing the chorus. + +Mr. Cowl's book is interesting, however, less on account of the sections +and subsections into which it is divided than because of the manner in +which it enables us to follow the flight of English poetry from the +romanticism of the Elizabethans to the neo-classicism of the eighteenth +century, and from this on to the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, +and from this to a newer neo-classicism whose prophet was Matthew Arnold. +There is not much of poetry captured in these cold-blooded criticisms, but +still the shadow of the poetry of his time occasionally falls on the +critic's formulae and aphorisms. How excellently Sir Philip Sidney +expresses the truth that the poet does not imitate the world, but creates +a world, in his observation that Nature's world "is brazen, the poets only +deliver a golden!" This, however, is a fine saying rather than an +interpretation. It has no importance as a contribution to the theory of +poetry to compare with a passage like that so often quoted from +Wordsworth's preface to _Lyrical Ballads_: + + I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful + feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in + tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of + reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, + kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is + gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. + +As a theory of poetic creation this may not apply universally. But what a +flood of light it throws on the creative genius of Wordsworth himself! How +rich in psychological insight it is, for instance, compared with Dryden's +comparable reference to the part played by the memory in poetry: + +The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the +poet ... is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, +which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field +of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after. + +As a matter of fact, few of these generalizations carry one far. Ben +Jonson revealed more of the secret of poetry when he said simply: "It +utters somewhat above a mortal mouth." So did Edgar Allan Poe, when he +said: "It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild +effort to reach the beauty above." Coleridge, again, initiates us into the +secrets of the poetic imagination when he speaks of it as something +which-- + + combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, + tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human + feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its + principle and fountain, which is alone truly one. + +On the other hand, the most dreadful thing that was ever written about +poetry was also written by Coleridge, and is repeated in Mr. Cowl's book: + + How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime + and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the faculty that + forms the many into one--_Ineins-bildung_! Eisenoplasy, or + esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, either + catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, + again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will. + +The meaning is simple enough: it is much the same as that of the preceding +paragraph. But was there ever a passage written suggesting more forcibly +how much easier it is to explain poetry by writing it than by writing +about it? + +Mr. Cowl's book makes it clear that fiercely as the critics may dispute +about poetry, they are practically all agreed on at least one point--that +it is an imitation. The schools have differed less over the question +whether it is an imitation than over the question how, in a discussion on +the nature of poetry, the word "imitation" must be qualified. Obviously, +the poet must imitate something--either what he sees in nature, or what he +sees in memory, or what he sees in other poets, or what he sees in his +soul, or it may me, all together. There arise schools every now and +then--classicists, Parnassians, realists, and so forth--who believe in +imitation, but will not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen in +the imaginative world. In the result their work is no true imitation of +life. Pope's poetry is not as true an imitation of life as Shakespeare's. +Nor is Zola's, for all its fidelity, as close an imitation of life as +Victor Hugo's. Poetry, or prose either, without romance, without +liberation, can never rise above the second order. The poet must be +faithful not only to his subject, but to his soul. Poe defined art as the +"reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of +the soul," and this, though like most definitions of art, incomplete, is +true in so far as it reminds us that art at its greatest is the statement +of a personal and ideal vision. That is why the reverence of rules in the +arts is so dangerous. It puts the standards of poetry not in the hands of +the poet, but in the hands of the grammarians. It is a Procrustes' bed +which mutilates the poet's vision. Luckily, England has always been a +rather lawless country, and we find even Pope insisting that "to judge ... +of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the laws of +one country who acted under those of another." Dennis might cry: "Poetry +is either an art or whimsy and fanaticism.... The great design of the arts +is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, by +restoring order." But, on the whole, the English poets and critics have +realized the truth that it is not an order imposed from without, but an +order imposed from within at which the poet must aim. He aims at bringing +order into chaos, but that does not mean that he aims at bringing +Aristotle into chaos. He is, in a sense, "beyond good and evil," so far as +the orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in a +nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who +condemned Shakespeare as "a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful +monsters," lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic +form." And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another +sentence in the same lecture: + + As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is + even this that constitutes its genius--the power of acting + creatively under laws of its own origination. + +Mr. Cowl enables us to follow, as in no other book we know, the endless +quarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit and the letter, +among the English authorities on poetry. It is a quarrel which will +obviously never be finally settled in any country. The mechanical theory +is a necessary reaction against romance that has decayed into windiness, +extravagance, and incoherence. It brings the poets back to literature +again. The romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminder +that the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision. It +brings the poets back to nature again. No one but a Dennis will hesitate +an instant in deciding which of the theories is the more importantly and +eternally true one. + + + + +XXIII.--THE CRITIC AS DESTROYER + + +It has been said often enough that all good criticism is praise. Pater +boldly called one of his volumes of critical essays _Appreciations_. There +are, of course, not a few brilliant instances of hostility in criticism. +The best-known of these in English is Macaulay's essay on Robert +Montgomery. In recent years we have witnessed the much more significant +assault by Tolstoy upon almost the whole army of the authors of the +civilized world from Æschylus down to Mallarmé. _What is Art?_ was +unquestionably the most remarkable piece of sustained hostile criticism +that was ever written. At the same time, it was less a denunciation of +individual authors than an attack on the general tendencies of the +literary art. Tolstoy quarrelled with Shakespeare not so much for being +Shakespeare as for failing to write like the authors of the Gospels. +Tolstoy would have made every book a Bible. He raged against men of +letters because with them literature was a means not to more abundant life +but to more abundant luxury. Like so many inexorable moralists, he was +intolerant of all literature that did not serve as a sort of example of +his own moral and social theories. That is why he was not a great critic, +though he was immeasurably greater than a great critic. One would not turn +to him for the perfect appreciation even of one of the authors he spared, +like Hugo or Dickens. The good critic must in some way begin by accepting +literature as it is, just as the good lyric poet must begin by accepting +life as it is. He may be as full of revolutionary and reforming theories +as he likes, but he must not allow any of these to come like a cloud +between him and the sun, moon and stars of literature. The man who +disparages the beauty of flowers and birds and love and laughter and +courage will never be counted among the lyric poets; and the man who +questions the beauty of the inhabited world the imaginative writers have +made--a world as unreasonable in its loveliness as the world of nature--is +not in the way of becoming a critic of literature. + +Another argument which tells in favour of the theory that the best +criticism is praise is the fact that almost all the memorable examples of +critical folly have been denunciations. One remembers that Carlyle +dismissed Herbert Spencer as a "never-ending ass." One remembers that +Byron thought nothing of Keats--"Jack Ketch," as he called him. One +remembers that the critics damned Wagner's operas as a new form of sin. +One remembers that Ruskin denounced one of Whistler's nocturnes as a pot +of paint flung in the face of the British public. In the world of science +we have a thousand similar examples of new genius being hailed by the +critics as folly and charlatanry. Only the other day a biographer of Lord +Lister was reminding us how, at the British Association in 1869, Lister's +antiseptic treatment was attacked as a "return to the dark ages of +surgery," the "carbolic mania," and "a professional criminality." The +history of science, art, music and literature is strewn with the wrecks of +such hostile criticisms. It is an appalling spectacle for anyone +interested in asserting the intelligence of the human race. So appalling +is it, indeed, that most of us nowadays labour under such a terror of +accidentally condemning something good that we have not the courage to +condemn anything at all. We think of the way in which Browning was once +taunted for his obscurity, and we cannot find it in our hearts to censure +Mr. Doughty. We recall the ignorant attacks on Manet and Monet, and we +will not risk an onslaught on the follies of Picasso and the +worse-than-Picassos of contemporary art. We grow a monstrous and unhealthy +plant of tolerance in our souls, and its branches drop colourless good +words on the just and on the unjust--on everybody, indeed, except Miss +Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, and a few others whom we know to be +second-rate because they have such big circulations. This is really a +disastrous state of affairs for literature and the other arts. If +criticism is, generally speaking, praise, it is, more definitely, praise +of the right things. Praise for the sake of praise is as great an evil as +blame for the sake of blame. Indiscriminate praise, in so far as it is the +result of distrust of one's own judgment or of laziness or of insincerity, +is one of the deadly sins in criticism. It is also one of the deadly dull +sins. Its effect is to make criticism ever more unreadable, and in the end +even the publishers, who love silly sentences to quote about their bad +books, will open their eyes to the futility of it. They will realize that, +when once criticism has become unreal and unreadable, people will no more +be bothered with it than they will with drinking lukewarm water. I mention +the publisher in especial, because there is no doubt that it is with the +idea of putting the publishers in a good, open-handed humour that so many +papers and reviews have turned criticism into a kind of stagnant pond. +Publishers, fortunately, are coming more and more to see that this kind of +criticism is of no use to them. Reviews in such-and-such a paper, they +will tell you, do not sell books. And the papers to which they refer in +such cases are always papers in which praise is disgustingly served out to +everybody, like spoonfuls of treacle-and-brimstone to a mob of +schoolchildren. + +Criticism, then, is praise, but it is praise of literature. There is all +the difference in the world between that and the praise of what pretends +to be literature. True criticism is a search for beauty and truth and an +announcement of them. It does not care twopence whether the method of +their revelation is new or old, academic or futuristic. It only asks that +the revelation shall be genuine. It is concerned with form, because beauty +and truth demand perfect expression. But it is a mere heresy in æsthetics +to say that perfect expression is the whole of art that matters. It is the +spirit that breaks through the form that is the main interest of +criticism. Form, we know, has a permanence of its own: so much so that it +has again and again been worshipped by the idolators of art as being in +itself more enduring than the thing which it embodies. Robert Burns, by +his genius for perfect statement, can give immortality to the joys of +being drunk with whiskey as the average hymn-writer cannot give +immortality to the joys of being drunk with the love of God. Style, then, +does seem actually to be a form of life. The critic may not ignore it any +more than he may exaggerate its place in the arts. As a matter of fact, he +could not ignore it if he would, for style and spirit have a way of +corresponding to one another like health and sunlight. + +It is to combat the stylelessness of many contemporary writers that the +destructive kind of criticism is just now most necessary. For, dangerous +as the heresy of style was forty or fifty years ago, the newer heresy of +sylelessness is more dangerous still. It has become the custom even of men +who write well to be as ashamed of their style as a schoolboy is of being +caught in an obvious piece of goodness. They keep silent about it as +though it were a kind of powdering or painting. They do not realize that +it is merely a form of ordinary truthfulness--the truthfulness of the word +about the thought. They forget that one has no more right to misuse words +than to beat one's wife. Someone has said that in the last analysis style +is a moral quality. It is a sincerity, a refusal to bow the knee to the +superficial, a passion for justice in language. Stylelessness, where it is +not, like colour-blindness, an accident of nature, is for the most part +merely an echo of the commercial man's world of hustle. It is like the +rushing to and fro of motor-buses which save minutes with great loss of +life. It is like the swift making of furniture with unseasoned wood. It is +a kind of introduction of the quick-lunch system into literature. One +cannot altogether acquit Mr. Masefield of a hasty stylelessness in some of +those long poems which the world has been raving about in the last year or +two. His line in _The Everlasting Mercy:_ + + And yet men ask, "Are barmaids chaste?" + +is a masterpiece of inexpertness. And the couplet: + + The Bosun turned: "I'll give you a thick ear! + Do it? I didn't. Get to hell from here!" + +is like a Sunday-school teacher's lame attempt to repeat a blasphemous +story. Mr. Masefield, on the other hand, is, we always feel, wrestling +with language. If he writes in a hurry, it is not because he is +indifferent, but because his soul is full of something that he is eager to +express. He does not gabble; he is, as it were, a man stammering out a +vision. So vastly greater are his virtues than his faults as a poet, +indeed, that the latter would only be worth the briefest mention if it +were not for the danger of their infecting other writers who envy him his +method but do not possess his conscience. One cannot contemplate with +equanimity the prospect of a Masefield school of poetry with all Mr. +Masefield's ineptitudes and none of his genius. + +Criticism, however, it is to be feared, is a fight for a lost cause if it +essays to prevent the founding of schools upon the faults of good writers. +Criticism will never kill the copyist. Nothing but the end of the world +can do that. Still, whatever the practical results of his work may be, it +is the function of the critic to keep the standard of writing high--to +insist that the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences are +like torn strips of newspaper for commonness. He is the enemy of +sloppiness in others--especially of that airy sloppiness which so often +nowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel. It was amazing to +find with what airiness a promising writer like Mr. Compton Mackenzie gave +us some years ago _Sinister Street_, a novel containing thousands of +sentences that only seemed to be there because he had not thought it worth +his while to leave them out, and thousands of others that seemed to be +mere hurried attempts to express realities upon which he was unable to +spend more time. Here is a writer who began literature with a sense of +words, and who is declining into a mere sense of wordiness. It is simply +another instance of the ridiculous rush of writing that is going on all +about us--a rush to satisfy a public which demands quantity rather than +quality in its books. I do not say that Mr. Mackenzie consciously wrote +down to the public, but the atmosphere obviously affected him. Otherwise +he would hardly have let his book go out into the world till he had +rewritten it--till he had separated his necessary from his unnecessary +sentences and given his conversations the tones of reality. + +There is no need, however, for criticism to lash out indiscriminately at +all hurried writing. There are a multitude of books turned out every year +which make no claim to be literature--the "thrillers," for example, of Mr. +Phillips Oppenheim and of that capable firm of feuilletonists, Coralie +Stanton and Heath Hosken. I do not think literature stands to gain +anything, even though all the critics in Europe were suddenly to assail +this kind of writing. It is a frankly commercial affair, and we have no +more right to demand style from those who live by it than from the authors +of the weather reports in the newspapers. Often, one notices, when the +golden youth, fresh from college and the reading of Shelley and Anatole +France, commences literary critic, he begins damning the sensational +novelists as though it were their business to write like Jane Austen. This +is a mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to what +pretends to be literature. That is why one is often impelled to attack +really excellent writers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch or Mr. Galsworthy, +as one would never dream of attacking, say, Mr. William Le Queux. To +attack Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is, indeed, a form of appreciation, for +the only just criticism that can be levelled against him is that his later +work does not seem to be written with that singleness of imagination and +that deliberate rightness of phrase which made _Noughts and Crosses_ and +_The Ship of Stars_ books to be kept beyond the end of the year. If one +attacks Mr. Galsworthy, again, it is usually because one admires his best +work so whole-heartedly that one is not willing to accept from him +anything but the best. One cannot, however, be content to see the author +of _The Man of Property_ dropping the platitudes and the false +fancifulness of _The Inn of Tranquillity_. It is the false pretences in +literature which criticism must seek to destroy. Recognizing Mr. +Galsworthy's genius for the realistic representation of men and women, it +must not be blinded by that genius to the essential second-rateness and +sentimentality of much of his presentation of ideas. He is a man of genius +in the black humility with which he confesses strength and weakness +through the figures of men and women. He achieves too much of a pulpit +complacency--therefore of condescendingness--therefore of falseness to the +deep intimacy of good literature--when he begins to moralize about time +and the universe. One finds the same complacency, the same +condescendingness, in a far higher degree in the essays of Mr. A.C. +Benson. Mr. Benson, I imagine, began writing with a considerable literary +gift, but his later work seems to me to have little in it but a good man's +pretentiousness. It has the air of going profoundly into the secrecies of +love and joy and truth, but it contains hardly a sentence that would waken +a ruffle on the surface of the shallowest spirit. It is not of the +literature that awakens, indeed, but of the literature that puts to sleep, +and that is always a danger unless it is properly labelled and +recognizable. Sleeping-draughts may be useful to help a sick man through a +bad night, but one does not recommend them as a cure for ordinary healthy +thirst. Nor will Mr. Benson escape just criticism on the score of his +manner of writing. He is an absolute master of the otiose word, the +superfluous sentence. He pours out pages as easily as a bird sings, but, +alas! it is a clockwork bird in this instance. He lacks the true innocent +absorption in his task which makes happy writing and happy reading. + +It is not always the authors, on the other hand, whose pretences it is the +work of criticism to destroy. It is frequently the wild claims of the +partisans of an author that must be put to the test. This sort of +pretentiousness often happens during "booms," when some author is talked +of as though he were the only man who had ever written well. How many of +these booms have we had in recent years--booms of Wilde, of Synge, of +Donne, of Dostoevsky! On the whole, no doubt, they do more good than harm. +They create a vivid enthusiasm for literature that affects many people who +might not otherwise know that to read a fine book is as exciting an +experience as going to a horse-race. Hundreds of people would not have the +courage to sit down to read a book like _The Brothers Karamazov_ unless +they were compelled to do so as a matter of fashionable duty. On the other +hand, booms more than anything else make for false estimates. It seems +impossible with many people to praise Dostoevsky without saying that he is +greater than Tolstoy or Turgenev. Oscar Wilde enthusiasts, again, invite +us to rejoice, not only over that pearl of triviality, _The Importance of +Being Earnest_, but over a blaze of paste jewelry like _Salomé_. +Similarly, Donne worshippers are not content to ask us to praise Donne's +gifts of fancy, analysis and idiosyncratic music. They insist that we +shall also admit that he knew the human heart better than Shakespeare. It +may be all we like sheep have gone astray in this kind of literary riot. +And so long as the exaggeration of a good writer's genius is an honest +personal affair, one resents it no more than one resents the large nose or +the bandy legs of a friend. It is when men begin to exaggerate in +herds--to repeat like a lesson learned the enthusiasm of others--that the +boom becomes offensive. It is as if men who had not large noses were to +begin to pretend that they had, or as if men whose legs were not bandy +were to pretend that they were, for fashion's sake. Insincerity is the one +entirely hideous artistic sin--whether in the creation or in the +appreciation of art. The man who enjoys reading _The Family Herald_, and +admits it, is nearer a true artistic sense than the man who is bored by +Henry James and denies it: though, perhaps, hypocrisy is a kind of homage +paid to art as well as to virtue. Still, the affectation of literary +rapture offends like every other affectation. It was the chorus of +imitative rapture over Synge a few years ago that helped most to bring +about a speedy reaction against him. Synge was undoubtedly a man of fine +genius--the genius of gloomy comedy and ironic tragedy. His mind delved +for strangenesses in speech and imagination among people whom the new age +had hardly touched, and his discoveries were sufficiently magnificent to +make the eyes of any lover of language brighten. His work showed less of +the mastery of life, however, than of the mastery of a theme. It was a +curious by-world of literature, a little literature of death's-heads, and, +therefore, no more to be mentioned with the work of the greatest than the +stories of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Unfortunately, some disturbances in +Dublin at the first production of _The Playboy_ turned the play into a +battle-cry, and the artists, headed by Mr. Yeats, used Synge to belabour +the Philistinism of the mob. In the excitement of the fight they were soon +talking about Synge as though Dublin had rejected a Shakespeare. Mr. Yeats +even used the word "Homeric" about him--surely the most inappropriate word +it would be possible to imagine. Before long Mr. Yeats's enthusiasm had +spread to England, where people who ignored the real magic of Synge's +work, as it is to be found in _Riders to the Sea_, _In the Shadow of the +Glen_, and _The Well of the Saints_, went into ecstasies over the inferior +_Playboy_. Such a boom meant not the appreciation of Synge but a +glorification of his more negligible work. It was almost as if we were to +boom Swinburne on the score of his later political poetry. Criticism makes +for the destruction of such booms. I do not mean that the critic has not +the right to fling about superlatives like any other man. Criticism, in +one aspect, is the art of flinging about superlatives finely. But they +must be personal superlatives, not boom superlatives. Even when they are +showered on an author who is the just victim of a boom--and, on a +reasonable estimate, at least fifty per cent of the booms have some +justification--they are as unbeautiful as rotten apples unless they have +this personal kind of honesty. + +It may be thought that an attitude of criticism like this may easily sink +into Pharisaism--a sort of "superior-person" aloofness from other people. +And no doubt the critic, like other people, needs to beat his breast and +pray, "God be merciful to me, a--critic." On the whole, however, the +critic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimes +imagined. He is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He is +not concerned with getting rid of the dross except in so far as it hides +the gold. In other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a +subsidiary affair. None of the best critics have been men of destructive +minds. They are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowers +than with the weeds. If I may change the metaphor, the whole truth about +criticism is contained in the Eastern proverb which declares that "Love is +the net of Truth." It is as a lover that the critic, like the lyric poet +and the mystic, will be most excellently symbolized. + + + + +XXIV.--BOOK REVIEWING + + +I notice that in Mr. Seekers' _Art and Craft of Letters_ series no volume +on book-reviewing has yet been announced. A volume on criticism has been +published, it is true, but book-reviewing is something different from +criticism. It swings somewhere between criticism on the one hand and +reporting on the other. When Mr. Arthur Bourchier a few years ago, in the +course of a dispute about Mr. Walkley's criticisms, spoke of the dramatic +critic as a dramatic reporter, he did a very insolent thing. But there was +a certain reasonableness in his phrase. The critic on the Press is a +news-gatherer as surely as the man who is sent to describe a public +meeting or a strike. Whether he is asked to write a report on a play of +Mr. Shaw's or an exhibition of etchings by Mr. Bone or a volume of short +stories by Mr. Conrad or a speech by Mr. Asquith or a strike on the Clyde, +his function is the same. It is primarily to give an account, a +description, of what he has seen or heard or read. This may seem to many +people--especially to critics--a degrading conception of a book-reviewer's +work. But it is quite the contrary. A great deal of book-reviewing at the +present time is dead matter. Book-reviews ought at least to be alive as +news. + +At present everybody is ready to write book-reviews. This is because +nearly everybody believes that they are the easiest kind of thing to +write. People who would shrink from offering to write poems or leading +articles or descriptive sketches of football matches, have an idea that +reviewing books is something with the capacity for which every man is +born, as he is born with the capacity for talking prose. They think it is +as easy as having opinions. It is simply making a few remarks at the end +of a couple of hours spent with a book in an armchair. Many men and +women--novelists, barristers, professors and others--review books in their +spare time, as they look on this as work they can do when their brains are +too tired to do anything which is of genuine importance. A great deal of +book-reviewing is done contemptuously, as though to review books well were +not as difficult as to do anything else well. This is perhaps due in some +measure to the fact that, for the amount of hard work it involves, +book-reviewing is one of the worst-paid branches of journalism. The hero +of Mr. Beresford's new novel, _The Invisible Event_, makes an income of +£250 a year as an outside reviewer, and it is by no means every outside +reviewer who makes as much as that from reviewing alone. It is not that +there is not an immense public which reads book-reviews. Mr. T.P. O'Connor +showed an admirable journalistic instinct when twenty years or so ago he +filled the front page of the _Weekly Sun_ with a long book-review. The +sale of the _Times Literary Supplement_, since it became a separate +publication, is evidence that, for good or bad, many thousands of readers +have acquired the habit of reading criticism of current literature. + +But I do not think that the mediocre quality of most book-reviewing is due +to low payment. It is a result, I believe, of a wrong conception of what a +book-review should be. My own opinion is that a review should be, from one +point of view, a portrait of a book. It should present the book instead of +merely presenting remarks about the book. In reviewing, portraiture is +more important than opinion. One has to get the reflexion of the book, and +not a mere comment on it, down on paper. Obviously, one must not press +this theory of portraiture too far. It is useful chiefly as a protest +against the curse of comment. Many clever writers, when they come to write +book-reviews, instead of portraying the book, waste their time in remarks +to the effect that the book should never have been written, and so forth. +That, in fact, is the usual attitude of clever reviewers when they begin. +They are so horrified to find that Mr. William Le Queux does not write +like Dostoevsky and that Mrs. Florence Barclay lacks the grandeur of +Æschylus that they run amok among their contemporaries with something of +the furious destructiveness of Don Quixote on his adventures. It is the +noble intolerance of youth; but how unreasonable it is! Suppose a +portrait-painter were suddenly to take his sitter by the throat on the +ground that he had no right to exist. One would say to him that that was +not his business: his business is to take the man's existence for granted, +and to paint him until he becomes in a new sense alive. If he is +worthless, paint his worthlessness, but do not merely comment on it. There +is no reason why a portrait should be flattering, but it should be a +portrait. It may be a portrait in the grand matter, or a portrait in +caricature: if it expresses its subject honestly and delightfully, that is +all we can ask of it. A critical portrait of a book by Mr. Le Queux may be +amazingly alive: a censorious comment can only be dull. Mr. Hubert Bland +was at one time an almost ideal portrait-painter of commonplace novels. He +obviously liked them, as the caricaturist likes the people in the street. +The novels themselves might not be readable, but Mr. Bland's reviews of +them were. He could reveal their characteristics in a few strokes, which +would tell you more of what you wanted to know about them than a whole +dictionary of adjectives of praise and blame. One could tell at a glance +whether the book had any literary value, whether it was worth turning to +as a stimulant, whether it was even intelligent of its kind. One would not +like to see Mr. Bland's method too slavishly adopted by reviewers: it was +suitable only for portraying certain kinds of books. But it is worth +recalling as the method of a man who, dealing with books that were for the +most part insipid and worthless, made his reviews delightfully alive as +well as admirably interpretative. + +The comparison of a review to a portrait fixes attention on one essential +quality of a book-review. A reviewer should never forget his +responsibility to his subject. He must allow nothing to distract him from +his main task of setting down the features of his book vividly and +recognizably. One may say this even while admitting that the most +delightful book-reviews of modern times--for the literary causeries of +Anatole France may fairly be classified as book-reviews--were the revolt +of an escaped angel against the limitations of a journalistic form. But +Anatole France happens to be a man of genius, and genius is a +justification of any method. In the hands of a pinchbeck Anatole France, +how unendurable the review conceived as a causerie would become! Anatole +France observes that "all books in general, and even the most admirable, +seem to me infinitely less precious for what they contain than for what he +who reads puts into them." That, in a sense, is true. But no reviewer +ought to believe it. His duty is to his author: whatever he "puts into +him" is a subsidiary matter. "The critic," says Anatole France again, +"must imbue himself thoroughly with the idea that every book has as many +different aspects as it has readers, and that a poem, like a landscape, is +transformed in all the eyes that see it, in all the souls that conceive +it." Here he gets nearer the idea of criticism as portraiture, and +practically every critic of importance has been a portrait-painter. In +this respect Saint-Beuve is at one with Macaulay, Pater with Matthew +Arnold, Anatole France (occasionally) with Henry James. They may portray +authors rather than books, artists rather than their work, but this only +means that criticism at its highest is a study of the mind of the artist +as reflected in his art. + +Clearly, if the reviewer can paint the portrait of an author, he is +achieving something better even than the portrait of a book. But what, at +all costs, he must avoid doing is to substitute for a portrait of one kind +or another the rag-bag of his own moral, political or religious opinions. +It is one of the most difficult things in the world for anyone who happens +to hold strong opinions not to make the mind of Shakespeare himself a +pulpit from which to roar them at the world. Reviewers with theories about +morality and religion can seldom be induced to come to the point of +portraiture until they have enjoyed a preliminary half-column of +self-explanation. In their eyes a review is a moral essay rather than an +imaginative interpretation. In dissenting from this view, one is not +pleading for a race of reviewers without moral or religious ideas, or even +prepossessions. One is merely urging that in a review, as in a novel or a +play, the moral should be seated at the heart instead of sprawling all +over the surface. In the well-worn phrase it should be implicit, not +explicit. Undoubtedly a rare critic of genius can make an interesting +review-article out of a statement of his own moral and political ideas. +But that only justifies the article as an essay, not as a review. To many +reviewers--especially in the bright days of youth--it seems an immensely +more important thing to write a good essay than a good review. And so it +is, but not when a review is wanted. It is a far, far better thing to +write a good essay about America than a good review of a book on America. +But the one should not be substituted for the other. If one takes up a +review of a book on America by Mr. Wells or Mr. Bennett, it is in +ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in order to find out what the author +thinks, not what the reviewer thinks. If the reviewer begins with a +paragraph of general remarks about America--or, worse still, about some +abstract thing like liberty--he is almost invariably wasting paper. I +believe it is a sound rule to destroy all preliminary paragraphs of this +kind. They are detestable in almost all writing, but most detestable of +all in book-reviews, where it is important to plunge all at once into the +middle of things. I say this, though there is an occasional book-reviewer +whose preliminary paragraphs I would not miss for worlds. But one has even +known book-reviewers who wrote delightful articles, though they made +scarcely any reference to the books under review at all. + +To my mind, nothing more clearly shows the general misconception of the +purpose of a book-review than the attitude of the majority of journalists +to the quotational review. It is the custom to despise the quotational +review--to dismiss is as mere "gutting." As a consequence, it is generally +very badly done. It is done as if under the impression that it does not +matter what quotations one gives so long as one fills the space. One great +paper lends support to this contemptuous attitude towards quotational +criticism by refusing to pay its contributors for space taken up by +quotations. A London evening newspaper was once guilty of the same folly. +A reviewer on the staff of the latter confessed to me that to the present +day he finds it impossible, without an effort, to make quotations in a +review, because of the memory of those days when to quote was to add to +one's poverty. Despised work is seldom done well, and it is not surprising +that it is almost more seldom that one finds a quotational review well +done than any other sort. Yet how critically illuminating a quotation may +be! There are many books in regard to which quotation is the only +criticism necessary. Books of memoirs and books of verse--the least +artistic as well as the most artistic forms of literature--both lend +themselves to it. To criticize verse without giving quotations is to leave +one largely in ignorance of the quality of the verse. The selection of +passages to quote is at least as fine a test of artistic judgment as any +comment the critic can make. In regard to books of memoirs, gossip, and so +forth, one does not ask for a test of delicate artistic judgment. Books of +this kind should simply be rummaged for entertaining "news." To review +them well is to make an anthology of (in a wide sense) amusing passages. +There is no other way to portray them. And yet I have known a very +brilliant reviewer take a book of gossip about the German Court and, +instead of quoting any of the numerous things that would interest people, +fill half a column with abuse of the way in which the book was written, of +the inconsequence of the chapters, of the second-handedness of many of the +anecdotes. Now, I do not object to any of these charges being brought. It +is well that "made" books should not be palmed off on the public as +literature. On the other hand, a mediocre book (from the point of view of +literature or history) is no excuse for a mediocre review. No matter how +mediocre a book is, if it is on a subject of great interest, it usually +contains enough vital matter to make an exciting half-column. Many +reviewers despise a bad book so heartily that, instead of squeezing every +drop of interest out of it, as they ought to do, they refrain from +squeezing a single drop of interest out of it. They are frequently people +who suffer from anecdotophobia. "Scorn not the anecdote" is a motto that +might be modestly hung up in the heart of every reviewer. After all, +Montaigne did not scorn it, and there is no reason why the modern +journalist should be ashamed of following so respectable an example. One +can quite easily understand how the gluttony of many publishers for +anecdotes has driven writers with a respect for their intellect into +revolt. But let us not be unjust to the anecdote because it has been +cheapened through no fault of its own. We may be sure of one thing. A +review--a review, at any rate, of a book of memoirs or any similar kind of +non-literary book--which contains an anecdote is better than a review +which does not contain an anecdote. If an anecdotal review is bad, it is +because it is badly done, not because it is anecdotal. This, one might +imagine, is too obvious to require saying; but many men of brains go +through life without ever being able to see it. + +One of the chief virtues of the anecdote is that it brings the reviewer +down from his generalizations to the individual instances. Generalizations +mixed with instances make a fine sort of review, but to flow on for a +column of generalizations without ever pausing to light them into life +with instances, concrete examples, anecdotes, is to write not a +book-review but a sermon. Of the two, the sermon is much the easier to +write: it does not involve the trouble of constant reference to one's +authorities. Perhaps, however, someone with practice in writing sermons +will argue that the sermon without instances is as somniferous as the +book-review with the same want. Whether that it so or not, the book-review +is not, as a rule, the place for abstract argument. Not that one wants to +shut out controversy. There is no pleasanter review to read than a +controversial review. Even here, however, one demands portrait as well as +argument. It is, in nine cases out of ten, waste of time to assail a +theory when you can portray a man. It always seems to me to be hopelessly +wrong for the reviewer of biographies, critical studies, or books of a +similar kind, to allow his mind to wander from the main figure in the book +to the discussion of some theory or other that has been incidentally put +forward. Thus, in a review of a book on Stevenson, the important thing is +to reconstruct the figure of Stevenson, the man and the artist. This is +much more vitally interesting and relevant than theorizing on such +questions as whether the writing of prose or of poetry is the more +difficult art, or what are the essential characteristics of romance. These +and many other questions may arise, and it is the proper task of the +reviewer to discuss them, so long as their discussion is kept subordinate +to the portraiture of the central figure. But they must not be allowed to +push the leading character in the whole business right out of the review. +If they are brought in at all, they must be brought in, like moral +sentiments, inoffensively by the way. + +In pleading that a review should be a portrait of a book to a vastly +greater degree than it is a direct comment on the book, I am not pleading +that it should be a mere bald summary. The summary kind of review is no +more a portrait than is the Scotland Yard description of a man wanted by +the police. Portraiture implies selection and a new emphasis. The synopsis +of the plot of a novel is as far from being a good review as is a +paragraph of general comment on it. The review must justify itself, not as +a reflection of dead bones, but by a new life of its own. + +Further, I am not pleading for the suppression of comment and, if need be, +condemnation. But either to praise or condemn without instances is dull. +Neither the one thing nor the other is the chief thing in the review. They +are the crown of the review, but not its life. There are many critics to +whom condemnation of books they do not like seems the chief end of man. +They regard themselves as engaged upon a holy war against the Devil and +his works. Horace complained that it was only poets who were not allowed +to be mediocre. The modern critic--I should say the modern critic of the +censorious kind, not the critic who looks on it as his duty to puff out +meaningless superlatives over every book that appears--will not allow any +author to be mediocre. The war against mediocrity is a necessary war, but +I cannot help thinking that mediocrity is more likely to yield to humour +than to contemptuous abuse. Apart from this, it is the reviewer's part to +maintain high standards for work that aims at being literature, rather +than to career about, like a destroying angel, among books that have no +such aim. Criticism, Anatole France has said, is the record of the soul's +adventures among masterpieces. Reviewing, alas! is for the most part the +record of the soul's adventures among books that are the reverse of +masterpieces. What, then, are his standards to be? Well, a man must judge +linen as linen, cotton as cotton, and shoddy as shoddy. It is ridiculous +to denounce any of them for not being silk. To do so is not to apply high +standards so much as to apply wrong standards. One has no right as a +reviewer to judge a book by any standard save that which the author aims +at reaching. As a private reader, one has the right to say of a novel by +Mr. Joseph Hocking, for instance: "This is not literature. This is not +realism. This does not interest me. This is awful." I do not say that +these sentences can be fairly used of any of Mr. Hocking's novels. I +merely take him as an example of a popular novelist who would be bound to +be condemned if judged by comparison with Flaubert or Meredith or even Mr. +Galsworthy. But the reviewer is not asked to state whether he finds Mr. +Hocking readable so much as to state the kind of readableness at which Mr. +Hocking aims and the measure of his success in achieving it. It is the +reviewer's business to discover the quality of a book rather than to keep +announcing that the quality does not appeal to him. Not that he need +conceal the fact that it has failed to appeal to him, but he should +remember that this is a comparatively irrelevant matter. He may make it as +clear as day--indeed, he ought to make it as clear as day, if it is his +opinion--that he regards the novels of Charles Garvice as shoddy, but he +ought also to make it clear whether they are the kind of shoddy that +serves its purpose. + +Is this to lower literary standards? I do not think so, for, in cases of +this kind, one is not judging literature, but popular books. Those to whom +popular books are anathema have a temperament which will always find it +difficult to fall in with the limitations of the work of a general +reviewer. The curious thing is that this intolerance of easy writing is +most generally found among those who are most opposed to intolerance in +the sphere of morals. It is as though they had escaped from one sort of +Puritanism into another. Personally, I do not see why, if we should be +tolerant of the breach of a moral commandment, we should not be equally +tolerant of the breach of a literary commandment. We should gently scan, +not only our brother man, but our brother author. The æsthete of to-day, +however, will look kindly on adultery, but show all the harshness of a +Pilgrim Father in his condemnation of a split infinitive. I cannot see the +logic of this. If irregular and commonplace people have the right to +exist, surely irregular and commonplace books have a right to exist by +their side. + +The reviewer, however, is often led into a false attitude to a book, not +by its bad quality, but by some irrelevant quality--some underlying moral +or political idea. He denounces a novel the moral ideas of which offend +him, without giving sufficient consideration to the success or failure of +the novelist in the effort to make his characters live. Similarly, he +praises a novel with the moral ideas of which he agrees, without +reflecting that perhaps it is as a tract rather than as a work of art that +it has given him pleasure. Both the praise and blame which have been +heaped upon Mr. Kipling are largely due to appreciation or dislike of his +politics. The Imperialist finds his heart beating faster as he reads _The +English Flag_, and he praises Mr. Kipling as an artist when it is really +Mr. Kipling as a propagandist who has moved him. The anti-Imperialist, on +the other hand, is often led by detestation of Mr. Kipling's politics to +deny even the palpable fact that Mr. Kipling is a very brilliant +short-story teller. It is for the reviewer to raise himself above such +prejudices and to discover what are Mr. Kipling's ideas apart from his +art, and what is his art apart from his ideas. + +The relation between one and the other is also clearly a relevant matter +for discussion. But the confusion of one with the other is fatal. In the +field of morals we are perhaps led astray in our judgments even more +frequently than in matters of politics. Mr. Shaw's plays are often +denounced by critics whom they have made laugh till their sides ached, and +the reason is that, after leaving the theatre, the critics remember that +they do not like Mr, Shaw's moral ideas. In the same way, it seems to me, +a great deal of the praise that has been given to Mr. D.H. Lawrence as an +artist ought really to be given to him as a distributor of certain moral +ideas. That he has studied wonderfully one aspect of human nature, that he +can describe wonderfully some aspects of external nature, I know; but I +doubt whether his art is fine enough or sympathetic enough to make +enthusiastic anyone who differs from the moral attitude, as it may be +called, of his stories. This is the real test of a work of art--has it +sufficient imaginative vitality to capture the imagination of artistic +readers who are not in sympathy with its point of view? The _Book of Job_ +survives the test: it is a book to the spell of which no imaginative man +could be indifferent, whether Christian, Jew or atheist. Similarly, +Shelley is read and written about with enthusiasm by many who hold moral, +religious, and political ideas directly contrary to his own. Mr. Kipling's +_Recessional_, with its sombre imaginative glow, its recapturing of Old +Testament prides and fears, commands the praise of thousands to whom much +of the rest of his poetry is the abominable thing. It is the reviewer's +task to discover imagination even in those who are the enemies of the +ideas he cherishes. In so far as he cannot do this, he fails in his +business as a critic of the arts. + +It may be said in answer to all this, however, that to appeal for +tolerance in book-reviewers is not necessary. The Press is already +overcrowded with laudations of commonplace books. Not a day passes but at +least a dozen books are praised as having "not a dull moment," being +"readable from cover to cover," and as reminding the reviewer of +Stevenson, Meredith, Oscar Wilde, Paul de Kock, and Jane Austen. That is +not the kind of tolerance which one is eager to see. That kind of review +is scarcely different from a publisher's advertisement. Besides, it +usually sins in being mere summary and comment, or even comment without +summary. It is a thoughtless scattering of acceptable words and is as +unlike the review conceived as a portrait as is the hostile kind of +commentatory review which I have been discussing. It is generally the +comment of a lazy brain, instead of being, like the other, the comment of +a clever brain. Praise is the vice of the commonplace reviewer, just as +censoriousness is the vice of the more clever sort. Not that one wishes +either praise or censure to be stinted. One is merely anxious not to see +them misapplied. It is a vice, not a virtue, of reviewing to be lukewarm +either in the one or the other. What one desires most of all in a +reviewer, after a capacity to portray books, is the courage of his +opinions, so that, whether he is face to face with an old reputation like +Mr. Conrad's or a new reputation like Mr. Mackenzie's, he will boldly +express his enthusiasms and his dissatisfactions without regard to the +estimate of the author, which is, for the moment, "in the air." What seems +to be wanted, then, in a book-reviewer is that, without being servile, he +should be swift to praise, and that, without being censorious, he should +have the courage to blame. While tolerant of kinds in literature, he +should be intolerant of pretentiousness. He should be less patient, for +instance, of a pseudo-Milton than of a writer who frankly aimed at nothing +higher than a book of music-hall songs. He should be more eager to define +the qualities of a book than to heap comment upon comment. If--I hope the +image is not too strained--he draws a book from the life, he will produce +a better review than if he spends his time calling it names, whether foul +or fair. + +But what of the equipment of the reviewer? it may be asked. What of his +standards? One of the faults of modern reviewing seems to me to be that +the standards of many critics are derived almost entirely from the +literature of the last thirty years. This is especially so with some +American critics, who rush feverishly into print with volumes spotted with +the names of modern writers as Christmas pudding is spotted with currants. +To read them is to get the impression that the world is only a hundred +years old. It seems to me that Matthew Arnold was right when he urged men +to turn to the classics for their standards. His definition of the +classics may have been too narrow, and nothing could be more utterly dead +than a criticism which tries to measure imaginary literature by an +academic standard or the rules of Aristotle. But it is only those to whom +the classics are themselves dead who are likely to lay this academic dead +hand on new literature. Besides, even the most academic standards are +valuable in a world in which chaos is hailed with enthusiasm both in art +and in politics. But, when all is said, the taste which is the essential +quality of a critic is something with which he is born. It is something +which is not born of reading Sophocles and Plato and does not perish of +reading Miss Marie Corelli. This taste must illuminate all the reviewer's +portraits. Without it, he had far better be a coach-builder than a +reviewer of books. It is this taste in the background that gives +distinction to a tolerant and humorous review of even the most unambitious +detective story. + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13764 *** |