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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Figures of Several Centuries
+
+Author: Arthur Symons
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2007 [EBook #21407]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES
+
+BY
+
+ARTHUR SYMONS
+
+LONDON
+CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
+1917
+
+
+_First published, December 1916._
+
+_Reprinted, January, June 1917._
+
+
+TO
+
+JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+WITH A FRIEND'S ADMIRATION
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+SAINT AUGUSTINE                                                     1
+
+CHARLES LAMB                                                       13
+
+VILLON                                                             37
+
+CASANOVA AT DUX                                                    41
+
+JOHN DONNE                                                         80
+
+EMILY BRONTË                                                      109
+
+EDGAR ALLAN POE                                                   115
+
+THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES                                             122
+
+GUSTAVE FLAUBERT                                                  130
+
+GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET                                         141
+
+ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE                                        153
+
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI                                            201
+
+A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY                              207
+
+LÉON CLADEL                                                       216
+
+HENRIK IBSEN                                                      222
+
+JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS                                               268
+
+TWO SYMBOLISTS                                                    300
+
+CHARLES BAUDELAIRE                                                310
+
+WALTER PATER                                                      316
+
+THE GONCOURTS                                                     336
+
+COVENTRY PATMORE                                                  351
+
+SAROJINI NAIDU                                                    376
+
+WELSH POETRY                                                      390
+
+
+
+
+SAINT AUGUSTINE
+
+The _Confessions_ of St. Augustine are the first autobiography, and they
+have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that they
+are addressed directly to God. Rousseau's unburdening of himself is the
+last, most effectual manifestation of that nervous, defiant
+consciousness of other people which haunted him all his life. He felt
+that all the men and women whom he passed on his way through the world
+were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions.
+The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the
+protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him,
+in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to
+the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himself
+was after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He felt
+the silent voices within him too acutely to keep silence. Cellini wrote
+his autobiography because he heard within him such trumpeting voices of
+praise, exultation, and the supreme satisfaction of a violent man who
+has conceived himself to be always in the right, that it shocked him to
+think of going down into his grave without having made the whole world
+hear those voices. He hurls at you this book of his own deeds that it
+may smite you into acquiescent admiration. Casanova, at the end of a
+long life in which he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth,
+with a simplicity of pleasure in which the sense of their being
+forbidden was only the least of their abounding flavours, looked back
+upon his past self with a slightly pathetic admiration, and set himself
+to go all over those successful adventures, in love and in other arts,
+firstly, in order that he might be amused by recalling them, and then
+because he thought the record would do him credit. He neither intrudes
+himself as a model, nor acknowledges that he was very often in the
+wrong. Always passionate after sensations, and for their own sake, the
+writing of an autobiography was the last, almost active, sensation that
+was left to him, and he accepted it energetically.
+
+Probably St. Augustine first conceived of the writing of an
+autobiography as a kind of penance, which might be fruitful also to
+others. By its form it challenges the slight difficulty that it appears
+to be telling God what God knew already. But that is the difficulty
+which every prayer also challenges. To those we love, are we not fond of
+telling many things about ourselves which they know already? A prayer,
+such confessions as these, are addressed to God by one of those
+subterfuges by which it is necessary to approach the unseen and
+infinite, under at least a disguise of mortality. And the whole book, as
+no other such book has ever been, is lyrical. This prose, so simple, so
+familiar, has in it the exaltation of poetry. It can pass, without a
+change of tone, from the boy's stealing of pears: 'If aught of those
+pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender
+human affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that be
+which is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius, my sweet
+friend'; and from that to the saint's rare, last ecstasy: 'And sometimes
+Thou admittedst me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul,
+rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know
+not what in it would not belong to the life to come.' And even
+self-analysis, of which there is so much, becoming at times a kind of
+mathematics, even those metaphysical subtleties which seem, to sharpen
+thought upon thought to an almost invisible fineness of edge, become
+also lyrical, inter-penetrated as they are with this sense of the
+divine.
+
+To St. Augustine all life is seen only in its relation to the divine;
+looked at from any other side, it has no meaning, and, looked at even
+with this light upon it, is but for the most part seen as a blundering
+in the dark, a wandering from the right path. In so far as it is
+natural, it is evil. In so far as it is corrected by divine grace, it
+leaves the human actors in it without merit; since all virtue is God's,
+though all vice is man's.
+
+This conception of life is certainly valuable in giving harmony to the
+book, presenting as it does a sort of background. It brings with it a
+very impressive kind of symbolism into its record of actual facts, to
+all of which it gives a value, not in themselves, if you please to put
+it so, or, perhaps more properly, their essential value. When nothing
+which happens, happens except under God's direct responsibility, when
+nothing is said which is not one of your 'lines' in the drama which is
+being played, not so much by as through you, there can be no
+exteriorities, nothing can be trivial, in a record of life so conceived.
+And this point of view also helps the writer to keep all his details in
+proportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least,
+being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because they happened
+to him. To St. Augustine, while not the smallest human event is without
+significance, in its relation to eternity, not the greatest human event
+is of importance, in its relation to time; and his own share in it would
+but induce a special, it may seem an exaggerated, humility on his part.
+Thus, speaking of his early studies, his triumphs in them, not without a
+certain _naïveté_: 'Whatever was written, either in rhetoric or logic,
+geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty or
+any instruction, I understood, Thou knowest, O Lord my God; because both
+quickness and understanding and acuteness in discerning is Thy gift.'
+Or, again, speaking of the youthful excellences ('excellently hadst Thou
+made him') of that son who was the son of his beloved mistress: 'I had
+no part in that boy, but the sin.'
+
+Intellectual pride, one sees in him indeed, at all times, by the very
+force with which it is repressed into humility; and, in all that relates
+to that mistress, in the famous cry: 'Give me chastity, but not yet!' in
+all those insurgent memories of 'these various and shadowy loves,' we
+see the force of the flesh, in one who lived always with so passionate a
+life, alike of the spirit and the senses. Now, recalling what was sinful
+in him, in his confessions to God, he is reluctant to allow any value to
+the most honourable of human sentiments, to so much as forgive the most
+estimable of human weaknesses. 'And now, Lord, in writing I confess it
+unto Thee. Read it who will, and interpret it how he will: and if any
+finds sin therein, that I wept my mother for a small portion of an hour
+(the mother who for the time was dead to mine eyes, who had for many
+years wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes), let him not deride
+me; but rather, if he be one of large charity, let him weep for himself
+for my sins unto Thee, the Father of all the brethren of Thy Christ.'
+And yet it is of this mother that he writes his most tender, his most
+beautiful pages. 'The day was now approaching whereon she was to depart
+this life (which day Thou well knewest, we knew not), it came to pass,
+Thyself, as I believe, by Thy secret ways so ordering it, that she and I
+stood alone, leaning in a certain window, which looked into the garden
+of the house where we now lay, at Ostia....' It is not often that
+memory, in him, is so careful of 'the images of earth, and water, and
+air,' as to call up these delicate pictures. They too had become for him
+among the desirable things which are to be renounced for a more
+desirable thing.
+
+That sense of the divine in life, and specially of the miracles which
+happen a certain number of times in every existence, the moments which
+alone count in the soul's summing-up of itself, St. Augustine has
+rendered with such significance, with such an absolute wiping out from
+the memory of everything else, just because he has come to that, it
+might seem, somewhat arid point of spiritual ascent. That famous moment
+of the _Tolle, lege_: 'I cast myself down I know not how, under a
+certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears ... when lo! I heard from
+a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting,
+and oft repeating, "Take up and read, take up and read"'; the Bishop's
+word to Monnica ('as if it had sounded from heaven'), 'It is not
+possible that the son of those tears should perish'; the beggar-man,
+'joking and joyous,' in the streets of Milan: it is by these, apparently
+trifling, these all-significant moments that his narrative moves, with a
+more reticent and effective symbolism than any other narrative known to
+me. They are the moments in which the soul has really lived, or has
+really seen; and the rest of life may well be a blindness and a troubled
+coming and going.
+
+I said that the height from which St. Augustine apprehends these truths
+may seem a somewhat arid one. That is perhaps only because it is nearer
+the sky, more directly bathed in what he calls, beautifully, 'this queen
+of colours, the light.' There is a passage in the tenth book which may
+almost be called a kind of æsthetics. They are æsthetics indeed of
+renunciation, but a renunciation of the many beauties for the one
+Beauty, which shall contain as well as eclipse them; 'because those
+beautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into their
+cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls.' And it
+is not a renunciation by one who had never enjoyed what he renounces, or
+who feels himself, even now, quite safe from certain forms of its
+seduction. He is troubled especially by the fear that 'those melodies
+which Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet and attuned
+voice,' may come to move him 'more with the voice than with the words
+sung.' Yet how graciously he speaks of music, allowing 'that the several
+affections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper
+measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence
+wherewith they are stirred up.' It is precisely because he feels so
+intimately the beauty of all things human, though it were but 'a dog
+coursing in the field, a lizard catching flies,' that he desires to pass
+through these to that passionate contemplation which is the desire of
+all seekers after the absolute, and which for him is God. He asks of all
+the powers of the earth: 'My questioning them, was my thoughts on them;
+and their form of beauty gave the answer.' And by how concrete a series
+of images does he strive to express the inexpressible, in that passage
+of pure poetry on the love of God! 'But what do I love, when I love
+thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the
+brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of
+varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and
+spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of
+flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind
+of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement, when I
+love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my
+inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain,
+and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what
+breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not,
+and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love
+when I love my God.'
+
+Mentioning in his confessions only such things as he conceives to be of
+import to God, it happens, naturally, that St. Augustine leaves unsaid
+many things that would have interested most men, perhaps more. 'What,
+then, have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions--as if
+they could heal my infirmities,--a race curious to know the lives of
+others, slothful to amend their own?' Finding, indeed, many significant
+mentions of things and books and persons, Faustus the Manichee, the
+'Hortensius' of Cicero, the theatre, we shall find little pasture here
+for our antiquarian, our purely curious, researches. We shall not even
+find all that we might care to know, in St. Augustine himself, of the
+surface of the mind's action, which we call character, or the surface
+emotions, which we call temperament. Here is a soul, one of the supreme
+souls of humanity, speaking directly to that supreme soul which it has
+apprehended outside humanity. Be sure that, if it forgets many things
+which you, who overhear, would like it to have remembered, it will
+remember everything which it is important to remember, everything which
+the recording angel, who is the soul's finer criticism of itself, has
+already inscribed in the book of the last judgment.
+
+1897.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB
+
+I
+
+
+There is something a little accidental about all Lamb's finest work.
+Poetry he seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but the
+supreme criticism of the _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ arose out
+of the casual habit of setting down an opinion of an extract just copied
+into one's note-book, and the book itself, because, he said, 'the book
+is such as I am glad there should be.' The beginnings of his
+miscellaneous prose are due to the 'ferreting' of Coleridge. 'He ferrets
+me day and night,' Lamb complains to Manning in 1800, 'to do something.
+He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressing
+occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip.... He has lugged me to
+the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a
+first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the
+anatomist of melancholy'; which was done, in the consummate way we know,
+and led in its turn to all the rest of the prose. And Barry Cornwall
+tells us that 'he was almost teased into writing the _Elia_ essays.'
+
+He had begun, indeed, deliberately, with a story, as personal really as
+the poems, but, unlike them, set too far from himself in subject and
+tangled with circumstances outside his knowledge. He wrote _Rosamund
+Gray_ before he was twenty-three, and in that 'lovely thing,' as Shelley
+called it, we see most of the merits and defects of his early poetry. It
+is a story which is hardly a story at all, told by comment, evasion, and
+recurrence, by 'little images, recollections, and circumstances of past
+pleasures' or distresses; with something vague and yet precise, like a
+dream partially remembered. Here and there is the creation of a mood and
+moment, almost like Coleridge's in the _Ancient Mariner_; but these
+flicker and go out. The style would be laughable in its simplicity if
+there were not in it some almost awing touch of innocence; some hint of
+that divine goodness which, in Lamb, needed the relief and savour of
+the later freakishness to sharpen it out of insipidity. There is already
+a sense of what is tragic and endearing in earthly existence, though no
+skill as yet in presenting it; and the moral of it is surely one of the
+morals or messages of _Elia_: 'God has built a brave world, but methinks
+he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they may.'
+
+Lamb had no sense of narrative, or, rather, he cared in a story only for
+the moments when it seemed to double upon itself and turn into irony.
+All his attempts to write for the stage (where his dialogue might have
+been so telling) were foiled by his inability to 'bring three together
+on the stage at once,' as he confessed in a letter to Mrs. Shelley;
+'they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there
+they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw
+them.' Narrative he could manage only when it was prepared for him by
+another, as in the _Tales from Shakespeare_ and the _Adventures of
+Ulysses_. Even in _Mrs. Leicester's School_, where he came nearest to
+success in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have less
+than the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb's: of _Father's
+Wedding-Day_, which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called
+'with the sole exception of the _Bride of Lammermoor_, the most
+beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern.'
+There is something of an incomparable kind of story-telling in most of
+the best essays of _Elia_, but it is a kind which he had to find out, by
+accident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly through
+letter-writing. 'Us dramatic geniuses,' he speaks of, in a letter to
+Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it was
+this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessential
+part of himself. 'Truth,' he says in this letter, 'is one and poor, like
+the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that
+multiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not
+believe it could be put to such purposes.' It was to his correspondents,
+indeed to the incitement of their wakeful friendship, that he owes more
+perhaps than the mere materials of his miracles.
+
+To be wholly himself, Lamb had to hide himself under some disguise, a
+name, 'Elia,' taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout
+borrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heighten
+and soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In
+the letter in which he announces the first essays of _Elia_, he writes
+to Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction,
+impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, the
+partitions perfectly invisible.' The correspondents were already
+accustomed to this 'heavenly mingle.' Few of the letters, those works of
+nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken on
+oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of
+sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of a
+preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays.
+What began in mischief ends in art.
+
+
+II
+
+'I am out of the world of readers,' Lamb wrote to Coleridge, 'I hate all
+that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather
+myself up into the old things.' 'I am jealous for the actors who
+pleased my youth,' he says elsewhere. And again: 'For me, I do not know
+whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately
+to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the
+usual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since
+seems of any value or importance compared to the colours which
+imagination gave to everything then.' In Lamb this love of old things,
+this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which imagination
+came to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves all
+through his life that child's attitude of wonder, before 'this good
+world, which he knows--which was created so lovely, beyond his
+deservings.' He loves the old, the accustomed, the things that people
+have had about them since they could remember. 'I am in love,' he says
+in the most profoundly serious of his essays, 'with this green earth;
+the face of town and country; and the sweet security of streets.' He was
+a man to whom mere living had zest enough to make up for everything that
+was contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not unhappy.
+Happiness came to him out of the little things that meant nothing to
+others, or were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living,
+and his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he left
+to others to remember him by.
+
+Lamb's religion, says Pater, was 'the religion of men of letters,
+religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last
+century'; and Hood says of him: 'As he was in spirit an Old Author, so
+was he in faith an Ancient Christian.' He himself tells Coleridge that
+he has 'a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit,' and,
+later in life, writes to a friend: 'Much of my seriousness has gone
+off.' On this, as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more into
+himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent with
+him. 'Such religion as I have,' he said, 'has always acted on me more by
+way of sentiment than argumentative process'; and we find him preferring
+churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done.
+To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over
+it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not
+lightly, or with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude,
+that he asked: 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer
+holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats
+and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and
+fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony
+itself_--do these things go out with life?'
+
+It was what I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so
+humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of
+all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of
+him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that
+species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this
+moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a
+'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical,
+'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and
+sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone
+stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth
+of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the
+most religious sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy.
+
+Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid
+out before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of the
+most precious, and after books came pictures. 'What any man can write,
+surely I may read!' he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios.
+'I like books about books,' he confesses, the test of the book-lover. 'I
+love,' he says, 'to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not
+walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.' He
+was the finest of all readers, far more instant than Coleridge; not to
+be taken unawares by a Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most
+extraordinary persons of the age,' he says of him, on but a slight and
+partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the _Lyrical Ballads_ are
+confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Among
+the Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it,' and can define precisely
+the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of
+escape, to Manning: 'It is full of original thought, but it does not
+often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of
+expression.' I choose these instances because the final test of a critic
+is in his reception of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found it
+much easier to be right, before every one else, about Webster, and Ford,
+and Cyril Tourneur, than to be the accurate critic that he was of
+Coleridge, at the very time when he was under the 'whiff and wind' of
+Coleridge's influence. And in writing of pictures, though his knowledge
+is not so great nor his instinct so wholly 'according to knowledge,' he
+can write as no one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that his
+very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantly
+detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of a
+would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin.
+
+Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has
+been no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, so
+intimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he
+speaks of the stage, as in that tiny masterpiece, _On the Acting of
+Munden_, which ends the book of _Elia_, with its great close, the
+Beethoven soft wondering close, after all the surges: 'He understands a
+leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace
+materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.'
+He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of Miss Kelly.
+When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the very
+wires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in love
+with Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words that
+might apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying of
+Mrs. Jordan, that 'she seemed one whom care could not come near; a
+privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness.'
+Then he goes on: 'This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit,
+escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I may
+use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good
+and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are
+visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she
+does so, I am not sure that she is not greatest.' Is not this, with all
+its precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a poetry made up of
+no poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but 'of imagination all
+compact,' poetry in substance?
+
+Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. 'The earth,
+and sea, and sky (when all is said),' he admitted, 'is but as a house to
+live in'; and, 'separate from the pleasure of your company,' he assured
+Wordsworth, 'I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I
+have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and
+intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with
+dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the
+innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons,
+play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden,
+the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles--life
+awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of
+being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun
+shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls,
+parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens,
+the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
+things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of
+satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks
+about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand
+from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of
+London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's
+catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he
+could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death),
+'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter
+not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets,
+their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his
+friends, 'the very streets, he says,' writes Mary, 'altering every day.'
+London was to him the new, better Eden. 'A garden was the primitive
+prison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself out
+of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers,
+goldsmiths, taverns, play-houses, satires, epigrams, puns--these all
+came in on the town part, and thither side of innocence.' To love London
+so was part of his human love, and in his praise of streets he has done
+as much for the creation and perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth ('by
+whose system,' Mary Lamb conjectured, 'it was doubtful whether a liver
+in towns had a soul to be saved') has done by his praise of flowers and
+hills.
+
+And yet, for all his 'disparagement of heath and highlands,' as he
+confessed to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciation
+of natural things, once brought before them, as he was in his
+appreciation of the things of art and the mind and man's making. He was
+a great walker, and sighs once, before his release from the desk: 'I
+wish I were a caravan driver or a penny post man, to earn my bread in
+air and sunshine.' We have seen what he wrote to Wordsworth about his
+mountains, before he had seen them. This is what he writes of them to
+Manning, after he has seen them: 'Such an impression I never received
+from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again.... In
+fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which
+tourists call _romantic_, which I very much suspected before.' And to
+Coleridge he writes: 'I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the
+last day I live. They haunt me perpetually.' All this Lamb saw and felt,
+because no beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But he
+wrote of it only in his letters, which were all of himself; because he
+put into his published writings only the best or the rarest or the
+accustomed and familiar part of himself, the part which he knew by
+heart.
+
+
+III
+
+Beyond any writer pre-eminent for charm, Lamb had salt and sting. There
+is hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere
+exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with
+something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says,
+briefly: 'Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by
+Affectation'; but then he is also never more himself than when he
+expands and develops, as in this rendering of the hisses which damned
+his play in Drury Lane:
+
+
+     It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a
+     congregation of mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows
+     and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness.
+     'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should
+     give His favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to
+     discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to
+     encourage warmly, to counsel wisely: to sing with, to drink with,
+     and to kiss with: and that they should turn them into the mouths of
+     adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit
+     breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse
+     and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow creatures who are
+     desirous to please them!
+
+
+Or it may be a cold in the head which starts the heroic agility of his
+tongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as
+full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly
+fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an
+idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake,
+which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some
+unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite
+through the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad,
+keeps double motion, like the earth--running the primary circuit of the
+tune, and still revolving upon its own axis'; and he can condense into
+six words the whole life-history and the soul's essential secret of
+Coleridge, when he says of him, in almost the last fragment of prose
+that he wrote, 'he had a hunger for eternity.'
+
+To read Lamb makes a man more humane, more tolerant, more dainty;
+incites to every natural piety, strengthens reverence; while it clears
+his brain of whatever dull fumes may have lodged there, stirs up all his
+senses to wary alertness, and actually quickens his vitality, like high
+pure air. It is, in the familiar phrase, 'a liberal education'; but it
+is that finer education which sets free the spirit. His natural piety,
+in the full sense of the word, seems to me deeper and more sensitive
+than that of any other English writer. Kindness, in him, embraces
+mankind, not with the wide engulfing arms of philanthropy, but with an
+individual caress. He is almost the sufficient type of virtue, so far as
+virtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in him which is
+not the bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had an
+unsocial origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noble
+things, or light up an unsuspected 'soul of goodness in things evil.'
+
+No man ever so loved his friends, or was so honest with them, or made
+such a religion of friendship. His character of Hazlitt in the 'Letter
+to Southey' is the finest piece of emotional prose which he ever wrote,
+and his pen is inspired whenever he speaks of Coleridge. 'Good people,
+as they are called,' he writes to Wordsworth, 'won't serve. I want
+individuals. I am made up of queer points and want so many answering
+needles.' He counts over his friends in public, like a child counting
+over his toys, when some one has offered an insult to one of them. He
+has delicacies and devotions towards his friends, so subtle and so noble
+that they make every man his friend. And, that love may deepen into awe,
+there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was
+made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with
+what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that
+paradox of his position, by which he supports that by which he is
+supported.
+
+It is, then, this 'human, too human' creature, who comes so close to our
+hearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or at
+least in the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact,
+flawless in technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of
+'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well become
+despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so
+occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastly
+vest of white patchwork,' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; what is it
+that gives to a style, which no man can analyse, its 'terseness, its
+jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?' Those are his own
+words, not used of himself; but do they not do something to define what
+can, after all, never be explained?
+
+
+IV
+
+Lamb's defects were his qualities, and nature drove them inward,
+concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or
+healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering
+tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the
+brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find Lamb writing to Godwin,
+
+
+     'cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an
+     author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common
+     letter into sane prose.... Ten thousand times I have confessed to
+     you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any
+     comprehensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or
+     perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This
+     infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two
+     little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader,
+     however partial, can find any story.'
+
+
+'My brain,' he says, in a letter to Wordsworth, 'is desultory, and
+snatches off hints from things.' And, in a wise critical letter to
+Southey, he says, summing up himself in a single phrase: 'I never judge
+system-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars.'
+
+Is he, in these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, really
+apologising for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne,
+who (it is Lamb that says it) 'anticipated all the discoveries of
+succeeding essayists,' affected no humility in the statement of almost
+exactly the same mental complexion. 'I take the first argument that
+fortune offers me,' he tells us; 'they are all equally good for me; I
+never design to treat them in their totality, for I never see the whole
+of anything, nor do those see it who promise to show it to me.... In
+general I love to seize things by some unwonted lustre.' There, in the
+two greatest of the essayists, one sees precisely what goes to the
+making of the essayist. First, a beautiful disorder: the simultaneous
+attack and appeal of contraries, a converging multitude of dreams,
+memories, thoughts, sensations, without mental preference, or conscious
+guiding of the judgment; and then, order in disorder, a harmony more
+properly musical than logical, a separating and return of many elements,
+which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of _Elia_ called _Old
+China_, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You
+will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle
+memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the
+actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant,
+lovely last sentence is like the refrain which returns at the end of a
+poem.
+
+Lamb was a mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; he
+saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of
+social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney,
+a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked
+exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the
+rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his
+excesses something of 'the good clerk.'
+
+Lamb seemed to his contemporaries notably eccentric, but he was nearer
+than them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from the
+very heart of light, and returned thither after the circuit. Where
+Coleridge lost himself in clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearest
+short-cut, and, having reached the goal, went no step beyond it.
+
+And he was a bee for honey, not, like Coleridge, a browsing ox. To him
+the essence of delight was choice; and choice, with him, was readier
+when the prize was far-fetched and dear bought: a rarity of manners,
+books, pictures, or whatever was human or touched humanity. 'Opinion,'
+he said, 'is a species of property; and though I am always desirous to
+share with my friends to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keep
+some tenets and some property properly my own.' And then he found, in
+rarity, one of the qualities of the best; and was never, like most
+others, content with the good, or in any danger of confusing it with the
+best. He was the only man of that great age, which had Coleridge, and
+Wordsworth, and Shelley, and the rest, whose taste was flawless. All the
+others, who seemed to be marching so straight to so determined a goal,
+went astray at one time or other; only Lamb, who was always wandering,
+never lost sense of direction, or failed to know how far he had strayed
+from the road.
+
+The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden
+in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the
+tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to
+the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and,
+also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike,
+was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with
+the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling;
+madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense.
+In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider
+well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the
+intellect. I know one who read the essays of _Elia_ with intense
+delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She
+had seen so well through the fun to its deep inner meaning that the fun
+had not detained her. She had found in all of it nothing but a pure
+intellectual reason, beyond logic, where reason is one with intuition.
+
+1905.
+
+
+
+
+VILLON
+
+
+Villon was the first modern poet; he remains the most modern of poets.
+One requires a certain amount of old French, together with some
+acquaintance with the argot of the time, to understand the words in
+which he has written down his poems; many allusions to people and things
+have only just begun to be cleared up, but, apart from these things, no
+poet has ever brought himself closer to us, taken us into his confidence
+more simply, than this _personnage peu recommandable, fainéant, ivrogne,
+joueur, débauché, écornifleur, et, qui pis est, souteneur de filles,
+escroc, voleur, crocheteur de portes et de coffres_. The most
+disreputable of poets, he confesses himself to us with a frankness in
+which shamelessness is difficult to distinguish from humility. M. Gaston
+Paris, who for the most part is content to take him as he is, for better
+for worse, finds it necessary to apologise for him when he comes to the
+ballad of _La Grosse Margot_: this, he professes, we need not take as a
+personal confession, but as a mere exercise in composition! But if we
+are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even _la grosse
+Margot_ from her place in his life. He was no dabbler in infamy, but one
+who loved infamous things for their own sake. He loved everything for
+its own sake: _la grosse Margot_ in the flesh, _les dames du temps
+jadis_ in the spirit,
+
+
+     Sausses, brouets et gros poissons,
+     Tartes, flaons, oefs frits et pochez,
+     Perdus, et en toutes façons,
+
+
+his mother, _le bon royaume de France_, and above all, Paris. _Il a
+parcouru toute la France sans rapporter une seule impression de
+campagne. C'est un poète de ville, plus encore: un poète de quartier. Il
+n'est vraiment chez lui que sur la Montague Sainte-Geneviève, entre le
+Palais, les collèges, le Châtelet, les tavernes, les rotisseries, les
+tripots et les rues où Marion l'Idole et la grande Jeanne de Bretagne
+tiennent leur 'publique école'._ It is in this world that he lived, for
+this world that he wrote. _Fils du peuple, entré par l'instruction dans
+la classe lettrée, puis déclassé par ses vices, il dut à son humble
+origine de rester en communication constante avec les sources éternelles
+de toute vraie poésie._ And so he came into a literature of formalists,
+like a child, a vigorous, unabashed, malicious child, into a company of
+greybeards.
+
+Villon, before any one in French literature, called things by their
+names, made poetry as Homer made it, with words that meant facts. He was
+a thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to be
+sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him,
+to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his
+soul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit,
+forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in the
+cloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dream
+exquisitely over the dead ladies who had once been young, and who had
+gone like last year's snow, and then turn to the account-book of his
+satirical malice against the clerks and usurers for whom he was making
+the testament of his poverty. He knew winter, 'when the wolves live on
+wind,' and how the gallows looks when one stands under it. And he knew
+all the secrets of the art of verse-making which courtly poets, like the
+King, used for the stringing together of delicate trifles, ornamental
+evasions of facts. He was no poet of the people, but a scholar vagabond,
+loving the gutter; and so he has the sincerity of the artist as well as
+the only half-convincing sincerity of the man. There has been no greater
+artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main
+part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long
+forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself.
+
+1901.
+
+
+
+
+CASANOVA AT DUX: AN UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER OF HISTORY
+
+I
+
+
+The _Memoirs_ of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a
+bad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students
+of literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr.
+Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books
+in the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova,
+published in _Affirmations_, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety.
+But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to
+take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in
+his relation to human problems. And yet these _Memoirs_ are perhaps the
+most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth
+century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality,
+one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they
+are more entertaining than _Gil Blas_, or _Monte Cristo_, or any of the
+imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been
+written in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved
+life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the
+most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
+indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows
+us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm
+resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an
+adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester,
+one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a
+vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his
+own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live
+to write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no
+longer.
+
+And his _Memoirs_ take one all over Europe, giving sidelights, all the
+more valuable in being almost accidental, upon many of the affairs and
+people most interesting to us during two-thirds of the eighteenth
+century. Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice, of Spanish and Italian
+parentage, on April 2, 1725; he died at the Château of Dux, in Bohemia,
+on June 4, 1798. In that lifetime of seventy-three years he travelled,
+as his _Memoirs_ show us, in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, England,
+Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Turkey; he met
+Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Montmorency, Fontenelle, d'Alembert and
+Crébillon at Paris, George III. in London, Louis XV. at Fontainebleau,
+Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg, Benedict XII. at Rome, Joseph II.
+at Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci. Imprisoned by the
+Inquisitors of State in the _Piombi_ at Venice, he made, in 1755, the
+most famous escape in history. His _Memoirs_, as we have them, break off
+abruptly at the moment when he is expecting a safe conduct, and the
+permission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings. He did
+return, as we know from documents in the Venetian archives; he returned
+as secret agent of the Inquisitors, and remained in their service from
+1774 until 1782. At the end of 1782 he left Venice; and next year we
+find him in Paris, where, in 1784, he met Count Waldstein at the
+Venetian Ambassador's, and was invited by him to become his librarian at
+Dux. He accepted, and for the fourteen remaining years of his life lived
+at Dux, where he wrote his _Memoirs_.
+
+Casanova died in 1798, but nothing was heard of the _Memoirs_ (which the
+Prince de Ligne, in his own _Memoirs_, tells us that Casanova had read
+to him, and in which he found _du dramatique, de la rapidité, du
+comique, de la philosophie, des choses neuves, sublimes, inimitables
+même_) until the year 1820, when a certain Carlo Angiolini brought to
+the publishing house of Brockhaus, in Leipzig, a manuscript entitled
+_Histoire de ma vie jusqu'à l'an_ 1797, in the handwriting of Casanova.
+This manuscript, which I have examined at Leipzig, is written on
+foolscap paper, rather rough and yellow; it is written on both sides of
+the page, and in sheets or quires; here and there the paging shows that
+some pages have been omitted, and in their place are smaller sheets of
+thinner and whiter paper, all in Casanova's handsome, unmistakable
+handwriting. The manuscript is done up in twelve bundles, corresponding
+with the twelve volumes of the original edition; and only in one place
+is there a gap. The fourth and fifth chapters of the twelfth volume are
+missing, as the editor of the original edition points out, adding: 'It
+is not probable that these two chapters have been withdrawn from the
+manuscript of Casanova by a strange hand; everything leads us to believe
+that the author himself suppressed them, in the intention, no doubt, of
+re-writing them, but without having found time to do so.' The manuscript
+ends abruptly with the year 1774, and not with the year 1797, as the
+title would lead us to suppose.
+
+This manuscript, in its original state, has never been printed. Herr
+Brockhaus, on obtaining possession of the manuscript, had it translated
+into German by Wilhelm Schütz, but with many omissions and alterations,
+and published this translation, volume by volume, from 1822 to 1828,
+under the title, _Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de
+Seingalt_. While the German edition was in course of publication, Herr
+Brockhaus employed a certain Jean Laforgue, a professor of the French
+language at Dresden, to revise the original manuscript, correcting
+Casanova's vigorous, but at times incorrect, and often somewhat Italian,
+French according to his own notions of elegant writing, suppressing
+passages which seemed too free-spoken from the point of view of morals
+and of politics, and altering the names of some of the persons referred
+to, or replacing those names by initials. This revised text was
+published in twelve volumes, the first two in 1826, the third and fourth
+in 1828, the fifth to the eighth in 1832, and the ninth to the twelfth
+in 1837; the first four bearing the imprint of Brockhaus at Leipzig and
+Ponthieu et Cie at Paris; the next four the imprint of Heideloff et
+Campé at Paris; and the last four nothing but _À Bruxelles_. The volumes
+are all uniform, and were all really printed for the firm of Brockhaus.
+This, however far from representing the real text, is the only
+authoritative edition, and my references throughout this article will
+always be to this edition.
+
+In turning over the manuscript at Leipzig, I read some of the suppressed
+passages, and regretted their suppression; but Herr Brockhaus, the
+present head of the firm, assured me that they are not really very
+considerable in number. The damage, however, to the vivacity of the
+whole narrative, by the persistent alterations of M. Laforgue, is
+incalculable. I compared many passages, and found scarcely three
+consecutive sentences untouched. Herr Brockhaus (whose courtesy I cannot
+sufficiently acknowledge) was kind enough to have a passage copied out
+for me, which I afterwards read over, and checked word by word. In this
+passage Casanova says, for instance: _Elle venoit presque tous les jours
+lui faire une belle visite._ This is altered into: _Cependant chaque
+jour Thérèse venait lui faire une visite._ Casanova says that some one
+_avoit, comme de raison, formé le projet d'allier Dieu avec le diable_.
+This is made to read: _Qui, comme de raison, avait saintement formé le
+projet d'allier les intérêts du ciel aux oeuvres de ce monde._
+Casanova tell us that Thérèse would not commit a mortal sin _pour
+devenir reine du monde_: _pour une couronne_, corrects the indefatigable
+Laforgue. _Il ne savoit que lui dire_ becomes _Dans cet état de
+perplexité_; and so forth. It must, therefore, be realised that the
+_Memoirs_, as we have them, are only a kind of pale tracing of the vivid
+colours of the original.
+
+When Casanova's _Memoirs_ were first published, doubts were expressed as
+to their authenticity, first by Ugo Foscolo (in the _Westminster
+Review_, 1827), then by Quérard, supposed to be an authority in regard
+to anonymous and pseudonymous writings, finally by Paul Lacroix, _le
+bibliophile Jacob_, who suggested, or rather expressed his 'certainty,'
+that the real author of the _Memoirs_ was Stendhal, whose 'mind,
+character, ideas and style' he seemed to recognise on every page. This
+theory, as foolish and as unsupported as the Baconian theory of
+Shakespeare, has been carelessly accepted, or at all events accepted as
+possible, by many good scholars who have never taken the trouble to look
+into the matter for themselves. It was finally disproved by a series of
+articles of Armand Baschet, entitled _Preuves curieuses de
+l'authenticité des Mémoires de Jacques Casanova de Seingalt_, in _Le
+Livre_, January, February, April and May, 1881; and these proofs were
+further corroborated by two articles of Alessandro d'Ancona, entitled
+_Un Avventuriere del Secolo XVIII._, in the _Nuova Antologia_, February
+1 and August 1, 1882. Baschet had never himself seen the manuscript of
+the _Memoirs_, but he had learnt all the facts about it from Messrs.
+Brockhaus, and he had himself examined the numerous papers relating to
+Casanova in the Venetian archives. A similar examination was made at the
+Frari at about the same time by the Abbé Fulin; and I myself, in 1894,
+not knowing at the time that the discovery had been already made, made
+it over again for myself. There the arrest of Casanova, his imprisonment
+in the _Piombi_, the exact date of escape, the name of the monk who
+accompanied him, are all authenticated by documents contained in the
+_riferte_ of the Inquisition of State; there are the bills for the
+repairs of the roof and walls of the cell from which he escaped; there
+are the reports of the spies on whose information he was arrested, for
+his too dangerous free-spokenness in matters of religion and morality.
+The same archives contain forty-eight letters of Casanova to the
+Inquisitors of State, dating from 1763 to 1782, among the _Riferte dei
+Confidenti_, or reports of secret agents; the earliest asking
+permission to return to Venice, the rest giving information in regard to
+the immoralities of the city, after his return there; all in the same
+handwriting as the _Memoirs_. Further proof could scarcely be needed,
+but Baschet has done more than prove the authenticity, he has proved the
+extraordinary veracity, of the _Memoirs_. F. W. Barthold, in _Die
+Geschichtlichen Persönlichkeiten in J. Casanova's Memoiren_, 2 vols.,
+1846, had already examined about a hundred of Casanova's allusions to
+well-known people, showing the perfect exactitude of all but six or
+seven, and out of these six or seven inexactitudes ascribing only a
+single one to the author's intention. Baschet and d'Ancona both carry on
+what Barthold had begun; other investigators, in France, Italy and
+Germany, have followed them; and two things are now certain, first, that
+Casanova himself wrote the _Memoirs_ published under his name, though
+not textually in the precise form in which we have them; and, second,
+that as their veracity becomes more and more evident as they are
+confronted with more and more independent witnesses, it is only fair to
+suppose that they are equally truthful where the facts are such as could
+only have been known to Casanova himself.
+
+
+II
+
+For more than two-thirds of a century it has been known that Casanova
+spent the last fourteen years of his life at Dux, that he wrote his
+_Memoirs_ there, and that he died there. During all this time people
+have been discussing the authenticity and the truthfulness of the
+_Memoirs_, they have been searching for information about Casanova in
+various directions, and yet hardly any one has ever taken the trouble,
+or obtained the permission, to make a careful examination in precisely
+the one place where information was most likely to be found. The very
+existence of the manuscripts at Dux was known only to a few, and to most
+of these only on hearsay; and thus the singular good fortune was
+reserved for me, on my visit to Count Waldstein in September 1899, to be
+the first to discover the most interesting things contained in these
+manuscripts. M. Octave Uzanne, though he had not himself visited Dux,
+had indeed procured copies of some of the manuscripts, a few of which
+were published by him in _Le Livre_, in 1887 and 1889. But with the
+death of _Le Livre_ in 1889 the _Casanova inédit_ came to an end, and
+has never, so far as I know, been continued elsewhere. Beyond the
+publication of these fragments, nothing has been done with the
+manuscripts at Dux, nor has an account of them ever been given by any
+one who has been allowed to examine them.
+
+For five years, ever since I had discovered the documents in the
+Venetian archives, I had wanted to go to Dux; and in 1899, when I was
+staying with Count Lützow at Zampach, in Bohemia, I found the way kindly
+opened for me. Count Waldstein, the present head of the family, with
+extreme courtesy, put all his manuscripts at my disposal, and invited me
+to stay with him. Unluckily, he was called away on the morning of the
+day that I reached Dux. He had left everything ready for me, and I was
+shown over the castle by a friend of his, Dr. Kittel, whose courtesy I
+should like also to acknowledge. After a hurried visit to the castle we
+started on the long drive to Oberleutensdorf, a smaller Schloss near
+Komotau, where the Waldstein family was then staying. The air was sharp
+and bracing; the two Russian horses flew like the wind; I was whirled
+along in an unfamiliar darkness, through a strange country, black with
+coal mines, through dark pine woods, where a wild peasantry dwelt in
+little mining towns. Here and there, a few men and women passed us on
+the road, in their Sunday finery; then a long space of silence, and we
+were in the open country, galloping between broad fields; and always in
+a haze of lovely hills, which I saw more distinctly as we drove back
+next morning.
+
+The return to Dux was like a triumphal entry, as we dashed through the
+market-place filled with people come for the Monday market, pots and
+pans and vegetables strewn in heaps all over the ground, on the rough
+paving stones, up to the great gateway of the castle, leaving but just
+room for us to drive through their midst. I had the sensation of an
+enormous building: all Bohemian castles are big, but this one was like a
+royal palace. Set there in the midst of the town, after the Bohemian
+fashion, it opens at the back upon great gardens, as if it were in the
+midst of the country. I walked through room after room, along corridor
+after corridor; everywhere there were pictures, everywhere portraits of
+Wallenstein, and battle-scenes in which he led on his troops. The
+library, which was formed, or at least arranged, by Casanova, and which
+remains as he left it, contains some 25,000 volumes, some of them of
+considerable value; one of the most famous books in Bohemian literature,
+Skála's _History of the Church_, exists in manuscript at Dux, and it is
+from this manuscript that the two published volumes of it were printed.
+The library forms part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing
+of the castle. The first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms
+are arranged, in a decorative way, covering the ceiling and the walls
+with strange patterns. The second room contains pottery, collected by
+Casanova's Waldstein on his Eastern travels. The third room is full of
+curious mechanical toys, and cabinets, and carvings in ivory. Finally,
+we come to the library, contained in the two innermost rooms. The
+book-shelves are painted white, and reach to the low-vaulted ceilings,
+which are white-washed. At the end of a bookcase, in the corner of one
+of the windows, hangs a fine engraved portrait of Casanova.
+
+After I had been all over the castle, so long Casanova's home, I was
+taken to Count Waldstein's study, and left there with the manuscripts. I
+found six huge cardboard cases, large enough to contain foolscap paper,
+lettered on the back: _Gräfl. Waldstein-Wartenberg'sches Real
+Fideicommiss. Dux-Oberleutensdorf: Handschriftlicher Nachlass Casanova_.
+The cases were arranged so as to stand like books; they opened at the
+side; and on opening them, one after another, I found series after
+series of manuscripts roughly thrown together, after some pretence at
+arrangement, and lettered with a very generalised description of
+contents. The greater part of the manuscripts were in Casanova's
+handwriting, which I could see gradually beginning to get shaky with
+years. Most were written in French, a certain number in Italian. The
+beginning of a catalogue in the library, though said to be by him, was
+not in his handwriting. Perhaps it was taken down at his dictation.
+There were also some copies of Italian and Latin poems not written by
+him. Then there were many big bundles of letters addressed to him,
+dating over more than thirty years. Almost all the rest was in his own
+handwriting.
+
+I came first upon the smaller manuscripts, among which I found, jumbled
+together on the same and on separate scraps of paper, washing-bills,
+accounts, hotel bills, lists of letters written, first drafts of letters
+with many erasures, notes on books, theological and mathematical notes,
+sums, Latin quotations, French and Italian verses, with variants, a long
+list of classical names which have and have not been _francisés_, with
+reasons for and against; 'what I must wear at Dresden'; headings without
+anything to follow, such as: 'Reflexions on respiration, on the true
+cause of youth--the crows'; a new method of winning the lottery at Rome;
+recipes, among which is a long printed list of perfumes sold at Spa; a
+newspaper cutting, dated Prague, 25th October 1790, on the
+thirty-seventh balloon ascent of Blanchard; thanks to some 'noble donor'
+for the gift of a dog called 'Finette'; a passport for _Monsieur de
+Casanova, Vénitien, allant d'ici en Hollande_, October 13, 1758 (_Ce
+Passeport bon pour quinze jours_), together with an order for
+post-horses, gratis, from Paris to Bordeaux and Bayonne.[1]
+
+Occasionally, one gets a glimpse into his daily life at Dux, as in this
+note, scribbled on a fragment of paper (here and always I translate the
+French literally): 'I beg you to tell my servant what the biscuits are
+that I like to eat, dipped in wine, to fortify my stomach. I believe
+that they can all be found at Roman's.' Usually, however, these notes,
+though often suggested by something closely personal, branch off into
+more general considerations; or else begin with general considerations,
+and end with a case in point. Thus, for instance, a fragment of three
+pages begins: 'A compliment which is only made to gild the pill is a
+positive impertinence, and Monsieur Bailli is nothing but a charlatan;
+the monarch ought to have spit in his face, but the monarch trembled
+with fear.' A manuscript entitled _Essai d'Égoïsme_, dated, 'Dux, this
+27th June, 1769,' contains, in the midst of various reflections, an
+offer to let his _appartement_ in return for enough money to
+'tranquillise for six months two Jew creditors at Prague.' Another
+manuscript is headed 'Pride and Folly,' and begins with a long series of
+antitheses, such as: 'All fools are not proud, and all proud men are
+fools. Many fools are happy, all proud men are unhappy.' On the same
+sheet follows this instance or application:
+
+
+     Whether it is possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest
+     beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We
+     must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards
+     see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for
+     there are extraordinary people in the world. My brother, in short,
+     ought to have composed the distich, because he says so, and because
+     he confided it to me tête-à-tête. I had, it is true, difficulty in
+     believing him; but what is one to do? Either one must believe, or
+     suppose him capable of telling a lie which could only be told by a
+     fool; and that is impossible, for all Europe knows that my brother
+     is not a fool.
+
+
+Here, as so often in these manuscripts, we seem to see Casanova thinking
+on paper. He uses scraps of paper (sometimes the blank page of a letter,
+on the other side of which we see the address) as a kind of informal
+diary; and it is characteristic of him, of the man of infinitely curious
+mind, which this adventurer really was, that there are so few merely
+personal notes among these casual jottings. Often, they are purely
+abstract; at times, metaphysical _jeux d'esprit_, like the sheet of
+fourteen 'Different Wagers,' which begins:
+
+
+     I wager that it is not true that a man who weighs a hundred pounds
+     will weigh more if you kill him. I wager that if there is any
+     difference, he will weigh less. I wager that diamond powder has not
+     sufficient force to kill a man.
+
+
+Side by side with these fanciful excursions into science, come more
+serious ones, as in the note on Algebra, which traces its progress since
+the year 1494, before which 'it had only arrived at the solution of
+problems of the second degree, inclusive.' A scrap of paper tells us
+that Casanova 'did not like regular towns.' 'I like,' he says, 'Venice,
+Rome, Florence, Milan, Constantinople, Genoa.' Then he becomes abstract
+and inquisitive again, and writes two pages, full of curious,
+out-of-the-way learning, on the name of Paradise:
+
+
+     The name of Paradise is a name in Genesis which indicates a place
+     of pleasure (_lieu voluptueux_): this term is Persian. This place
+     of pleasure was made by God before he had created man.
+
+
+It may be remembered that Casanova quarrelled with Voltaire, because
+Voltaire had told him frankly that his translation of _L'Écossaise_ was
+a bad translation. It is piquant to read another note written in this
+style of righteous indignation:
+
+
+     Voltaire, the hardy Voltaire, whose pen is without bit or bridle;
+     Voltaire, who devoured the Bible, and ridiculed our dogmas, doubts,
+     and after having made proselytes to impiety, is not ashamed, being
+     reduced to the extremity of life, to ask for the sacraments, and to
+     cover his body with more relics than St. Louis had at Amboise.
+
+
+Here is an argument more in keeping with the tone of the _Memoirs_:
+
+
+     A girl who is pretty and good, and as virtuous as you please, ought
+     not to take it ill that a man, carried away by her charms, should
+     set himself to the task of making their conquest. If this man
+     cannot please her by any means, even if his passion be criminal,
+     she ought never to take offence at it, nor treat him unkindly; she
+     ought to be gentle, and pity him, if she does not love him, and
+     think it enough to keep invincibly hold upon her own duty.
+
+
+Occasionally he touches upon æsthetical matters, as in a fragment which
+begins with liberal definition of beauty:
+
+
+     Harmony makes beauty, says M. de S. P. (Bernardin de St. Pierre),
+     but the definition is too short, if he thinks he has said
+     everything. Here is mine. Remember that the subject is
+     metaphysical. An object really beautiful ought to seem beautiful to
+     all whose eyes fall upon it. That is all; there is nothing more to
+     be said.
+
+
+At times we have an anecdote and its commentary, perhaps jotted down for
+use in that latter part of the _Memoirs_ which was never written, or
+which has been lost. Here is a single sheet, dated 'this 2nd September,
+1791,' and headed _Souvenir_:
+
+
+     The Prince de Rosenberg said to me, as we went down stairs, that
+     Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de
+     Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa
+     d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city
+     library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal
+     laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the
+     Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret.' 'Is His
+     Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (_sic_) he
+     will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is a
+     monument there which relates to him when he was Grand Duke.' 'In
+     that case, His Majesty can also see my critical remarks on the
+     Egyptian prints.'
+
+     The Emperor asked me this morning, 6th October, how I employed my
+     time at Dux, and I told him that I was making an Italian anthology.
+     'You have all the Italians, then?' 'All, sire.' See what a lie
+     leads to. If I had not lied in saying that I was making an
+     anthology, I should not have found myself obliged to lie again in
+     saying that we have all the Italian poets. If the Emperor comes to
+     Dux, I shall kill myself.
+
+
+'They say that this Dux is a delightful spot,' says Casanova in one of
+the most personal of his notes, 'and I see that it might be for many;
+but not for me, for what delights me in my old age is independent of the
+place which I inhabit. When I do not sleep I dream, and when I am tired
+of dreaming I blacken paper, then I read, and most often reject all that
+my pen has vomited.' Here we see him blackening paper, on every
+occasion, and for every purpose. In one bundle I found an unfinished
+story about Roland, and some adventure with women in a cave; then a
+'Meditation on arising from sleep, 19th May 1789'; then a 'Short
+Reflection of a Philosopher who finds himself thinking of procuring his
+own death. At Dux, on getting out of bed on 13th October 1793, day
+dedicated to St. Lucy, memorable in my too long life.' A big budget,
+containing cryptograms, is headed 'Grammatical Lottery'; and there is
+the title-page of a treatise on _The Duplication of the Hexahedron,
+demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies
+of Europe_.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all
+stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear
+in half a dozen tentative forms:
+
+
+     _Sans mystère point de plaisirs,_
+     _Sans silence point de mystère._
+     _Charme divin de mes loisirs,_
+     _Solitude! que tu m'es chère!_
+
+
+Then there are a number of more or less complete manuscripts of some
+extent. There is the manuscript of the translation of Homer's _Iliad, in
+ottava rima_ (published in Venice, 1775-8); of the _Histoire de Venise_,
+of the _Icosameron_, a curious book published in 1787, purporting to be
+'translated from English,' but really an original work of Casanova;
+_Philocalies sur les Sottises des Mortels_, a long manuscript never
+published; the sketch and beginning of _Le Polémarque, ou la Calomnie
+démasquée par la présence d'esprit. Tragicomédie en trois actes,
+composée à Dux dans le mois de Juin de l'Année, 1791_, which recurs
+again under the form of the _Polémoscopé: La Lorgnette menteuse ou la
+Calomnie démasquée_, acted before the Princess de Ligne, at her château
+at Teplitz, 1791. There is a treatise in Italian, _Delle Passioni_;
+there are long dialogues, such as _Le Philosophe et le Théologien_, and
+_Rêve: Dieu-Moi_; there is the _Songe d'un Quart d'Heure_, divided into
+minutes; there is the very lengthy criticism of _Bernardin de
+Saint-Pierre_; there is the _Confutation d'une Censure indiscrète qu'on
+lit dans la Gazette de Iéna, 19 Juin 1789_; with another large
+manuscript, unfortunately imperfect, first called _L'Insulte_, and then
+_Placet au Public_, dated 'Dux, this 2nd March, 1790,' referring to the
+same criticism on the _Icosameron_ and the _Fuite des Prisons_.
+_L'Histoire de ma Fuite des Prisons de la République de Venise, qu'on
+appelle les Plombs_, which is the first draft of the most famous part of
+the _Memoirs_, was published at Leipzig in 1788; and, having read it in
+the Marcian Library at Venice, I am not surprised to learn from this
+indignant document that it was printed 'under the care of a young Swiss,
+who had the talent to commit a hundred faults of orthography.'
+
+
+III
+
+We come now to the documents directly relating to the _Memoirs_, and
+among these are several attempts at a preface, in which we see the
+actual preface coming gradually into form. One is entitled _Casanova au
+Lecteur_, another _Histoire de mon Existence_, and a third _Preface_.
+There is also a brief and characteristic _Précis de ma vie_, dated
+November 17, 1797. Some of these have been printed in _Le Livre_, 1887.
+But by far the most important manuscript that I discovered, one which,
+apparently, I am the first to discover, is a manuscript entitled
+_Extrait du Chapitre 4 et 5_. It is written on paper similar to that on
+which the _Memoirs_ are written; the pages are numbered 104-148; and
+though it is described as _Extrait_, it seems to contain, at all events,
+the greater part of the missing chapters to which I have already
+referred, Chapters IV. and V. of the last volume of the _Memoirs_. In
+this manuscript we find Armelline and Scolastica, whose story is
+interrupted by the abrupt ending of Chapter III.; we find Mariuccia of
+Vol. VII., Chapter IX., who married a hairdresser; and we find also
+Jaconine, whom Casanova recognises as his daughter, 'much prettier than
+Sophia, the daughter of Thérèse Pompeati, whom I had left at London.'[3]
+It is curious that this very important manuscript, which supplies the
+one missing link in the _Memoirs_, should never have been discovered by
+any of the few people who have had the opportunity of looking over the
+Dux manuscripts. I am inclined to explain it by the fact that the case
+in which I found this manuscript contains some papers not relating to
+Casanova. Probably, those who looked into this case looked no further. I
+have told Herr Brockhaus of my discovery, and I hope to see Chapters IV.
+and V. in their places when the long-looked-for edition of the complete
+text is at length given to the world.
+
+Another manuscript which I found tells with great piquancy the whole
+story of the Abbé de Brosses' ointment, the curing of the Princess de
+Conti's pimples, and the birth of the Duc de Montpensier, which is told
+very briefly, and with much less point, in the _Memoirs_ (vol. iii., p.
+327). Readers of the _Memoirs_ will remember the duel at Warsaw with
+Count Branicki in 1766 (vol. x., pp. 274-320), an affair which attracted
+a good deal of attention at the time, and of which there is an account
+in a letter from the Abbé Taruffi to the dramatist, Francesco Albergati,
+dated Warsaw, March 19, 1766, quoted in Ernesto Masi's _Life of
+Albergati_, Bologna, 1878. A manuscript at Dux in Casanova's handwriting
+gives an account of this duel in the third person; it is entitled,
+_Description de l'affaire arrivée à Varsovie le 5 Mars, 1766_. D'Ancona,
+in the _Nuova Antologia_ (vol. lxvii., p. 412), referring to the Abbé
+Taruffi's account, mentions what he considers to be a slight
+discrepancy: that Taruffi refers to the _danseuse_, about whom the duel
+was fought, as La Casacci, while Casanova refers to her as La Catai. In
+this manuscript Casanova always refers to her as La Casacci; La Catai is
+evidently one of M. Laforgue's arbitrary alterations of the text.
+
+In turning over another manuscript, I was caught by the name Charpillon,
+which every reader of the _Memoirs_ will remember as the name of the
+harpy by whom Casanova suffered so much in London, in 1763-4. This
+manuscript begins by saying: 'I have been in London for six months and
+have been to see them (that is, the mother and daughter) in their own
+house,' where he finds nothing but 'swindlers, who cause all who go
+there to lose their money in gambling.' This manuscript adds some
+details to the story told in the ninth and tenth volumes of the
+_Memoirs_, and refers to the meeting with the Charpillons four and a
+half years before, described in Volume V., pages 482-485. It is written
+in a tone of great indignation. Elsewhere, I found a letter written by
+Casanova, but not signed, referring to an anonymous letter which he had
+received in reference to the Charpillons, and ending: 'My handwriting is
+known.' It was not until the last that I came upon great bundles of
+letters addressed to Casanova, and so carefully preserved that little
+scraps of paper, on which postscripts are written, are still in their
+places. One still sees the seals on the backs of many of the letters, on
+paper which has slightly yellowed with age, leaving the ink, however,
+almost always fresh. They come from Venice, Paris, Rome, Prague,
+Bayreuth, The Hague, Genoa, Fiume, Trieste, etc., and are addressed to
+as many places, often _poste restante_. Many are letters from women,
+some in beautiful handwriting, on thick paper; others on scraps of
+paper, in painful hands, ill-spelt. A Countess writes pitifully,
+imploring help; one protests her love, in spite of the 'many chagrins'
+he has caused her; another asks 'how they are to live together'; another
+laments that a report has gone about that she is secretly living with
+him, which may harm _his_ reputation. Some are in French, more in
+Italian. _Mon cher Giacometto_, writes one woman, in French; _Carissimo
+e Amatissimo_, writes another, in Italian. These letters from women are
+in some confusion, and are in need of a good deal of sorting over and
+rearranging before their full extent can be realised. Thus I found
+letters in the same handwriting separated by letters in other
+handwritings; many are unsigned, or signed only by a single initial;
+many are undated, or dated only with the day of the week or month. There
+are a great many letters, dating from 1779 to 1786, signed 'Francesca
+Buschini,' a name which I cannot identify; they are written in Italian,
+and one of them begins: _Unico Mio vero Amico_ ('my only true friend').
+Others are signed 'Virginia B.'; one of these is dated, 'Forli, October
+15, 1773.' There is also a 'Theresa B.,' who writes from Genoa. I was at
+first unable to identify the writer of a whole series of letters in
+French, very affectionate and intimate letters, usually unsigned,
+occasionally signed 'B.' She calls herself _votre petite amie_; or she
+ends with a half-smiling, half-reproachful 'good-night, and sleep better
+than I.' In one letter, sent from Paris in 1759, she writes: 'Never
+believe me, but when I tell you that I love you, and that I shall love
+you always.' In another letter, ill-spelt, as her letters often are, she
+writes: 'Be assured that evil tongues, vapours, calumny, nothing can
+change my heart, which is yours entirely, and has no will to change its
+master.' Now, it seems to me that these letters must be from Manon
+Baletti, and that they are the letters referred to in the sixth volume
+of the _Memoirs_. We read there (page 60) how on Christmas Day, 1759,
+Casanova receives a letter from Manon in Paris, announcing her marriage
+with 'M. Blondel, architect to the King, and member of his Academy'; she
+returns him his letters, and begs him to return hers, or burn them.
+Instead of doing so he allows Esther to read them, intending to burn
+them afterwards. Esther begs to be allowed to keep the letters,
+promising to 'preserve them religiously all her life.' 'These letters,'
+he says, 'numbered more than two hundred, and the shortest were of four
+pages.' Certainly there are not two hundred of them at Dux, but it seems
+to me highly probable that Casanova made a final selection from Manon's
+letters, and that it is these which I have found.
+
+But, however this may be, I was fortunate enough to find the set of
+letters which I was most anxious to find: the letters from Henriette,
+whose loss every writer on Casanova has lamented. Henriette, it will be
+remembered, makes her first appearance at Cesena, in the year 1748;
+after their meeting at Geneva, she reappears, romantically _à propos_,
+twenty-two years later, at Aix in Provence; and she writes to Casanova
+proposing _un commerce épistolaire_, asking him what he has done since
+his escape from prison, and promising to do her best to tell him all
+that has happened to her during the long interval. After quoting her
+letter, he adds: 'I replied to her, accepting the correspondence that
+she offered me, and telling her briefly all my vicissitudes. She related
+to me in turn, in some forty letters, all the history of her life. If
+she dies before me, I shall add these letters to these _Memoirs_; but
+to-day she is still alive, and always happy, though now old.' It has
+never been known what became of these letters, and why they were not
+added to the _Memoirs_. I have found a great quantity of them, some
+signed with her married name in full, 'Henriette de Schnetzmann,' and I
+am inclined to think that she survived Casanova, for one of the letters
+is dated Bayreuth, 1798, the year of Casanova's death. They are
+remarkably charming, written with a mixture of piquancy and
+distinction; and I will quote the characteristic beginning and end of
+the last letter I was able to find. It begins: 'No, it is impossible to
+be sulky with you!' and ends: 'If I become vicious, it is you, my
+Mentor, who make me so, and I cast my sins upon you. Even if I were
+damned I should still be your most devoted friend, Henriette de
+Schnetzmann.' Casanova was twenty-three when he met Henriette; now,
+herself an old woman, she writes to him when he is seventy-three, as if
+the fifty years that had passed were blotted out in the faithful
+affection of her memory. How many more discreet and less changing lovers
+have had the quality of constancy in change, to which this life-long
+correspondence bears witness? Does it not suggest a view of Casanova not
+quite the view of all the world? To me it shows the real man, who
+perhaps of all others best understood what Shelley meant when he said:
+
+
+     True love in this differs from gold or clay,
+     That to divide is not to take away.
+
+
+But, though the letters from women naturally interested me the most,
+they were only a certain proportion of the great mass of correspondence
+which I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was
+afterwards to bring the manuscript of the _Memoirs_ to Brockhaus; from
+Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the _Piombi_; from the
+Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is
+some account in the _Memoirs_; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished
+man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same
+volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from
+Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, _bel
+homme, ayant de l'esprit, le ton et le goût de la bonne société_, who
+came to settle at Gorizia in 1773, while Casanova was there; from the
+Procurator Morosini, whom he speaks of in the _Memoirs_ as his
+'protector,' and as one of those through whom he obtained permission to
+return to Venice. His other 'protector,' the _avogador_ Zaguri, had,
+says Casanova, 'since the affair of the Marquis Albergati, carried on a
+most interesting correspondence with me'; and in fact I found a bundle
+of no less than a hundred and thirty-eight letters from him, dating
+from 1784 to 1798. Another bundle contains one hundred and seventy-two
+letters from Count Lamberg. In the _Memoirs_ Casanova says, referring to
+his visit to Augsburg at the end of 1761:
+
+
+     I used to spend my evenings in a very agreeable manner at the house
+     of Count Max de Lamberg, who resided at the court of the
+     Prince-Bishop with the title of Grand Marshal. What particularly
+     attached me to Count Lamberg was his literary talent. A first-rate
+     scholar, learned to a degree, he has published several much
+     esteemed works. I carried on an exchange of letters with him which
+     ended only with his death four years ago in 1792.
+
+
+Casanova tells us that, at his second visit to Augsburg in the early
+part of 1767, he 'supped with Count Lamberg two or three times a week,'
+during the four months he was there. It is with this year that the
+letters I have found begin: they end with the year of his death, 1792.
+In his _Mémorial d'un Mondain_ Lamberg refers to Casanova as 'a man
+known in literature, a man of profound knowledge.' In the first edition
+of 1774, he laments that 'a man such as M. de S. Galt' should not yet
+have been taken back into favour by the Venetian government, and in the
+second edition, 1775, rejoices over Casanova's return to Venice. Then
+there are letters from Da Ponte, who tells the story of Casanova's
+curious relations with Mme. d'Urfé, in his _Memorie scritte da esso_,
+1829; from Pittoni, Bono, and others mentioned in different parts of the
+_Memoirs_, and from some dozen others who are not mentioned in them. The
+only letters in the whole collection that have been published are those
+from the Prince de Ligne and from Count Koenig.
+
+
+IV
+
+Casanova tells us in his _Memoirs_ that, during his later years at Dux,
+he had only been able to 'hinder black melancholy from devouring his
+poor existence, or sending him out of his mind,' by writing ten or
+twelve hours a day. The copious manuscripts at Dux show us how
+persistently he was at work on a singular variety of subjects, in
+addition to the _Memoirs_, and to the various books which he published
+during those years. We see him jotting down everything that comes into
+his head, for his own amusement, and certainly without any thought of
+publication; engaging in learned controversies, writing treatises on
+abstruse mathematical problems, composing comedies to be acted before
+Count Waldstein's neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages,
+indeed with more patience than success, writing philosophical dialogues
+in which God and himself are the speakers, and keeping up an extensive
+correspondence, both with distinguished men and with delightful women.
+His mental activity, up to the age of seventy-three, is as prodigious as
+the activity which he had expended in living a multiform and
+incalculable life. As in life everything living had interested him, so
+in his retirement from life every idea makes its separate appeal to him;
+and he welcomes ideas with the same impartiality with which he had
+welcomed adventures. Passion has intellectualised itself, and remains
+not less passionate. He wishes to do everything, to compete with every
+one; and it is only after having spent seven years in heaping up
+miscellaneous learning, and exercising his faculties in many directions,
+that he turns to look back over his own past life, and to live it over
+again in memory, as he writes down the narrative of what had interested
+him most in it. 'I write in the hope that my history will never see the
+broad daylight of publication,' he tells us, scarcely meaning it, we may
+be sure, even in the moment of hesitancy which may naturally come to
+him. But if ever a book was written for the pleasure of writing it, it
+was this one; and an autobiography written for oneself is not likely to
+be anything but frank.
+
+'Truth is the only God I have ever adored,' he tells us: and we now know
+how truthful he was in saying so. I have only summarised in this article
+the most important confirmations of his exact accuracy in facts and
+dates; the number could be extended indefinitely. In the manuscripts we
+find innumerable further confirmations; and their chief value as
+testimony is that they tell us nothing which we should not have already
+known, if we had merely taken Casanova at his word. But it is not always
+easy to take people at their own word, when they are writing about
+themselves; and the world has been very loth to believe in Casanova as
+he represents himself. It has been specially loth to believe that he is
+telling the truth when he tells us about his adventures with women. But
+the letters contained among these manuscripts show us the women of
+Casanova writing to him with all the fervour and all the fidelity which
+he attributes to them; and they show him to us in the character of as
+fervid and faithful a lover. In every fact, every detail, and in the
+whole mental impression which they convey, these manuscripts bring
+before us the Casanova of the _Memoirs_. As I seemed to come upon
+Casanova at home, it was as if I came upon an old friend, already
+perfectly known to me, before I had made my pilgrimage to Dux.
+
+1902.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] See the account of this visit to Holland, and the reference to
+taking a passport, _Memoirs_, v. 238.
+
+[2] See Charles Henry, _Les Connaissances Mathématiques de Casanova_.
+Rome 1883.
+
+[3] See _Memoirs_, ix. 272, _et seq._
+
+
+
+
+JOHN DONNE
+
+I
+
+
+Biography as a fine art can go no further than Walton's _Life and Death
+of Dr. Donne_. From the 'good and virtuous parents' of the first line to
+the 'small quantity of Christian dust' of the last, every word is the
+touch of a cunning brush painting a picture. The picture lives, and with
+so vivid and gracious a life that it imposes itself upon us as the
+portrait of a real man, faithfully copied from the man as he lived. But
+that is precisely the art of the painter. Walton's picture is so
+beautiful because everything in it is sacrificed to beauty; because it
+is a convention, a picture in which life is treated almost as theme for
+music. And so there remains an opportunity, even after this masterpiece,
+for a life of Donne which shall make no pretence to harmonise a
+sometimes discordant existence, or indeed to produce, properly speaking,
+a piece of art at all; but which shall be faithful to the document, a
+piece of history. Such a book has now been written by Mr. Gosse, in his
+_Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's_. It is perhaps the
+most solid and serious contribution which Mr. Gosse has made to English
+literature, and we may well believe that it will remain the final
+authority on so interesting and so difficult a subject. For the first
+time, in the light of this clear analysis, and of these carefully
+arranged letters, we are able, if not indeed to see Donne as he really
+was, at all events to form our own opinion about every action of his
+life. This is one of the merits of Mr. Gosse's book; he has collected
+his documents, and he has given them to us as they are, guiding us
+adroitly along the course of the life which they illustrate, but not
+allowing himself to dogmatise on what must still remain conjectural. And
+he has given us a series of reproductions of portraits, of the highest
+importance in the study of one who is not merely a difficult poet, but a
+very ambiguous human being. They begin with the eager, attractive,
+somewhat homely youth of eighteen, grasping the hilt of his sword so
+tightly that his knuckles start out from the thin covering of flesh;
+passing into the mature Donne as we know him, the lean, humorous,
+large-browed, courtly thinker, with his large intent eyes, a cloak
+folded elegantly about his uncovered throat, or the ruff tightening
+about his carefully trimmed beard; and ending with the ghastly emblem
+set as a frontispiece to _Death's Duel_, the dying man wrapped already
+in his shroud, which gathers into folds above his head, as if tied
+together like the mouth of a sack, while the sunken cheeks and hollow
+closed eyelids are mocked by the shapely moustache, brushed upwards from
+the lips. In the beautiful and fanciful monument in St. Paul's done
+after the drawing from which this frontispiece was engraved, there is
+less ghastliness and a more harmonious beauty in the brave attitude of a
+man who dresses for death as he would dress for Court, wearing the last
+livery with an almost foppish sense of propriety. Between them these
+portraits tell much, and Mr. Gosse, in his narrative, tells us
+everything else that there is to tell, much of it for the first time;
+and the distinguished and saintly person of Walton's narrative, so
+simple, so easily explicable, becomes more complex at every moment, as
+fresh light makes the darkness more and more visible. At the end we seem
+to have become singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzling
+creature, whom each of us may try to understand after his fashion, as we
+try to understand the real secrets of the character of our friends.
+
+Donne's mind, then, if I may make my own attempt to understand him, was
+the mind of the dialectician, of the intellectual adventurer; he is a
+poet almost by accident, or at least for reasons with which art in the
+abstract has but little to do. He writes verse, first of all, because he
+has observed keenly, and because it pleases the pride of his intellect
+to satirise the pretensions of humanity. Then it is the flesh which
+speaks in his verse, the curiosity of woman, which he has explored in
+the same spirit of adventure; then passion, making a slave of him for
+love's sake, and turning at last to the slave's hatred; finally,
+religion, taken up with the same intellectual interest, the same subtle
+indifference, and, in its turn, passing also into passionate reality. A
+few poems are inspired in him by what he has seen in remote countries;
+some are marriage songs and funeral elegies, written for friendship or
+for money. But he writes nothing 'out of his own head,' as we say;
+nothing lightly, or, it would seem, easily; nothing for the song's sake.
+He speaks, in a letter, of 'descending to print anything in verse'; and
+it is certain that he was never completely absorbed by his own poetry,
+or at all careful to measure his achievements against those of others.
+He took his own poems very seriously, he worked upon them with the whole
+force of his intellect; but to himself, even before he became a divine,
+he was something more than a poet. Poetry was but one means of
+expressing the many-sided activity of his mind and temperament. Prose
+was another, preaching another; travel and contact with great events and
+persons scarcely less important to him, in the building up of himself.
+
+And he was interested in everything. At one moment he is setting himself
+to study Oriental languages, a singularly difficult task in those days.
+Both in poetry and divinity he has more Spanish than English books in
+his library. Scientific and technical terms are constantly found in his
+verse, where we should least expect them, where indeed they are least
+welcome. In _Ignatius--his Conclave_ he speaks with learned enthusiasm
+of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and of his own immediate contemporaries,
+then but just become famous, Galileo ('who of late hath summoned the
+other worlds, the stars, to come nearer to him, and to give an account
+of themselves') and Kepler ('who hath received it into his care, that no
+new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge'). He rebukes
+himself for his abandonment to 'the worst voluptuousness, which is an
+hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages.' At
+twenty-three he was a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went on
+the 'Islands Voyage'; later on, at different periods, he travelled over
+many parts of the Continent, with rich patrons or on diplomatic offices.
+Born a Catholic, he became a Protestant, deliberately enough; wrote
+books on controversial subjects, against his old party, before he had
+taken orders in the Church of England; besides a strange, morbid
+speculation on the innocence of suicide. He used his lawyer's training
+for dubious enough purposes, advising the Earl of Somerset in the dark
+business of his divorce and re-marriage. And, in a mournful pause in the
+midst of many harrowing concerns, he writes to a friend: 'When I must
+shipwreck, I would fain do it in a sea where mine own impotency might
+have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so
+much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something,
+but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a
+planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he
+confesses later in the same letter.
+
+No doubt some of this feverish activity, this uncertainty of aim, was a
+matter of actual physical health. It is uncertain at what time the
+wasting disease, of which he died, first settled upon him; but he seems
+to have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at times
+depressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon the whole
+organisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led him
+to write his _Biathanatos_, with its elaborate apology for suicide, and
+at the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying,
+was but one symptom of a morbid state of body and brain and nerves, to
+which so many of his poems and so many of his letters bear witness.
+'Sometimes,' he writes, in a characteristic letter, 'when I find myself
+transported with jollity and love of company, I hang lead to my heels,
+and reduce to my thoughts my fortunes, my years, the duties of a man, of
+a friend, of a husband, of a father, and all the incumbencies of a
+family; when sadness dejects me, either I countermine it with another
+sadness, or I kindle squibs about me again, and fly into sportfulness
+and company.'
+
+At the age of thirty-five he writes from his bed describing every detail
+of what he frantically calls 'a sickness which I cannot name or
+describe,' and ends his letter: 'I profess to you truly, that my
+loathness to give over now, seems to myself an ill sign that I shall
+write no more.' It was at this time that he wrote the _Biathanatos_,
+with its explicit declaration in the preface: 'Whensoever any
+affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own
+hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own
+sword.' Fifteen years later, when one of his most serious illnesses was
+upon him, and his life in real danger, he notes down all his symptoms as
+he lies awake night after night, with an extraordinary and, in itself,
+morbid acuteness. 'I observe the physician with the same diligence as he
+the disease; I see he fears, and I fear with him; I overtake him, I
+over-run him in his fear, because he makes his pace slow; I fear the
+more because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpness
+because he would not have me see it.' As he lies in bed, he realises 'I
+am mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct them.
+They conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me for
+dead now, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight, and ask
+how I do to-morrow. Miserable and inhuman posture, where I must practise
+my lying in the grave by lying still.' This preying upon itself of the
+brain is but one significant indication of a temperament, neurotic
+enough indeed, but in which the neurosis is still that of the curious
+observer, the intellectual casuist, rather than of the artist. A
+wonderful piece of self-analysis, worthy of St. Augustine, which occurs
+in one of his funeral sermons, gives poignant expression to what must
+doubtless have been a common condition of so sensitive a brain. 'I throw
+myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and His angels
+together; 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 prayer, eyes lifted up, knees bowed
+down, as though I prayed to God; and if God should ask me when I last
+thought of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I
+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 chimera in my brain, troubles me
+in my prayer.' It is this brain, turned inward upon itself, and darting
+out on every side in purely random excursions, that was responsible, I
+cannot doubt, for all the contradictions of a career in which the inner
+logic is not at first apparent.
+
+Donne's career divides itself sharply into three parts: his youth, when
+we see him a soldier, a traveller, a lover, a poet, unrestrained in all
+the passionate adventures of youth; then a middle period, in which he is
+a lawyer and a theologian, seeking knowledge and worldly advancement,
+without any too restraining scruple as to the means which come to his
+hand; and then a last stage of saintly living and dying. What then is
+the link between these successive periods, the principle of development,
+the real Donne in short? 'He was none of these, or all of these, or
+more,' says Mr. Gosse. But, surely, he was indeed all of these, and his
+individuality precisely the growth from one stage to another, the subtle
+intelligence being always there, working vividly, but in each period
+working in a different direction. 'I would fain do something, but that I
+cannot tell what is no wonder.' Everything in Donne seems to me to
+explain itself in that fundamental uncertainty of aim, and his
+uncertainty of aim partly by a morbid physical condition. He searches,
+nothing satisfies him, tries everything, in vain; finding satisfaction
+at last in the Church, as in a haven of rest. Always it is the curious,
+insatiable brain searching. And he is always wretchedly aware that he
+'can do nothing constantly.'
+
+His three periods, then, are three stages in the search after a way to
+walk in, something worthy of himself to do. Thus, of his one printed
+collection of verse he writes: 'Of my _Anniversaries_, the fault which I
+acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse,
+which, though it have excuse, even in our times, by example of men,
+which one would think should as little have done it as I, yet I confess
+I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself.' Of his legal
+studies he writes in the same letter: 'For my purpose of proceeding in
+the profession of the law, so far as to a title, you may be pleased to
+correct that imagination where you find it. I ever thought the study of
+it my best entertainment and pastime, but I have no ambition nor design
+upon the style.' Until he accepts religion, with all its limitations and
+encouragements, he has not even sure landmarks on his way. So
+speculative a brain, able to prove, and proving for its own uneasy
+satisfaction, that even suicide is 'not so naturally sin, that it may
+never be otherwise,' could allow itself to be guided by no fixed rules;
+and to a brain so abstract, conduct must always have seemed of less
+importance than it does to most other people, and especially conduct
+which is argument, like the demonstrations on behalf of what seems, on
+the face of it, a somewhat iniquitous divorce and re-marriage, or like
+those unmeasured eulogies, both of this 'blest pair of swans,' and of
+the dead child of a rich father. He admits, in one of his letters, that
+in his elegies, 'I did best when I had least truth for my subjects'; and
+of the _Anniversaries_ in honour of little Mistress Drury, 'But for the
+other part of the imputation of having said so much, my defence is, that
+my purpose was to say as well as I could; for since I never saw the
+gentlewoman, I cannot be understood to have bound myself to have spoken
+the just truth.' He is always the casuist, always mentally impartial in
+the face of a moral problem, reserving judgment on matters which, after
+all, seem to him remote from an unimpassioned contemplation of things;
+until that moment of crisis comes, long after he has become a clergyman,
+when the death of his wife changed the world for him, and he became, in
+the words of Walton, 'crucified to the world, and all those vanities,
+those imaginary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage;
+and they were as perfectly crucified to him.' From that time to the end
+of his life he had found what he had all the while been seeking: rest
+for the restlessness of his mind, in a meditation upon the divine
+nature; occupation, in being 'ambassador of God,' through the pulpit;
+himself, as it seemed to him, at his fullest and noblest. It was
+himself, really, that he had been seeking all the time, conscious at
+least of that in all the deviations of the way; himself, the ultimate of
+his curiosities.
+
+
+II
+
+And yet, what remains to us out of this life of many purposes, which had
+found an end satisfying to itself in the Deanery of St. Paul's, is
+simply a bundle of manuscript verses, which the writer could bring
+himself neither to print nor to destroy. His first satire speaks
+contemptuously of 'giddy fantastic poets,' and, when he allowed himself
+to write poetry, he was resolved to do something different from what
+anybody had ever done before, not so much from the artist's instinctive
+desire of originality, as from a kind of haughty, yet really bourgeois,
+desire to be indebted to nobody. With what care he wrote is confessed in
+a passage of one of his letters, where, speaking of a sermon, he says:
+'For, as Cardinal Cusanus wrote a book, _Cribratio Alchorani_, I have
+cribrated, and re-cribrated, and post-cribrated the sermon, and must
+necessarily say, the King, who hath let fall his eye upon some of my
+poems, never saw, of mine, a hand, or an eye, or an affection, set down
+with so much study and diligence, and labour of syllables, as in this
+sermon I expressed those two points.' But he thought there were other
+things more important than being a poet, and this very labour of his was
+partly a sign of it. 'He began,' says Mr. Gosse with truth, 'as if
+poetry had never been written before.' To the people of his time, to
+those who came immediately after him, he was the restorer of English
+poetry.
+
+
+     The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
+     O'erspread, was purged by thee,
+
+
+says Carew, in those memorial verses in which the famous lines occur:
+
+
+     Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
+     The universal monarchy of wit.
+
+
+Shakespeare was living, remember, and it was Elizabethan poetry that
+Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system
+of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less
+arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,'
+said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet,
+if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasis
+of what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in at
+all events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way he meant
+them to be delivered is not always as beautiful as it is expressive.
+Donne would be original at all costs, preferring himself to his art. He
+treated poetry as Æsop's master treated his slave, and broke what he
+could not bend.
+
+But Donne's novelty of metre is only a part of his too deliberate
+novelty as a poet. As Mr. Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evident
+truth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's real
+position in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realistic
+writer, who makes a clean sweep of tradition, and puts everything down
+in the most modern words and with the help of the most trivial actual
+images.
+
+
+     To what a cumbersome unwieldiness,
+     And burdensome corpulence my love hath grown,
+
+
+he will begin a poem on _Love's Diet_. Of love, as the master of hearts,
+he declares seriously:
+
+
+     He swallows us and never chaws;
+     By him, as by chain'd shot, whole ranks do die;
+     He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.
+
+
+And, in his unwise insistence that every metaphor shall be absolutely
+new, he drags medical and alchemical and legal properties into verse
+really full of personal passion, producing at times poetry which is a
+kind of disease of the intellect, a sick offshoot of science. Like most
+poets of powerful individuality, Donne lost precisely where he gained.
+That cumulative and crowding and sweeping intellect which builds up his
+greatest poems into miniature Escurials of poetry, mountainous and
+four-square to all the winds of the world, 'purges' too often the
+flowers as well as the weeds out of 'the Muses' garden.' To write poetry
+as if it had never been written before is to attempt what the greatest
+poets never attempted. There are only two poets in English literature
+who thus stand out of the tradition, who are without ancestors, Donne
+and Browning. Each seems to have certain qualities almost greater than
+the qualities of the greatest; and yet in each some precipitation of
+arrogant egoism remains in the crucible, in which the draught has all
+but run immortally clear.
+
+Donne's quality of passion is unique in English poetry. It is a rapture
+in which the mind is supreme, a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a
+pitch of actual violence. The words themselves rarely count for much, as
+they do in Crashaw, for instance, where words turn giddy at the height
+of their ascension. The words mean things, and it is the things that
+matter. They can be brutal: 'For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let
+me love!' as if a long, pre-supposed self-repression gave way suddenly,
+in an outburst. 'Love, any devil else but you,' he begins, in his abrupt
+leap to the heart of the matter. Or else his exaltation will be grave,
+tranquil, measureless in assurance.
+
+
+     All kings, and all their favourites,
+     All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
+     The sun itself, which makes time, as they pass,
+     Is elder by a year now than it was
+     When thou and I first one another saw.
+     All other things to their destruction draw,
+     Only our love hath no decay;
+     This no to-morrow hath, no yesterday;
+     Running, it never runs from us away,
+     But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
+
+
+This lover loves with his whole nature, and so collectedly because
+reason, in him, is not in conflict with passion, but passion's ally. His
+senses speak with unparalleled directness, as in those elegies which
+must remain the model in English of masculine sensual sobriety. He
+distinguishes the true end of such loving in a forcible,
+characteristically prosaic image:
+
+
+     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.
+
+
+And he exemplifies every motion and the whole pilgrim's progress of
+physical love, with a deliberate, triumphant, unluxurious explicitness
+which 'leaves no doubt,' as we say 'of his intentions,' and can be no
+more than referred to passingly in modern pages. In a series of hate
+poems, of which I will quote the finest, he gives expression to a whole
+region of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, out
+of Catullus, with such intolerable truth.
+
+
+     When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead,
+     And that thou think'st thee free
+     From all solicitation from me,
+     Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
+     And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see:
+     Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
+     And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
+     Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
+     Thou call'st for more,
+     And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;
+     And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
+     Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
+     A verier ghost than I.
+     What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
+     Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
+     I'd rather thou should'st painfully repent,
+     Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.
+
+
+Yet it is the same lover, and very evidently the same, who winnows all
+this earthly passion to a fine, fruitful dust, fit to make bread for
+angels. Ecstatic reason, passion justifying its intoxication by
+revealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the
+quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to
+make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly
+abstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture of
+solution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called _The
+Ecstasy_, which seems to anticipate a metaphysical Blake; it is all
+close reasoning, step by step, and yet is what its title claims for it.
+
+It may be, though I doubt it, that other poets who have written personal
+verse in English, have known as much of women's hearts and the senses of
+men, and the interchanges of passionate intercourse between man and
+woman; but, partly by reason of this very method of saying things, no
+one has ever rendered so exactly, and with such elaborate subtlety,
+every mood of the actual passion. It has been done in prose; may one not
+think of Stendhal, for a certain way he has of turning the whole forces
+of the mind upon those emotions and sensations which are mostly left to
+the heat of an unreflective excitement? Donne, as he suffers all the
+colds and fevers of love, is as much the sufferer and the physician of
+his disease as we have seen him to be in cases of actual physical
+sickness. Always detached from himself, even when he is most helplessly
+the slave of circumstances, he has that frightful faculty of seeing
+through his own illusions; of having no illusions to the mind, only to
+the senses. Other poets, with more wisdom towards poetry, give us the
+beautiful or pathetic results of no matter what creeping or soaring
+passions. Donne, making a new thing certainly, if not always a thing of
+beauty, tells us exactly what a man really feels as he makes love to a
+woman, as he sits beside her husband at table, as he dreams of her in
+absence, as he scorns himself for loving her, as he hates or despises
+her for loving him, as he realises all that is stupid in her devotion,
+and all that is animal in his. 'Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to
+love,' he tells her, in a burst of angry contempt, priding himself on
+his superior craft in the art. And his devotions to her are exquisite,
+appealing to what is most responsive in woman, beyond those of tenderer
+poets. A woman cares most for the lover who understands her best, and is
+least taken in by what it is the method of her tradition to feign. So
+wearily conscious that she is not the abstract angel of her pretence and
+of her adorers, she will go far in sheer thankfulness to the man who can
+see so straight into her heart as to have
+
+
+               found something like a heart,
+     But colours it and corners had;
+     It was not good, it was not bad,
+     It was entire to none, and few had part.
+
+
+Donne shows women themselves, in delight, anger, or despair; they know
+that he finds nothing in the world more interesting, and they much more
+than forgive him for all the ill he says of them. If women most
+conscious of their sex were ever to read Donne, they would say, He was a
+great lover; he understood.
+
+And, in the poems of divine love, there is the same quality of mental
+emotion as in the poems of human love. Donne adores God reasonably,
+knowing why he adores Him. He renders thanks point by point, celebrates
+the heavenly perfections with metaphysical precision, and is no vaguer
+with God than with woman. Donne knew what he believed and why he
+believed, and is carried into no heat or mist as he tells over the
+recording rosary of his devotions. His _Holy Sonnets_ are a kind of
+argument with God; they tell over, and discuss, and resolve, such
+perplexities of faith and reason as would really occur to a speculative
+brain like his. Thought crowds in upon thought, in these tightly packed
+lines, which but rarely admit a splendour of this kind:
+
+
+     At the round earth's imagined corners blow
+     Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
+     From death, you numberless infinities
+     Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.
+
+
+More typical is this too knotted beginning of another sonnet:
+
+
+     Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
+     As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
+     That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
+     Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
+
+
+Having something very minute and very exact to say, he hates to leave
+anything out; dreading diffuseness, as he dreads the tame sweetness of
+an easy melody, he will use only the smallest possible number of words
+to render his thought; and so, as here, he is too often ingenious rather
+than felicitous, forgetting that to the poet poetry comes first, and all
+the rest afterwards.
+
+For the writing of great poetry something more is needed than to be a
+poet and to have great occasions. Donne was a poet, and he had the
+passions and the passionate adventures, in body and mind, which make the
+material for poetry; he was sincere to himself in expressing what he
+really felt under the burden of strong emotion and sharp sensation.
+Almost every poem that he wrote is written on a genuine inspiration, a
+genuine personal inspiration, but most of his poems seem to have been
+written before that personal inspiration has had time to fuse itself
+with the poetic inspiration. It is always useful to remember
+Wordsworth's phrase of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity,' for
+nothing so well defines that moment of crystallisation in which direct
+emotion or sensation deviates exquisitely into art. Donne is intent on
+the passion itself, the thought, the reality; so intent that he is not
+at the same time, in that half-unconscious way which is the way of the
+really great poet, equally intent on the form, that both may come to
+ripeness together. Again it is the heresy of the realist. Just as he
+drags into his verse words that have had no time to take colour from
+men's association of them with beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinking
+heart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He gives us
+the real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetry
+will have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated them
+into a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of ours
+as the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of the
+poet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supreme
+poetic language of Dante. But the personal or human reality and the
+imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the art
+will be at fault. Donne is too proud to abandon himself to his own
+inspiration, to his inspiration as a poet; he would be something more
+than a voice for deeper yet speechless powers; he would make poetry
+speak straight. Well, poetry will not speak straight, in the way Donne
+wished it to, and under the goading that his restless intellect gave it.
+
+He forgot beauty, preferring to it every form of truth, and beauty has
+revenged itself upon him, glittering miraculously out of many lines in
+which he wrote humbly, and leaving the darkness of a retreating shadow
+upon great spaces in which a confident intellect was conscious of
+shining.
+
+
+     For, though mind be the heaven, where love may sit,
+     Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it,
+
+
+he writes, in the _Valediction to his Book_, thus giving formal
+expression to his heresy. 'The greatest wit, though not the best poet of
+our nation,' Dryden called him; the greatest intellect, that is, which
+had expressed itself in poetry. Dryden himself was not always careful to
+distinguish between what material was fit and what unfit for verse; so
+that we can now enjoy his masterly prose with more equable pleasure than
+his verse. But he saw clearly enough the distinction in Donne between
+intellect and the poetical spirit; that fatal division of two forces,
+which, had they pulled together instead of apart, might have achieved a
+result wholly splendid. Without a great intellect no man was ever a
+great poet; but to possess a great intellect is not even a first step in
+the direction of becoming a poet at all.
+
+Compare Donne, for instance, with Herrick. Herrick has little enough of
+the intellect, the passion, the weight and the magnificence of Donne;
+but, setting out with so much less to carry, he certainly gets first to
+the goal, and partly by running always in the right direction. The most
+limited poet in the language, he is the surest. He knows the airs that
+weave themselves into songs, as he knows the flowers that twine best
+into garlands. Words come to him in an order which no one will ever
+alter, and no one will ever forget. Whether they come easily or not is
+no matter; he knows when they have come right, and they always come
+right before he lets them go. But Donne is only occasionally sure of his
+words as airs; he sets them doggedly to the work of saying something,
+whether or no they step to the beat of the music. Conscious writer
+though he was, I suppose he was more or less unconscious of his
+extraordinary felicities, more conscious probably of how they came than
+of what they were doing. And they come chiefly through a sudden
+heightening of mood, which brings with it a clearer and a more exalted
+mode of speech, in its merely accurate expression of itself. Even then I
+cannot imagine him quite reconciled to beauty, at least actually doing
+homage to it, but rather as one who receives a gift by the way.
+
+1899.
+
+
+
+
+EMILY BRONTË
+
+
+     This was a woman young and passionate,
+     Loving the Earth, and loving most to be
+     Where she might be alone with liberty;
+     Loving the beasts, who are compassionate;
+     The homeless moors, her home; the bright elate
+     Winds of the cold dawn; rock and stone and tree;
+     Night, bringing dreams out of eternity;
+     And memory of Death's unforgetting date.
+     She too was unforgetting: has she yet
+     Forgotten that long agony when her breath
+     Too fierce for living fanned the flame of death?
+     Earth for her heather, does she now forget
+     What pity knew not in her love from scorn,
+     And that it was an unjust thing to be born?
+
+
+The Stoic in woman has been seen once only, and that in the only woman
+in whom there has been seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness.
+Emily Brontë lived with an unparalleled energy a life of outward quiet,
+in a loneliness which she shared only with the moors and with the
+animals whom she loved. She required no passion-experience to endow her
+with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is
+alive in the earth. And the vehemence of that inner fire fed on itself,
+and wore out her body before its time, because it had no respite and no
+outlet. We see her condemned to self-imprisonment, and dying of too much
+life.
+
+Her poems are few and brief, and nothing more personal has ever been
+written. A few are as masterly in execution as in conception, and almost
+all have a direct truth of utterance, which rarely lacks at least the
+bare beauty of muscle and sinew, of a kind of naked strength and
+alertness. They are without heat or daylight, the sun is rarely in them,
+and then 'blood-red'; light comes as starshine, or comes as
+
+
+                  hostile light
+     That does not warm but burn.
+
+
+At times the landscape in this bare, grey, craggy verse, always a
+landscape of Yorkshire moors, with its touches of stern and tender
+memory, 'The mute bird sitting on the stone,' 'A little and a lone green
+lane,' has a quality more thrilling than that of Wordsworth. There is
+none of his observation, and none of his sense of a benignant 'presence
+far more deeply interfused'; but there is the voice of the heart's
+roots, crying out to its home in the earth.
+
+At first this unornamented verse may seem forbidding, may seem even to
+be ordinary, as an actual moorland may, to those for whom it has no
+special attraction. But in the verse, as on the moors, there is space,
+wind, and the smell of the earth; and there is room to be alone, that
+liberty which this woman cried for when she cried:
+
+
+     Leave the heart that now I bear,
+     And give me liberty.
+
+
+To be alone was for her to be alone with 'a chainless soul,' which asked
+of whatever powers might be only 'courage to endure,' constancy not to
+forget, and the right to leave the door wide open to those visions that
+came to her out of mere fixed contemplation: 'the God of Visions,' as
+she called her imagination, 'my slave, my comrade, and my king.' And we
+know that her courage was flawless, heroic, beyond praise; that she
+forgot nothing, not even that love for her unspeakable brother, for
+whom she has expressed in two of her poems a more than masculine
+magnanimity of pity and contempt; and that at all times she could turn
+inward to that world within, where her imagination waited for her,
+
+
+     Where thou, and I, and Liberty
+     Have undisputed sovereignty.
+
+
+Yet even imagination, though 'benignant,' is to her a form of 'phantom
+bliss' to which she will not trust herself wholly. 'So hopeless is the
+world without': but is the world within ever quite frankly accepted as a
+substitute, as a truer reality? She is always on her guard against
+imagination as against the outer world, whose 'lies' she is resolved
+shall not 'beguile' her. She has accepted reason as the final arbiter,
+and desires only to see clearly, to see things as they are. She really
+believed that
+
+
+     Earth reserves no blessing
+     For the unblest of heaven;
+
+
+and she had an almost Calvinistic sense of her own condemnation to
+unhappiness. That being so, she was suspicious of those opportunities of
+joy which did come to her, or at least resolute not to believe too
+implicitly in the good messages of the stars, which might be mere
+dreams, or of the earth, which was only certainly kind in preparing for
+her that often-thought-of grave. 'No coward soul is mine' is one of her
+true sayings; but it was with difficulty that she trusted even that
+message of life which she seemed to discover in death. She has to assure
+herself of it, again and again: 'Who once lives, never dies!' And that
+sense of personal identity which aches throughout all her poems is a
+sense, not of the delight, but of the pain and ineradicable sting of
+personal identity.
+
+Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, _Wuthering Heights_, is
+one long outcry. A soul on the rack seems to make itself heard at
+moments, when suffering has grown too acute for silence. Every poem is
+as if torn from her. Even when she does not write seemingly in her own
+person, the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner,' 'Honour's
+Martyr,' 'The Outcast Mother,' echoes of all the miseries and useless
+rebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dying
+faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely into
+the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always
+arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a
+clear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt is itself an
+affirmation, her defiance would be an entreaty but for the 'quenchless
+will' of her pride. She faces every terror, and to her pained
+apprehension birth and death and life are alike terrible. Only Webster's
+dirge might have been said over her coffin.
+
+
+     What my soul bore my soul alone
+     Within itself may tell,
+
+
+she says truthfully; but some of that long endurance of her life, in
+which exile, the body's weakness, and a sense of some 'divinest anguish'
+which clung about the world and all things living, had their share, she
+was able to put into ascetic and passionate verse. It is sad-coloured
+and desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the
+clouds that hang generally above it, a rare and stormy beauty comes into
+the bare outlines, quickening them with living splendour.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+EDGAR ALLAN POE
+
+
+The poems of Edgar Allan Poe are the work of a poet who thought
+persistently about poetry as an art, and would have reduced inspiration
+to a method. At their best they are perfectly defined by Baudelaire,
+when he says of Poe's poetry that it is a thing 'deep and shimmering as
+dreams, mysterious and perfect as crystal.' Not all the poems, few as
+they are, are flawless. In a few unequal poems we have the only
+essential poetry which has yet come from America, Walt Whitman's vast
+poetical nature having remained a nature only, not come to be an art.
+Because Poe was fantastically inhuman, a conscious artist doing strange
+things with strange materials, not every one has realised how fine, how
+rare, was that beauty which this artist brought into the world. It is
+true that there was in the genius of Poe something meretricious; it is
+the flaw in his genius; but then he had genius, and Whittier and Bryant
+and Longfellow and Lowell had only varying degrees of talent. Let us
+admit, by all means, that a diamond is flawed; but need we compare it
+with this and that fine specimen of quartz?
+
+Poetry Poe defined as 'the rhythmical creation of beauty'; and the first
+element of poetry he found in 'the thirst for supernal beauty.' 'It is
+not,' he repeats, 'the mere appreciation of the beauty before us. It is
+a wild effort to reach the beauty above.... Inspired with a prescient
+ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, it struggles by multiform
+novelty of combination among the things and thoughts of time, to
+anticipate some portions of that loveliness whose very elements,
+perhaps, appertain solely to eternity.' The poet, then, 'should limit
+his endeavours to the creation of novel moods of beauty, in form, in
+colour, in sound, in sentiment.' Note the emphasis upon novel: to Poe
+there was no beauty without strangeness. He makes his favourite
+quotation: '"But," says Lord Bacon (how justly!) "there is no exquisite
+beauty without some strangeness in the proportions." Take away this
+element of strangeness--of unexpectedness--of novelty--of
+originality--call it what we will--and all that is ethereal in
+loveliness is lost at once.... We lose, in short, all that assimilates
+the beauty of earth with what we dream of the beauty of heaven!' And, as
+another of the elements of this creation of beauty, there must be
+indefiniteness. 'I _know_,' he says, 'that indefiniteness is an element
+of the true music--I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any
+undue decision--imbue it with any very determinate tone--and you deprive
+it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential
+character.' Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine's
+'Art Poétique': '_Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance_'? And is not the
+essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarmé and of the French
+Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation of 'that class
+of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current
+of meaning an under or _suggestive_ one'? To this 'mystic or secondary
+impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in
+music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always
+a distinct, but an august soul-exalting _echo_.' Has anything that has
+been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of
+verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more subtly or
+more precisely?
+
+And Poe does not end here, with what may seem generalities. 'Beyond the
+limits of beauty,' he says of poetry, 'its province does not extend. Its
+sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has
+only collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally,
+upon either Duty or Truth.' And of the poet who said, not meaning
+anything very different from what Poe meant, 'Beauty is truth, truth
+beauty,' he says: 'He is the sole British poet who has never erred in
+his themes.' And, as if still thinking of Keats, he says: 'It is chiefly
+amid forms of physical loveliness (we use the word _forms_ in its widest
+sense as embracing modifications of sound and colour) that the soul
+seeks the realisation of its dreams of Beauty.' And, with more earnest
+insistence on those limits which he knew to be so much more necessary to
+guard in poetry than its so-called freedom ('the true artist will avail
+himself of no "license" whatever'), he states, with categorical
+precision: 'A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by
+having, for its _immediate_ object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by
+having, for its object, an _indefinite_ instead of a _definite_
+pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance
+presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with _in_definite
+sensations, to which end music is an _essential_, since comprehension of
+sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with
+a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music;
+the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.'
+
+And he would set these careful limits, not only to the province of
+poetic pleasure, but to the form and length of actual poetry. 'A long
+poem,' he says, with more truth than most people are quite willing to
+see, 'is a paradox.' 'I hold,' he says elsewhere, 'that a long poem does
+not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat
+contradiction in terms.' And, after defining his ideal, 'a rhymed poem,
+not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour,' he says,
+very justly, that 'within this limit alone can the highest order of true
+poetry exist.' In another essay he narrows the duration to 'half an
+hour, at the very utmost'; and wisely. In yet another essay he suggests
+'a length of about one hundred lines' as the length most likely to
+convey that unity of impression, with that intensity of true poetical
+effect, in which he found the highest merit of poetry. Remember, that of
+true poetry we have already had his definition; and concede, that a
+loftier conception of poetry as poetry, poetry as lyric essence, cannot
+easily be imagined. We are too ready to accept, under the general name
+of poetry, whatever is written eloquently in metre; to call even
+Wordsworth's _Excursion_ a poem, and to accept _Paradise Lost_ as
+throughout a poem. But there are not thirty consecutive lines of
+essential poetry in the whole of _The Excursion_, and, while _Paradise
+Lost_ is crammed with essential poetry, that poetry is not consecutive;
+but the splendid workmanship comes in to fill up the gaps, and to hold
+our attention until the poetry returns. Essential poetry is an essence
+too strong for the general sense; diluted, it can be endured; and, for
+the most part, the poets dilute it. Poe could conceive of it only in the
+absolute; and his is the counsel of perfection, if of a perfection
+almost beyond mortal powers. He sought for it in the verse of all poets;
+he sought, as few have ever sought, to concentrate it in his own verse;
+and he has left us at least a few poems, '_ciascun distinto e di fulgore
+e d'arte_,' in which he has found, within his own limits, the absolute.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
+
+
+With the strange fortune that always accompanied him, in life and in
+death, Beddoes has not merely escaped the indiscriminate applause which
+he would never have valued, but he has remained a bibliographical rather
+than a literary rarity. Few except the people who collect first
+editions--not, as a rule, the public for a poet--have had the chance of
+possessing _Death's Jest-Book_ (1850) and the _Poems_ (1851). At last
+Beddoes has been made accessible, the real story of his death, that
+suicide so much in the casual and determined manner of one of his own
+characters.
+
+'The power of the man is immense and irresistible.' Browning's emphatic
+phrase comes first to the memory, and remains always the most
+appropriate word of eulogy. Beddoes has been rashly called a great poet.
+I do not think he was a great poet, but he was, in every sense of the
+word, an astonishing one. Read these lines, and remember that they were
+written just at that stagnant period (1821-1826) which comes between the
+period of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, and the period of Browning and
+Tennyson. It is a murderer who speaks:
+
+
+     I am unsouled, dishumanised, uncreated;
+     My passions swell and grow like brutes conceived;
+     My feet are fixing roots, and every limb
+     Is billowy and gigantic, till I seem
+     A wild, old, wicked mountain in the air:
+     And the abhorred conscience of this murder,
+     It will grow up a lion, all alone,
+     A mighty-maned, grave-mouthed prodigy,
+     And lair him in my caves: and other thoughts,
+     Some will be snakes, and bears, and savage wolves,
+     And when I lie tremendous in the desert,
+     Or abandoned sea, murderers and idiot men
+     Will come to live upon my rugged sides,
+     Die, and be buried in me. Now it comes;
+     I break, and magnify, and lose my form,
+     And yet I shall be taken for a man,
+     And never be discovered till I die.
+
+
+How much this has of the old, splendid audacity of the Elizabethans! How
+unlike timid modern verse! Beddoes is always large, impressive; the
+greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful
+consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have
+achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he
+is a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs.
+
+The one important work which Beddoes actually completed, _Death's
+Jest-Book_, is nominally a drama in five acts. All the rest of his work,
+except a few lyrics and occasional poems, is also nominally dramatic.
+But there never was anything less dramatic in substance than this mass
+of admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes' genius was essentially
+lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a
+strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic power
+he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a
+credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no
+conception of what character might be in men and women, he had no
+faculty of expressing emotion convincingly. Constantly you find the most
+beautiful poetry where it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do you
+find one of those brief and memorable phrases, words from the heart,
+for which one would give much beautiful poetry. To take one instance: an
+Arab slave wishes to say that he has caught sight of a sail nearing the
+coast. And this is how he says it:
+
+
+     I looked abroad upon the wide old world,
+     And in the sky and sea, through the same clouds,
+     The same stars saw I glistening, and nought else,
+     And as my soul sighed unto the world's soul,
+     Far in the north a wind blackened the waters,
+     And, after that creating breath was still,
+     A dark speck sat on the sky's edge: as watching
+     Upon the heaven-girt border of my mind
+     The first faint thought of a great deed arise,
+     With force and fascination I drew on
+     The wished sight, and my hope seemed to stamp
+     Its shade upon it. Not yet is it clear
+     What, or from whom, the vessel.
+
+
+In scenes which aim at being passionate one sees the same inability to
+be natural. What we get is always literature; it is never less than
+that, nor more than that. It is never frank, uncompromising nature. The
+fact is, that Beddoes wrote from the head, collectively, and without
+emotion, or without inspiration, save in literature. All Beddoes'
+characters speak precisely the same language, express the same desires;
+all in the same way startle us by their ghostly remoteness from flesh
+and blood. 'Man is tired of being merely human,' Siegfried says, in
+_Death's Jest-Book_, and Beddoes may be said to have grown tired of
+humanity before he ever came to understand it.
+
+Looked at from the normal standpoint, Beddoes' idea of the drama was
+something wildly amateurish. As a practical playwright he would be
+beneath contempt; but what he aimed at was something peculiar to
+himself, a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia. He would have admitted
+his obligations to Webster and Tourneur, to all the _macabre_
+Elizabethan work; he would have admitted that his foundations were based
+on literature, not on life; but he would have claimed, and claimed
+justly, that he had produced, out of many strange elements, something
+which has a place apart in English poetry. _Death's Jest-Book_ is
+perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page
+without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A
+slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable
+of death:
+
+
+         Sleeping, or feigning sleep,
+     Well done of her: 'tis trying on a garb
+     Which she must wear, sooner or later, long:
+     'Tis but a warmer, lighter death.
+
+
+Not Baudelaire was more amorous of corruption; not Poe was more
+spellbound by the scent of graveyard earth. So Beddoes has written a new
+Dance of Death, in poetry; has become the chronicler of the praise and
+ridicule of Death. 'Tired of being merely human,' he has peopled a play
+with confessed phantoms. It is natural that these eloquent speakers
+should pass us by with their words, that they should fail to move us by
+their sorrows or their hates: they are not intended to be human, except,
+indeed, in the wizard humanity of Death.
+
+I have said already that the genius of Beddoes is not dramatic, but
+lyrical. What was really most spontaneous in him (nothing was quite
+spontaneous) was the impulse of song-writing. And it seems to me that he
+is really most successful in sweet and graceful lyrics like this
+_Dirge_, so much more than 'half in love with easeful death.'
+
+
+     If thou wilt ease thine heart
+     Of love and all its smart,
+         Then sleep, dear, sleep;
+     And not a sorrow
+       Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
+         Lie still and deep,
+       Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
+     The rim o' the sun to-morrow,
+         In eastern sky.
+
+     But wilt thou cure thine heart
+     Of love and all its smart,
+         Then die, dear, die;
+     'Tis deeper, sweeter,
+       Than on a rose-bank to lie dreaming
+         With folded eye;
+       And then alone, amid the beaming
+     Of love's stars, thou'lt meet her
+         In eastern sky.
+
+
+A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming, morbid, and magnificent poetry
+in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, of
+English poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones and
+Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writer
+of more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had
+certainly a more personal passion to express in his rough and
+tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actual
+poetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts:
+actual poetical genius.
+
+1891.
+
+
+
+
+GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
+
+
+_Salammbô_ is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told
+us, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the
+modern novel.' By the modern novel he means the novel as he had
+reconstructed it; he means _Madame Bovary_. That perfect book is perfect
+because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject suited to his
+method, had made his method and his subject one. On his scientific side
+Flaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps a more intimately
+personal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in a large, sweeping way.
+The lyric poet in him made _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_, the analyst
+made _L'Education Sentimentale_; but in _Madame Bovary_ we find the
+analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman,
+as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and
+observed in surroundings of the most ordinary kind. But Flaubert finds
+the romantic material which he loved, the materials of beauty, in
+precisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly.
+Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical,
+incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile
+aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to
+Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of
+reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes
+exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a
+commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric
+in his rendering of it.
+
+In writing _Salammbô_ Flaubert set himself to renew the historical
+novel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted,
+doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible,
+by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of the
+reality of the things about us, only able to translate them
+approximately into any form of art. How much is left over, in the
+closest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a passing
+steamer, of one's next-door neighbour, of the point of view of a
+foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind, moment
+by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble Arch? Think,
+then, of the attempt to reconstruct no matter what period of the past,
+to distinguish the difference in the aspect of a world perhaps bossed
+with castles and ridged with ramparts, to two individualities encased
+within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his antiquity wisely: a period of
+which we know too little to confuse us, a city of which no stone is left
+on another, the minds of Barbarians who have left us no psychological
+documents. 'Be sure I have made no fantastic Carthage,' he says proudly,
+pointing to his documents; Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him
+with 'the _exact_ form of a door'; the Bible and Theophrastus, from
+which he obtains his perfumes and his precious stones; Gresenius, from
+whom he gets his Punic names; the _Mémoires de l'Académie des
+Inscriptions_. 'As for the temple of Tanit, I am sure of having
+reconstructed it as it was, with the treatise of the Syrian Goddess,
+with the medals of the Duc de Luynes, with what is known of the temple
+at Jerusalem, with a passage of St. Jerome, quoted by Seldon (_De Diis
+Syriis_), with the plan of the temple of Gozzo, which is quite
+Carthaginian, and best of all, with the ruins of the temple of Thugga,
+which I have seen myself, with my own eyes, and of which no traveller or
+antiquarian, so far as I know, has ever spoken.' But that, after all, as
+he admits (when, that is, he has proved point by point his minute
+accuracy to all that is known of ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to
+every indication which can serve for his guidance, his patience in
+grouping rather than his daring in the invention of action and details),
+that is not the question. 'I care little enough for archæology! If the
+colour is not uniform, if the details are out of keeping, if the manners
+do not spring from the religion and the actions from the passions, if
+the characters are not consistent, if the costumes are not appropriate
+to the habits and the architecture to the climate, if, in a word, there
+is not harmony, I am in error. If not, no.'
+
+And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can give
+a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time a definition
+of the merit which sets _Salammbô_ above all other historical novels.
+Everything in the book is strange, some of it might easily be
+bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony. The harmony is like
+that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying its charm, or even the
+secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a monotony coiling
+perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its own. Or rather, it is
+like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite colours, firmly
+detached from a background of burning sky; a procession of Barbarians,
+each in the costume of his country, passes across the wall; there are
+battles, in which elephants fight with men; an army besieges a great
+city, or rots to death in a defile between mountains; the ground is
+paved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living burden, stand
+against the sky; a few figures of men and women appear again and again,
+expressing by their gestures the soul of the story.
+
+Flaubert himself has pointed, with his unerring self-criticism, to the
+main defect of his book: 'The pedestal is too large for the statue.'
+There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more about Salammbô.
+He declares: 'There is not in my book an isolated or gratuitous
+description; all are useful to my characters, and have an influence,
+near or remote, on the action.' This is true, and yet, all the same, the
+pedestal is too large for the statue. Salammbô, 'always surrounded with
+grave and exquisite things,' has something of the somnambulism which
+enters into the heroism of Judith; she has a hieratic beauty, and a
+consciousness as pale and vague as the moon whom she worships. She
+passes before us, 'her body saturated with perfumes,' encrusted with
+jewels like an idol, her head turreted with violet hair, the gold chain
+tinkling between her ankles; and is hardly more than an attitude, a
+fixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom one sees passing, with
+oblique eyes and mouths painted into smiles, their faces curiously
+traced into a work of art, in the languid movements of a pantomimic
+dance. The soul behind those eyes? the temperament under that at times
+almost terrifying mask? Salammbô is as inarticulate for us as the
+serpent, to whose drowsy beauty, capable of such sudden awakenings, hers
+seems half akin; they move before us in a kind of hieratic pantomime, a
+coloured, expressive thing, signifying nothing. Mâtho, maddened with
+love, 'in an invincible stupor, like those who have drunk some draught
+of which they are to die,' has the same somnambulistic life; the prey of
+Venus, he has an almost literal insanity, which, as Flaubert reminds us,
+is true to the ancient view of that passion. He is the only quite vivid
+person in the book, and he lives with the intensity of a wild beast, a
+life 'blinded alike' from every inner and outer interruption to one or
+two fixed ideas. The others have their places in the picture, fall into
+their attitudes naturally, remain so many coloured outlines for us. The
+illusion is perfect; these people may not be the real people of history,
+but at least they have no self-consciousness, no Christian tinge in
+their minds.
+
+'The metaphors are few, the epithets definite,' Flaubert tells us, of
+his style in this book, where, as he says, he has sacrificed less 'to
+the amplitude of the phrase and to the period,' than in _Madame Bovary_.
+The movement here is in briefer steps, with a more earnest gravity,
+without any of the engaging weakness of adjectives. The style is never
+archaic, it is absolutely simple, the precise word being put always for
+the precise thing; but it obtains a dignity, a historical remoteness, by
+the large seriousness of its manner, the absence of modern ways of
+thought, which, in _Madame Bovary_, bring with them an instinctively
+modern cadence.
+
+_Salammbô_ is written with the severity of history, but Flaubert notes
+every detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural things.
+A slave is being flogged under a tree: Flaubert notes the movement of
+the thong as it flies, and tells us: 'The thongs, as they whistled
+through the air, sent the bark of the plane trees flying.' Before the
+battle of the Macar, the Barbarians are awaiting the approach of the
+Carthaginian army. First 'the Barbarians were surprised to see the
+ground undulate in the distance.' Clouds of dust rise and whirl over
+the desert, through which are seen glimpses of horns, and, as it seems,
+wings. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the desert? The
+Barbarians watch intently. 'At last they made out several transverse
+bars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser, larger;
+dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes came into
+view; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, "The
+Carthaginians!" arose.' Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes,
+unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves,
+taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert puts
+himself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them as
+to see for them.
+
+Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will find
+that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its
+subject-matter. That style, which has almost every merit and hardly a
+fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of most
+writers careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire,
+and you will find that the aim of these writers has been to construct a
+style which shall be adaptable to every occasion, but without structural
+change; the cadence is always the same. The most exquisite word-painting
+of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm into English, without
+difficulty; once you have mastered the tune, you have merely to go on;
+every verse will be the same. But Flaubert is so difficult to translate
+because he has no fixed rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regular
+march-music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his
+cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has no
+theory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a
+living thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and
+interprets. 'If I call stones blue, it is because blue is the precise
+word, believe me,' he replies to Sainte-Beuve's criticism. Beauty comes
+into his words from the precision with which they express definite
+things, definite ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where the
+material is so hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheer
+exactitude which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure and
+order, seen equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage, at the
+time of their flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on the
+corpses of the Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains.
+
+1901.
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET
+
+
+Meredith has always suffered from the curse of too much ability. He has
+both genius and talent, but the talent, instead of acting as a
+counterpoise to the genius, blows it yet more windily about the air. He
+has almost all the qualities of a great writer, but some perverse spirit
+in his blood has mixed them to their mutual undoing. When he writes
+prose, the prose seems always about to burst into poetry; when he writes
+verse, the verse seems always about to sink into prose. He thinks in
+flashes, and writes in shorthand. He has an intellectual passion for
+words, but he has never been able to accustom his mind to the slowness
+of their service; he tosses them about the page in his anger, tearing
+them open and gutting them with a savage pleasure. He has so fastidious
+a fear of dirtying his hands with what other hands have touched that he
+makes the language over again, so as to avoid writing a sentence or a
+line as any one else could have written it. His hatred of the
+commonplace becomes a mania, and it is by his head-long hunt after the
+best that he has lost by the way its useful enemy, good. In prose he
+would have every sentence shine, in verse he would have every line
+sparkle; like a lady who puts on all her jewellery at once, immediately
+after breakfast. As his own brain never rests, he does not realise that
+there are other brains which feel fatigue; and as his own taste is for
+what is hard, ringing, showy, drenched with light, he does not leave any
+cool shadows to be a home for gentle sounds, in the whole of his work.
+His books are like picture galleries, in which every inch of wall is
+covered, and picture screams at picture across its narrow division of
+frame. Almost every picture is good, but each suffers from its context.
+As time goes on, Meredith's mannerisms have grown rigid, like old bones.
+Exceptions have become rules, experiments have been accepted for
+solutions.
+
+In Meredith's earliest verse there is a certain harshness, which seems
+to come from a too urgent desire to be at once concise and explicit.
+_Modern Love_, published in 1862, remains Meredith's masterpiece in
+poetry, and it will always remain, beside certain things of Donne and of
+Browning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse.
+It is packed with imagination, but with imagination of so nakedly human
+a kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse:
+it is like scraps of broken, of heart-broken, talk, overheard and jotted
+down at random, hardly suggesting a story, but burning into one like the
+touch of a corroding acid. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no
+illusions, and their 'tragic hints' are like a fine, pained mockery of
+love itself, as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of
+passion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness more
+constant than that of Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensation
+carried to the point of agony at which Othello sweats words like these:
+
+
+                                   O thou weed,
+     Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet
+     That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!
+
+
+Meredith has written nothing more like _Modern Love_, and for twenty
+years after the publication of the volume containing it he published no
+other volume of verse. In 1883 appeared _Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of
+Earth_; in 1887 _Poems and Ballads of Tragic Life_; and, in 1888, _A
+Reading of Earth_, to which _A Reading of Life_ is a sort of companion
+volume. The main part of this work is a kind of nature-poetry unlike any
+other nature-poetry; but there are several groups which must be
+distinguished from it. One group contains _Cassandra_, from the volume
+of 1862, _The Nuptials of Attila, The Song of Theodolinda_, from the
+volume of 1887. There is something fierce, savage, convulsive, in the
+passion which informs these poems; a note sounded in our days by no
+other poet. The words rush rattling on one another, like the clashing of
+spears or the ring of iron on iron in a day of old-world battle. The
+lines are javelins, consonanted lines full of force and fury, as if sung
+or played by a northern skald harping on a field of slain. There is
+another group of romantic ballads, containing the early _Margaret's
+Bridal Eve_, and the later _Arch-duchess Anne_ and _The Young
+Princess_. There are also the humorous and pathetic studies in _Roadside
+Philosophers_ and the like, in which, forty years ago, Meredith
+anticipated, with the dignity of a poet, the vernacular studies of
+others. And, finally, there is a section containing poems of impassioned
+meditation, beginning with the lofty and sustained ode to _France,
+December_ 1870, and ending with the volcanic volume of _Odes in
+Contribution to the Song of French History_, published in 1900.
+
+But it is in the poems of nature that Meredith is most consistent to an
+attitude, most himself as he would have himself. There is in them an
+almost pagan sense of the nearness and intimacy of the awful and
+benignant powers of nature; but this sense, once sufficient for the
+making of poetry, is interpenetrated, in this modern poet, by an almost
+scientific consciousness of the processes of evolution. Earth seen
+through a brain, not a temperament, it might be defined; and it would be
+possible to gather a complete philosophy of life from these poems, in
+which, though 'the joy of earth' is sung, it is sung with the wise,
+collected ecstasy of Melampus, not with the irresponsible ecstasy of
+the Mænads. It is not what Browning calls 'the wild joy of living,' but
+the strenuous joy of living in perfect accordance with nature, with the
+sanity of animals who have climbed to reason, and are content to be
+guided by it. It is a philosophy which may well be contrasted with the
+transcendental theories of one with whom Meredith may otherwise be
+compared, Emerson. Both, in different ways, have tried to make poetry
+out of the brain, forgetting that poetry draws nourishment from other
+soil, and dies in the brain as in a vacuum. Both have taken the
+abstract, not the concrete, for their province; both have tortured words
+in the cause of ideas, both have had so much to say that they have had
+little time left over for singing.
+
+Meredith has never been a clear writer in verse; _Modern Love_ requires
+reading and re-reading; but at one time he had a somewhat exasperating
+semblance of lucidity, which still lurks mockingly about his work. A
+freshman who heard Mallarmé lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I
+understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is sometimes
+equally tantalising. The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one,
+clearly visible on the other side of some hard transparency through
+which there is no passage. Have you ever seen a cat pawing at the glass
+from the other side of a window? It paws and paws, turns its head to the
+right, turns its head to the left, walks to and fro, sniffing at the
+corner of every pane; its claws screech on the glass, in a helpless
+endeavour to get through to what it sees before it; it gives up at last,
+in an evident bewilderment. That is how one figures the reader of
+Meredith's later verse. It is not merely that Meredith's meaning is not
+obvious at a glance, it is, when obscure, ugly in its obscurity, not
+beautiful. There is not an uglier line in the English language than:
+
+
+     Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate.
+
+
+It is almost impossible to say it at all. Often Meredith wishes to be
+too concise, and squeezes his thoughts together like this:
+
+
+                 and the totterer Earth detests,
+     Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
+
+
+In his desire to cram a separate sentence into every line, he writes
+such lines as:
+
+
+     Look I once back, a broken pinion I,
+
+
+He thinks differently from other people, and not only more quickly; and
+his mind works in a kind of double process. Take, for instance, this
+phrase:
+
+
+     Ravenous all the line for speed.
+
+
+An image occurs to him, the image of a runner, who, as we say, 'devours'
+the ground. Thereupon he translates this image into his own dialect,
+where it becomes intensely vivid if it can be caught in passing; only,
+to catch it in passing, you must go through two mental processes at
+once. That is why he cannot be read aloud. In a poem where every line is
+on the pattern of the line I have quoted, every line has to be
+unriddled; and no brain works fast enough to catch so many separate
+meanings, and to translate as it goes.
+
+Meredith has half the making of a great artist in verse. He has harmony
+without melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations upon
+verse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the
+swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to
+astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical
+skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical
+skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has
+written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud
+of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping
+as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the
+building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the
+delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his
+poems, the _Hymn to Colour_, he can begin one stanza with this ample
+magnificence:
+
+
+     Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes
+     The house of heaven splendid for the bride;
+
+
+and can end another stanza thus lumpishly:
+
+
+     With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,
+     Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged
+         Shall on through brave wars waged.
+
+
+Meredith is not satisfied with English verse as it is; he persists in
+trying to make it into something wholly different, and these
+eccentricities come partly from certain theories. He speaks in one place
+of
+
+
+     A soft compulsion on terrene
+     By heavenly,
+
+
+which is not English, but a misapplication of the jargon of science. In
+another place he speaks of
+
+
+     The posts that named the swallowed mile,
+
+
+which is a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference,
+liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and
+'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two
+lines from _The Woods of Westermain_, published in 1883 in the _Poems
+and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth_, sum up in themselves the whole theory:
+
+
+     Life, the small self-dragon ramped,
+     Thrill for service to be stamped.
+
+
+Here every word is harsh, prickly, hard of sense; the rhymes come like
+buffets in the face. It is possible that Meredith has more or less
+consciously imitated the French practice in the matter of rhymes, for in
+France rarity of rhyme is sought as eagerly as in England it is avoided.
+Rhyme in French poetry is an important part of the art of verse; in
+English poetry, except to some extent at the time of Pope, it has been
+accepted as a thing rather to be disguised than accentuated. There is
+something a little barbarous in rhyme itself, with its mnemonic click
+of emphasis, and the skill of the most skilful English poets has always
+been shown in the softening of that click, in reducing it to the
+inarticulate answer of an echo. Meredith hammers out his rhymes on the
+anvil on which he has forged his clanging and rigid-jointed words. His
+verse moves in plate-armour, 'terrible as an army with banners.'
+
+To Meredith poetry has come to be a kind of imaginative logic, and
+almost the whole of his later work is a reasoning in verse. He reasons,
+not always clearly to the eye, and never satisfyingly to the ear, but
+with a fiery intelligence which has more passion than most other poets
+put into frankly emotional verse. He reasons in pictures, every line
+having its imagery, and he uses pictorial words to express abstract
+ideas. Disdaining the common subjects of poetry, as he disdains common
+rhythms, common rhymes, and common language, he does much by his
+enormous vitality to give human warmth to arguments concerning humanity.
+He does much, though he attempts the impossible. His poetry is always
+what Rossetti called 'amusing'; it has, in other words, what Baudelaire
+called 'the supreme literary grace, energy'; but with what relief does
+one not lay down this _Reading of Life_ and take up the _Modern Love_ of
+forty years ago, in which life speaks! Meredith has always been in
+wholesome revolt against convention, against every deadening limitation
+of art, but he sometimes carries revolt to the point of anarchy. In
+finding new subjects and new forms for verse he is often throwing away
+the gold and gathering up the ore. In taking for his foundation the
+stone which the builders rejected he is sometimes only giving a proof of
+their wisdom in rejecting it.
+
+1901.
+
+
+
+
+ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
+
+I
+
+
+It is forty-four years since the publication of Swinburne's first
+volume, and it is scarcely to the credit of the English public that we
+should have had to wait so long for a collected edition of the poems of
+one of the greatest poets of this or any country. 'It is nothing to me,'
+Swinburne tells us, with a delicate precision in his pride, 'that what I
+write should find immediate or general acceptance.' And indeed
+'immediate' it can scarcely be said to have been; 'general' it is hardly
+likely ever to be. Swinburne has always been a poet writing for poets,
+or for those rare lovers of poetry who ask for poetry, and nothing more
+or less, in a poet. Such writers can never be really popular, any more
+than gold without alloy can ever really be turned to practical uses.
+Think of how extremely little the poetical merit of his poetry had to
+do with the immense success of Byron; think how very much besides
+poetical merit contributed to the surprising reputation of Tennyson.
+There was a time when the first series of _Poems and Ballads_ was read
+for what seemed startling in its subject-matter; but that time has long
+since passed, and it is not probable that any reviewer of the new
+edition now reprinted verbatim from the edition of 1866 will so much as
+allude to the timid shrieks which went up from the reviewers of that
+year, except perhaps as one of the curiosities of literature.
+
+A poet is always interesting and instructive when he talks about
+himself, and Swinburne, in his dedicatory epistle to his 'best and
+dearest friend,' Mr. Watts-Dunton, who has been the finest, the surest,
+and the subtlest critic of poetry now living, talks about himself, or
+rather about his work, with a proud and simple frankness. It is not only
+interesting, but of considerable critical significance, to know that,
+among his plays, Swinburne prefers _Mary Stuart_, and, among his lyrical
+poems, the ode on Athens and the ode on the Armada. 'By the test of
+these two poems,' he tells us, 'I am content that my claims should be
+decided and my station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of
+the term; a craftsman in the most ambitious line of his art that ever
+aroused or can arouse the emulous aspiration of his kind.'
+
+In one sense a poet is always the most valuable critic of his own work;
+in another sense his opinion is almost valueless. He knows, better than
+any one else, what he wanted to do, and he knows, better than any one
+else, how nearly he has done it. In judging his own technical skill in
+the accomplishment of his aim, it is easy for him to be absolutely
+unbiased, technique being a thing wholly apart from one's self, an
+acquirement. But, in a poem, the way it is done is by no means
+everything; something else, the vital element in it, the quality of
+inspiration, as we rightly call it, has to be determined. Of this the
+poet is rarely a judge. To him it is a part of himself, and he is
+scarcely more capable of questioning its validity than he is of
+questioning his own intentions. To him it is enough that it is his.
+Conscious, as he may rightly be, of genius, how can he discriminate, in
+his own work, between the presence or the absence of that genius, which,
+though it means everything, may be absent in a production technically
+faultless, or present in a production less strictly achieved according
+to rule? Swinburne, it is evident, grudges some of the fame which has
+set _Atalanta in Calydon_ higher in general favour than _Erechtheus_,
+and, though he is perfectly right in every reason which he gives for
+setting _Erechtheus_ above _Atalanta in Calydon_, the fact remains that
+there is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the same
+degree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth of
+inspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and the
+ode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is no
+more likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer of
+those two splendid poems than there is of Coleridge, to take Swinburne's
+own instance, being remembered as the writer of the ode to France rather
+than as the writer of the ode on Dejection. The ode to France is a
+product of the finest poetical rhetoric; the ode on Dejection is a
+growth of the profoundest poetical genius.
+
+Another point on which Swinburne takes for granted what is perhaps his
+highest endowment as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the
+'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the
+sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that
+marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English
+or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural
+command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne,
+'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or
+instinct as the greatest writer and the greatest versifier of our age
+must have felt at its highest possible degree when composing a musical
+exercise of such incomparable scope and fulness as _Les Djinns_.' In
+metrical inventiveness Swinburne is as much Victor Hugo's superior as
+the English language is superior to the French in metrical capability.
+His music has never the sudden bird's flight, the thrill, pause, and
+unaccountable ecstasy of the very finest lyrics of Blake or of
+Coleridge; one never wholly forgets the artist in the utterance. But
+where he is incomparable is in an 'arduous fulness' of intricate
+harmony, around which the waves of melody flow, foam and scatter like
+the waves of the sea about a rock. No poet has ever loved or praised the
+sea as Swinburne has loved and praised it; and to no poet has it been
+given to create music with words in so literal an analogy with the
+inflexible and vital rhythmical science of the sea.
+
+In his reference to the 'clatter aroused' by the first publication of
+the wonderful volume now reprinted, the first series of _Poems and
+Ballads_, Swinburne has said with tact, precision, and finality all that
+need ever be said on the subject. He records, with a touch of not
+unkindly humour, his own 'deep diversion of collating and comparing the
+variously inaccurate verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who
+insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted
+or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions
+of absolute fancy.' And, admitting that there was work in it of both
+kinds, he claims, with perfect justice, that 'if the two kinds cannot be
+distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an
+artist whose medium or material has more in common with a musician's
+than with a sculptor's.' Rarely has the prying ignorance of ordinary
+criticism been more absurdly evident than in the criticisms on _Poems
+and Ballads_, in which the question as to whether these poems were or
+were not the record of personal experience was debated with as much
+solemn fury as if it really mattered in the very least. When a poem has
+once been written, of what consequence is it to anybody whether it was
+inspired by a line of Sappho or by a lady living round the corner? There
+may be theoretical preferences, and these may be rationally enough
+argued, as to whether one should work from life or from memory or from
+imagination. But, the poem once written, only one question remains: is
+it a good or a bad poem? A poem of Coleridge or of Wordsworth is neither
+better nor worse because it came to the one in a dream and to the other
+in 'a storm, worse if possible, in which the pony could (or would) only
+make his way slantwise.' The knowledge of the circumstances or the
+antecedents of composition is, no doubt, as gratifying to human
+curiosity as the personal paragraphs in the newspapers; it can hardly
+be of much greater importance.
+
+A passage in Swinburne's dedicatory epistle which was well worth saying,
+a passage which comes with doubled force from a poet who is also a
+scholar, is that on books which are living things: 'Marlowe and
+Shakespeare, Æschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty
+shelves of libraries.' To Swinburne, as he says, the distinction between
+books and life is but a 'dullard's distinction,' and it may justly be
+said of him that it is with an equal instinct and an equal enthusiasm
+that he is drawn to whatever in nature, in men, in books, or in ideas is
+great, noble, and heroic. The old name of _Laudi_, which has lately been
+revived by d'Annunzio, might be given to the larger part of Swinburne's
+lyric verse: it is filled by a great praising of the universe. To the
+prose-minded reader who reads verse in the intervals of newspaper and
+business there must be an actual fatigue in merely listening to so
+unintermittent a hymn of thanksgiving. Here is a poet, he must say, who
+is without any moderation at all; birds at dawn, praising light, are not
+more troublesome to a sleeper.
+
+Reading the earlier and the later Swinburne on a high rock around which
+the sea is washing, one is struck by the way in which these cadences, in
+their unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm of
+the sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, a
+rhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebuked
+by the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked by the stars.
+'We are what suns and winds and waters make us,' as Landor knew: the
+whole essence of Swinburne seems to be made by the rush and soft flowing
+impetus of the sea. The sea has passed into his blood like a passion and
+into his verse like a transfiguring element. It is actually the last
+word of many of his poems, and it is the first and last word of his
+poetry.
+
+He does not make pictures, for he does not see the visible world without
+an emotion which troubles his sight. He sees as through a cloud of
+rapture. Sight is to him a transfiguring thrill, and his record of
+things seen is clouded over with shining words and broken into little
+separate shafts and splinters of light. He has still, undimmed, the
+child's awakenings to wonder, love, reverence, the sense of beauty in
+every sensation. He has the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost
+unparalleled abundance. There is for him no tedium in things, because,
+to his sense, books catch up and continue the delights of nature, and
+with books and nature he has all that he needs for a continual inner
+communing.
+
+In this new book there are poems of nature, poems of the sea, the lake,
+the high oaks, the hawthorn, a rosary, Northumberland; and there are
+poems of books, poems about Burns, Christina Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas,
+and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in
+this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism,
+and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater
+Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist,
+the poet of strenuous laughter.
+
+
+     But love and wine were moon and sun
+     For many a fame long since undone,
+     And sorrow and joy have lost and won
+         By stormy turns
+     As many a singer's soul, if none
+         More bright than Burns.
+
+     And sweeter far in grief and mirth
+     Have songs as glad and sad of birth
+     Found voice to speak of wealth or dearth
+         In joy of life:
+     But never song took fire from earth
+         More strong for strife.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Above the storms of praise and blame
+     That blur with mist his lustrous name,
+     His thunderous laughter went and came,
+         And lives and flies;
+     The war that follows on the flame
+         When lightning dies.
+
+
+Here the homage is given with splendid energy, but with fine justice.
+There are other poems of homage in this book, along with denunciations,
+as there are on so many pages of the _Songs before Sunrise_ and the
+_Songs of Two Nations_, in which the effect is far less convincing, as
+it is far less clear. Whether Mazzini or Nelson be praised, Napoleon
+III. or Gladstone be buffeted, little distinction, save of degree, can
+be discerned between the one and the other. The hate poems, it must be
+admitted, are more interesting, partly because they are more
+distinguishable, than the poems of adoration; for hate seizes upon the
+lineaments which love glorifies willingly out of recognition. There was
+a finely ferocious energy in the _Dirae_ ending with _The Descent into
+Hell_ of 9th January 1873, and there is a good swinging and slashing
+vigour in _The Commonweal_ of 1886. Why is it that this deeply felt
+political verse, like so much of the political verse of the _Songs
+before Sunrise_, does not satisfy the ear or the mind like the early
+love poetry or the later nature poetry? Is it not that one distinguishes
+only a voice, not a personality behind the voice? Speech needs weight,
+though song only needs wings.
+
+
+     I set the trumpet to my lips and blow,
+
+
+said Swinburne in the _Songs before Sunrise,_ when he was the trumpeter
+of Mazzini.
+
+And yet, it must be remembered, Swinburne has always meant exactly what
+he has said, and this fact points an amusing contrast between the
+attitude of the critics thirty years ago towards work which was then new
+and their attitude now towards the same work when it is thirty years
+old. There is, in the _Songs before Sunrise_, an arraignment of
+Christianity as deliberate as Leconte de Lisle's, as wholesale as
+Nietzsche's; in the _Poems and Ballads_, a learned sensuality without
+parallel in English poetry; and the critics, or the descendants of the
+critics, who, when these poems first appeared, could see nothing but
+these accidental qualities of substance, are now, thanks merely to the
+triumph of time, to the ease with which time forgets and forgives, able
+to take all such things for granted, and to acknowledge the genuine and
+essential qualities of lyric exaltation and generous love of liberty by
+which the poems exist, and have a right to exist, as poems. But when we
+are told that _Before a Crucifix_ is a poem fundamentally reverent
+towards Christianity, and that _Anactoria_ is an ascetic experiment in
+scholarship, a learned attempt at the reconstruction of the order of
+Sappho, it is difficult not to wonder with what kind of smile the writer
+of these poems reflects anew over the curiosities of criticism. I have
+taken the new book and the old book together, because there is
+surprisingly little difference between the form and manner of the old
+poems and the new. The contents of _A Channel Passage_ are unusually
+varied in subject, and the longest poem, _The Altar of Righteousness_, a
+marvellous piece of rhythmical architecture, is unusually varied in
+form. Technically the whole book shows Swinburne at his best; if,
+indeed, he may ever be said not to be at his best, technically. Is there
+any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so
+unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often
+foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is
+apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to
+me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the
+imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us
+and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poets
+present us with their best effects deliberately, giving them as weighty
+an accent as they can; Swinburne scatters them by the way. Take, for
+instance, the line:
+
+
+     The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness
+       fell.
+
+
+The line comes rearing like a wave, and has fallen and raced past us
+before we have properly grasped what is imaginatively fine in the
+latter clause. Presented to us in the manner of slower poets, thus:
+
+
+               The tyranny
+     Kindled in darkness fell,
+
+
+how much more easily do we realise the quality of the speech which goes
+to make this song.
+
+And yet there is no doubt that Swinburne has made his own moulds of
+language, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt,
+when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs to
+him, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead of
+creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in
+the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in
+translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated,
+he misses the naïve quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version
+not in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtle
+way, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will not
+stop to think that 'wife,' though a good word for his rhyme scheme, is
+not a word that Villon could have used, and that
+
+
+     Deux estions et n'avions qu'ung cueur,
+
+
+though it is perfectly rendered by Rossetti in
+
+
+     Two we were and the heart was one,
+
+
+is turned into a wholly different, a Swinburnian thing, by
+
+
+     Twain we were, and our hearts one song,
+     One heart.
+
+
+Nor is 'Dead as the carver's figured throng' (for 'Comme les images, par
+cueur') either clear in meaning, or characteristic of Villon in form. Is
+it not one of the penalties of extreme technical ability that the hand
+at times works, as it were, blindly, without the delicate vigilance or
+direction of the brain?
+
+Of the poems contained in this new volume, the title-poem, _A Channel
+Passage_, is perhaps the finest. It is the record of a memory, fifty
+years old, and it is filled with a passionate ecstasy in the
+recollection of
+
+
+     Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal
+       joy,
+     Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's
+       heart in a boy.
+
+
+It may be that Swinburne has praised the sea more eloquently, or sung
+of it more melodiously, but not in the whole of his works is there a
+poem fuller of personal rapture in the communion of body and soul with
+the very soul of the sea in storm. _The Lake of Gaube_ is remarkable for
+an exultant and very definite and direct rendering of the sensation of a
+dive through deep water. There are other sea-poems in the two brief and
+concentrated poems in honour of Nelson; the most delicate of the poems
+of flowers in _A Rosary_; the most passionate and memorable of the
+political poems in _Russia: an Ode_; the Elizabethan prologues. These
+poems, so varied in subject and manner, are the work of many years; to
+those who love Swinburne most as a lyric poet they will come with
+special delight, for they represent, in almost absolute equality, almost
+every side of his dazzling and unique lyric genius.
+
+The final volume of the greatest lyrical poet since Shelley contains
+three books, each published at an interval of ten years: the _Midsummer
+Holiday_ of 1884, the _Astrophel_ of 1894, and the _Channel Passage_ of
+1904. Choice among them is as difficult as it is unnecessary. They are
+alike in their ecstatic singing of the sea, of great poets and great
+men, of England and liberty, and of children. One contains the finest
+poems about the sea from on shore, another the finest poem about the sea
+from at sea, and the other the finest poem about the earth from the
+heart of the woods. Even in Swinburne's work the series of nine ballades
+in long lines which bears the name of _A Midsummer Holiday_ stands out
+as a masterpiece of its kind, and of a unique kind. A form of French
+verse, which up to then had been used, since the time when Villon used
+it as no man has used it before or since, and almost exclusively in
+iambic measures, is suddenly transported from the hothouse into the open
+air, is stretched and moulded beyond all known limits, and becomes, it
+may almost be said, a new lyric form. After _A Midsummer Holiday_ no one
+can contend any longer that the ballade is a structure necessarily any
+more artificial than the sonnet. But then in the hands of Swinburne an
+acrostic would cease to be artificial.
+
+In this last volume the technique which is seen apparently perfected in
+the _Poems and Ballads_ of 1866 has reached a point from which that
+relative perfection looks easy and almost accidental. Something is lost,
+no doubt, and much has changed. But to compare the metrical qualities of
+_Dolores_ or even of _The Triumph of Time_ with the metrical qualities
+of _On the Verge_ is almost like comparing the art of Thomas Moore with
+the art of Coleridge. In Swinburne's development as a poet the metrical
+development is significant of every change through which the poet has
+passed. Subtlety and nobility, the appeal of ever homelier and loftier
+things, are seen more and more clearly in his work, as the metrical
+qualities of it become purified and intensified, with always more of
+subtlety and distinction, an energy at last tamed to the needs and paces
+of every kind of beauty.
+
+
+II
+
+'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his
+dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for
+antiquity: nor need you be assured that when I write plays it is with a
+view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black
+Friars.' In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if not
+my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly
+unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the
+pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had
+left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my
+first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore
+evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn
+four pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so close
+as this:
+
+
+     We are so more than poor,
+     The dear'st of all our spoil would profit you
+     Less than mere losing; so most more than weak
+     It were but shame for one to smite us, who
+     Could but weep louder.
+
+
+A Shakespearean trick is copied in such lines as:
+
+
+                    All other women's praise
+     Makes part of my blame, and things of least account
+     In them are all my praises.
+
+
+And there is a jester who talks in a metre that might have come
+straight out of Beaumont and Fletcher, as here:
+
+
+     I am considering of that apple still;
+     It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too
+     Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children,
+     Come, my sweet scraps; come, painted pieces; come.
+
+
+Touches of the early Browning come into this Elizabethan work, come and
+go there, as in these lines:
+
+
+     What are you made God's friend for but to have
+     His hand over your head to keep it well
+     And warm the rainy weather through, when snow
+     Spoils half the world's work?
+
+
+And does one not hear Beddoes in the grim line, spoken of the earth:
+
+
+     Naked as brown feet of unburied men?
+
+
+An influence still more closely contemporary seems to be felt in _Fair
+Rosamond_, the influence of that extraordinarily individual blank verse
+which William Morris had made his first and last experiment in, two
+years earlier, in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_.
+
+So many influences, then, are seen at work on the form at least of these
+two plays, published at the age of twenty-three. _Fair Rosamond_,
+though it has beautiful lines here and there, and shows some
+anticipation of that luxurious heat and subtle rendering of physical
+sensation which was to be so evident in the _Poems and Ballads_, is
+altogether a less mature piece of work, less satisfactory in every way,
+than the longer and more regular drama of _The Queen-Mother_. Swinburne
+speaks of the two pieces without distinction, and finds all that there
+is in them of promise or of merit 'in the language and the style of such
+better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches
+of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches
+is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations
+and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best
+speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of
+language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power
+to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive'
+which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic,
+reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardly
+possible to make the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however they
+were presented. Swinburne, however, has done so.' It seems to me, on the
+contrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict sense
+of the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The two great speeches of
+the play, the one beginning 'That God that made high things,' and the
+one beginning 'I would fain see rain,' are indeed more splendid in
+execution than significant as drama, but they have their dramatic
+significance, none the less. There is a Shakespearean echo, but is there
+not also a preparation of the finest Swinburnian harmonies, in such
+lines as these?
+
+
+                          I should be mad,
+     I talk as one filled through with wine; thou God,
+     Whose thunder is confusion of the hills,
+     And with wrath sown abolishes the fields,
+     I pray thee if thy hand would ruin us,
+     Make witness of it even this night that is
+     The last for many cradles, and the grave
+     Of many reverend seats; even at this turn,
+     This edge of season, this keen joint of time,
+     Finish and spare not.
+
+
+The verse is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurative
+meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less fluid,
+less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in
+reference to the verse of _Atalanta in Calydon_). He is ready to be
+harsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; he holds
+out against the enervating allurements of alliteration; he can stop when
+he has said the essential thing.
+
+In the first book of most poets there is something which will be found
+in no other book; some virginity of youth, lost with the first
+intercourse with print. In _The Queen-Mother_ and _Rosamond_ Swinburne
+is certainly not yet himself, he has not yet settled down within his own
+limits. But what happy strayings beyond those limits! What foreign
+fruits and flowers, brought back from far countries! In these two plays
+there is no evidence, certainly, of a playwright; but there is no
+evidence that their writer could never become one. And there is evidence
+already of a poet of original genius and immense accomplishment, a poet
+with an incomparable gift of speech. That this technical quality, at
+least, the sound of these new harmonies in English verse, awakened no
+ears to attention, would be more surprising if one did not remember
+that two years earlier the first and best of William Morris's books was
+saluted as 'a Manchester mystery, not a real vision,' and that two years
+later the best though not the first of George Meredith's books of verse,
+_Modern Love_, was noticed only to be hooted at. Rossetti waited, and
+was wise.
+
+The plays of Swinburne, full as they are of splendid poetry, and even of
+splendid dramatic poetry, suffer from a lack of that 'continual slight
+novelty' which great drama, more than any other poetical form, requires.
+There is, in the writing, a monotony of excellence, which becomes an
+actual burden upon the reader. Here is a poet who touches nothing that
+he does not transform, who can, as in _Mary Stuart_, fill scores of
+pages with talk of lawyers, conspirators, and statesmen, versifying
+history as closely as Shakespeare versified it, and leaving in the
+result less prose deposit than Shakespeare left. It is perhaps because
+in this play he has done a more difficult thing than in any other that
+the writer has come to prefer this to any other of his plays; as men in
+general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similar
+satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties,
+leads him to say of the modern play, _The Sisters_, that it is the only
+modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural
+dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse
+between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or
+made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.' This
+may be as true as that, in the astounding experiment of _Locrine_, none
+of 'the life of human character or the life-likeness of dramatic
+dialogue has suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificed
+to the exigences of metre.' But when all is said, when an unparalleled
+skill in language, versification, and everything that is verbal in form,
+has been admitted, and with unqualified admiration; when, in addition,
+one has admitted, with not less admiration, noble qualities of
+substance, superb qualities of poetic imagination, there still remains
+the question: is either substance or form consistently dramatic? and the
+further question: can work professedly dramatic which is not
+consistently dramatic in substance and form be accepted as wholly
+satisfactory from any other point of view?
+
+The trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots must remain the largest and most
+ambitious attempt which Swinburne has made. The first part,
+_Chastelard_, was published in 1865; the last, _Mary Stuart_, in 1881.
+And what Swinburne says in speaking of the intermediate play,
+_Bothwell_, may be said of them all: 'I will add that I took as much
+care and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history of
+the period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came
+within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of _Bothwell_, the
+longest of the three plays--indeed, the longest play in existence,
+Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece
+of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the
+old Shakespearean term of a chronicle history.' Definition is not
+defence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is in
+itself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use of
+it proves only that he found his way through chronicle to drama, and to
+take his work in the chronicle play as a model is hardly more
+reasonable than to take _Venus and Adonis_ as a model for narrative
+poetry. But, further, there is no play of Shakespeare's, chronicle or
+other, which might not at least be conceived of, if not on the stage of
+our time, at least on that of his, or on that of any time when drama was
+allowed to live its own life according to its own nature. Can we
+conceive of _Bothwell_ even on the stage which has seen _Les Burgraves_?
+The Chinese theatre, which goes on from morning to night without a
+pause, might perhaps grapple with it; but no other. Nor would cutting be
+of any use, for what the stage-manager would cut away would be largely
+just such parts as are finest in the printed play.
+
+There is, in most of Swinburne's plays, some scene or passage of vital
+dramatic quality, and in _Bothwell_ there is one scene, the scene
+leading to the death of Darnley, which is among the great single scenes
+in drama. But there is not even any such scene in the whole of the
+lovely and luxurious song of _Chastelard_ or in the severe and strenuous
+study of _Mary Stuart_. There are moments, in all, where speech is as
+simple, as explicit, as expressive as speech in verse can be; and no
+one will ever speak in verse more naturally than this:
+
+
+     Well, all is one to me: and for my part
+     I thank God I shall die without regret
+     Of anything that I have done alive.
+
+
+These simple beginnings are apt indeed to lead to their end by ways as
+tortuous as this:
+
+
+     Indeed I have done all this if aught I have,
+     And loved at all or loathed, save what mine eye
+     Hath ever loathed or loved since first it saw
+     That face which taught it faith and made it first
+     Think scorn to turn and look on change, or see
+     How hateful in my love's sight are their eyes
+     That give love's light to others.
+
+
+But, even when speech is undiluted, and expresses with due fire or
+calmness the necessary feeling of the moment, it is nearly always mere
+speech, a talking about action or emotion, not itself action or emotion.
+And every scene, even the finest, is thought of as a scene of talk, not
+as visible action; the writer hears his people speak, but does not see
+their faces or where or how they stand or move. It is this power of
+visualisation that is the first requirement of the dramatist; by itself
+it can go no further than the ordering of dumb show; but all drama must
+begin with the ordering of dumb show, and should be playable without
+words.
+
+It was once said by William Morris that Swinburne's poems did not make
+pictures. The criticism was just, but mattered little; because they make
+harmonies. No English poet has ever shown so great and various a mastery
+over harmony in speech, and it is this lyrical quality which has given
+him a place among the great lyrical poets of England. In drama the
+lyrical gift is essential to the making of great poetic drama, but to
+the dramatist it should be an addition rather than a substitute.
+Throughout all these plays it is first and last and all but everything.
+It is for this reason that a play like _Locrine_, which is confessedly,
+by its very form, a sequence of lyrics, comes more nearly to being
+satisfactory as a whole than any of the more 'ambitious, conscientious,
+and comprehensive' plays. _Marino Faliero_, though an episode of
+history, comes into somewhat the same category, and repeats with nobler
+energy the song-like character of _Chastelard_. The action is brief and
+concentrated, tragic and heroic. Its 'magnificent monotony,' its
+'fervent and inexhaustible declamation,' have a height and heat in them
+which turn the whole play into a poem rather than a play, but a poem
+comparable with the 'succession of dramatic scenes or pictures' which
+makes the vast lyric of _Tristram of Lyonesse_. To think of Byron's play
+on the same subject, to compare the actual scenes which can be
+paralleled in both plays, is to realise how much more can be done, in
+poetry and even in drama, by a great lyric poet with a passion for what
+is heroic in human nature and for what is ardent and unlimited in human
+speech, than by a poet who saw in Faliero only the politician, and in
+the opportunities of verse only the opportunity for thin and shrewish
+rhetoric pulled and lopped into an intermittent resemblance to metre.
+
+The form of _Locrine_ has something in common with the form of _Atalanta
+in Calydon_, with a kind of sombre savagery in the subject which recurs
+only once, and less lyrically, in _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_. It
+is written throughout in rhyme, and the dialogue twists and twines,
+without effort, through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene,
+beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet,
+Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line
+stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by
+Shakespeare in the _Rape of Lucrece_, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes,
+and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a
+third rhyme comes forward in the last line but one (after the manner of
+terza rima) and starts a new octave, which closes at the end in a stanza
+of two rhymes only, the last line but one turning back instead of
+forward, to lock the chain's circle. No other English poet who ever
+lived could have written dialogue under such conditions, and it is not
+less true than strange that these fetters act as no more than a beating
+of time to the feet that dance in them. The emotion is throughout at
+white heat; there is lyrical splendour even in the arguments: and a
+child's prattle, in nine-line stanzas of two rhymes apiece, goes as
+merrily as this:
+
+
+     That song is hardly even as wise as I--
+     Nay, very foolishness it is. To die
+     In March before its life were well on wing,
+     Before its time and kindly season--why
+     Should spring be sad--before the swallows fly--
+     Enough to dream of such a wintry thing?
+     Such foolish words were more unmeet for spring
+     Than snow for summer when his heart is high:
+     And why should words be foolish when they sing?
+
+
+Swinburne is a great master of blank verse; there is nothing that can be
+done with blank verse that he cannot do with it. Listen to these lines
+from _Mary Stuart_:
+
+
+     She shall be a world's wonder to all time,
+     A deadly glory watched of marvelling men
+     Not without praise, not without noble tears,
+     And if without what she would never have
+     Who had it never, pity--yet from none
+     Quite without reverence and some kind of love
+     For that which was so royal.
+
+
+There is in them something of the cadence of Milton and something of the
+cadence of Shakespeare, and they are very Swinburne. Yet, after reading
+_Locrine_, and with _Atalanta_ and _Erechtheus_ in memory, it is
+difficult not to wish that Swinburne had written all his plays in
+rhyme, and that they had all been romantic plays and not histories.
+_Locrine_ has been acted, and might well be acted again. Its rhyme would
+sound on the stage with another splendour than the excellent and
+well-sounding rhymes into which Mr. Gilbert Murray has translated
+Euripides. And there would be none of that difficulty which seems to be
+insuperable on the modern stage: the chorus, which, whether it speaks,
+or chants, or sings, seems alike out of place and out of key.
+
+The tragic anecdote which Swinburne has told in _Rosamund, Queen of the
+Lombards_, is told with a directness and conciseness unusual in his
+dramatic or lyric work. The story, simple, barbarous, and cruel--a story
+of the year 573--acts itself out before us in large clear outlines, with
+surprisingly little of modern self-consciousness. The book is a small
+one, the speeches are short, and the words for the most part short too;
+every speech tells like an action in words; there is scarcely a single
+merely decorative passage from beginning to end. Here and there the
+lines become lyric, as in
+
+
+                                  Thou rose,
+     Why did God give thee more than all thy kin,
+     Whose pride is perfume only and colour, this?
+     Music? No rose but mine sings, and the birds
+     Hush all their hearts to hearken. Dost thou hear not
+     How heavy sounds her note now?
+
+
+But even here the lyrical touch marks a point of 'business.' And for the
+most part the speeches are as straightforward as prose; are indeed
+written with a deliberate aim at a sort of prose effect. For instance:
+
+
+
+                         ALMACHILDES.
+
+                                God must be
+     Dead. Such a thing as thou could never else
+     Live.
+
+                           ROSAMUND.
+
+            That concerns not thee nor me. Be thou
+     Sure that my will and power to serve it live.
+     Lift now thine eyes to look upon thy lord.
+
+
+Compare these lines with the lines which end the fourth act:
+
+
+                         ALMACHILDES.
+
+                             I cannot slay him
+     Thus.
+
+                           ROSAMUND.
+
+            Canst thou slay thy bride by fire? He dies,
+     Or she dies, bound against the stake. His death
+     Were the easier. Follow him: save her: strike but once.
+
+                         ALMACHILDES.
+
+     I cannot. God requite thee this! I will.             [_Exit._
+
+                           ROSAMUND.
+
+     And I will see it. And, father, thou shalt see.      [_Exit._
+
+
+In both these instances one sees the quality which is most conspicuous
+in this play--a naked strength, which is the same kind of strength that
+has always been present in Swinburne's plays, but hitherto draped
+elaborately, and often more than half concealed in the draperies. The
+outline of every play has been hard, sharp, firmly drawn; the characters
+always forthright and unwavering; there has always been a real precision
+in the main drift of the speeches; but this is the first time in which
+the outlines have been left to show themselves in all their sharpness.
+Development or experiment, whichever it may be, this resolute simplicity
+brings a new quality into Swinburne's work, and a quality full of
+dramatic possibilities. All the luxuriousness of his verse has gone, and
+the lines ring like sword clashing against sword. These savage and
+simple people of the sixth century do not turn over their thoughts
+before concentrating them into words, and they do not speak except to
+tell their thoughts. Imagine what even Murray, in _Chastelard_, a
+somewhat curt speaker, would have said in place of Almachildes's one
+line, a whole conflict of love, hate, honour, and shame in eight words:
+
+
+     I cannot. God requite thee this! I will.
+
+
+Dramatic realism can go no further than such lines. The question remains
+whether dramatic realism is in itself an altogether desirable thing, and
+whether Swinburne in particular does not lose more than he gains by such
+self-restraint.
+
+The poetic drama is in itself a compromise. That people should speak in
+verse is itself a violation of probability; and so strongly is this felt
+by most actors that they endeavour, in acting a play in verse, to make
+the verse sound as much like prose as possible. But, as it seems to me,
+the aim of the poetic drama is to create a new world in a new
+atmosphere, where the laws of human existence are no longer recognised.
+The aim of the poetic drama is beauty, not truth; and Shakespeare, to
+take the supreme example, is great, not because he makes Othello
+probable as a jealous husband, or gives him exactly the words that a
+jealous husband might have used, but because he creates in him an image
+of more than human energy, and puts into his mouth words of a more
+splendid poetry than any one but Shakespeare himself could have found to
+say. Fetter the poetic drama to an imitation of actual speech, and you
+rob it of the convention which is its chief glory and best opportunity.
+A new colour may certainly be given to that convention, by which a
+certain directness, rather of Dante than of Shakespeare, may be employed
+for its novel kind of beauty, convention being still recognised as
+convention. No doubt that is really Swinburne's aim, and to have
+succeeded in it is to show that he can master every form, and do as he
+pleases with language. And there are passages in the play, like this
+one, which have a fervid colour of their own, fully characteristic of
+the writer who has put more Southern colouring into English verse than
+any other English poet:
+
+
+     This sun--no sun like ours--burns out my soul.
+     I would, when June takes hold on us like fire,
+     The wind could waft and whirl us northward: here
+     The splendour and the sweetness of the world
+     Eat out all joy of life or manhood. Earth
+     Is here too hard on heaven--the Italian air
+     Too bright to breathe, as fire, its next of kin,
+     Too keen to handle. God, whoe'er God be,
+     Keep us from withering as the lords of Rome--
+     Slackening and sickening toward the imperious end
+     That wiped them out of empire! Yea, he shall.
+
+
+The atmosphere of the play is that of June at Verona, and the sun's heat
+seems to beat upon us all through its brief and fevered action.
+Swinburne's words never make pictures, but they are unparalleled in
+their power of conveying atmosphere. He sees with a certain generalised
+vision--it might almost be said that he sees musically; but no English
+poet has ever presented bodily sensation with such curious and subtle
+intensity. And just as he renders bodily sensation carried to the point
+of agony, so he is at his best when dealing, as here, with emotion
+tortured to the last limit of endurance. Albovine, the king, sets bare
+his heart, confessing:
+
+
+     The devil and God are crying in either ear
+     One murderous word for ever, night and day,
+     Dark day and deadly night and deadly day,
+     Can she love thee who slewest her father? I
+     Love her.
+
+
+Rosamund, his wife, meditating her monstrous revenge, confesses:
+
+
+     I am yet alive to question if I live
+     And wonder what may ever bid me die.
+                         ... There is nought
+     Left in the range and record of the world
+     For me that is not poisoned: even my heart
+     Is all envenomed in me.
+
+
+And she recognises that
+
+
+     No healing and no help for life on earth
+     Hath God or man found out save death and sleep.
+
+
+The two young lovers, caught innocently in a net of intolerable shame,
+can but question and answer one another thus:
+
+
+                          HILDEGARD.
+
+     Hast thou forgiven me?
+
+                         ALMACHILDES.
+
+                            I have not forgiven God.
+
+
+And at the end Narsetes, the old councillor, the only one of the persons
+of the drama who is not the actor or the sufferer of some subtle horror,
+sums up all that has happened in a reflection which casts the
+responsibility of things further off than to the edge of the world:
+
+
+     Let none make moan. This doom is none of man's.
+
+
+As in the time of the great first volume of _Poems and Ballads_,
+Swinburne is still drawn to
+
+
+                               see
+     What fools God's anger makes of men.
+
+
+He has never been a philosophical thinker; but he has acquired the
+equivalent of a philosophy through his faithfulness to a single outlook
+upon human life and destiny. And in this brief and burning play, more
+than in much of his later writing, I find the reflection of that unique
+temperament, to which real things are so abstract, and abstract things
+so coloured and tangible; a temperament in which there is almost too
+much poetry for a poet--as pure gold, to be worked in, needs to be
+mingled with alloy.
+
+There is, perhaps, no more terrible story in the later history of the
+world, no actual tragedy more made to the hand of the dramatist, than
+the story of the Borgias. In its entirety it would make another _Cenci_,
+in the hands of another Shelley, and another Censor would prohibit the
+one as he prohibits the other. We are not permitted to deal with some
+form of evil on the stage. Yet what has Shelley said?
+
+
+     There must be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient
+     to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral
+     purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the
+     teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies,
+     the knowledge of itself.
+
+
+A great drama on the story of the Borgias could certainly have much to
+teach the human heart in the knowledge of itself. It would be moral in
+its presentation of the most ignobly splendid vices that have swayed the
+world; of the pride and defiance which rise like a strangling serpent,
+coiling about the momentary weakness of good; of that pageant in which
+the pagan gods came back, drunk and debauched with their long exile
+under the earth, and the garden-god assumed the throne of the Holy of
+Holies. Alexander, Cæsar, Lucrezia, the threefold divinity, might be
+shown as a painter has shown one of them on the wall of one of his own
+chapels: a swinish portent in papal garments, kneeling, bloated,
+thinking of Lucrezia, with fingers folded over the purple of his rings.
+Or the family might have been shown as Rossetti, in one of the
+loveliest, most cruel, and most significant of his pictures, has shown
+it: a light, laughing masquerade of innocence, the boy and girl dancing
+before the cushioned idol and her two worshippers.
+
+Swinburne in _The Duke of Gandia_ has not dealt with the whole matter of
+the story--only, in a single act of four scenes, with the heart or
+essence of it. The piece is not drama for the stage, nor intended to be
+seen or heard outside the pages of a book; but it is meant to be, and
+is, a great, brief, dramatic poem, a lyric almost, of hate, ambition,
+fear, desire, and the conquest of ironic evil. Swinburne has written
+nothing like it before. The manner of it is new, or anticipated only in
+the far less effectual _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_; the style,
+speech, and cadence are tightened, restrained, full of sullen
+fierceness. Lucrezia, strangely, is no more than a pale image passing
+without consciousness through some hot feast-room; she is there, she is
+hidden under their speech, but we scarcely see her, and, like her
+historians, wonder if she was so evil, or only a scholar to whom learned
+men wrote letters, as if to a pattern of virtue. But in the father and
+son live a flame and a cloud, the flame rising steadily to beat back and
+consume the cloud. It is Cæsar Borgia who is the flame, and Alexander
+the Pope who fills the Vatican and the world with his contagious clouds.
+The father, up to this moment, has held all his vices well in hand; he
+has no rival; his sons and his daughter he has made, and they live about
+him for their own pleasure, and he watches them, and is content. Now one
+steps out, the circle is broken; there is no longer a younger son, a
+cardinal, but the Duke of Gandia, eldest son and on the highest step of
+the Pope's chair. It is, in this brief, almost speechless moment of
+action, as if the door of a furnace had suddenly been thrown open and
+then shut. One scene stands out, only surpassed by the terrible and
+magnificent scene leading up to the death of Darnley--a scene itself
+only surpassed, in its own pitiful and pitiless kind, by that death of
+Marlowe's king in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle, which, to all who can
+endure to read it, 'moves pity and terror,' as to Lamb, 'beyond any
+scene ancient or modern.' And only in _Bothwell_, in the whole of
+Swinburne's drama, is there speech so adequate, so human, so full of
+fear and suspense. Take, for instance, the opening of the great final
+scene. The youngest son has had his elder brother drowned in the Tiber,
+and after seven days he appears calmly before his father.
+
+
+       ALEX. Thou hast done this deed.
+       CÆSAR. Thou hast said it.
+       ALEX. Dost thou think
+     To live, and look upon me?
+       CÆSAR. Some while yet.
+       ALEX. I would there were a God--that he might hear.
+       CÆSAR. 'Tis pity there should be--for thy sake--none.
+       ALEX. Wilt thou slay me?
+       CÆSAR. Why?
+       ALEX. Am I not thy sire?
+       CÆSAR. And Christendom's to boot.
+       ALEX. I pray thee, man,
+     Slay me.
+       CÆSAR. And then myself? Thou art crazed, but I
+     Sane.
+       ALEX. Art thou very flesh and blood?
+       CÆSAR. They say,
+     Thine.
+       ALEX. If the heaven stand still and smite thee not,
+     There is no God indeed.
+       CÆSAR. Nor thou nor I
+     Know.
+       ALEX. I could pray to God that God might be,
+     Were I but mad. Thou sayest I am mad: thou liest:
+     I do not pray.
+
+
+There, surely, is great dramatic speech, and the two men who speak face
+to face are seen clearly before us, naked to the sight. Yet even these
+lines do not make drama that would hold the stage. How is it that only
+one of our greater poets since the last of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
+and that one Shelley, has understood the complete art of the playwright,
+and achieved it? Byron, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, all wrote plays
+for the stage; all had their chance of being acted; Tennyson only made
+even a temporary success, and _Becket_ is likely to have gone out with
+Irving. Landor wrote plays full of sublime poetry, but not meant for the
+stage; and now we have Swinburne following his example, but with an
+unexampled lyrical quality. Why, without capacity to deal with it, are
+our poets so insistent on using the only form for which a special
+faculty, outside the pure poetic gift, is inexorably required?
+
+A poet so great as Swinburne, possessed by an ecstasy which turns into
+song as instinctively as the flawless inspiration of Mozart turned into
+divine melody, cannot be questioned. Mozart, without a special genius
+for dramatic music, wrote _Die Zauberflöte_ to a bad libretto with as
+great a perfection as the music to _Don Giovanni_, which had a good one.
+The same inspiration was there, always apt to the occasion. Swinburne is
+ready to write in any known form of verse, with an equal facility and
+(this is the all-important point) the same inspiration. Loving the form
+of the drama, and capable of turning it to his uses, not of bending it
+to its own, he has filled play after play with music, noble feeling,
+brave eloquence. Here in this briefest and most actual of his plays--an
+act, an episode--he has concentrated much of this floating beauty, this
+overflowing imagination, into a few stern and adequate words, and made a
+new thing, as always, in his own image. It is the irony that has given
+its precise form to this representation of a twofold Satan, as Blake
+might have seen him in vision, parodying God with unbreakable pride. The
+conflict between father and son ends in a kind of unholy litany. 'And
+now,' cries Cæsar, fresh from murder,
+
+
+     Behoves thee rise again as Christ our God,
+     Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away
+     This grief from off thy godhead.
+
+
+And the old man, temporising with his grief, answers:
+
+
+     Thou art subtle and strong.
+     I would thou hadst spared him--couldst have spared him.
+
+
+And the son replies:
+
+
+                                         Sire,
+     I would so too. Our sire, his sire and mine,
+     I slew him not for lust of slaying, or hate,
+     Or aught less like thy wiser spirit and mine.
+
+
+But Cæsar-Satan has already said the epilogue to the whole
+representation, when, speaking to his mother, he bids her leave the
+responsibility of things:
+
+
+     And God, who made me and my sire and thee,
+     May take the charge upon him.
+
+
+1899-1908.
+
+
+
+
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+
+Rossetti's phrase about poetry, that it must be 'amusing'; his
+'commandment' about verse translation, 'that a good poem shall not be
+turned into a bad one'; his roughest and most random criticisms about
+poets, are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse. Only Coleridge
+among English poets has anything like the same definite grasp upon
+whatever is essential in poetry. And it is this intellectual sanity
+partly, this complete knowledge of the medium in which he worked, that
+has given Rossetti a position of his own, a kind of leadership in art.
+
+And, technically, Rossetti has done much for English poetry. Such a line
+as
+
+
+     And when the night-vigil was done,
+
+
+is a perfectly good metrical line if read without any displacement of
+the normal accent in speaking, and the rhyme of 'of' to 'enough' is as
+satisfying to the ear as the more commonly accepted rhyme of 'love' and
+'move.' Rossetti did nothing but good by his troubling of many rhythms
+which had become stagnant, and it is in his extraordinary subtlety of
+rhythm, most accomplished where it seems most hesitating, that he has
+produced his finest emotional effects, effects before his time found but
+rarely, and for the most part accidentally, in English poetry.
+
+Like Baudelaire and like Mallarmé in France, Rossetti was not only a
+wholly original poet, but a new personal force in literature. That he
+stimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true of
+Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not
+true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the
+greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on
+those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an
+unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one
+is without defence. It is the sound of a voice, rather than anything
+said; and, when Rossetti speaks, no other voice, for the moment, seems
+worth listening to. Even after one has listened, not very much seems to
+have been said; but the world is not quite the same. He has stimulated a
+new sense, by which a new mood of beauty can be apprehended.
+
+Dreams are precise; it is only when we awake, when we go outside, that
+they become vague. In a certain sense Rossetti, with all his keen
+practical intelligence, was never wholly awake, had never gone outside
+that house of dreams in which the only real things were the things of
+the imagination. In the poetry of most poets there is a double kind of
+existence, of which each half is generally quite distinct; a real world,
+and a world of the imagination. But the poetry of Rossetti knows but one
+world, and it inhabits a corner there, like a perfectly contented
+prisoner, or like a prisoner to whom the sense of imprisonment is a joy.
+The love of beauty, the love of love, because love is the supreme energy
+of beauty, suffices for an existence in which every moment is a crisis;
+for to him, as Pater has said, 'life is a crisis at every moment': life,
+that is to say, the inner life, the life of imagination, in which the
+senses are messengers from the outer world, from which they can but
+bring disquieting tidings.
+
+The whole of this poetry is tragic, though without pathos or even
+self-pity. Every human attempt to maintain happiness is foredoomed to be
+a failure, and this is an attempt to maintain ecstasy in a region where
+everything which is not ecstasy is pain. In reading every other poet who
+has written of love one is conscious of compensations: the happiness of
+loving or of being loved, the honour of defeat, the help and comfort of
+nature or of action. But here all energy is concentrated on the one
+ecstasy, and this exists for its own sake, and the desire of it is like
+thirst, which returns after every partial satisfaction. The desire of
+beauty, the love of love, can but be a form of martyrdom when, as with
+Rossetti, there is also the desire of possession.
+
+Circumstances have very little to do with the making of a poet's
+temperament or vision, and it would be enough to point to Christina
+Rossetti, who was hardly more in the country than her brother, but to
+whom a blade of grass was enough to summon the whole country about her,
+and whose poetry is full of the sense of growing things. Rossetti
+instinctively saw faces, and only faces, and he would have seen them if
+he had lived in the loneliest countryside, and he would never have
+learned to distinguish between oats and barley if he had had fields of
+them about his door from childhood. It was in the beauty of women, and
+chiefly in the mysterious beauty of faces, that Rossetti found the
+supreme embodiment of beauty; and it was in the love of women, and not
+in any more abstract love, of God, of nature, or of ideas, that he found
+the supreme revelation of love.
+
+With this narrowness, with this intensity, he has rendered in his
+painting as in his poetry one ideal, one obsession. He calls what is
+really the House of Love _The House of Life_, and this is because the
+house of love was literally to him the house of life. There is no mystic
+to whom love has not seemed to be the essence or ultimate expression of
+the soul. Rossetti's whole work is a parable of this belief, and it is a
+parable written with his life-blood. Of beauty he has said, 'I drew it
+in as simply as my breath,' but, as the desire of beauty possessed him,
+as he laboured to create it over again, with rebellious words or
+colours, always too vague for him when they were most precise, never the
+precise embodiment of a dream, the pursuit turned to a labour and the
+labour to a pain. Part of what hypnotises us in this work is, no doubt,
+that sense of personal tragedy which comes to us out of its elaborate
+beauty: the eternal tragedy of those who have loved the absolute in
+beauty too well, and with too mortal a thirst.
+
+1904.
+
+
+
+
+A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY
+
+
+He has a kind of naked face, in which you see the brain always working,
+with an almost painful simplicity--just saved from being painful by a
+humorous sense of external things, which becomes also a kind of
+intellectual criticism. He is a fatalist, and he studies the workings of
+fate in the chief vivifying and disturbing influence in life, women. His
+view of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel,
+not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not,
+as with Meredith, man's and woman's at once. He sees all that is
+irresponsible for good and evil in a woman's character, all that is
+unreliable in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her
+variability. He is her apologist, but always with a certain reserve of
+private judgment. No one has created more attractive women, women whom
+a man would have been more likely to love, or more likely to regret
+loving. _Jude the Obscure_ is perhaps the most unbiased consideration of
+the more complicated questions of sex which we can find in English
+fiction. At the same time, there is almost no passion in his work,
+neither the author nor any of his characters ever seeming able to pass
+beyond the state of curiosity, the most intellectually interesting of
+limitations, under the influence of any emotion. In his feeling for
+nature, curiosity sometimes seems to broaden into a more intimate kind
+of communion. The heath, the village with its peasants, the change of
+every hour among the fields and on the roads, mean more to him, in a
+sense, than even the spectacle of man and woman in their blind, and
+painful, and absorbing struggle for existence. His knowledge of woman
+confirms him in a suspension of judgment; his knowledge of nature brings
+him nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All the
+quite happy entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him from
+his contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth,
+translating the dumbness of the fields into humour. His peasants have
+been compared with Shakespeare's; that is, because he has the
+Shakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurrying
+animal life, to which they act the part of chorus, with an unconscious
+wisdom in their close, narrow, and undistracted view of things.
+
+In his verse there is something brooding, obscure, tremulous,
+half-inarticulate, as he meditates over man, nature, and destiny:
+Nature, 'waking by touch alone,' and Fate, who sees and feels. In _The
+Mother Mourns_, a strange, dreary, ironical song of science, Nature
+laments that her best achievement, man, has become discontented with her
+in his ungrateful discontent with himself. It is like the whimpering of
+a hurt animal, and the queer, ingenious metre, with its one rhyme set at
+wide but distinct and heavily recurrent intervals, beats on the ear like
+a knell. Blind and dumb forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out of
+sleep, turning back heavily to sleep again. Many poets have been sorry
+for man, angry with Nature on man's behalf. Here is a poet who is sorry
+for Nature, who feels the earth and its roots, as if he had sap in his
+veins instead of blood, and could get closer than any other man to the
+things of the earth.
+
+Who else could have written this crabbed, subtle, strangely impressive
+poem?
+
+
+                 AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT
+
+     A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
+     And the beat of a clock from a distant floor;
+     On this scene enter--winged, horned, and spined--
+     A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
+     While 'mid my page there idly stands
+     A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands.
+
+     Thus meet we five, in this still place,
+     At this point of time, at this point in space.
+     --My guests parade my new-penned ink,
+     Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.
+     'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why?
+     They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
+
+
+No such drama has been written in verse since Browning, and the people
+of the drama are condensed to almost as pregnant an utterance as _Adam,
+Lilith, and Eve_.
+
+Why is it that there are so few novels which can be read twice, while
+all good poetry can be read over and over? Is it something inherent in
+the form, one of the reasons in nature why a novel cannot be of the
+same supreme imaginative substance as a poem? I think it is, and that it
+will never be otherwise. But, among novels, why is it that one here and
+there calls us back to its shelf with almost the insistence of a lyric,
+while for the most part a story read is a story done with? Balzac is
+always good to re-read, but not Tolstoi: and I couple two of the giants.
+To take lesser artists, I would say that we can re-read _Lavengro_ but
+not _Romola_. But what seems puzzling is that Hardy, who is above all a
+story-teller, and whose stories are of the kind that rouse suspense and
+satisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite without
+novelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in _The Mayor
+of Casterbridge_, where the plot extends into almost inextricable
+entanglements; and yet that is precisely one of the books that can be
+re-read. Is it on account of that concealed poetry, never absent though
+often unseen, which gives to these fantastic or real histories a meaning
+beyond the meaning of the facts, beneath it like an under-current,
+around it like an atmosphere? Facts, once known, are done with; stories
+of mere action gallop through the brain and are gone; but in Hardy
+there is a vision or interpretation, a sense of life as a growth out of
+the earth, and as much a mystery between soil and sky as the corn is,
+which will draw men back to the stories with an interest which outlasts
+their interest in the story.
+
+It is a little difficult to get accustomed to Hardy, or to do him
+justice without doing him more than justice. He is always right, always
+a seer, when he is writing about 'the seasons in their moods, morning
+and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,
+waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate
+things.' (What gravity and intimacy in his numbering of them!) He is
+always right, always faultless in matter and style, when he is showing
+that 'the impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic
+life than the pachydermatous king.' But he requires a certain amount of
+emotion to shake off the lethargy natural to his style, and when he has
+merely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on his
+couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.' In the next
+sentence, where he is interested in expressing the impalpable emotion
+of the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'The
+night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent;
+the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now
+digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a
+thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.'
+
+No one has ever studied so scrupulously as Hardy the effect of emotion
+on inanimate things, or has ever seen emotion so visually in people. For
+instance: 'Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was
+flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole.'
+But so intense is his preoccupation with these visual effects that he
+sometimes cannot resist noting a minute appearance, though in the very
+moment of assuring us that the person looking on did not see it. 'She
+hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so
+large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like
+the object lens of a microscope.' And it is this power of seeing to
+excess, and being limited to sight which is often strangely revealing,
+that leaves him at times helpless before the naked words that a
+situation supremely seen demands for its completion. The one failure in
+what is perhaps his masterpiece, _The Return of the Native_, is in the
+words put into the mouth of Eustacia and Yeobright in the perfectly
+imagined scene before the mirror, a scene which should be the
+culminating scene of the book; and it is, all but the words: the words
+are crackle and tinsel.
+
+What is it, then, that makes up the main part of the value and
+fascination of Hardy, and how is it that what at first seem, and may
+well be, defects, uncouthnesses, bits of formal preaching, grotesque
+ironies of event and idea, come at last to seem either good in
+themselves or good where they are, a part of the man if not of the
+artist? One begins by reading for the story, and the story is of an
+attaching interest. Here is a story-teller of the good old kind, a
+story-teller whose plot is enough to hold his readers. With this point
+no doubt many readers stop and are content. But go on, and next after
+the story-teller one comes on the philosopher. He is dejected and a
+little sinister, and may check your pleasure in his narrative if you
+are too attentive to his criticism of it. But a new meaning comes into
+the facts as you observe his attitude towards them, and you may be well
+content to stop and be fed with thoughts by the philosopher. But if you
+go further still you will find, at the very last, the poet, and you need
+look for nothing beyond. I am inclined to question if any novelist has
+been more truly a poet without ceasing to be in the true sense a
+novelist. The poetry of Hardy's novels is a poetry of roots, and it is a
+voice of the earth. He seems often to be closer to the earth (which is
+at times, as in _The Return of the Native_, the chief person, or the
+chorus, of the story) than to men and women, and to see men and women
+out of the eyes of wild creatures, and out of the weeds and stones of
+the heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us
+to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual
+observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of
+birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the
+deprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep?
+
+1907.
+
+
+
+
+LÉON CLADEL
+
+
+I hope that the life of Léon Cladel by his daughter Judith, which
+Lemerre has brought out in a pleasant volume, will do something for the
+fame of one of the most original writers of our time. Cladel had the
+good fortune to be recognised in his lifetime by those whose approval
+mattered most, beginning with Baudelaire, who discovered him before he
+had printed his first book, and helped to teach him the craft of
+letters. But so exceptional an artist could never be popular, though he
+worked in living stuff and put the whole savour of his countryside into
+his tragic and passionate stories. A peasant, who writes about peasants
+and poor people, with a curiosity of style which not only packs his
+vocabulary with difficult words, old or local, and with unheard of
+rhythms, chosen to give voice to some never yet articulated emotion, but
+which drives him into oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the very
+shape of his accents! A page of Cladel has a certain visible
+uncouthness, and at first this seems in keeping with his matter; but the
+uncouthness, when you look into it, turns out to be itself a refinement,
+and what has seemed a confused whirl, an improvisation, to be the result
+really of reiterated labour, whose whole aim has been to bring the
+spontaneity of the first impulse back into the laboriously finished
+work.
+
+In this just, sensitive, and admirable book, written by one who has
+inherited a not less passionate curiosity about life, but with more
+patience in waiting upon it, watching it, noting its surprises, we have
+a simple and sufficient commentary upon the books and upon the man. The
+narrative has warmth and reserve, and is at once tender and
+clear-sighted. _J'entrevois nettement_, she says with truth, _combien
+seront précieux pour les futurs historiens de la littérature du xix^e
+siècle, les mémoires tracés au contact immédiat de l'artiste, exposés de
+ses faits et gestes particuliers, de ses origines, de la germination de
+ses croyances et de son talent; ses critiques à venir y trouveront de_
+_solides matériaux, ses admirateurs un aliment à leur piété et les
+philosophes un des aspects de l'Âme française._ The man is shown to us,
+_les élans de cette âme toujours grondante et fulgurante comme une
+forge, et les nuances de ce fiévreux visage d'apôtre, brun, fin et
+sinueux_, and we see the inevitable growth, out of the hard soil of
+Quercy and out of the fertilising contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of
+this whole literature, these books no less astonishing than their
+titles: _Ompdrailles-le-Tombeau-des-Lutteurs_, _Celui de la
+Croix-aux-Boeufs_, _La Fête Votive de Saint-Bartholomée-Porte-Glaive_.
+The very titles are an excitement. I can remember how mysterious and
+alluring they used to seem to me when I first saw them on the cover of
+what was perhaps his best book, _Les Va-Nu-Pieds_.
+
+It is by one of the stories, and the shortest, in _Les Va-Nu-Pieds_,
+that I remember Cladel. I read it when I was a boy, and I cannot think
+of it now without a shiver. It is called _L'Hercule_, and it is about a
+Sandow of the streets, a professional strong man, who kills himself by
+an over-strain; it is not a story at all, it is the record of an
+incident, and there is only the strong man in it and his friend the
+zany, who makes the jokes while the strong man juggles with bars and
+cannon-balls. It is all told in a breath, without a pause, as if some
+one who had just seen it poured it out in a flood of hot words. Such
+vehemence, such pity, such a sense of the cruelty of the spectacle of a
+man driven to death like a beast, for a few pence and the pleasure of a
+few children; such an evocation of the sun and the streets and this
+sordid tragic thing happening to the sound of drum and cymbals; such a
+vision in sunlight of a barbarous and ridiculous and horrible accident,
+lifted by the telling of it into a new and unforgettable beauty, I have
+never felt or seen in any other story of a like grotesque tragedy. It
+realises an ideal, it does for once what many artists have tried and
+failed to do; it wrings the last drop of agony out of that subject which
+it is so easy to make pathetic and effective. Dickens could not have
+done it, Bret Harte could not have done it, Kipling could not do it:
+Cladel did it only once, with this perfection.
+
+Something like it he did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence,
+with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and
+thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she
+calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this
+tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured
+to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. _La recherche
+du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la surabondance des
+vocables puisés à toutes sources ... la condensation de l'action autour
+de ces quelques motifs éternels de l'épopée: combat, ripaille, palabre
+et luxure_, there, as she sees justly, are links with Rabelais.
+Goncourt, himself always aiming at an impossible closeness of written to
+spoken speech, noted with admiration _la vraie photographie de la parole
+avec ses tours, ses abbréviations ses ellipses, son essoufflement
+presque_. Speech out of breath, that is what Cladel's is always; his
+words, never the likely ones, do not so much speak as cry, gesticulate,
+overtake one another. _L'âme de Léon Cladel_, says his daughter, _était
+dans un constant et flamboyant automne_. Something of the colour and
+fever of autumn is in all he wrote. Another writer since Cladel, who has
+probably never heard of him, has made heroes of peasants and vagabonds.
+But Maxim Gorki makes heroes of them, consciously, with a mental
+self-assertion, giving them ideas which he has found in Nietzsche.
+Cladel put into all his people some of his own passionate way of seeing
+'scarlet,' to use Barbey d'Aurevilly's epithet: _un rural écarlate_.
+Vehement and voluminous, he overflowed: his whole aim as an artist, as a
+pupil of Baudelaire, was to concentrate, to hold himself back; and the
+effort added impetus to the checked overflow. To the realists he seemed
+merely extravagant; he saw certainly what they could not see; and his
+romance was always a fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be
+in conflict with the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant,
+extracted from that hard soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an
+extraordinary mingling of the peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the
+long hair and beard, the sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding
+eyes, in which wildness and delicacy, strength and a kind of
+stealthiness, seem to be grafted on an inflexible peasant stock.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+HENRIK IBSEN
+
+
+'Everything which I have created as a poet,' Ibsen said in a letter,
+'has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never
+wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.' Yet his chief
+aim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, and
+to stand aside, reserving his judgment. 'The method, the technique of
+the construction,' he says, speaking of what is probably his
+masterpiece, _Ghosts_, 'in itself entirely precludes the author's
+appearing in the speeches. My intention was to produce the impression in
+the mind of the reader that he was witnessing something real.' That, at
+his moment of most perfect balance, was his intention; that was what he
+achieved in an astonishing way. But his whole life was a development;
+and we see him moving from point to point, deliberately, and yet
+inevitably; reaching the goal which it was his triumph to reach, then
+going beyond the goal, because movement in any direction was a necessity
+of his nature.
+
+In Ibsen's letters we shall find invaluable help in the study of this
+character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none
+the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard,
+crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow,
+precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed
+himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense
+of duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom he hated
+and resembled.
+
+His creed, as man and as artist, was the cultivation, the realisation of
+self. In quite another sense that, too, was the creed of Nietzsche; but
+what in Nietzsche was pride, the pride of individual energy, in Ibsen
+was a kind of humility, or a practical deduction from the fact that only
+by giving complete expression to oneself can one produce the finest
+work. Duty to oneself: that was how he looked upon it; and though, in a
+letter to Björnson, he affirmed, as the highest praise, 'his life was
+his best work,' to himself it was the building-up of the artist in him
+that he chiefly cared for. And to this he set himself with a moral
+fervour and a scientific tenacity. There was in Ibsen none of the
+abundance of great natures, none of the ease of strength. He nursed his
+force, as a miser hoards his gold; and does he not give you at times an
+uneasy feeling that he is making the most of himself, as the miser makes
+the most of his gold by scraping up every farthing?
+
+'The great thing,' he says in a letter of advice, 'is to hedge about
+what is one's own, to keep it free and clear from everything outside
+that has no connexion with it.' He bids Brandes cultivate 'a genuine,
+full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what
+concerns you as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else
+as non-existent.' Yet he goes on to talk about 'benefiting society,' is
+conscious of the weight which such a conviction or compromise lays upon
+him, and yet cannot get rid of the burden, as Nietzsche does. He has
+less courage than Nietzsche, though no less logic, and is held back from
+a complete realisation of his own doctrine because he has so much
+worldly wisdom and is so anxious to make the best of all worlds.
+
+'In every new poem or play,' he writes, 'I have aimed at my own personal
+spiritual emancipation and purification, for a man shares the
+responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.' This
+queer entanglement in social bonds on the part of one whose main
+endeavour had always been to free the individual from the conventions
+and restrictions of society is one of those signs of parochialism which
+peep out in Ibsen again and again. 'The strongest man,' he says in a
+letter, anticipating the epilogue of one of his plays, 'is he who stands
+alone.' But Ibsen did not find it easy to stand alone, though he found
+pleasure in standing aloof. The influence of his environment upon him is
+marked from the first. He breaks with his father and mother, never
+writes to them or goes back to see them; partly because he feels it
+necessary to avoid contact with 'certain tendencies prevailing there.'
+'Friends are an expensive luxury,' he finds, because they keep him from
+doing what he wishes to do, out of consideration for them. Is not this
+intellectual sensitiveness the corollary of a practical
+cold-heartedness? He cannot live in Norway because, he says, 'I could
+never lead a consistent spiritual life there.' In Norway he finds that
+'the accumulation of small details makes the soul small.' How curious an
+admission for an individualist, for an artist! He goes to Rome, and
+feels that he has discovered a new mental world. 'After I had been in
+Italy I could not understand how I had been able to exist before I had
+been there.' Yet before long he must go on to Munich, because 'here one
+is too entirely out of touch with the movements of the day.'
+
+He insists, again and again: 'Environment has a great influence upon the
+forms in which the imagination creates'; and, in a tone of
+half-burlesque, but with something serious in his meaning, he declares
+that wine had something to do with the exaltation of _Brand_ and _Peer
+Gynt_, and sausages and beer with the satirical analysis of _The League
+of Youth_. And he adds: 'I do not intend by this to place the
+last-mentioned play on a lower level. I only mean that my point of view
+has changed, because here I am in a community well ordered even to
+weariness.' He says elsewhere that he could only have written _Peer
+Gynt_ where he wrote it, at Ischia and Sorrento, because it is 'written
+without regard to consequences--as I only dare to write far away from
+home.' If we trace him through his work we shall see him, with a strange
+docility, allowing not only 'frame of mind and situation in life,' but
+his actual surroundings, to mould his work, alike in form and in
+substance. If he had never left Norway he might have written verse to
+the end of his life; if he had not lived in Germany, where there is
+'up-to-date civilisation to study,' he would certainly never have
+written the social dramas; if he had not returned to Norway at the end
+of his life, the last plays would not have been what they were. I am
+taking him at his word; but Ibsen is a man who must be taken at his
+word.
+
+What is perhaps most individual in the point of view of Ibsen in his
+dramas is his sense of the vast importance trifles, of the natural human
+tendency to invent or magnify misunderstandings. A misunderstanding is
+his main lever of the tragic mischief; and he has studied and diagnosed
+this unconscious agent of destiny more minutely and persistently than
+any other dramatist. He found it in himself. We see just this brooding
+over trifles, this sensitiveness to wrongs, imaginary or insignificant,
+in the revealing pages of his letters. It made the satirist of his
+earlier years; it made him a satirist of non-essentials. A criticism of
+one of his books sets him talking of wide vengeance; and he admitted in
+later life that he said to himself, 'I am ruined,' because a newspaper
+had attacked him overnight.
+
+With all his desire to 'undermine the idea of the state,' he besieges
+king and government with petitions for money; and he will confess in a
+letter, 'I should very much like to write publicly about the mean
+behaviour of the government,' which, however, he refrains from doing. He
+gets sore and angry over party and parochial rights and wrongs, even
+when he is far away from them, and has congratulated himself on the
+calming and enlightening effect of distance. A Norwegian bookseller
+threatens to pirate one of his books, and he makes a national matter of
+it. 'If,' he says, 'this dishonest speculation really obtains sympathy
+and support at home, it is my intention, come what may, to sever all
+ties with Norway and never set foot on her soil again.' How petty, how
+like a hysterical woman that is! How, in its way of taking a possible
+trifling personal injustice as if it were a thing of vital and even
+national moment, he betrays what was always to remain narrow, as well as
+bitter, in the centre of his being! He has recorded it against himself
+(for he spared himself, as he proudly and truthfully said, no more than
+others) in an anecdote which is a profound symbol.
+
+
+     During the time I was writing _Brand_, I had on my desk a glass
+     with a scorpion in it. From time to time the little animal was ill.
+     Then I used to give it a piece of soft fruit, upon which it fell
+     furiously and emptied its poison into it--after which it was well
+     again. Does not something of the kind happen with us poets?
+
+
+Poets, no; but in Ibsen there is always some likeness of the sick
+scorpion in the glass.
+
+In one of his early letters to Björnson, he had written: 'When I read
+the news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimable
+narrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insane
+man staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot.' All his life Ibsen
+gazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less and
+less of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw the
+black spot at the core of the earth's fruit, of the whole apple of the
+earth; and as he became more hopeless, he became less angry; he learned
+something of the supreme indifference of art. He had learned much when
+he came to realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly the
+energy of the struggle that mattered. 'He who possesses liberty,' he
+said, 'otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead
+and soulless.... So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle
+and says, "Now I have it," thereby shows that he has lost it.' He had
+learned still more when he could add to his saying, 'The minority is
+always right,' this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectual
+vanguard can never collect a majority around him. 'At the point where I
+stood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a tolerably
+compact crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere; farther
+ahead, I hope.' 'That man is right,' he thought, 'who has allied
+himself most closely with the future.' The future, to Ibsen, was a
+palpable thing, not concerned merely with himself as an individual, but
+a constantly removing, continually occupied promised land, into which he
+was not content to go alone. Yet he would always have asked of a
+follower, with Zarathustra: 'This is my road; which is yours?' His
+future was to be peopled by great individuals.
+
+It was in seeking to find himself that Ibsen sought to find truth; and
+truth he knew was to be found only within him. The truth which he sought
+for himself was not at all truth in the abstract, but a truth literally
+'efficacious,' and able to work out the purpose of his existence. That
+purpose he never doubted. The work he had to do was the work of an
+artist, and to this everything must be subservient. 'The great thing is
+to become honest and truthful in dealing with oneself--not to determine
+to do this or determine to do that, but to do what one _must_ do because
+one is oneself. All the rest simply leads to falsehood.' He conceives of
+truth as being above all clear-sighted, and the approach to truth as a
+matter largely of will. No preacher of God and of righteousness and the
+kingdom to come was ever more centred, more convinced, more impregnably
+minded every time that he has absorbed a new idea or is constructing a
+new work of art. His conception of art often changes; but he never
+deviates at any one time from any one conception. There is something
+narrow as well as something intense in this certainty, this calmness,
+this moral attitude towards art. Nowhere has he expressed more of
+himself than in a letter to a woman who had written some kind of
+religious sequel to _Brand_. He tells her:
+
+
+     _Brand_ is an æsthetic work, pure and simple. What it may have
+     demolished or built up is a matter of absolute indifference to me.
+     It came into being as the result of something which I had not
+     observed, but experienced; it was a necessity for me to free myself
+     from something which my inner man had done with, by giving poetic
+     form to it; and, when by this means I had got rid of it, my book
+     had no longer any interest for me.
+
+
+It is in the same positive, dogmatic way that he assures us that _Peer
+Gynt_ is a poem, not a satire; _The League of Youth_ a 'simple comedy
+and nothing more'; _Emperor and Galilean_ an 'entirely realistic work';
+that in _Ghosts_ 'there is not a single opinion, a single utterance
+which can be laid to the account of the author.... My intention was to
+produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessing
+something real.... It preaches nothing at all.' Of _Hedda Gabler_ he
+says: 'It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called
+problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings,
+human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of the social
+conditions and principles of the present day.' 'My chief life-task,' he
+defines: 'to depict human characters and human destinies.'
+
+
+Ibsen's development has always lain chiefly in the perfecting of his
+tools. From the beginning he has had certain ideas, certain tendencies,
+a certain consciousness of things to express; he has been haunted, as
+only creative artists are haunted, by a world waiting to be born; and,
+from the beginning, he has built on a basis of criticism, a criticism of
+life. Part of his strength has gone out in fighting: he has had the
+sense of a mission. Part of his strength has gone out in the attempt to
+fly: he has had the impulse, without the wings, of the poet. And when he
+has been content to leave fighting and flying alone, and to build
+solidly on a solid foundation, it is then that he has achieved his great
+work. But he has never been satisfied, or never been able, to go on
+doing just that work, his own work; and the poet in him, the impotent
+poet who is full of a sense of what poetry is, but is never able, for
+more than a moment, to create poetry, has come whispering in the ear of
+the man of science, who is the new, unerring artist, the maker of a
+wonderful new art of prose, and has made him uneasy, and given
+uncertainty to his hand. The master-builder has altered his design, he
+has set up a tower here, 'too high for a dwelling-house,' and added a
+window there, with the stained glass of a church window, and fastened on
+ornaments in stucco, breaking the severe line of the original design.
+
+In Ibsen science has made its great stand against poetry; and the
+Germans have come worshipping, saying, 'Here, in our era of
+marvellously realistic politics, we have come upon correspondingly
+realistic poetry.... We received from it the first idea of a possible
+new poetic world.... We were adherents of this new school of realistic
+art: we had found our æsthetic creed.' But the maker of this creed, the
+creator of this school of realistic art, was not able to be content with
+what he had done, though this was the greatest thing he was able to do.
+It is with true insight that he boasts, in one of his letters, of what
+he can do 'if I am only careful to do what I am quite capable of,
+namely, combine this relentlessness of mind with deliberateness in the
+choice of means.' There lay his success: deliberateness in the choice of
+means for the doing of a given thing, the thing for which his best
+energies best fitted him. Yet it took him forty years to discover
+exactly what those means to that end were; and then the experimenting
+impulse, the sense of what poetry is, was soon to begin its
+disintegrating work. Science, which seemed to have conquered poetry, was
+to pay homage to poetry.
+
+Ibsen comes before us as a man of science who would have liked to be a
+poet; or who, half-equipped as a poet, is halved or hampered by the
+scientific spirit until he realises that he is essentially a man of
+science. From the first his aim was to express himself; and it was a
+long time before he realised that verse was not his native language. His
+first three plays were in verse, the fourth in verse alternating with
+prose; then came two plays, historic and legendary, written in more or
+less archaic prose; then a satire in verse, _Love's Comedy_, in which
+there is the first hint of the social dramas; then another prose play,
+the nearest approach that he ever made to poetry, but written in prose,
+_The Pretenders_; and then the two latest and most famous of the poems,
+_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. After this, verse is laid aside, and at last we
+find him condemning it, and declaring 'it is improbable that verse will
+be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate
+future.... It is therefore doomed.' But the doom was Ibsen's: to be a
+great prose dramatist, and only the segment of a poet.
+
+Nothing is more interesting than to study Ibsen's verse in the making.
+His sincerity to his innermost aim, the aim at the expression of
+himself, is seen in his refusal from the beginning to accept any poetic
+convention, to limit himself in poetic subject, to sift his material or
+clarify his metre. He has always insisted on producing something
+personal, thoughtful, fantastic, and essentially prosaic; and it is in a
+vain protest against the nature of things that he writes of _Peer Gynt_,
+'My book _is_ poetry; and if it is not, then it will be. The conception
+of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to the
+book.' His verse was the assertion of his individuality at all costs; it
+was a costly tool, which he cast aside only when he found that it would
+not carve every material.
+
+Ibsen's earliest work in verse has not been translated. Dr. Brandes
+tells us that it followed Danish models, the sagas, and the national
+ballads. In the prose play, _Lady Inger of Östraat_, we see the
+dramatist, the clever playwright, still holding on to the skirts of
+romance, and ready with rhetoric enough on occasion, but more concerned
+with plot and stage effect than with even what is interesting in the
+psychology of the characters. _The Vikings_, also in prose, is a piece
+of strong grappling with a heroic subject, with better rhetoric, and
+some good poetry taken straight out of the sagas, with fervour in it,
+and gravity; yet an experiment only, a thing not made wholly personal,
+nor wholly achieved. It shows how well Ibsen could do work which was not
+his work. In _Love's Comedy_, a modern play in verse, he is already
+himself. Point of view is there; materials are there; the man of science
+has already laid his hand upon the poet. We are told that Ibsen tried to
+write it in prose, failed, and fell back upon verse. It is quite likely;
+he has already an accomplished technique, and can put his thoughts into
+verse with admirable skill. But the thoughts are not born in verse, and,
+brilliantly rhymed as they are, they do not make poetry.
+
+Dr. Brandes admits everything that can be said against Ibsen as a poet
+when he says, speaking of this play and of _Brand_:
+
+
+     Even if the ideas they express have not previously found utterance
+     in poetry, they have done so in prose literature. In other words,
+     these poems do not set forth new thoughts, but translate into metre
+     and rhyme thoughts already expressed.
+
+
+_Love's Comedy_ is a criticism of life; it is full of hard, scientific,
+prose thought about conduct, which has its own quality as long as it
+sticks to fact and remains satire; but when the prose curvets and tries
+to lift, when criticism turns constructive, we find no more than bubbles
+and children's balloons, empty and coloured, that soar and evaporate.
+There is, in this farce of the intellect, a beginning of social drama;
+realism peeps through the artificial point and polish of a verse which
+has some of the qualities of Pope and some of the qualities of Swift;
+but the dramatist is still content that his puppets shall have the air
+of puppets; he stands in the arena of his circus and cracks his whip;
+they gallop round grimacing, and with labels on their backs. The verse
+comes between him and nature, as the satire comes between him and
+poetry. Cynicism has gone to the making of poetry more than once, but
+only under certain conditions: that the poet should be a lyric poet,
+like Heine, or a great personality in action, like Byron, to whom
+cynicism should be but one of the tones of his speech, the gestures of
+his attitude. With Ibsen it is a petty anger, an anger against nature,
+and it leads to a transcendentalism which is empty and outside nature.
+
+The criticism of love, so far as it goes beyond what is amusing and
+Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile
+than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks
+he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a
+denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal
+suicide such as that in _Rosmersholm_, or may feed the brain on some air
+unbreathable by the body, as in _When we Dead Awaken_. It is the old
+idea of self-sacrifice creeping back under cover of a new idea of
+self-intensification; and it comes, like asceticism, from a contempt of
+nature, a distrust of nature, an abstract intellectual criticism of
+nature.
+
+Out of such material no poetry will ever come; and none has come in
+_Love's Comedy_. In the prose play which followed, _The Pretenders_,
+which is the dramatisation of an inner problem in the form of a
+historical drama, there is a much nearer approach to poetry. The
+stagecraft is still too obvious; effect follows effect like
+thunder-claps; there is melodrama in the tragedy; but the play is, above
+all, the working-out of a few deep ideas, and in these ideas there is
+both beauty and wisdom.
+
+It was with the publication of _Brand_ that Ibsen became famous, not
+only in his own country, but throughout Europe. The poem has been
+seriously compared, even in England, with _Hamlet_; even in Germany with
+_Faust_. A better comparison is that which Mr. Gosse has made with
+Sidney Dobell's _Balder_. It is full of satire and common-sense, of
+which there is little enough in _Balder_: but not _Balder_ is more
+abstract, or more inhuman in its action. Types, not people, move in it;
+their speech is doctrine, not utterance; it is rather a tract than a
+poem. The technique of the verse, if we can judge it from the brilliant
+translation of Professor Herford, which reads almost everywhere like an
+original, is more than sufficient for its purpose; all this
+argumentative and abstract and realistic material finds adequate
+expression in a verse which has aptly been compared with the verse of
+Browning's _Christmas-eve and Easter-day_. The comparison may be carried
+further, and it is disastrous to Ibsen. Browning deals with hard matter,
+and can be boisterous; but he is never, as Ibsen is always, pedestrian.
+The poet, though, like St. Michael, he carry a sword, must, like St.
+Michael, have wings. Ibsen has no wings.
+
+But there is another comparison by which I think we can determine more
+precisely the station and quality of _Brand_ as poetry. Take any one of
+the vigorous and vivid statements of dogma, which are the very kernel of
+the poem, and compare them with a few lines from Blake's _Everlasting
+Gospel_. There every line, with all its fighting force, is pure poetry;
+it was conceived as poetry, born as poetry, and can be changed into no
+other substance. Here we find a vigorous technique fitting striking
+thought into good swinging verse, with abundance of apt metaphor; but
+where is the vision, the essence, which distinguishes it from what,
+written in prose, would have lost nothing? Ibsen writes out of the
+intellect, adding fancy and emotion as he goes; but in Blake every line
+leaps forth like lightning from a cloud.
+
+The motto of _Brand_ was 'all or nothing'; that of _Peer Gynt_ 'to be
+master of the situation.' Both are studies of egoism, in the finding and
+losing of self; both are personal studies and national lessons. Of _Peer
+Gynt_ Ibsen said, 'I meant it to be a caprice.' It is Ibsen in high
+spirits; and it is like a mute dancing at a funeral. It is a harlequin
+of a poem, a thing of threads and patches; and there are gold threads in
+it and tattered clouts. It is an experiment which has hardly succeeded,
+because it is not one but a score of experiments. It is made up of two
+elements, an element of folklore and an element of satire. The first
+comes and goes for the most part with Peer and his mother; and all this
+brings Norwegian soil with it, and is alive. The satire is fierce,
+local, and fantastic. Out of the two comes a clashing thing which may
+itself suggest, as has been said, the immense contrast between Norwegian
+summer, which is day, and winter, which is night. Grieg's music,
+childish, mumbling, singing, leaping, and sombre, has aptly illustrated
+it. It was a thing done on a holiday, for a holiday. It was of this
+that Ibsen said he could not have written it any nearer home than Ischia
+and Sorrento. But is it, for all its splendid scraps and patches, a
+single masterpiece? is it, above all, a poem? The idea, certainly, is
+one and coherent; every scene is an illustration of that idea; but is it
+born of that idea? Is it, more than once or twice, inevitable? What
+touches at times upon poetry is the folk element; the irony at times has
+poetic substance in it; but this glimmer of poetic substance, which
+comes and goes, is lost for the most part among mists and vapours, and
+under artificial light. That poet which exists somewhere in Ibsen,
+rarely quite out of sight, never wholly at liberty, comes into this
+queer dance of ideas and humours, and gives it, certainly, the main
+value it has. But the 'state satirist' is always on the heels of the
+poet; and imagination, whenever it appears for a moment, is led away
+into bondage by the spirit of the fantastic, which is its prose
+equivalent or makeshift. It is the fantastic that Ibsen generally gives
+us in the place of imagination; and the fantastic is a kind of
+rhetoric, manufactured by the will, and has no place in poetry.
+
+
+In _The League of Youth_ Ibsen takes finally the step which he had half
+taken in _Loves Comedy_. 'In my new comedy,' he writes to Dr. Brandes,
+'you will find the common order of things--no strong emotions, no deep
+feelings, and, more particularly, no isolated thoughts.' He adds: 'It is
+written in prose, which gives it a strong realistic colouring. I have
+paid particular attention to form, and, among other things, I have
+accomplished the feat of doing without a single monologue, in fact
+without a single "aside." 'The play is hardly more than a good farce;
+the form is no more than the slightest of advances towards probability
+on the strict lines of the Scribe tradition; the 'common order of
+things' is there, in subject, language, and in everything but the
+satirical intention which underlies the whole trivial, stupid, and no
+doubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, the
+photographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relief
+from the photographic. The stage mechanism is still obvious; but the
+intention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps to
+get the mechanism in order.
+
+After _The League of Youth_ Ibsen tells us that he tried to 'seek
+salvation in remoteness of subject'; so he returned to his old scheme
+for a play on Julian the Apostate, and wrote the two five-act plays
+which make up _Emperor and Galilean_. He tells us that it is the first
+work which he wrote under German intellectual influences, and that it
+contains 'that positive theory of life which the critics have demanded
+of me so long.' In one letter he affirms that it is 'an entirely
+realistic work,' and in another, 'It is a part of my own spiritual life
+which I am putting into this book ... and the historical subject chosen
+has a much more intimate connexion with the movements of our own time
+than one might at first imagine.' How great a relief it must have been,
+after the beer and sausages of _The League of Youth_, to go back to an
+old cool wine, no one can read _Emperor and Galilean_ and doubt. It is a
+relief and an escape; and the sense of the stage has been put wholly on
+one side in both of these plays, of which the second reads almost like
+a parody of the first: the first so heated, so needlessly colloquial,
+the second so full of argumentative rhetoric. Ibsen has turned against
+his hero in the space between writing the one and the other; and the
+Julian of the second is more harshly satirised from within than ever
+_Peer Gynt_ was. In a letter to Dr. Brandes, Ibsen says: 'What the book
+is or is not, I have no desire to enquire. I only know that I saw a
+fragment of humanity plainly before my eyes, and that I tried to
+reproduce what I saw.' But in the play itself this intention comes and
+goes; and, while some of it reminds one of _Salammbô_ in its attempt to
+treat remote ages realistically, other parts are given up wholly to the
+exposition of theories, and yet others to a kind of spectacular romance,
+after the cheap method of George Ebers and the German writers of
+historical fiction. The satire is more serious, the criticism of ideas
+more fundamental than anything in _The League of Youth_; but, as in
+almost the whole of Ibsen's more characteristic work up to this point,
+satire strives with realism; it is still satire, not irony, and is not
+yet, as the later irony is to be, a deepening, and thus a
+justification, of the realism.
+
+Eight years passed between _The League of Youth_ and _The Pillars of
+Society_; but they are both woven of the same texture. Realism has made
+for itself a firmer footing; the satire has more significance; the
+mechanism of the stage goes much more smoothly, though indeed to a more
+conventionally happy ending; melodrama has taken some of the place of
+satire. Yet the 'state satirist' is still at his work, still concerned
+with society and bringing only a new detail of the old accusation
+against society. Like every play of this period, it is the unveiling of
+a lie. See yourselves as you are, the man of science seems to be saying
+to us. Here are your 'pillars of society'; they are the tools of
+society. Here is your happy marriage, and it is a doll's house. Here is
+your respected family, here is the precept of 'honour your father and
+your mother' in practice; and here is the little voice of heredity
+whispering 'ghosts!' There is the lie of respectability, the lie hidden
+behind marriage, the lie which saps the very roots of the world.
+
+Ibsen is no preacher, and he has told us expressly that _Ghosts_
+'preaches nothing at all.' This pursuit of truth to its most secret
+hiding-place is not a sermon against sin; it sets a scientific dogma
+visibly to work, and watches the effect of the hypothesis. As the dogma
+is terrible and plausible, and the logic of its working-out faultless,
+we get one of the deeper thrills that modern art has to give us. I would
+take _A Doll's House_, _Ghosts_, and _The Wild Duck_ as Ibsen's three
+central plays, the plays in which his method completely attained its
+end, in which his whole capacities are seen at their finest balance; and
+this work, this reality in which every word, meaningless in itself, is
+alive with suggestion, is the finest scientific work which has been done
+in literature. Into this period comes his one buoyant play, _An Enemy of
+the People_, his rebound against the traditional hypocrisy which had
+attacked _Ghosts_ for its telling of unseasonable truths; it is an
+allegory, in the form of journalism, or journalism in the form of
+allegory, and is the 'apology' of the man of science for his mission.
+Every play is a dissection, or a vivisection rather; for these people
+who suffer so helplessly, and are shown us so calmly in their agonies,
+are terribly alive. _A Doll's House_ is the first of Ibsen's plays in
+which the puppets have no visible wires. The playwright has perfected
+his art of illusion; beyond _A Doll's House_ and _Ghosts_ dramatic
+illusion has never gone. And the irony of the ideas that work these
+living puppets has now become their life-blood. It is the tragic irony
+of a playwright who is the greatest master of technique since Sophocles,
+but who is only the playwright in Sophocles, not the poet.
+
+For this moment, the moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic
+element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so
+sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With _The
+Wild Duck_ fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit
+symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is
+more disinterested than even in _Ghosts_, for it turns back on the
+reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the
+pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays
+which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the
+poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms of
+the fantastic in place of any simple and sufficing gift of imagination.
+The man of science has had his way, has fulfilled his aim, and is
+discontented with the limits within which he has fulfilled it. He would
+extend those limits; and at first it seems as if those limits are to be
+extended. But the exquisite pathos which humanises what is fantastic in
+_The Wild Duck_ passes, in _Rosmersholm_, in which the problems of
+_Love's Comedy_ are worked out to their logical conclusion, into a form,
+not of genuine tragedy, but of mental melodrama. In _The Lady from the
+Sea_, how far is the symbol which has eaten up reality really symbol? Is
+it not rather the work of the intelligence than of the imagination? Is
+it not allegory intruding into reality, disturbing that reality and
+giving us no spiritual reality in its place?
+
+_Hedda Gabler_ is closer to life; and Ibsen said about it in a letter:
+
+
+     It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called
+     problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human
+     beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of
+     certain of the social conditions and principles of the present
+     day.'
+
+
+The play might be taken for a study in that particular kind of
+'decadence' which has come to its perfection in uncivilised and
+overcivilised Russia; and the woman whom Ibsen studied as his model was
+actually half-Russian. Eleonora Duse has created Hedda over again, as a
+poet would have created her, and has made a wonderful creature whom
+Ibsen never conceived, or at least never rendered. Ibsen has tried to
+add his poetry by way of ornament, and gives us a trivial and
+inarticulate poet about whom float certain catchwords. Here the chief
+catchword is 'vine-leaves in the hair'; in _The Master-builder_ it is
+'harps in the air'; in _Little Eyolf_ it takes human form and becomes
+the Rat-wife; in _John Gabriel Borkman_ it drops to the tag of 'a dead
+man and two shadows'; in _When we Dead Awaken_ there is nothing but icy
+allegory. All that queer excitement of _The Master-builder_, that
+'ideal' awake again, is it not really a desire to open one's door to the
+younger generation? But is it the younger generation that finds itself
+at home there? is it not rather _Peer Gynt_ back again, and the ride
+through the air on the back of the reindeer?
+
+In his earlier plays Ibsen had studied the diseases of society, and he
+had considered the individual only in his relation to society. Now he
+turns to study the diseases of the individual conscience. Only life
+interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial
+irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental
+artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The
+man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back,
+though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife
+in _Little Eyolf_; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination,
+neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the offspring of a
+supernaturalism that does not believe in itself. In _John Gabriel
+Borkman_, which is the culmination of Ibsen's skill in construction, a
+play in four acts with only the pause of a minute between each, he is no
+longer content to concern himself with the old material, lies or
+misunderstandings, the irony of things happening as they do; but will
+have fierce hatreds, and a kind of incipient madness in things. In _When
+we Dead Awaken_ all the people are quite consciously insane, and act a
+kind of charade with perfectly solemn faces and a visible effort to look
+their parts.
+
+In these last plays, with their many splendid qualities, not bound
+together and concentrated as in _Ghosts_, we see the revenge of the
+imagination upon the realist, who has come to be no longer interested in
+the action of society upon the individual, but in the individual as a
+soul to be lost or saved. The man of science has discovered the soul,
+and does not altogether know what to do with it. He has settled its
+limits, set it to work in space and time, laid bare some of its secrets,
+shown its 'physical basis.' And now certain eccentricities in it begin
+to beckon to him; he would follow the soul into the darkness, but it is
+dark to him; he can but strain after it as it flutters. In the preface
+to the collected edition of his plays, published in 1901, Maeterlinck
+has pointed out, as one still standing at the cross-roads might point
+out to those who have followed him so far on his way, the great
+uncertainty in which the poet, the dramatist of to-day, finds himself,
+as what seems to be known or conjectured of 'the laws of nature' is
+forced upon him, making the old, magnificently dramatic opportunities of
+the ideas of fate, of eternal justice, no longer possible for him to
+use.
+
+
+     _Le poète dramatique est obligé de faire descendre dans la vie
+     réelle, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'idée qu'il se fait de
+     l'inconnu. Il faut qu'il nous montre de quelle façon, sous quelle
+     forme, dans quelles conditions, d'après quelles lois, à quelle fin,
+     agissent sur nos destinées les puissances supérieures, les
+     influences inintelligibles, les principes infinis, dont, en tant
+     que poète, il est persuadé que l'univers est plein. Et comme il est
+     arrivé à une heure où loyalement il lui est à peu près impossible
+     d'admettre les anciennes, et où celles qui les doivent remplacer ne
+     sont pas encore déterminées, n'ont pas encore de nom, il hésite,
+     tâtonne, et s'il veut rester absolument sincère, il n'ose plus se
+     risquer hors de la réalité immédiate. Il se borne à étudier les
+     sentiments humains dans leurs effets matériels et psychologiques._
+
+
+So long as Ibsen does this, he achieves great and solid things; and in
+_Ghosts_ a scientific dogma, the law or theory of heredity, has for once
+taken the place of fate, and almost persuaded us that science, if it
+takes poetry from us, can restore to us a kind of poetry. But, as
+Maeterlinck has seen, as it is impossible not to see,
+
+
+     _quand Ibsen, dans d'autres drames, essaie de relier à d'autres
+     mystères les gestes de ses hommes en mal de conscience
+     exceptionelle ou de ses femmes hallucinées, il faut convenir que,
+     si l'atmosphère qu'il parvient à créer est étrange et troublante,
+     elle est rarement saine et respirable, parce qu'elle est rarement
+     raisonnable et réele._
+
+
+From the time when, in _A Doll's House_, Ibsen's puppets came to life,
+they have refused ever since to be put back into their boxes. The
+manager may play what tricks with them he pleases, but he cannot get
+them back into their boxes. They are alive, and they live with a weird,
+spectacular, but irrevocable life. But, after the last play of all, the
+dramatic epilogue, _When we Dead Awaken_, the puppets have gone back
+into their boxes. Now they have come to obey the manager, and to make
+mysterious gestures which they do not understand, and to speak in images
+and take them for literal truths. Even their spectral life has gone out
+of them; they are rigid now, and only the strings set them dancing. The
+puppets had come to life, they had lived the actual life of the earth;
+and then a desire of the impossible, the desire of a life rarefied
+beyond human limits, took their human life from them, and they were
+puppets again. The epilogue to the plays is the apostasy of the man of
+science, and, as with all apostates, his new faith is not a vital thing;
+the poet was not really there to reawaken.
+
+
+Before Ibsen the drama was a part of poetry; Ibsen has made it prose.
+All drama up to Ibsen had been romantic; Ibsen made it science. Until
+Ibsen no playwright had ever tried to imitate life on the stage, or
+even, as Ibsen does, to interpret it critically. The desire of every
+dramatist had been to create over again a more abundant life, and to
+create it through poetry or through humour; through some form, that is,
+of the imagination. There was a time when Ibsen too would have made
+poetry of the drama; there was a time when verse seemed to him the only
+adequate form in which drama could be written. But his power to work in
+poetry was not equal to his desire to be a poet; and, when he revolted
+against verse and deliberately adopted as his material 'the common order
+of things,' when he set himself, for the first time in the history of
+the drama, to produce an illusion of reality rather than a translation
+or transfiguration of reality, he discovered his own strength, the
+special gift which he had brought into the world; but at the same time
+he set, for himself and for his age, his own limits to drama.
+
+It is quite possible to write poetic drama in prose, though to use prose
+rather than verse is to write with the left hand rather than with the
+right. Before Ibsen, prose had been but a serving-maid to verse; and no
+great dramatist had ever put forward the prose conception of the drama.
+Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had used prose as an escape or a
+side-issue, for variety, or for the heightening of verse. Molière had
+used prose as the best makeshift for verse, because he was not himself a
+good craftsman in the art. And, along with the verse, and necessarily
+dependent upon it, there was the poetic, the romantic quality in drama.
+Think of those dramatists who seem to have least kinship with poetry;
+think, I will not say of Molière, but of Congreve. What is more romantic
+than _The Way of the World_? But Ibsen extracts the romantic quality
+from drama as if it were a poison; and, in deciding to write
+realistically in prose, he gives up every aim but that which he defines,
+so early as 1874, as the wish 'to produce the impression on the reader
+that what he was reading was something that had really happened.' He is
+not even speaking of the effect in a theatre; he is defining his aim
+inside the covers of a book, his whole conception of drama.
+
+The art of imitation has never been carried further than it has been
+carried by Ibsen in his central plays; and with him, at his best, it is
+no mere imitation but a critical interpretation of life. How greatly
+this can be done, how greatly Ibsen has done it, there is _Ghosts_ to
+show us. Yet at what point this supreme criticism may stop, what remains
+beyond it in the treatment of the vilest contemporary material, we shall
+see if we turn to a play which seems at first sight more grossly
+realistic than the most realistic play of Ibsen--Tolstoi's _Powers of
+Darkness_. Though, as one reads and sees it, the pity and fear seem to
+weigh almost intolerably upon one, the impression left upon the mind
+when the reading or the performance is over, is that left by the hearing
+of noble and tragic music. How, out of such human discords, such a
+divine harmony can be woven I do not know; that is the secret of
+Tolstoi's genius, as it is the secret of the musician's. Here, achieved
+in terms of naked horror, we find some of the things which Maeterlinck
+has aimed at and never quite rendered through an atmosphere and through
+forms of vague beauty. And we find also another kind of achievement, by
+the side of which Ibsen's cunning adjustments of reality seem a little
+trivial or a little unreal. Here, for once, human life is islanded on
+the stage, a pin-point of light in an immense darkness; and the sense of
+that surrounding darkness is conveyed to us, as in no other modern play,
+by an awful sincerity and an unparalleled simplicity. Whether Tolstoi
+has learned by instinct some stagecraft which playwrights have been
+toiling after in vain, or by what conscious and deliberate art he has
+supplemented instinct, I do not know. But, out of horror and humour, out
+of some creative abundance which has taken the dregs of human life up
+into itself and transfigured them by that pity which is understanding,
+by that faith which is creation, Tolstoi has in this play done what
+Ibsen has never done--given us an interpretation of life which owes
+nothing to science, nothing to the prose conception of life, but which,
+in spite of its form, is essential poetry.
+
+Ibsen's concern is with character; and no playwright has created a more
+probable gallery of characters with whom we can become so easily and so
+completely familiar. They live before us, and with apparently so
+unconscious a self-revelation that we speculate about them as we would
+about real people, and sometimes take sides with them against their
+creator. Nora would, would not, have left her children! We know all
+their tricks of mind, their little differences from other people, their
+habits, the things that a novelist spends so much of his time in
+bringing laboriously before us. Ibsen, in a single stage direction,
+gives you more than you would find in a chapter of a novel. His
+characters, when they are most themselves, are modern, of the day or
+moment; they are average, and represent nothing which we have not met
+with, nothing which astonishes us because it is of a nobility, a
+heroism, a wildness beyond our acquaintance. It is for this that he has
+been most praised; and there is something marvellous in the precision of
+his measurements of just so much and no more of the soul.
+
+Yet there are no great characters in Ibsen; and do not great characters
+still exist? Ibsen's exceptional people never authenticate themselves as
+being greatly exceptional; their genius is vouched for on a report which
+they are themselves unable to confirm, as in the inarticulate poet
+Lövborg, or on their own assertion, as with John Gabriel Borkman, of
+whom even Dr. Brandes admits, 'His own words do not convince me, for
+one, that he has ever possessed true genius.' When he is most himself,
+when he has the firmest hold on his material, Ibsen limits himself to
+that part of the soul which he and science know. By taking the average
+man as his hero, by having no hero, no villain, only probable levels, by
+limiting human nature to the bounds within which he can clinically
+examine it, he shirks, for the most part, the greatest crisis of the
+soul. Can the greatest drama be concerned with less than the ultimate
+issues of nature, the ultimate types of energy? with Lear and with
+Oedipus? The world of Shakespeare and of the Greeks is the world; it
+is universal, whether Falstaff blubbers in the tavern or Philoctetes
+cries in the cave. But the world which Ibsen really knows is that little
+segment of the world which we call society; its laws are not those of
+nature, its requirements are not the requirements of God or of man; it
+is a business association for the capture and division of profits; it
+is, in short, a fit subject for scientific study, but no longer a part
+of the material of poetry. The characteristic plays of Ibsen are rightly
+known as 'social dramas.' Their problem, for the main part, is no longer
+man in the world, but man in society. That is why they have no
+atmosphere, no background, but are carefully localised.
+
+The rhythm of prose is physiological; the rhythm of poetry is musical.
+There is in every play of Ibsen a rhythm perfect of its kind, but it is
+the physiological rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespeare
+speaks to the blood like wine or music; it is with exultation, with
+intoxication, that we see or read _Antony and Cleopatra_, or even
+_Richard II_. But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of a
+diagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the
+purely mental exaltation of a problem solved. These people who are seen
+so clearly, moving about in a well-realised world, using probable words
+and doing necessary things, may owe some of their manner at least to the
+modern French stage, and to the pamphleteer's prose world of Dumas
+_fils_; yet, though they may illustrate problems, they no longer recite
+them. They are seen, not as the poet sees his people, naked against a
+great darkness, but clothed and contemporary, from the level of an
+ironical observer who sits in a corner of the same room. It is the
+doctor who sits there, watching his patients, and smiling ambiguously as
+he infers from his knowledge of their bodies what pranks their souls are
+likely to play.
+
+If Ibsen gets no other kind of beauty, does he not get beauty of
+emotion? Or can there be beauty in an intensity of emotion which can be
+at least approached, in the power of thrilling, by an Adelphi
+melodrama? Is the speech of his people, when it is most nearly a
+revelation of the obscure forces outside us or within us, more than a
+stammering of those to whom unconsciousness does not lend distinction
+but intensifies idiosyncrasy? Drama, in its essence, requires no speech;
+it can be played by marionettes, or in dumb show, and be enthralling.
+But, speech once admitted, must not that speech, if it is to collaborate
+in supreme drama, be filled with imagination, be itself a beautiful
+thing? To Ibsen beauty has always been of the nature of an ornament, not
+an end. He would concentrate it into a catchword, repeated until it has
+lost all emotional significance. For the rest, his speech is the
+language of the newspaper, recorded with the fidelity of the phonograph.
+Its whole aim is at economy, as if economy were an end rather than a
+means.
+
+Has not Ibsen, in the social dramas, tried to make poems without words?
+There is to be beauty of motive and beauty of emotion; but the words are
+to be the plainest of all the plain words which we use in talking with
+one another, and nothing in them is to speak greatly when great
+occasions arise. Men's speech in great drama is as much higher than the
+words they would use in real life as their thoughts are higher than
+those words. It says the unuttered part of our speech. Ibsen would
+suppress all this heightening as he has suppressed the soliloquy and the
+aside. But here what he suppresses is not a convention but a means of
+interpretation. It is suppressing the essence for the sake of the
+accident.
+
+Ibsen's genius for the invention of a situation has never been
+surpassed. More living characters than the characters of Ibsen have
+never moved on the stage. His women are at work now in the world,
+interpreting women to themselves, helping to make the women of the
+future. He has peopled a new world. But the inhabitants of this new
+world, before they begin to transgress its laws and so lose their own
+citizenship there, are so faithfully copied from the people about us
+that they share their dumbness, that dumbness to which it is the power
+and privilege of poetry to give speech. Given the character and the
+situation, what Ibsen asks at the moment of crisis is: What would this
+man be most likely to say? not, What would be the finest, the most
+deeply revealing thing that he could say? In that difference lies all
+the difference between prose and poetry.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS
+
+
+The novels of Huysmans, however we may regard them as novels, are, at
+all events, the sincere and complete expression of a very remarkable
+personality. From _Marthe_ to _Là-Bas_ every story, every volume,
+disengages the same atmosphere--the atmosphere of a London November,
+when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little miseries of
+life loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable grotesqueness.
+Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation--and
+sensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be well
+or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for each
+of us, what each of us feels it to be. To Huysmans the world appears to
+be a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, ridiculous place, with a
+certain solace in various forms of art, and certain possibilities of at
+least temporary escape. Part of his work presents to us a picture of
+ordinary life as he conceives it, in its uniform trivial wretchedness;
+in another part he has made experiment in directions which have seemed
+to promise escape, relief; in yet other portions he has allowed himself
+the delight of his sole enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of art. He himself
+would be the first to acknowledge--indeed, practically, he has
+acknowledged--that the particular way in which he sees life is a matter
+of personal temperament and constitution, a matter of nerves. The
+Goncourts have never tired of insisting on the fact of their _névrose_,
+of pointing out its importance in connection with the form and structure
+of their work, their touch on style, even. To them the _maladie fin de
+siècle_ has come delicately, as to the chlorotic fine ladies of the
+Faubourg Saint-Germain: it has sharpened their senses to a point of
+morbid acuteness, it has given their work a certain feverish beauty. To
+Huysmans it has given the exaggerated horror of whatever is ugly and
+unpleasant, with the fatal instinct of discovering, the fatal necessity
+of contemplating, every flaw and every discomfort that a somewhat
+imperfect world can offer for inspection. It is the transposition of the
+ideal. Relative values are lost, for it is the sense of the disagreeable
+only that is heightened; and the world, in this strange disorder of
+vision, assumes an aspect which can only be compared with that of a drop
+of impure water under the microscope. 'Nature seen through a
+temperament' is Zola's definition of all art. Nothing, certainly, could
+be more exact and expressive as a definition of the art of Huysmans.
+
+To realise how faithfully and how completely Huysmans has revealed
+himself in all he has written, it is necessary to know the man. 'He gave
+me the impression of a cat,' some interviewer once wrote of him;
+'courteous, perfectly polite, almost amiable, but all nerves, ready to
+shoot out his claws at the least word.' And, indeed, there is something
+of his favourite animal about him. The face is grey, wearily alert, with
+a look of benevolent malice. At first sight it is commonplace, the
+features are ordinary, one seems to have seen it at the Bourse or the
+Stock Exchange. But gradually that strange, unvarying expression, that
+look of benevolent malice, grows upon you as the influence of the man
+makes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office--he is an employé
+in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employé; I have seen him
+in a café, in various houses; but I always see him in memory as I used
+to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back on the
+sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive fingers, looking
+at no one and at nothing, while Madame X. moves about with solid
+vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of _bric-à-brac_.
+The spoils of all the world are there, in that incredibly tiny _salon_;
+they lie underfoot, they climb up walls, they cling to screens,
+brackets, and tables; one of your elbows menaces a Japanese toy, the
+other a Dresden china shepherdess; all the colours of the rainbow clash
+in a barbaric discord of notes. And in a corner of this fantastic room,
+Huysmans lies back indifferently on the sofa, with the air of one
+perfectly resigned to the boredom of life. Something is said by my
+learned friend who is to write for the new periodical, or perhaps it is
+the young editor of the new periodical who speaks, or (if that were not
+impossible) the taciturn Englishman who accompanies me; and Huysmans,
+without looking up, and without taking the trouble to speak very
+distinctly, picks up the phrase, transforms it, more likely transpierces
+it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of impromptu elaboration.
+Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a
+stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomes
+monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle of imbecility; the
+unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It
+is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the
+intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the
+sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an
+epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks
+with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of contempt, so
+profound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility.
+
+Yes, that is the true Huysmans, the Huysmans of _A Rebours_, and it is
+just such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality.
+With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passion
+for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusively
+an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, being
+produced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, would
+be, in a way, the quintessence of contemporary Decadence. And it is
+precisely such a book that Huysmans has written, in the extravagant,
+astonishing _A Rebours_. All his other books are a sort of unconscious
+preparation for this one book, a sort of inevitable and scarcely
+necessary sequel to it. They range themselves along the line of a
+somewhat erratic development, from Baudelaire, through Goncourt, by way
+of Zola, to the surprising originality of so disconcerting an exception
+to any and every order of things.
+
+The descendant of a long line of Dutch painters--one of whom, Cornelius
+Huysmans, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape men of the great
+period--Joris-Karl Huysmans was born at Paris, February 5, 1848. His
+first book, _Le Drageoir á Epices_, published at the age of twenty-six,
+is a _pasticcio_ of prose poems, done after Baudelaire, of little
+sketches, done after Dutch artists, together with a few studies of
+Parisian landscape, done after nature. It shows us the careful, laboured
+work of a really artistic temperament; it betrays, here and there, the
+spirit of acrimonious observation which is to count for so much with
+Huysmans--in the crude malice of 'L'Extase,' for example, in the
+notation of the 'richness of tone,' the 'superb colouring,' of an old
+drunkard. And one sees already something of the novelty and the
+precision of his description, the novelty and the unpleasantness of the
+subjects which he chooses to describe, in this vividly exact picture of
+the carcass of a cow hung up outside a butcher's shop: 'As in a
+hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shot
+out on every side like trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work
+extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurled
+their violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a sharp
+white, against the red medley of quivering flesh.'
+
+In _Marthe: histoire d'une fille_, which followed in 1876, two years
+later, Huysmans is almost as far from actual achievement as in _Le
+Drageoir à Epices_, but the book, in its crude attempt to deal
+realistically, and somewhat after the manner of Goncourt, with the life
+of a prostitute of the lowest depths, marks a considerable advance upon
+the somewhat casual experiments of his earlier manner. It is important
+to remember that _Marthe_ preceded _La Fille Elisa_ and _Nana_. 'I write
+what I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced,' says the brief
+and defiant preface, 'and I write it as well as I can: that is all. This
+explanation is not an excuse, it is simply the statement of the aim that
+I pursue in art.' Explanation or excuse notwithstanding, the book was
+forbidden to be sold in France. It is Naturalism in its earliest and
+most pitiless stage--Naturalism which commits the error of evoking no
+sort of interest in this unhappy creature who rises a little from her
+native gutter, only to fall back more woefully into the gutter again.
+Goncourt's Elisa at least interests us; Zola's Nana at all events
+appeals to our senses. But Marthe is a mere document, like her story.
+Notes have been taken--no doubt _sur le vif_--they have been strung
+together, and here they are, with only an interesting brutality, a
+curious sordidness to note, in these descriptions that do duty for
+psychology and incident alike, in the general flatness of character, the
+general dislocation of episode.
+
+_Les Soeurs Vatard_, published in 1879, and the short story _Sac au
+Dos_, which appeared in 1880 in the famous Zolaist manifesto, _Les
+Soirées de Médan_, show the influence of _Les Rougon-Macquart_ rather
+than of _Germinie Lacerteux_. For the time the 'formula' of Zola has
+been accepted: the result is, a remarkable piece of work, but a story
+without a story, a frame without a picture. With Zola, there is at all
+events a beginning and an end, a chain of events, a play of character
+upon incident. But in _Les Soeurs Vatard_ there is no reason for the
+narrative ever beginning or ending; there are miracles of
+description--the workroom, the rue de Sèvres, the locomotives, the
+_Foire du pain d'épice_--which lead to nothing; there are interiors,
+there are interviews, there are the two work-girls, Céline and Désirée,
+and their lovers; there is what Zola himself described as _tout ce
+milieu ouvrier, ce coin de misère et d'ignorance, de tranquille ordure
+et d'air naturellement empesté_. And with it all there is a heavy sense
+of stagnancy, a dreary lifelessness. All that is good in the book
+reappears, in vastly better company, in _En Ménage_ (1881), a novel
+which is, perhaps, more in the direct line of heritage from _L'Education
+Sentimentale_--the starting-point of the Naturalistic novel--than any
+other novel of the Naturalists.
+
+_En Ménage_ is the story of '_Monsieur Tout-le-monde_, an insignificant
+personality, one of those poor creatures who have not even the supreme
+consolation of being able to complain of any injustice in their fate,
+for an injustice supposes at all events a misunderstood merit, a force.'
+André is the reduction to the bourgeois formula of the invariable hero
+of Huysmans. He is just enough removed from the commonplace to suffer
+from it with acuteness. He cannot get on either with or without a woman
+in his establishment. Betrayed by his wife, he consoles himself with a
+mistress, and finally goes back to the wife. And the moral of it all
+is: 'Let us be stupidly comfortable, if we can, in any way we can: but
+it is almost certain that we cannot.' In _A Vau-l'Eau_, a less
+interesting story which followed _En Ménage_, the daily misery of the
+respectable M. Folantin, the government employé, consists in the
+impossible search for a decent restaurant, a satisfactory dinner: for M.
+Folantin, too, there is only the same counsel of a desperate, an
+inevitable resignation. Never has the intolerable monotony of small
+inconveniences been so scrupulously, so unsparingly chronicled, as in
+these two studies in the heroic degree of the commonplace. It happens to
+André, at a certain epoch in his life, to take back an old servant who
+had left him many years before. He finds that she has exactly the same
+defects as before, and 'to find them there again,' comments the author,
+'did not displease him. He had been expecting them all the time, he
+saluted them as old acquaintances, yet with a certain surprise,
+notwithstanding, to see them neither grown nor diminished. He noted for
+himself with satisfaction that the stupidity of his servant had remained
+stationary.' On another page, referring to the inventor of cards,
+Huysmans defines him as one who 'did something towards suppressing the
+free exchange of human imbecility.' Having to say in passing that a girl
+has returned from a ball, 'she was at home again,' he observes, 'after
+the half-dried sweat of the waltzes.' In this invariably sarcastic turn
+of the phrase, this absoluteness of contempt, this insistence on the
+disagreeable, we find the note of Huysmans, particularly at this point
+in his career, when, like Flaubert, he forced himself to contemplate and
+to analyse the more mediocre manifestations of _la bêtise humaine_.
+
+There is a certain perversity in this furious contemplation of
+stupidity, this fanatical insistence on the exasperating attraction of
+the sordid and the disagreeable; and it is by such stages that we come
+to _A Rebours_. But on the way we have to note a volume of _Croquis
+Parisiens_ (1880), in which the virtuoso who is a part of the artist in
+Huysmans has executed some of his most astonishing feats; and a volume
+on _L'Art Moderne_ (1883), in which the most modern of artists in
+literature has applied himself to the criticism--the revelation,
+rather--of modernity in art. In the latter, Huysmans was the first to
+declare the supremacy of Degas--'the greatest artist that we possess
+to-day in France'--while announcing with no less fervour the remote,
+reactionary, and intricate genius of Gustave Moreau. He was the first to
+discover Raffaëlli, 'the painter of poor people and the open sky--a sort
+of Parisian Millet,' as he called him; the first to discover Forain, 'le
+véritable peintre de la fille'; the first to discover Odilon Redon, to
+do justice to Pissaro and Paul Gauguin. No literary artist since
+Baudelaire has made so valuable a contribution to art criticism, and the
+_Curiosités Esthétiques_ are, after all, less exact in their actual
+study, less revolutionary, and less really significant in their critical
+judgments, than _L'Art Moderne_. The _Croquis Parisiens_, which, in its
+first edition, was illustrated by etchings of Forain and Raffaëlli, is
+simply the attempt to do in words what those artists have done in
+aquafortis or in pastel. There are the same Parisian types--the
+omnibus-conductor, the washerwoman, the man who sells hot chestnuts--the
+same impressions of a sick and sorry landscape, La Bièvre, for
+preference, in all its desolate and lamentable attraction; there is a
+marvellously minute series of studies of that typically Parisian
+music-hall, the Folies-Bergère. Huysmans' faculty of description is here
+seen at its fullest stretch of agility; precise, suggestive, with all
+the outline and colour of actual brush-work, it might even be compared
+with the art of Degas, only there is just that last touch wanting, that
+breath of palpitating life, which is what we always get in Degas, what
+we never get in Huysmans.
+
+In _L'Art Moderne_, speaking of the water-colours of Forain, Huysmans
+attributes to them 'a specious and _cherché_ art, demanding, for its
+appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense.' To realise
+the full value, the real charm, of _A Rebours_, some such initiation
+might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its exquisite
+artificiality, it is the natural sequel of _En Ménage_ and _A
+Vau-l'Eau_, which are so much more acutely sordid than the most sordid
+kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred and horror
+of human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence, which we have
+seen to be the special form of Huysmans' _névrose_. The motto, taken
+from a thirteenth-century mystic, Rusbroeck the Admirable, is a cry for
+escape, for the 'something in the world that is there in no satisfying
+measure, or not at all': _Il faut que je me réjouisse au-dessus du temps
+... quoique le monde ait horreur de ma joie et que sa grossièreté ne
+sache pas ce que je veux dire_. And the book is the history of a
+_Thebaïde raffinée_--a voluntary exile from the world in a new kind of
+'Palace of Art.' Des Esseintes, the vague but typical hero, is one of
+those half-pathological cases which help us to understand the full
+meaning of the word _décadence_, which they partly represent. The last
+descendant of an ancient family, his impoverished blood tainted by all
+sorts of excesses, Des Esseintes finds himself at thirty _sur le chemin,
+dégrisé, seul, abominablement lassé_. He has already realised that 'the
+world is divided, in great part, into swaggerers and simpletons.' His
+one desire is to 'hide himself away, far from the world, in some
+retreat, where he might deaden the sound of the loud rumbling of
+inflexible life, as one covers the street with straw, for sick people.'
+This retreat he discovers, just far enough from Paris to be safe from
+disturbance, just near enough to be saved from the nostalgia of the
+unattainable. He succeeds in making his house a paradise of the
+artificial, choosing the tones of colour that go best with candle-light,
+for it need scarcely be said that Des Esseintes has effected a simple
+transposition of night and day. His disappearance from the world has
+been complete; it seems to him that the 'comfortable desert' of his
+exile need never cease to be just such a luxurious solitude; it seems to
+him that he has attained his desire, that he has attained to happiness.
+
+Disturbing physical symptoms harass him from time to time, but they
+pass. It is an effect of nerves that now and again he is haunted by
+remembrance; the recurrence of a perfume, the reading of a book, brings
+back a period of life when his deliberate perversity was exercised
+actively in matters of the senses. There are his fantastic banquets, his
+fantastic amours: the _repas de deuil_, Miss Urania the acrobat, the
+episode of the ventriloquist-woman and the reincarnation of the Sphinx
+and the Chimæra of Flaubert, the episode of the boy _chez_ Madame
+Laure. A casual recollection brings up the schooldays of his childhood
+with the Jesuits, and with that the beliefs of childhood, the fantasies
+of the Church, the Catholic abnegation of the _Imitatio_ joining so
+strangely with the final philosophy of Schopenhauer. At times his brain
+is haunted by social theories--his dull hatred of the ordinary in life
+taking form in the region of ideas. But in the main he feeds himself,
+with something of the satisfaction of success, on the strange food for
+the sensations with which he has so laboriously furnished himself. There
+are his books, and among these a special library of the Latin writers of
+the Decadence. Exasperated by Virgil, profoundly contemptuous of Horace,
+he tolerates Lucan (which is surprising), adores Petronius (as well he
+might), and delights in the neologisms and the exotic novelty of
+Apuleius. His curiosity extends to the later Christian poets--from the
+coloured verse of Claudian down to the verse which is scarcely verse of
+the incoherent ninth century. He is, of course, an amateur of exquisite
+printing, of beautiful bindings, and possesses an incomparable
+Baudelaire (_édition tirée à un exemplaire_), a unique Mallarmé.
+Catholicism being the adopted religion of the Decadence--for its
+venerable age, valuable in such matters as the age of an old wine, its
+vague excitation of the senses, its mystical picturesqueness--Des
+Esseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature,
+where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find
+their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello,
+the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality,
+Barbey d'Aurevilly. His collection of 'profane' writers is small, but it
+is selected for the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be his
+only care in art--for the somewhat diseased, or the somewhat artificial
+beauty that alone can strike a responsive thrill from his exacting
+nerves. 'Considering within himself, he realised that a work of art, in
+order to attract him, must come to him with that quality of strangeness
+demanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route, and
+sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated
+deliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over which
+he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or of
+solid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. He
+delighted in a work of art, both for what it was in itself and for what
+it could lend him; he would fain go along with it, thanks to it, as
+though sustained by an adjuvant, as though borne in a vehicle, into a
+sphere where his sublimated sensations would wake in him an unaccustomed
+stir, the cause of which he would long and vainly seek to determine.' So
+he comes to care supremely for Baudelaire, 'who, more than any other,
+possessed the marvellous power of rendering, with a strange sanity of
+expression, the most fleeting, the most wavering morbid states of
+exhausted minds, of desolate souls.' In Flaubert he prefers _La
+Tentation de Saint-Antoine_; in Goncourt, _La Faustin_; in Zola, _La
+Faute de l'Abbé Mouret_--the exceptional, the most remote and
+_recherché_ outcome of each temperament. And of the three it is the
+novel of Goncourt that appeals to him with special intimacy--that novel
+which, more than any other, seems to express, in its exquisitely
+perverse charm, all that decadent civilisation of which Des Esseintes
+is the type and symbol. In poetry he has discovered the fine perfume,
+the evanescent charm, of Paul Verlaine, and near that great poet
+(forgetting, strangely, Arthur Rimbaud) he places two poets who are
+curious--the disconcerting, tumultuous Tristan Corbière, and the painted
+and bejewelled Théodore Hannon. With Edgar Poe he has the instinctive
+sympathy which drew Baudelaire to the enigmatically perverse Decadent of
+America; he delights, sooner than all the world, in the astonishing,
+unbalanced, unachieved genius of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it is
+in Stéphane Mallarmé that he finds the incarnation of 'the decadence of
+a literature, irreparably affected in its organism, weakened in its
+ideas by age, exhausted by the excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the
+curiosity which fevers sick people, and yet hastening to say everything,
+now at the end, torn by the wish to atone for all its omissions of
+enjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest memories of sorrow on its
+death-bed.'
+
+But it is not on books alone that Des Esseintes nurses his sick and
+craving fancy. He pushes his delight in the artificial to the last
+limits, and diverts himself with a bouquet of jewels, a concert of
+flowers, an orchestra of liqueurs, an orchestra of perfumes. In flowers
+he prefers the real flowers that imitate artificial ones. It is the
+monstrosities of nature, the offspring of unnatural adulteries, that he
+cherishes in the barbarically coloured flowers, the plants with barbaric
+names, the carnivorous plants of the Antilles--morbid horrors of
+vegetation, chosen, not for their beauty, but for their strangeness. And
+his imagination plays harmonies on the sense of taste, like combinations
+of music, from the flute-like sweetness of anisette, the trumpet-note of
+kirsch, the eager yet velvety sharpness of curaçao, the clarionet. He
+combines scents, weaving them into odorous melodies, with effects like
+those of the refrains of certain poems, employing, for example, the
+method of Baudelaire in _L'Irréparable_ and _Le Balcon_, where the last
+line of the stanza is the echo of the first, in the languorous
+progression of the melody. And above all he has his few, carefully
+chosen pictures, with their diverse notes of strange beauty and strange
+terror--the two Salomés of Gustave Moreau, the 'Religious Persecutions'
+of Jan Luyken, the opium-dreams of Odilon Redon. His favourite artist is
+Gustave Moreau, and it is on this superb and disquieting picture that he
+cares chiefly to dwell.
+
+
+     A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath
+     innumerable arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman
+     pillars, enamelled with vari-coloured bricks, set with mosaics,
+     incrusted with lapis lazuli and sardonyx, in a palace like the
+     basilica of an architecture at once Mussulman and Byzantine. In the
+     centre of the tabernacle surmounting the altar, fronted with rows
+     of circular steps, sat the Tetrarch Herod, the tiara on his head,
+     his legs pressed together, his hands on his knees. His face was
+     yellow, parchment-like, annulated with wrinkles, withered with age;
+     his long beard floated like a white cloud on the jewelled stars
+     that constellated the robe of netted gold across his breast. Around
+     this statue, motionless, frozen in the sacred pose of a Hindu god,
+     perfumes burned, throwing out clouds of vapour, pierced, as by the
+     phosphorescent eyes of animals, by the fire of precious stones set
+     in the sides of the throne; then the vapour mounted, unrolling
+     itself beneath arches where the blue smoke mingled with the
+     powdered gold of great sunrays, fallen from the domes.
+
+     In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of
+     this church, Salomé, her left arm extended in a gesture of command,
+     her bent right arm holding at the level of the face a great lotus,
+     advances slowly to the sound of a guitar, thrummed by a woman who
+     crouches on the floor.
+
+     With collected, solemn, almost august countenance, she begins the
+     lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses of the aged
+     Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of the
+     whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her
+     skin, her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal
+     robe, sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold,
+     the jewelled breast-plate, whose every stitch is a precious stone,
+     bursts into flame, scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the
+     ivory-toned, tea-rose flesh, like splendid insects with dazzling
+     wings, marbled with carmine, dotted with morning gold, diapered
+     with steel-blue, streaked with peacock-green.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des
+     Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman
+     Salomé that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing-girl
+     who, with the corrupt torsion of her limbs, tears a cry of desire
+     from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her palpitating
+     body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the will, of a
+     king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the
+     goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among
+     many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has
+     hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,
+     insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near to
+     her, all that look upon her, all that she touches.
+
+
+It is in such a 'Palace of Art' that Des Esseintes would recreate his
+already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion
+is only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. This
+one episode of action, this one touch of realism, in a book given over
+to the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projected
+voyage to London, a voyage that never occurs. Des Esseintes has been
+reading Dickens, idly, to quiet his nerves, and the violent colours of
+those ultra-British scenes and characters have imposed themselves upon
+his imagination. Days of rain and fog complete the picture of that _pays
+de brume et de boue_, and suddenly, stung by the unwonted desire for
+change, he takes the train to Paris, resolved to distract himself by a
+visit to London. Arrived in Paris before his time, he takes a cab to the
+office of _Galignani's Messenger_, fancying himself, as the rain-drops
+rattle on the roof and the mud splashes against the windows, already in
+the midst of the immense city, its smoke and dirt. He reaches
+_Galignani's Messenger_, and there, turning over Baedekers and Murrays,
+loses himself in dreams of an imagined London. He buys a Baedeker, and,
+to pass the time, enters the 'Bodéga' at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli
+and the Rue Castiglione. The wine-cellar is crowded with Englishmen: he
+sees, as he drinks his port, and listens to the unfamiliar accents, all
+the characters of Dickens--a whole England of caricature; as he drinks
+his Amontillado, the recollection of Poe puts a new horror into the
+good-humoured faces about him. Leaving the 'Bodéga,' he steps out again
+into the rain-swept street, regains his cab, and drives to the English
+tavern of the Rue d'Amsterdam. He has just time for dinner, and he finds
+a place beside the _insulaires_, with 'their porcelain eyes, their
+crimson cheeks,' and orders a heavy English dinner, which he washes down
+with ale and porter, seasoning his coffee, as he imagines we do in
+England, with gin. As time passes, and the hour of the train draws near,
+he begins to reflect vaguely on his project; he recalls the disillusion
+of the visit he had once paid to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion
+await him in London? 'Why travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a
+chair? Was he not at London already, since its odours, its atmosphere,
+its inhabitants, its food, its utensils, were all about him?' The train
+is due, but he does not stir. 'I have felt and seen,' he says to
+himself, 'what I wanted to feel and see. I have been saturated with
+English life all this time; it would be madness to lose, by a clumsy
+change of place, these imperishable sensations.' So he gathers together
+his luggage, and goes home again, resolving never to abandon the 'docile
+phantasmagoria of the brain' for the mere realities of the actual world.
+But his nervous malady, one of whose symptoms had driven him forth and
+brought him back so spasmodically, is on the increase. He is seized by
+hallucinations, haunted by sounds: the hysteria of Schumann, the morbid
+exaltation of Berlioz, communicate themselves to him in the music that
+besieges his brain. Obliged at last to send for a doctor, we find him,
+at the end of the book, ordered back to Paris, to the normal life, the
+normal conditions, with just that chance of escape from death or
+madness. So suggestively, so instructively, closes the record of a
+strange, attractive folly--in itself partly a serious ideal (which
+indeed is Huysmans' own), partly the caricature of that ideal. Des
+Esseintes, though studied from a real man, who is known to those who
+know a certain kind of society in Paris, is a type rather than a man: he
+is the offspring of the Decadent art that he adores, and this book a
+sort of breviary for its worshippers. It has a place of its own in the
+literature of the day, for it sums up, not only a talent, but a
+spiritual epoch.
+
+_A Rebours_ is a book that can only be written once, and since that date
+Huysmans has published a short story, _Un Dilemme_ (1887), which is
+merely a somewhat lengthy anecdote; two novels, _En Rade_ (1887) and
+_Là-Bas_ (1891), both of which are interesting experiments, but neither
+of them an entire success; and a volume of art criticism, _Certains_
+(1890), notable for a single splendid essay, that on Félicien Rops, the
+etcher of the fantastically erotic. _En Rade_ is a sort of deliberately
+exaggerated record--vision rather than record--of the disillusions of a
+country sojourn, as they affect the disordered nerves of a town
+_névrose_. The narrative is punctuated by nightmares, marvellously woven
+out of nothing, and with no psychological value--the human part of the
+book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representation
+of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of the
+country. There is a cat which becomes interesting in its agonies; but
+the long boredom of the man and woman is only too faithfully shared with
+the reader. _Là-Bas_ is a more artistic creation, on a more solid
+foundation. It is a study of Satanism, a dexterous interweaving of the
+history of Gilles de Retz (the traditional Bluebeard) with the
+contemporary manifestations of the Black Art. 'The execration of
+impotence, the hate of the mediocre--that is perhaps one of the most
+indulgent definitions of Diabolism,' says Huysmans, somewhere in the
+book, and it is on this side that one finds the link of connection with
+the others of that series of pessimist studies in life. _Un naturalisme
+spiritualiste_, he defines his own art at this point in its development;
+and it is in somewhat the 'documentary' manner that he applies himself
+to the study of these strange problems, half of hysteria, half of a real
+mystical corruption that does actually exist in our midst. I do not
+know whether the monstrous tableau of the Black Mass--so marvellously,
+so revoltingly described in the central episode of the book--is still
+enacted in our days, but I do know that all but the most horrible
+practices of the sacrilegious magic of the Middle Ages are yet
+performed, from time to time, in a secrecy which is all but absolute.
+The character of Madame Chantelouve is an attempt, probably the first in
+literature, to diagnose a case of Sadism in a woman. To say that it is
+successful would be to assume that the thing is possible, which one
+hesitates to do. The book is even more disquieting, to the normal mind,
+than _A Rebours_. But it is not, like that, the study of an exception
+which has become a type. It is the study of an exception which does not
+profess to be anything but a disease.
+
+Huysmans' place in contemporary literature is not quite easy to
+estimate. There is a danger of being too much attracted, or too much
+repelled, by those qualities of deliberate singularity which make his
+work, sincere expression as it is of his own personality, so artificial
+and _recherché_ in itself. With his pronounced, exceptional
+characteristics, it would have been impossible for him to write fiction
+impersonally, or to range himself, for long, in any school, under any
+master. Interrogated one day as to his opinion of Naturalism, he had but
+to say in reply: _Au fond, il y a des écrivains qui ont du talent et
+d'autres qui n'en ont pas, qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques,
+décadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, ça m'est égal! il s'agit pour moi
+d'avoir du talent, et voilà tout!_ But, as we have seen, he has
+undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first he
+has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and, even in
+_Le Drageoir à Epices_, we find such daring combinations as this
+(_Camaïeu Rouge_)--_Cette fanfare de rouge m'étourdissait; cette gamme
+d'une intensité furieuse, d'une violence inouïe, m'aveuglait._ Working
+upon the foundation of Flaubert and of Goncourt, the two great modern
+stylists, he has developed an intensely personal style of his own, in
+which the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the sense of colour.
+He manipulates the French language with a freedom sometimes barbarous,
+'dragging his images by the heels or the hair' (in the admirable phrase
+of Léon Bloy) 'up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified
+syntax,' gaining, certainly, the effects at which he aims. He possesses,
+in the highest degree, that _style tacheté et faisandé_--high-flavoured
+and spotted with corruption--that he attributes to Goncourt and
+Verlaine. And with this audacious and barbaric profusion of
+words--chosen always for their colour and their vividly expressive
+quality--he is able to describe the essentially modern aspects of things
+as no one had ever described them before. No one before him had ever so
+realised the perverse charm of the sordid, the perverse charm of the
+artificial. Exceptional always, it is for such qualities as these,
+rather than for the ordinary qualities of the novelist, that he is
+remarkable. His stories are without incident, they are constructed to go
+on until they stop, they are almost without characters. His psychology
+is a matter of the sensations, and chiefly the visual sensations. The
+moral nature is ignored, the emotions resolve themselves for the most
+part into a sordid ennui, rising at times into a rage at existence. The
+protagonist of every book is not so much a character as a bundle of
+impressions and sensations--the vague outline of a single consciousness,
+his own. But it is that single consciousness--in this morbidly personal
+writer--with which we are concerned. For Huysmans' novels, with all
+their strangeness, their charm, their repulsion, typical too, as they
+are, of much beside himself, are certainly the expression of a
+personality as remarkable as that of any contemporary writer.
+
+1892.
+
+
+
+
+TWO SYMBOLISTS
+
+
+_Un livre comme je ne les aime pas_, says Mallarmé characteristically
+(_ceux épars et privés d'architecture_) of this long expected first
+volume of collected prose, _Divagations_, in which we find the prose
+poems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers de
+l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; the
+marvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and the
+theatrical spectacle, comparatively early in date; _Richard Wagner:
+rêverie d'un Poète français, Le Mystère dans les Lettres_; and, under
+various titles, the surprising _Variations sur un Sujet_. The hesitation
+of a lifetime having been, it would seem, overcome, we are at last able
+to read Mallarmé's 'doctrine,' if not altogether as he would have us
+read it. And we are at last able, without too much injustice, to judge
+him as a writer of prose.
+
+In saying that this volume is the most beautiful and the most valuable
+which has found its way into my hands for I know not how long, I shall
+not pretend to have read it with ease, or to have understood every word
+of it. _D'exhiber les choses à un imperturbable premier plan, en
+camelots, activés par la pression de l'instant, d'accord--écrire, dans
+le cas pourquoi, indûment, sauf pour étaler la banalité; plutôt que
+tendre le nuage, précieux, flottant sur l'intime gouffre de chaque
+pensée, vu que vulgaire l'est ce à quoi on décerne, pas plus, un
+caractère immédiat._ No, it has always been to that _labyrinthe illuminé
+par des fleurs_ that Mallarmé has felt it due to their own dignity to
+invite his readers. To their own dignity, and also to his. Mallarmé is
+obscure, not so much because he writes differently as because he thinks
+differently from other people. His mind is elliptical, and (relying on
+the intelligence of his readers) he emphasises the effect of what is
+unlike other people in his mind by resolutely ignoring even the links of
+connection that exist between them. Never having aimed at popularity, he
+has never needed, as most writers need, to make the first advances. He
+has made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who after all
+need not read him. And when he has spoken he has not considered it
+needful or seemly to listen in order that he might hear whether he was
+heard. To the charge of obscurity he replies, with sufficient disdain,
+that there are many who do not know how to read--except the newspapers,
+he adds, in one of those disconcerting, oddly printed parentheses, which
+make his work, to those who can rightly apprehend it, so full of wise
+limitations, so safe from hasty or seemingly final conclusions. No one
+in our time has more significantly vindicated the supreme right of the
+artist in the aristocracy of letters; wilfully, perhaps, not always
+wisely, but nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk from that
+making of himself 'a motley to the view,' that handing over of his naked
+soul to the laughter of the multitude? but who in our time has wrought
+so subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick cloud
+on the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had the wisdom
+to hide their secret in the obscurity of double meanings or of what has
+seemed meaningless; and might it not after all be the finest epitaph for
+a self-respecting man of letters to be able to say, even after the
+writing of many books: I have kept my secret, I have not betrayed myself
+to the crowd?
+
+It has been the distinction of Mallarmé that he has always aspired after
+an impossible liberation of the soul of literature from what is fretting
+and constraining in 'the body of that death,' which is the mere
+literature of words. Words, he has realised, are of value only as
+notations of the free breath of the spirit; words, therefore, must be
+employed with an extreme care in their choice and adjustment, in setting
+them to reflect and chime upon one another; yet least of all things for
+their own sake, for the sake of what they can never, except by
+suggestion, express. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use of
+words--that seeming artificiality which comes from using words as if
+they had never been used before, that chimerical search after the
+virginity of language--is but the paradoxical outward sign of an extreme
+discontent with even the best of their service. Writers who use words
+fluently, seeming to disregard their importance, do so from an
+unconscious confidence in their expressiveness, which the scrupulous
+thinker, the precise dreamer, can never place in the most carefully
+chosen among them. To evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of
+language, without the formality of an after all impossible description;
+to be, in fact, rather than to express; that is what Mallarmé has
+consistently, and from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has
+sought this wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of
+dreams, over more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the
+depths of many forests, far from the sunlight. He would be the last to
+permit me to say that he has found what he sought; but (is it possible
+to avoid saying?) how heroic a search, and what marvellous discoveries,
+by the way!
+
+Yes, all these, he admits perhaps proudly, are divagations, and the
+secret, eternal, and only beauty is not yet found. Is it, perhaps, in a
+mood, a momentary mood, really of discouragement, that he has consented
+to the publication--the 'showing off,' within covers, as of goods in a
+shop-window: it is his own image--of these fragmentary suggestions
+towards a complete Æsthetic? Beautiful and invaluable I find them; here
+and there final; and always, in form, hieratic.
+
+Certain writers, in whom the artist's contempt for common things has
+been carried to its utmost limit, should only be read in books of
+beautiful and slightly unusual form. Perhaps of all modern writers
+Villiers and Mallarmé have most carefully sought the most remote ideal,
+and seem most to require some elaborate presentation to the reader.
+Mallarmé, indeed, delighted in heaping up obstacles in the reader's way,
+not only in the concealment of his meaning by style, but in a furtive,
+fragmentary, and only too luxurious method of publication, which made it
+difficult for most people to get his books at all, even for unlimited
+money. Villiers, on the contrary, after publishing his first book, the
+_Premières Poésies_ of 1859, in the delicate type of Perrin of Lyons, on
+ribbed paper, with old gold covers, became careless as to how his books
+appeared, and has to be read in a disorderly crowd of volumes, some of
+them as hideous as the original edition of _L'Eve Future_, with its red
+stars and streaks, its Apollo and Cupid and grey city landscape. It is
+therefore with singular pleasure that one finds the two beautiful books
+which have lately been published by M. Deman, the well-known publisher
+of Rops: one, the fullest collection of Mallarmé's poems which has ever
+been published, the other a selection of twenty stories by Villiers. The
+Mallarmé is white and red, the poems printed in italics, a frontispiece
+by Rops; the Villiers is a large square volume in shimmering dark green
+and gold, with headpieces and tailpieces, in two tints, by Th. van
+Rysselberghe. These scrolls and titles are done with a sort of reverent
+self-suppression, as if, for once, decoration existed for a book and not
+the book for the decoration, which is hardly the quality for which
+modern decorators are most conspicuous.
+
+In the _Poésies_ we have, no doubt, Mallarmé's final selection from his
+own poems. Some of it is even new. The magnificent and mysterious
+fragment of _Hérodiade_, his masterpiece, perhaps, is, though not indeed
+completed, more than doubled in length by the addition of a long passage
+on which he was at work almost to the time of his death. It is curious
+to note that the new passage is written in exactly the style of the
+older passage, though in the interval between the writing of the one and
+the writing of the other Mallarmé had completely changed his style. By
+an effort of will he had thought himself back into an earlier style, and
+the two fragments join without an apparent seam. There were, it appears,
+still a hymn or lyric spoken by St. John and a concluding monologue, to
+be added to the poem; but we have at least the whole of the dialogue
+between Hérodiade and the Nurse, certainly a poem sufficiently complete
+in itself. The other new pieces are in the latest manner, mainly without
+punctuation; they would scarcely be alluring, one imagines, even if
+punctuated. In the course of a few centuries, I am convinced, every line
+of Mallarmé will have become perfectly clear, as a corrupt Greek text
+becomes clear in time. Even now a learned commentator could probably do
+much to explain them, at the cost of a life-long labour; but scholars
+only give up their lives to the difficult authors of a remote past.
+Mallarmé can afford to wait; he will not be forgotten; and for us of the
+present there are the clear and lovely early poems, so delightfully
+brought together in the white and red book.
+
+_L'insensibilité de l'azur et des pierres_: a serene and gem-like
+quality, entirely his own, is in all these poems, in which a particular
+kind of French verse realises its ideal. Mallarmé is the poet of a few,
+a limited poet, perfect within his limits as the Chinese artist of his
+own symbol. In a beautiful poem he compares himself to the painter of
+tea-cups who spends his life in painting a strange flower
+
+
+     _Sur ses tasses de neige à la lune ravie_,
+
+
+a flower which has perfumed his whole existence, since, as a child, he
+had felt it graft itself upon the 'blue filigree of his soul.'
+
+A very different image must be sought if we wish to sum up the
+characteristics of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. An uncertain artist, he was
+a man of passionate and lofty genius, and he has left us a great mass of
+imperfect work, out of which we have to form for ourselves whatever
+notion we can of a man greater than his work. My first impression, on
+looking at the twenty stories which make up the present selection, was
+that the selection had been badly made. Where is _Les Demoiselles de
+Bienfilâtre_? I asked myself, remembering that little ironical
+masterpiece; where is _Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes_, with its
+subtlety of horror; _Sentimentalisme_, with its tragic and tender
+modernity; _La Reine Ysabeau_, with its sombre and taciturn intensity?
+Story after story came into my mind, finer, it seemed to me, in the
+artistic qualities of the story than many of those selected. Second
+thoughts inclined me to think that the selection could scarcely have
+been better. For it is a selection made after a plan, and it shows us,
+not indeed always Villiers at his best as a story-teller, but,
+throughout, Villiers at his highest point of elevation; the man whom we
+are always trying to see through his work, and the man as he would have
+seen himself. There is not a collection of stories in French of greater
+nobility than these _Histoires Souveraines_ in which a regal pomp of
+speech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers who
+mocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; the
+idealist is at home in his own world, among his ideals.
+
+1897, 1899.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+
+
+Baudelaire is little known and much misunderstood in England. Only one
+English writer has ever done him justice, or said anything adequate
+about him. As long ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire to
+English readers: in the columns of the _Spectator_, it is amusing to
+remember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise in
+his book on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy on
+his death, _Ave atque Vale_. There have been occasional outbreaks of
+irrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generally
+mis-spelled) is the journalist's handiest brickbat for hurling at random
+in the name of respectability. Does all this mean that we are waking up,
+over here, to the consciousness of one of the great literary forces of
+the age, a force which has been felt in every other country but ours?
+
+It would be a useful influence for us. Baudelaire desired perfection,
+and we have never realised that perfection is a thing to aim at. He only
+did what he could do supremely well, and he was in poverty all his life,
+not because he would not work, but because he would work only at certain
+things, the things which he could hope to do to his own satisfaction. Of
+the men of letters of our age he was the most scrupulous. He spent his
+whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry
+has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a
+fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which
+his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a
+marvellous original. What would French poetry be to-day if Baudelaire
+had never existed? As different a thing from what it is as English
+poetry would be without Rossetti. Neither of them is quite among the
+greatest poets, but they are more fascinating than the greatest, they
+influence more minds. And Baudelaire was an equally great critic. He
+discovered Poe, Wagner, and Manet. Where even Sainte-Beuve, with his
+vast materials, his vast general talent for criticism, went wrong in
+contemporary judgments, Baudelaire was infallibly right. He wrote
+neither verse nor prose with ease, but he would not permit himself to
+write either without inspiration. His work is without abundance, but it
+is without waste. It is made out of his whole intellect and all his
+nerves. Every poem is a train of thought and every essay is the record
+of sensation. This 'romantic' had something classic in his moderation, a
+moderation which becomes at times as terrifying as Poe's logic. To
+'cultivate one's hysteria' so calmly, and to affront the reader
+(_Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère_) as a judge rather than
+as a penitent; to be a casuist in confession; to be so much a moralist,
+with so keen a sense of the ecstasy of evil: that has always bewildered
+the world, even in his own country, where the artist is allowed to live
+as experimentally as he writes. Baudelaire lived and died solitary,
+secret, a confessor of sins who has never told the whole truth, _le
+mauvais moine_ of his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the
+brothel.
+
+To understand, not Baudelaire, but what we can of him, we must read, not
+only the four volumes of his collected works, but every document in
+Crépet's _Oeuvres Posthumes_, and, above all, the letters, and these
+have only now been collected into a volume, under the care of an editor
+who has done more for Baudelaire than any one since Crépet. Baudelaire
+put into his letters only what he cared to reveal of himself at a given
+moment: he has a different angle to distract the sight of every
+observer; and let no one think that he knows Baudelaire when he has read
+the letters to Poulet-Malassis, the friend and publisher, to whom he
+showed his business side, or the letters to la Présidente, the
+touchstone of his _spleen et idéal_, his chief experiment in the higher
+sentiments. Some of his carefully hidden virtues peep out at moments, it
+is true, but nothing that everybody has not long been aware of. We hear
+of his ill-luck with money, with proof-sheets, with his own health. The
+tragedy of the life which he chose, as he chose all things (poetry,
+Jeanne Duval, the 'artificial paradises') deliberately, is made a little
+clearer to us; we can moralise over it if we like. But the man remains
+baffling, and will probably never be discovered.
+
+As it is, much of the value of the book consists in those glimpses into
+his mind and intentions which he allowed people now and then to see.
+Writing to Sainte-Beuve, to Flaubert, to Soulary, he sometimes lets out,
+through mere sensitiveness to an intelligence capable of understanding
+him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that he
+defines and explains the origin and real meaning of the _Petits Poèmes
+en Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur
+constante (bonne humeur nécessaire, même pour traiter des sujets
+tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules,
+de musiques, de réverbères même, voilà ce que j'ai voulu faire!_ And,
+writing to some obscure person, he will take the trouble to be even more
+explicit, as in this symbol of the sonnet: _Avez-vous observé qu'un
+morceau de ciel aperçu par un soupirail, ou entre deux cheminées, deux
+rochers, ou par une arcade, donnait une idée plus profonde de l'infini
+que le grand panorama vu du haul d'une montagne?_ It is to another
+casual person that he speaks out still more intimately (and the occasion
+of his writing is some thrill of gratitude towards one who had at last
+done 'a little justice,' not to himself, but to Manet): _Eh bien! on
+m'accuse, moi, d'imiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si
+patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il me ressemblait. La première fois que
+j'ai ouvert un livre de lui, j'ai vu avec épouvante et ravissement, non
+seulement des sujets rêvés par moi, mais des phrases, pensées par moi,
+et écrites par lui, vingt ans auparavant._ It is in such glimpses as
+these that we see something of Baudelaire in his letters.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+WALTER PATER
+
+
+Writing about Botticelli, in that essay which first interpreted
+Botticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after naming the supreme
+artists, Michelangelo or Leonardo:
+
+
+     But, besides these great men, there is a certain number of artists
+     who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us
+     a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and
+     these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be
+     interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and
+     are often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration
+     wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the
+     stress of a great name and authority.
+
+
+It is among these rare artists, so much more interesting, to many, than
+the very greatest, that Pater belongs; and he can only be properly
+understood, loved, or even measured by those to whom it is 'the
+delicacies of fine literature' that chiefly appeal. There have been
+greater prose-writers in our language, even in our time; but he was, as
+Mallarmé called him, 'le prosateur ouvragé par excellence de ce temps.'
+For strangeness and subtlety of temperament, for rarity and delicacy of
+form, for something incredibly attractive to those who felt his
+attraction, he was as unique in our age as Botticelli in the great age
+of Raphael. And he, too, above all to those who knew him, can scarcely
+fail to become, not only 'the object of a special diligence,' but also
+of 'a consideration wholly affectionate,' not lessened by the slowly
+increasing 'stress of authority' which is coming to be laid, almost by
+the world in general, on his name.
+
+In the work of Pater, thought moves to music, and does all its hard work
+as if in play. And Pater seems to listen for his thought, and to
+overhear it, as the poet overhears his song in the air. It is like
+music, and has something of the character of poetry, yet, above all, it
+is precise, individual, thought filtered through a temperament; and it
+comes to us as it does because the style which clothes and fits it is a
+style in which, to use some of his own words, 'the writer succeeds in
+saying what he _wills_.'
+
+The style of Pater has been praised and blamed for its particular
+qualities of colour, harmony, weaving; but it has not always, or often,
+been realised that what is most wonderful in the style is precisely its
+adaptability to every shade of meaning or intention, its extraordinary
+closeness in following the turns of thought, the waves of sensation, in
+the man himself. Everything in Pater was in harmony, when you got
+accustomed to its particular forms of expression: the heavy frame, so
+slow and deliberate in movement, so settled in repose; the timid and yet
+scrutinising eyes; the mannered, yet so personal, voice; the precise,
+pausing speech, with its urbanity, its almost painful conscientiousness
+of utterance; the whole outer mask, in short, worn for protection and
+out of courtesy, yet moulded upon the inner truth of nature like a mask
+moulded upon the features which it covers. And the books are the man,
+literally the man in many accents, turns of phrase; and, far more than
+that, the man himself, whom one felt through his few, friendly,
+intimate, serious words: the inner life of his soul coming close to us,
+in a slow and gradual revelation.
+
+He has said, in the first essay of his which we have:
+
+
+     The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires
+     only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer
+     and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life, not simply
+     expressive of the inward, becomes thinner and thinner.
+
+
+And Pater seemed to draw up into himself every form of earthly beauty,
+or of the beauty made by men, and many forms of knowledge and wisdom,
+and a sense of human things which was neither that of the lover nor of
+the priest, but partly of both; and his work was the giving out of all
+this again, with a certain labour to give it wholly. It is all, the
+criticism, and the stories, and the writing about pictures and places, a
+confession, the _vraie vérité_ (as he was fond of saying) about the
+world in which he lived. That world he thought was open to all; he was
+sure that it was the real blue and green earth, and that he caught the
+tangible moments as they passed. It was a world into which we can only
+look, not enter, for none of us have his secret. But part of his secret
+was in the gift and cultivation of a passionate temperance, an
+unrelaxing attentiveness to whatever was rarest and most delightful in
+passing things.
+
+In Pater logic is of the nature of ecstasy, and ecstasy never soars
+wholly beyond the reach of logic. Pater is keen in pointing out the
+liberal and spendthrift weakness of Coleridge in his thirst for the
+absolute, his 'hunger for eternity,' and for his part he is content to
+set all his happiness, and all his mental energies, on a relative basis,
+on a valuation of the things of eternity under the form of time. He asks
+for no 'larger flowers' than the best growth of the earth; but he would
+choose them flower by flower, and for himself. He finds life worth just
+living, a thing satisfying in itself, if you are careful to extract its
+essence, moment by moment, not in any calculated 'hedonism,' even of the
+mind, but in a quiet, discriminating acceptance of whatever is
+beautiful, active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew older he
+added something more like a Stoic sense of 'duty' to the old, properly
+and severely Epicurean doctrine of 'pleasure.' Pleasure was never, for
+Pater, less than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not
+merely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious from the first,
+and had always to be served with a strict ritual. 'Only be sure it is
+passion,' he said of that spirit of divine motion to which he appealed
+for the quickening of our sense of life, our sense of ourselves; be
+sure, he said, 'that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened,
+multiplied consciousness.' What he cared most for at all times was that
+which could give 'the highest quality to our moments as they pass'; he
+differed only, to a certain extent, in his estimation of what that was.
+'The herb, the wine, the gem' of the preface to the _Renaissance_ tended
+more and more to become, under less outward symbols of perfection, 'the
+discovery, the new faculty, the privileged apprehension' by which 'the
+imaginative regeneration of the world' should be brought about, or even,
+at times, a brooding over 'what the soul passes, and must pass, through,
+_aux abois_ with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious powers
+that may really occupy it.'
+
+
+When I first met Pater he was nearly fifty. I did not meet him for about
+two years after he had been writing to me, and his first letter reached
+me when I was just over twenty-one. I had been writing verse all my
+life, and what Browning was to me in verse Pater, from about the age of
+seventeen, had been to me in prose. Meredith made the third; but his
+form of art was not, I knew never could be, mine. Verse, I suppose,
+requires no teaching, but it was from reading Pater's _Studies in the
+History of the Renaissance_, in its first edition on ribbed paper (I
+have the feel of it still in my fingers), that I realised that prose
+also could be a fine art. That book opened a new world to me, or,
+rather, gave me the key or secret of the world in which I was living. It
+taught me that there was a beauty besides the beauty of what one calls
+inspiration, and comes and goes, and cannot be caught or followed; that
+life (which had seemed to me of so little moment) could be itself a work
+of art; from that book I realised for the first time that there was
+anything interesting or vital in the world besides poetry and music. I
+caught from it an unlimited curiosity, or, at least, the direction of
+curiosity into definite channels.
+
+The knowledge that there was such a person as Pater in the world, an
+occasional letter from him, an occasional meeting, and, gradually, the
+definite encouragement of my work in which, for some years, he was
+unfailingly generous and attentive, meant more to me, at that time, than
+I can well indicate, or even realise, now. It was through him that my
+first volume of verse was published; and it was through his influence
+and counsels that I trained myself to be infinitely careful in all
+matters of literature. Influence and counsel were always in the
+direction of sanity, restraint, precision.
+
+I remember a beautiful phrase which he once made up, in his delaying
+way, with 'wells' and 'no doubts' in it, to describe, and to describe
+supremely, a person whom I had seemed to him to be disparaging. 'He
+does,' he said meditatively, 'remind me of, well, of a steam-engine
+stuck in the mud. But he is so enthusiastic!' Pater liked people to be
+enthusiastic, but, with him, enthusiasm was an ardent quietude, guarded
+by the wary humour that protects the sensitive. He looked upon undue
+earnestness, even in outward manner, in a world through which the artist
+is bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand,' as bad form, which shocked
+him as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form of
+extravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: he
+suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less
+dislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words
+which he often used to express his distaste for things and people. He
+never would have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because of what
+seemed to him perhaps unnecessarily 'sordid' in their lives. It pained
+him, as it pains some people, perhaps only because they are more acutely
+sensitive than others, to walk through mean streets, where people are
+poor, miserable, and hopeless.
+
+And since I have mentioned Verlaine, I may say that what Pater most
+liked in poetry was the very opposite of such work as that of Verlaine,
+which he might have been supposed likely to like. I do not think it was
+actually one of Verlaine's poems, but something done after his manner in
+English, that some reviewer once quoted, saying: 'That, to our mind,
+would be Mr. Pater's ideal of poetry.' Pater said to me, with a sad
+wonder, 'I simply don't know what he meant.' What he liked in poetry was
+something even more definite than can be got in prose; and he valued
+poets like Dante and like Rossetti for their 'delight in concrete
+definition,' not even quite seeing the ultimate magic of such things as
+_Kubla Khan_, which he omitted in a brief selection from the poetry of
+Coleridge. In the most interesting letter which I ever had from him, the
+only letter which went to six pages, he says:
+
+
+                                                12 EARL'S TERRACE,
+                                                    KENSINGTON, W.,
+                                                       _Jan. 8, 1888._
+
+     MY DEAR MR. SYMONS,--I feel much flattered at your choosing me as
+     an arbiter in the matter of your literary work, and thank you for
+     the pleasure I have had in reading carefully the two poems you have
+     sent me. I don't use the word 'arbiter' loosely for 'critic'; but
+     suppose a real controversy, on the question whether you shall spend
+     your best energies in writing verse, between your poetic
+     aspirations on the one side, and prudence (calculating results) on
+     the other. Well! judging by these two pieces, I should say that you
+     have a poetic talent remarkable, especially at the present day, for
+     precise and intellectual grasp on the matter it deals with.
+     Rossetti, I believe, said that the value of every artistic product
+     was in direct proportion to the amount of purely intellectual force
+     that went to the initial conception of it: and it is just this
+     intellectual conception which seems to me to be so conspicuously
+     wanting in what, in some ways, is the most characteristic verse of
+     our time, especially that of our secondary poets. In your own
+     pieces, particularly in your MS. 'A Revenge,' I find Rossetti's
+     requirement fulfilled, and should anticipate great things from one
+     who has the talent of conceiving his motive with so much firmness
+     and tangibility--with that close logic, if I may say so, which is
+     an element in any genuinely imaginative process. It is clear to me
+     that you aim at this, and it is what gives your verses, to my mind,
+     great interest. Otherwise, I think the two pieces of unequal
+     excellence, greatly preferring 'A Revenge' to 'Bell in Camp.'
+     Reserving some doubt whether the watch, as the lover's gift, is not
+     a little bourgeois, I think this piece worthy of any poet. It has
+     that aim of concentration and organic unity which I value greatly
+     both in prose and verse. 'Bell in Camp' pleases me less, for the
+     same reason which makes me put Rossetti's 'Jenny,' and some of
+     Browning's pathetic-satiric pieces, below the rank which many
+     assign them. In no one of the poems I am thinking of, is the
+     inherent sordidness of everything in the persons supposed, except
+     the one poetic trait then under treatment, quite forgotten.
+     Otherwise, I feel the pathos, the humour, of the piece (in the
+     full sense of the word humour) and the skill with which you have
+     worked out your motive therein. I think the present age an
+     unfavourable one to poets, at least in England. The young poet
+     comes into a generation which has produced a large amount of
+     first-rate poetry, and an enormous amount of good secondary poetry.
+     You know I give a high place to the literature of prose as a fine
+     art, and therefore hope you won't think me brutal in saying that
+     the admirable qualities of your verse are those also of imaginative
+     prose; as I think is the case also with much of Browning's finest
+     verse. I should say, make prose your principal _métier_, as a man
+     of letters, and publish your verse as a more intimate gift for
+     those who already value you for your pedestrian work in literature.
+     I should think you ought to find no difficulty in finding a
+     publisher for poems such as those you have sent to me.
+
+     I am more than ever anxious to meet you. Letters are such poor
+     means of communication. Don't come to London without making an
+     appointment to come and see me here.--Very sincerely yours,
+
+                                                      WALTER PATER.
+
+
+'Browning, one of my best-loved writers,' is a phrase I find in his
+first letter to me, in December 1886, thanking me for a little book on
+Browning which I had just published. There is, I think, no mention of
+any other writer except Shakespeare (besides the reference to Rossetti
+which I have just quoted) in any of the fifty or sixty letters which I
+have from him. Everything that is said about books is a direct matter of
+business: work which he was doing, of which he tells me, or which I was
+doing, about which he advises and encourages me.
+
+In practical things Pater was wholly vague, troubled by their
+persistence when they pressed upon him. To wrap up a book to send by
+post was an almost intolerable effort, and he had another reason for
+hesitating. 'I take your copy of Shakespeare's sonnets with me,' he
+writes in June 1889, 'hoping to be able to restore it to you there lest
+it should get bruised by transit through the post.' He wrote letters
+with distaste, never really well, and almost always with excuses or
+regrets in them: 'Am so over-burdened (my time, I mean) just now with
+pupils, lectures, and the making thereof'; or, with hopes for a meeting:
+'Letters are such poor means of communication: when are we to meet?' or,
+as a sort of hasty makeshift: 'I send this prompt answer, for I know by
+experience that when I delay my delays are apt to be lengthy.' A review
+took him sometimes a year to get through; and remained in the end, like
+his letters, a little cramped, never finished to the point of ease, like
+his published writings. To lecture was a great trial to him. Two of the
+three lectures which I have heard in my life were given by Pater, one on
+Mérimée, at the London Institution, in November 1890, and the other on
+Raphael, at Toynbee Hall, in 1892. I never saw a man suffer a severer
+humiliation. The act of reading his written lecture was an agony which
+communicated itself to the main part of the audience. Before going into
+the hall at Whitechapel he had gone into a church to compose his mind a
+little, between the discomfort of the underground railway and the
+distress of the lecture-hall.
+
+In a room, if he was not among very intimate friends, Pater was rarely
+quite at his ease, but he liked being among people, and he made the
+greater satisfaction overcome the lesser reluctance. He was particularly
+fond of cats, and I remember one evening, when I had been dining with
+him in London, the quaint, solemn, and perfectly natural way in which he
+took up the great black Persian, kissed it, and set it down carefully
+again on his way upstairs. Once at Oxford he told me that M. Bourget had
+sent him the first volume of his _Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine_,
+and that the cat had got hold of the book and torn up the part
+containing the essay on Baudelaire, 'and as Baudelaire was such a lover
+of cats I thought she might have spared him!'
+
+We were talking once about fairs, and I had been saying how fond I was
+of them. He said: 'I am fond of them, too. I always go to fairs. I am
+getting to find they are very similar.' Then he began to tell me about
+the fairs in France, and I remember, as if it were an unpublished
+fragment in one of his stories, the minute, coloured impression of the
+booths, the little white horses of the 'roundabouts,' and the little
+wild beast shows, in which what had most struck him was the interest of
+the French peasant in the wolf, a creature he might have seen in his own
+woods. 'An English clown would not have looked at a wolf if he could
+have seen a tiger.'
+
+I once asked Pater if his family was really connected with that of the
+painter, Jean-Baptiste Pater. He said: 'I think so, I believe so, I
+always say so.' The relationship has never been verified, but one would
+like to believe it; to find something lineally Dutch in the English
+writer. It was, no doubt, through this kind of family interest that he
+came to work upon Goncourt's essay and the contemporary _Life of
+Watteau_ by the Count de Caylus, printed in the first series of _L'Art
+du XVIII^e Siècle_, out of which he has made certainly the most living
+of his _Imaginary Portraits_, that _Prince of Court Painters_ which is
+supposed to be the journal of a sister of Jean-Baptiste Pater, whom we
+see in one of Watteau's portraits in the Louvre. As far back as 1889[4]
+Pater was working towards a second volume of _Imaginary Portraits_, of
+which _Hippolytus Veiled_ was to have been one. He had another subject
+in Moroni's _Portrait of a Tailor_ in the National Gallery, whom he was
+going to make a Burgomaster; and another was to have been a study of
+life in the time of the Albigensian persecution. There was also to be a
+modern study: could this have been _Emerald Uthwart_? No doubt _Apollo
+in Picardy_, published in 1893, would have gone into the volume. _The
+Child in the House_, which was printed as an _Imaginary Portrait_, in
+_Macmillans Magazine_ in 1878, was really meant to be the first chapter
+of a romance which was to show 'the poetry of modern life,' something,
+he said, as _Aurora Leigh_ does. There is much personal detail in it,
+the red hawthorn, for instance, and he used to talk to me of the old
+house at Tunbridge, where his great-aunt lived, and where he spent much
+of his time when a child. He remembered the gipsies there, and their
+caravans, when they came down for the hop-picking; and the old lady in
+her large cap going out on the lawn to do battle with the surveyors who
+had come to mark out a railway across it; and his terror of the train,
+and of 'the red flag, which meant _blood_.' It was because he always
+dreamed of going on with it that he did not reprint this imaginary
+portrait in the book of _Imaginary Portraits_; but he did not go on with
+it because, having begun the long labour of _Marius_, it was out of his
+mind for many years, and when, in 1889, he still spoke of finishing it,
+he was conscious that he could never continue it in the same style, and
+that it would not be satisfactory to rewrite it in his severer, later
+manner. It remains, perhaps fortunately, a fragment, to which no
+continuation could ever add a more essential completeness.
+
+Style, in Pater, varied more than is generally supposed, in the course
+of his development, and, though never thought of as a thing apart from
+what it expresses, was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers,
+he said, 'make time to write English more as a learned language.' It has
+been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and Flaubert were among the chief
+'origins' of Pater's style; it is curiously significant that matter, in
+Pater, was developed before style, and that in the bare and angular
+outlines of the earliest fragment, _Diaphanéité_, there is already the
+substance which is to be clothed upon by beautiful and appropriate flesh
+in the _Studies in the Renaissance_. Ruskin, I never heard him mention,
+but I do not doubt that there, to the young man beginning to concern
+himself with beauty in art and literature, was at least a quickening
+influence. Of De Quincey he spoke with an admiration which I had
+difficulty in sharing, and I remember his showing me with pride a set of
+his works bound in half-parchment, with pale gold lettering on the white
+backs, and with the cinnamon edges which he was so fond of. Of Flaubert
+we rarely met without speaking. He thought _Julien l'Hospitalier_ as
+perfect as anything he had done. _L'Education Sentimentale_ was one of
+the books which he advised me to read; that, and _Le Rouge et le Noir_
+of Stendhal; and he spoke with particular admiration of two episodes in
+the former, the sickness and the death of the child. Of the Goncourts he
+spoke with admiration tempered by dislike. Their books often repelled
+him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things
+should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read
+_Madame Gervaisais_, and he spoke of _Chérie_ (for all its 'immodesty')
+as an admirable thing, and a model for all such studies.
+
+Once, as we were walking in Oxford, he pointed to a window and said,
+with a slow smile: 'That is where I get my Zolas.' He was always a
+little on his guard in respect of books; and, just as he read Flaubert
+and Goncourt because they were intellectual neighbours, so he could read
+Zola for mere pastime, knowing that there would be nothing there to
+distract him. I remember telling him about _The Story of an African
+Farm_, and of the wonderful human quality in it. He said, repeating his
+favourite formula: 'No doubt you are quite right; but I do not suppose I
+shall ever read it.' And he explained to me that he was always writing
+something, and that while he was writing he did not allow himself to
+read anything which might possibly affect him too strongly, by bringing
+a new current of emotion to bear upon him. He was quite content that his
+mind should 'keep as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world'; it
+was that prisoner's dream of a world that it was his whole business as a
+writer to remember, to perpetuate.
+
+1906.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[4] In this same year he intended to follow the _Appreciations_ by a
+volume of _Studies of Greek Remains_, in which he then meant to include
+the studies in Platonism, not yet written; and he had thought of putting
+together a volume of 'theory,' which was to include the essay on Style.
+In two or three years' time, he thought, _Gastom de Latour_ would be
+finished.
+
+
+
+
+THE GONCOURTS
+
+
+My first visit to Edmond de Goncourt was in May 1892. I remember my
+immense curiosity about that 'House Beautiful,' at Auteuil, of which I
+had heard so much, and my excitement as I rang the bell, and was shown
+at once into the garden, where Goncourt was just saying good-bye to some
+friends. He was carelessly dressed, without a collar, and with the usual
+loosely knotted large white scarf rolled round his neck. He was wearing
+a straw hat, and it was only afterwards that I could see the fine sweep
+of the white hair, falling across the forehead. I thought him the most
+distinguished-looking man of letters I had ever seen; for he had at once
+the distinction of race, of fine breeding, and of that delicate artistic
+genius which, with him, was so intimately a part of things beautiful and
+distinguished. He had the eyes of an old eagle; a general air of
+dignified collectedness; a rare, and a rarely charming, smile, which
+came out, like a ray of sunshine, in the instinctive pleasure of having
+said a witty or graceful thing to which one's response had been
+immediate. When he took me indoors, into that house which was a museum,
+I noticed the delicacy of his hands, and the tenderness with which he
+handled his treasures, touching them as if he loved them, with little,
+unconscious murmurs: _Quel goût! quel goût!_ These rose-coloured rooms,
+with their embroidered ceilings, were filled with cabinets of beautiful
+things, Japanese carvings, and prints (the miraculous 'Plongeuses'!),
+always in perfect condition (_Je cherche le beau_); albums had been made
+for him in Japan, and in these he inserted prints, mounting others upon
+silver and gold paper, which formed a sort of frame. He showed me his
+eighteenth-century designs, among which I remember his pointing out one
+(a Chardin, I think) as the first he had ever bought; he had been
+sixteen at the time, and he bought it for twelve francs.
+
+When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me all
+his own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions of
+Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me, of
+the men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother with a
+serene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and appropriate;
+and I remember his speaking (with a parenthetic disdain of the
+_brouillard scandinave_, in which it seemed to him that France was
+trying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but _un mauvais
+brouillard_) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to
+represent the only thing worth representing, _la vie vécue, la vraie
+vérité_. As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing,
+_l'optique_: out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have all
+seen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way of
+expressing it. 'There is a true thing I have said in my journal,' he
+went on. 'The thing is, to find a lorgnette' (and he put up his hands to
+his eyes, adjusting them carefully) 'through which to see things. My
+brother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it from
+us.'
+
+How true that is, and how significantly it states just what is most
+essential in the work of the Goncourts! It is a new way of seeing,
+literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented; and it is in
+the invention of this that they have invented that 'new language' of
+which purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly complained.
+You remember that saying of Masson, the mask of Gautier, in _Charles
+Demailly:_ 'I am a man for whom the visible world exists.' Well, that is
+true, also, of the Goncourts; but in a different way.
+
+'The delicacies of fine literature,' that phrase of Pater always comes
+into my mind when I think of the Goncourts; and indeed Pater seems to me
+the only English writer who has ever handled language at all in their
+manner or spirit. I frequently heard Pater refer to certain of their
+books, to _Madame Gervaisais_, to _L'Art du XVIII Siècle_, to _Chérie_;
+with a passing objection to what he called the 'immodesty' of this last
+book, and a strong emphasis in the assertion that 'that was how it
+seemed to him a book should be written.' I repeated this once to
+Goncourt, trying to give him some idea of what Pater's work was like;
+and he lamented that his ignorance of English prevented him from what he
+instinctively realised would be so intimate an enjoyment. Pater was of
+course far more scrupulous, more limited, in his choice of epithet, less
+feverish in his variations of cadence; and naturally so, for he dealt
+with another subject-matter and was careful of another kind of truth.
+But with both there was that passionately intent preoccupation with 'the
+delicacies of fine literature'; both achieved a style of the most
+personal sincerity: _tout grand écrivain de tous les temps_, said
+Goncourt, _ne se reconnaît absolument qu'à cela, c'est qu'il a une
+langue personnelle, une langue dont chaque page, chaque ligne, est
+signée, pour le lecteur lettré, comme si son nom était au bas de cette
+page, de cette ligne_: and this style, in both, was accused, by the
+'literary' criticism of its generation, of being insincere, artificial,
+and therefore reprehensible.
+
+It is difficult, in speaking of Edmond de Goncourt, to avoid attributing
+to him the whole credit of the work which has so long borne his name
+alone. That is an error which he himself would never have pardoned.
+_Mon frère et moi_ was the phrase constantly on his lips, and in his
+journal, his prefaces, he has done full justice to the vivid and
+admirable qualities of that talent which, all the same, would seem to
+have been the lesser, the more subservient, of the two. Jules, I think,
+had a more active sense of life, a more generally human curiosity; for
+the novels of Edmond, written since his brother's death, have, in even
+that excessively specialised world of their common observation, a yet
+more specialised choice and direction. But Edmond, there is no doubt,
+was in the strictest sense the writer; and it is above all for the
+qualities of its writing that the work of the Goncourts will live. It
+has been largely concerned with truth--truth to the minute details of
+human character, sensation, and circumstance, and also of the document,
+the exact words, of the past; but this devotion to fact, to the
+curiosities of fact, has been united with an even more persistent
+devotion to the curiosities of expression. They have invented a new
+language: that was the old reproach against them; let it be their
+distinction. Like all writers of an elaborate carefulness, they have
+been accused of sacrificing both truth and beauty to a deliberate
+eccentricity. Deliberate their style certainly was; eccentric it may,
+perhaps, sometimes have been; but deliberately eccentric, no. It was
+their belief that a writer should have a personal style, a style as
+peculiar to himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see in the
+handwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics of his style.
+Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a certain elegant
+stiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the 'continual slight
+novelty' of its form to be quite clear at a glance: very personal, very
+distinguished writing.
+
+It may be asserted that the Goncourts are not merely men of genius, but
+are perhaps the typical men of letters of the close of our century. They
+have all the curiosities and the acquirements, the new weaknesses and
+the new powers, that belong to our age; and they sum up in themselves
+certain theories, aspirations, ways of looking at things, notions of
+literary duty and artistic conscience, which have only lately become at
+all actual, and some of which owe to them their very origin. To be not
+merely novelists (inventing a new kind of novel), but historians; not
+merely historians, but the historians of a particular century, and of
+what was intimate and what is unknown in it; to be also discriminating,
+indeed innovating, critics of art, but of a certain section of art, the
+eighteenth century, in France and in Japan; to collect pictures and
+_bibelots_, beautiful things, always of the French and Japanese
+eighteenth century: these excursions in so many directions, with their
+audacities and their careful limitations, their bold novelty and their
+scrupulous exactitude in detail, are characteristic of what is the
+finest in the modern, conception of culture and the modern ideal in art.
+Look, for instance, at the Goncourts' view of history. _Quand les
+civilisations commencent, quand les peuples se forment, l'histoire est
+drame ou geste.... Les siècles qui ont précédé notre siècle ne
+demandaient à l'historien que le personnage de l'homme, et le portrait
+de son génie.... Le XIX^e siècle demande l'homme qui était cet homme
+d'État, cet homme de guerre, ce poète, ce peintre, ce grand homme de
+science ou de métier. L'âme qui était en cet acteur, le coeur qui a
+vécu derrière cet esprit, il les exige et les réclame; et s'il ne peut
+recueillir tout cet être moral, toute la vie intérieure, il commande du
+moins qu'on lui en apporte une trace, un jour, un lambeau, une relique._
+From this theory, this conviction, came that marvellous series of
+studies in the eighteenth century in France (_La Femme au XVIII^e
+Siècle_, _Portraits intimes du XVIII^e Siècle_, _La du Barry_, and the
+others), made entirely out of documents, autograph letters, scraps of
+costume, engravings, songs, the unconscious self-revelations of the
+time, forming, as they justly say, _l'histoire intime; c'est ce roman
+vrai que la postérité appellera peut-être un jour l'histoire humaine_.
+To be the bookworm and the magician; to give the actual documents, but
+not to set barren fact by barren fact; to find a soul and a voice in
+documents, to make them more living and more charming than the charm of
+life itself: that is what the Goncourts have done. And it is through
+this conception of history that they have found their way to that new
+conception of the novel which has revolutionised the entire art of
+fiction.
+
+_Aujourd'hui_, they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to _Germinie
+Lacerteux_, _que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la
+grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'étude littéraire et de
+l'enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche
+psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman
+s'est imposé les études et les devoirs de la science, il pent en
+revendiquer les libertés et les franchises_. _Le public aime les romans
+faux_, is another brave declaration in the same preface; _ce roman est
+un roman vrai_. But what, precisely, is it that the Goncourts understood
+by _un roman vrai_? The old notion of the novel was that it should be an
+entertaining record of incidents or adventures told for their own sake;
+a plain, straightforward narrative of facts, the aim being to produce as
+nearly as possible an effect of continuity, of nothing having been
+omitted, the statement, so to speak, of a witness on oath; in a word, it
+is the same as the old notion of history, _drame ou geste_. That is not
+how the Goncourts apprehend life, or how they conceive it should be
+rendered. As in the study of history they seek mainly the _inédit_,
+caring only to record that, so it is the _inédit_ of life that they
+conceive to be the main concern, the real 'inner history.' And for them
+the _inédit_ of life consists in the noting of the sensations; it is of
+the sensations that they have resolved to be the historians; not of
+action, nor of emotion, properly speaking, nor of moral conceptions, but
+of an inner life which is all made up of the perceptions of the senses.
+It is scarcely too paradoxical to say that they are psychologists for
+whom the soul does not exist. One thing, they know, exists: the
+sensation flashed through the brain, the image on the mental retina.
+Having found that, they bodily omit all the rest as of no importance,
+trusting to their instinct of selection, of retaining all that really
+matters. It is the painter's method, a selection made almost visually;
+the method of the painter who accumulates detail on detail, in his
+patient, many-sided observation of his subject, and then omits
+everything which is not an essential part of the _ensemble_ which he
+sees. Thus the new conception of what the real truth of things consists
+in has brought with it, inevitably, an entirely new form, a breaking-up
+of the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which are
+generally quite disconnected, and sometimes of less than a page in
+length. A very apt image for this new, curious manner of narrative has
+been found, somewhat maliciously, by M. Lemaître. _Un homme qui marche à
+l'intérieur d'une maison, si nous regardons du dehors, apparaît
+successivement à chaque fenêtre, et dans les intervalles nous échappe.
+Ces fenêtres, ce sont les chapitres de MM. de Goncourt. Encore_, he
+adds, _y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fenêtres où l'homme que nous attendions
+ne passe point_. That, certainly, is the danger of the method. No doubt
+the Goncourts, in their passion for the _inédit_, leave out certain
+things because they are obvious, even if they are obviously true and
+obviously important; that is the defect of their quality. To represent
+life by a series of moments, and to choose these moments for a certain
+subtlety and rarity in them, is to challenge grave perils. Nor are these
+the only perils which the Goncourts have constantly before them. There
+are others, essential to their natures, to their preferences. And, first
+of all, as we may see on every page of that miraculous _Journal_, which
+will remain, doubtless, the truest, deepest, most poignant piece of
+human history that they have ever written, they are sick men, seeing
+life through the medium of diseased nerves. _Notre oeuvre entier_,
+writes Edmond de Goncourt, _repose sur la maladie nerveuse; les
+peintures de la maladie, nous les avons tirées de nous-mêmes, et, à
+force de nous disséquer, nous sommes arrivés à une sensitivité
+supra-aiguë que blessaient les infiniment petits de la vie_. This
+unhealthy sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well as
+certain shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts' vision
+of reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth of
+things; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpening the
+acuteness of every sensation; or somewhat such a sense as one derives
+from haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and fragrant
+way, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the notion of
+time, the notion of space. What the Goncourts paint is the subtler
+poetry of reality, its unusual aspects, and they evoke it, fleetingly,
+like Whistler; they do not render it in hard outline, like Flaubert,
+like Manet. As in the world of Whistler, so in the world of the
+Goncourts, we see cities in which there are always fireworks at
+Cremorne, and fair women reflected beautifully and curiously in mirrors.
+It is a world which is extraordinarily real; but there is choice, there
+is curiosity, in the aspect of reality which it presents.
+
+Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of the work of the
+Goncourts, with those of Théophile Gautier, who may reasonably be said
+to have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, and
+also the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, but
+it is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or,
+rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell you
+the things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points of
+view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute,
+distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things as
+an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might see
+them; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a deliberate
+attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in
+which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture.
+In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, from
+no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction, archaism, barbarous
+epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render a
+sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should
+palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in
+expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in their
+relations with language, which they would have not merely a passionate
+and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately
+depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of French
+critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that the
+language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless French of
+the past. It is true; it is their distinction; it is the most wonderful
+of all their inventions: in order to render new sensations, a new vision
+of things, they have invented a new language.
+
+1894, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+COVENTRY PATMORE
+
+
+There are two portraits of Coventry Patmore by Mr. Sargent. One, in the
+National Portrait Gallery, gives us the man as he ordinarily was: the
+straggling hair, the drooping eyelid, the large, loose-lipped mouth, the
+long, thin, furrowed throat, the whole air of gentlemanly ferocity. But
+the other, a sketch of the head in profile, gives us more than that;
+gives us, in the lean, strong, aquiline head, startlingly, all that was
+abrupt, fiery, and essential in the genius of a rare and misunderstood
+poet. There never was a man less like the popular idea of him than the
+writer of _The Angel in the House_. Certainly an autocrat in the home,
+impatient, intolerant, full of bracing intellectual scorn, not always
+just, but always just in intention, a disdainful recluse, judging all
+human and divine affairs from a standpoint of imperturbable
+omniscience, Coventry Patmore charmed one by his whimsical energy, his
+intense sincerity, and, indeed, by the childlike egoism of an absolutely
+self-centred intelligence. Speaking of Patmore as he was in 1879, Mr.
+Gosse says, in his admirable memoir:
+
+
+     Three things were in those days particularly noticeable in the head
+     of Coventry Patmore: the vast convex brows, arched with vision; the
+     bright, shrewd, bluish-grey eyes, the outer fold of one eyelid
+     permanently and humorously drooping; and the wilful, sensuous
+     mouth. These three seemed ever at war among themselves; they spoke
+     three different tongues; they proclaimed a man of dreams, a canny
+     man of business, a man of vehement determination. It was the
+     harmony of these in apparently discordant contrast which made the
+     face so fascinating; the dwellers under this strange mask were
+     three, and the problem was how they contrived the common life.
+
+
+That is a portrait which is also an interpretation, and many of the
+pages on this 'angular, vivid, discordant, and yet exquisitely
+fascinating person,' are full of a similar insight. They contain many of
+those anecdotes which indicate crises, a thing very different from the
+merely decorative anecdotes of the ordinary biographer. The book,
+written by one who has been a good friend to many poets, and to none a
+more valuable friend than to Patmore, gives us a more vivid sense of
+what Patmore was as a man than anything except Mr. Sargent's two
+portraits, and a remarkable article by Mr. Frederick Greenwood,
+published after the book, as a sort of appendix, which it completes on
+the spiritual side.
+
+To these portraits of Patmore I have nothing of importance to add; and I
+have given my own estimate of Patmore as a poet in an essay published in
+1897, in _Studies in Two Literatures_. But I should like to supplement
+these various studies by a few supplementary notes, and the discussion
+of a few points, chiefly technical, connected with his art as a poet. I
+knew Patmore only during the last ten years of his life, and never with
+any real intimacy; but as I have been turning over a little bundle of
+his letters, written with a quill on greyish-blue paper, in the fine,
+careless handwriting which had something of the distinction of the
+writer, it seems to me that there are things in them characteristic
+enough to be worth preserving.
+
+The first letter in my bundle is not addressed to me, but to the friend
+through whom I was afterwards to meet him, the kindest and most helpful
+friend whom I or any man ever had, James Dykes Campbell. Two years
+before, when I was twenty-one, I had written an _Introduction to the
+Study of Browning_. Campbell had been at my elbow all the time,
+encouraging and checking me; he would send back my proof-sheets in a
+network of criticisms and suggestions, with my most eloquent passages
+rigorously shorn, my pet eccentricities of phrase severely straightened.
+At the beginning of 1888 Campbell sent the book to Patmore. His opinion,
+when it came, seemed to me, at that time, crushing; it enraged me, I
+know, not on my account, but on Browning's. I read it now with a clearer
+understanding of what he meant, and it is interesting, certainly, as a
+more outspoken and detailed opinion on Browning than Patmore ever
+printed.
+
+
+     MY DEAR MR. CAMPBELL,--I have read enough of Mr. Arthur Symons'
+     clever book on Browning to entitle me to judge of it as well as if
+     I had read the whole. He does not seem to me to be quite qualified,
+     as yet, for this kind of criticism. He does not seem to have
+     attained to the point of view from which all great critics have
+     judged poetry and art in general. He does not see that, in art, the
+     style in which a thing is said or done is of more importance than
+     the thing said or done. Indeed, he does not appear to know what
+     style means. Browning has an immense deal of mannerism--which in
+     art is always bad;--he has, in his few best passages, manner, which
+     as far as it goes is good; but of style--that indescribable
+     reposeful 'breath of a pure and unique individuality'--I recognise
+     no trace, though I find it distinctly enough in almost every other
+     English poet who has obtained so distinguished a place as Browning
+     has done in the estimation of the better class of readers. I do not
+     pretend to say absolutely that style does not exist in Browning's
+     work; but, if so, its 'still small voice' is utterly overwhelmed,
+     for me, by the din of the other elements. I think I can see, in
+     Browning's poetry, all that Mr. Symons sees, though not perhaps all
+     that he fancies he sees. But I also discern a want of which he
+     appears to feel nothing; and those defects of manner which he
+     acknowledges, but thinks little of, are to me most distressing, and
+     fatal to all enjoyment of the many brilliant qualities they are
+     mixed up with.--Yours very truly,
+                                                COVENTRY PATMORE.
+
+
+Campbell, I suppose, protested in his vigorous fashion against the
+criticism of Browning, and the answer to that letter, dated May 7, is
+printed on p. 264 of the second volume of Mr. Basil Champneys' _Life of
+Patmore_. It is a reiteration, with further explanations, such as that
+
+
+     When I said that manner was more important than matter in poetry, I
+     really meant that the true matter of poetry could only be expressed
+     by the manner. I find the brilliant thinking and the deep feeling
+     in Browning, but no true individuality--though of course his manner
+     is marked enough.
+
+
+Another letter in the same year, to Campbell, after reading the proofs
+of my first book of verse, _Days and Nights_, contained a criticism
+which I thought, at the time, not less discouraging than the criticism
+of my _Browning_. It seems to me now to contain the truth, the whole
+truth, and nothing but the truth, about that particular book, and to
+allow for whatever I may have done in verse since then. The first letter
+addressed to me is a polite note, dated March 16, 1889, thanking me for
+a copy of my book, and saying 'I send herewith a little volume of my
+own, which I hope may please you in some of your idle moments.' The book
+was a copy of _Florilegium Amantis_, a selection of his own poems,
+edited by Dr. Garnett. Up to that time I had read nothing of Patmore
+except fragments of _The Angel in the House_, which I had not had the
+patience to read through. I dipped into these pages, and as I read for
+the first time some of the odes of _The Unknown Eros_, I seemed to have
+made a great discovery: here was a whole glittering and peaceful tract
+of poetry which was like a new world to me. I wrote to him full of my
+enthusiasm; and, though I heard nothing then in reply, I find among my
+books a copy of _The Unknown Eros_ with this inscription: 'Arthur
+Symons, from Coventry Patmore, July 23, 1890.'
+
+The date is the date of his sixty-seventh birthday, and the book was
+given to me after a birthday-dinner at his house at Hastings, when, I
+remember, a wreath of laurel had been woven in honour of the occasion,
+and he had laughingly, but with a quite naïve gratification, worn it for
+a while at the end of dinner. He was one of the very few poets I have
+seen who could wear a laurel wreath and not look ridiculous.
+
+In the summer of that year I undertook to look after the _Academy_ for a
+few weeks (a wholly new task to me) while Mr. Cotton, the editor, went
+for a holiday. The death of Cardinal Newman occurred just then, and I
+wrote to Patmore, asking him if he would do an obituary notice for me.
+He replied, in a letter dated August 13, 1890:
+
+
+     I should have been very glad to have complied with your request,
+     had I felt myself at all able to do the work effectively; but my
+     acquaintance with Dr. Newman was very slight, and I have no sources
+     of knowledge about his life, but such as are open to all. I have
+     never taken much interest in contemporary Catholic history and
+     politics. There are a hundred people who could do what you want
+     better than I could, and I can never stir my lazy soul to take up
+     the pen, unless I fancy that I have something to say which makes it
+     a matter of conscience that I should say it.
+
+
+Failing Patmore, I asked Dr. Greenhill, who was then living at Hastings,
+and Patmore wrote on August 16:
+
+
+     Dr. Greenhill will do your work far better than I could have done
+     it. What an intellect we have lost in Newman--so delicately capable
+     of adjustment that it could crush a Hume or crack a Kingsley! And
+     what an example both in literature and in life. But that we have
+     not lost.
+
+
+Patmore's memory was retentive of good phrases which had once come up
+under his pen, as that witty phrase about crushing and cracking had come
+up in the course of a brief note scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.
+The phrase reappears five years afterwards, elaborated into an
+impressive sentence, in the preface to _The Rod, the Root, and the
+Flower_, dated Lymington, May 1895:
+
+
+     The steam-hammer of that intellect which could be so delicately
+     adjusted to its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or
+     cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work, that tongue which had the
+     weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent; but its
+     mighty task of so representing truth as to make it credible to the
+     modern mind, when not interested in unbelief, has been done.
+
+
+In the same preface will be found a phrase which Mr. Gosse quotes from a
+letter of June 17, 1888, in which Patmore says that the reviewers of his
+forthcoming book, _Principle in Art_, 'will say, or at least feel, "Ugh,
+Ugh! the horrid thing! It's alive!" and think it their duty to set their
+heels on it accordingly.' By 1895 the reviewers were replaced by
+'readers, zealously Christian,' and the readers, instead of setting
+their heels on it, merely 'put aside this little volume with a cry.'
+
+I find no more letters, beyond mere notes and invitations, until the end
+of 1893, but it was during these years that I saw Patmore most often,
+generally when I was staying with Dykes Campbell at St. Leonards. When
+one is five-and-twenty, and writing verse, among young men of one's own
+age, also writing verse, the occasional companionship of an older poet,
+who stands aside, in a dignified seclusion, acknowledged, respected, not
+greatly loved or, in his best work at least, widely popular, can hardly
+fail to be an incentive and an invigoration. It was with a full sense of
+my privilege that I walked to and fro with Coventry Patmore on that high
+terrace in his garden at Hastings, or sat in the house watching him
+smoke cigarette after cigarette, or drove with him into the country, or
+rowed with him round the moat of Bodiam Castle, with Dykes Campbell in
+the stern of the boat; always attentive to his words, learning from him
+all I could, as he talked of the things I most cared for, and of some
+things for which I cared nothing. Yes, even when he talked of politics,
+I listened with full enjoyment of his bitter humour, his ferocious
+gaiety of onslaught; though I was glad when he changed from Gladstone to
+St. Thomas Aquinas, and gladder still when he spoke of that other
+religion, poetry. I think I never heard him speak long without some
+reference to St. Thomas Aquinas, of whom he has written so often and
+with so great an enthusiasm. It was he who first talked to me of St.
+John of the Cross, and when, eight years later, at Seville, I came upon
+a copy of the first edition of the _Obras Espirituales_ on a stall of
+old books in the Sierpes, and began to read, and to try to render in
+English, that extraordinary verse which remains, with that of S. Teresa,
+the finest lyrical verse which Spain has produced, I understood how much
+the mystic of the prose and the poet of _The Unknown Eros_ owed to the
+_Noche Escura_ and the _Llama de Amor Viva_. He spoke of the Catholic
+mystics like an explorer who has returned from the perils of far
+countries, with a remembering delight which he can share with few.
+
+If Mr. Gosse is anywhere in his book unjust to Patmore it is in speaking
+of the later books of prose, the _Religio Poetae_ and _The Rod, the
+Root, and the Flower_, some parts of which seem to him 'not very
+important except as extending our knowledge of' Patmore's 'mind, and as
+giving us a curious collection of the raw material of his poetry.' To
+this I can only reply in some words which I used in writing of the
+_Religio Poetae_, and affirm with an emphasis which I only wish to
+strengthen, that, here and everywhere, and never more than in the
+exquisite passage which Mr. Gosse only quotes to depreciate, the prose
+of Patmore is the prose of a poet; not prose 'incompletely executed,'
+and aspiring after the 'nobler order' of poetry, but adequate and
+achieved prose, of a very rare kind. Thought, in him, is of the very
+substance of poetry, and is sustained throughout at almost the lyrical
+pitch. There is, in these essays, a rarefied air as of the mountain-tops
+of meditation; and the spirit of their sometimes remote contemplation is
+always in one sense, as Pater has justly said of Wordsworth,
+impassioned. Only in the finest of his poems has he surpassed these
+pages of chill and ecstatic prose.
+
+But if Patmore spoke, as he wrote, of these difficult things as a
+traveller speaks of the countries from which he has returned, when he
+spoke of poetry it was like one who speaks of his native country. At
+first I found it a little difficult to accustom myself to his permanent
+mental attitude there, with his own implied or stated pre-eminence
+(Tennyson and Barnes on the lower slopes, Browning vaguely in sight, the
+rest of his contemporaries nowhere), but, after all, there was an
+undisguised simplicity in it, which was better, because franker, than
+the more customary 'pride that apes humility,' or the still baser
+affectation of indifference. A man of genius, whose genius, like
+Patmore's, is of an intense and narrow kind, cannot possibly do justice
+to the work which has every merit but his own. Nor can he, when he is
+conscious of its equality in technical skill, be expected to
+discriminate between what is more or less valuable in his own work;
+between, that is, his own greater or less degree of inspiration. And
+here I may quote a letter which Patmore wrote to me, dated Lymington,
+December 31, 1893, about a review of mine in which I had greeted him as
+'a poet, one of the most essential poets of our time,' but had ventured
+to say, perhaps petulantly, what I felt about a certain part of his
+work.
+
+
+     I thank you for the copy of the _Athenæum_, containing your
+     generous and well-written notice of 'Religio Poetae.' There is much
+     in it that must needs be gratifying to me, and nothing that I feel
+     disposed to complain of but your allusion to the 'dinner-table
+     domesticities of the "Angel in the House."' I think that you have
+     been a little misled--as almost everybody has been--by the
+     differing characters of the metres of the 'Angel' and 'Eros.' The
+     meats and wines of the two are, in very great part, almost
+     identical in character; but, in one case, they are served on the
+     deal table of the octo-syllabic quatrain, and, in the other, they
+     are spread on the fine, irregular rock of the free tetrameter.
+
+
+In his own work he could see no flaw; he knew, better than any one, how
+nearly it answered almost everywhere to his own intention; and of his
+own intentions he could be no critic. It was from this standpoint of
+absolute satisfaction with what he had himself done that he viewed other
+men's work; necessarily, in the case of one so certain of himself, with
+a measure of dissatisfaction. He has said in print fundamentally foolish
+things about writers living and dead; and yet remains, if not a great
+critic, at least a great thinker on the first principles of art. And, in
+those days when I used to listen to him while he talked to me of the
+basis of poetry, and of metres and cadences, and of poetical methods,
+what meant more to me than anything he said, though not a word was
+without its value, was the profound religious gravity with which he
+treated the art of poetry, the sense he conveyed to one of his own
+reasoned conception of its immense importance, its divinity.
+
+It was partly, no doubt, from this reverence for his art that Patmore
+wrote so rarely, and only under an impulse which could not be withstood.
+Even his prose was written with the same ardour and reluctance, and a
+letter which he wrote to me from Lymington, dated August 7, 1894, in
+answer to a suggestion that he should join some other writers in a
+contemplated memorial to Walter Pater, is literally exact in its
+statement of his own way of work, not only during his later life:
+
+
+     I should have liked to make one of the honourable company of
+     commentators upon Pater, were it not that the faculty of writing,
+     or, what amounts to the same thing, interest in writing, has quite
+     deserted me. Some accidental motive wind comes over me, once in a
+     year or so, and I find myself able to write half a dozen pages in
+     an hour or two: but all the rest of my time is hopelessly sterile.
+
+
+To what was this curious difficulty or timidity in composition due? In
+the case of the poetry, Mr. Gosse attributes it largely to the fact of a
+poet of lyrical genius attempting to write only philosophical or
+narrative poetry; and there is much truth in the suggestion. Nothing in
+Patmore, except his genius, is so conspicuous as his limitations.
+Herrick, we may remember from his essay on Mrs. Meynell, seemed to him
+but 'a splendid insect'; Keats, we learn from Mr. Champneys' life,
+seemed to him 'to be greatly deficient in first-rate imaginative power';
+Shelley 'is all unsubstantial splendour, like the transformation scene
+of a pantomime, or the silvered globes hung up in a gin-palace'; Blake
+is 'nearly all utter rubbish, with here and there not so much a gleam as
+a trick of genius.' All this, when he said it, had a queer kind of
+delightfulness, and, to those able to understand him, never seemed, as
+it might have seemed in any one else, mere arrogant bad taste, but a
+necessary part of a very narrow and very intense nature. Although
+Patmore was quite ready to give his opinion on any subject, whether on
+'Wagner, the musical impostor,' or on 'the grinning woman, in every
+canvas of Leonardo,' he was singularly lacking in the critical faculty,
+even in regard to his own art; and this was because, in his own art, he
+was a poet of one idea and of one metre. He did marvellous things with
+that one idea and that one metre, but he saw nothing beyond them; all
+thought must be brought into relation with nuptial love, or it was of no
+interest to him, and the iambic metre must do everything that poetry
+need concern itself about doing.
+
+In a memorandum for prayer made in 1861, we read this petition:
+
+
+     That I may be enabled to write my poetry from immediate perception
+     of the truth and delight of love at once divine and human, and that
+     all events may so happen as shall best advance this my chief work
+     and probable means of working out my own salvation.
+
+
+In his earlier work, it is with human love only that he deals; in his
+later, and inconceivably finer work, it is not with human love only, but
+with 'the relation of the soul to Christ as his betrothed wife': 'the
+burning heart of the universe,' as he realises it. This conception of
+love, which we see developing from so tamely domestic a level to so
+incalculable a height of mystic rapture, possessed the whole man,
+throughout the whole of his life, shutting him into a 'solitude for two'
+which has never perhaps been apprehended with so complete a
+satisfaction. He was a married monk, whose monastery was the world; he
+came and went in the world, imagining he saw it more clearly than any
+one else; and, indeed, he saw things about him clearly enough, when they
+were remote enough from his household prejudices. But all he really ever
+did was to cultivate a little corner of a garden, where he brought to
+perfection a rare kind of flower, which some thought too pretty to be
+fine, and some too colourless to be beautiful, but in which he saw the
+seven celestial colours, faultlessly mingled, and which he took to be
+the image of the flower most loved by the Virgin in heaven.
+
+Patmore was a poet profoundly learned in the technique of his art, and
+the _Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law_, which fills the first
+eighty-five pages of the _Amelia_ volume of 1878, is among the subtlest
+and most valuable of such studies which we have in English. In this
+essay he praises the simplest metres for various just reasons, but yet
+is careful to define the 'rhyme royal,' or stanza of seven ten-syllable
+lines, as the most heroic of measures; and to admit that blank verse,
+which he never used, 'is, of all recognised English metres, the most
+difficult to write well in.' But, in his expressed aversion for trochaic
+and dactylic measures, is he not merely recording his own inability to
+handle them? and, in setting more and more rigorous limits to himself in
+his own dealing with iambic measures, is he not accepting, and making
+the best of, a lack of metrical flexibility? It is nothing less than
+extraordinary to note that, until the publication of the nine _Odes_ in
+1868, not merely was he wholly tied to the iambic measure, but even
+within those limits he was rarely quite so good in the four-line stanza
+of eights and sixes as in the four-line stanza of eights; that he was
+usually less good in the six-line than in the four-line stanza of eights
+and sixes; and that he was invariably least good in the stanza of three
+long lines which, to most practical intents and purposes, corresponds
+with this six-line stanza. The extremely slight licence which this
+rearrangement into longer lines affords was sufficient to disturb the
+balance of his cadences, and nowhere else was he capable of writing
+quite such lines as:
+
+
+     One friend was left, a falcon, famed for beauty, skill and size,
+     Kept from his fortune's ruin, for the sake of its great eyes.
+
+
+All sense, not merely of the delicacy, but of the correctness of rhythm,
+seems to have left him suddenly, without warning.
+
+And then, the straightening and tightening of the bonds of metre having
+had its due effect, an unprecedented thing occurred. In the _Odes_ of
+1868, absorbed finally into _The Unknown Eros_ of 1877, the iambic metre
+is still used; but with what a new freedom, and at the summons of how
+liberating an inspiration! At the same time Patmore's substance is
+purged and his speech loosened, and, in throwing off that burden of
+prose stuff which had tied down the very wings of his imagination, he
+finds himself rising on a different movement. Never was a development
+in metre so spiritually significant.
+
+In spite of Patmore's insistence to the contrary, as in the letter which
+I have already quoted, there is no doubt that the difference between
+_The Angel in the House_ and _The Unknown Eros_ is the difference
+between what is sometimes poetry in spite of itself, and what is poetry
+alike in accident and essence. In all his work before the _Odes_ of
+1868, Patmore had been writing down to his conception of what poetry
+ought to be; when, through I know not what suffering, or contemplation,
+or actual inner illumination, his whole soul had been possessed by this
+new conception of what poetry could be, he began to write as finely, and
+not only as neatly, as he was able. The poetry which came, came fully
+clothed, in a form of irregular but not lawless verse, which Mr. Gosse
+states was introduced into English by the _Pindarique Odes_ of Cowley,
+but which may be more justly derived, as Patmore himself, in one of his
+prefaces, intimates, from an older and more genuine poet, Drummond of
+Hawthornden.
+
+Mr. Gosse is cruel enough to say that Patmore had 'considerable
+affinities' with Cowley, and that 'when Patmore is languid and Cowley is
+unusually felicitous, it is difficult to see much difference in the form
+of their odes.' But Patmore, in his essay on metre, has said,
+
+
+     If there is not sufficient motive power of passionate thought, no
+     typographical aids will make anything of this sort of verse but
+     metrical nonsense--which it nearly always is--even in Cowley, whose
+     brilliant wit and ingenuity are strangely out of harmony with most
+     of his measures;
+
+
+and it seems to me that he is wholly right in saying so. The difference
+between the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows the
+contours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; in
+Cowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need not
+surprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verse
+of Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose.' The fault of
+his own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. The
+pauses in Patmore, left as they are to be a kind of breathing, or pause
+for breath, may not seem to be everywhere faultless to all ears; but
+they _are_ the pauses in breathing, while in Cowley the structure of his
+verse, when it is irregular, remains as external, as mechanical, as the
+couplets of the _Davideis_.
+
+
+     Whether Patmore ever acknowledged it or no, or indeed whether [says
+     Mr. Gosse] the fact has ever been observed, I know not, but the
+     true analogy of the _Odes_ is with the Italian lyric of the early
+     Renaissance. It is in the writings of Petrarch and Dante, and
+     especially in the _Canzoniere_ of the former, that we must look for
+     examples of the source of Patmore's later poetic form.
+
+
+Here again, while there may be a closer 'analogy,' at least in spirit,
+there is another, and even clearer difference in form. The canzoni of
+Petrarch are composed in stanzas of varying, but in each case uniform,
+length, and every stanza corresponds precisely in metrical arrangement
+with every other stanza in the same canzone. In English the
+_Epithalamion_ and the _Prothalamion_ of Spenser (except for their
+refrain) do exactly what Petrarch had done in Italian; and whatever
+further analogy there may be between the spirit of Patmore's writing and
+that of Spenser in these two poems, the form is essentially different.
+The resemblance with _Lycidas_ is closer, and closer still with the
+poems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit of
+mingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, like
+Goethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly unrhymed irregular
+lyrical verse.
+
+Patmore's endeavour, in _The Unknown Eros_, is certainly towards a form
+of _vers libre_, but it is directed only towards the variation of the
+normal pause in the normal English metre, the iambic 'common time,' and
+is therefore as strictly tied by law as a metre can possibly be when it
+ceases to be wholly regular. Verse literally 'free,' as it is being
+attempted in the present day in France, every measure being mingled, and
+the disentangling of them left wholly to the ear of the reader, has
+indeed been attempted by great metrists in many ages, but for the most
+part only very rarely and with extreme caution. The warning, so far, of
+all these failures, or momentary half-successes, is to be seen in the
+most monstrous and magnificent failure of the nineteenth century, the
+_Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman. Patmore realised that without law
+there can be no order, and thus no life; for life is the result of a
+harmony between opposites. For him, cramped as he had been by a
+voluntary respect for far more than the letter of the law, the discovery
+of a freer mode of speech was of incalculable advantage. It removed from
+him all temptation to that 'cleverness' which Mr. Gosse rightly finds in
+the handling of 'the accidents of civilised life,' the unfortunate part
+of his subject-matter in _The Angel in the House_; it allowed him to
+abandon himself to the poetic ecstasy, which in him was almost of the
+same nature as philosophy, without translating it downward into the
+terms of popular apprehension; it gave him a choice, formal, yet
+flexible means of expression for his uninterrupted contemplation of
+divine things.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+SAROJINI NAIDU
+
+
+It was at my persuasion that _The Golden Threshold_ was published. The
+earliest of the poems were read to me in London in 1896, when the writer
+was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when
+she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those
+two periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their
+own, I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. 'Your
+letter made me very proud and very sad,' she wrote. 'Is it possible that
+I have written verses that are "filled with beauty," and is it possible
+that you really think them worthy of being given to the world? You know
+how high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual little poems seem
+to be less than beautiful--I mean with that final enduring beauty that I
+desire.' And, in another letter, she writes: 'I am not a poet really. I
+have the vision and the desire, but not the voice. If I could write just
+one poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be
+exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my
+songs are as ephemeral.' It is for this bird-like quality of song, it
+seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of
+delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of a
+woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language and
+under partly Western influences. They do not express the whole of that
+temperament; but they express, I think, its essence; and there is an
+Eastern magic in them.
+
+Sarojini Chattopâdhyây was born at Hyderabad on February 13, 1879. Her
+father, Dr. Aghorenath Chattopâdhyây, is descended from the ancient
+family of Chattorajes of Bhramangram, who were noted throughout Eastern
+Bengal as patrons of Sanskrit learning, and for their practice of Yoga.
+He took his degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Edinburgh
+in 1877, and afterwards studied brilliantly at Bonn. On his return to
+India he founded the Nizam College at Hyderabad, and has since laboured
+incessantly, and at great personal sacrifice, in the cause of education.
+
+Sarojini was the eldest of a large family, all of whom were taught
+English at an early age. 'I,' she writes, 'was stubborn and refused to
+speak it. So one day, when I was nine years old, my father punished
+me--the only time I was ever punished--by shutting me in a room alone
+for a whole day. I came out of it a full-blown linguist. I have never
+spoken any other language to him, or to my mother, who always speaks to
+me in Hindustani. I don't think I had any special hankering to write
+poetry as a little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy
+nature. My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific
+character. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician or a
+scientist, but the poetic instinct, which I inherited from him and also
+from my mother (who wrote some lovely Bengali lyrics in her youth),
+proved stronger. One day, when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in
+algebra; it _wouldn't_ come right; but instead a whole poem came to me
+suddenly. I wrote it down.
+
+'From that day my "poetic career" began. At thirteen I wrote a long
+poem _à la_ "Lady of the Lake"--1300 lines in six days. At thirteen I
+wrote a drama of 2000 lines, a full-fledged passionate thing that I
+began on the spur of the moment, without forethought, just to spite my
+doctor, who said I was very ill and must not touch a book. My health
+broke down permanently about this time, and, my regular studies being
+stopped, I read voraciously. I suppose the greater part of my reading
+was done between fourteen and sixteen. I wrote a novel, I wrote fat
+volumes of journals: I took myself very seriously in those days.'
+
+Before she was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr.
+Govindurajulu Naidu, now her husband, is, though of an old and
+honourable family, not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused an
+equal opposition, not only on the side of her family, but of his; and in
+1895 she was sent to England, against her will, with a special
+scholarship from the Nizam. She remained in England, with an interval of
+travel in Italy, till 1898, studying first at King's College, London,
+then, till her health again broke down, at Girton. She returned to
+Hyderabad in September 1898, and in the December of that year, to the
+scandal of all India, broke through the bonds of caste, and married Dr.
+Naidu. 'Do you know I have some very beautiful poems floating in the
+air,' she wrote to me in 1904; 'and if the gods are kind I shall cast my
+soul like a net and capture them, this year. If the gods are kind--and
+grant me a little measure of health. It is all I need to make my life
+perfect, for the very "Spirit of Delight" that Shelley wrote of dwells
+in my little home; it is full of the music of birds in the garden and
+children in the long-arched verandah.' There are songs about the
+children in this book; they are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun of
+Victory, the Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight.
+
+'My ancestors for thousands of years,' I find written in one of her
+letters, 'have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves, great
+dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a dreamer
+himself, a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been a magnificent
+failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are few men whose
+learning is greater than his, and I don't think there are many men more
+beloved. He has a great white beard, and the profile of Homer, and a
+laugh that brings the roof down. He has wasted all his money on two
+great objects: to help others, and on alchemy. He holds huge courts
+every day in his garden of all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs
+and beggars and saints, and downright villains, all delightfully mixed
+up, and all treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day
+the experiments are going on, and every man who brings a new
+prescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you know,
+only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for Beauty, the
+eternal Beauty. "The makers of gold and the makers of verse," they are
+the twin creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery; and
+what in my father is the genius of curiosity--the very essence of all
+scientific genius--in me is the desire for beauty. Do you remember
+Pater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, "curiosity and the desire of
+beauty"?'
+
+It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her 'nerves of
+delight' were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To those who
+knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure seemed to
+concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards beauty as the
+sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and wider until one saw
+nothing but the eyes. She was dressed always in clinging dresses of
+Eastern silk, and, as she was so small, and her long black hair hung
+straight down her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
+little, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed, wherever
+she was, to be alone.
+
+Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East. And
+first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known any one who
+seemed to exist on such 'large draughts of intellectual day' as this
+child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's personal troubles
+and agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the East maturity comes
+early; and this child had already lived through all a woman's life. But
+there was something else, something hardly personal, something which
+belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian, which I realised,
+wondered at, and admired, in her passionate tranquillity of mind, before
+which everything mean and trivial and temporary caught fire and burnt
+away in smoke. Her body was never without suffering, or her heart
+without conflict; but neither the body's weakness nor the heart's
+violence could disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on his
+lotus-throne.
+
+And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race, there was
+what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation. Pain or pleasure
+transported her, and the whole of pain or pleasure might be held in a
+flower's cup or the imagined frown of a friend. It was never found in
+those things which to others seemed things of importance. At the age of
+twelve she passed the Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke
+to find herself famous throughout India. 'Honestly,' she said to me, 'I
+was not pleased; such things did not appeal to me.' But here, in a
+letter from Hyderabad, bidding one 'share a March morning' with her,
+there is, at the mere contact of the sun, this outburst: 'Come and share
+my exquisite March morning with me: this sumptuous blaze of gold and
+sapphire sky; these scarlet lilies that adorn the sunshine; the
+voluptuous scents of neem and champak and serisha that beat upon the
+languid air with their implacable sweetness; the thousand little gold
+and blue and silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy of
+life in nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and
+unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and love. And,
+do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by petal from my
+heart's blood, these little quivering birds are my soul made incarnate
+music, these heavy perfumes are my emotions dissolved into aerial
+essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is the "very me," that part of
+me that incessantly and insolently, yes, and a little deliberately,
+triumphs over that other part--a thing of nerves and tissues that
+suffers and cries out, and that must die to-morrow perhaps, or twenty
+years hence.'
+
+Then there was her humour, which was part of her strange wisdom, and was
+always awake and on the watch. In all her letters, written in exquisite
+English prose, but with an ardent imagery and a vehement sincerity of
+emotion which make them, like the poems, indeed almost more directly,
+un-English, Oriental, there was always this intellectual, critical sense
+of humour, which could laugh at one's own enthusiasm as frankly as that
+enthusiasm had been set down. And partly the humour, like the delicate
+reserve of her manner, was a mask or a shelter. 'I have taught myself,'
+she writes to me from India, 'to be commonplace and like everybody else
+superficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and cheerful, so "brave,"
+all the banal things that are so comfortable to be. My mother knows me
+only as "such a tranquil child, but so strong-willed." A tranquil
+child!' And she writes again, with deeper significance: 'I too have
+learnt the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is
+a subtle philosophy though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine:
+"Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." I have gone through so
+many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its
+full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of
+speech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcely
+two months since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to be
+anything but radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps my
+temperament has given me I prize the gift of laughter as beyond price.'
+
+Her desire, always, was to be 'a wild free thing of the air like the
+birds, with a song in my heart.' A spirit of too much fire in too frail
+a body, it was rarely that her desire was fully granted. But in Italy
+she found what she could not find in England, and from Italy her letters
+are radiant. 'This Italy is made of gold,' she writes from Florence,
+'the gold of dawn and daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancing
+in weird enchanting rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold of
+fireflies in the perfumed darkness--"aerial gold." I long to catch the
+subtle music of their fairy dances and make a poem with a rhythm like
+the quick irregular wild flash of their sudden movements. Would it not
+be wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in my
+hair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of darkness. It gave
+me a strange sensation, as if I were not human at all, but an elfin
+spirit. I wonder why these little things move me so deeply? It is
+because I have a most "unbalanced intellect," I suppose.' Then, looking
+out on Florence, she cries, 'God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I am
+that I am alive to-day!' And she tells me that she is drinking in the
+beauty like wine, 'wine, golden and scented, and shining, fit for the
+gods; and the gods have drunk it, the dead gods of Etruria, two thousand
+years ago. Did I say dead? No, for the gods are immortal, and one might
+still find them loitering in some solitary dell on the grey hillsides of
+Fiesole. Have I seen them? Yes, looking with dreaming eyes, I have found
+them sitting under the olives, in their grave, strong, antique
+beauty--Etruscan gods!'
+
+In Italy she watches the faces of the monks, and at one moment longs to
+attain to their peace by renunciation, longs for Nirvana; 'then, when
+one comes out again into the hot sunshine that warms one's blood, and
+sees the eager hurrying faces of men and women in the street, dramatic
+faces over which the disturbing experiences of life have passed and
+left their symbols, one's heart thrills up into one's throat. No, no,
+no, a thousand times no! how can one deliberately renounce this
+coloured, unquiet, fiery human life of the earth?' And, all the time,
+her subtle criticism is alert, and this woman of the East marvels at the
+women of the West, 'the beautiful worldly women of the West,' whom she
+sees walking in the Cascine, 'taking the air so consciously attractive
+in their brilliant toilettes, in the brilliant coquetry of their
+manner!' She finds them 'a little incomprehensible,' 'profound artists
+in all the subtle intricacies of fascination,' and asks if these
+'incalculable frivolities and vanities and coquetries and caprices' are,
+to us, an essential part of their charm? And she watches them with
+amusement as they flutter about her, petting her as if she were a nice
+child, a child or a toy, not dreaming that she is saying to herself
+sorrowfully: 'How utterly empty their lives must be of all spiritual
+beauty _if_ they are nothing more than they appear to be.'
+
+She sat in our midst, and judged us, and few knew what was passing
+behind that face 'like an awakening soul,' to use one of her own
+epithets. Her eyes were like deep pools, and you seemed to fall through
+them into depths below depths.
+
+1905.
+
+
+
+
+WELSH POETRY
+
+
+There is certainly a reason for at least suggesting to those who concern
+themselves, for good or evil, with Celtic literature, what Celtic
+literature really is when it is finest; what a 'reaction against the
+despotism of fact' really means; what 'natural magic' really means, and
+why the phrase 'Celtic glamour' is perhaps the most unfortunate that
+could well have been chosen to express the character of a literature
+which is above all things precise, concrete, definite.
+
+Lamartine, in the preface to the _Méditations_, describes the
+characteristics of Ossian, very justly, as _le vague, la rêverie,
+l'anéantissement dans la contemplation, le regard fixé sur des
+apparitions confuses dans le lointain_; and it is those very qualities,
+still looked upon by so many as the typically Celtic qualities, which
+prove the spuriousness of Ossian. That gaze fixed on formless and
+distant shadows, that losing of oneself in contemplation, that vague
+dreaminess, which Lamartine admired in Ossian, will be found nowhere in
+the _Black Book of Carmarthen_, in the _Book of Taliesin_, in the _Red
+Book of Hergest_, however much a doubtful text, uncertain readings, and
+confusing commentators may leave us in uncertainty as to the real
+meaning of many passages. Just as the true mystic is the man who sees
+obscure things clearly, so the Welsh poets (whom I take for the moment
+as representing the 'Celtic note,' the quality which we find in the work
+of primitive races) saw everything in the universe, the wind itself,
+under the images of mortality, hands and feet and the ways and motions
+of men. They filled human life with the greatness of their imagination,
+they ennobled it with the pride of their expectancy of noble things,
+they were boundless in praising and in cursing; but poetical excitement,
+in them, only taught them the amplitude and splendour of real things. A
+chief is an eagle, a serpent, the bull of battle, an oak; he is the
+strength of the ninth wave, an uplifted pillar of wrath, impetuous as
+the fire through a chimney; the ruddy reapers of war are his desire.
+The heart of Cyndyllan was like the ice of winter, like the fire of
+spring; the horses of Geraint are ruddy ones, with the assault of
+spotted eagles, of black eagles, of red eagles, of white eagles; an
+onset in battle is like the roaring of the wind against the ashen
+spears. These poets are the poets of 'tumults, shouting, swords, and men
+in battle-array.' The sound of battle is heard in them; they are 'where
+the ravens screamed over blood'; they are among 'crimsoned hair and
+clamorous sorrow'; they praise 'war with the shining wing,' and they
+know all the piteousness of the death of heroes, the sense of the
+'delicate white body,' 'the lovely, slender, blood-stained body,' that
+will be covered with earth, and sand, and stones, and nettles, and the
+roots of the oak. They know too the piteousness of the hearth left
+desolate, the hearth that will be covered with nettles, and slender
+brambles, and thorns, and dock-leaves, and scratched up by fowls, and
+turned up by swine. And they praise the gentleness of strength and
+courage: 'he was gentle, with a hand eager for battle.' Women are known
+chiefly as the widows and the 'sleepless' mothers of heroes; rarely so
+much esteemed as to be a snare, rarely a desire, rarely a reward; 'a
+soft herd.' They praise drunkenness for its ecstasy, its uncalculating
+generosity, and equal with the flowing of blood in battle, and the
+flowing of mead in the hall, is the flowing of song. They have the
+haughtiness of those who, if they take rewards, 'ale for the drinking,
+and a fair homestead, and beautiful clothing,' give rewards: 'I am
+Taliesin, who will repay thee thy banquet.'
+
+And they have their philosophy, always a close, vehemently definite
+thing, crying out for precise images, by which alone it can apprehend
+the unseen. Taliesin knows that 'man is oldest when he is born, and is
+younger and younger continually.' He wonders where man is when he is
+sleeping, and where the night waits until the passing of day. He is
+astonished that books have not found out the soul, and where it resides,
+and the air it breathes, and its form and shape. He thinks, too, of the
+dregs of the soul, and debates what is the best intoxication for its
+petulance and wonder and mockery. And, in a poem certainly late, or
+interpolated with fragments of a Latin hymn, he uses the eternal
+numeration of the mystics, and speaks of 'the nine degrees of the
+companies of heaven, and the tenth, saints a preparation of sevens';
+numbers that are 'clean and holy.' And even in poems plainly Christian
+there is a fine simplicity of imagination; as when, at the day of
+judgment, an arm reaches out, and hides the sea and the stars; or when
+Christ, hanging on the cross, laments that the bones of his feet are
+stretched with extreme pain.
+
+It is this sharp physical apprehension of things that really gives its
+note to Welsh poetry; a sense of things felt and seen, so intense, that
+the crutch on which an old man leans becomes the symbol of all the
+bodily sorrow of the world. In the poem attributed to Llywarch Hen there
+is a fierce, loud complaint, in which mere physical sickness and the
+intolerance of age translate themselves into a limitless hunger, and
+into that wisdom which is the sorrowful desire of beauty. The cuckoos at
+Aber Cuawg, singing 'clamorously' to the sick man: 'there are that hear
+them that will not hear them again!' the sound of the large wave
+grating sullenly on the pebbles,--
+
+
+     The birds are clamorous; the strand is wet:
+     Clear is the sky; large the wave:
+     The heart is palsied with longing:
+
+
+all these bright, wild outcries, in which wind and wave and leaves and
+the song of the cuckoo speak the same word, as if all came from the same
+heart of things; and, through it all, the remembrance: 'God will not
+undo what he is doing'; have indeed, and supremely, the 'Celtic note.'
+'I love the strand, but I hate the sea,' says the _Black Book of
+Carmarthen_, and in all these poems we find a more than mediæval hatred
+of winter and cold (so pathetic, yet after all so temperate, in the
+Latin students' songs), with a far more unbounded hatred of old age and
+sickness and the disasters which are not bred in the world, but are a
+blind part of the universe itself; older than the world, as old as
+chaos, out of which the world was made.
+
+Yet, wild and sorrowful as so much of this poetry is, with its praise of
+slaughter and its lament over death, there is much also of a gentle
+beauty, a childlike saying over of wind and wave and the brightness in
+the tops of green things, as a child counts over its toys. In the 'Song
+of Pleasant Things' there is no distinction between the pleasantness of
+sea-gulls playing, of summer and slow long days, of the heath when it is
+green, of a horse with a thick mane in a tangle, and of 'the word that
+utters the Trinity.' 'The beautiful I sang of, I will sing,' says
+Taliesin; and with him the seven senses become in symbol 'fire and
+earth, and water and air, and mist and flowers, and southerly wind.' And
+touches of natural beauty come irrelevantly into the most tragical
+places, like the 'sweet apple-tree of delightful branches' in that song
+of battles and of the coming of madness, where Myrddin says: 'I have
+been wandering so long in darkness and among spirits that it is needless
+now for darkness and spirits to lead me astray.' The same sense of the
+beauty of earth and of the elements comes into those mysterious
+riddle-rhymes, not so far removed from the riddle-rhymes which children
+say to one another in Welsh cottages to this day: 'I have been a tear in
+the air, I have been the dullest of stars; I was made of the flower of
+nettles, and of the water of the ninth wave; I played in the twilight, I
+slept in purple; my fingers are long and white, it is long since I was a
+herdsman.'
+
+And now, after looking at these characteristics of Welsh poetry, look at
+Ossian, and that 'gaze fixed on formless and distant shadows,' which
+seemed so impressive and so Celtic to Lamartine. 'In the morning of
+Saturday,' or 'On Sunday, at the time of dawn, there was a great
+battle'; that is how the Welsh poet tells you what he had to sing about.
+And he tells you, in his definite way, more than that; he tells you: 'I
+have been where the warriors were slain, from the East to the North, and
+from the East to the South: I am alive, they are in their graves!' It is
+human emotion reduced to its elements; that instinct of life and death,
+of the mystery of all that is tangible in the world, of its personal
+meaning, to one man after another, age after age, which in every age
+becomes more difficult to feel simply, more difficult to say simply. 'I
+am alive, they are in their graves!' and nothing remains to be said in
+the face of that immense problem. Well, the Welsh poet leaves you with
+his thought, and that simple emphasis of his seems to us now so large
+and remote and impressive, just because it was once so passionately
+felt, and set down as it was felt. And so with his sense for nature,
+with that which seems like style in him; it is a wonderful way of
+trusting instinct, of trusting the approaches of natural things. He
+says, quite simply: 'I was told by a sea-gull that had come a great
+way,' as a child would tell you now. And when he tells you that 'Cynon
+rushed forward with the green dawn,' it is not what we call a figure of
+speech: it is his sensitive, literal way of seeing things. More
+definite, more concrete, closer to the earth and to instinctive emotion
+than most other poets, the Welsh poet might have said of himself, in
+another sense than that in which he said it of Alexander: 'What he
+desired in his mind he had from the world.'
+
+1898.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Printed in Great Britain by
+
+T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the University Press,
+Edinburgh
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons
+
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Figures Of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons.
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Figures of Several Centuries
+
+Author: Arthur Symons
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2007 [EBook #21407]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES ***
+
+
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+
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+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
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+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>ARTHUR SYMONS</h2>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">LONDON<br />CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD<br />1917</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>First published, December 1916.</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Reprinted, January, June 1917.</i></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>TO</h4>
+
+<h3>JOSEPH CONRAD</h3>
+
+<h4>WITH A FRIEND'S ADMIRATION</h4>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class="index">
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#SAINT_AUGUSTINE">SAINT AUGUSTINE</a></li>
+<li><a href="#CHARLES_LAMB">CHARLES LAMB</a></li>
+<li><a href="#VILLON">VILLON</a></li>
+<li><a href="#CASANOVA_AT_DUX_AN_UNPUBLISHED_CHAPTER_OF_HISTORY">CASANOVA AT DUX</a></li>
+<li><a href="#JOHN_DONNE">JOHN DONNE</a></li>
+<li><a href="#EMILY_BRONTE">EMILY BRONT&Euml;</a></li>
+<li><a href="#EDGAR_ALLAN_POE">EDGAR ALLAN POE</a></li>
+<li><a href="#THOMAS_LOVELL_BEDDOES">THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES</a></li>
+<li><a href="#GUSTAVE_FLAUBERT">GUSTAVE FLAUBERT</a></li>
+<li><a href="#GEORGE_MEREDITH_AS_A_POET">GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET</a></li>
+<li><a href="#ALGERNON_CHARLES_SWINBURNE">ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE</a></li>
+<li><a href="#DANTE_GABRIEL_ROSSETTI">DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI</a></li>
+<li><a href="#A_NOTE_ON_THE_GENIUS_OF_THOMAS_HARDY">A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY</a></li>
+<li><a href="#LEON_CLADEL">L&Eacute;ON CLADEL</a></li>
+<li><a href="#HENRIK_IBSEN">HENRIK IBSEN</a></li>
+<li><a href="#JORIS-KARL_HUYSMANS">JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS</a></li>
+<li><a href="#TWO_SYMBOLISTS">TWO SYMBOLISTS</a></li>
+<li><a href="#CHARLES_BAUDELAIRE">CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</a></li>
+<li><a href="#WALTER_PATER">WALTER PATER</a></li>
+<li><a href="#THE_GONCOURTS">THE GONCOURTS</a></li>
+<li><a href="#COVENTRY_PATMORE">COVENTRY PATMORE</a></li>
+<li><a href="#SAROJINI_NAIDU">SAROJINI NAIDU</a></li>
+<li><a href="#WELSH_POETRY">WELSH POETRY</a></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SAINT_AUGUSTINE" id="SAINT_AUGUSTINE"></a>SAINT AUGUSTINE</h2>
+
+<p>The <i>Confessions</i> of St. Augustine are the first autobiography, and they
+have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that they
+are addressed directly to God. Rousseau's unburdening of himself is the
+last, most effectual manifestation of that nervous, defiant
+consciousness of other people which haunted him all his life. He felt
+that all the men and women whom he passed on his way through the world
+were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions.
+The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the
+protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him,
+in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to
+the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himself
+was after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> felt
+the silent voices within him too acutely to keep silence. Cellini wrote
+his autobiography because he heard within him such trumpeting voices of
+praise, exultation, and the supreme satisfaction of a violent man who
+has conceived himself to be always in the right, that it shocked him to
+think of going down into his grave without having made the whole world
+hear those voices. He hurls at you this book of his own deeds that it
+may smite you into acquiescent admiration. Casanova, at the end of a
+long life in which he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth,
+with a simplicity of pleasure in which the sense of their being
+forbidden was only the least of their abounding flavours, looked back
+upon his past self with a slightly pathetic admiration, and set himself
+to go all over those successful adventures, in love and in other arts,
+firstly, in order that he might be amused by recalling them, and then
+because he thought the record would do him credit. He neither intrudes
+himself as a model, nor acknowledges that he was very often in the
+wrong. Always passionate after sensations, and for their own sake, the
+writing of an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>autobiography was the last, almost active, sensation that
+was left to him, and he accepted it energetically.</p>
+
+<p>Probably St. Augustine first conceived of the writing of an
+autobiography as a kind of penance, which might be fruitful also to
+others. By its form it challenges the slight difficulty that it appears
+to be telling God what God knew already. But that is the difficulty
+which every prayer also challenges. To those we love, are we not fond of
+telling many things about ourselves which they know already? A prayer,
+such confessions as these, are addressed to God by one of those
+subterfuges by which it is necessary to approach the unseen and
+infinite, under at least a disguise of mortality. And the whole book, as
+no other such book has ever been, is lyrical. This prose, so simple, so
+familiar, has in it the exaltation of poetry. It can pass, without a
+change of tone, from the boy's stealing of pears: 'If aught of those
+pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender
+human affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that be
+which is signified by that bosom, there lives my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> Nebridius, my sweet
+friend'; and from that to the saint's rare, last ecstasy: 'And sometimes
+Thou admittedst me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul,
+rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know
+not what in it would not belong to the life to come.' And even
+self-analysis, of which there is so much, becoming at times a kind of
+mathematics, even those metaphysical subtleties which seem, to sharpen
+thought upon thought to an almost invisible fineness of edge, become
+also lyrical, inter-penetrated as they are with this sense of the
+divine.</p>
+
+<p>To St. Augustine all life is seen only in its relation to the divine;
+looked at from any other side, it has no meaning, and, looked at even
+with this light upon it, is but for the most part seen as a blundering
+in the dark, a wandering from the right path. In so far as it is
+natural, it is evil. In so far as it is corrected by divine grace, it
+leaves the human actors in it without merit; since all virtue is God's,
+though all vice is man's.</p>
+
+<p>This conception of life is certainly valuable in giving harmony to the
+book, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>presenting as it does a sort of background. It brings with it a
+very impressive kind of symbolism into its record of actual facts, to
+all of which it gives a value, not in themselves, if you please to put
+it so, or, perhaps more properly, their essential value. When nothing
+which happens, happens except under God's direct responsibility, when
+nothing is said which is not one of your 'lines' in the drama which is
+being played, not so much by as through you, there can be no
+exteriorities, nothing can be trivial, in a record of life so conceived.
+And this point of view also helps the writer to keep all his details in
+proportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least,
+being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because they happened
+to him. To St. Augustine, while not the smallest human event is without
+significance, in its relation to eternity, not the greatest human event
+is of importance, in its relation to time; and his own share in it would
+but induce a special, it may seem an exaggerated, humility on his part.
+Thus, speaking of his early studies, his triumphs in them, not without a
+certain <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i>: 'Whatever was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> written, either in rhetoric or logic,
+geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty or
+any instruction, I understood, Thou knowest, O Lord my God; because both
+quickness and understanding and acuteness in discerning is Thy gift.'
+Or, again, speaking of the youthful excellences ('excellently hadst Thou
+made him') of that son who was the son of his beloved mistress: 'I had
+no part in that boy, but the sin.'</p>
+
+<p>Intellectual pride, one sees in him indeed, at all times, by the very
+force with which it is repressed into humility; and, in all that relates
+to that mistress, in the famous cry: 'Give me chastity, but not yet!' in
+all those insurgent memories of 'these various and shadowy loves,' we
+see the force of the flesh, in one who lived always with so passionate a
+life, alike of the spirit and the senses. Now, recalling what was sinful
+in him, in his confessions to God, he is reluctant to allow any value to
+the most honourable of human sentiments, to so much as forgive the most
+estimable of human weaknesses. 'And now, Lord, in writing I confess it
+unto Thee. Read it who will,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> and interpret it how he will: and if any
+finds sin therein, that I wept my mother for a small portion of an hour
+(the mother who for the time was dead to mine eyes, who had for many
+years wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes), let him not deride
+me; but rather, if he be one of large charity, let him weep for himself
+for my sins unto Thee, the Father of all the brethren of Thy Christ.'
+And yet it is of this mother that he writes his most tender, his most
+beautiful pages. 'The day was now approaching whereon she was to depart
+this life (which day Thou well knewest, we knew not), it came to pass,
+Thyself, as I believe, by Thy secret ways so ordering it, that she and I
+stood alone, leaning in a certain window, which looked into the garden
+of the house where we now lay, at Ostia....' It is not often that
+memory, in him, is so careful of 'the images of earth, and water, and
+air,' as to call up these delicate pictures. They too had become for him
+among the desirable things which are to be renounced for a more
+desirable thing.</p>
+
+<p>That sense of the divine in life, and specially of the miracles which
+happen a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> certain number of times in every existence, the moments which
+alone count in the soul's summing-up of itself, St. Augustine has
+rendered with such significance, with such an absolute wiping out from
+the memory of everything else, just because he has come to that, it
+might seem, somewhat arid point of spiritual ascent. That famous moment
+of the <i>Tolle, lege</i>: 'I cast myself down I know not how, under a
+certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears ... when lo! I heard from
+a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting,
+and oft repeating, "Take up and read, take up and read"'; the Bishop's
+word to Monnica ('as if it had sounded from heaven'), 'It is not
+possible that the son of those tears should perish'; the beggar-man,
+'joking and joyous,' in the streets of Milan: it is by these, apparently
+trifling, these all-significant moments that his narrative moves, with a
+more reticent and effective symbolism than any other narrative known to
+me. They are the moments in which the soul has really lived, or has
+really seen; and the rest of life may well be a blindness and a troubled
+coming and going.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p><p>I said that the height from which St. Augustine apprehends these truths
+may seem a somewhat arid one. That is perhaps only because it is nearer
+the sky, more directly bathed in what he calls, beautifully, 'this queen
+of colours, the light.' There is a passage in the tenth book which may
+almost be called a kind of &aelig;sthetics. They are &aelig;sthetics indeed of
+renunciation, but a renunciation of the many beauties for the one
+Beauty, which shall contain as well as eclipse them; 'because those
+beautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into their
+cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls.' And it
+is not a renunciation by one who had never enjoyed what he renounces, or
+who feels himself, even now, quite safe from certain forms of its
+seduction. He is troubled especially by the fear that 'those melodies
+which Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet and attuned
+voice,' may come to move him 'more with the voice than with the words
+sung.' Yet how graciously he speaks of music, allowing 'that the several
+affections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper
+measures in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence
+wherewith they are stirred up.' It is precisely because he feels so
+intimately the beauty of all things human, though it were but 'a dog
+coursing in the field, a lizard catching flies,' that he desires to pass
+through these to that passionate contemplation which is the desire of
+all seekers after the absolute, and which for him is God. He asks of all
+the powers of the earth: 'My questioning them, was my thoughts on them;
+and their form of beauty gave the answer.' And by how concrete a series
+of images does he strive to express the inexpressible, in that passage
+of pure poetry on the love of God! 'But what do I love, when I love
+thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the
+brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of
+varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and
+spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of
+flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind
+of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement, when I
+love my God, the light,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my
+inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain,
+and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what
+breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not,
+and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love
+when I love my God.'</p>
+
+<p>Mentioning in his confessions only such things as he conceives to be of
+import to God, it happens, naturally, that St. Augustine leaves unsaid
+many things that would have interested most men, perhaps more. 'What,
+then, have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions&mdash;as if
+they could heal my infirmities,&mdash;a race curious to know the lives of
+others, slothful to amend their own?' Finding, indeed, many significant
+mentions of things and books and persons, Faustus the Manichee, the
+'Hortensius' of Cicero, the theatre, we shall find little pasture here
+for our antiquarian, our purely curious, researches. We shall not even
+find all that we might care to know, in St. Augustine himself, of the
+surface of the mind's action, which we call character, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> the surface
+emotions, which we call temperament. Here is a soul, one of the supreme
+souls of humanity, speaking directly to that supreme soul which it has
+apprehended outside humanity. Be sure that, if it forgets many things
+which you, who overhear, would like it to have remembered, it will
+remember everything which it is important to remember, everything which
+the recording angel, who is the soul's finer criticism of itself, has
+already inscribed in the book of the last judgment.</p>
+
+<p>1897.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHARLES_LAMB" id="CHARLES_LAMB"></a>CHARLES LAMB</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>There is something a little accidental about all Lamb's finest work.
+Poetry he seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but the
+supreme criticism of the <i>Specimens of English Dramatic Poets</i> arose out
+of the casual habit of setting down an opinion of an extract just copied
+into one's note-book, and the book itself, because, he said, 'the book
+is such as I am glad there should be.' The beginnings of his
+miscellaneous prose are due to the 'ferreting' of Coleridge. 'He ferrets
+me day and night,' Lamb complains to Manning in 1800, 'to do something.
+He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressing
+occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip.... He has lugged me to
+the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a
+first plan the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the
+anatomist of melancholy'; which was done, in the consummate way we know,
+and led in its turn to all the rest of the prose. And Barry Cornwall
+tells us that 'he was almost teased into writing the <i>Elia</i> essays.'</p>
+
+<p>He had begun, indeed, deliberately, with a story, as personal really as
+the poems, but, unlike them, set too far from himself in subject and
+tangled with circumstances outside his knowledge. He wrote <i>Rosamund
+Gray</i> before he was twenty-three, and in that 'lovely thing,' as Shelley
+called it, we see most of the merits and defects of his early poetry. It
+is a story which is hardly a story at all, told by comment, evasion, and
+recurrence, by 'little images, recollections, and circumstances of past
+pleasures' or distresses; with something vague and yet precise, like a
+dream partially remembered. Here and there is the creation of a mood and
+moment, almost like Coleridge's in the <i>Ancient Mariner</i>; but these
+flicker and go out. The style would be laughable in its simplicity if
+there were not in it some almost awing touch of innocence; some hint of
+that divine goodness which, in Lamb, needed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> relief and savour of
+the later freakishness to sharpen it out of insipidity. There is already
+a sense of what is tragic and endearing in earthly existence, though no
+skill as yet in presenting it; and the moral of it is surely one of the
+morals or messages of <i>Elia</i>: 'God has built a brave world, but methinks
+he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they may.'</p>
+
+<p>Lamb had no sense of narrative, or, rather, he cared in a story only for
+the moments when it seemed to double upon itself and turn into irony.
+All his attempts to write for the stage (where his dialogue might have
+been so telling) were foiled by his inability to 'bring three together
+on the stage at once,' as he confessed in a letter to Mrs. Shelley;
+'they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there
+they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw
+them.' Narrative he could manage only when it was prepared for him by
+another, as in the <i>Tales from Shakespeare</i> and the <i>Adventures of
+Ulysses</i>. Even in <i>Mrs. Leicester's School</i>, where he came nearest to
+success in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have less
+than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb's: of <i>Father's
+Wedding-Day</i>, which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called
+'with the sole exception of the <i>Bride of Lammermoor</i>, the most
+beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern.'
+There is something of an incomparable kind of story-telling in most of
+the best essays of <i>Elia</i>, but it is a kind which he had to find out, by
+accident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly through
+letter-writing. 'Us dramatic geniuses,' he speaks of, in a letter to
+Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it was
+this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessential
+part of himself. 'Truth,' he says in this letter, 'is one and poor, like
+the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that
+multiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not
+believe it could be put to such purposes.' It was to his correspondents,
+indeed to the incitement of their wakeful friendship, that he owes more
+perhaps than the mere materials of his miracles.</p>
+
+<p>To be wholly himself, Lamb had to hide himself under some disguise, a
+name, 'Elia,'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout
+borrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heighten
+and soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In
+the letter in which he announces the first essays of <i>Elia</i>, he writes
+to Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction,
+impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, the
+partitions perfectly invisible.' The correspondents were already
+accustomed to this 'heavenly mingle.' Few of the letters, those works of
+nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken on
+oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of
+sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of a
+preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays.
+What began in mischief ends in art.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>'I am out of the world of readers,' Lamb wrote to Coleridge, 'I hate all
+that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather
+myself up into the old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> things.' 'I am jealous for the actors who
+pleased my youth,' he says elsewhere. And again: 'For me, I do not know
+whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately
+to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the
+usual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since
+seems of any value or importance compared to the colours which
+imagination gave to everything then.' In Lamb this love of old things,
+this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which imagination
+came to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves all
+through his life that child's attitude of wonder, before 'this good
+world, which he knows&mdash;which was created so lovely, beyond his
+deservings.' He loves the old, the accustomed, the things that people
+have had about them since they could remember. 'I am in love,' he says
+in the most profoundly serious of his essays, 'with this green earth;
+the face of town and country; and the sweet security of streets.' He was
+a man to whom mere living had zest enough to make up for everything that
+was contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not unhappy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+Happiness came to him out of the little things that meant nothing to
+others, or were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living,
+and his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he left
+to others to remember him by.</p>
+
+<p>Lamb's religion, says Pater, was 'the religion of men of letters,
+religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last
+century'; and Hood says of him: 'As he was in spirit an Old Author, so
+was he in faith an Ancient Christian.' He himself tells Coleridge that
+he has 'a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit,' and,
+later in life, writes to a friend: 'Much of my seriousness has gone
+off.' On this, as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more into
+himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent with
+him. 'Such religion as I have,' he said, 'has always acted on me more by
+way of sentiment than argumentative process'; and we find him preferring
+churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done.
+To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over
+it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> it was not
+lightly, or with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude,
+that he asked: 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer
+holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats
+and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and
+fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and <i>irony
+itself</i>&mdash;do these things go out with life?'</p>
+
+<p>It was what I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so
+humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of
+all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of
+him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that
+species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this
+moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a
+'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical,
+'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and
+sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone
+stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth
+of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> and gave birth to the
+most religious sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy.</p>
+
+<p>Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid
+out before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of the
+most precious, and after books came pictures. 'What any man can write,
+surely I may read!' he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios.
+'I like books about books,' he confesses, the test of the book-lover. 'I
+love,' he says, 'to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not
+walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.' He
+was the finest of all readers, far more instant than Coleridge; not to
+be taken unawares by a Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most
+extraordinary persons of the age,' he says of him, on but a slight and
+partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the <i>Lyrical Ballads</i> are
+confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Among
+the Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it,' and can define precisely
+the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of
+escape, to Manning:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> 'It is full of original thought, but it does not
+often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of
+expression.' I choose these instances because the final test of a critic
+is in his reception of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found it
+much easier to be right, before every one else, about Webster, and Ford,
+and Cyril Tourneur, than to be the accurate critic that he was of
+Coleridge, at the very time when he was under the 'whiff and wind' of
+Coleridge's influence. And in writing of pictures, though his knowledge
+is not so great nor his instinct so wholly 'according to knowledge,' he
+can write as no one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that his
+very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantly
+detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of a
+would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin.</p>
+
+<p>Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has
+been no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, so
+intimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he
+speaks of the stage, as in that tiny <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>masterpiece, <i>On the Acting of
+Munden</i>, which ends the book of <i>Elia</i>, with its great close, the
+Beethoven soft wondering close, after all the surges: 'He understands a
+leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace
+materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.'
+He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of Miss Kelly.
+When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the very
+wires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in love
+with Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words that
+might apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying of
+Mrs. Jordan, that 'she seemed one whom care could not come near; a
+privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness.'
+Then he goes on: 'This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit,
+escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I may
+use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good
+and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are
+visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she
+does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> so, I am not sure that she is not greatest.' Is not this, with all
+its precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a poetry made up of
+no poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but 'of imagination all
+compact,' poetry in substance?</p>
+
+<p>Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. 'The earth,
+and sea, and sky (when all is said),' he admitted, 'is but as a house to
+live in'; and, 'separate from the pleasure of your company,' he assured
+Wordsworth, 'I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I
+have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and
+intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with
+dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the
+innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons,
+play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden,
+the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles&mdash;life
+awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of
+being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun
+shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>bookstalls,
+parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens,
+the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade&mdash;all these
+things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of
+satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks
+about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand
+from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of
+London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's
+catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he
+could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death),
+'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter
+not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets,
+their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his
+friends, 'the very streets, he says,' writes Mary, 'altering every day.'
+London was to him the new, better Eden. 'A garden was the primitive
+prison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself out
+of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers,
+goldsmiths, taverns, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>play-houses, satires, epigrams, puns&mdash;these all
+came in on the town part, and thither side of innocence.' To love London
+so was part of his human love, and in his praise of streets he has done
+as much for the creation and perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth ('by
+whose system,' Mary Lamb conjectured, 'it was doubtful whether a liver
+in towns had a soul to be saved') has done by his praise of flowers and
+hills.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, for all his 'disparagement of heath and highlands,' as he
+confessed to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciation
+of natural things, once brought before them, as he was in his
+appreciation of the things of art and the mind and man's making. He was
+a great walker, and sighs once, before his release from the desk: 'I
+wish I were a caravan driver or a penny post man, to earn my bread in
+air and sunshine.' We have seen what he wrote to Wordsworth about his
+mountains, before he had seen them. This is what he writes of them to
+Manning, after he has seen them: 'Such an impression I never received
+from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again.... In
+fine, I have satisfied<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> myself that there is such a thing as that which
+tourists call <i>romantic</i>, which I very much suspected before.' And to
+Coleridge he writes: 'I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the
+last day I live. They haunt me perpetually.' All this Lamb saw and felt,
+because no beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But he
+wrote of it only in his letters, which were all of himself; because he
+put into his published writings only the best or the rarest or the
+accustomed and familiar part of himself, the part which he knew by
+heart.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Beyond any writer pre-eminent for charm, Lamb had salt and sting. There
+is hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere
+exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with
+something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says,
+briefly: 'Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by
+Affectation'; but then he is also never more himself than when he
+expands and develops, as in this rendering of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> hisses which damned
+his play in Drury Lane:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a
+congregation of mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows
+and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness.
+'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should
+give His favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to
+discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to
+encourage warmly, to counsel wisely: to sing with, to drink with,
+and to kiss with: and that they should turn them into the mouths of
+adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit
+breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse
+and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow creatures who are
+desirous to please them!</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Or it may be a cold in the head which starts the heroic agility of his
+tongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as
+full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly
+fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an
+idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake,
+which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some
+unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+through the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad,
+keeps double motion, like the earth&mdash;running the primary circuit of the
+tune, and still revolving upon its own axis'; and he can condense into
+six words the whole life-history and the soul's essential secret of
+Coleridge, when he says of him, in almost the last fragment of prose
+that he wrote, 'he had a hunger for eternity.'</p>
+
+<p>To read Lamb makes a man more humane, more tolerant, more dainty;
+incites to every natural piety, strengthens reverence; while it clears
+his brain of whatever dull fumes may have lodged there, stirs up all his
+senses to wary alertness, and actually quickens his vitality, like high
+pure air. It is, in the familiar phrase, 'a liberal education'; but it
+is that finer education which sets free the spirit. His natural piety,
+in the full sense of the word, seems to me deeper and more sensitive
+than that of any other English writer. Kindness, in him, embraces
+mankind, not with the wide engulfing arms of philanthropy, but with an
+individual caress. He is almost the sufficient type of virtue, so far as
+virtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in him which is
+not the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had an
+unsocial origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noble
+things, or light up an unsuspected 'soul of goodness in things evil.'</p>
+
+<p>No man ever so loved his friends, or was so honest with them, or made
+such a religion of friendship. His character of Hazlitt in the 'Letter
+to Southey' is the finest piece of emotional prose which he ever wrote,
+and his pen is inspired whenever he speaks of Coleridge. 'Good people,
+as they are called,' he writes to Wordsworth, 'won't serve. I want
+individuals. I am made up of queer points and want so many answering
+needles.' He counts over his friends in public, like a child counting
+over his toys, when some one has offered an insult to one of them. He
+has delicacies and devotions towards his friends, so subtle and so noble
+that they make every man his friend. And, that love may deepen into awe,
+there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was
+made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with
+what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that
+paradox of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> position, by which he supports that by which he is
+supported.</p>
+
+<p>It is, then, this 'human, too human' creature, who comes so close to our
+hearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or at
+least in the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact,
+flawless in technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of
+'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well become
+despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so
+occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastly
+vest of white patchwork,' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; what is it
+that gives to a style, which no man can analyse, its 'terseness, its
+jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?' Those are his own
+words, not used of himself; but do they not do something to define what
+can, after all, never be explained?</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Lamb's defects were his qualities, and nature drove them inward,
+concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> normal or
+healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering
+tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the
+brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find Lamb writing to Godwin,</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>'cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an
+author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common
+letter into sane prose.... Ten thousand times I have confessed to
+you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any
+comprehensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or
+perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This
+infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two
+little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader,
+however partial, can find any story.'</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>'My brain,' he says, in a letter to Wordsworth, 'is desultory, and
+snatches off hints from things.' And, in a wise critical letter to
+Southey, he says, summing up himself in a single phrase: 'I never judge
+system-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars.'</p>
+
+<p>Is he, in these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, really
+apologising for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne,
+who (it is Lamb that says it) 'anticipated all the discoveries of
+succeeding essayists,' affected no humility in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>statement of almost
+exactly the same mental complexion. 'I take the first argument that
+fortune offers me,' he tells us; 'they are all equally good for me; I
+never design to treat them in their totality, for I never see the whole
+of anything, nor do those see it who promise to show it to me.... In
+general I love to seize things by some unwonted lustre.' There, in the
+two greatest of the essayists, one sees precisely what goes to the
+making of the essayist. First, a beautiful disorder: the simultaneous
+attack and appeal of contraries, a converging multitude of dreams,
+memories, thoughts, sensations, without mental preference, or conscious
+guiding of the judgment; and then, order in disorder, a harmony more
+properly musical than logical, a separating and return of many elements,
+which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of <i>Elia</i> called <i>Old
+China</i>, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You
+will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle
+memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the
+actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant,
+lovely last sentence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> is like the refrain which returns at the end of a
+poem.</p>
+
+<p>Lamb was a mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; he
+saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of
+social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney,
+a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked
+exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the
+rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his
+excesses something of 'the good clerk.'</p>
+
+<p>Lamb seemed to his contemporaries notably eccentric, but he was nearer
+than them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from the
+very heart of light, and returned thither after the circuit. Where
+Coleridge lost himself in clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearest
+short-cut, and, having reached the goal, went no step beyond it.</p>
+
+<p>And he was a bee for honey, not, like Coleridge, a browsing ox. To him
+the essence of delight was choice; and choice, with him, was readier
+when the prize was far-fetched and dear bought: a rarity of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> manners,
+books, pictures, or whatever was human or touched humanity. 'Opinion,'
+he said, 'is a species of property; and though I am always desirous to
+share with my friends to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keep
+some tenets and some property properly my own.' And then he found, in
+rarity, one of the qualities of the best; and was never, like most
+others, content with the good, or in any danger of confusing it with the
+best. He was the only man of that great age, which had Coleridge, and
+Wordsworth, and Shelley, and the rest, whose taste was flawless. All the
+others, who seemed to be marching so straight to so determined a goal,
+went astray at one time or other; only Lamb, who was always wandering,
+never lost sense of direction, or failed to know how far he had strayed
+from the road.</p>
+
+<p>The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden
+in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the
+tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to
+the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and,
+also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> sister alike,
+was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with
+the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling;
+madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense.
+In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider
+well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the
+intellect. I know one who read the essays of <i>Elia</i> with intense
+delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She
+had seen so well through the fun to its deep inner meaning that the fun
+had not detained her. She had found in all of it nothing but a pure
+intellectual reason, beyond logic, where reason is one with intuition.</p>
+
+<p>1905.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="VILLON" id="VILLON"></a>VILLON</h2>
+
+<p>Villon was the first modern poet; he remains the most modern of poets.
+One requires a certain amount of old French, together with some
+acquaintance with the argot of the time, to understand the words in
+which he has written down his poems; many allusions to people and things
+have only just begun to be cleared up, but, apart from these things, no
+poet has ever brought himself closer to us, taken us into his confidence
+more simply, than this <i>personnage peu recommandable, fain&eacute;ant, ivrogne,
+joueur, d&eacute;bauch&eacute;, &eacute;cornifleur, et, qui pis est, souteneur de filles,
+escroc, voleur, crocheteur de portes et de coffres</i>. The most
+disreputable of poets, he confesses himself to us with a frankness in
+which shamelessness is difficult to distinguish from humility. M. Gaston
+Paris, who for the most part is content to take him as he is, for better
+for worse, finds it necessary to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> apologise for him when he comes to the
+ballad of <i>La Grosse Margot</i>: this, he professes, we need not take as a
+personal confession, but as a mere exercise in composition! But if we
+are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even <i>la grosse
+Margot</i> from her place in his life. He was no dabbler in infamy, but one
+who loved infamous things for their own sake. He loved everything for
+its own sake: <i>la grosse Margot</i> in the flesh, <i>les dames du temps
+jadis</i> in the spirit,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Sausses, brouets et gros poissons,</div>
+<div>Tartes, flaons, &oelig;fs frits et pochez,</div>
+<div>Perdus, et en toutes fa&ccedil;ons,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>his mother, <i>le bon royaume de France</i>, and above all, Paris. <i>Il a
+parcouru toute la France sans rapporter une seule impression de
+campagne. C'est un po&egrave;te de ville, plus encore: un po&egrave;te de quartier. Il
+n'est vraiment chez lui que sur la Montague Sainte-Genevi&egrave;ve, entre le
+Palais, les coll&egrave;ges, le Ch&acirc;telet, les tavernes, les rotisseries, les
+tripots et les rues o&ugrave; Marion l'Idole et la grande Jeanne de Bretagne
+tiennent leur 'publique &eacute;cole'.</i> It is in this world that he lived, for
+this world that he wrote. <i>Fils du peuple, entr&eacute; par l'instruction dans
+la classe</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span><i>lettr&eacute;e, puis d&eacute;class&eacute; par ses vices, il dut &agrave; son humble
+origine de rester en communication constante avec les sources &eacute;ternelles
+de toute vraie po&eacute;sie.</i> And so he came into a literature of formalists,
+like a child, a vigorous, unabashed, malicious child, into a company of
+greybeards.</p>
+
+<p>Villon, before any one in French literature, called things by their
+names, made poetry as Homer made it, with words that meant facts. He was
+a thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to be
+sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him,
+to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his
+soul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit,
+forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in the
+cloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dream
+exquisitely over the dead ladies who had once been young, and who had
+gone like last year's snow, and then turn to the account-book of his
+satirical malice against the clerks and usurers for whom he was making
+the testament of his poverty. He knew winter, 'when the wolves live on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+wind,' and how the gallows looks when one stands under it. And he knew
+all the secrets of the art of verse-making which courtly poets, like the
+King, used for the stringing together of delicate trifles, ornamental
+evasions of facts. He was no poet of the people, but a scholar vagabond,
+loving the gutter; and so he has the sincerity of the artist as well as
+the only half-convincing sincerity of the man. There has been no greater
+artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main
+part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long
+forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself.</p>
+
+<p>1901.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CASANOVA_AT_DUX_AN_UNPUBLISHED_CHAPTER_OF_HISTORY" id="CASANOVA_AT_DUX_AN_UNPUBLISHED_CHAPTER_OF_HISTORY"></a>CASANOVA AT DUX: AN UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER OF HISTORY</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>The <i>Memoirs</i> of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a
+bad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students
+of literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr.
+Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books
+in the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova,
+published in <i>Affirmations</i>, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety.
+But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to
+take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in
+his relation to human problems. And yet these <i>Memoirs</i> are perhaps the
+most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth
+century; they are the history of a unique life, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> unique personality,
+one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they
+are more entertaining than <i>Gil Blas</i>, or <i>Monte Cristo</i>, or any of the
+imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been
+written in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved
+life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the
+most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
+indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows
+us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm
+resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an
+adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester,
+one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a
+vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his
+own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live
+to write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no
+longer.</p>
+
+<p>And his <i>Memoirs</i> take one all over Europe, giving sidelights, all the
+more valuable in being almost accidental, upon many of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> affairs and
+people most interesting to us during two-thirds of the eighteenth
+century. Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice, of Spanish and Italian
+parentage, on April 2, 1725; he died at the Ch&acirc;teau of Dux, in Bohemia,
+on June 4, 1798. In that lifetime of seventy-three years he travelled,
+as his <i>Memoirs</i> show us, in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, England,
+Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Turkey; he met
+Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Montmorency, Fontenelle, d'Alembert and
+Cr&eacute;billon at Paris, George III. in London, Louis XV. at Fontainebleau,
+Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg, Benedict XII. at Rome, Joseph II.
+at Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci. Imprisoned by the
+Inquisitors of State in the <i>Piombi</i> at Venice, he made, in 1755, the
+most famous escape in history. His <i>Memoirs</i>, as we have them, break off
+abruptly at the moment when he is expecting a safe conduct, and the
+permission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings. He did
+return, as we know from documents in the Venetian archives; he returned
+as secret agent of the Inquisitors, and remained in their service<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> from
+1774 until 1782. At the end of 1782 he left Venice; and next year we
+find him in Paris, where, in 1784, he met Count Waldstein at the
+Venetian Ambassador's, and was invited by him to become his librarian at
+Dux. He accepted, and for the fourteen remaining years of his life lived
+at Dux, where he wrote his <i>Memoirs</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Casanova died in 1798, but nothing was heard of the <i>Memoirs</i> (which the
+Prince de Ligne, in his own <i>Memoirs</i>, tells us that Casanova had read
+to him, and in which he found <i>du dramatique, de la rapidit&eacute;, du
+comique, de la philosophie, des choses neuves, sublimes, inimitables
+m&ecirc;me</i>) until the year 1820, when a certain Carlo Angiolini brought to
+the publishing house of Brockhaus, in Leipzig, a manuscript entitled
+<i>Histoire de ma vie jusqu'&agrave; l'an</i> 1797, in the handwriting of Casanova.
+This manuscript, which I have examined at Leipzig, is written on
+foolscap paper, rather rough and yellow; it is written on both sides of
+the page, and in sheets or quires; here and there the paging shows that
+some pages have been omitted, and in their place are smaller sheets of
+thinner and whiter paper, all in Casanova's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> handsome, unmistakable
+handwriting. The manuscript is done up in twelve bundles, corresponding
+with the twelve volumes of the original edition; and only in one place
+is there a gap. The fourth and fifth chapters of the twelfth volume are
+missing, as the editor of the original edition points out, adding: 'It
+is not probable that these two chapters have been withdrawn from the
+manuscript of Casanova by a strange hand; everything leads us to believe
+that the author himself suppressed them, in the intention, no doubt, of
+re-writing them, but without having found time to do so.' The manuscript
+ends abruptly with the year 1774, and not with the year 1797, as the
+title would lead us to suppose.</p>
+
+<p>This manuscript, in its original state, has never been printed. Herr
+Brockhaus, on obtaining possession of the manuscript, had it translated
+into German by Wilhelm Sch&uuml;tz, but with many omissions and alterations,
+and published this translation, volume by volume, from 1822 to 1828,
+under the title, <i>Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de
+Seingalt</i>. While the German edition was in course of publication,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> Herr
+Brockhaus employed a certain Jean Laforgue, a professor of the French
+language at Dresden, to revise the original manuscript, correcting
+Casanova's vigorous, but at times incorrect, and often somewhat Italian,
+French according to his own notions of elegant writing, suppressing
+passages which seemed too free-spoken from the point of view of morals
+and of politics, and altering the names of some of the persons referred
+to, or replacing those names by initials. This revised text was
+published in twelve volumes, the first two in 1826, the third and fourth
+in 1828, the fifth to the eighth in 1832, and the ninth to the twelfth
+in 1837; the first four bearing the imprint of Brockhaus at Leipzig and
+Ponthieu et Cie at Paris; the next four the imprint of Heideloff et
+Camp&eacute; at Paris; and the last four nothing but <i>&Agrave; Bruxelles</i>. The volumes
+are all uniform, and were all really printed for the firm of Brockhaus.
+This, however far from representing the real text, is the only
+authoritative edition, and my references throughout this article will
+always be to this edition.</p>
+
+<p>In turning over the manuscript at Leipzig, I read some of the suppressed
+passages, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> regretted their suppression; but Herr Brockhaus, the
+present head of the firm, assured me that they are not really very
+considerable in number. The damage, however, to the vivacity of the
+whole narrative, by the persistent alterations of M. Laforgue, is
+incalculable. I compared many passages, and found scarcely three
+consecutive sentences untouched. Herr Brockhaus (whose courtesy I cannot
+sufficiently acknowledge) was kind enough to have a passage copied out
+for me, which I afterwards read over, and checked word by word. In this
+passage Casanova says, for instance: <i>Elle venoit presque tous les jours
+lui faire une belle visite.</i> This is altered into: <i>Cependant chaque
+jour Th&eacute;r&egrave;se venait lui faire une visite.</i> Casanova says that some one
+<i>avoit, comme de raison, form&eacute; le projet d'allier Dieu avec le diable</i>.
+This is made to read: <i>Qui, comme de raison, avait saintement form&eacute; le
+projet d'allier les int&eacute;r&ecirc;ts du ciel aux &oelig;uvres de ce monde.</i>
+Casanova tell us that Th&eacute;r&egrave;se would not commit a mortal sin <i>pour
+devenir reine du monde</i>: <i>pour une couronne</i>, corrects the indefatigable
+Laforgue. <i>Il ne savoit que lui dire</i> becomes <i>Dans cet &eacute;tat de
+perplexit&eacute;</i>; and so forth. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> must, therefore, be realised that the
+<i>Memoirs</i>, as we have them, are only a kind of pale tracing of the vivid
+colours of the original.</p>
+
+<p>When Casanova's <i>Memoirs</i> were first published, doubts were expressed as
+to their authenticity, first by Ugo Foscolo (in the <i>Westminster
+Review</i>, 1827), then by Qu&eacute;rard, supposed to be an authority in regard
+to anonymous and pseudonymous writings, finally by Paul Lacroix, <i>le
+bibliophile Jacob</i>, who suggested, or rather expressed his 'certainty,'
+that the real author of the <i>Memoirs</i> was Stendhal, whose 'mind,
+character, ideas and style' he seemed to recognise on every page. This
+theory, as foolish and as unsupported as the Baconian theory of
+Shakespeare, has been carelessly accepted, or at all events accepted as
+possible, by many good scholars who have never taken the trouble to look
+into the matter for themselves. It was finally disproved by a series of
+articles of Armand Baschet, entitled <i>Preuves curieuses de
+l'authenticit&eacute; des M&eacute;moires de Jacques Casanova de Seingalt</i>, in <i>Le
+Livre</i>, January, February, April and May, 1881; and these proofs were
+further corroborated by two articles of Alessandro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> d'Ancona, entitled
+<i>Un Avventuriere del Secolo XVIII.</i>, in the <i>Nuova Antologia</i>, February
+1 and August 1, 1882. Baschet had never himself seen the manuscript of
+the <i>Memoirs</i>, but he had learnt all the facts about it from Messrs.
+Brockhaus, and he had himself examined the numerous papers relating to
+Casanova in the Venetian archives. A similar examination was made at the
+Frari at about the same time by the Abb&eacute; Fulin; and I myself, in 1894,
+not knowing at the time that the discovery had been already made, made
+it over again for myself. There the arrest of Casanova, his imprisonment
+in the <i>Piombi</i>, the exact date of escape, the name of the monk who
+accompanied him, are all authenticated by documents contained in the
+<i>riferte</i> of the Inquisition of State; there are the bills for the
+repairs of the roof and walls of the cell from which he escaped; there
+are the reports of the spies on whose information he was arrested, for
+his too dangerous free-spokenness in matters of religion and morality.
+The same archives contain forty-eight letters of Casanova to the
+Inquisitors of State, dating from 1763 to 1782, among the <i>Riferte dei
+Confidenti</i>, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> reports of secret agents; the earliest asking
+permission to return to Venice, the rest giving information in regard to
+the immoralities of the city, after his return there; all in the same
+handwriting as the <i>Memoirs</i>. Further proof could scarcely be needed,
+but Baschet has done more than prove the authenticity, he has proved the
+extraordinary veracity, of the <i>Memoirs</i>. F. W. Barthold, in <i>Die
+Geschichtlichen Pers&ouml;nlichkeiten in J. Casanova's Memoiren</i>, 2 vols.,
+1846, had already examined about a hundred of Casanova's allusions to
+well-known people, showing the perfect exactitude of all but six or
+seven, and out of these six or seven inexactitudes ascribing only a
+single one to the author's intention. Baschet and d'Ancona both carry on
+what Barthold had begun; other investigators, in France, Italy and
+Germany, have followed them; and two things are now certain, first, that
+Casanova himself wrote the <i>Memoirs</i> published under his name, though
+not textually in the precise form in which we have them; and, second,
+that as their veracity becomes more and more evident as they are
+confronted with more and more independent witnesses,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> it is only fair to
+suppose that they are equally truthful where the facts are such as could
+only have been known to Casanova himself.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>For more than two-thirds of a century it has been known that Casanova
+spent the last fourteen years of his life at Dux, that he wrote his
+<i>Memoirs</i> there, and that he died there. During all this time people
+have been discussing the authenticity and the truthfulness of the
+<i>Memoirs</i>, they have been searching for information about Casanova in
+various directions, and yet hardly any one has ever taken the trouble,
+or obtained the permission, to make a careful examination in precisely
+the one place where information was most likely to be found. The very
+existence of the manuscripts at Dux was known only to a few, and to most
+of these only on hearsay; and thus the singular good fortune was
+reserved for me, on my visit to Count Waldstein in September 1899, to be
+the first to discover the most interesting things contained in these
+manuscripts. M. Octave Uzanne, though he had not himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> visited Dux,
+had indeed procured copies of some of the manuscripts, a few of which
+were published by him in <i>Le Livre</i>, in 1887 and 1889. But with the
+death of <i>Le Livre</i> in 1889 the <i>Casanova in&eacute;dit</i> came to an end, and
+has never, so far as I know, been continued elsewhere. Beyond the
+publication of these fragments, nothing has been done with the
+manuscripts at Dux, nor has an account of them ever been given by any
+one who has been allowed to examine them.</p>
+
+<p>For five years, ever since I had discovered the documents in the
+Venetian archives, I had wanted to go to Dux; and in 1899, when I was
+staying with Count L&uuml;tzow at Zampach, in Bohemia, I found the way kindly
+opened for me. Count Waldstein, the present head of the family, with
+extreme courtesy, put all his manuscripts at my disposal, and invited me
+to stay with him. Unluckily, he was called away on the morning of the
+day that I reached Dux. He had left everything ready for me, and I was
+shown over the castle by a friend of his, Dr. Kittel, whose courtesy I
+should like also to acknowledge. After a hurried visit to the castle we
+started on the long drive to Oberleutensdorf, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> smaller Schloss near
+Komotau, where the Waldstein family was then staying. The air was sharp
+and bracing; the two Russian horses flew like the wind; I was whirled
+along in an unfamiliar darkness, through a strange country, black with
+coal mines, through dark pine woods, where a wild peasantry dwelt in
+little mining towns. Here and there, a few men and women passed us on
+the road, in their Sunday finery; then a long space of silence, and we
+were in the open country, galloping between broad fields; and always in
+a haze of lovely hills, which I saw more distinctly as we drove back
+next morning.</p>
+
+<p>The return to Dux was like a triumphal entry, as we dashed through the
+market-place filled with people come for the Monday market, pots and
+pans and vegetables strewn in heaps all over the ground, on the rough
+paving stones, up to the great gateway of the castle, leaving but just
+room for us to drive through their midst. I had the sensation of an
+enormous building: all Bohemian castles are big, but this one was like a
+royal palace. Set there in the midst of the town, after the Bohemian
+fashion, it opens at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> back upon great gardens, as if it were in the
+midst of the country. I walked through room after room, along corridor
+after corridor; everywhere there were pictures, everywhere portraits of
+Wallenstein, and battle-scenes in which he led on his troops. The
+library, which was formed, or at least arranged, by Casanova, and which
+remains as he left it, contains some 25,000 volumes, some of them of
+considerable value; one of the most famous books in Bohemian literature,
+Sk&aacute;la's <i>History of the Church</i>, exists in manuscript at Dux, and it is
+from this manuscript that the two published volumes of it were printed.
+The library forms part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing
+of the castle. The first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms
+are arranged, in a decorative way, covering the ceiling and the walls
+with strange patterns. The second room contains pottery, collected by
+Casanova's Waldstein on his Eastern travels. The third room is full of
+curious mechanical toys, and cabinets, and carvings in ivory. Finally,
+we come to the library, contained in the two innermost rooms. The
+book-shelves are painted white, and reach to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> the low-vaulted ceilings,
+which are white-washed. At the end of a bookcase, in the corner of one
+of the windows, hangs a fine engraved portrait of Casanova.</p>
+
+<p>After I had been all over the castle, so long Casanova's home, I was
+taken to Count Waldstein's study, and left there with the manuscripts. I
+found six huge cardboard cases, large enough to contain foolscap paper,
+lettered on the back: <i>Gr&auml;fl. Waldstein-Wartenberg'sches Real
+Fideicommiss. Dux-Oberleutensdorf: Handschriftlicher Nachlass Casanova</i>.
+The cases were arranged so as to stand like books; they opened at the
+side; and on opening them, one after another, I found series after
+series of manuscripts roughly thrown together, after some pretence at
+arrangement, and lettered with a very generalised description of
+contents. The greater part of the manuscripts were in Casanova's
+handwriting, which I could see gradually beginning to get shaky with
+years. Most were written in French, a certain number in Italian. The
+beginning of a catalogue in the library, though said to be by him, was
+not in his handwriting. Perhaps it was taken down at his dictation.
+There<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> were also some copies of Italian and Latin poems not written by
+him. Then there were many big bundles of letters addressed to him,
+dating over more than thirty years. Almost all the rest was in his own
+handwriting.</p>
+
+<p>I came first upon the smaller manuscripts, among which I found, jumbled
+together on the same and on separate scraps of paper, washing-bills,
+accounts, hotel bills, lists of letters written, first drafts of letters
+with many erasures, notes on books, theological and mathematical notes,
+sums, Latin quotations, French and Italian verses, with variants, a long
+list of classical names which have and have not been <i>francis&eacute;s</i>, with
+reasons for and against; 'what I must wear at Dresden'; headings without
+anything to follow, such as: 'Reflexions on respiration, on the true
+cause of youth&mdash;the crows'; a new method of winning the lottery at Rome;
+recipes, among which is a long printed list of perfumes sold at Spa; a
+newspaper cutting, dated Prague, 25th October 1790, on the
+thirty-seventh balloon ascent of Blanchard; thanks to some 'noble donor'
+for the gift of a dog called 'Finette'; a passport for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> <i>Monsieur de
+Casanova, V&eacute;nitien, allant d'ici en Hollande</i>, October 13, 1758 (<i>Ce
+Passeport bon pour quinze jours</i>), together with an order for
+post-horses, gratis, from Paris to Bordeaux and Bayonne.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>Occasionally, one gets a glimpse into his daily life at Dux, as in this
+note, scribbled on a fragment of paper (here and always I translate the
+French literally): 'I beg you to tell my servant what the biscuits are
+that I like to eat, dipped in wine, to fortify my stomach. I believe
+that they can all be found at Roman's.' Usually, however, these notes,
+though often suggested by something closely personal, branch off into
+more general considerations; or else begin with general considerations,
+and end with a case in point. Thus, for instance, a fragment of three
+pages begins: 'A compliment which is only made to gild the pill is a
+positive impertinence, and Monsieur Bailli is nothing but a charlatan;
+the monarch ought to have spit in his face, but the monarch trembled
+with fear.' A manuscript entitled <i>Essai d'&Eacute;go&iuml;sme</i>, dated, 'Dux, this
+27th June,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> 1769,' contains, in the midst of various reflections, an
+offer to let his <i>appartement</i> in return for enough money to
+'tranquillise for six months two Jew creditors at Prague.' Another
+manuscript is headed 'Pride and Folly,' and begins with a long series of
+antitheses, such as: 'All fools are not proud, and all proud men are
+fools. Many fools are happy, all proud men are unhappy.' On the same
+sheet follows this instance or application:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Whether it is possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest
+beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We
+must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards
+see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for
+there are extraordinary people in the world. My brother, in short,
+ought to have composed the distich, because he says so, and because
+he confided it to me t&ecirc;te-&agrave;-t&ecirc;te. I had, it is true, difficulty in
+believing him; but what is one to do? Either one must believe, or
+suppose him capable of telling a lie which could only be told by a
+fool; and that is impossible, for all Europe knows that my brother
+is not a fool.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Here, as so often in these manuscripts, we seem to see Casanova thinking
+on paper. He uses scraps of paper (sometimes the blank page of a letter,
+on the other side of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> which we see the address) as a kind of informal
+diary; and it is characteristic of him, of the man of infinitely curious
+mind, which this adventurer really was, that there are so few merely
+personal notes among these casual jottings. Often, they are purely
+abstract; at times, metaphysical <i>jeux d'esprit</i>, like the sheet of
+fourteen 'Different Wagers,' which begins:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>I wager that it is not true that a man who weighs a hundred pounds
+will weigh more if you kill him. I wager that if there is any
+difference, he will weigh less. I wager that diamond powder has not
+sufficient force to kill a man.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Side by side with these fanciful excursions into science, come more
+serious ones, as in the note on Algebra, which traces its progress since
+the year 1494, before which 'it had only arrived at the solution of
+problems of the second degree, inclusive.' A scrap of paper tells us
+that Casanova 'did not like regular towns.' 'I like,' he says, 'Venice,
+Rome, Florence, Milan, Constantinople, Genoa.' Then he becomes abstract
+and inquisitive again, and writes two pages, full of curious,
+out-of-the-way learning, on the name of Paradise:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p><blockquote><p>The name of Paradise is a name in Genesis which indicates a place
+of pleasure (<i>lieu voluptueux</i>): this term is Persian. This place
+of pleasure was made by God before he had created man.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>It may be remembered that Casanova quarrelled with Voltaire, because
+Voltaire had told him frankly that his translation of <i>L'&Eacute;cossaise</i> was
+a bad translation. It is piquant to read another note written in this
+style of righteous indignation:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Voltaire, the hardy Voltaire, whose pen is without bit or bridle;
+Voltaire, who devoured the Bible, and ridiculed our dogmas, doubts,
+and after having made proselytes to impiety, is not ashamed, being
+reduced to the extremity of life, to ask for the sacraments, and to
+cover his body with more relics than St. Louis had at Amboise.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Here is an argument more in keeping with the tone of the <i>Memoirs</i>:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>A girl who is pretty and good, and as virtuous as you please, ought
+not to take it ill that a man, carried away by her charms, should
+set himself to the task of making their conquest. If this man
+cannot please her by any means, even if his passion be criminal,
+she ought never to take offence at it, nor treat him unkindly; she
+ought to be gentle, and pity him, if she does not love him, and
+think it enough to keep invincibly hold upon her own duty.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p><p>Occasionally he touches upon &aelig;sthetical matters, as in a fragment which
+begins with liberal definition of beauty:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Harmony makes beauty, says M. de S. P. (Bernardin de St. Pierre),
+but the definition is too short, if he thinks he has said
+everything. Here is mine. Remember that the subject is
+metaphysical. An object really beautiful ought to seem beautiful to
+all whose eyes fall upon it. That is all; there is nothing more to
+be said.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>At times we have an anecdote and its commentary, perhaps jotted down for
+use in that latter part of the <i>Memoirs</i> which was never written, or
+which has been lost. Here is a single sheet, dated 'this 2nd September,
+1791,' and headed <i>Souvenir</i>:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>The Prince de Rosenberg said to me, as we went down stairs, that
+Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de
+Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa
+d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city
+library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal
+laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the
+Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret.' 'Is His
+Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (<i>sic</i>) he
+will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is a
+monument there which relates to him when he was Grand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> Duke.' 'In
+that case, His Majesty can also see my critical remarks on the
+Egyptian prints.'</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor asked me this morning, 6th October, how I employed my
+time at Dux, and I told him that I was making an Italian anthology.
+'You have all the Italians, then?' 'All, sire.' See what a lie
+leads to. If I had not lied in saying that I was making an
+anthology, I should not have found myself obliged to lie again in
+saying that we have all the Italian poets. If the Emperor comes to
+Dux, I shall kill myself.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>'They say that this Dux is a delightful spot,' says Casanova in one of
+the most personal of his notes, 'and I see that it might be for many;
+but not for me, for what delights me in my old age is independent of the
+place which I inhabit. When I do not sleep I dream, and when I am tired
+of dreaming I blacken paper, then I read, and most often reject all that
+my pen has vomited.' Here we see him blackening paper, on every
+occasion, and for every purpose. In one bundle I found an unfinished
+story about Roland, and some adventure with women in a cave; then a
+'Meditation on arising from sleep, 19th May 1789'; then a 'Short
+Reflection of a Philosopher who finds himself thinking of procuring his
+own death. At Dux, on getting out of bed on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> 13th October 1793, day
+dedicated to St. Lucy, memorable in my too long life.' A big budget,
+containing cryptograms, is headed 'Grammatical Lottery'; and there is
+the title-page of a treatise on <i>The Duplication of the Hexahedron,
+demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies
+of Europe</i>.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all
+stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear
+in half a dozen tentative forms:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div><i>Sans myst&egrave;re point de plaisirs,</i></div>
+<div><i>Sans silence point de myst&egrave;re.</i></div>
+<div><i>Charme divin de mes loisirs,</i></div>
+<div><i>Solitude! que tu m'es ch&egrave;re!</i></div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Then there are a number of more or less complete manuscripts of some
+extent. There is the manuscript of the translation of Homer's <i>Iliad, in
+ottava rima</i> (published in Venice, 1775-8); of the <i>Histoire de Venise</i>,
+of the <i>Icosameron</i>, a curious book published in 1787, purporting to be
+'translated from English,' but really an original work of Casanova;
+<i>Philocalies sur les Sottises des Mortels</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> a long manuscript never
+published; the sketch and beginning of <i>Le Pol&eacute;marque, ou la Calomnie
+d&eacute;masqu&eacute;e par la pr&eacute;sence d'esprit. Tragicom&eacute;die en trois actes,
+compos&eacute;e &agrave; Dux dans le mois de Juin de l'Ann&eacute;e, 1791</i>, which recurs
+again under the form of the <i>Pol&eacute;moscop&eacute;: La Lorgnette menteuse ou la
+Calomnie d&eacute;masqu&eacute;e</i>, acted before the Princess de Ligne, at her ch&acirc;teau
+at Teplitz, 1791. There is a treatise in Italian, <i>Delle Passioni</i>;
+there are long dialogues, such as <i>Le Philosophe et le Th&eacute;ologien</i>, and
+<i>R&ecirc;ve: Dieu-Moi</i>; there is the <i>Songe d'un Quart d'Heure</i>, divided into
+minutes; there is the very lengthy criticism of <i>Bernardin de
+Saint-Pierre</i>; there is the <i>Confutation d'une Censure indiscr&egrave;te qu'on
+lit dans la Gazette de I&eacute;na, 19 Juin 1789</i>; with another large
+manuscript, unfortunately imperfect, first called <i>L'Insulte</i>, and then
+<i>Placet au Public</i>, dated 'Dux, this 2nd March, 1790,' referring to the
+same criticism on the <i>Icosameron</i> and the <i>Fuite des Prisons</i>.
+<i>L'Histoire de ma Fuite des Prisons de la R&eacute;publique de Venise, qu'on
+appelle les Plombs</i>, which is the first draft of the most famous part of
+the <i>Memoirs</i>, was published at Leipzig in 1788; and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> having read it in
+the Marcian Library at Venice, I am not surprised to learn from this
+indignant document that it was printed 'under the care of a young Swiss,
+who had the talent to commit a hundred faults of orthography.'</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>We come now to the documents directly relating to the <i>Memoirs</i>, and
+among these are several attempts at a preface, in which we see the
+actual preface coming gradually into form. One is entitled <i>Casanova au
+Lecteur</i>, another <i>Histoire de mon Existence</i>, and a third <i>Preface</i>.
+There is also a brief and characteristic <i>Pr&eacute;cis de ma vie</i>, dated
+November 17, 1797. Some of these have been printed in <i>Le Livre</i>, 1887.
+But by far the most important manuscript that I discovered, one which,
+apparently, I am the first to discover, is a manuscript entitled
+<i>Extrait du Chapitre 4 et 5</i>. It is written on paper similar to that on
+which the <i>Memoirs</i> are written; the pages are numbered 104-148; and
+though it is described as <i>Extrait</i>, it seems to contain, at all events,
+the greater part of the missing chapters to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> which I have already
+referred, Chapters <span class="smcap">iv</span>. and <span class="smcap">v</span>. of the last volume of the <i>Memoirs</i>. In
+this manuscript we find Armelline and Scolastica, whose story is
+interrupted by the abrupt ending of Chapter <span class="smcap">iii</span>.; we find Mariuccia of
+Vol. <span class="smcap">vii</span>., Chapter <span class="smcap">ix</span>., who married a hairdresser; and we find also
+Jaconine, whom Casanova recognises as his daughter, 'much prettier than
+Sophia, the daughter of Th&eacute;r&egrave;se Pompeati, whom I had left at London.'<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>
+It is curious that this very important manuscript, which supplies the
+one missing link in the <i>Memoirs</i>, should never have been discovered by
+any of the few people who have had the opportunity of looking over the
+Dux manuscripts. I am inclined to explain it by the fact that the case
+in which I found this manuscript contains some papers not relating to
+Casanova. Probably, those who looked into this case looked no further. I
+have told Herr Brockhaus of my discovery, and I hope to see Chapters <span class="smcap">iv</span>.
+and <span class="smcap">v</span>. in their places when the long-looked-for edition of the complete
+text is at length given to the world.</p>
+
+<p>Another manuscript which I found tells<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> with great piquancy the whole
+story of the Abb&eacute; de Brosses' ointment, the curing of the Princess de
+Conti's pimples, and the birth of the Duc de Montpensier, which is told
+very briefly, and with much less point, in the <i>Memoirs</i> (vol. iii., p.
+327). Readers of the <i>Memoirs</i> will remember the duel at Warsaw with
+Count Branicki in 1766 (vol. x., pp. 274-320), an affair which attracted
+a good deal of attention at the time, and of which there is an account
+in a letter from the Abb&eacute; Taruffi to the dramatist, Francesco Albergati,
+dated Warsaw, March 19, 1766, quoted in Ernesto Masi's <i>Life of
+Albergati</i>, Bologna, 1878. A manuscript at Dux in Casanova's handwriting
+gives an account of this duel in the third person; it is entitled,
+<i>Description de l'affaire arriv&eacute;e &agrave; Varsovie le 5 Mars, 1766</i>. D'Ancona,
+in the <i>Nuova Antologia</i> (vol. lxvii., p. 412), referring to the Abb&eacute;
+Taruffi's account, mentions what he considers to be a slight
+discrepancy: that Taruffi refers to the <i>danseuse</i>, about whom the duel
+was fought, as La Casacci, while Casanova refers to her as La Catai. In
+this manuscript Casanova always refers to her as La Casacci; La Catai is
+evidently one of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> M. Laforgue's arbitrary alterations of the text.</p>
+
+<p>In turning over another manuscript, I was caught by the name Charpillon,
+which every reader of the <i>Memoirs</i> will remember as the name of the
+harpy by whom Casanova suffered so much in London, in 1763-4. This
+manuscript begins by saying: 'I have been in London for six months and
+have been to see them (that is, the mother and daughter) in their own
+house,' where he finds nothing but 'swindlers, who cause all who go
+there to lose their money in gambling.' This manuscript adds some
+details to the story told in the ninth and tenth volumes of the
+<i>Memoirs</i>, and refers to the meeting with the Charpillons four and a
+half years before, described in Volume <span class="smcap">v</span>., pages 482-485. It is written
+in a tone of great indignation. Elsewhere, I found a letter written by
+Casanova, but not signed, referring to an anonymous letter which he had
+received in reference to the Charpillons, and ending: 'My handwriting is
+known.' It was not until the last that I came upon great bundles of
+letters addressed to Casanova, and so carefully preserved that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> little
+scraps of paper, on which postscripts are written, are still in their
+places. One still sees the seals on the backs of many of the letters, on
+paper which has slightly yellowed with age, leaving the ink, however,
+almost always fresh. They come from Venice, Paris, Rome, Prague,
+Bayreuth, The Hague, Genoa, Fiume, Trieste, etc., and are addressed to
+as many places, often <i>poste restante</i>. Many are letters from women,
+some in beautiful handwriting, on thick paper; others on scraps of
+paper, in painful hands, ill-spelt. A Countess writes pitifully,
+imploring help; one protests her love, in spite of the 'many chagrins'
+he has caused her; another asks 'how they are to live together'; another
+laments that a report has gone about that she is secretly living with
+him, which may harm <i>his</i> reputation. Some are in French, more in
+Italian. <i>Mon cher Giacometto</i>, writes one woman, in French; <i>Carissimo
+e Amatissimo</i>, writes another, in Italian. These letters from women are
+in some confusion, and are in need of a good deal of sorting over and
+rearranging before their full extent can be realised. Thus I found
+letters in the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> handwriting separated by letters in other
+handwritings; many are unsigned, or signed only by a single initial;
+many are undated, or dated only with the day of the week or month. There
+are a great many letters, dating from 1779 to 1786, signed 'Francesca
+Buschini,' a name which I cannot identify; they are written in Italian,
+and one of them begins: <i>Unico Mio vero Amico</i> ('my only true friend').
+Others are signed 'Virginia B.'; one of these is dated, 'Forli, October
+15, 1773.' There is also a 'Theresa B.,' who writes from Genoa. I was at
+first unable to identify the writer of a whole series of letters in
+French, very affectionate and intimate letters, usually unsigned,
+occasionally signed 'B.' She calls herself <i>votre petite amie</i>; or she
+ends with a half-smiling, half-reproachful 'good-night, and sleep better
+than I.' In one letter, sent from Paris in 1759, she writes: 'Never
+believe me, but when I tell you that I love you, and that I shall love
+you always.' In another letter, ill-spelt, as her letters often are, she
+writes: 'Be assured that evil tongues, vapours, calumny, nothing can
+change my heart, which is yours entirely, and has no will to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> change its
+master.' Now, it seems to me that these letters must be from Manon
+Baletti, and that they are the letters referred to in the sixth volume
+of the <i>Memoirs</i>. We read there (page 60) how on Christmas Day, 1759,
+Casanova receives a letter from Manon in Paris, announcing her marriage
+with 'M. Blondel, architect to the King, and member of his Academy'; she
+returns him his letters, and begs him to return hers, or burn them.
+Instead of doing so he allows Esther to read them, intending to burn
+them afterwards. Esther begs to be allowed to keep the letters,
+promising to 'preserve them religiously all her life.' 'These letters,'
+he says, 'numbered more than two hundred, and the shortest were of four
+pages.' Certainly there are not two hundred of them at Dux, but it seems
+to me highly probable that Casanova made a final selection from Manon's
+letters, and that it is these which I have found.</p>
+
+<p>But, however this may be, I was fortunate enough to find the set of
+letters which I was most anxious to find: the letters from Henriette,
+whose loss every writer on Casanova has lamented. Henriette, it will be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>
+remembered, makes her first appearance at Cesena, in the year 1748;
+after their meeting at Geneva, she reappears, romantically <i>&agrave; propos</i>,
+twenty-two years later, at Aix in Provence; and she writes to Casanova
+proposing <i>un commerce &eacute;pistolaire</i>, asking him what he has done since
+his escape from prison, and promising to do her best to tell him all
+that has happened to her during the long interval. After quoting her
+letter, he adds: 'I replied to her, accepting the correspondence that
+she offered me, and telling her briefly all my vicissitudes. She related
+to me in turn, in some forty letters, all the history of her life. If
+she dies before me, I shall add these letters to these <i>Memoirs</i>; but
+to-day she is still alive, and always happy, though now old.' It has
+never been known what became of these letters, and why they were not
+added to the <i>Memoirs</i>. I have found a great quantity of them, some
+signed with her married name in full, 'Henriette de Schnetzmann,' and I
+am inclined to think that she survived Casanova, for one of the letters
+is dated Bayreuth, 1798, the year of Casanova's death. They are
+remarkably charming,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> written with a mixture of piquancy and
+distinction; and I will quote the characteristic beginning and end of
+the last letter I was able to find. It begins: 'No, it is impossible to
+be sulky with you!' and ends: 'If I become vicious, it is you, my
+Mentor, who make me so, and I cast my sins upon you. Even if I were
+damned I should still be your most devoted friend, Henriette de
+Schnetzmann.' Casanova was twenty-three when he met Henriette; now,
+herself an old woman, she writes to him when he is seventy-three, as if
+the fifty years that had passed were blotted out in the faithful
+affection of her memory. How many more discreet and less changing lovers
+have had the quality of constancy in change, to which this life-long
+correspondence bears witness? Does it not suggest a view of Casanova not
+quite the view of all the world? To me it shows the real man, who
+perhaps of all others best understood what Shelley meant when he said:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>True love in this differs from gold or clay,</div>
+<div>That to divide is not to take away.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But, though the letters from women naturally interested me the most,
+they were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> only a certain proportion of the great mass of correspondence
+which I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was
+afterwards to bring the manuscript of the <i>Memoirs</i> to Brockhaus; from
+Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the <i>Piombi</i>; from the
+Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is
+some account in the <i>Memoirs</i>; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished
+man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same
+volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from
+Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, <i>bel
+homme, ayant de l'esprit, le ton et le go&ucirc;t de la bonne soci&eacute;t&eacute;</i>, who
+came to settle at Gorizia in 1773, while Casanova was there; from the
+Procurator Morosini, whom he speaks of in the <i>Memoirs</i> as his
+'protector,' and as one of those through whom he obtained permission to
+return to Venice. His other 'protector,' the <i>avogador</i> Zaguri, had,
+says Casanova, 'since the affair of the Marquis Albergati, carried on a
+most interesting correspondence with me'; and in fact I found a bundle
+of no less than a hundred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> and thirty-eight letters from him, dating
+from 1784 to 1798. Another bundle contains one hundred and seventy-two
+letters from Count Lamberg. In the <i>Memoirs</i> Casanova says, referring to
+his visit to Augsburg at the end of 1761:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>I used to spend my evenings in a very agreeable manner at the house
+of Count Max de Lamberg, who resided at the court of the
+Prince-Bishop with the title of Grand Marshal. What particularly
+attached me to Count Lamberg was his literary talent. A first-rate
+scholar, learned to a degree, he has published several much
+esteemed works. I carried on an exchange of letters with him which
+ended only with his death four years ago in 1792.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Casanova tells us that, at his second visit to Augsburg in the early
+part of 1767, he 'supped with Count Lamberg two or three times a week,'
+during the four months he was there. It is with this year that the
+letters I have found begin: they end with the year of his death, 1792.
+In his <i>M&eacute;morial d'un Mondain</i> Lamberg refers to Casanova as 'a man
+known in literature, a man of profound knowledge.' In the first edition
+of 1774, he laments that 'a man such as M. de S. Galt' should not yet
+have been taken back into favour by the Venetian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> government, and in the
+second edition, 1775, rejoices over Casanova's return to Venice. Then
+there are letters from Da Ponte, who tells the story of Casanova's
+curious relations with Mme. d'Urf&eacute;, in his <i>Memorie scritte da esso</i>,
+1829; from Pittoni, Bono, and others mentioned in different parts of the
+<i>Memoirs</i>, and from some dozen others who are not mentioned in them. The
+only letters in the whole collection that have been published are those
+from the Prince de Ligne and from Count Koenig.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Casanova tells us in his <i>Memoirs</i> that, during his later years at Dux,
+he had only been able to 'hinder black melancholy from devouring his
+poor existence, or sending him out of his mind,' by writing ten or
+twelve hours a day. The copious manuscripts at Dux show us how
+persistently he was at work on a singular variety of subjects, in
+addition to the <i>Memoirs</i>, and to the various books which he published
+during those years. We see him jotting down everything that comes into
+his head, for his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> own amusement, and certainly without any thought of
+publication; engaging in learned controversies, writing treatises on
+abstruse mathematical problems, composing comedies to be acted before
+Count Waldstein's neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages,
+indeed with more patience than success, writing philosophical dialogues
+in which God and himself are the speakers, and keeping up an extensive
+correspondence, both with distinguished men and with delightful women.
+His mental activity, up to the age of seventy-three, is as prodigious as
+the activity which he had expended in living a multiform and
+incalculable life. As in life everything living had interested him, so
+in his retirement from life every idea makes its separate appeal to him;
+and he welcomes ideas with the same impartiality with which he had
+welcomed adventures. Passion has intellectualised itself, and remains
+not less passionate. He wishes to do everything, to compete with every
+one; and it is only after having spent seven years in heaping up
+miscellaneous learning, and exercising his faculties in many directions,
+that he turns to look back over his own past<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> life, and to live it over
+again in memory, as he writes down the narrative of what had interested
+him most in it. 'I write in the hope that my history will never see the
+broad daylight of publication,' he tells us, scarcely meaning it, we may
+be sure, even in the moment of hesitancy which may naturally come to
+him. But if ever a book was written for the pleasure of writing it, it
+was this one; and an autobiography written for oneself is not likely to
+be anything but frank.</p>
+
+<p>'Truth is the only God I have ever adored,' he tells us: and we now know
+how truthful he was in saying so. I have only summarised in this article
+the most important confirmations of his exact accuracy in facts and
+dates; the number could be extended indefinitely. In the manuscripts we
+find innumerable further confirmations; and their chief value as
+testimony is that they tell us nothing which we should not have already
+known, if we had merely taken Casanova at his word. But it is not always
+easy to take people at their own word, when they are writing about
+themselves; and the world has been very loth to believe in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> Casanova as
+he represents himself. It has been specially loth to believe that he is
+telling the truth when he tells us about his adventures with women. But
+the letters contained among these manuscripts show us the women of
+Casanova writing to him with all the fervour and all the fidelity which
+he attributes to them; and they show him to us in the character of as
+fervid and faithful a lover. In every fact, every detail, and in the
+whole mental impression which they convey, these manuscripts bring
+before us the Casanova of the <i>Memoirs</i>. As I seemed to come upon
+Casanova at home, it was as if I came upon an old friend, already
+perfectly known to me, before I had made my pilgrimage to Dux.</p>
+
+<p>1902.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> See the account of this visit to Holland, and the reference
+to taking a passport, <i>Memoirs</i>, v. 238.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> See Charles Henry, <i>Les Connaissances Math&eacute;matiques de
+Casanova</i>. Rome 1883.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> See <i>Memoirs</i>, ix. 272, <i>et seq.</i></p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="JOHN_DONNE" id="JOHN_DONNE"></a>JOHN DONNE</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Biography as a fine art can go no further than Walton's <i>Life and Death
+of Dr. Donne</i>. From the 'good and virtuous parents' of the first line to
+the 'small quantity of Christian dust' of the last, every word is the
+touch of a cunning brush painting a picture. The picture lives, and with
+so vivid and gracious a life that it imposes itself upon us as the
+portrait of a real man, faithfully copied from the man as he lived. But
+that is precisely the art of the painter. Walton's picture is so
+beautiful because everything in it is sacrificed to beauty; because it
+is a convention, a picture in which life is treated almost as theme for
+music. And so there remains an opportunity, even after this masterpiece,
+for a life of Donne which shall make no pretence to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> harmonise a
+sometimes discordant existence, or indeed to produce, properly speaking,
+a piece of art at all; but which shall be faithful to the document, a
+piece of history. Such a book has now been written by Mr. Gosse, in his
+<i>Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's</i>. It is perhaps the
+most solid and serious contribution which Mr. Gosse has made to English
+literature, and we may well believe that it will remain the final
+authority on so interesting and so difficult a subject. For the first
+time, in the light of this clear analysis, and of these carefully
+arranged letters, we are able, if not indeed to see Donne as he really
+was, at all events to form our own opinion about every action of his
+life. This is one of the merits of Mr. Gosse's book; he has collected
+his documents, and he has given them to us as they are, guiding us
+adroitly along the course of the life which they illustrate, but not
+allowing himself to dogmatise on what must still remain conjectural. And
+he has given us a series of reproductions of portraits, of the highest
+importance in the study of one who is not merely a difficult poet, but a
+very ambiguous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> human being. They begin with the eager, attractive,
+somewhat homely youth of eighteen, grasping the hilt of his sword so
+tightly that his knuckles start out from the thin covering of flesh;
+passing into the mature Donne as we know him, the lean, humorous,
+large-browed, courtly thinker, with his large intent eyes, a cloak
+folded elegantly about his uncovered throat, or the ruff tightening
+about his carefully trimmed beard; and ending with the ghastly emblem
+set as a frontispiece to <i>Death's Duel</i>, the dying man wrapped already
+in his shroud, which gathers into folds above his head, as if tied
+together like the mouth of a sack, while the sunken cheeks and hollow
+closed eyelids are mocked by the shapely moustache, brushed upwards from
+the lips. In the beautiful and fanciful monument in St. Paul's done
+after the drawing from which this frontispiece was engraved, there is
+less ghastliness and a more harmonious beauty in the brave attitude of a
+man who dresses for death as he would dress for Court, wearing the last
+livery with an almost foppish sense of propriety. Between them these
+portraits tell much, and Mr. Gosse, in his narrative, tells us
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>everything else that there is to tell, much of it for the first time;
+and the distinguished and saintly person of Walton's narrative, so
+simple, so easily explicable, becomes more complex at every moment, as
+fresh light makes the darkness more and more visible. At the end we seem
+to have become singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzling
+creature, whom each of us may try to understand after his fashion, as we
+try to understand the real secrets of the character of our friends.</p>
+
+<p>Donne's mind, then, if I may make my own attempt to understand him, was
+the mind of the dialectician, of the intellectual adventurer; he is a
+poet almost by accident, or at least for reasons with which art in the
+abstract has but little to do. He writes verse, first of all, because he
+has observed keenly, and because it pleases the pride of his intellect
+to satirise the pretensions of humanity. Then it is the flesh which
+speaks in his verse, the curiosity of woman, which he has explored in
+the same spirit of adventure; then passion, making a slave of him for
+love's sake, and turning at last to the slave's hatred; finally,
+religion, taken up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> with the same intellectual interest, the same subtle
+indifference, and, in its turn, passing also into passionate reality. A
+few poems are inspired in him by what he has seen in remote countries;
+some are marriage songs and funeral elegies, written for friendship or
+for money. But he writes nothing 'out of his own head,' as we say;
+nothing lightly, or, it would seem, easily; nothing for the song's sake.
+He speaks, in a letter, of 'descending to print anything in verse'; and
+it is certain that he was never completely absorbed by his own poetry,
+or at all careful to measure his achievements against those of others.
+He took his own poems very seriously, he worked upon them with the whole
+force of his intellect; but to himself, even before he became a divine,
+he was something more than a poet. Poetry was but one means of
+expressing the many-sided activity of his mind and temperament. Prose
+was another, preaching another; travel and contact with great events and
+persons scarcely less important to him, in the building up of himself.</p>
+
+<p>And he was interested in everything. At one moment he is setting himself
+to study<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> Oriental languages, a singularly difficult task in those days.
+Both in poetry and divinity he has more Spanish than English books in
+his library. Scientific and technical terms are constantly found in his
+verse, where we should least expect them, where indeed they are least
+welcome. In <i>Ignatius&mdash;his Conclave</i> he speaks with learned enthusiasm
+of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and of his own immediate contemporaries,
+then but just become famous, Galileo ('who of late hath summoned the
+other worlds, the stars, to come nearer to him, and to give an account
+of themselves') and Kepler ('who hath received it into his care, that no
+new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge'). He rebukes
+himself for his abandonment to 'the worst voluptuousness, which is an
+hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages.' At
+twenty-three he was a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went on
+the 'Islands Voyage'; later on, at different periods, he travelled over
+many parts of the Continent, with rich patrons or on diplomatic offices.
+Born a Catholic, he became a Protestant, deliberately enough; wrote
+books on controversial subjects, against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> his old party, before he had
+taken orders in the Church of England; besides a strange, morbid
+speculation on the innocence of suicide. He used his lawyer's training
+for dubious enough purposes, advising the Earl of Somerset in the dark
+business of his divorce and re-marriage. And, in a mournful pause in the
+midst of many harrowing concerns, he writes to a friend: 'When I must
+shipwreck, I would fain do it in a sea where mine own impotency might
+have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so
+much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something,
+but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a
+planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he
+confesses later in the same letter.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt some of this feverish activity, this uncertainty of aim, was a
+matter of actual physical health. It is uncertain at what time the
+wasting disease, of which he died, first settled upon him; but he seems
+to have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at times
+depressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> the whole
+organisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led him
+to write his <i>Biathanatos</i>, with its elaborate apology for suicide, and
+at the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying,
+was but one symptom of a morbid state of body and brain and nerves, to
+which so many of his poems and so many of his letters bear witness.
+'Sometimes,' he writes, in a characteristic letter, 'when I find myself
+transported with jollity and love of company, I hang lead to my heels,
+and reduce to my thoughts my fortunes, my years, the duties of a man, of
+a friend, of a husband, of a father, and all the incumbencies of a
+family; when sadness dejects me, either I countermine it with another
+sadness, or I kindle squibs about me again, and fly into sportfulness
+and company.'</p>
+
+<p>At the age of thirty-five he writes from his bed describing every detail
+of what he frantically calls 'a sickness which I cannot name or
+describe,' and ends his letter: 'I profess to you truly, that my
+loathness to give over now, seems to myself an ill sign that I shall
+write no more.' It was at this time that he wrote the <i>Biathanatos</i>,
+with its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> explicit declaration in the preface: 'Whensoever any
+affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own
+hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own
+sword.' Fifteen years later, when one of his most serious illnesses was
+upon him, and his life in real danger, he notes down all his symptoms as
+he lies awake night after night, with an extraordinary and, in itself,
+morbid acuteness. 'I observe the physician with the same diligence as he
+the disease; I see he fears, and I fear with him; I overtake him, I
+over-run him in his fear, because he makes his pace slow; I fear the
+more because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpness
+because he would not have me see it.' As he lies in bed, he realises 'I
+am mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct them.
+They conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me for
+dead now, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight, and ask
+how I do to-morrow. Miserable and inhuman posture, where I must practise
+my lying in the grave by lying still.' This preying upon itself of the
+brain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> is but one significant indication of a temperament, neurotic
+enough indeed, but in which the neurosis is still that of the curious
+observer, the intellectual casuist, rather than of the artist. A
+wonderful piece of self-analysis, worthy of St. Augustine, which occurs
+in one of his funeral sermons, gives poignant expression to what must
+doubtless have been a common condition of so sensitive a brain. 'I throw
+myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and His angels
+together; 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 prayer, eyes lifted up, knees bowed
+down, as though I prayed to God; and if God should ask me when I last
+thought of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I
+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 chimera in my brain, troubles me
+in my prayer.' It is this brain, turned inward upon itself, and darting
+out on every side in purely random<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> excursions, that was responsible, I
+cannot doubt, for all the contradictions of a career in which the inner
+logic is not at first apparent.</p>
+
+<p>Donne's career divides itself sharply into three parts: his youth, when
+we see him a soldier, a traveller, a lover, a poet, unrestrained in all
+the passionate adventures of youth; then a middle period, in which he is
+a lawyer and a theologian, seeking knowledge and worldly advancement,
+without any too restraining scruple as to the means which come to his
+hand; and then a last stage of saintly living and dying. What then is
+the link between these successive periods, the principle of development,
+the real Donne in short? 'He was none of these, or all of these, or
+more,' says Mr. Gosse. But, surely, he was indeed all of these, and his
+individuality precisely the growth from one stage to another, the subtle
+intelligence being always there, working vividly, but in each period
+working in a different direction. 'I would fain do something, but that I
+cannot tell what is no wonder.' Everything in Donne seems to me to
+explain itself in that fundamental uncertainty of aim, and his
+uncertainty of aim partly by a morbid physical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> condition. He searches,
+nothing satisfies him, tries everything, in vain; finding satisfaction
+at last in the Church, as in a haven of rest. Always it is the curious,
+insatiable brain searching. And he is always wretchedly aware that he
+'can do nothing constantly.'</p>
+
+<p>His three periods, then, are three stages in the search after a way to
+walk in, something worthy of himself to do. Thus, of his one printed
+collection of verse he writes: 'Of my <i>Anniversaries</i>, the fault which I
+acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse,
+which, though it have excuse, even in our times, by example of men,
+which one would think should as little have done it as I, yet I confess
+I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself.' Of his legal
+studies he writes in the same letter: 'For my purpose of proceeding in
+the profession of the law, so far as to a title, you may be pleased to
+correct that imagination where you find it. I ever thought the study of
+it my best entertainment and pastime, but I have no ambition nor design
+upon the style.' Until he accepts religion, with all its limitations and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>encouragements, he has not even sure landmarks on his way. So
+speculative a brain, able to prove, and proving for its own uneasy
+satisfaction, that even suicide is 'not so naturally sin, that it may
+never be otherwise,' could allow itself to be guided by no fixed rules;
+and to a brain so abstract, conduct must always have seemed of less
+importance than it does to most other people, and especially conduct
+which is argument, like the demonstrations on behalf of what seems, on
+the face of it, a somewhat iniquitous divorce and re-marriage, or like
+those unmeasured eulogies, both of this 'blest pair of swans,' and of
+the dead child of a rich father. He admits, in one of his letters, that
+in his elegies, 'I did best when I had least truth for my subjects'; and
+of the <i>Anniversaries</i> in honour of little Mistress Drury, 'But for the
+other part of the imputation of having said so much, my defence is, that
+my purpose was to say as well as I could; for since I never saw the
+gentlewoman, I cannot be understood to have bound myself to have spoken
+the just truth.' He is always the casuist, always mentally impartial in
+the face of a moral problem, reserving judgment on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> matters which, after
+all, seem to him remote from an unimpassioned contemplation of things;
+until that moment of crisis comes, long after he has become a clergyman,
+when the death of his wife changed the world for him, and he became, in
+the words of Walton, 'crucified to the world, and all those vanities,
+those imaginary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage;
+and they were as perfectly crucified to him.' From that time to the end
+of his life he had found what he had all the while been seeking: rest
+for the restlessness of his mind, in a meditation upon the divine
+nature; occupation, in being 'ambassador of God,' through the pulpit;
+himself, as it seemed to him, at his fullest and noblest. It was
+himself, really, that he had been seeking all the time, conscious at
+least of that in all the deviations of the way; himself, the ultimate of
+his curiosities.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>And yet, what remains to us out of this life of many purposes, which had
+found an end satisfying to itself in the Deanery of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> St. Paul's, is
+simply a bundle of manuscript verses, which the writer could bring
+himself neither to print nor to destroy. His first satire speaks
+contemptuously of 'giddy fantastic poets,' and, when he allowed himself
+to write poetry, he was resolved to do something different from what
+anybody had ever done before, not so much from the artist's instinctive
+desire of originality, as from a kind of haughty, yet really bourgeois,
+desire to be indebted to nobody. With what care he wrote is confessed in
+a passage of one of his letters, where, speaking of a sermon, he says:
+'For, as Cardinal Cusanus wrote a book, <i>Cribratio Alchorani</i>, I have
+cribrated, and re-cribrated, and post-cribrated the sermon, and must
+necessarily say, the King, who hath let fall his eye upon some of my
+poems, never saw, of mine, a hand, or an eye, or an affection, set down
+with so much study and diligence, and labour of syllables, as in this
+sermon I expressed those two points.' But he thought there were other
+things more important than being a poet, and this very labour of his was
+partly a sign of it. 'He began,' says Mr. Gosse with truth, 'as if
+poetry had never been written before.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> To the people of his time, to
+those who came immediately after him, he was the restorer of English
+poetry.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds</div>
+<div>O'erspread, was purged by thee,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>says Carew, in those memorial verses in which the famous lines occur:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit</div>
+<div>The universal monarchy of wit.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Shakespeare was living, remember, and it was Elizabethan poetry that
+Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system
+of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less
+arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,'
+said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet,
+if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasis
+of what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in at
+all events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way he meant
+them to be delivered is not always as beautiful as it is expressive.
+Donne would be original at all costs, preferring himself to his art. He
+treated poetry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> as &AElig;sop's master treated his slave, and broke what he
+could not bend.</p>
+
+<p>But Donne's novelty of metre is only a part of his too deliberate
+novelty as a poet. As Mr. Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evident
+truth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's real
+position in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realistic
+writer, who makes a clean sweep of tradition, and puts everything down
+in the most modern words and with the help of the most trivial actual
+images.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>To what a cumbersome unwieldiness,</div>
+<div>And burdensome corpulence my love hath grown,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he will begin a poem on <i>Love's Diet</i>. Of love, as the master of hearts,
+he declares seriously:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>He swallows us and never chaws;</div>
+<div>By him, as by chain'd shot, whole ranks do die;</div>
+<div>He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And, in his unwise insistence that every metaphor shall be absolutely
+new, he drags medical and alchemical and legal properties into verse
+really full of personal passion, producing at times poetry which is a
+kind of disease of the intellect, a sick offshoot of science. Like most
+poets of powerful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> individuality, Donne lost precisely where he gained.
+That cumulative and crowding and sweeping intellect which builds up his
+greatest poems into miniature Escurials of poetry, mountainous and
+four-square to all the winds of the world, 'purges' too often the
+flowers as well as the weeds out of 'the Muses' garden.' To write poetry
+as if it had never been written before is to attempt what the greatest
+poets never attempted. There are only two poets in English literature
+who thus stand out of the tradition, who are without ancestors, Donne
+and Browning. Each seems to have certain qualities almost greater than
+the qualities of the greatest; and yet in each some precipitation of
+arrogant egoism remains in the crucible, in which the draught has all
+but run immortally clear.</p>
+
+<p>Donne's quality of passion is unique in English poetry. It is a rapture
+in which the mind is supreme, a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a
+pitch of actual violence. The words themselves rarely count for much, as
+they do in Crashaw, for instance, where words turn giddy at the height
+of their ascension. The words mean things, and it is the things that
+matter. They can be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> brutal: 'For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let
+me love!' as if a long, pre-supposed self-repression gave way suddenly,
+in an outburst. 'Love, any devil else but you,' he begins, in his abrupt
+leap to the heart of the matter. Or else his exaltation will be grave,
+tranquil, measureless in assurance.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>All kings, and all their favourites,</div>
+<div>All glory of honours, beauties, wits,</div>
+<div>The sun itself, which makes time, as they pass,</div>
+<div>Is elder by a year now than it was</div>
+<div>When thou and I first one another saw.</div>
+<div>All other things to their destruction draw,</div>
+<div>Only our love hath no decay;</div>
+<div>This no to-morrow hath, no yesterday;</div>
+<div>Running, it never runs from us away,</div>
+<div>But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This lover loves with his whole nature, and so collectedly because
+reason, in him, is not in conflict with passion, but passion's ally. His
+senses speak with unparalleled directness, as in those elegies which
+must remain the model in English of masculine sensual sobriety. He
+distinguishes the true end of such loving in a forcible,
+characteristically prosaic image:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Whoever loves, if he do not propose</div>
+<div>The right true end of love, he's one that goes</div>
+<div>To sea for nothing but to make him sick.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p><p>And he exemplifies every motion and the whole pilgrim's progress of
+physical love, with a deliberate, triumphant, unluxurious explicitness
+which 'leaves no doubt,' as we say 'of his intentions,' and can be no
+more than referred to passingly in modern pages. In a series of hate
+poems, of which I will quote the finest, he gives expression to a whole
+region of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, out
+of Catullus, with such intolerable truth.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead,</div>
+<div>And that thou think'st thee free</div>
+<div>From all solicitation from me,</div>
+<div>Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,</div>
+<div>And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see:</div>
+<div>Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,</div>
+<div>And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,</div>
+<div>Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think</div>
+<div>Thou call'st for more,</div>
+<div>And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;</div>
+<div>And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou</div>
+<div>Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie</div>
+<div>A verier ghost than I.</div>
+<div>What I will say, I will not tell thee now,</div>
+<div>Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,</div>
+<div>I'd rather thou should'st painfully repent,</div>
+<div>Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yet it is the same lover, and very evidently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> the same, who winnows all
+this earthly passion to a fine, fruitful dust, fit to make bread for
+angels. Ecstatic reason, passion justifying its intoxication by
+revealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the
+quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to
+make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly
+abstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture of
+solution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called <i>The
+Ecstasy</i>, which seems to anticipate a metaphysical Blake; it is all
+close reasoning, step by step, and yet is what its title claims for it.</p>
+
+<p>It may be, though I doubt it, that other poets who have written personal
+verse in English, have known as much of women's hearts and the senses of
+men, and the interchanges of passionate intercourse between man and
+woman; but, partly by reason of this very method of saying things, no
+one has ever rendered so exactly, and with such elaborate subtlety,
+every mood of the actual passion. It has been done in prose; may one not
+think of Stendhal, for a certain way he has of turning the whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> forces
+of the mind upon those emotions and sensations which are mostly left to
+the heat of an unreflective excitement? Donne, as he suffers all the
+colds and fevers of love, is as much the sufferer and the physician of
+his disease as we have seen him to be in cases of actual physical
+sickness. Always detached from himself, even when he is most helplessly
+the slave of circumstances, he has that frightful faculty of seeing
+through his own illusions; of having no illusions to the mind, only to
+the senses. Other poets, with more wisdom towards poetry, give us the
+beautiful or pathetic results of no matter what creeping or soaring
+passions. Donne, making a new thing certainly, if not always a thing of
+beauty, tells us exactly what a man really feels as he makes love to a
+woman, as he sits beside her husband at table, as he dreams of her in
+absence, as he scorns himself for loving her, as he hates or despises
+her for loving him, as he realises all that is stupid in her devotion,
+and all that is animal in his. 'Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to
+love,' he tells her, in a burst of angry contempt, priding himself on
+his superior craft in the art. And his devotions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> to her are exquisite,
+appealing to what is most responsive in woman, beyond those of tenderer
+poets. A woman cares most for the lover who understands her best, and is
+least taken in by what it is the method of her tradition to feign. So
+wearily conscious that she is not the abstract angel of her pretence and
+of her adorers, she will go far in sheer thankfulness to the man who can
+see so straight into her heart as to have</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i4">found something like a heart,</div>
+<div>But colours it and corners had;</div>
+<div>It was not good, it was not bad,</div>
+<div>It was entire to none, and few had part.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Donne shows women themselves, in delight, anger, or despair; they know
+that he finds nothing in the world more interesting, and they much more
+than forgive him for all the ill he says of them. If women most
+conscious of their sex were ever to read Donne, they would say, He was a
+great lover; he understood.</p>
+
+<p>And, in the poems of divine love, there is the same quality of mental
+emotion as in the poems of human love. Donne adores God reasonably,
+knowing why he adores Him. He renders thanks point by point,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> celebrates
+the heavenly perfections with metaphysical precision, and is no vaguer
+with God than with woman. Donne knew what he believed and why he
+believed, and is carried into no heat or mist as he tells over the
+recording rosary of his devotions. His <i>Holy Sonnets</i> are a kind of
+argument with God; they tell over, and discuss, and resolve, such
+perplexities of faith and reason as would really occur to a speculative
+brain like his. Thought crowds in upon thought, in these tightly packed
+lines, which but rarely admit a splendour of this kind:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>At the round earth's imagined corners blow</div>
+<div>Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise</div>
+<div>From death, you numberless infinities</div>
+<div>Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>More typical is this too knotted beginning of another sonnet:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you</div>
+<div>As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;</div>
+<div>That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend</div>
+<div>Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Having something very minute and very exact to say, he hates to leave
+anything out; dreading diffuseness, as he dreads the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> tame sweetness of
+an easy melody, he will use only the smallest possible number of words
+to render his thought; and so, as here, he is too often ingenious rather
+than felicitous, forgetting that to the poet poetry comes first, and all
+the rest afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>For the writing of great poetry something more is needed than to be a
+poet and to have great occasions. Donne was a poet, and he had the
+passions and the passionate adventures, in body and mind, which make the
+material for poetry; he was sincere to himself in expressing what he
+really felt under the burden of strong emotion and sharp sensation.
+Almost every poem that he wrote is written on a genuine inspiration, a
+genuine personal inspiration, but most of his poems seem to have been
+written before that personal inspiration has had time to fuse itself
+with the poetic inspiration. It is always useful to remember
+Wordsworth's phrase of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity,' for
+nothing so well defines that moment of crystallisation in which direct
+emotion or sensation deviates exquisitely into art. Donne is intent on
+the passion itself, the thought, the reality; so intent that he is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> not
+at the same time, in that half-unconscious way which is the way of the
+really great poet, equally intent on the form, that both may come to
+ripeness together. Again it is the heresy of the realist. Just as he
+drags into his verse words that have had no time to take colour from
+men's association of them with beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinking
+heart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He gives us
+the real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetry
+will have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated them
+into a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of ours
+as the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of the
+poet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supreme
+poetic language of Dante. But the personal or human reality and the
+imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the art
+will be at fault. Donne is too proud to abandon himself to his own
+inspiration, to his inspiration as a poet; he would be something more
+than a voice for deeper yet speechless powers; he would make poetry
+speak straight. Well,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> poetry will not speak straight, in the way Donne
+wished it to, and under the goading that his restless intellect gave it.</p>
+
+<p>He forgot beauty, preferring to it every form of truth, and beauty has
+revenged itself upon him, glittering miraculously out of many lines in
+which he wrote humbly, and leaving the darkness of a retreating shadow
+upon great spaces in which a confident intellect was conscious of
+shining.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>For, though mind be the heaven, where love may sit,</div>
+<div>Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>he writes, in the <i>Valediction to his Book</i>, thus giving formal
+expression to his heresy. 'The greatest wit, though not the best poet of
+our nation,' Dryden called him; the greatest intellect, that is, which
+had expressed itself in poetry. Dryden himself was not always careful to
+distinguish between what material was fit and what unfit for verse; so
+that we can now enjoy his masterly prose with more equable pleasure than
+his verse. But he saw clearly enough the distinction in Donne between
+intellect and the poetical spirit; that fatal division of two forces,
+which, had they pulled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> together instead of apart, might have achieved a
+result wholly splendid. Without a great intellect no man was ever a
+great poet; but to possess a great intellect is not even a first step in
+the direction of becoming a poet at all.</p>
+
+<p>Compare Donne, for instance, with Herrick. Herrick has little enough of
+the intellect, the passion, the weight and the magnificence of Donne;
+but, setting out with so much less to carry, he certainly gets first to
+the goal, and partly by running always in the right direction. The most
+limited poet in the language, he is the surest. He knows the airs that
+weave themselves into songs, as he knows the flowers that twine best
+into garlands. Words come to him in an order which no one will ever
+alter, and no one will ever forget. Whether they come easily or not is
+no matter; he knows when they have come right, and they always come
+right before he lets them go. But Donne is only occasionally sure of his
+words as airs; he sets them doggedly to the work of saying something,
+whether or no they step to the beat of the music. Conscious writer
+though he was, I suppose he was more or less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> unconscious of his
+extraordinary felicities, more conscious probably of how they came than
+of what they were doing. And they come chiefly through a sudden
+heightening of mood, which brings with it a clearer and a more exalted
+mode of speech, in its merely accurate expression of itself. Even then I
+cannot imagine him quite reconciled to beauty, at least actually doing
+homage to it, but rather as one who receives a gift by the way.</p>
+
+<p>1899.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EMILY_BRONTE" id="EMILY_BRONTE"></a>EMILY BRONT&Euml;</h2>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>This was a woman young and passionate,</div>
+<div>Loving the Earth, and loving most to be</div>
+<div>Where she might be alone with liberty;</div>
+<div>Loving the beasts, who are compassionate;</div>
+<div>The homeless moors, her home; the bright elate</div>
+<div>Winds of the cold dawn; rock and stone and tree;</div>
+<div>Night, bringing dreams out of eternity;</div>
+<div>And memory of Death's unforgetting date.</div>
+<div>She too was unforgetting: has she yet</div>
+<div>Forgotten that long agony when her breath</div>
+<div>Too fierce for living fanned the flame of death?</div>
+<div>Earth for her heather, does she now forget</div>
+<div>What pity knew not in her love from scorn,</div>
+<div>And that it was an unjust thing to be born?</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Stoic in woman has been seen once only, and that in the only woman
+in whom there has been seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness.
+Emily Bront&euml; lived with an unparalleled energy a life of outward quiet,
+in a loneliness which she shared only with the moors and with the
+animals whom she loved. She required no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>passion-experience to endow her
+with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is
+alive in the earth. And the vehemence of that inner fire fed on itself,
+and wore out her body before its time, because it had no respite and no
+outlet. We see her condemned to self-imprisonment, and dying of too much
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Her poems are few and brief, and nothing more personal has ever been
+written. A few are as masterly in execution as in conception, and almost
+all have a direct truth of utterance, which rarely lacks at least the
+bare beauty of muscle and sinew, of a kind of naked strength and
+alertness. They are without heat or daylight, the sun is rarely in them,
+and then 'blood-red'; light comes as starshine, or comes as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i6">hostile light</div>
+<div>That does not warm but burn.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>At times the landscape in this bare, grey, craggy verse, always a
+landscape of Yorkshire moors, with its touches of stern and tender
+memory, 'The mute bird sitting on the stone,' 'A little and a lone green
+lane,' has a quality more thrilling than that of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>Wordsworth. There is
+none of his observation, and none of his sense of a benignant 'presence
+far more deeply interfused'; but there is the voice of the heart's
+roots, crying out to its home in the earth.</p>
+
+<p>At first this unornamented verse may seem forbidding, may seem even to
+be ordinary, as an actual moorland may, to those for whom it has no
+special attraction. But in the verse, as on the moors, there is space,
+wind, and the smell of the earth; and there is room to be alone, that
+liberty which this woman cried for when she cried:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Leave the heart that now I bear,</div>
+<div>And give me liberty.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>To be alone was for her to be alone with 'a chainless soul,' which asked
+of whatever powers might be only 'courage to endure,' constancy not to
+forget, and the right to leave the door wide open to those visions that
+came to her out of mere fixed contemplation: 'the God of Visions,' as
+she called her imagination, 'my slave, my comrade, and my king.' And we
+know that her courage was flawless, heroic, beyond praise; that she
+forgot nothing, not even that love for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> her unspeakable brother, for
+whom she has expressed in two of her poems a more than masculine
+magnanimity of pity and contempt; and that at all times she could turn
+inward to that world within, where her imagination waited for her,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Where thou, and I, and Liberty</div>
+<div>Have undisputed sovereignty.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yet even imagination, though 'benignant,' is to her a form of 'phantom
+bliss' to which she will not trust herself wholly. 'So hopeless is the
+world without': but is the world within ever quite frankly accepted as a
+substitute, as a truer reality? She is always on her guard against
+imagination as against the outer world, whose 'lies' she is resolved
+shall not 'beguile' her. She has accepted reason as the final arbiter,
+and desires only to see clearly, to see things as they are. She really
+believed that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Earth reserves no blessing</div>
+<div>For the unblest of heaven;</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and she had an almost Calvinistic sense of her own condemnation to
+unhappiness. That being so, she was suspicious of those opportunities of
+joy which did come to her, or at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> least resolute not to believe too
+implicitly in the good messages of the stars, which might be mere
+dreams, or of the earth, which was only certainly kind in preparing for
+her that often-thought-of grave. 'No coward soul is mine' is one of her
+true sayings; but it was with difficulty that she trusted even that
+message of life which she seemed to discover in death. She has to assure
+herself of it, again and again: 'Who once lives, never dies!' And that
+sense of personal identity which aches throughout all her poems is a
+sense, not of the delight, but of the pain and ineradicable sting of
+personal identity.</p>
+
+<p>Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, <i>Wuthering Heights</i>, is
+one long outcry. A soul on the rack seems to make itself heard at
+moments, when suffering has grown too acute for silence. Every poem is
+as if torn from her. Even when she does not write seemingly in her own
+person, the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner,' 'Honour's
+Martyr,' 'The Outcast Mother,' echoes of all the miseries and useless
+rebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dying
+faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> closely into
+the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always
+arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a
+clear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt is itself an
+affirmation, her defiance would be an entreaty but for the 'quenchless
+will' of her pride. She faces every terror, and to her pained
+apprehension birth and death and life are alike terrible. Only Webster's
+dirge might have been said over her coffin.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>What my soul bore my soul alone</div>
+<div>Within itself may tell,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>she says truthfully; but some of that long endurance of her life, in
+which exile, the body's weakness, and a sense of some 'divinest anguish'
+which clung about the world and all things living, had their share, she
+was able to put into ascetic and passionate verse. It is sad-coloured
+and desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the
+clouds that hang generally above it, a rare and stormy beauty comes into
+the bare outlines, quickening them with living splendour.</p>
+
+<p>1906.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="EDGAR_ALLAN_POE" id="EDGAR_ALLAN_POE"></a>EDGAR ALLAN POE</h2>
+
+<p>The poems of Edgar Allan Poe are the work of a poet who thought
+persistently about poetry as an art, and would have reduced inspiration
+to a method. At their best they are perfectly defined by Baudelaire,
+when he says of Poe's poetry that it is a thing 'deep and shimmering as
+dreams, mysterious and perfect as crystal.' Not all the poems, few as
+they are, are flawless. In a few unequal poems we have the only
+essential poetry which has yet come from America, Walt Whitman's vast
+poetical nature having remained a nature only, not come to be an art.
+Because Poe was fantastically inhuman, a conscious artist doing strange
+things with strange materials, not every one has realised how fine, how
+rare, was that beauty which this artist brought into the world. It is
+true that there was in the genius of Poe something meretricious; it is
+the flaw in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> his genius; but then he had genius, and Whittier and Bryant
+and Longfellow and Lowell had only varying degrees of talent. Let us
+admit, by all means, that a diamond is flawed; but need we compare it
+with this and that fine specimen of quartz?</p>
+
+<p>Poetry Poe defined as 'the rhythmical creation of beauty'; and the first
+element of poetry he found in 'the thirst for supernal beauty.' 'It is
+not,' he repeats, 'the mere appreciation of the beauty before us. It is
+a wild effort to reach the beauty above.... Inspired with a prescient
+ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, it struggles by multiform
+novelty of combination among the things and thoughts of time, to
+anticipate some portions of that loveliness whose very elements,
+perhaps, appertain solely to eternity.' The poet, then, 'should limit
+his endeavours to the creation of novel moods of beauty, in form, in
+colour, in sound, in sentiment.' Note the emphasis upon novel: to Poe
+there was no beauty without strangeness. He makes his favourite
+quotation: '"But," says Lord Bacon (how justly!) "there is no exquisite
+beauty without some strangeness in the proportions." Take away this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+element of strangeness&mdash;of unexpectedness&mdash;of novelty&mdash;of
+originality&mdash;call it what we will&mdash;and all that is ethereal in
+loveliness is lost at once.... We lose, in short, all that assimilates
+the beauty of earth with what we dream of the beauty of heaven!' And, as
+another of the elements of this creation of beauty, there must be
+indefiniteness. 'I <i>know</i>,' he says, 'that indefiniteness is an element
+of the true music&mdash;I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any
+undue decision&mdash;imbue it with any very determinate tone&mdash;and you deprive
+it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential
+character.' Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine's
+'Art Po&eacute;tique': '<i>Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance</i>'? And is not the
+essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarm&eacute; and of the French
+Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation of 'that class
+of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current
+of meaning an under or <i>suggestive</i> one'? To this 'mystic or secondary
+impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in
+music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> and not always
+a distinct, but an august soul-exalting <i>echo</i>.' Has anything that has
+been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of
+verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more subtly or
+more precisely?</p>
+
+<p>And Poe does not end here, with what may seem generalities. 'Beyond the
+limits of beauty,' he says of poetry, 'its province does not extend. Its
+sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has
+only collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally,
+upon either Duty or Truth.' And of the poet who said, not meaning
+anything very different from what Poe meant, 'Beauty is truth, truth
+beauty,' he says: 'He is the sole British poet who has never erred in
+his themes.' And, as if still thinking of Keats, he says: 'It is chiefly
+amid forms of physical loveliness (we use the word <i>forms</i> in its widest
+sense as embracing modifications of sound and colour) that the soul
+seeks the realisation of its dreams of Beauty.' And, with more earnest
+insistence on those limits which he knew to be so much more necessary to
+guard in poetry than its so-called freedom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> ('the true artist will avail
+himself of no "license" whatever'), he states, with categorical
+precision: 'A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by
+having, for its <i>immediate</i> object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by
+having, for its object, an <i>indefinite</i> instead of a <i>definite</i>
+pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance
+presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with <i>in</i>definite
+sensations, to which end music is an <i>essential</i>, since comprehension of
+sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with
+a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music;
+the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.'</p>
+
+<p>And he would set these careful limits, not only to the province of
+poetic pleasure, but to the form and length of actual poetry. 'A long
+poem,' he says, with more truth than most people are quite willing to
+see, 'is a paradox.' 'I hold,' he says elsewhere, 'that a long poem does
+not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat
+contradiction in terms.' And, after defining his ideal, 'a rhymed poem,
+not to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> exceed in length what might be perused in an hour,' he says,
+very justly, that 'within this limit alone can the highest order of true
+poetry exist.' In another essay he narrows the duration to 'half an
+hour, at the very utmost'; and wisely. In yet another essay he suggests
+'a length of about one hundred lines' as the length most likely to
+convey that unity of impression, with that intensity of true poetical
+effect, in which he found the highest merit of poetry. Remember, that of
+true poetry we have already had his definition; and concede, that a
+loftier conception of poetry as poetry, poetry as lyric essence, cannot
+easily be imagined. We are too ready to accept, under the general name
+of poetry, whatever is written eloquently in metre; to call even
+Wordsworth's <i>Excursion</i> a poem, and to accept <i>Paradise Lost</i> as
+throughout a poem. But there are not thirty consecutive lines of
+essential poetry in the whole of <i>The Excursion</i>, and, while <i>Paradise
+Lost</i> is crammed with essential poetry, that poetry is not consecutive;
+but the splendid workmanship comes in to fill up the gaps, and to hold
+our attention until the poetry returns. Essential poetry is an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> essence
+too strong for the general sense; diluted, it can be endured; and, for
+the most part, the poets dilute it. Poe could conceive of it only in the
+absolute; and his is the counsel of perfection, if of a perfection
+almost beyond mortal powers. He sought for it in the verse of all poets;
+he sought, as few have ever sought, to concentrate it in his own verse;
+and he has left us at least a few poems, '<i>ciascun distinto e di fulgore
+e d'arte</i>,' in which he has found, within his own limits, the absolute.</p>
+
+<p>1906.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THOMAS_LOVELL_BEDDOES" id="THOMAS_LOVELL_BEDDOES"></a>THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES</h2>
+
+<p>With the strange fortune that always accompanied him, in life and in
+death, Beddoes has not merely escaped the indiscriminate applause which
+he would never have valued, but he has remained a bibliographical rather
+than a literary rarity. Few except the people who collect first
+editions&mdash;not, as a rule, the public for a poet&mdash;have had the chance of
+possessing <i>Death's Jest-Book</i> (1850) and the <i>Poems</i> (1851). At last
+Beddoes has been made accessible, the real story of his death, that
+suicide so much in the casual and determined manner of one of his own
+characters.</p>
+
+<p>'The power of the man is immense and irresistible.' Browning's emphatic
+phrase comes first to the memory, and remains always the most
+appropriate word of eulogy. Beddoes has been rashly called a great poet.
+I do not think he was a great poet, but he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> was, in every sense of the
+word, an astonishing one. Read these lines, and remember that they were
+written just at that stagnant period (1821-1826) which comes between the
+period of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, and the period of Browning and
+Tennyson. It is a murderer who speaks:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>I am unsouled, dishumanised, uncreated;</div>
+<div>My passions swell and grow like brutes conceived;</div>
+<div>My feet are fixing roots, and every limb</div>
+<div>Is billowy and gigantic, till I seem</div>
+<div>A wild, old, wicked mountain in the air:</div>
+<div>And the abhorred conscience of this murder,</div>
+<div>It will grow up a lion, all alone,</div>
+<div>A mighty-maned, grave-mouthed prodigy,</div>
+<div>And lair him in my caves: and other thoughts,</div>
+<div>Some will be snakes, and bears, and savage wolves,</div>
+<div>And when I lie tremendous in the desert,</div>
+<div>Or abandoned sea, murderers and idiot men</div>
+<div>Will come to live upon my rugged sides,</div>
+<div>Die, and be buried in me. Now it comes;</div>
+<div>I break, and magnify, and lose my form,</div>
+<div>And yet I shall be taken for a man,</div>
+<div>And never be discovered till I die.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>How much this has of the old, splendid audacity of the Elizabethans! How
+unlike timid modern verse! Beddoes is always large, impressive; the
+greatness of his aim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> gives him a certain claim on respectful
+consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have
+achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he
+is a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs.</p>
+
+<p>The one important work which Beddoes actually completed, <i>Death's
+Jest-Book</i>, is nominally a drama in five acts. All the rest of his work,
+except a few lyrics and occasional poems, is also nominally dramatic.
+But there never was anything less dramatic in substance than this mass
+of admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes' genius was essentially
+lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a
+strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic power
+he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a
+credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no
+conception of what character might be in men and women, he had no
+faculty of expressing emotion convincingly. Constantly you find the most
+beautiful poetry where it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do you
+find one of those brief and memorable phrases,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> words from the heart,
+for which one would give much beautiful poetry. To take one instance: an
+Arab slave wishes to say that he has caught sight of a sail nearing the
+coast. And this is how he says it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>I looked abroad upon the wide old world,</div>
+<div>And in the sky and sea, through the same clouds,</div>
+<div>The same stars saw I glistening, and nought else,</div>
+<div>And as my soul sighed unto the world's soul,</div>
+<div>Far in the north a wind blackened the waters,</div>
+<div>And, after that creating breath was still,</div>
+<div>A dark speck sat on the sky's edge: as watching</div>
+<div>Upon the heaven-girt border of my mind</div>
+<div>The first faint thought of a great deed arise,</div>
+<div>With force and fascination I drew on</div>
+<div>The wished sight, and my hope seemed to stamp</div>
+<div>Its shade upon it. Not yet is it clear</div>
+<div>What, or from whom, the vessel.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In scenes which aim at being passionate one sees the same inability to
+be natural. What we get is always literature; it is never less than
+that, nor more than that. It is never frank, uncompromising nature. The
+fact is, that Beddoes wrote from the head, collectively, and without
+emotion, or without inspiration, save in literature. All Beddoes'
+characters speak precisely the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> language, express the same desires;
+all in the same way startle us by their ghostly remoteness from flesh
+and blood. 'Man is tired of being merely human,' Siegfried says, in
+<i>Death's Jest-Book</i>, and Beddoes may be said to have grown tired of
+humanity before he ever came to understand it.</p>
+
+<p>Looked at from the normal standpoint, Beddoes' idea of the drama was
+something wildly amateurish. As a practical playwright he would be
+beneath contempt; but what he aimed at was something peculiar to
+himself, a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia. He would have admitted
+his obligations to Webster and Tourneur, to all the <i>macabre</i>
+Elizabethan work; he would have admitted that his foundations were based
+on literature, not on life; but he would have claimed, and claimed
+justly, that he had produced, out of many strange elements, something
+which has a place apart in English poetry. <i>Death's Jest-Book</i> is
+perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page
+without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A
+slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable
+of death:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span><div class="i2">Sleeping, or feigning sleep,</div>
+<div>Well done of her: 'tis trying on a garb</div>
+<div>Which she must wear, sooner or later, long:</div>
+<div>'Tis but a warmer, lighter death.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Not Baudelaire was more amorous of corruption; not Poe was more
+spellbound by the scent of graveyard earth. So Beddoes has written a new
+Dance of Death, in poetry; has become the chronicler of the praise and
+ridicule of Death. 'Tired of being merely human,' he has peopled a play
+with confessed phantoms. It is natural that these eloquent speakers
+should pass us by with their words, that they should fail to move us by
+their sorrows or their hates: they are not intended to be human, except,
+indeed, in the wizard humanity of Death.</p>
+
+<p>I have said already that the genius of Beddoes is not dramatic, but
+lyrical. What was really most spontaneous in him (nothing was quite
+spontaneous) was the impulse of song-writing. And it seems to me that he
+is really most successful in sweet and graceful lyrics like this
+<i>Dirge</i>, so much more than 'half in love with easeful death.'</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span><div>If thou wilt ease thine heart</div>
+<div>Of love and all its smart,</div>
+<div class="i2">Then sleep, dear, sleep;</div>
+<div>And not a sorrow</div>
+<div class="i1">Hang any tear on your eyelashes;</div>
+<div class="i2">Lie still and deep,</div>
+<div class="i1">Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes</div>
+<div>The rim o' the sun to-morrow,</div>
+<div class="i2">In eastern sky.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>But wilt thou cure thine heart</div>
+<div>Of love and all its smart,</div>
+<div class="i2">Then die, dear, die;</div>
+<div>'Tis deeper, sweeter,</div>
+<div class="i1">Than on a rose-bank to lie dreaming</div>
+<div class="i2">With folded eye;</div>
+<div class="i1">And then alone, amid the beaming</div>
+<div>Of love's stars, thou'lt meet her</div>
+<div class="i2">In eastern sky.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming, morbid, and magnificent poetry
+in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, of
+English poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones and
+Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writer
+of more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had
+certainly a more personal passion to express in his rough and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actual
+poetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts:
+actual poetical genius.</p>
+
+<p>1891.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="GUSTAVE_FLAUBERT" id="GUSTAVE_FLAUBERT"></a>GUSTAVE FLAUBERT</h2>
+
+<p><i>Salammb&ocirc;</i> is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told
+us, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the
+modern novel.' By the modern novel he means the novel as he had
+reconstructed it; he means <i>Madame Bovary</i>. That perfect book is perfect
+because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject suited to his
+method, had made his method and his subject one. On his scientific side
+Flaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps a more intimately
+personal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in a large, sweeping way.
+The lyric poet in him made <i>La Tentation de Saint-Antoine</i>, the analyst
+made <i>L'Education Sentimentale</i>; but in <i>Madame Bovary</i> we find the
+analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman,
+as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+observed in surroundings of the most ordinary kind. But Flaubert finds
+the romantic material which he loved, the materials of beauty, in
+precisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly.
+Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical,
+incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile
+aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to
+Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of
+reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes
+exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a
+commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric
+in his rendering of it.</p>
+
+<p>In writing <i>Salammb&ocirc;</i> Flaubert set himself to renew the historical
+novel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted,
+doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible,
+by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of the
+reality of the things about us, only able to translate them
+approximately into any form of art. How much is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> left over, in the
+closest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a passing
+steamer, of one's next-door neighbour, of the point of view of a
+foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind, moment
+by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble Arch? Think,
+then, of the attempt to reconstruct no matter what period of the past,
+to distinguish the difference in the aspect of a world perhaps bossed
+with castles and ridged with ramparts, to two individualities encased
+within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his antiquity wisely: a period of
+which we know too little to confuse us, a city of which no stone is left
+on another, the minds of Barbarians who have left us no psychological
+documents. 'Be sure I have made no fantastic Carthage,' he says proudly,
+pointing to his documents; Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him
+with 'the <i>exact</i> form of a door'; the Bible and Theophrastus, from
+which he obtains his perfumes and his precious stones; Gresenius, from
+whom he gets his Punic names; the <i>M&eacute;moires de l'Acad&eacute;mie des
+Inscriptions</i>. 'As for the temple of Tanit, I am sure of having
+reconstructed it as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> it was, with the treatise of the Syrian Goddess,
+with the medals of the Duc de Luynes, with what is known of the temple
+at Jerusalem, with a passage of St. Jerome, quoted by Seldon (<i>De Diis
+Syriis</i>), with the plan of the temple of Gozzo, which is quite
+Carthaginian, and best of all, with the ruins of the temple of Thugga,
+which I have seen myself, with my own eyes, and of which no traveller or
+antiquarian, so far as I know, has ever spoken.' But that, after all, as
+he admits (when, that is, he has proved point by point his minute
+accuracy to all that is known of ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to
+every indication which can serve for his guidance, his patience in
+grouping rather than his daring in the invention of action and details),
+that is not the question. 'I care little enough for arch&aelig;ology! If the
+colour is not uniform, if the details are out of keeping, if the manners
+do not spring from the religion and the actions from the passions, if
+the characters are not consistent, if the costumes are not appropriate
+to the habits and the architecture to the climate, if, in a word, there
+is not harmony, I am in error. If not, no.'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p><p>And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can give
+a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time a definition
+of the merit which sets <i>Salammb&ocirc;</i> above all other historical novels.
+Everything in the book is strange, some of it might easily be
+bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony. The harmony is like
+that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying its charm, or even the
+secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a monotony coiling
+perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its own. Or rather, it is
+like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite colours, firmly
+detached from a background of burning sky; a procession of Barbarians,
+each in the costume of his country, passes across the wall; there are
+battles, in which elephants fight with men; an army besieges a great
+city, or rots to death in a defile between mountains; the ground is
+paved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living burden, stand
+against the sky; a few figures of men and women appear again and again,
+expressing by their gestures the soul of the story.</p>
+
+<p>Flaubert himself has pointed, with his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> unerring self-criticism, to the
+main defect of his book: 'The pedestal is too large for the statue.'
+There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more about Salammb&ocirc;.
+He declares: 'There is not in my book an isolated or gratuitous
+description; all are useful to my characters, and have an influence,
+near or remote, on the action.' This is true, and yet, all the same, the
+pedestal is too large for the statue. Salammb&ocirc;, 'always surrounded with
+grave and exquisite things,' has something of the somnambulism which
+enters into the heroism of Judith; she has a hieratic beauty, and a
+consciousness as pale and vague as the moon whom she worships. She
+passes before us, 'her body saturated with perfumes,' encrusted with
+jewels like an idol, her head turreted with violet hair, the gold chain
+tinkling between her ankles; and is hardly more than an attitude, a
+fixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom one sees passing, with
+oblique eyes and mouths painted into smiles, their faces curiously
+traced into a work of art, in the languid movements of a pantomimic
+dance. The soul behind those eyes? the temperament under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> that at times
+almost terrifying mask? Salammb&ocirc; is as inarticulate for us as the
+serpent, to whose drowsy beauty, capable of such sudden awakenings, hers
+seems half akin; they move before us in a kind of hieratic pantomime, a
+coloured, expressive thing, signifying nothing. M&acirc;tho, maddened with
+love, 'in an invincible stupor, like those who have drunk some draught
+of which they are to die,' has the same somnambulistic life; the prey of
+Venus, he has an almost literal insanity, which, as Flaubert reminds us,
+is true to the ancient view of that passion. He is the only quite vivid
+person in the book, and he lives with the intensity of a wild beast, a
+life 'blinded alike' from every inner and outer interruption to one or
+two fixed ideas. The others have their places in the picture, fall into
+their attitudes naturally, remain so many coloured outlines for us. The
+illusion is perfect; these people may not be the real people of history,
+but at least they have no self-consciousness, no Christian tinge in
+their minds.</p>
+
+<p>'The metaphors are few, the epithets definite,' Flaubert tells us, of
+his style in this book,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> where, as he says, he has sacrificed less 'to
+the amplitude of the phrase and to the period,' than in <i>Madame Bovary</i>.
+The movement here is in briefer steps, with a more earnest gravity,
+without any of the engaging weakness of adjectives. The style is never
+archaic, it is absolutely simple, the precise word being put always for
+the precise thing; but it obtains a dignity, a historical remoteness, by
+the large seriousness of its manner, the absence of modern ways of
+thought, which, in <i>Madame Bovary</i>, bring with them an instinctively
+modern cadence.</p>
+
+<p><i>Salammb&ocirc;</i> is written with the severity of history, but Flaubert notes
+every detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural things.
+A slave is being flogged under a tree: Flaubert notes the movement of
+the thong as it flies, and tells us: 'The thongs, as they whistled
+through the air, sent the bark of the plane trees flying.' Before the
+battle of the Macar, the Barbarians are awaiting the approach of the
+Carthaginian army. First 'the Barbarians were surprised to see the
+ground undulate in the distance.' Clouds of dust rise and whirl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> over
+the desert, through which are seen glimpses of horns, and, as it seems,
+wings. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the desert? The
+Barbarians watch intently. 'At last they made out several transverse
+bars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser, larger;
+dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes came into
+view; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, "The
+Carthaginians!" arose.' Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes,
+unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves,
+taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert puts
+himself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them as
+to see for them.</p>
+
+<p>Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will find
+that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its
+subject-matter. That style, which has almost every merit and hardly a
+fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of most
+writers careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire,
+and you will find that the aim of these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> writers has been to construct a
+style which shall be adaptable to every occasion, but without structural
+change; the cadence is always the same. The most exquisite word-painting
+of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm into English, without
+difficulty; once you have mastered the tune, you have merely to go on;
+every verse will be the same. But Flaubert is so difficult to translate
+because he has no fixed rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regular
+march-music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his
+cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has no
+theory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a
+living thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and
+interprets. 'If I call stones blue, it is because blue is the precise
+word, believe me,' he replies to Sainte-Beuve's criticism. Beauty comes
+into his words from the precision with which they express definite
+things, definite ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where the
+material is so hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheer
+exactitude which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+order, seen equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage, at the
+time of their flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on the
+corpses of the Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>1901.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="GEORGE_MEREDITH_AS_A_POET" id="GEORGE_MEREDITH_AS_A_POET"></a>GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET</h2>
+
+<p>Meredith has always suffered from the curse of too much ability. He has
+both genius and talent, but the talent, instead of acting as a
+counterpoise to the genius, blows it yet more windily about the air. He
+has almost all the qualities of a great writer, but some perverse spirit
+in his blood has mixed them to their mutual undoing. When he writes
+prose, the prose seems always about to burst into poetry; when he writes
+verse, the verse seems always about to sink into prose. He thinks in
+flashes, and writes in shorthand. He has an intellectual passion for
+words, but he has never been able to accustom his mind to the slowness
+of their service; he tosses them about the page in his anger, tearing
+them open and gutting them with a savage pleasure. He has so fastidious
+a fear of dirtying his hands with what other hands have touched that he
+makes the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> language over again, so as to avoid writing a sentence or a
+line as any one else could have written it. His hatred of the
+commonplace becomes a mania, and it is by his head-long hunt after the
+best that he has lost by the way its useful enemy, good. In prose he
+would have every sentence shine, in verse he would have every line
+sparkle; like a lady who puts on all her jewellery at once, immediately
+after breakfast. As his own brain never rests, he does not realise that
+there are other brains which feel fatigue; and as his own taste is for
+what is hard, ringing, showy, drenched with light, he does not leave any
+cool shadows to be a home for gentle sounds, in the whole of his work.
+His books are like picture galleries, in which every inch of wall is
+covered, and picture screams at picture across its narrow division of
+frame. Almost every picture is good, but each suffers from its context.
+As time goes on, Meredith's mannerisms have grown rigid, like old bones.
+Exceptions have become rules, experiments have been accepted for
+solutions.</p>
+
+<p>In Meredith's earliest verse there is a certain harshness, which seems
+to come from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> a too urgent desire to be at once concise and explicit.
+<i>Modern Love</i>, published in 1862, remains Meredith's masterpiece in
+poetry, and it will always remain, beside certain things of Donne and of
+Browning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse.
+It is packed with imagination, but with imagination of so nakedly human
+a kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse:
+it is like scraps of broken, of heart-broken, talk, overheard and jotted
+down at random, hardly suggesting a story, but burning into one like the
+touch of a corroding acid. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no
+illusions, and their 'tragic hints' are like a fine, pained mockery of
+love itself, as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of
+passion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness more
+constant than that of Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensation
+carried to the point of agony at which Othello sweats words like these:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i12">O thou weed,</div>
+<div>Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet</div>
+<div>That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p><p>Meredith has written nothing more like <i>Modern Love</i>, and for twenty
+years after the publication of the volume containing it he published no
+other volume of verse. In 1883 appeared <i>Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of
+Earth</i>; in 1887 <i>Poems and Ballads of Tragic Life</i>; and, in 1888, <i>A
+Reading of Earth</i>, to which <i>A Reading of Life</i> is a sort of companion
+volume. The main part of this work is a kind of nature-poetry unlike any
+other nature-poetry; but there are several groups which must be
+distinguished from it. One group contains <i>Cassandra</i>, from the volume
+of 1862, <i>The Nuptials of Attila, The Song of Theodolinda</i>, from the
+volume of 1887. There is something fierce, savage, convulsive, in the
+passion which informs these poems; a note sounded in our days by no
+other poet. The words rush rattling on one another, like the clashing of
+spears or the ring of iron on iron in a day of old-world battle. The
+lines are javelins, consonanted lines full of force and fury, as if sung
+or played by a northern skald harping on a field of slain. There is
+another group of romantic ballads, containing the early <i>Margaret's
+Bridal Eve</i>, and the later <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span><i>Arch-duchess Anne</i> and <i>The Young
+Princess</i>. There are also the humorous and pathetic studies in <i>Roadside
+Philosophers</i> and the like, in which, forty years ago, Meredith
+anticipated, with the dignity of a poet, the vernacular studies of
+others. And, finally, there is a section containing poems of impassioned
+meditation, beginning with the lofty and sustained ode to <i>France,
+December</i> 1870, and ending with the volcanic volume of <i>Odes in
+Contribution to the Song of French History</i>, published in 1900.</p>
+
+<p>But it is in the poems of nature that Meredith is most consistent to an
+attitude, most himself as he would have himself. There is in them an
+almost pagan sense of the nearness and intimacy of the awful and
+benignant powers of nature; but this sense, once sufficient for the
+making of poetry, is interpenetrated, in this modern poet, by an almost
+scientific consciousness of the processes of evolution. Earth seen
+through a brain, not a temperament, it might be defined; and it would be
+possible to gather a complete philosophy of life from these poems, in
+which, though 'the joy of earth' is sung, it is sung with the wise,
+collected ecstasy of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> Melampus, not with the irresponsible ecstasy of
+the M&aelig;nads. It is not what Browning calls 'the wild joy of living,' but
+the strenuous joy of living in perfect accordance with nature, with the
+sanity of animals who have climbed to reason, and are content to be
+guided by it. It is a philosophy which may well be contrasted with the
+transcendental theories of one with whom Meredith may otherwise be
+compared, Emerson. Both, in different ways, have tried to make poetry
+out of the brain, forgetting that poetry draws nourishment from other
+soil, and dies in the brain as in a vacuum. Both have taken the
+abstract, not the concrete, for their province; both have tortured words
+in the cause of ideas, both have had so much to say that they have had
+little time left over for singing.</p>
+
+<p>Meredith has never been a clear writer in verse; <i>Modern Love</i> requires
+reading and re-reading; but at one time he had a somewhat exasperating
+semblance of lucidity, which still lurks mockingly about his work. A
+freshman who heard Mallarm&eacute; lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I
+understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is sometimes
+equally tantalising.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one,
+clearly visible on the other side of some hard transparency through
+which there is no passage. Have you ever seen a cat pawing at the glass
+from the other side of a window? It paws and paws, turns its head to the
+right, turns its head to the left, walks to and fro, sniffing at the
+corner of every pane; its claws screech on the glass, in a helpless
+endeavour to get through to what it sees before it; it gives up at last,
+in an evident bewilderment. That is how one figures the reader of
+Meredith's later verse. It is not merely that Meredith's meaning is not
+obvious at a glance, it is, when obscure, ugly in its obscurity, not
+beautiful. There is not an uglier line in the English language than:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is almost impossible to say it at all. Often Meredith wishes to be
+too concise, and squeezes his thoughts together like this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i6">and the totterer Earth detests,</div>
+<div>Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In his desire to cram a separate sentence into every line, he writes
+such lines as:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Look I once back, a broken pinion I,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p><p>He thinks differently from other people, and not only more quickly; and
+his mind works in a kind of double process. Take, for instance, this
+phrase:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Ravenous all the line for speed.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>An image occurs to him, the image of a runner, who, as we say, 'devours'
+the ground. Thereupon he translates this image into his own dialect,
+where it becomes intensely vivid if it can be caught in passing; only,
+to catch it in passing, you must go through two mental processes at
+once. That is why he cannot be read aloud. In a poem where every line is
+on the pattern of the line I have quoted, every line has to be
+unriddled; and no brain works fast enough to catch so many separate
+meanings, and to translate as it goes.</p>
+
+<p>Meredith has half the making of a great artist in verse. He has harmony
+without melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations upon
+verse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the
+swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to
+astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical
+skill carry him into such excesses of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> ugliness in verse as technical
+skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has
+written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud
+of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping
+as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the
+building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the
+delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his
+poems, the <i>Hymn to Colour</i>, he can begin one stanza with this ample
+magnificence:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes</div>
+<div>The house of heaven splendid for the bride;</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and can end another stanza thus lumpishly:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,</div>
+<div>Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged</div>
+<div class="i2">Shall on through brave wars waged.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Meredith is not satisfied with English verse as it is; he persists in
+trying to make it into something wholly different, and these
+eccentricities come partly from certain theories. He speaks in one place
+of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>A soft compulsion on terrene</div>
+<div>By heavenly,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>which is not English, but a misapplication of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> the jargon of science. In
+another place he speaks of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>The posts that named the swallowed mile,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>which is a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference,
+liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and
+'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two
+lines from <i>The Woods of Westermain</i>, published in 1883 in the <i>Poems
+and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth</i>, sum up in themselves the whole theory:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Life, the small self-dragon ramped,</div>
+<div>Thrill for service to be stamped.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here every word is harsh, prickly, hard of sense; the rhymes come like
+buffets in the face. It is possible that Meredith has more or less
+consciously imitated the French practice in the matter of rhymes, for in
+France rarity of rhyme is sought as eagerly as in England it is avoided.
+Rhyme in French poetry is an important part of the art of verse; in
+English poetry, except to some extent at the time of Pope, it has been
+accepted as a thing rather to be disguised than accentuated. There is
+something a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> little barbarous in rhyme itself, with its mnemonic click
+of emphasis, and the skill of the most skilful English poets has always
+been shown in the softening of that click, in reducing it to the
+inarticulate answer of an echo. Meredith hammers out his rhymes on the
+anvil on which he has forged his clanging and rigid-jointed words. His
+verse moves in plate-armour, 'terrible as an army with banners.'</p>
+
+<p>To Meredith poetry has come to be a kind of imaginative logic, and
+almost the whole of his later work is a reasoning in verse. He reasons,
+not always clearly to the eye, and never satisfyingly to the ear, but
+with a fiery intelligence which has more passion than most other poets
+put into frankly emotional verse. He reasons in pictures, every line
+having its imagery, and he uses pictorial words to express abstract
+ideas. Disdaining the common subjects of poetry, as he disdains common
+rhythms, common rhymes, and common language, he does much by his
+enormous vitality to give human warmth to arguments concerning humanity.
+He does much, though he attempts the impossible. His poetry is always
+what Rossetti called<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> 'amusing'; it has, in other words, what Baudelaire
+called 'the supreme literary grace, energy'; but with what relief does
+one not lay down this <i>Reading of Life</i> and take up the <i>Modern Love</i> of
+forty years ago, in which life speaks! Meredith has always been in
+wholesome revolt against convention, against every deadening limitation
+of art, but he sometimes carries revolt to the point of anarchy. In
+finding new subjects and new forms for verse he is often throwing away
+the gold and gathering up the ore. In taking for his foundation the
+stone which the builders rejected he is sometimes only giving a proof of
+their wisdom in rejecting it.</p>
+
+<p>1901.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="ALGERNON_CHARLES_SWINBURNE" id="ALGERNON_CHARLES_SWINBURNE"></a>ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>It is forty-four years since the publication of Swinburne's first
+volume, and it is scarcely to the credit of the English public that we
+should have had to wait so long for a collected edition of the poems of
+one of the greatest poets of this or any country. 'It is nothing to me,'
+Swinburne tells us, with a delicate precision in his pride, 'that what I
+write should find immediate or general acceptance.' And indeed
+'immediate' it can scarcely be said to have been; 'general' it is hardly
+likely ever to be. Swinburne has always been a poet writing for poets,
+or for those rare lovers of poetry who ask for poetry, and nothing more
+or less, in a poet. Such writers can never be really popular, any more
+than gold without alloy can ever really be turned to practical uses.
+Think of how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> extremely little the poetical merit of his poetry had to
+do with the immense success of Byron; think how very much besides
+poetical merit contributed to the surprising reputation of Tennyson.
+There was a time when the first series of <i>Poems and Ballads</i> was read
+for what seemed startling in its subject-matter; but that time has long
+since passed, and it is not probable that any reviewer of the new
+edition now reprinted verbatim from the edition of 1866 will so much as
+allude to the timid shrieks which went up from the reviewers of that
+year, except perhaps as one of the curiosities of literature.</p>
+
+<p>A poet is always interesting and instructive when he talks about
+himself, and Swinburne, in his dedicatory epistle to his 'best and
+dearest friend,' Mr. Watts-Dunton, who has been the finest, the surest,
+and the subtlest critic of poetry now living, talks about himself, or
+rather about his work, with a proud and simple frankness. It is not only
+interesting, but of considerable critical significance, to know that,
+among his plays, Swinburne prefers <i>Mary Stuart</i>, and, among his lyrical
+poems, the ode on Athens and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> ode on the Armada. 'By the test of
+these two poems,' he tells us, 'I am content that my claims should be
+decided and my station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of
+the term; a craftsman in the most ambitious line of his art that ever
+aroused or can arouse the emulous aspiration of his kind.'</p>
+
+<p>In one sense a poet is always the most valuable critic of his own work;
+in another sense his opinion is almost valueless. He knows, better than
+any one else, what he wanted to do, and he knows, better than any one
+else, how nearly he has done it. In judging his own technical skill in
+the accomplishment of his aim, it is easy for him to be absolutely
+unbiased, technique being a thing wholly apart from one's self, an
+acquirement. But, in a poem, the way it is done is by no means
+everything; something else, the vital element in it, the quality of
+inspiration, as we rightly call it, has to be determined. Of this the
+poet is rarely a judge. To him it is a part of himself, and he is
+scarcely more capable of questioning its validity than he is of
+questioning his own intentions. To him it is enough that it is his.
+Conscious, as he may rightly be, of genius, how can he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> discriminate, in
+his own work, between the presence or the absence of that genius, which,
+though it means everything, may be absent in a production technically
+faultless, or present in a production less strictly achieved according
+to rule? Swinburne, it is evident, grudges some of the fame which has
+set <i>Atalanta in Calydon</i> higher in general favour than <i>Erechtheus</i>,
+and, though he is perfectly right in every reason which he gives for
+setting <i>Erechtheus</i> above <i>Atalanta in Calydon</i>, the fact remains that
+there is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the same
+degree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth of
+inspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and the
+ode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is no
+more likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer of
+those two splendid poems than there is of Coleridge, to take Swinburne's
+own instance, being remembered as the writer of the ode to France rather
+than as the writer of the ode on Dejection. The ode to France is a
+product of the finest poetical rhetoric; the ode on Dejection is a
+growth of the profoundest poetical genius.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p><p>Another point on which Swinburne takes for granted what is perhaps his
+highest endowment as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the
+'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the
+sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that
+marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English
+or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural
+command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne,
+'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or
+instinct as the greatest writer and the greatest versifier of our age
+must have felt at its highest possible degree when composing a musical
+exercise of such incomparable scope and fulness as <i>Les Djinns</i>.' In
+metrical inventiveness Swinburne is as much Victor Hugo's superior as
+the English language is superior to the French in metrical capability.
+His music has never the sudden bird's flight, the thrill, pause, and
+unaccountable ecstasy of the very finest lyrics of Blake or of
+Coleridge; one never wholly forgets the artist in the utterance. But
+where he is incomparable is in an 'arduous fulness' of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> intricate
+harmony, around which the waves of melody flow, foam and scatter like
+the waves of the sea about a rock. No poet has ever loved or praised the
+sea as Swinburne has loved and praised it; and to no poet has it been
+given to create music with words in so literal an analogy with the
+inflexible and vital rhythmical science of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>In his reference to the 'clatter aroused' by the first publication of
+the wonderful volume now reprinted, the first series of <i>Poems and
+Ballads</i>, Swinburne has said with tact, precision, and finality all that
+need ever be said on the subject. He records, with a touch of not
+unkindly humour, his own 'deep diversion of collating and comparing the
+variously inaccurate verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who
+insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted
+or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions
+of absolute fancy.' And, admitting that there was work in it of both
+kinds, he claims, with perfect justice, that 'if the two kinds cannot be
+distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an
+artist whose medium or material has more in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> common with a musician's
+than with a sculptor's.' Rarely has the prying ignorance of ordinary
+criticism been more absurdly evident than in the criticisms on <i>Poems
+and Ballads</i>, in which the question as to whether these poems were or
+were not the record of personal experience was debated with as much
+solemn fury as if it really mattered in the very least. When a poem has
+once been written, of what consequence is it to anybody whether it was
+inspired by a line of Sappho or by a lady living round the corner? There
+may be theoretical preferences, and these may be rationally enough
+argued, as to whether one should work from life or from memory or from
+imagination. But, the poem once written, only one question remains: is
+it a good or a bad poem? A poem of Coleridge or of Wordsworth is neither
+better nor worse because it came to the one in a dream and to the other
+in 'a storm, worse if possible, in which the pony could (or would) only
+make his way slantwise.' The knowledge of the circumstances or the
+antecedents of composition is, no doubt, as gratifying to human
+curiosity as the personal paragraphs in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> newspapers; it can hardly
+be of much greater importance.</p>
+
+<p>A passage in Swinburne's dedicatory epistle which was well worth saying,
+a passage which comes with doubled force from a poet who is also a
+scholar, is that on books which are living things: 'Marlowe and
+Shakespeare, &AElig;schylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty
+shelves of libraries.' To Swinburne, as he says, the distinction between
+books and life is but a 'dullard's distinction,' and it may justly be
+said of him that it is with an equal instinct and an equal enthusiasm
+that he is drawn to whatever in nature, in men, in books, or in ideas is
+great, noble, and heroic. The old name of <i>Laudi</i>, which has lately been
+revived by d'Annunzio, might be given to the larger part of Swinburne's
+lyric verse: it is filled by a great praising of the universe. To the
+prose-minded reader who reads verse in the intervals of newspaper and
+business there must be an actual fatigue in merely listening to so
+unintermittent a hymn of thanksgiving. Here is a poet, he must say, who
+is without any moderation at all; birds at dawn, praising light, are not
+more troublesome to a sleeper.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p><p>Reading the earlier and the later Swinburne on a high rock around which
+the sea is washing, one is struck by the way in which these cadences, in
+their unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm of
+the sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, a
+rhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebuked
+by the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked by the stars.
+'We are what suns and winds and waters make us,' as Landor knew: the
+whole essence of Swinburne seems to be made by the rush and soft flowing
+impetus of the sea. The sea has passed into his blood like a passion and
+into his verse like a transfiguring element. It is actually the last
+word of many of his poems, and it is the first and last word of his
+poetry.</p>
+
+<p>He does not make pictures, for he does not see the visible world without
+an emotion which troubles his sight. He sees as through a cloud of
+rapture. Sight is to him a transfiguring thrill, and his record of
+things seen is clouded over with shining words and broken into little
+separate shafts and splinters of light. He has still, undimmed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> the
+child's awakenings to wonder, love, reverence, the sense of beauty in
+every sensation. He has the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost
+unparalleled abundance. There is for him no tedium in things, because,
+to his sense, books catch up and continue the delights of nature, and
+with books and nature he has all that he needs for a continual inner
+communing.</p>
+
+<p>In this new book there are poems of nature, poems of the sea, the lake,
+the high oaks, the hawthorn, a rosary, Northumberland; and there are
+poems of books, poems about Burns, Christina Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas,
+and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in
+this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism,
+and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater
+Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist,
+the poet of strenuous laughter.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>But love and wine were moon and sun</div>
+<div>For many a fame long since undone,</div>
+<div>And sorrow and joy have lost and won</div>
+<div class="i2">By stormy turns</div>
+<div>As many a singer's soul, if none</div>
+<div class="i2">More bright than Burns.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span><div>And sweeter far in grief and mirth</div>
+<div>Have songs as glad and sad of birth</div>
+<div>Found voice to speak of wealth or dearth</div>
+<div class="i2">In joy of life:</div>
+<div>But never song took fire from earth</div>
+<div class="i2">More strong for strife.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>Above the storms of praise and blame</div>
+<div>That blur with mist his lustrous name,</div>
+<div>His thunderous laughter went and came,</div>
+<div class="i2">And lives and flies;</div>
+<div>The war that follows on the flame</div>
+<div class="i2">When lightning dies.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here the homage is given with splendid energy, but with fine justice.
+There are other poems of homage in this book, along with denunciations,
+as there are on so many pages of the <i>Songs before Sunrise</i> and the
+<i>Songs of Two Nations</i>, in which the effect is far less convincing, as
+it is far less clear. Whether Mazzini or Nelson be praised, Napoleon
+III. or Gladstone be buffeted, little distinction, save of degree, can
+be discerned between the one and the other. The hate poems, it must be
+admitted, are more interesting, partly because they are more
+distinguishable, than the poems of adoration; for hate seizes upon the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>lineaments which love glorifies willingly out of recognition. There was
+a finely ferocious energy in the <i>Dirae</i> ending with <i>The Descent into
+Hell</i> of 9th January 1873, and there is a good swinging and slashing
+vigour in <i>The Commonweal</i> of 1886. Why is it that this deeply felt
+political verse, like so much of the political verse of the <i>Songs
+before Sunrise</i>, does not satisfy the ear or the mind like the early
+love poetry or the later nature poetry? Is it not that one distinguishes
+only a voice, not a personality behind the voice? Speech needs weight,
+though song only needs wings.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>I set the trumpet to my lips and blow,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>said Swinburne in the <i>Songs before Sunrise,</i> when he was the trumpeter
+of Mazzini.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, it must be remembered, Swinburne has always meant exactly what
+he has said, and this fact points an amusing contrast between the
+attitude of the critics thirty years ago towards work which was then new
+and their attitude now towards the same work when it is thirty years
+old. There is, in the <i>Songs before Sunrise</i>, an arraignment of
+Christianity as deliberate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> as Leconte de Lisle's, as wholesale as
+Nietzsche's; in the <i>Poems and Ballads</i>, a learned sensuality without
+parallel in English poetry; and the critics, or the descendants of the
+critics, who, when these poems first appeared, could see nothing but
+these accidental qualities of substance, are now, thanks merely to the
+triumph of time, to the ease with which time forgets and forgives, able
+to take all such things for granted, and to acknowledge the genuine and
+essential qualities of lyric exaltation and generous love of liberty by
+which the poems exist, and have a right to exist, as poems. But when we
+are told that <i>Before a Crucifix</i> is a poem fundamentally reverent
+towards Christianity, and that <i>Anactoria</i> is an ascetic experiment in
+scholarship, a learned attempt at the reconstruction of the order of
+Sappho, it is difficult not to wonder with what kind of smile the writer
+of these poems reflects anew over the curiosities of criticism. I have
+taken the new book and the old book together, because there is
+surprisingly little difference between the form and manner of the old
+poems and the new. The contents of <i>A Channel Passage</i> are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> unusually
+varied in subject, and the longest poem, <i>The Altar of Righteousness</i>, a
+marvellous piece of rhythmical architecture, is unusually varied in
+form. Technically the whole book shows Swinburne at his best; if,
+indeed, he may ever be said not to be at his best, technically. Is there
+any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so
+unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often
+foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is
+apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to
+me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the
+imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us
+and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poets
+present us with their best effects deliberately, giving them as weighty
+an accent as they can; Swinburne scatters them by the way. Take, for
+instance, the line:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness fell.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The line comes rearing like a wave, and has fallen and raced past us
+before we have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> properly grasped what is imaginatively fine in the
+latter clause. Presented to us in the manner of slower poets, thus:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i6">The tyranny</div>
+<div>Kindled in darkness fell,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>how much more easily do we realise the quality of the speech which goes
+to make this song.</p>
+
+<p>And yet there is no doubt that Swinburne has made his own moulds of
+language, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt,
+when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs to
+him, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead of
+creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in
+the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in
+translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated,
+he misses the na&iuml;ve quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version
+not in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtle
+way, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will not
+stop to think that 'wife,' though a good word<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> for his rhyme scheme, is
+not a word that Villon could have used, and that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Deux estions et n'avions qu'ung cueur,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>though it is perfectly rendered by Rossetti in</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Two we were and the heart was one,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is turned into a wholly different, a Swinburnian thing, by</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Twain we were, and our hearts one song,</div>
+<div>One heart.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nor is 'Dead as the carver's figured throng' (for 'Comme les images, par
+cueur') either clear in meaning, or characteristic of Villon in form. Is
+it not one of the penalties of extreme technical ability that the hand
+at times works, as it were, blindly, without the delicate vigilance or
+direction of the brain?</p>
+
+<p>Of the poems contained in this new volume, the title-poem, <i>A Channel
+Passage</i>, is perhaps the finest. It is the record of a memory, fifty
+years old, and it is filled with a passionate ecstasy in the
+recollection of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal joy,</div>
+<div>Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's heart in a boy.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It may be that Swinburne has praised the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> sea more eloquently, or sung
+of it more melodiously, but not in the whole of his works is there a
+poem fuller of personal rapture in the communion of body and soul with
+the very soul of the sea in storm. <i>The Lake of Gaube</i> is remarkable for
+an exultant and very definite and direct rendering of the sensation of a
+dive through deep water. There are other sea-poems in the two brief and
+concentrated poems in honour of Nelson; the most delicate of the poems
+of flowers in <i>A Rosary</i>; the most passionate and memorable of the
+political poems in <i>Russia: an Ode</i>; the Elizabethan prologues. These
+poems, so varied in subject and manner, are the work of many years; to
+those who love Swinburne most as a lyric poet they will come with
+special delight, for they represent, in almost absolute equality, almost
+every side of his dazzling and unique lyric genius.</p>
+
+<p>The final volume of the greatest lyrical poet since Shelley contains
+three books, each published at an interval of ten years: the <i>Midsummer
+Holiday</i> of 1884, the <i>Astrophel</i> of 1894, and the <i>Channel Passage</i> of
+1904. Choice among them is as difficult<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> as it is unnecessary. They are
+alike in their ecstatic singing of the sea, of great poets and great
+men, of England and liberty, and of children. One contains the finest
+poems about the sea from on shore, another the finest poem about the sea
+from at sea, and the other the finest poem about the earth from the
+heart of the woods. Even in Swinburne's work the series of nine ballades
+in long lines which bears the name of <i>A Midsummer Holiday</i> stands out
+as a masterpiece of its kind, and of a unique kind. A form of French
+verse, which up to then had been used, since the time when Villon used
+it as no man has used it before or since, and almost exclusively in
+iambic measures, is suddenly transported from the hothouse into the open
+air, is stretched and moulded beyond all known limits, and becomes, it
+may almost be said, a new lyric form. After <i>A Midsummer Holiday</i> no one
+can contend any longer that the ballade is a structure necessarily any
+more artificial than the sonnet. But then in the hands of Swinburne an
+acrostic would cease to be artificial.</p>
+
+<p>In this last volume the technique which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> is seen apparently perfected in
+the <i>Poems and Ballads</i> of 1866 has reached a point from which that
+relative perfection looks easy and almost accidental. Something is lost,
+no doubt, and much has changed. But to compare the metrical qualities of
+<i>Dolores</i> or even of <i>The Triumph of Time</i> with the metrical qualities
+of <i>On the Verge</i> is almost like comparing the art of Thomas Moore with
+the art of Coleridge. In Swinburne's development as a poet the metrical
+development is significant of every change through which the poet has
+passed. Subtlety and nobility, the appeal of ever homelier and loftier
+things, are seen more and more clearly in his work, as the metrical
+qualities of it become purified and intensified, with always more of
+subtlety and distinction, an energy at last tamed to the needs and paces
+of every kind of beauty.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his
+dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for
+antiquity: nor need you be assured that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> when I write plays it is with a
+view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black
+Friars.' In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if not
+my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly
+unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the
+pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had
+left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my
+first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore
+evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn
+four pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so close
+as this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>We are so more than poor,</div>
+<div>The dear'st of all our spoil would profit you</div>
+<div>Less than mere losing; so most more than weak</div>
+<div>It were but shame for one to smite us, who</div>
+<div>Could but weep louder.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A Shakespearean trick is copied in such lines as:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i6">All other women's praise</div>
+<div>Makes part of my blame, and things of least account</div>
+<div>In them are all my praises.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And there is a jester who talks in a metre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> that might have come
+straight out of Beaumont and Fletcher, as here:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>I am considering of that apple still;</div>
+<div>It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too</div>
+<div>Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children,</div>
+<div>Come, my sweet scraps; come, painted pieces; come.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Touches of the early Browning come into this Elizabethan work, come and
+go there, as in these lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>What are you made God's friend for but to have</div>
+<div>His hand over your head to keep it well</div>
+<div>And warm the rainy weather through, when snow</div>
+<div>Spoils half the world's work?</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And does one not hear Beddoes in the grim line, spoken of the earth:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Naked as brown feet of unburied men?</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>An influence still more closely contemporary seems to be felt in <i>Fair
+Rosamond</i>, the influence of that extraordinarily individual blank verse
+which William Morris had made his first and last experiment in, two
+years earlier, in <i>Sir Peter Harpdon's End</i>.</p>
+
+<p>So many influences, then, are seen at work on the form at least of these
+two plays, published at the age of twenty-three. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span><i>Fair Rosamond</i>,
+though it has beautiful lines here and there, and shows some
+anticipation of that luxurious heat and subtle rendering of physical
+sensation which was to be so evident in the <i>Poems and Ballads</i>, is
+altogether a less mature piece of work, less satisfactory in every way,
+than the longer and more regular drama of <i>The Queen-Mother</i>. Swinburne
+speaks of the two pieces without distinction, and finds all that there
+is in them of promise or of merit 'in the language and the style of such
+better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches
+of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches
+is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations
+and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best
+speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of
+language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power
+to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive'
+which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic,
+reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardly
+possible to make<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however they
+were presented. Swinburne, however, has done so.' It seems to me, on the
+contrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict sense
+of the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The two great speeches of
+the play, the one beginning 'That God that made high things,' and the
+one beginning 'I would fain see rain,' are indeed more splendid in
+execution than significant as drama, but they have their dramatic
+significance, none the less. There is a Shakespearean echo, but is there
+not also a preparation of the finest Swinburnian harmonies, in such
+lines as these?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i8">I should be mad,</div>
+<div>I talk as one filled through with wine; thou God,</div>
+<div>Whose thunder is confusion of the hills,</div>
+<div>And with wrath sown abolishes the fields,</div>
+<div>I pray thee if thy hand would ruin us,</div>
+<div>Make witness of it even this night that is</div>
+<div>The last for many cradles, and the grave</div>
+<div>Of many reverend seats; even at this turn,</div>
+<div>This edge of season, this keen joint of time,</div>
+<div>Finish and spare not.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The verse is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurative
+meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> fluid,
+less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in
+reference to the verse of <i>Atalanta in Calydon</i>). He is ready to be
+harsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; he holds
+out against the enervating allurements of alliteration; he can stop when
+he has said the essential thing.</p>
+
+<p>In the first book of most poets there is something which will be found
+in no other book; some virginity of youth, lost with the first
+intercourse with print. In <i>The Queen-Mother</i> and <i>Rosamond</i> Swinburne
+is certainly not yet himself, he has not yet settled down within his own
+limits. But what happy strayings beyond those limits! What foreign
+fruits and flowers, brought back from far countries! In these two plays
+there is no evidence, certainly, of a playwright; but there is no
+evidence that their writer could never become one. And there is evidence
+already of a poet of original genius and immense accomplishment, a poet
+with an incomparable gift of speech. That this technical quality, at
+least, the sound of these new harmonies in English verse, awakened no
+ears to attention, would be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> more surprising if one did not remember
+that two years earlier the first and best of William Morris's books was
+saluted as 'a Manchester mystery, not a real vision,' and that two years
+later the best though not the first of George Meredith's books of verse,
+<i>Modern Love</i>, was noticed only to be hooted at. Rossetti waited, and
+was wise.</p>
+
+<p>The plays of Swinburne, full as they are of splendid poetry, and even of
+splendid dramatic poetry, suffer from a lack of that 'continual slight
+novelty' which great drama, more than any other poetical form, requires.
+There is, in the writing, a monotony of excellence, which becomes an
+actual burden upon the reader. Here is a poet who touches nothing that
+he does not transform, who can, as in <i>Mary Stuart</i>, fill scores of
+pages with talk of lawyers, conspirators, and statesmen, versifying
+history as closely as Shakespeare versified it, and leaving in the
+result less prose deposit than Shakespeare left. It is perhaps because
+in this play he has done a more difficult thing than in any other that
+the writer has come to prefer this to any other of his plays; as men in
+general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> similar
+satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties,
+leads him to say of the modern play, <i>The Sisters</i>, that it is the only
+modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural
+dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse
+between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or
+made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.' This
+may be as true as that, in the astounding experiment of <i>Locrine</i>, none
+of 'the life of human character or the life-likeness of dramatic
+dialogue has suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificed
+to the exigences of metre.' But when all is said, when an unparalleled
+skill in language, versification, and everything that is verbal in form,
+has been admitted, and with unqualified admiration; when, in addition,
+one has admitted, with not less admiration, noble qualities of
+substance, superb qualities of poetic imagination, there still remains
+the question: is either substance or form consistently dramatic? and the
+further question: can work professedly dramatic which is not
+consistently dramatic in substance and form be accepted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> as wholly
+satisfactory from any other point of view?</p>
+
+<p>The trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots must remain the largest and most
+ambitious attempt which Swinburne has made. The first part,
+<i>Chastelard</i>, was published in 1865; the last, <i>Mary Stuart</i>, in 1881.
+And what Swinburne says in speaking of the intermediate play,
+<i>Bothwell</i>, may be said of them all: 'I will add that I took as much
+care and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history of
+the period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came
+within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of <i>Bothwell</i>, the
+longest of the three plays&mdash;indeed, the longest play in existence,
+Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece
+of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the
+old Shakespearean term of a chronicle history.' Definition is not
+defence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is in
+itself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use of
+it proves only that he found his way through chronicle to drama, and to
+take his work in the chronicle play as a model is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> hardly more
+reasonable than to take <i>Venus and Adonis</i> as a model for narrative
+poetry. But, further, there is no play of Shakespeare's, chronicle or
+other, which might not at least be conceived of, if not on the stage of
+our time, at least on that of his, or on that of any time when drama was
+allowed to live its own life according to its own nature. Can we
+conceive of <i>Bothwell</i> even on the stage which has seen <i>Les Burgraves</i>?
+The Chinese theatre, which goes on from morning to night without a
+pause, might perhaps grapple with it; but no other. Nor would cutting be
+of any use, for what the stage-manager would cut away would be largely
+just such parts as are finest in the printed play.</p>
+
+<p>There is, in most of Swinburne's plays, some scene or passage of vital
+dramatic quality, and in <i>Bothwell</i> there is one scene, the scene
+leading to the death of Darnley, which is among the great single scenes
+in drama. But there is not even any such scene in the whole of the
+lovely and luxurious song of <i>Chastelard</i> or in the severe and strenuous
+study of <i>Mary Stuart</i>. There are moments, in all, where speech is as
+simple,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> as explicit, as expressive as speech in verse can be; and no
+one will ever speak in verse more naturally than this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Well, all is one to me: and for my part</div>
+<div>I thank God I shall die without regret</div>
+<div>Of anything that I have done alive.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These simple beginnings are apt indeed to lead to their end by ways as
+tortuous as this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Indeed I have done all this if aught I have,</div>
+<div>And loved at all or loathed, save what mine eye</div>
+<div>Hath ever loathed or loved since first it saw</div>
+<div>That face which taught it faith and made it first</div>
+<div>Think scorn to turn and look on change, or see</div>
+<div>How hateful in my love's sight are their eyes</div>
+<div>That give love's light to others.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But, even when speech is undiluted, and expresses with due fire or
+calmness the necessary feeling of the moment, it is nearly always mere
+speech, a talking about action or emotion, not itself action or emotion.
+And every scene, even the finest, is thought of as a scene of talk, not
+as visible action; the writer hears his people speak, but does not see
+their faces or where or how they stand or move. It is this power of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>visualisation that is the first requirement of the dramatist; by itself
+it can go no further than the ordering of dumb show; but all drama must
+begin with the ordering of dumb show, and should be playable without
+words.</p>
+
+<p>It was once said by William Morris that Swinburne's poems did not make
+pictures. The criticism was just, but mattered little; because they make
+harmonies. No English poet has ever shown so great and various a mastery
+over harmony in speech, and it is this lyrical quality which has given
+him a place among the great lyrical poets of England. In drama the
+lyrical gift is essential to the making of great poetic drama, but to
+the dramatist it should be an addition rather than a substitute.
+Throughout all these plays it is first and last and all but everything.
+It is for this reason that a play like <i>Locrine</i>, which is confessedly,
+by its very form, a sequence of lyrics, comes more nearly to being
+satisfactory as a whole than any of the more 'ambitious, conscientious,
+and comprehensive' plays. <i>Marino Faliero</i>, though an episode of
+history, comes into somewhat the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> category, and repeats with nobler
+energy the song-like character of <i>Chastelard</i>. The action is brief and
+concentrated, tragic and heroic. Its 'magnificent monotony,' its
+'fervent and inexhaustible declamation,' have a height and heat in them
+which turn the whole play into a poem rather than a play, but a poem
+comparable with the 'succession of dramatic scenes or pictures' which
+makes the vast lyric of <i>Tristram of Lyonesse</i>. To think of Byron's play
+on the same subject, to compare the actual scenes which can be
+paralleled in both plays, is to realise how much more can be done, in
+poetry and even in drama, by a great lyric poet with a passion for what
+is heroic in human nature and for what is ardent and unlimited in human
+speech, than by a poet who saw in Faliero only the politician, and in
+the opportunities of verse only the opportunity for thin and shrewish
+rhetoric pulled and lopped into an intermittent resemblance to metre.</p>
+
+<p>The form of <i>Locrine</i> has something in common with the form of <i>Atalanta
+in Calydon</i>, with a kind of sombre savagery in the subject which recurs
+only once, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> less lyrically, in <i>Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards</i>. It
+is written throughout in rhyme, and the dialogue twists and twines,
+without effort, through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene,
+beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet,
+Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line
+stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by
+Shakespeare in the <i>Rape of Lucrece</i>, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes,
+and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a
+third rhyme comes forward in the last line but one (after the manner of
+terza rima) and starts a new octave, which closes at the end in a stanza
+of two rhymes only, the last line but one turning back instead of
+forward, to lock the chain's circle. No other English poet who ever
+lived could have written dialogue under such conditions, and it is not
+less true than strange that these fetters act as no more than a beating
+of time to the feet that dance in them. The emotion is throughout at
+white heat; there is lyrical splendour even in the arguments: and a
+child's prattle, in nine-line stanzas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> of two rhymes apiece, goes as
+merrily as this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>That song is hardly even as wise as I&mdash;</div>
+<div>Nay, very foolishness it is. To die</div>
+<div>In March before its life were well on wing,</div>
+<div>Before its time and kindly season&mdash;why</div>
+<div>Should spring be sad&mdash;before the swallows fly&mdash;</div>
+<div>Enough to dream of such a wintry thing?</div>
+<div>Such foolish words were more unmeet for spring</div>
+<div>Than snow for summer when his heart is high:</div>
+<div>And why should words be foolish when they sing?</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Swinburne is a great master of blank verse; there is nothing that can be
+done with blank verse that he cannot do with it. Listen to these lines
+from <i>Mary Stuart</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>She shall be a world's wonder to all time,</div>
+<div>A deadly glory watched of marvelling men</div>
+<div>Not without praise, not without noble tears,</div>
+<div>And if without what she would never have</div>
+<div>Who had it never, pity&mdash;yet from none</div>
+<div>Quite without reverence and some kind of love</div>
+<div>For that which was so royal.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is in them something of the cadence of Milton and something of the
+cadence of Shakespeare, and they are very Swinburne. Yet, after reading
+<i>Locrine</i>, and with <i>Atalanta</i> and <i>Erechtheus</i> in memory, it is
+difficult not to wish that Swinburne had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> written all his plays in
+rhyme, and that they had all been romantic plays and not histories.
+<i>Locrine</i> has been acted, and might well be acted again. Its rhyme would
+sound on the stage with another splendour than the excellent and
+well-sounding rhymes into which Mr. Gilbert Murray has translated
+Euripides. And there would be none of that difficulty which seems to be
+insuperable on the modern stage: the chorus, which, whether it speaks,
+or chants, or sings, seems alike out of place and out of key.</p>
+
+<p>The tragic anecdote which Swinburne has told in <i>Rosamund, Queen of the
+Lombards</i>, is told with a directness and conciseness unusual in his
+dramatic or lyric work. The story, simple, barbarous, and cruel&mdash;a story
+of the year 573&mdash;acts itself out before us in large clear outlines, with
+surprisingly little of modern self-consciousness. The book is a small
+one, the speeches are short, and the words for the most part short too;
+every speech tells like an action in words; there is scarcely a single
+merely decorative passage from beginning to end. Here and there the
+lines become lyric, as in</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span><div class="i14">Thou rose,</div>
+<div>Why did God give thee more than all thy kin,</div>
+<div>Whose pride is perfume only and colour, this?</div>
+<div>Music? No rose but mine sings, and the birds</div>
+<div>Hush all their hearts to hearken. Dost thou hear not</div>
+<div>How heavy sounds her note now?</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But even here the lyrical touch marks a point of 'business.' And for the
+most part the speeches are as straightforward as prose; are indeed
+written with a deliberate aim at a sort of prose effect. For instance:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i8"><span class="smcap">Almachildes</span>.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i12">God must be</div>
+<div>Dead. Such a thing as thou could never else</div>
+<div>Live.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i8"><span class="smcap">Rosamund</span>.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i2">That concerns not thee nor me. Be thou</div>
+<div>Sure that my will and power to serve it live.</div>
+<div>Lift now thine eyes to look upon thy lord.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Compare these lines with the lines which end the fourth act:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i8"><span class="smcap">Almachildes</span>.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i6">I cannot slay him</div>
+<div>Thus.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i8"><span class="smcap">Rosamund</span>.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i2">Canst thou slay thy bride by fire? He dies,</div>
+<div>Or she dies, bound against the stake. His death</div>
+<div>Were the easier. Follow him: save her: strike but once.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span><div class="i8"><span class="smcap">Almachildes</span>.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>I cannot. God requite thee this! I will.</div>
+<div class="right">[<i>Exit.</i></div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i8"><span class="smcap">Rosamund</span>.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>And I will see it. And, father, thou shalt see.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="right">[<i>Exit.</i></div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In both these instances one sees the quality which is most conspicuous
+in this play&mdash;a naked strength, which is the same kind of strength that
+has always been present in Swinburne's plays, but hitherto draped
+elaborately, and often more than half concealed in the draperies. The
+outline of every play has been hard, sharp, firmly drawn; the characters
+always forthright and unwavering; there has always been a real precision
+in the main drift of the speeches; but this is the first time in which
+the outlines have been left to show themselves in all their sharpness.
+Development or experiment, whichever it may be, this resolute simplicity
+brings a new quality into Swinburne's work, and a quality full of
+dramatic possibilities. All the luxuriousness of his verse has gone, and
+the lines ring like sword clashing against sword. These savage and
+simple people of the sixth century do not turn over their thoughts
+before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> concentrating them into words, and they do not speak except to
+tell their thoughts. Imagine what even Murray, in <i>Chastelard</i>, a
+somewhat curt speaker, would have said in place of Almachildes's one
+line, a whole conflict of love, hate, honour, and shame in eight words:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>I cannot. God requite thee this! I will.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Dramatic realism can go no further than such lines. The question remains
+whether dramatic realism is in itself an altogether desirable thing, and
+whether Swinburne in particular does not lose more than he gains by such
+self-restraint.</p>
+
+<p>The poetic drama is in itself a compromise. That people should speak in
+verse is itself a violation of probability; and so strongly is this felt
+by most actors that they endeavour, in acting a play in verse, to make
+the verse sound as much like prose as possible. But, as it seems to me,
+the aim of the poetic drama is to create a new world in a new
+atmosphere, where the laws of human existence are no longer recognised.
+The aim of the poetic drama is beauty, not truth; and Shakespeare, to
+take the supreme example, is great, not because he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> makes Othello
+probable as a jealous husband, or gives him exactly the words that a
+jealous husband might have used, but because he creates in him an image
+of more than human energy, and puts into his mouth words of a more
+splendid poetry than any one but Shakespeare himself could have found to
+say. Fetter the poetic drama to an imitation of actual speech, and you
+rob it of the convention which is its chief glory and best opportunity.
+A new colour may certainly be given to that convention, by which a
+certain directness, rather of Dante than of Shakespeare, may be employed
+for its novel kind of beauty, convention being still recognised as
+convention. No doubt that is really Swinburne's aim, and to have
+succeeded in it is to show that he can master every form, and do as he
+pleases with language. And there are passages in the play, like this
+one, which have a fervid colour of their own, fully characteristic of
+the writer who has put more Southern colouring into English verse than
+any other English poet:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>This sun&mdash;no sun like ours&mdash;burns out my soul.</div>
+<div>I would, when June takes hold on us like fire,</div>
+<div>The wind could waft and whirl us northward: here</div>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span><div>The splendour and the sweetness of the world</div>
+<div>Eat out all joy of life or manhood. Earth</div>
+<div>Is here too hard on heaven&mdash;the Italian air</div>
+<div>Too bright to breathe, as fire, its next of kin,</div>
+<div>Too keen to handle. God, whoe'er God be,</div>
+<div>Keep us from withering as the lords of Rome&mdash;</div>
+<div>Slackening and sickening toward the imperious end</div>
+<div>That wiped them out of empire! Yea, he shall.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The atmosphere of the play is that of June at Verona, and the sun's heat
+seems to beat upon us all through its brief and fevered action.
+Swinburne's words never make pictures, but they are unparalleled in
+their power of conveying atmosphere. He sees with a certain generalised
+vision&mdash;it might almost be said that he sees musically; but no English
+poet has ever presented bodily sensation with such curious and subtle
+intensity. And just as he renders bodily sensation carried to the point
+of agony, so he is at his best when dealing, as here, with emotion
+tortured to the last limit of endurance. Albovine, the king, sets bare
+his heart, confessing:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>The devil and God are crying in either ear</div>
+<div>One murderous word for ever, night and day,</div>
+<div>Dark day and deadly night and deadly day,</div>
+<div>Can she love thee who slewest her father? I</div>
+<div>Love her.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span></p><p>Rosamund, his wife, meditating her monstrous revenge, confesses:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>I am yet alive to question if I live</div>
+<div>And wonder what may ever bid me die.</div>
+<div>.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;There is nought</div>
+<div>Left in the range and record of the world</div>
+<div>For me that is not poisoned: even my heart</div>
+<div>Is all envenomed in me.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And she recognises that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>No healing and no help for life on earth</div>
+<div>Hath God or man found out save death and sleep.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The two young lovers, caught innocently in a net of intolerable shame,
+can but question and answer one another thus:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i8"><span class="smcap">Hildegard</span>.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>Hast thou forgiven me?</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i8"><span class="smcap">Almachildes</span>.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i12">I have not forgiven</div>
+<div>God.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And at the end Narsetes, the old councillor, the only one of the persons
+of the drama who is not the actor or the sufferer of some subtle horror,
+sums up all that has happened in a reflection which casts the
+responsibility of things further off than to the edge of the world:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Let none make moan. This doom is none of man's.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p><p>As in the time of the great first volume of <i>Poems and Ballads</i>,
+Swinburne is still drawn to</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i12">see</div>
+<div>What fools God's anger makes of men.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He has never been a philosophical thinker; but he has acquired the
+equivalent of a philosophy through his faithfulness to a single outlook
+upon human life and destiny. And in this brief and burning play, more
+than in much of his later writing, I find the reflection of that unique
+temperament, to which real things are so abstract, and abstract things
+so coloured and tangible; a temperament in which there is almost too
+much poetry for a poet&mdash;as pure gold, to be worked in, needs to be
+mingled with alloy.</p>
+
+<p>There is, perhaps, no more terrible story in the later history of the
+world, no actual tragedy more made to the hand of the dramatist, than
+the story of the Borgias. In its entirety it would make another <i>Cenci</i>,
+in the hands of another Shelley, and another Censor would prohibit the
+one as he prohibits the other. We are not permitted to deal with some
+form of evil on the stage. Yet what has Shelley said?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p><blockquote><p>There must be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient
+to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral
+purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the
+teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies,
+the knowledge of itself.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>A great drama on the story of the Borgias could certainly have much to
+teach the human heart in the knowledge of itself. It would be moral in
+its presentation of the most ignobly splendid vices that have swayed the
+world; of the pride and defiance which rise like a strangling serpent,
+coiling about the momentary weakness of good; of that pageant in which
+the pagan gods came back, drunk and debauched with their long exile
+under the earth, and the garden-god assumed the throne of the Holy of
+Holies. Alexander, C&aelig;sar, Lucrezia, the threefold divinity, might be
+shown as a painter has shown one of them on the wall of one of his own
+chapels: a swinish portent in papal garments, kneeling, bloated,
+thinking of Lucrezia, with fingers folded over the purple of his rings.
+Or the family might have been shown as Rossetti, in one of the
+loveliest, most cruel, and most significant of his pictures, has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> shown
+it: a light, laughing masquerade of innocence, the boy and girl dancing
+before the cushioned idol and her two worshippers.</p>
+
+<p>Swinburne in <i>The Duke of Gandia</i> has not dealt with the whole matter of
+the story&mdash;only, in a single act of four scenes, with the heart or
+essence of it. The piece is not drama for the stage, nor intended to be
+seen or heard outside the pages of a book; but it is meant to be, and
+is, a great, brief, dramatic poem, a lyric almost, of hate, ambition,
+fear, desire, and the conquest of ironic evil. Swinburne has written
+nothing like it before. The manner of it is new, or anticipated only in
+the far less effectual <i>Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards</i>; the style,
+speech, and cadence are tightened, restrained, full of sullen
+fierceness. Lucrezia, strangely, is no more than a pale image passing
+without consciousness through some hot feast-room; she is there, she is
+hidden under their speech, but we scarcely see her, and, like her
+historians, wonder if she was so evil, or only a scholar to whom learned
+men wrote letters, as if to a pattern of virtue. But in the father and
+son live a flame and a cloud, the flame rising steadily to beat back and
+consume the cloud.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> It is C&aelig;sar Borgia who is the flame, and Alexander
+the Pope who fills the Vatican and the world with his contagious clouds.
+The father, up to this moment, has held all his vices well in hand; he
+has no rival; his sons and his daughter he has made, and they live about
+him for their own pleasure, and he watches them, and is content. Now one
+steps out, the circle is broken; there is no longer a younger son, a
+cardinal, but the Duke of Gandia, eldest son and on the highest step of
+the Pope's chair. It is, in this brief, almost speechless moment of
+action, as if the door of a furnace had suddenly been thrown open and
+then shut. One scene stands out, only surpassed by the terrible and
+magnificent scene leading up to the death of Darnley&mdash;a scene itself
+only surpassed, in its own pitiful and pitiless kind, by that death of
+Marlowe's king in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle, which, to all who can
+endure to read it, 'moves pity and terror,' as to Lamb, 'beyond any
+scene ancient or modern.' And only in <i>Bothwell</i>, in the whole of
+Swinburne's drama, is there speech so adequate, so human, so full of
+fear and suspense. Take, for instance, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>opening of the great final
+scene. The youngest son has had his elder brother drowned in the Tiber,
+and after seven days he appears calmly before his father.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">Alex</span>. Thou hast done this deed.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">C&aelig;sar</span>. Thou hast said it.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">Alex</span>. Dost thou think</div>
+<div>To live, and look upon me?</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">C&aelig;sar</span>. Some while yet.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">Alex</span>. I would there were a God&mdash;that he might hear.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">C&aelig;sar</span>. 'Tis pity there should be&mdash;for thy sake&mdash;none.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">Alex</span>. Wilt thou slay me?</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">C&aelig;sar</span>. Why?</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">Alex</span>. Am I not thy sire?</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">C&aelig;sar</span>. And Christendom's to boot.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">Alex</span>. I pray thee, man,</div>
+<div>Slay me.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">C&aelig;sar</span>. And then myself? Thou art crazed, but I</div>
+<div>Sane.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">Alex</span>. Art thou very flesh and blood?</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">C&aelig;sar</span>. They say,</div>
+<div>Thine.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">Alex</span>. If the heaven stand still and smite thee not,</div>
+<div>There is no God indeed.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">C&aelig;sar</span>. Nor thou nor I</div>
+<div>Know.</div>
+<div class="i1"><span class="smcap">Alex</span>. I could pray to God that God might be,</div>
+<div>Were I but mad. Thou sayest I am mad: thou liest:</div>
+<div>I do not pray.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p><p>There, surely, is great dramatic speech, and the two men who speak face
+to face are seen clearly before us, naked to the sight. Yet even these
+lines do not make drama that would hold the stage. How is it that only
+one of our greater poets since the last of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
+and that one Shelley, has understood the complete art of the playwright,
+and achieved it? Byron, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, all wrote plays
+for the stage; all had their chance of being acted; Tennyson only made
+even a temporary success, and <i>Becket</i> is likely to have gone out with
+Irving. Landor wrote plays full of sublime poetry, but not meant for the
+stage; and now we have Swinburne following his example, but with an
+unexampled lyrical quality. Why, without capacity to deal with it, are
+our poets so insistent on using the only form for which a special
+faculty, outside the pure poetic gift, is inexorably required?</p>
+
+<p>A poet so great as Swinburne, possessed by an ecstasy which turns into
+song as instinctively as the flawless inspiration of Mozart turned into
+divine melody, cannot be questioned. Mozart, without a special<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> genius
+for dramatic music, wrote <i>Die Zauberfl&ouml;te</i> to a bad libretto with as
+great a perfection as the music to <i>Don Giovanni</i>, which had a good one.
+The same inspiration was there, always apt to the occasion. Swinburne is
+ready to write in any known form of verse, with an equal facility and
+(this is the all-important point) the same inspiration. Loving the form
+of the drama, and capable of turning it to his uses, not of bending it
+to its own, he has filled play after play with music, noble feeling,
+brave eloquence. Here in this briefest and most actual of his plays&mdash;an
+act, an episode&mdash;he has concentrated much of this floating beauty, this
+overflowing imagination, into a few stern and adequate words, and made a
+new thing, as always, in his own image. It is the irony that has given
+its precise form to this representation of a twofold Satan, as Blake
+might have seen him in vision, parodying God with unbreakable pride. The
+conflict between father and son ends in a kind of unholy litany. 'And
+now,' cries C&aelig;sar, fresh from murder,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Behoves thee rise again as Christ our God,</div>
+<div>Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away</div>
+<div>This grief from off thy godhead.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p><p>And the old man, temporising with his grief, answers:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>Thou art subtle and strong.</div>
+<div>I would thou hadst spared him&mdash;couldst have spared him.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And the son replies:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i14">Sire,</div>
+<div>I would so too. Our sire, his sire and mine,</div>
+<div>I slew him not for lust of slaying, or hate,</div>
+<div>Or aught less like thy wiser spirit and mine.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But C&aelig;sar-Satan has already said the epilogue to the whole
+representation, when, speaking to his mother, he bids her leave the
+responsibility of things:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>And God, who made me and my sire and thee,</div>
+<div>May take the charge upon him.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>1899-1908.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="DANTE_GABRIEL_ROSSETTI" id="DANTE_GABRIEL_ROSSETTI"></a>DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI</h2>
+
+<p>Rossetti's phrase about poetry, that it must be 'amusing'; his
+'commandment' about verse translation, 'that a good poem shall not be
+turned into a bad one'; his roughest and most random criticisms about
+poets, are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse. Only Coleridge
+among English poets has anything like the same definite grasp upon
+whatever is essential in poetry. And it is this intellectual sanity
+partly, this complete knowledge of the medium in which he worked, that
+has given Rossetti a position of his own, a kind of leadership in art.</p>
+
+<p>And, technically, Rossetti has done much for English poetry. Such a line
+as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>And when the night-vigil was done,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>is a perfectly good metrical line if read without any displacement of
+the normal accent in speaking, and the rhyme of 'of' to 'enough' is as
+satisfying to the ear as the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> more commonly accepted rhyme of 'love' and
+'move.' Rossetti did nothing but good by his troubling of many rhythms
+which had become stagnant, and it is in his extraordinary subtlety of
+rhythm, most accomplished where it seems most hesitating, that he has
+produced his finest emotional effects, effects before his time found but
+rarely, and for the most part accidentally, in English poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Like Baudelaire and like Mallarm&eacute; in France, Rossetti was not only a
+wholly original poet, but a new personal force in literature. That he
+stimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true of
+Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not
+true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the
+greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on
+those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an
+unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one
+is without defence. It is the sound of a voice, rather than anything
+said; and, when Rossetti speaks, no other voice, for the moment, seems
+worth listening to.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> Even after one has listened, not very much seems to
+have been said; but the world is not quite the same. He has stimulated a
+new sense, by which a new mood of beauty can be apprehended.</p>
+
+<p>Dreams are precise; it is only when we awake, when we go outside, that
+they become vague. In a certain sense Rossetti, with all his keen
+practical intelligence, was never wholly awake, had never gone outside
+that house of dreams in which the only real things were the things of
+the imagination. In the poetry of most poets there is a double kind of
+existence, of which each half is generally quite distinct; a real world,
+and a world of the imagination. But the poetry of Rossetti knows but one
+world, and it inhabits a corner there, like a perfectly contented
+prisoner, or like a prisoner to whom the sense of imprisonment is a joy.
+The love of beauty, the love of love, because love is the supreme energy
+of beauty, suffices for an existence in which every moment is a crisis;
+for to him, as Pater has said, 'life is a crisis at every moment': life,
+that is to say, the inner life, the life of imagination, in which the
+senses are messengers from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> outer world, from which they can but
+bring disquieting tidings.</p>
+
+<p>The whole of this poetry is tragic, though without pathos or even
+self-pity. Every human attempt to maintain happiness is foredoomed to be
+a failure, and this is an attempt to maintain ecstasy in a region where
+everything which is not ecstasy is pain. In reading every other poet who
+has written of love one is conscious of compensations: the happiness of
+loving or of being loved, the honour of defeat, the help and comfort of
+nature or of action. But here all energy is concentrated on the one
+ecstasy, and this exists for its own sake, and the desire of it is like
+thirst, which returns after every partial satisfaction. The desire of
+beauty, the love of love, can but be a form of martyrdom when, as with
+Rossetti, there is also the desire of possession.</p>
+
+<p>Circumstances have very little to do with the making of a poet's
+temperament or vision, and it would be enough to point to Christina
+Rossetti, who was hardly more in the country than her brother, but to
+whom a blade of grass was enough to summon the whole country about her,
+and whose poetry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> is full of the sense of growing things. Rossetti
+instinctively saw faces, and only faces, and he would have seen them if
+he had lived in the loneliest countryside, and he would never have
+learned to distinguish between oats and barley if he had had fields of
+them about his door from childhood. It was in the beauty of women, and
+chiefly in the mysterious beauty of faces, that Rossetti found the
+supreme embodiment of beauty; and it was in the love of women, and not
+in any more abstract love, of God, of nature, or of ideas, that he found
+the supreme revelation of love.</p>
+
+<p>With this narrowness, with this intensity, he has rendered in his
+painting as in his poetry one ideal, one obsession. He calls what is
+really the House of Love <i>The House of Life</i>, and this is because the
+house of love was literally to him the house of life. There is no mystic
+to whom love has not seemed to be the essence or ultimate expression of
+the soul. Rossetti's whole work is a parable of this belief, and it is a
+parable written with his life-blood. Of beauty he has said, 'I drew it
+in as simply as my breath,' but, as the desire of beauty possessed him,
+as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> he laboured to create it over again, with rebellious words or
+colours, always too vague for him when they were most precise, never the
+precise embodiment of a dream, the pursuit turned to a labour and the
+labour to a pain. Part of what hypnotises us in this work is, no doubt,
+that sense of personal tragedy which comes to us out of its elaborate
+beauty: the eternal tragedy of those who have loved the absolute in
+beauty too well, and with too mortal a thirst.</p>
+
+<p>1904.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="A_NOTE_ON_THE_GENIUS_OF_THOMAS_HARDY" id="A_NOTE_ON_THE_GENIUS_OF_THOMAS_HARDY"></a>A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY</h2>
+
+<p>He has a kind of naked face, in which you see the brain always working,
+with an almost painful simplicity&mdash;just saved from being painful by a
+humorous sense of external things, which becomes also a kind of
+intellectual criticism. He is a fatalist, and he studies the workings of
+fate in the chief vivifying and disturbing influence in life, women. His
+view of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel,
+not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not,
+as with Meredith, man's and woman's at once. He sees all that is
+irresponsible for good and evil in a woman's character, all that is
+unreliable in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her
+variability. He is her apologist, but always with a certain reserve of
+private judgment. No one has created more attractive women,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> women whom
+a man would have been more likely to love, or more likely to regret
+loving. <i>Jude the Obscure</i> is perhaps the most unbiased consideration of
+the more complicated questions of sex which we can find in English
+fiction. At the same time, there is almost no passion in his work,
+neither the author nor any of his characters ever seeming able to pass
+beyond the state of curiosity, the most intellectually interesting of
+limitations, under the influence of any emotion. In his feeling for
+nature, curiosity sometimes seems to broaden into a more intimate kind
+of communion. The heath, the village with its peasants, the change of
+every hour among the fields and on the roads, mean more to him, in a
+sense, than even the spectacle of man and woman in their blind, and
+painful, and absorbing struggle for existence. His knowledge of woman
+confirms him in a suspension of judgment; his knowledge of nature brings
+him nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All the
+quite happy entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him from
+his contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth,
+translating the dumbness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> of the fields into humour. His peasants have
+been compared with Shakespeare's; that is, because he has the
+Shakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurrying
+animal life, to which they act the part of chorus, with an unconscious
+wisdom in their close, narrow, and undistracted view of things.</p>
+
+<p>In his verse there is something brooding, obscure, tremulous,
+half-inarticulate, as he meditates over man, nature, and destiny:
+Nature, 'waking by touch alone,' and Fate, who sees and feels. In <i>The
+Mother Mourns</i>, a strange, dreary, ironical song of science, Nature
+laments that her best achievement, man, has become discontented with her
+in his ungrateful discontent with himself. It is like the whimpering of
+a hurt animal, and the queer, ingenious metre, with its one rhyme set at
+wide but distinct and heavily recurrent intervals, beats on the ear like
+a knell. Blind and dumb forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out of
+sleep, turning back heavily to sleep again. Many poets have been sorry
+for man, angry with Nature on man's behalf. Here is a poet who is sorry
+for Nature, who feels the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> earth and its roots, as if he had sap in his
+veins instead of blood, and could get closer than any other man to the
+things of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Who else could have written this crabbed, subtle, strangely impressive
+poem?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="i6">AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>A shaded lamp and a waving blind,</div>
+<div>And the beat of a clock from a distant floor;</div>
+<div>On this scene enter&mdash;winged, horned, and spined&mdash;</div>
+<div>A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;</div>
+<div>While 'mid my page there idly stands</div>
+<div>A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>Thus meet we five, in this still place,</div>
+<div>At this point of time, at this point in space.</div>
+<div>&mdash;My guests parade my new-penned ink,</div>
+<div>Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.</div>
+<div>'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why?</div>
+<div>They know Earth-secrets that know not I.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>No such drama has been written in verse since Browning, and the people
+of the drama are condensed to almost as pregnant an utterance as <i>Adam,
+Lilith, and Eve</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Why is it that there are so few novels which can be read twice, while
+all good poetry can be read over and over? Is it something inherent in
+the form, one of the reasons in nature why a novel cannot be of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> the
+same supreme imaginative substance as a poem? I think it is, and that it
+will never be otherwise. But, among novels, why is it that one here and
+there calls us back to its shelf with almost the insistence of a lyric,
+while for the most part a story read is a story done with? Balzac is
+always good to re-read, but not Tolstoi: and I couple two of the giants.
+To take lesser artists, I would say that we can re-read <i>Lavengro</i> but
+not <i>Romola</i>. But what seems puzzling is that Hardy, who is above all a
+story-teller, and whose stories are of the kind that rouse suspense and
+satisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite without
+novelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in <i>The Mayor
+of Casterbridge</i>, where the plot extends into almost inextricable
+entanglements; and yet that is precisely one of the books that can be
+re-read. Is it on account of that concealed poetry, never absent though
+often unseen, which gives to these fantastic or real histories a meaning
+beyond the meaning of the facts, beneath it like an under-current,
+around it like an atmosphere? Facts, once known, are done with; stories
+of mere action<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> gallop through the brain and are gone; but in Hardy
+there is a vision or interpretation, a sense of life as a growth out of
+the earth, and as much a mystery between soil and sky as the corn is,
+which will draw men back to the stories with an interest which outlasts
+their interest in the story.</p>
+
+<p>It is a little difficult to get accustomed to Hardy, or to do him
+justice without doing him more than justice. He is always right, always
+a seer, when he is writing about 'the seasons in their moods, morning
+and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,
+waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate
+things.' (What gravity and intimacy in his numbering of them!) He is
+always right, always faultless in matter and style, when he is showing
+that 'the impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic
+life than the pachydermatous king.' But he requires a certain amount of
+emotion to shake off the lethargy natural to his style, and when he has
+merely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on his
+couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.' In the next
+sentence, where he is interested<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> in expressing the impalpable emotion
+of the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'The
+night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent;
+the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now
+digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a
+thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.'</p>
+
+<p>No one has ever studied so scrupulously as Hardy the effect of emotion
+on inanimate things, or has ever seen emotion so visually in people. For
+instance: 'Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was
+flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole.'
+But so intense is his preoccupation with these visual effects that he
+sometimes cannot resist noting a minute appearance, though in the very
+moment of assuring us that the person looking on did not see it. 'She
+hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so
+large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like
+the object lens of a microscope.' And it is this power of seeing to
+excess, and being limited to sight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> which is often strangely revealing,
+that leaves him at times helpless before the naked words that a
+situation supremely seen demands for its completion. The one failure in
+what is perhaps his masterpiece, <i>The Return of the Native</i>, is in the
+words put into the mouth of Eustacia and Yeobright in the perfectly
+imagined scene before the mirror, a scene which should be the
+culminating scene of the book; and it is, all but the words: the words
+are crackle and tinsel.</p>
+
+<p>What is it, then, that makes up the main part of the value and
+fascination of Hardy, and how is it that what at first seem, and may
+well be, defects, uncouthnesses, bits of formal preaching, grotesque
+ironies of event and idea, come at last to seem either good in
+themselves or good where they are, a part of the man if not of the
+artist? One begins by reading for the story, and the story is of an
+attaching interest. Here is a story-teller of the good old kind, a
+story-teller whose plot is enough to hold his readers. With this point
+no doubt many readers stop and are content. But go on, and next after
+the story-teller one comes on the philosopher. He is dejected and a
+little sinister, and may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> check your pleasure in his narrative if you
+are too attentive to his criticism of it. But a new meaning comes into
+the facts as you observe his attitude towards them, and you may be well
+content to stop and be fed with thoughts by the philosopher. But if you
+go further still you will find, at the very last, the poet, and you need
+look for nothing beyond. I am inclined to question if any novelist has
+been more truly a poet without ceasing to be in the true sense a
+novelist. The poetry of Hardy's novels is a poetry of roots, and it is a
+voice of the earth. He seems often to be closer to the earth (which is
+at times, as in <i>The Return of the Native</i>, the chief person, or the
+chorus, of the story) than to men and women, and to see men and women
+out of the eyes of wild creatures, and out of the weeds and stones of
+the heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us
+to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual
+observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of
+birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the
+deprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep?</p>
+
+<p>1907.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="LEON_CLADEL" id="LEON_CLADEL"></a>L&Eacute;ON CLADEL</h2>
+
+<p>I hope that the life of L&eacute;on Cladel by his daughter Judith, which
+Lemerre has brought out in a pleasant volume, will do something for the
+fame of one of the most original writers of our time. Cladel had the
+good fortune to be recognised in his lifetime by those whose approval
+mattered most, beginning with Baudelaire, who discovered him before he
+had printed his first book, and helped to teach him the craft of
+letters. But so exceptional an artist could never be popular, though he
+worked in living stuff and put the whole savour of his countryside into
+his tragic and passionate stories. A peasant, who writes about peasants
+and poor people, with a curiosity of style which not only packs his
+vocabulary with difficult words, old or local, and with unheard of
+rhythms, chosen to give voice to some never yet articulated emotion, but
+which drives<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> him into oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the very
+shape of his accents! A page of Cladel has a certain visible
+uncouthness, and at first this seems in keeping with his matter; but the
+uncouthness, when you look into it, turns out to be itself a refinement,
+and what has seemed a confused whirl, an improvisation, to be the result
+really of reiterated labour, whose whole aim has been to bring the
+spontaneity of the first impulse back into the laboriously finished
+work.</p>
+
+<p>In this just, sensitive, and admirable book, written by one who has
+inherited a not less passionate curiosity about life, but with more
+patience in waiting upon it, watching it, noting its surprises, we have
+a simple and sufficient commentary upon the books and upon the man. The
+narrative has warmth and reserve, and is at once tender and
+clear-sighted. <i>J'entrevois nettement</i>, she says with truth, <i>combien
+seront pr&eacute;cieux pour les futurs historiens de la litt&eacute;rature du xix<sup>e</sup>
+si&egrave;cle, les m&eacute;moires trac&eacute;s au contact imm&eacute;diat de l'artiste, expos&eacute;s de
+ses faits et gestes particuliers, de ses origines, de la germination de
+ses croyances et de son talent; ses critiques &agrave; venir y trouveront de</i>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span><i>solides mat&eacute;riaux, ses admirateurs un aliment &agrave; leur pi&eacute;t&eacute; et les
+philosophes un des aspects de l'&Acirc;me fran&ccedil;aise.</i> The man is shown to us,
+<i>les &eacute;lans de cette &acirc;me toujours grondante et fulgurante comme une
+forge, et les nuances de ce fi&eacute;vreux visage d'ap&ocirc;tre, brun, fin et
+sinueux</i>, and we see the inevitable growth, out of the hard soil of
+Quercy and out of the fertilising contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of
+this whole literature, these books no less astonishing than their
+titles: <i>Ompdrailles-le-Tombeau-des-Lutteurs</i>, <i>Celui de la
+Croix-aux-B&oelig;ufs</i>, <i>La F&ecirc;te Votive de Saint-Bartholom&eacute;e-Porte-Glaive</i>.
+The very titles are an excitement. I can remember how mysterious and
+alluring they used to seem to me when I first saw them on the cover of
+what was perhaps his best book, <i>Les Va-Nu-Pieds</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is by one of the stories, and the shortest, in <i>Les Va-Nu-Pieds</i>,
+that I remember Cladel. I read it when I was a boy, and I cannot think
+of it now without a shiver. It is called <i>L'Hercule</i>, and it is about a
+Sandow of the streets, a professional strong man, who kills himself by
+an over-strain; it is not a story at all, it is the record of an
+incident, and there is only the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> strong man in it and his friend the
+zany, who makes the jokes while the strong man juggles with bars and
+cannon-balls. It is all told in a breath, without a pause, as if some
+one who had just seen it poured it out in a flood of hot words. Such
+vehemence, such pity, such a sense of the cruelty of the spectacle of a
+man driven to death like a beast, for a few pence and the pleasure of a
+few children; such an evocation of the sun and the streets and this
+sordid tragic thing happening to the sound of drum and cymbals; such a
+vision in sunlight of a barbarous and ridiculous and horrible accident,
+lifted by the telling of it into a new and unforgettable beauty, I have
+never felt or seen in any other story of a like grotesque tragedy. It
+realises an ideal, it does for once what many artists have tried and
+failed to do; it wrings the last drop of agony out of that subject which
+it is so easy to make pathetic and effective. Dickens could not have
+done it, Bret Harte could not have done it, Kipling could not do it:
+Cladel did it only once, with this perfection.</p>
+
+<p>Something like it he did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence,
+with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and
+thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she
+calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this
+tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured
+to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. <i>La recherche
+du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la surabondance des
+vocables puis&eacute;s &agrave; toutes sources ... la condensation de l'action autour
+de ces quelques motifs &eacute;ternels de l'&eacute;pop&eacute;e: combat, ripaille, palabre
+et luxure</i>, there, as she sees justly, are links with Rabelais.
+Goncourt, himself always aiming at an impossible closeness of written to
+spoken speech, noted with admiration <i>la vraie photographie de la parole
+avec ses tours, ses abbr&eacute;viations ses ellipses, son essoufflement
+presque</i>. Speech out of breath, that is what Cladel's is always; his
+words, never the likely ones, do not so much speak as cry, gesticulate,
+overtake one another. <i>L'&acirc;me de L&eacute;on Cladel</i>, says his daughter, <i>&eacute;tait
+dans un constant et flamboyant automne</i>. Something of the colour and
+fever of autumn is in all he wrote. Another writer since Cladel, who has
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>probably never heard of him, has made heroes of peasants and vagabonds.
+But Maxim Gorki makes heroes of them, consciously, with a mental
+self-assertion, giving them ideas which he has found in Nietzsche.
+Cladel put into all his people some of his own passionate way of seeing
+'scarlet,' to use Barbey d'Aurevilly's epithet: <i>un rural &eacute;carlate</i>.
+Vehement and voluminous, he overflowed: his whole aim as an artist, as a
+pupil of Baudelaire, was to concentrate, to hold himself back; and the
+effort added impetus to the checked overflow. To the realists he seemed
+merely extravagant; he saw certainly what they could not see; and his
+romance was always a fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be
+in conflict with the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant,
+extracted from that hard soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an
+extraordinary mingling of the peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the
+long hair and beard, the sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding
+eyes, in which wildness and delicacy, strength and a kind of
+stealthiness, seem to be grafted on an inflexible peasant stock.</p>
+
+<p>1906.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="HENRIK_IBSEN" id="HENRIK_IBSEN"></a>HENRIK IBSEN</h2>
+
+<p>'Everything which I have created as a poet,' Ibsen said in a letter,
+'has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never
+wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.' Yet his chief
+aim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, and
+to stand aside, reserving his judgment. 'The method, the technique of
+the construction,' he says, speaking of what is probably his
+masterpiece, <i>Ghosts</i>, 'in itself entirely precludes the author's
+appearing in the speeches. My intention was to produce the impression in
+the mind of the reader that he was witnessing something real.' That, at
+his moment of most perfect balance, was his intention; that was what he
+achieved in an astonishing way. But his whole life was a development;
+and we see him moving from point to point, deliberately, and yet
+inevitably; reaching<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> the goal which it was his triumph to reach, then
+going beyond the goal, because movement in any direction was a necessity
+of his nature.</p>
+
+<p>In Ibsen's letters we shall find invaluable help in the study of this
+character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none
+the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard,
+crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow,
+precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed
+himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense
+of duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom he hated
+and resembled.</p>
+
+<p>His creed, as man and as artist, was the cultivation, the realisation of
+self. In quite another sense that, too, was the creed of Nietzsche; but
+what in Nietzsche was pride, the pride of individual energy, in Ibsen
+was a kind of humility, or a practical deduction from the fact that only
+by giving complete expression to oneself can one produce the finest
+work. Duty to oneself: that was how he looked upon it; and though, in a
+letter to Bj&ouml;rnson, he affirmed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> as the highest praise, 'his life was
+his best work,' to himself it was the building-up of the artist in him
+that he chiefly cared for. And to this he set himself with a moral
+fervour and a scientific tenacity. There was in Ibsen none of the
+abundance of great natures, none of the ease of strength. He nursed his
+force, as a miser hoards his gold; and does he not give you at times an
+uneasy feeling that he is making the most of himself, as the miser makes
+the most of his gold by scraping up every farthing?</p>
+
+<p>'The great thing,' he says in a letter of advice, 'is to hedge about
+what is one's own, to keep it free and clear from everything outside
+that has no connexion with it.' He bids Brandes cultivate 'a genuine,
+full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what
+concerns you as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else
+as non-existent.' Yet he goes on to talk about 'benefiting society,' is
+conscious of the weight which such a conviction or compromise lays upon
+him, and yet cannot get rid of the burden, as Nietzsche does. He has
+less courage than Nietzsche, though no less logic, and is held back from
+a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> complete realisation of his own doctrine because he has so much
+worldly wisdom and is so anxious to make the best of all worlds.</p>
+
+<p>'In every new poem or play,' he writes, 'I have aimed at my own personal
+spiritual emancipation and purification, for a man shares the
+responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.' This
+queer entanglement in social bonds on the part of one whose main
+endeavour had always been to free the individual from the conventions
+and restrictions of society is one of those signs of parochialism which
+peep out in Ibsen again and again. 'The strongest man,' he says in a
+letter, anticipating the epilogue of one of his plays, 'is he who stands
+alone.' But Ibsen did not find it easy to stand alone, though he found
+pleasure in standing aloof. The influence of his environment upon him is
+marked from the first. He breaks with his father and mother, never
+writes to them or goes back to see them; partly because he feels it
+necessary to avoid contact with 'certain tendencies prevailing there.'
+'Friends are an expensive luxury,' he finds, because they keep him from
+doing what he wishes to do, out of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>consideration for them. Is not this
+intellectual sensitiveness the corollary of a practical
+cold-heartedness? He cannot live in Norway because, he says, 'I could
+never lead a consistent spiritual life there.' In Norway he finds that
+'the accumulation of small details makes the soul small.' How curious an
+admission for an individualist, for an artist! He goes to Rome, and
+feels that he has discovered a new mental world. 'After I had been in
+Italy I could not understand how I had been able to exist before I had
+been there.' Yet before long he must go on to Munich, because 'here one
+is too entirely out of touch with the movements of the day.'</p>
+
+<p>He insists, again and again: 'Environment has a great influence upon the
+forms in which the imagination creates'; and, in a tone of
+half-burlesque, but with something serious in his meaning, he declares
+that wine had something to do with the exaltation of <i>Brand</i> and <i>Peer
+Gynt</i>, and sausages and beer with the satirical analysis of <i>The League
+of Youth</i>. And he adds: 'I do not intend by this to place the
+last-mentioned play on a lower level. I only mean that my point of view
+has changed, because here I am<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> in a community well ordered even to
+weariness.' He says elsewhere that he could only have written <i>Peer
+Gynt</i> where he wrote it, at Ischia and Sorrento, because it is 'written
+without regard to consequences&mdash;as I only dare to write far away from
+home.' If we trace him through his work we shall see him, with a strange
+docility, allowing not only 'frame of mind and situation in life,' but
+his actual surroundings, to mould his work, alike in form and in
+substance. If he had never left Norway he might have written verse to
+the end of his life; if he had not lived in Germany, where there is
+'up-to-date civilisation to study,' he would certainly never have
+written the social dramas; if he had not returned to Norway at the end
+of his life, the last plays would not have been what they were. I am
+taking him at his word; but Ibsen is a man who must be taken at his
+word.</p>
+
+<p>What is perhaps most individual in the point of view of Ibsen in his
+dramas is his sense of the vast importance trifles, of the natural human
+tendency to invent or magnify misunderstandings. A misunderstanding is
+his main lever of the tragic mischief; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> he has studied and diagnosed
+this unconscious agent of destiny more minutely and persistently than
+any other dramatist. He found it in himself. We see just this brooding
+over trifles, this sensitiveness to wrongs, imaginary or insignificant,
+in the revealing pages of his letters. It made the satirist of his
+earlier years; it made him a satirist of non-essentials. A criticism of
+one of his books sets him talking of wide vengeance; and he admitted in
+later life that he said to himself, 'I am ruined,' because a newspaper
+had attacked him overnight.</p>
+
+<p>With all his desire to 'undermine the idea of the state,' he besieges
+king and government with petitions for money; and he will confess in a
+letter, 'I should very much like to write publicly about the mean
+behaviour of the government,' which, however, he refrains from doing. He
+gets sore and angry over party and parochial rights and wrongs, even
+when he is far away from them, and has congratulated himself on the
+calming and enlightening effect of distance. A Norwegian bookseller
+threatens to pirate one of his books, and he makes a national matter of
+it. 'If,' he says, 'this dishonest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> speculation really obtains sympathy
+and support at home, it is my intention, come what may, to sever all
+ties with Norway and never set foot on her soil again.' How petty, how
+like a hysterical woman that is! How, in its way of taking a possible
+trifling personal injustice as if it were a thing of vital and even
+national moment, he betrays what was always to remain narrow, as well as
+bitter, in the centre of his being! He has recorded it against himself
+(for he spared himself, as he proudly and truthfully said, no more than
+others) in an anecdote which is a profound symbol.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>During the time I was writing <i>Brand</i>, I had on my desk a glass
+with a scorpion in it. From time to time the little animal was ill.
+Then I used to give it a piece of soft fruit, upon which it fell
+furiously and emptied its poison into it&mdash;after which it was well
+again. Does not something of the kind happen with us poets?</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Poets, no; but in Ibsen there is always some likeness of the sick
+scorpion in the glass.</p>
+
+<p>In one of his early letters to Bj&ouml;rnson, he had written: 'When I read
+the news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimable
+narrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insane
+man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot.' All his life Ibsen
+gazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less and
+less of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw the
+black spot at the core of the earth's fruit, of the whole apple of the
+earth; and as he became more hopeless, he became less angry; he learned
+something of the supreme indifference of art. He had learned much when
+he came to realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly the
+energy of the struggle that mattered. 'He who possesses liberty,' he
+said, 'otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead
+and soulless.... So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle
+and says, "Now I have it," thereby shows that he has lost it.' He had
+learned still more when he could add to his saying, 'The minority is
+always right,' this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectual
+vanguard can never collect a majority around him. 'At the point where I
+stood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a tolerably
+compact crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere; farther
+ahead, I hope.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> 'That man is right,' he thought, 'who has allied
+himself most closely with the future.' The future, to Ibsen, was a
+palpable thing, not concerned merely with himself as an individual, but
+a constantly removing, continually occupied promised land, into which he
+was not content to go alone. Yet he would always have asked of a
+follower, with Zarathustra: 'This is my road; which is yours?' His
+future was to be peopled by great individuals.</p>
+
+<p>It was in seeking to find himself that Ibsen sought to find truth; and
+truth he knew was to be found only within him. The truth which he sought
+for himself was not at all truth in the abstract, but a truth literally
+'efficacious,' and able to work out the purpose of his existence. That
+purpose he never doubted. The work he had to do was the work of an
+artist, and to this everything must be subservient. 'The great thing is
+to become honest and truthful in dealing with oneself&mdash;not to determine
+to do this or determine to do that, but to do what one <i>must</i> do because
+one is oneself. All the rest simply leads to falsehood.' He conceives of
+truth as being above all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>clear-sighted, and the approach to truth as a
+matter largely of will. No preacher of God and of righteousness and the
+kingdom to come was ever more centred, more convinced, more impregnably
+minded every time that he has absorbed a new idea or is constructing a
+new work of art. His conception of art often changes; but he never
+deviates at any one time from any one conception. There is something
+narrow as well as something intense in this certainty, this calmness,
+this moral attitude towards art. Nowhere has he expressed more of
+himself than in a letter to a woman who had written some kind of
+religious sequel to <i>Brand</i>. He tells her:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>Brand</i> is an &aelig;sthetic work, pure and simple. What it may have
+demolished or built up is a matter of absolute indifference to me.
+It came into being as the result of something which I had not
+observed, but experienced; it was a necessity for me to free myself
+from something which my inner man had done with, by giving poetic
+form to it; and, when by this means I had got rid of it, my book
+had no longer any interest for me.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>It is in the same positive, dogmatic way that he assures us that <i>Peer
+Gynt</i> is a poem, not a satire; <i>The League of Youth</i> a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> 'simple comedy
+and nothing more'; <i>Emperor and Galilean</i> an 'entirely realistic work';
+that in <i>Ghosts</i> 'there is not a single opinion, a single utterance
+which can be laid to the account of the author.... My intention was to
+produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessing
+something real.... It preaches nothing at all.' Of <i>Hedda Gabler</i> he
+says: 'It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called
+problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings,
+human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of the social
+conditions and principles of the present day.' 'My chief life-task,' he
+defines: 'to depict human characters and human destinies.'</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen's development has always lain chiefly in the perfecting of his
+tools. From the beginning he has had certain ideas, certain tendencies,
+a certain consciousness of things to express; he has been haunted, as
+only creative artists are haunted, by a world waiting to be born; and,
+from the beginning, he has built on a basis of criticism, a criticism of
+life. Part of his strength has gone out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> in fighting: he has had the
+sense of a mission. Part of his strength has gone out in the attempt to
+fly: he has had the impulse, without the wings, of the poet. And when he
+has been content to leave fighting and flying alone, and to build
+solidly on a solid foundation, it is then that he has achieved his great
+work. But he has never been satisfied, or never been able, to go on
+doing just that work, his own work; and the poet in him, the impotent
+poet who is full of a sense of what poetry is, but is never able, for
+more than a moment, to create poetry, has come whispering in the ear of
+the man of science, who is the new, unerring artist, the maker of a
+wonderful new art of prose, and has made him uneasy, and given
+uncertainty to his hand. The master-builder has altered his design, he
+has set up a tower here, 'too high for a dwelling-house,' and added a
+window there, with the stained glass of a church window, and fastened on
+ornaments in stucco, breaking the severe line of the original design.</p>
+
+<p>In Ibsen science has made its great stand against poetry; and the
+Germans have come worshipping, saying, 'Here, in our era<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> of
+marvellously realistic politics, we have come upon correspondingly
+realistic poetry.... We received from it the first idea of a possible
+new poetic world.... We were adherents of this new school of realistic
+art: we had found our &aelig;sthetic creed.' But the maker of this creed, the
+creator of this school of realistic art, was not able to be content with
+what he had done, though this was the greatest thing he was able to do.
+It is with true insight that he boasts, in one of his letters, of what
+he can do 'if I am only careful to do what I am quite capable of,
+namely, combine this relentlessness of mind with deliberateness in the
+choice of means.' There lay his success: deliberateness in the choice of
+means for the doing of a given thing, the thing for which his best
+energies best fitted him. Yet it took him forty years to discover
+exactly what those means to that end were; and then the experimenting
+impulse, the sense of what poetry is, was soon to begin its
+disintegrating work. Science, which seemed to have conquered poetry, was
+to pay homage to poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen comes before us as a man of science who would have liked to be a
+poet; or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> who, half-equipped as a poet, is halved or hampered by the
+scientific spirit until he realises that he is essentially a man of
+science. From the first his aim was to express himself; and it was a
+long time before he realised that verse was not his native language. His
+first three plays were in verse, the fourth in verse alternating with
+prose; then came two plays, historic and legendary, written in more or
+less archaic prose; then a satire in verse, <i>Love's Comedy</i>, in which
+there is the first hint of the social dramas; then another prose play,
+the nearest approach that he ever made to poetry, but written in prose,
+<i>The Pretenders</i>; and then the two latest and most famous of the poems,
+<i>Brand</i> and <i>Peer Gynt</i>. After this, verse is laid aside, and at last we
+find him condemning it, and declaring 'it is improbable that verse will
+be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate
+future.... It is therefore doomed.' But the doom was Ibsen's: to be a
+great prose dramatist, and only the segment of a poet.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is more interesting than to study Ibsen's verse in the making.
+His sincerity to his innermost aim, the aim at the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>expression of
+himself, is seen in his refusal from the beginning to accept any poetic
+convention, to limit himself in poetic subject, to sift his material or
+clarify his metre. He has always insisted on producing something
+personal, thoughtful, fantastic, and essentially prosaic; and it is in a
+vain protest against the nature of things that he writes of <i>Peer Gynt</i>,
+'My book <i>is</i> poetry; and if it is not, then it will be. The conception
+of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to the
+book.' His verse was the assertion of his individuality at all costs; it
+was a costly tool, which he cast aside only when he found that it would
+not carve every material.</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen's earliest work in verse has not been translated. Dr. Brandes
+tells us that it followed Danish models, the sagas, and the national
+ballads. In the prose play, <i>Lady Inger of &Ouml;straat</i>, we see the
+dramatist, the clever playwright, still holding on to the skirts of
+romance, and ready with rhetoric enough on occasion, but more concerned
+with plot and stage effect than with even what is interesting in the
+psychology of the characters. <i>The Vikings</i>, also in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> prose, is a piece
+of strong grappling with a heroic subject, with better rhetoric, and
+some good poetry taken straight out of the sagas, with fervour in it,
+and gravity; yet an experiment only, a thing not made wholly personal,
+nor wholly achieved. It shows how well Ibsen could do work which was not
+his work. In <i>Love's Comedy</i>, a modern play in verse, he is already
+himself. Point of view is there; materials are there; the man of science
+has already laid his hand upon the poet. We are told that Ibsen tried to
+write it in prose, failed, and fell back upon verse. It is quite likely;
+he has already an accomplished technique, and can put his thoughts into
+verse with admirable skill. But the thoughts are not born in verse, and,
+brilliantly rhymed as they are, they do not make poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Brandes admits everything that can be said against Ibsen as a poet
+when he says, speaking of this play and of <i>Brand</i>:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Even if the ideas they express have not previously found utterance
+in poetry, they have done so in prose literature. In other words,
+these poems do not set forth new thoughts, but translate into metre
+and rhyme thoughts already expressed.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p><p><i>Love's Comedy</i> is a criticism of life; it is full of hard, scientific,
+prose thought about conduct, which has its own quality as long as it
+sticks to fact and remains satire; but when the prose curvets and tries
+to lift, when criticism turns constructive, we find no more than bubbles
+and children's balloons, empty and coloured, that soar and evaporate.
+There is, in this farce of the intellect, a beginning of social drama;
+realism peeps through the artificial point and polish of a verse which
+has some of the qualities of Pope and some of the qualities of Swift;
+but the dramatist is still content that his puppets shall have the air
+of puppets; he stands in the arena of his circus and cracks his whip;
+they gallop round grimacing, and with labels on their backs. The verse
+comes between him and nature, as the satire comes between him and
+poetry. Cynicism has gone to the making of poetry more than once, but
+only under certain conditions: that the poet should be a lyric poet,
+like Heine, or a great personality in action, like Byron, to whom
+cynicism should be but one of the tones of his speech, the gestures of
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> attitude. With Ibsen it is a petty anger, an anger against nature,
+and it leads to a transcendentalism which is empty and outside nature.</p>
+
+<p>The criticism of love, so far as it goes beyond what is amusing and
+Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile
+than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks
+he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a
+denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal
+suicide such as that in <i>Rosmersholm</i>, or may feed the brain on some air
+unbreathable by the body, as in <i>When we Dead Awaken</i>. It is the old
+idea of self-sacrifice creeping back under cover of a new idea of
+self-intensification; and it comes, like asceticism, from a contempt of
+nature, a distrust of nature, an abstract intellectual criticism of
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>Out of such material no poetry will ever come; and none has come in
+<i>Love's Comedy</i>. In the prose play which followed, <i>The Pretenders</i>,
+which is the dramatisation of an inner problem in the form of a
+historical drama, there is a much nearer approach to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> poetry. The
+stagecraft is still too obvious; effect follows effect like
+thunder-claps; there is melodrama in the tragedy; but the play is, above
+all, the working-out of a few deep ideas, and in these ideas there is
+both beauty and wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>It was with the publication of <i>Brand</i> that Ibsen became famous, not
+only in his own country, but throughout Europe. The poem has been
+seriously compared, even in England, with <i>Hamlet</i>; even in Germany with
+<i>Faust</i>. A better comparison is that which Mr. Gosse has made with
+Sidney Dobell's <i>Balder</i>. It is full of satire and common-sense, of
+which there is little enough in <i>Balder</i>: but not <i>Balder</i> is more
+abstract, or more inhuman in its action. Types, not people, move in it;
+their speech is doctrine, not utterance; it is rather a tract than a
+poem. The technique of the verse, if we can judge it from the brilliant
+translation of Professor Herford, which reads almost everywhere like an
+original, is more than sufficient for its purpose; all this
+argumentative and abstract and realistic material finds adequate
+expression in a verse which has aptly been compared with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> the verse of
+Browning's <i>Christmas-eve and Easter-day</i>. The comparison may be carried
+further, and it is disastrous to Ibsen. Browning deals with hard matter,
+and can be boisterous; but he is never, as Ibsen is always, pedestrian.
+The poet, though, like St. Michael, he carry a sword, must, like St.
+Michael, have wings. Ibsen has no wings.</p>
+
+<p>But there is another comparison by which I think we can determine more
+precisely the station and quality of <i>Brand</i> as poetry. Take any one of
+the vigorous and vivid statements of dogma, which are the very kernel of
+the poem, and compare them with a few lines from Blake's <i>Everlasting
+Gospel</i>. There every line, with all its fighting force, is pure poetry;
+it was conceived as poetry, born as poetry, and can be changed into no
+other substance. Here we find a vigorous technique fitting striking
+thought into good swinging verse, with abundance of apt metaphor; but
+where is the vision, the essence, which distinguishes it from what,
+written in prose, would have lost nothing? Ibsen writes out of the
+intellect, adding fancy and emotion as he goes; but in Blake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> every line
+leaps forth like lightning from a cloud.</p>
+
+<p>The motto of <i>Brand</i> was 'all or nothing'; that of <i>Peer Gynt</i> 'to be
+master of the situation.' Both are studies of egoism, in the finding and
+losing of self; both are personal studies and national lessons. Of <i>Peer
+Gynt</i> Ibsen said, 'I meant it to be a caprice.' It is Ibsen in high
+spirits; and it is like a mute dancing at a funeral. It is a harlequin
+of a poem, a thing of threads and patches; and there are gold threads in
+it and tattered clouts. It is an experiment which has hardly succeeded,
+because it is not one but a score of experiments. It is made up of two
+elements, an element of folklore and an element of satire. The first
+comes and goes for the most part with Peer and his mother; and all this
+brings Norwegian soil with it, and is alive. The satire is fierce,
+local, and fantastic. Out of the two comes a clashing thing which may
+itself suggest, as has been said, the immense contrast between Norwegian
+summer, which is day, and winter, which is night. Grieg's music,
+childish, mumbling, singing, leaping, and sombre, has aptly illustrated
+it. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> was a thing done on a holiday, for a holiday. It was of this
+that Ibsen said he could not have written it any nearer home than Ischia
+and Sorrento. But is it, for all its splendid scraps and patches, a
+single masterpiece? is it, above all, a poem? The idea, certainly, is
+one and coherent; every scene is an illustration of that idea; but is it
+born of that idea? Is it, more than once or twice, inevitable? What
+touches at times upon poetry is the folk element; the irony at times has
+poetic substance in it; but this glimmer of poetic substance, which
+comes and goes, is lost for the most part among mists and vapours, and
+under artificial light. That poet which exists somewhere in Ibsen,
+rarely quite out of sight, never wholly at liberty, comes into this
+queer dance of ideas and humours, and gives it, certainly, the main
+value it has. But the 'state satirist' is always on the heels of the
+poet; and imagination, whenever it appears for a moment, is led away
+into bondage by the spirit of the fantastic, which is its prose
+equivalent or makeshift. It is the fantastic that Ibsen generally gives
+us in the place of imagination; and the fantastic is a kind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> of
+rhetoric, manufactured by the will, and has no place in poetry.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The League of Youth</i> Ibsen takes finally the step which he had half
+taken in <i>Loves Comedy</i>. 'In my new comedy,' he writes to Dr. Brandes,
+'you will find the common order of things&mdash;no strong emotions, no deep
+feelings, and, more particularly, no isolated thoughts.' He adds: 'It is
+written in prose, which gives it a strong realistic colouring. I have
+paid particular attention to form, and, among other things, I have
+accomplished the feat of doing without a single monologue, in fact
+without a single "aside." 'The play is hardly more than a good farce;
+the form is no more than the slightest of advances towards probability
+on the strict lines of the Scribe tradition; the 'common order of
+things' is there, in subject, language, and in everything but the
+satirical intention which underlies the whole trivial, stupid, and no
+doubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, the
+photographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relief
+from the photographic. The stage mechanism is still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> obvious; but the
+intention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps to
+get the mechanism in order.</p>
+
+<p>After <i>The League of Youth</i> Ibsen tells us that he tried to 'seek
+salvation in remoteness of subject'; so he returned to his old scheme
+for a play on Julian the Apostate, and wrote the two five-act plays
+which make up <i>Emperor and Galilean</i>. He tells us that it is the first
+work which he wrote under German intellectual influences, and that it
+contains 'that positive theory of life which the critics have demanded
+of me so long.' In one letter he affirms that it is 'an entirely
+realistic work,' and in another, 'It is a part of my own spiritual life
+which I am putting into this book ... and the historical subject chosen
+has a much more intimate connexion with the movements of our own time
+than one might at first imagine.' How great a relief it must have been,
+after the beer and sausages of <i>The League of Youth</i>, to go back to an
+old cool wine, no one can read <i>Emperor and Galilean</i> and doubt. It is a
+relief and an escape; and the sense of the stage has been put wholly on
+one side in both of these plays, of which the second reads almost like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+a parody of the first: the first so heated, so needlessly colloquial,
+the second so full of argumentative rhetoric. Ibsen has turned against
+his hero in the space between writing the one and the other; and the
+Julian of the second is more harshly satirised from within than ever
+<i>Peer Gynt</i> was. In a letter to Dr. Brandes, Ibsen says: 'What the book
+is or is not, I have no desire to enquire. I only know that I saw a
+fragment of humanity plainly before my eyes, and that I tried to
+reproduce what I saw.' But in the play itself this intention comes and
+goes; and, while some of it reminds one of <i>Salammb&ocirc;</i> in its attempt to
+treat remote ages realistically, other parts are given up wholly to the
+exposition of theories, and yet others to a kind of spectacular romance,
+after the cheap method of George Ebers and the German writers of
+historical fiction. The satire is more serious, the criticism of ideas
+more fundamental than anything in <i>The League of Youth</i>; but, as in
+almost the whole of Ibsen's more characteristic work up to this point,
+satire strives with realism; it is still satire, not irony, and is not
+yet, as the later irony<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> is to be, a deepening, and thus a
+justification, of the realism.</p>
+
+<p>Eight years passed between <i>The League of Youth</i> and <i>The Pillars of
+Society</i>; but they are both woven of the same texture. Realism has made
+for itself a firmer footing; the satire has more significance; the
+mechanism of the stage goes much more smoothly, though indeed to a more
+conventionally happy ending; melodrama has taken some of the place of
+satire. Yet the 'state satirist' is still at his work, still concerned
+with society and bringing only a new detail of the old accusation
+against society. Like every play of this period, it is the unveiling of
+a lie. See yourselves as you are, the man of science seems to be saying
+to us. Here are your 'pillars of society'; they are the tools of
+society. Here is your happy marriage, and it is a doll's house. Here is
+your respected family, here is the precept of 'honour your father and
+your mother' in practice; and here is the little voice of heredity
+whispering 'ghosts!' There is the lie of respectability, the lie hidden
+behind marriage, the lie which saps the very roots of the world.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span></p><p>Ibsen is no preacher, and he has told us expressly that <i>Ghosts</i>
+'preaches nothing at all.' This pursuit of truth to its most secret
+hiding-place is not a sermon against sin; it sets a scientific dogma
+visibly to work, and watches the effect of the hypothesis. As the dogma
+is terrible and plausible, and the logic of its working-out faultless,
+we get one of the deeper thrills that modern art has to give us. I would
+take <i>A Doll's House</i>, <i>Ghosts</i>, and <i>The Wild Duck</i> as Ibsen's three
+central plays, the plays in which his method completely attained its
+end, in which his whole capacities are seen at their finest balance; and
+this work, this reality in which every word, meaningless in itself, is
+alive with suggestion, is the finest scientific work which has been done
+in literature. Into this period comes his one buoyant play, <i>An Enemy of
+the People</i>, his rebound against the traditional hypocrisy which had
+attacked <i>Ghosts</i> for its telling of unseasonable truths; it is an
+allegory, in the form of journalism, or journalism in the form of
+allegory, and is the 'apology' of the man of science for his mission.
+Every play is a dissection, or a vivisection rather; for these people
+who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> suffer so helplessly, and are shown us so calmly in their agonies,
+are terribly alive. <i>A Doll's House</i> is the first of Ibsen's plays in
+which the puppets have no visible wires. The playwright has perfected
+his art of illusion; beyond <i>A Doll's House</i> and <i>Ghosts</i> dramatic
+illusion has never gone. And the irony of the ideas that work these
+living puppets has now become their life-blood. It is the tragic irony
+of a playwright who is the greatest master of technique since Sophocles,
+but who is only the playwright in Sophocles, not the poet.</p>
+
+<p>For this moment, the moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic
+element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so
+sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With <i>The
+Wild Duck</i> fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit
+symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is
+more disinterested than even in <i>Ghosts</i>, for it turns back on the
+reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the
+pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays
+which follows we see the return and encroachment of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> symbolism, the
+poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms of
+the fantastic in place of any simple and sufficing gift of imagination.
+The man of science has had his way, has fulfilled his aim, and is
+discontented with the limits within which he has fulfilled it. He would
+extend those limits; and at first it seems as if those limits are to be
+extended. But the exquisite pathos which humanises what is fantastic in
+<i>The Wild Duck</i> passes, in <i>Rosmersholm</i>, in which the problems of
+<i>Love's Comedy</i> are worked out to their logical conclusion, into a form,
+not of genuine tragedy, but of mental melodrama. In <i>The Lady from the
+Sea</i>, how far is the symbol which has eaten up reality really symbol? Is
+it not rather the work of the intelligence than of the imagination? Is
+it not allegory intruding into reality, disturbing that reality and
+giving us no spiritual reality in its place?</p>
+
+<p><i>Hedda Gabler</i> is closer to life; and Ibsen said about it in a letter:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called
+problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human
+beings, human emotions, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> human destinies, upon a groundwork of
+certain of the social conditions and principles of the present
+day.'</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The play might be taken for a study in that particular kind of
+'decadence' which has come to its perfection in uncivilised and
+overcivilised Russia; and the woman whom Ibsen studied as his model was
+actually half-Russian. Eleonora Duse has created Hedda over again, as a
+poet would have created her, and has made a wonderful creature whom
+Ibsen never conceived, or at least never rendered. Ibsen has tried to
+add his poetry by way of ornament, and gives us a trivial and
+inarticulate poet about whom float certain catchwords. Here the chief
+catchword is 'vine-leaves in the hair'; in <i>The Master-builder</i> it is
+'harps in the air'; in <i>Little Eyolf</i> it takes human form and becomes
+the Rat-wife; in <i>John Gabriel Borkman</i> it drops to the tag of 'a dead
+man and two shadows'; in <i>When we Dead Awaken</i> there is nothing but icy
+allegory. All that queer excitement of <i>The Master-builder</i>, that
+'ideal' awake again, is it not really a desire to open one's door to the
+younger generation? But is it the younger generation that finds itself
+at home there? is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> it not rather <i>Peer Gynt</i> back again, and the ride
+through the air on the back of the reindeer?</p>
+
+<p>In his earlier plays Ibsen had studied the diseases of society, and he
+had considered the individual only in his relation to society. Now he
+turns to study the diseases of the individual conscience. Only life
+interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial
+irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental
+artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The
+man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back,
+though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife
+in <i>Little Eyolf</i>; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination,
+neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the offspring of a
+supernaturalism that does not believe in itself. In <i>John Gabriel
+Borkman</i>, which is the culmination of Ibsen's skill in construction, a
+play in four acts with only the pause of a minute between each, he is no
+longer content to concern himself with the old material, lies or
+misunderstandings, the irony of things happening as they do;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> but will
+have fierce hatreds, and a kind of incipient madness in things. In <i>When
+we Dead Awaken</i> all the people are quite consciously insane, and act a
+kind of charade with perfectly solemn faces and a visible effort to look
+their parts.</p>
+
+<p>In these last plays, with their many splendid qualities, not bound
+together and concentrated as in <i>Ghosts</i>, we see the revenge of the
+imagination upon the realist, who has come to be no longer interested in
+the action of society upon the individual, but in the individual as a
+soul to be lost or saved. The man of science has discovered the soul,
+and does not altogether know what to do with it. He has settled its
+limits, set it to work in space and time, laid bare some of its secrets,
+shown its 'physical basis.' And now certain eccentricities in it begin
+to beckon to him; he would follow the soul into the darkness, but it is
+dark to him; he can but strain after it as it flutters. In the preface
+to the collected edition of his plays, published in 1901, Maeterlinck
+has pointed out, as one still standing at the cross-roads might point
+out to those who have followed him so far on his way, the great
+uncertainty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> in which the poet, the dramatist of to-day, finds himself,
+as what seems to be known or conjectured of 'the laws of nature' is
+forced upon him, making the old, magnificently dramatic opportunities of
+the ideas of fate, of eternal justice, no longer possible for him to
+use.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>Le po&egrave;te dramatique est oblig&eacute; de faire descendre dans la vie
+r&eacute;elle, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'id&eacute;e qu'il se fait de
+l'inconnu. Il faut qu'il nous montre de quelle fa&ccedil;on, sous quelle
+forme, dans quelles conditions, d'apr&egrave;s quelles lois, &agrave; quelle fin,
+agissent sur nos destin&eacute;es les puissances sup&eacute;rieures, les
+influences inintelligibles, les principes infinis, dont, en tant
+que po&egrave;te, il est persuad&eacute; que l'univers est plein. Et comme il est
+arriv&eacute; &agrave; une heure o&ugrave; loyalement il lui est &agrave; peu pr&egrave;s impossible
+d'admettre les anciennes, et o&ugrave; celles qui les doivent remplacer ne
+sont pas encore d&eacute;termin&eacute;es, n'ont pas encore de nom, il h&eacute;site,
+t&acirc;tonne, et s'il veut rester absolument sinc&egrave;re, il n'ose plus se
+risquer hors de la r&eacute;alit&eacute; imm&eacute;diate. Il se borne &agrave; &eacute;tudier les
+sentiments humains dans leurs effets mat&eacute;riels et psychologiques.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p>So long as Ibsen does this, he achieves great and solid things; and in
+<i>Ghosts</i> a scientific dogma, the law or theory of heredity, has for once
+taken the place of fate, and almost persuaded us that science, if it
+takes poetry from us, can restore to us a kind of poetry.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> But, as
+Maeterlinck has seen, as it is impossible not to see,</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><i>quand Ibsen, dans d'autres drames, essaie de relier &agrave; d'autres
+myst&egrave;res les gestes de ses hommes en mal de conscience
+exceptionelle ou de ses femmes hallucin&eacute;es, il faut convenir que,
+si l'atmosph&egrave;re qu'il parvient &agrave; cr&eacute;er est &eacute;trange et troublante,
+elle est rarement saine et respirable, parce qu'elle est rarement
+raisonnable et r&eacute;ele.</i></p></blockquote>
+
+<p>From the time when, in <i>A Doll's House</i>, Ibsen's puppets came to life,
+they have refused ever since to be put back into their boxes. The
+manager may play what tricks with them he pleases, but he cannot get
+them back into their boxes. They are alive, and they live with a weird,
+spectacular, but irrevocable life. But, after the last play of all, the
+dramatic epilogue, <i>When we Dead Awaken</i>, the puppets have gone back
+into their boxes. Now they have come to obey the manager, and to make
+mysterious gestures which they do not understand, and to speak in images
+and take them for literal truths. Even their spectral life has gone out
+of them; they are rigid now, and only the strings set them dancing. The
+puppets had come to life, they had lived the actual life of the earth;
+and then a desire of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> impossible, the desire of a life rarefied
+beyond human limits, took their human life from them, and they were
+puppets again. The epilogue to the plays is the apostasy of the man of
+science, and, as with all apostates, his new faith is not a vital thing;
+the poet was not really there to reawaken.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Before Ibsen the drama was a part of poetry; Ibsen has made it prose.
+All drama up to Ibsen had been romantic; Ibsen made it science. Until
+Ibsen no playwright had ever tried to imitate life on the stage, or
+even, as Ibsen does, to interpret it critically. The desire of every
+dramatist had been to create over again a more abundant life, and to
+create it through poetry or through humour; through some form, that is,
+of the imagination. There was a time when Ibsen too would have made
+poetry of the drama; there was a time when verse seemed to him the only
+adequate form in which drama could be written. But his power to work in
+poetry was not equal to his desire to be a poet; and, when he revolted
+against verse and deliberately adopted as his material 'the common order
+of things,' when he set<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> himself, for the first time in the history of
+the drama, to produce an illusion of reality rather than a translation
+or transfiguration of reality, he discovered his own strength, the
+special gift which he had brought into the world; but at the same time
+he set, for himself and for his age, his own limits to drama.</p>
+
+<p>It is quite possible to write poetic drama in prose, though to use prose
+rather than verse is to write with the left hand rather than with the
+right. Before Ibsen, prose had been but a serving-maid to verse; and no
+great dramatist had ever put forward the prose conception of the drama.
+Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had used prose as an escape or a
+side-issue, for variety, or for the heightening of verse. Moli&egrave;re had
+used prose as the best makeshift for verse, because he was not himself a
+good craftsman in the art. And, along with the verse, and necessarily
+dependent upon it, there was the poetic, the romantic quality in drama.
+Think of those dramatists who seem to have least kinship with poetry;
+think, I will not say of Moli&egrave;re, but of Congreve. What is more romantic
+than <i>The Way of the World</i>?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> But Ibsen extracts the romantic quality
+from drama as if it were a poison; and, in deciding to write
+realistically in prose, he gives up every aim but that which he defines,
+so early as 1874, as the wish 'to produce the impression on the reader
+that what he was reading was something that had really happened.' He is
+not even speaking of the effect in a theatre; he is defining his aim
+inside the covers of a book, his whole conception of drama.</p>
+
+<p>The art of imitation has never been carried further than it has been
+carried by Ibsen in his central plays; and with him, at his best, it is
+no mere imitation but a critical interpretation of life. How greatly
+this can be done, how greatly Ibsen has done it, there is <i>Ghosts</i> to
+show us. Yet at what point this supreme criticism may stop, what remains
+beyond it in the treatment of the vilest contemporary material, we shall
+see if we turn to a play which seems at first sight more grossly
+realistic than the most realistic play of Ibsen&mdash;Tolstoi's <i>Powers of
+Darkness</i>. Though, as one reads and sees it, the pity and fear seem to
+weigh almost intolerably upon one, the impression left upon the mind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+when the reading or the performance is over, is that left by the hearing
+of noble and tragic music. How, out of such human discords, such a
+divine harmony can be woven I do not know; that is the secret of
+Tolstoi's genius, as it is the secret of the musician's. Here, achieved
+in terms of naked horror, we find some of the things which Maeterlinck
+has aimed at and never quite rendered through an atmosphere and through
+forms of vague beauty. And we find also another kind of achievement, by
+the side of which Ibsen's cunning adjustments of reality seem a little
+trivial or a little unreal. Here, for once, human life is islanded on
+the stage, a pin-point of light in an immense darkness; and the sense of
+that surrounding darkness is conveyed to us, as in no other modern play,
+by an awful sincerity and an unparalleled simplicity. Whether Tolstoi
+has learned by instinct some stagecraft which playwrights have been
+toiling after in vain, or by what conscious and deliberate art he has
+supplemented instinct, I do not know. But, out of horror and humour, out
+of some creative abundance which has taken the dregs of human life up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>
+into itself and transfigured them by that pity which is understanding,
+by that faith which is creation, Tolstoi has in this play done what
+Ibsen has never done&mdash;given us an interpretation of life which owes
+nothing to science, nothing to the prose conception of life, but which,
+in spite of its form, is essential poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen's concern is with character; and no playwright has created a more
+probable gallery of characters with whom we can become so easily and so
+completely familiar. They live before us, and with apparently so
+unconscious a self-revelation that we speculate about them as we would
+about real people, and sometimes take sides with them against their
+creator. Nora would, would not, have left her children! We know all
+their tricks of mind, their little differences from other people, their
+habits, the things that a novelist spends so much of his time in
+bringing laboriously before us. Ibsen, in a single stage direction,
+gives you more than you would find in a chapter of a novel. His
+characters, when they are most themselves, are modern, of the day or
+moment; they are average, and represent nothing which we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> have not met
+with, nothing which astonishes us because it is of a nobility, a
+heroism, a wildness beyond our acquaintance. It is for this that he has
+been most praised; and there is something marvellous in the precision of
+his measurements of just so much and no more of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there are no great characters in Ibsen; and do not great characters
+still exist? Ibsen's exceptional people never authenticate themselves as
+being greatly exceptional; their genius is vouched for on a report which
+they are themselves unable to confirm, as in the inarticulate poet
+L&ouml;vborg, or on their own assertion, as with John Gabriel Borkman, of
+whom even Dr. Brandes admits, 'His own words do not convince me, for
+one, that he has ever possessed true genius.' When he is most himself,
+when he has the firmest hold on his material, Ibsen limits himself to
+that part of the soul which he and science know. By taking the average
+man as his hero, by having no hero, no villain, only probable levels, by
+limiting human nature to the bounds within which he can clinically
+examine it, he shirks, for the most part, the greatest crisis of the
+soul.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> Can the greatest drama be concerned with less than the ultimate
+issues of nature, the ultimate types of energy? with Lear and with
+&OElig;dipus? The world of Shakespeare and of the Greeks is the world; it
+is universal, whether Falstaff blubbers in the tavern or Philoctetes
+cries in the cave. But the world which Ibsen really knows is that little
+segment of the world which we call society; its laws are not those of
+nature, its requirements are not the requirements of God or of man; it
+is a business association for the capture and division of profits; it
+is, in short, a fit subject for scientific study, but no longer a part
+of the material of poetry. The characteristic plays of Ibsen are rightly
+known as 'social dramas.' Their problem, for the main part, is no longer
+man in the world, but man in society. That is why they have no
+atmosphere, no background, but are carefully localised.</p>
+
+<p>The rhythm of prose is physiological; the rhythm of poetry is musical.
+There is in every play of Ibsen a rhythm perfect of its kind, but it is
+the physiological rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespeare
+speaks to the blood like wine or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> music; it is with exultation, with
+intoxication, that we see or read <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, or even
+<i>Richard II</i>. But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of a
+diagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the
+purely mental exaltation of a problem solved. These people who are seen
+so clearly, moving about in a well-realised world, using probable words
+and doing necessary things, may owe some of their manner at least to the
+modern French stage, and to the pamphleteer's prose world of Dumas
+<i>fils</i>; yet, though they may illustrate problems, they no longer recite
+them. They are seen, not as the poet sees his people, naked against a
+great darkness, but clothed and contemporary, from the level of an
+ironical observer who sits in a corner of the same room. It is the
+doctor who sits there, watching his patients, and smiling ambiguously as
+he infers from his knowledge of their bodies what pranks their souls are
+likely to play.</p>
+
+<p>If Ibsen gets no other kind of beauty, does he not get beauty of
+emotion? Or can there be beauty in an intensity of emotion which can be
+at least approached, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> power of thrilling, by an Adelphi
+melodrama? Is the speech of his people, when it is most nearly a
+revelation of the obscure forces outside us or within us, more than a
+stammering of those to whom unconsciousness does not lend distinction
+but intensifies idiosyncrasy? Drama, in its essence, requires no speech;
+it can be played by marionettes, or in dumb show, and be enthralling.
+But, speech once admitted, must not that speech, if it is to collaborate
+in supreme drama, be filled with imagination, be itself a beautiful
+thing? To Ibsen beauty has always been of the nature of an ornament, not
+an end. He would concentrate it into a catchword, repeated until it has
+lost all emotional significance. For the rest, his speech is the
+language of the newspaper, recorded with the fidelity of the phonograph.
+Its whole aim is at economy, as if economy were an end rather than a
+means.</p>
+
+<p>Has not Ibsen, in the social dramas, tried to make poems without words?
+There is to be beauty of motive and beauty of emotion; but the words are
+to be the plainest of all the plain words which we use in talking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> with
+one another, and nothing in them is to speak greatly when great
+occasions arise. Men's speech in great drama is as much higher than the
+words they would use in real life as their thoughts are higher than
+those words. It says the unuttered part of our speech. Ibsen would
+suppress all this heightening as he has suppressed the soliloquy and the
+aside. But here what he suppresses is not a convention but a means of
+interpretation. It is suppressing the essence for the sake of the
+accident.</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen's genius for the invention of a situation has never been
+surpassed. More living characters than the characters of Ibsen have
+never moved on the stage. His women are at work now in the world,
+interpreting women to themselves, helping to make the women of the
+future. He has peopled a new world. But the inhabitants of this new
+world, before they begin to transgress its laws and so lose their own
+citizenship there, are so faithfully copied from the people about us
+that they share their dumbness, that dumbness to which it is the power
+and privilege of poetry to give speech. Given the character and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+situation, what Ibsen asks at the moment of crisis is: What would this
+man be most likely to say? not, What would be the finest, the most
+deeply revealing thing that he could say? In that difference lies all
+the difference between prose and poetry.</p>
+
+<p>1906.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="JORIS-KARL_HUYSMANS" id="JORIS-KARL_HUYSMANS"></a>JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS</h2>
+
+<p>The novels of Huysmans, however we may regard them as novels, are, at
+all events, the sincere and complete expression of a very remarkable
+personality. From <i>Marthe</i> to <i>L&agrave;-Bas</i> every story, every volume,
+disengages the same atmosphere&mdash;the atmosphere of a London November,
+when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little miseries of
+life loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable grotesqueness.
+Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation&mdash;and
+sensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be well
+or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for each
+of us, what each of us feels it to be. To Huysmans the world appears to
+be a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, ridiculous place, with a
+certain solace in various forms of art, and certain possibilities of at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>
+least temporary escape. Part of his work presents to us a picture of
+ordinary life as he conceives it, in its uniform trivial wretchedness;
+in another part he has made experiment in directions which have seemed
+to promise escape, relief; in yet other portions he has allowed himself
+the delight of his sole enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of art. He himself
+would be the first to acknowledge&mdash;indeed, practically, he has
+acknowledged&mdash;that the particular way in which he sees life is a matter
+of personal temperament and constitution, a matter of nerves. The
+Goncourts have never tired of insisting on the fact of their <i>n&eacute;vrose</i>,
+of pointing out its importance in connection with the form and structure
+of their work, their touch on style, even. To them the <i>maladie fin de
+si&egrave;cle</i> has come delicately, as to the chlorotic fine ladies of the
+Faubourg Saint-Germain: it has sharpened their senses to a point of
+morbid acuteness, it has given their work a certain feverish beauty. To
+Huysmans it has given the exaggerated horror of whatever is ugly and
+unpleasant, with the fatal instinct of discovering, the fatal necessity
+of contemplating, every flaw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> and every discomfort that a somewhat
+imperfect world can offer for inspection. It is the transposition of the
+ideal. Relative values are lost, for it is the sense of the disagreeable
+only that is heightened; and the world, in this strange disorder of
+vision, assumes an aspect which can only be compared with that of a drop
+of impure water under the microscope. 'Nature seen through a
+temperament' is Zola's definition of all art. Nothing, certainly, could
+be more exact and expressive as a definition of the art of Huysmans.</p>
+
+<p>To realise how faithfully and how completely Huysmans has revealed
+himself in all he has written, it is necessary to know the man. 'He gave
+me the impression of a cat,' some interviewer once wrote of him;
+'courteous, perfectly polite, almost amiable, but all nerves, ready to
+shoot out his claws at the least word.' And, indeed, there is something
+of his favourite animal about him. The face is grey, wearily alert, with
+a look of benevolent malice. At first sight it is commonplace, the
+features are ordinary, one seems to have seen it at the Bourse or the
+Stock Exchange. But gradually that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> strange, unvarying expression, that
+look of benevolent malice, grows upon you as the influence of the man
+makes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office&mdash;he is an employ&eacute;
+in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employ&eacute;; I have seen him
+in a caf&eacute;, in various houses; but I always see him in memory as I used
+to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back on the
+sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive fingers, looking
+at no one and at nothing, while Madame X. moves about with solid
+vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of <i>bric-&agrave;-brac</i>.
+The spoils of all the world are there, in that incredibly tiny <i>salon</i>;
+they lie underfoot, they climb up walls, they cling to screens,
+brackets, and tables; one of your elbows menaces a Japanese toy, the
+other a Dresden china shepherdess; all the colours of the rainbow clash
+in a barbaric discord of notes. And in a corner of this fantastic room,
+Huysmans lies back indifferently on the sofa, with the air of one
+perfectly resigned to the boredom of life. Something is said by my
+learned friend who is to write for the new periodical, or perhaps it is
+the young<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> editor of the new periodical who speaks, or (if that were not
+impossible) the taciturn Englishman who accompanies me; and Huysmans,
+without looking up, and without taking the trouble to speak very
+distinctly, picks up the phrase, transforms it, more likely transpierces
+it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of impromptu elaboration.
+Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a
+stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomes
+monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle of imbecility; the
+unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It
+is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the
+intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the
+sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an
+epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks
+with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of contempt, so
+profound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, that is the true Huysmans, the Huysmans of <i>A Rebours</i>, and it is
+just such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality.
+With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passion
+for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusively
+an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, being
+produced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, would
+be, in a way, the quintessence of contemporary Decadence. And it is
+precisely such a book that Huysmans has written, in the extravagant,
+astonishing <i>A Rebours</i>. All his other books are a sort of unconscious
+preparation for this one book, a sort of inevitable and scarcely
+necessary sequel to it. They range themselves along the line of a
+somewhat erratic development, from Baudelaire, through Goncourt, by way
+of Zola, to the surprising originality of so disconcerting an exception
+to any and every order of things.</p>
+
+<p>The descendant of a long line of Dutch painters&mdash;one of whom, Cornelius
+Huysmans, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape men of the great
+period&mdash;Joris-Karl Huysmans was born at Paris, February 5, 1848. His
+first book, <i>Le Drageoir &aacute; Epices</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> published at the age of twenty-six,
+is a <i>pasticcio</i> of prose poems, done after Baudelaire, of little
+sketches, done after Dutch artists, together with a few studies of
+Parisian landscape, done after nature. It shows us the careful, laboured
+work of a really artistic temperament; it betrays, here and there, the
+spirit of acrimonious observation which is to count for so much with
+Huysmans&mdash;in the crude malice of 'L'Extase,' for example, in the
+notation of the 'richness of tone,' the 'superb colouring,' of an old
+drunkard. And one sees already something of the novelty and the
+precision of his description, the novelty and the unpleasantness of the
+subjects which he chooses to describe, in this vividly exact picture of
+the carcass of a cow hung up outside a butcher's shop: 'As in a
+hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shot
+out on every side like trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work
+extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurled
+their violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a sharp
+white, against the red medley of quivering flesh.'</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p><p>In <i>Marthe: histoire d'une fille</i>, which followed in 1876, two years
+later, Huysmans is almost as far from actual achievement as in <i>Le
+Drageoir &agrave; Epices</i>, but the book, in its crude attempt to deal
+realistically, and somewhat after the manner of Goncourt, with the life
+of a prostitute of the lowest depths, marks a considerable advance upon
+the somewhat casual experiments of his earlier manner. It is important
+to remember that <i>Marthe</i> preceded <i>La Fille Elisa</i> and <i>Nana</i>. 'I write
+what I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced,' says the brief
+and defiant preface, 'and I write it as well as I can: that is all. This
+explanation is not an excuse, it is simply the statement of the aim that
+I pursue in art.' Explanation or excuse notwithstanding, the book was
+forbidden to be sold in France. It is Naturalism in its earliest and
+most pitiless stage&mdash;Naturalism which commits the error of evoking no
+sort of interest in this unhappy creature who rises a little from her
+native gutter, only to fall back more woefully into the gutter again.
+Goncourt's Elisa at least interests us; Zola's Nana at all events
+appeals to our senses. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> Marthe is a mere document, like her story.
+Notes have been taken&mdash;no doubt <i>sur le vif</i>&mdash;they have been strung
+together, and here they are, with only an interesting brutality, a
+curious sordidness to note, in these descriptions that do duty for
+psychology and incident alike, in the general flatness of character, the
+general dislocation of episode.</p>
+
+<p><i>Les S&oelig;urs Vatard</i>, published in 1879, and the short story <i>Sac au
+Dos</i>, which appeared in 1880 in the famous Zolaist manifesto, <i>Les
+Soir&eacute;es de M&eacute;dan</i>, show the influence of <i>Les Rougon-Macquart</i> rather
+than of <i>Germinie Lacerteux</i>. For the time the 'formula' of Zola has
+been accepted: the result is, a remarkable piece of work, but a story
+without a story, a frame without a picture. With Zola, there is at all
+events a beginning and an end, a chain of events, a play of character
+upon incident. But in <i>Les S&oelig;urs Vatard</i> there is no reason for the
+narrative ever beginning or ending; there are miracles of
+description&mdash;the workroom, the rue de S&egrave;vres, the locomotives, the
+<i>Foire du pain d'&eacute;pice</i>&mdash;which lead to nothing; there are interiors,
+there are interviews, there are the two work-girls, C&eacute;line and D&eacute;sir&eacute;e,
+and their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> lovers; there is what Zola himself described as <i>tout ce
+milieu ouvrier, ce coin de mis&egrave;re et d'ignorance, de tranquille ordure
+et d'air naturellement empest&eacute;</i>. And with it all there is a heavy sense
+of stagnancy, a dreary lifelessness. All that is good in the book
+reappears, in vastly better company, in <i>En M&eacute;nage</i> (1881), a novel
+which is, perhaps, more in the direct line of heritage from <i>L'Education
+Sentimentale</i>&mdash;the starting-point of the Naturalistic novel&mdash;than any
+other novel of the Naturalists.</p>
+
+<p><i>En M&eacute;nage</i> is the story of '<i>Monsieur Tout-le-monde</i>, an insignificant
+personality, one of those poor creatures who have not even the supreme
+consolation of being able to complain of any injustice in their fate,
+for an injustice supposes at all events a misunderstood merit, a force.'
+Andr&eacute; is the reduction to the bourgeois formula of the invariable hero
+of Huysmans. He is just enough removed from the commonplace to suffer
+from it with acuteness. He cannot get on either with or without a woman
+in his establishment. Betrayed by his wife, he consoles himself with a
+mistress, and finally goes back to the wife. And the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> moral of it all
+is: 'Let us be stupidly comfortable, if we can, in any way we can: but
+it is almost certain that we cannot.' In <i>A Vau-l'Eau</i>, a less
+interesting story which followed <i>En M&eacute;nage</i>, the daily misery of the
+respectable M. Folantin, the government employ&eacute;, consists in the
+impossible search for a decent restaurant, a satisfactory dinner: for M.
+Folantin, too, there is only the same counsel of a desperate, an
+inevitable resignation. Never has the intolerable monotony of small
+inconveniences been so scrupulously, so unsparingly chronicled, as in
+these two studies in the heroic degree of the commonplace. It happens to
+Andr&eacute;, at a certain epoch in his life, to take back an old servant who
+had left him many years before. He finds that she has exactly the same
+defects as before, and 'to find them there again,' comments the author,
+'did not displease him. He had been expecting them all the time, he
+saluted them as old acquaintances, yet with a certain surprise,
+notwithstanding, to see them neither grown nor diminished. He noted for
+himself with satisfaction that the stupidity of his servant had remained
+stationary.' On another page, referring to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> the inventor of cards,
+Huysmans defines him as one who 'did something towards suppressing the
+free exchange of human imbecility.' Having to say in passing that a girl
+has returned from a ball, 'she was at home again,' he observes, 'after
+the half-dried sweat of the waltzes.' In this invariably sarcastic turn
+of the phrase, this absoluteness of contempt, this insistence on the
+disagreeable, we find the note of Huysmans, particularly at this point
+in his career, when, like Flaubert, he forced himself to contemplate and
+to analyse the more mediocre manifestations of <i>la b&ecirc;tise humaine</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There is a certain perversity in this furious contemplation of
+stupidity, this fanatical insistence on the exasperating attraction of
+the sordid and the disagreeable; and it is by such stages that we come
+to <i>A Rebours</i>. But on the way we have to note a volume of <i>Croquis
+Parisiens</i> (1880), in which the virtuoso who is a part of the artist in
+Huysmans has executed some of his most astonishing feats; and a volume
+on <i>L'Art Moderne</i> (1883), in which the most modern of artists in
+literature has applied himself to the criticism&mdash;the revelation,
+rather&mdash;of modernity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> in art. In the latter, Huysmans was the first to
+declare the supremacy of Degas&mdash;'the greatest artist that we possess
+to-day in France'&mdash;while announcing with no less fervour the remote,
+reactionary, and intricate genius of Gustave Moreau. He was the first to
+discover Raffa&euml;lli, 'the painter of poor people and the open sky&mdash;a sort
+of Parisian Millet,' as he called him; the first to discover Forain, 'le
+v&eacute;ritable peintre de la fille'; the first to discover Odilon Redon, to
+do justice to Pissaro and Paul Gauguin. No literary artist since
+Baudelaire has made so valuable a contribution to art criticism, and the
+<i>Curiosit&eacute;s Esth&eacute;tiques</i> are, after all, less exact in their actual
+study, less revolutionary, and less really significant in their critical
+judgments, than <i>L'Art Moderne</i>. The <i>Croquis Parisiens</i>, which, in its
+first edition, was illustrated by etchings of Forain and Raffa&euml;lli, is
+simply the attempt to do in words what those artists have done in
+aquafortis or in pastel. There are the same Parisian types&mdash;the
+omnibus-conductor, the washerwoman, the man who sells hot chestnuts&mdash;the
+same impressions of a sick and sorry landscape, La Bi&egrave;vre, for
+preference, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> all its desolate and lamentable attraction; there is a
+marvellously minute series of studies of that typically Parisian
+music-hall, the Folies-Berg&egrave;re. Huysmans' faculty of description is here
+seen at its fullest stretch of agility; precise, suggestive, with all
+the outline and colour of actual brush-work, it might even be compared
+with the art of Degas, only there is just that last touch wanting, that
+breath of palpitating life, which is what we always get in Degas, what
+we never get in Huysmans.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>L'Art Moderne</i>, speaking of the water-colours of Forain, Huysmans
+attributes to them 'a specious and <i>cherch&eacute;</i> art, demanding, for its
+appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense.' To realise
+the full value, the real charm, of <i>A Rebours</i>, some such initiation
+might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its exquisite
+artificiality, it is the natural sequel of <i>En M&eacute;nage</i> and <i>A
+Vau-l'Eau</i>, which are so much more acutely sordid than the most sordid
+kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred and horror
+of human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence, which we have
+seen to be the special<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> form of Huysmans' <i>n&eacute;vrose</i>. The motto, taken
+from a thirteenth-century mystic, Rusbroeck the Admirable, is a cry for
+escape, for the 'something in the world that is there in no satisfying
+measure, or not at all': <i>Il faut que je me r&eacute;jouisse au-dessus du temps
+... quoique le monde ait horreur de ma joie et que sa grossi&egrave;ret&eacute; ne
+sache pas ce que je veux dire</i>. And the book is the history of a
+<i>Theba&iuml;de raffin&eacute;e</i>&mdash;a voluntary exile from the world in a new kind of
+'Palace of Art.' Des Esseintes, the vague but typical hero, is one of
+those half-pathological cases which help us to understand the full
+meaning of the word <i>d&eacute;cadence</i>, which they partly represent. The last
+descendant of an ancient family, his impoverished blood tainted by all
+sorts of excesses, Des Esseintes finds himself at thirty <i>sur le chemin,
+d&eacute;gris&eacute;, seul, abominablement lass&eacute;</i>. He has already realised that 'the
+world is divided, in great part, into swaggerers and simpletons.' His
+one desire is to 'hide himself away, far from the world, in some
+retreat, where he might deaden the sound of the loud rumbling of
+inflexible life, as one covers the street with straw, for sick people.'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>
+This retreat he discovers, just far enough from Paris to be safe from
+disturbance, just near enough to be saved from the nostalgia of the
+unattainable. He succeeds in making his house a paradise of the
+artificial, choosing the tones of colour that go best with candle-light,
+for it need scarcely be said that Des Esseintes has effected a simple
+transposition of night and day. His disappearance from the world has
+been complete; it seems to him that the 'comfortable desert' of his
+exile need never cease to be just such a luxurious solitude; it seems to
+him that he has attained his desire, that he has attained to happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Disturbing physical symptoms harass him from time to time, but they
+pass. It is an effect of nerves that now and again he is haunted by
+remembrance; the recurrence of a perfume, the reading of a book, brings
+back a period of life when his deliberate perversity was exercised
+actively in matters of the senses. There are his fantastic banquets, his
+fantastic amours: the <i>repas de deuil</i>, Miss Urania the acrobat, the
+episode of the ventriloquist-woman and the reincarnation of the Sphinx
+and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> Chim&aelig;ra of Flaubert, the episode of the boy <i>chez</i> Madame
+Laure. A casual recollection brings up the schooldays of his childhood
+with the Jesuits, and with that the beliefs of childhood, the fantasies
+of the Church, the Catholic abnegation of the <i>Imitatio</i> joining so
+strangely with the final philosophy of Schopenhauer. At times his brain
+is haunted by social theories&mdash;his dull hatred of the ordinary in life
+taking form in the region of ideas. But in the main he feeds himself,
+with something of the satisfaction of success, on the strange food for
+the sensations with which he has so laboriously furnished himself. There
+are his books, and among these a special library of the Latin writers of
+the Decadence. Exasperated by Virgil, profoundly contemptuous of Horace,
+he tolerates Lucan (which is surprising), adores Petronius (as well he
+might), and delights in the neologisms and the exotic novelty of
+Apuleius. His curiosity extends to the later Christian poets&mdash;from the
+coloured verse of Claudian down to the verse which is scarcely verse of
+the incoherent ninth century. He is, of course, an amateur of exquisite
+printing, of beautiful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> bindings, and possesses an incomparable
+Baudelaire (<i>&eacute;dition tir&eacute;e &agrave; un exemplaire</i>), a unique Mallarm&eacute;.
+Catholicism being the adopted religion of the Decadence&mdash;for its
+venerable age, valuable in such matters as the age of an old wine, its
+vague excitation of the senses, its mystical picturesqueness&mdash;Des
+Esseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature,
+where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find
+their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello,
+the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality,
+Barbey d'Aurevilly. His collection of 'profane' writers is small, but it
+is selected for the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be his
+only care in art&mdash;for the somewhat diseased, or the somewhat artificial
+beauty that alone can strike a responsive thrill from his exacting
+nerves. 'Considering within himself, he realised that a work of art, in
+order to attract him, must come to him with that quality of strangeness
+demanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route, and
+sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated
+deliquescences<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> of style; he required a troubling indecision over which
+he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or of
+solid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. He
+delighted in a work of art, both for what it was in itself and for what
+it could lend him; he would fain go along with it, thanks to it, as
+though sustained by an adjuvant, as though borne in a vehicle, into a
+sphere where his sublimated sensations would wake in him an unaccustomed
+stir, the cause of which he would long and vainly seek to determine.' So
+he comes to care supremely for Baudelaire, 'who, more than any other,
+possessed the marvellous power of rendering, with a strange sanity of
+expression, the most fleeting, the most wavering morbid states of
+exhausted minds, of desolate souls.' In Flaubert he prefers <i>La
+Tentation de Saint-Antoine</i>; in Goncourt, <i>La Faustin</i>; in Zola, <i>La
+Faute de l'Abb&eacute; Mouret</i>&mdash;the exceptional, the most remote and
+<i>recherch&eacute;</i> outcome of each temperament. And of the three it is the
+novel of Goncourt that appeals to him with special intimacy&mdash;that novel
+which, more than any other, seems to express, in its exquisitely
+perverse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> charm, all that decadent civilisation of which Des Esseintes
+is the type and symbol. In poetry he has discovered the fine perfume,
+the evanescent charm, of Paul Verlaine, and near that great poet
+(forgetting, strangely, Arthur Rimbaud) he places two poets who are
+curious&mdash;the disconcerting, tumultuous Tristan Corbi&egrave;re, and the painted
+and bejewelled Th&eacute;odore Hannon. With Edgar Poe he has the instinctive
+sympathy which drew Baudelaire to the enigmatically perverse Decadent of
+America; he delights, sooner than all the world, in the astonishing,
+unbalanced, unachieved genius of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it is
+in St&eacute;phane Mallarm&eacute; that he finds the incarnation of 'the decadence of
+a literature, irreparably affected in its organism, weakened in its
+ideas by age, exhausted by the excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the
+curiosity which fevers sick people, and yet hastening to say everything,
+now at the end, torn by the wish to atone for all its omissions of
+enjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest memories of sorrow on its
+death-bed.'</p>
+
+<p>But it is not on books alone that Des Esseintes nurses his sick and
+craving fancy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> He pushes his delight in the artificial to the last
+limits, and diverts himself with a bouquet of jewels, a concert of
+flowers, an orchestra of liqueurs, an orchestra of perfumes. In flowers
+he prefers the real flowers that imitate artificial ones. It is the
+monstrosities of nature, the offspring of unnatural adulteries, that he
+cherishes in the barbarically coloured flowers, the plants with barbaric
+names, the carnivorous plants of the Antilles&mdash;morbid horrors of
+vegetation, chosen, not for their beauty, but for their strangeness. And
+his imagination plays harmonies on the sense of taste, like combinations
+of music, from the flute-like sweetness of anisette, the trumpet-note of
+kirsch, the eager yet velvety sharpness of cura&ccedil;ao, the clarionet. He
+combines scents, weaving them into odorous melodies, with effects like
+those of the refrains of certain poems, employing, for example, the
+method of Baudelaire in <i>L'Irr&eacute;parable</i> and <i>Le Balcon</i>, where the last
+line of the stanza is the echo of the first, in the languorous
+progression of the melody. And above all he has his few, carefully
+chosen pictures, with their diverse notes of strange beauty and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> strange
+terror&mdash;the two Salom&eacute;s of Gustave Moreau, the 'Religious Persecutions'
+of Jan Luyken, the opium-dreams of Odilon Redon. His favourite artist is
+Gustave Moreau, and it is on this superb and disquieting picture that he
+cares chiefly to dwell.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath
+innumerable arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman
+pillars, enamelled with vari-coloured bricks, set with mosaics,
+incrusted with lapis lazuli and sardonyx, in a palace like the
+basilica of an architecture at once Mussulman and Byzantine. In the
+centre of the tabernacle surmounting the altar, fronted with rows
+of circular steps, sat the Tetrarch Herod, the tiara on his head,
+his legs pressed together, his hands on his knees. His face was
+yellow, parchment-like, annulated with wrinkles, withered with age;
+his long beard floated like a white cloud on the jewelled stars
+that constellated the robe of netted gold across his breast. Around
+this statue, motionless, frozen in the sacred pose of a Hindu god,
+perfumes burned, throwing out clouds of vapour, pierced, as by the
+phosphorescent eyes of animals, by the fire of precious stones set
+in the sides of the throne; then the vapour mounted, unrolling
+itself beneath arches where the blue smoke mingled with the
+powdered gold of great sunrays, fallen from the domes.</p>
+
+<p>In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of
+this church, Salom&eacute;, her left arm extended in a gesture of command,
+her bent right arm holding at the level of the face a great lotus,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+advances slowly to the sound of a guitar, thrummed by a woman who
+crouches on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>With collected, solemn, almost august countenance, she begins the
+lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses of the aged
+Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of the
+whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her
+skin, her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal
+robe, sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold,
+the jewelled breast-plate, whose every stitch is a precious stone,
+bursts into flame, scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the
+ivory-toned, tea-rose flesh, like splendid insects with dazzling
+wings, marbled with carmine, dotted with morning gold, diapered
+with steel-blue, streaked with peacock-green.</p></blockquote>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<blockquote><p>In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des
+Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman
+Salom&eacute; that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing-girl
+who, with the corrupt torsion of her limbs, tears a cry of desire
+from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her palpitating
+body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the will, of a
+king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the
+goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among
+many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has
+hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,
+insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near to
+her, all that look upon her, all that she touches.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p><p>It is in such a 'Palace of Art' that Des Esseintes would recreate his
+already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion
+is only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. This
+one episode of action, this one touch of realism, in a book given over
+to the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projected
+voyage to London, a voyage that never occurs. Des Esseintes has been
+reading Dickens, idly, to quiet his nerves, and the violent colours of
+those ultra-British scenes and characters have imposed themselves upon
+his imagination. Days of rain and fog complete the picture of that <i>pays
+de brume et de boue</i>, and suddenly, stung by the unwonted desire for
+change, he takes the train to Paris, resolved to distract himself by a
+visit to London. Arrived in Paris before his time, he takes a cab to the
+office of <i>Galignani's Messenger</i>, fancying himself, as the rain-drops
+rattle on the roof and the mud splashes against the windows, already in
+the midst of the immense city, its smoke and dirt. He reaches
+<i>Galignani's Messenger</i>, and there, turning over Baedekers and Murrays,
+loses himself in dreams of an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> imagined London. He buys a Baedeker, and,
+to pass the time, enters the 'Bod&eacute;ga' at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli
+and the Rue Castiglione. The wine-cellar is crowded with Englishmen: he
+sees, as he drinks his port, and listens to the unfamiliar accents, all
+the characters of Dickens&mdash;a whole England of caricature; as he drinks
+his Amontillado, the recollection of Poe puts a new horror into the
+good-humoured faces about him. Leaving the 'Bod&eacute;ga,' he steps out again
+into the rain-swept street, regains his cab, and drives to the English
+tavern of the Rue d'Amsterdam. He has just time for dinner, and he finds
+a place beside the <i>insulaires</i>, with 'their porcelain eyes, their
+crimson cheeks,' and orders a heavy English dinner, which he washes down
+with ale and porter, seasoning his coffee, as he imagines we do in
+England, with gin. As time passes, and the hour of the train draws near,
+he begins to reflect vaguely on his project; he recalls the disillusion
+of the visit he had once paid to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion
+await him in London? 'Why travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a
+chair? Was he not at London already,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> since its odours, its atmosphere,
+its inhabitants, its food, its utensils, were all about him?' The train
+is due, but he does not stir. 'I have felt and seen,' he says to
+himself, 'what I wanted to feel and see. I have been saturated with
+English life all this time; it would be madness to lose, by a clumsy
+change of place, these imperishable sensations.' So he gathers together
+his luggage, and goes home again, resolving never to abandon the 'docile
+phantasmagoria of the brain' for the mere realities of the actual world.
+But his nervous malady, one of whose symptoms had driven him forth and
+brought him back so spasmodically, is on the increase. He is seized by
+hallucinations, haunted by sounds: the hysteria of Schumann, the morbid
+exaltation of Berlioz, communicate themselves to him in the music that
+besieges his brain. Obliged at last to send for a doctor, we find him,
+at the end of the book, ordered back to Paris, to the normal life, the
+normal conditions, with just that chance of escape from death or
+madness. So suggestively, so instructively, closes the record of a
+strange, attractive folly&mdash;in itself partly a serious ideal (which
+indeed is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> Huysmans' own), partly the caricature of that ideal. Des
+Esseintes, though studied from a real man, who is known to those who
+know a certain kind of society in Paris, is a type rather than a man: he
+is the offspring of the Decadent art that he adores, and this book a
+sort of breviary for its worshippers. It has a place of its own in the
+literature of the day, for it sums up, not only a talent, but a
+spiritual epoch.</p>
+
+<p><i>A Rebours</i> is a book that can only be written once, and since that date
+Huysmans has published a short story, <i>Un Dilemme</i> (1887), which is
+merely a somewhat lengthy anecdote; two novels, <i>En Rade</i> (1887) and
+<i>L&agrave;-Bas</i> (1891), both of which are interesting experiments, but neither
+of them an entire success; and a volume of art criticism, <i>Certains</i>
+(1890), notable for a single splendid essay, that on F&eacute;licien Rops, the
+etcher of the fantastically erotic. <i>En Rade</i> is a sort of deliberately
+exaggerated record&mdash;vision rather than record&mdash;of the disillusions of a
+country sojourn, as they affect the disordered nerves of a town
+<i>n&eacute;vrose</i>. The narrative is punctuated by nightmares, marvellously woven
+out of nothing, and with no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>psychological value&mdash;the human part of the
+book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representation
+of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of the
+country. There is a cat which becomes interesting in its agonies; but
+the long boredom of the man and woman is only too faithfully shared with
+the reader. <i>L&agrave;-Bas</i> is a more artistic creation, on a more solid
+foundation. It is a study of Satanism, a dexterous interweaving of the
+history of Gilles de Retz (the traditional Bluebeard) with the
+contemporary manifestations of the Black Art. 'The execration of
+impotence, the hate of the mediocre&mdash;that is perhaps one of the most
+indulgent definitions of Diabolism,' says Huysmans, somewhere in the
+book, and it is on this side that one finds the link of connection with
+the others of that series of pessimist studies in life. <i>Un naturalisme
+spiritualiste</i>, he defines his own art at this point in its development;
+and it is in somewhat the 'documentary' manner that he applies himself
+to the study of these strange problems, half of hysteria, half of a real
+mystical corruption that does actually exist in our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> midst. I do not
+know whether the monstrous tableau of the Black Mass&mdash;so marvellously,
+so revoltingly described in the central episode of the book&mdash;is still
+enacted in our days, but I do know that all but the most horrible
+practices of the sacrilegious magic of the Middle Ages are yet
+performed, from time to time, in a secrecy which is all but absolute.
+The character of Madame Chantelouve is an attempt, probably the first in
+literature, to diagnose a case of Sadism in a woman. To say that it is
+successful would be to assume that the thing is possible, which one
+hesitates to do. The book is even more disquieting, to the normal mind,
+than <i>A Rebours</i>. But it is not, like that, the study of an exception
+which has become a type. It is the study of an exception which does not
+profess to be anything but a disease.</p>
+
+<p>Huysmans' place in contemporary literature is not quite easy to
+estimate. There is a danger of being too much attracted, or too much
+repelled, by those qualities of deliberate singularity which make his
+work, sincere expression as it is of his own personality, so artificial
+and <i>recherch&eacute;</i> in itself. With his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> pronounced, exceptional
+characteristics, it would have been impossible for him to write fiction
+impersonally, or to range himself, for long, in any school, under any
+master. Interrogated one day as to his opinion of Naturalism, he had but
+to say in reply: <i>Au fond, il y a des &eacute;crivains qui ont du talent et
+d'autres qui n'en ont pas, qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques,
+d&eacute;cadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, &ccedil;a m'est &eacute;gal! il s'agit pour moi
+d'avoir du talent, et voil&agrave; tout!</i> But, as we have seen, he has
+undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first he
+has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and, even in
+<i>Le Drageoir &agrave; Epices</i>, we find such daring combinations as this
+(<i>Cama&iuml;eu Rouge</i>)&mdash;<i>Cette fanfare de rouge m'&eacute;tourdissait; cette gamme
+d'une intensit&eacute; furieuse, d'une violence inou&iuml;e, m'aveuglait.</i> Working
+upon the foundation of Flaubert and of Goncourt, the two great modern
+stylists, he has developed an intensely personal style of his own, in
+which the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the sense of colour.
+He manipulates the French language with a freedom sometimes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>barbarous,
+'dragging his images by the heels or the hair' (in the admirable phrase
+of L&eacute;on Bloy) 'up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified
+syntax,' gaining, certainly, the effects at which he aims. He possesses,
+in the highest degree, that <i>style tachet&eacute; et faisand&eacute;</i>&mdash;high-flavoured
+and spotted with corruption&mdash;that he attributes to Goncourt and
+Verlaine. And with this audacious and barbaric profusion of
+words&mdash;chosen always for their colour and their vividly expressive
+quality&mdash;he is able to describe the essentially modern aspects of things
+as no one had ever described them before. No one before him had ever so
+realised the perverse charm of the sordid, the perverse charm of the
+artificial. Exceptional always, it is for such qualities as these,
+rather than for the ordinary qualities of the novelist, that he is
+remarkable. His stories are without incident, they are constructed to go
+on until they stop, they are almost without characters. His psychology
+is a matter of the sensations, and chiefly the visual sensations. The
+moral nature is ignored, the emotions resolve themselves for the most
+part into a sordid ennui, rising at times into a rage at existence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> The
+protagonist of every book is not so much a character as a bundle of
+impressions and sensations&mdash;the vague outline of a single consciousness,
+his own. But it is that single consciousness&mdash;in this morbidly personal
+writer&mdash;with which we are concerned. For Huysmans' novels, with all
+their strangeness, their charm, their repulsion, typical too, as they
+are, of much beside himself, are certainly the expression of a
+personality as remarkable as that of any contemporary writer.</p>
+
+<p>1892.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="TWO_SYMBOLISTS" id="TWO_SYMBOLISTS"></a>TWO SYMBOLISTS</h2>
+
+<p><i>Un livre comme je ne les aime pas</i>, says Mallarm&eacute; characteristically
+(<i>ceux &eacute;pars et priv&eacute;s d'architecture</i>) of this long expected first
+volume of collected prose, <i>Divagations</i>, in which we find the prose
+poems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers de
+l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; the
+marvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and the
+theatrical spectacle, comparatively early in date; <i>Richard Wagner:
+r&ecirc;verie d'un Po&egrave;te fran&ccedil;ais, Le Myst&egrave;re dans les Lettres</i>; and, under
+various titles, the surprising <i>Variations sur un Sujet</i>. The hesitation
+of a lifetime having been, it would seem, overcome, we are at last able
+to read Mallarm&eacute;'s 'doctrine,' if not altogether as he would have us
+read it. And we are at last able, without too much injustice, to judge
+him as a writer of prose.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span></p><p>In saying that this volume is the most beautiful and the most valuable
+which has found its way into my hands for I know not how long, I shall
+not pretend to have read it with ease, or to have understood every word
+of it. <i>D'exhiber les choses &agrave; un imperturbable premier plan, en
+camelots, activ&eacute;s par la pression de l'instant, d'accord&mdash;&eacute;crire, dans
+le cas pourquoi, ind&ucirc;ment, sauf pour &eacute;taler la banalit&eacute;; plut&ocirc;t que
+tendre le nuage, pr&eacute;cieux, flottant sur l'intime gouffre de chaque
+pens&eacute;e, vu que vulgaire l'est ce &agrave; quoi on d&eacute;cerne, pas plus, un
+caract&egrave;re imm&eacute;diat.</i> No, it has always been to that <i>labyrinthe illumin&eacute;
+par des fleurs</i> that Mallarm&eacute; has felt it due to their own dignity to
+invite his readers. To their own dignity, and also to his. Mallarm&eacute; is
+obscure, not so much because he writes differently as because he thinks
+differently from other people. His mind is elliptical, and (relying on
+the intelligence of his readers) he emphasises the effect of what is
+unlike other people in his mind by resolutely ignoring even the links of
+connection that exist between them. Never having aimed at popularity, he
+has never needed, as most writers need, to make<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> the first advances. He
+has made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who after all
+need not read him. And when he has spoken he has not considered it
+needful or seemly to listen in order that he might hear whether he was
+heard. To the charge of obscurity he replies, with sufficient disdain,
+that there are many who do not know how to read&mdash;except the newspapers,
+he adds, in one of those disconcerting, oddly printed parentheses, which
+make his work, to those who can rightly apprehend it, so full of wise
+limitations, so safe from hasty or seemingly final conclusions. No one
+in our time has more significantly vindicated the supreme right of the
+artist in the aristocracy of letters; wilfully, perhaps, not always
+wisely, but nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk from that
+making of himself 'a motley to the view,' that handing over of his naked
+soul to the laughter of the multitude? but who in our time has wrought
+so subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick cloud
+on the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had the wisdom
+to hide their secret in the obscurity of double meanings or of what has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+seemed meaningless; and might it not after all be the finest epitaph for
+a self-respecting man of letters to be able to say, even after the
+writing of many books: I have kept my secret, I have not betrayed myself
+to the crowd?</p>
+
+<p>It has been the distinction of Mallarm&eacute; that he has always aspired after
+an impossible liberation of the soul of literature from what is fretting
+and constraining in 'the body of that death,' which is the mere
+literature of words. Words, he has realised, are of value only as
+notations of the free breath of the spirit; words, therefore, must be
+employed with an extreme care in their choice and adjustment, in setting
+them to reflect and chime upon one another; yet least of all things for
+their own sake, for the sake of what they can never, except by
+suggestion, express. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use of
+words&mdash;that seeming artificiality which comes from using words as if
+they had never been used before, that chimerical search after the
+virginity of language&mdash;is but the paradoxical outward sign of an extreme
+discontent with even the best of their service. Writers who use words
+fluently, seeming to disregard their importance, do so from an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>
+unconscious confidence in their expressiveness, which the scrupulous
+thinker, the precise dreamer, can never place in the most carefully
+chosen among them. To evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of
+language, without the formality of an after all impossible description;
+to be, in fact, rather than to express; that is what Mallarm&eacute; has
+consistently, and from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has
+sought this wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of
+dreams, over more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the
+depths of many forests, far from the sunlight. He would be the last to
+permit me to say that he has found what he sought; but (is it possible
+to avoid saying?) how heroic a search, and what marvellous discoveries,
+by the way!</p>
+
+<p>Yes, all these, he admits perhaps proudly, are divagations, and the
+secret, eternal, and only beauty is not yet found. Is it, perhaps, in a
+mood, a momentary mood, really of discouragement, that he has consented
+to the publication&mdash;the 'showing off,' within covers, as of goods in a
+shop-window: it is his own image&mdash;of these fragmentary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> suggestions
+towards a complete &AElig;sthetic? Beautiful and invaluable I find them; here
+and there final; and always, in form, hieratic.</p>
+
+<p>Certain writers, in whom the artist's contempt for common things has
+been carried to its utmost limit, should only be read in books of
+beautiful and slightly unusual form. Perhaps of all modern writers
+Villiers and Mallarm&eacute; have most carefully sought the most remote ideal,
+and seem most to require some elaborate presentation to the reader.
+Mallarm&eacute;, indeed, delighted in heaping up obstacles in the reader's way,
+not only in the concealment of his meaning by style, but in a furtive,
+fragmentary, and only too luxurious method of publication, which made it
+difficult for most people to get his books at all, even for unlimited
+money. Villiers, on the contrary, after publishing his first book, the
+<i>Premi&egrave;res Po&eacute;sies</i> of 1859, in the delicate type of Perrin of Lyons, on
+ribbed paper, with old gold covers, became careless as to how his books
+appeared, and has to be read in a disorderly crowd of volumes, some of
+them as hideous as the original edition of <i>L'Eve Future</i>, with its red
+stars and streaks, its Apollo and Cupid and grey city <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>landscape. It is
+therefore with singular pleasure that one finds the two beautiful books
+which have lately been published by M. Deman, the well-known publisher
+of Rops: one, the fullest collection of Mallarm&eacute;'s poems which has ever
+been published, the other a selection of twenty stories by Villiers. The
+Mallarm&eacute; is white and red, the poems printed in italics, a frontispiece
+by Rops; the Villiers is a large square volume in shimmering dark green
+and gold, with headpieces and tailpieces, in two tints, by Th. van
+Rysselberghe. These scrolls and titles are done with a sort of reverent
+self-suppression, as if, for once, decoration existed for a book and not
+the book for the decoration, which is hardly the quality for which
+modern decorators are most conspicuous.</p>
+
+<p>In the <i>Po&eacute;sies</i> we have, no doubt, Mallarm&eacute;'s final selection from his
+own poems. Some of it is even new. The magnificent and mysterious
+fragment of <i>H&eacute;rodiade</i>, his masterpiece, perhaps, is, though not indeed
+completed, more than doubled in length by the addition of a long passage
+on which he was at work almost to the time of his death. It is curious
+to note that the new passage is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> written in exactly the style of the
+older passage, though in the interval between the writing of the one and
+the writing of the other Mallarm&eacute; had completely changed his style. By
+an effort of will he had thought himself back into an earlier style, and
+the two fragments join without an apparent seam. There were, it appears,
+still a hymn or lyric spoken by St. John and a concluding monologue, to
+be added to the poem; but we have at least the whole of the dialogue
+between H&eacute;rodiade and the Nurse, certainly a poem sufficiently complete
+in itself. The other new pieces are in the latest manner, mainly without
+punctuation; they would scarcely be alluring, one imagines, even if
+punctuated. In the course of a few centuries, I am convinced, every line
+of Mallarm&eacute; will have become perfectly clear, as a corrupt Greek text
+becomes clear in time. Even now a learned commentator could probably do
+much to explain them, at the cost of a life-long labour; but scholars
+only give up their lives to the difficult authors of a remote past.
+Mallarm&eacute; can afford to wait; he will not be forgotten; and for us of the
+present there are the clear<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> and lovely early poems, so delightfully
+brought together in the white and red book.</p>
+
+<p><i>L'insensibilit&eacute; de l'azur et des pierres</i>: a serene and gem-like
+quality, entirely his own, is in all these poems, in which a particular
+kind of French verse realises its ideal. Mallarm&eacute; is the poet of a few,
+a limited poet, perfect within his limits as the Chinese artist of his
+own symbol. In a beautiful poem he compares himself to the painter of
+tea-cups who spends his life in painting a strange flower</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div><i>Sur ses tasses de neige &agrave; la lune ravie</i>,</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>a flower which has perfumed his whole existence, since, as a child, he
+had felt it graft itself upon the 'blue filigree of his soul.'</p>
+
+<p>A very different image must be sought if we wish to sum up the
+characteristics of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. An uncertain artist, he was
+a man of passionate and lofty genius, and he has left us a great mass of
+imperfect work, out of which we have to form for ourselves whatever
+notion we can of a man greater than his work. My first impression, on
+looking at the twenty stories which make up the present selection, was
+that the selection had been badly made.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> Where is <i>Les Demoiselles de
+Bienfil&acirc;tre</i>? I asked myself, remembering that little ironical
+masterpiece; where is <i>Le Convive des Derni&egrave;res F&ecirc;tes</i>, with its
+subtlety of horror; <i>Sentimentalisme</i>, with its tragic and tender
+modernity; <i>La Reine Ysabeau</i>, with its sombre and taciturn intensity?
+Story after story came into my mind, finer, it seemed to me, in the
+artistic qualities of the story than many of those selected. Second
+thoughts inclined me to think that the selection could scarcely have
+been better. For it is a selection made after a plan, and it shows us,
+not indeed always Villiers at his best as a story-teller, but,
+throughout, Villiers at his highest point of elevation; the man whom we
+are always trying to see through his work, and the man as he would have
+seen himself. There is not a collection of stories in French of greater
+nobility than these <i>Histoires Souveraines</i> in which a regal pomp of
+speech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers who
+mocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; the
+idealist is at home in his own world, among his ideals.</p>
+
+<p>1897, 1899.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHARLES_BAUDELAIRE" id="CHARLES_BAUDELAIRE"></a>CHARLES BAUDELAIRE</h2>
+
+<p>Baudelaire is little known and much misunderstood in England. Only one
+English writer has ever done him justice, or said anything adequate
+about him. As long ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire to
+English readers: in the columns of the <i>Spectator</i>, it is amusing to
+remember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise in
+his book on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy on
+his death, <i>Ave atque Vale</i>. There have been occasional outbreaks of
+irrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generally
+mis-spelled) is the journalist's handiest brickbat for hurling at random
+in the name of respectability. Does all this mean that we are waking up,
+over here, to the consciousness of one of the great literary forces of
+the age, a force which has been felt in every other country but ours?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p><p>It would be a useful influence for us. Baudelaire desired perfection,
+and we have never realised that perfection is a thing to aim at. He only
+did what he could do supremely well, and he was in poverty all his life,
+not because he would not work, but because he would work only at certain
+things, the things which he could hope to do to his own satisfaction. Of
+the men of letters of our age he was the most scrupulous. He spent his
+whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry
+has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a
+fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which
+his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a
+marvellous original. What would French poetry be to-day if Baudelaire
+had never existed? As different a thing from what it is as English
+poetry would be without Rossetti. Neither of them is quite among the
+greatest poets, but they are more fascinating than the greatest, they
+influence more minds. And Baudelaire was an equally great critic. He
+discovered Poe, Wagner, and Manet. Where even Sainte-Beuve, with his
+vast materials,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> his vast general talent for criticism, went wrong in
+contemporary judgments, Baudelaire was infallibly right. He wrote
+neither verse nor prose with ease, but he would not permit himself to
+write either without inspiration. His work is without abundance, but it
+is without waste. It is made out of his whole intellect and all his
+nerves. Every poem is a train of thought and every essay is the record
+of sensation. This 'romantic' had something classic in his moderation, a
+moderation which becomes at times as terrifying as Poe's logic. To
+'cultivate one's hysteria' so calmly, and to affront the reader
+(<i>Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon fr&egrave;re</i>) as a judge rather than
+as a penitent; to be a casuist in confession; to be so much a moralist,
+with so keen a sense of the ecstasy of evil: that has always bewildered
+the world, even in his own country, where the artist is allowed to live
+as experimentally as he writes. Baudelaire lived and died solitary,
+secret, a confessor of sins who has never told the whole truth, <i>le
+mauvais moine</i> of his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the
+brothel.</p>
+
+<p>To understand, not Baudelaire, but what we can of him, we must read, not
+only the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> four volumes of his collected works, but every document in
+Cr&eacute;pet's <i>&OElig;uvres Posthumes</i>, and, above all, the letters, and these
+have only now been collected into a volume, under the care of an editor
+who has done more for Baudelaire than any one since Cr&eacute;pet. Baudelaire
+put into his letters only what he cared to reveal of himself at a given
+moment: he has a different angle to distract the sight of every
+observer; and let no one think that he knows Baudelaire when he has read
+the letters to Poulet-Malassis, the friend and publisher, to whom he
+showed his business side, or the letters to la Pr&eacute;sidente, the
+touchstone of his <i>spleen et id&eacute;al</i>, his chief experiment in the higher
+sentiments. Some of his carefully hidden virtues peep out at moments, it
+is true, but nothing that everybody has not long been aware of. We hear
+of his ill-luck with money, with proof-sheets, with his own health. The
+tragedy of the life which he chose, as he chose all things (poetry,
+Jeanne Duval, the 'artificial paradises') deliberately, is made a little
+clearer to us; we can moralise over it if we like. But the man remains
+baffling, and will probably never be discovered.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span></p><p>As it is, much of the value of the book consists in those glimpses into
+his mind and intentions which he allowed people now and then to see.
+Writing to Sainte-Beuve, to Flaubert, to Soulary, he sometimes lets out,
+through mere sensitiveness to an intelligence capable of understanding
+him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that he
+defines and explains the origin and real meaning of the <i>Petits Po&egrave;mes
+en Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur
+constante (bonne humeur n&eacute;cessaire, m&ecirc;me pour traiter des sujets
+tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules,
+de musiques, de r&eacute;verb&egrave;res m&ecirc;me, voil&agrave; ce que j'ai voulu faire!</i> And,
+writing to some obscure person, he will take the trouble to be even more
+explicit, as in this symbol of the sonnet: <i>Avez-vous observ&eacute; qu'un
+morceau de ciel aper&ccedil;u par un soupirail, ou entre deux chemin&eacute;es, deux
+rochers, ou par une arcade, donnait une id&eacute;e plus profonde de l'infini
+que le grand panorama vu du haul d'une montagne?</i> It is to another
+casual person that he speaks out still more intimately (and the occasion
+of his writing is some thrill of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> gratitude towards one who had at last
+done 'a little justice,' not to himself, but to Manet): <i>Eh bien! on
+m'accuse, moi, d'imiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si
+patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il me ressemblait. La premi&egrave;re fois que
+j'ai ouvert un livre de lui, j'ai vu avec &eacute;pouvante et ravissement, non
+seulement des sujets r&ecirc;v&eacute;s par moi, mais des phrases, pens&eacute;es par moi,
+et &eacute;crites par lui, vingt ans auparavant.</i> It is in such glimpses as
+these that we see something of Baudelaire in his letters.</p>
+
+<p>1906.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="WALTER_PATER" id="WALTER_PATER"></a>WALTER PATER</h2>
+
+<p>Writing about Botticelli, in that essay which first interpreted
+Botticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after naming the supreme
+artists, Michelangelo or Leonardo:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>But, besides these great men, there is a certain number of artists
+who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us
+a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and
+these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be
+interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and
+are often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration
+wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the
+stress of a great name and authority.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>It is among these rare artists, so much more interesting, to many, than
+the very greatest, that Pater belongs; and he can only be properly
+understood, loved, or even measured by those to whom it is 'the
+delicacies of fine literature' that chiefly appeal. There have been
+greater prose-writers in our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> language, even in our time; but he was, as
+Mallarm&eacute; called him, 'le prosateur ouvrag&eacute; par excellence de ce temps.'
+For strangeness and subtlety of temperament, for rarity and delicacy of
+form, for something incredibly attractive to those who felt his
+attraction, he was as unique in our age as Botticelli in the great age
+of Raphael. And he, too, above all to those who knew him, can scarcely
+fail to become, not only 'the object of a special diligence,' but also
+of 'a consideration wholly affectionate,' not lessened by the slowly
+increasing 'stress of authority' which is coming to be laid, almost by
+the world in general, on his name.</p>
+
+<p>In the work of Pater, thought moves to music, and does all its hard work
+as if in play. And Pater seems to listen for his thought, and to
+overhear it, as the poet overhears his song in the air. It is like
+music, and has something of the character of poetry, yet, above all, it
+is precise, individual, thought filtered through a temperament; and it
+comes to us as it does because the style which clothes and fits it is a
+style in which, to use some of his own<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> words, 'the writer succeeds in
+saying what he <i>wills</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>The style of Pater has been praised and blamed for its particular
+qualities of colour, harmony, weaving; but it has not always, or often,
+been realised that what is most wonderful in the style is precisely its
+adaptability to every shade of meaning or intention, its extraordinary
+closeness in following the turns of thought, the waves of sensation, in
+the man himself. Everything in Pater was in harmony, when you got
+accustomed to its particular forms of expression: the heavy frame, so
+slow and deliberate in movement, so settled in repose; the timid and yet
+scrutinising eyes; the mannered, yet so personal, voice; the precise,
+pausing speech, with its urbanity, its almost painful conscientiousness
+of utterance; the whole outer mask, in short, worn for protection and
+out of courtesy, yet moulded upon the inner truth of nature like a mask
+moulded upon the features which it covers. And the books are the man,
+literally the man in many accents, turns of phrase; and, far more than
+that, the man himself, whom one felt through his few,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> friendly,
+intimate, serious words: the inner life of his soul coming close to us,
+in a slow and gradual revelation.</p>
+
+<p>He has said, in the first essay of his which we have:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires
+only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer
+and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life, not simply
+expressive of the inward, becomes thinner and thinner.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>And Pater seemed to draw up into himself every form of earthly beauty,
+or of the beauty made by men, and many forms of knowledge and wisdom,
+and a sense of human things which was neither that of the lover nor of
+the priest, but partly of both; and his work was the giving out of all
+this again, with a certain labour to give it wholly. It is all, the
+criticism, and the stories, and the writing about pictures and places, a
+confession, the <i>vraie v&eacute;rit&eacute;</i> (as he was fond of saying) about the
+world in which he lived. That world he thought was open to all; he was
+sure that it was the real blue and green earth, and that he caught the
+tangible moments as they passed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> It was a world into which we can only
+look, not enter, for none of us have his secret. But part of his secret
+was in the gift and cultivation of a passionate temperance, an
+unrelaxing attentiveness to whatever was rarest and most delightful in
+passing things.</p>
+
+<p>In Pater logic is of the nature of ecstasy, and ecstasy never soars
+wholly beyond the reach of logic. Pater is keen in pointing out the
+liberal and spendthrift weakness of Coleridge in his thirst for the
+absolute, his 'hunger for eternity,' and for his part he is content to
+set all his happiness, and all his mental energies, on a relative basis,
+on a valuation of the things of eternity under the form of time. He asks
+for no 'larger flowers' than the best growth of the earth; but he would
+choose them flower by flower, and for himself. He finds life worth just
+living, a thing satisfying in itself, if you are careful to extract its
+essence, moment by moment, not in any calculated 'hedonism,' even of the
+mind, but in a quiet, discriminating acceptance of whatever is
+beautiful, active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew older he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>
+added something more like a Stoic sense of 'duty' to the old, properly
+and severely Epicurean doctrine of 'pleasure.' Pleasure was never, for
+Pater, less than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not
+merely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious from the first,
+and had always to be served with a strict ritual. 'Only be sure it is
+passion,' he said of that spirit of divine motion to which he appealed
+for the quickening of our sense of life, our sense of ourselves; be
+sure, he said, 'that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened,
+multiplied consciousness.' What he cared most for at all times was that
+which could give 'the highest quality to our moments as they pass'; he
+differed only, to a certain extent, in his estimation of what that was.
+'The herb, the wine, the gem' of the preface to the <i>Renaissance</i> tended
+more and more to become, under less outward symbols of perfection, 'the
+discovery, the new faculty, the privileged apprehension' by which 'the
+imaginative regeneration of the world' should be brought about, or even,
+at times, a brooding over 'what the soul passes, and must pass, through,
+<i>aux abois</i> with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>nothingness, or with those offended mysterious powers
+that may really occupy it.'</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>When I first met Pater he was nearly fifty. I did not meet him for about
+two years after he had been writing to me, and his first letter reached
+me when I was just over twenty-one. I had been writing verse all my
+life, and what Browning was to me in verse Pater, from about the age of
+seventeen, had been to me in prose. Meredith made the third; but his
+form of art was not, I knew never could be, mine. Verse, I suppose,
+requires no teaching, but it was from reading Pater's <i>Studies in the
+History of the Renaissance</i>, in its first edition on ribbed paper (I
+have the feel of it still in my fingers), that I realised that prose
+also could be a fine art. That book opened a new world to me, or,
+rather, gave me the key or secret of the world in which I was living. It
+taught me that there was a beauty besides the beauty of what one calls
+inspiration, and comes and goes, and cannot be caught or followed; that
+life (which had seemed to me of so little moment) could be itself a work
+of art; from that book I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> realised for the first time that there was
+anything interesting or vital in the world besides poetry and music. I
+caught from it an unlimited curiosity, or, at least, the direction of
+curiosity into definite channels.</p>
+
+<p>The knowledge that there was such a person as Pater in the world, an
+occasional letter from him, an occasional meeting, and, gradually, the
+definite encouragement of my work in which, for some years, he was
+unfailingly generous and attentive, meant more to me, at that time, than
+I can well indicate, or even realise, now. It was through him that my
+first volume of verse was published; and it was through his influence
+and counsels that I trained myself to be infinitely careful in all
+matters of literature. Influence and counsel were always in the
+direction of sanity, restraint, precision.</p>
+
+<p>I remember a beautiful phrase which he once made up, in his delaying
+way, with 'wells' and 'no doubts' in it, to describe, and to describe
+supremely, a person whom I had seemed to him to be disparaging. 'He
+does,' he said meditatively, 'remind me of, well, of a steam-engine
+stuck in the mud. But he is so enthusiastic!' Pater liked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> people to be
+enthusiastic, but, with him, enthusiasm was an ardent quietude, guarded
+by the wary humour that protects the sensitive. He looked upon undue
+earnestness, even in outward manner, in a world through which the artist
+is bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand,' as bad form, which shocked
+him as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form of
+extravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: he
+suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less
+dislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words
+which he often used to express his distaste for things and people. He
+never would have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because of what
+seemed to him perhaps unnecessarily 'sordid' in their lives. It pained
+him, as it pains some people, perhaps only because they are more acutely
+sensitive than others, to walk through mean streets, where people are
+poor, miserable, and hopeless.</p>
+
+<p>And since I have mentioned Verlaine, I may say that what Pater most
+liked in poetry was the very opposite of such work as that of Verlaine,
+which he might have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> been supposed likely to like. I do not think it was
+actually one of Verlaine's poems, but something done after his manner in
+English, that some reviewer once quoted, saying: 'That, to our mind,
+would be Mr. Pater's ideal of poetry.' Pater said to me, with a sad
+wonder, 'I simply don't know what he meant.' What he liked in poetry was
+something even more definite than can be got in prose; and he valued
+poets like Dante and like Rossetti for their 'delight in concrete
+definition,' not even quite seeing the ultimate magic of such things as
+<i>Kubla Khan</i>, which he omitted in a brief selection from the poetry of
+Coleridge. In the most interesting letter which I ever had from him, the
+only letter which went to six pages, he says:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p class="right">12 <span class="smcap">Earl's Terrace</span>, &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<br />
+<span class="smcap">Kensington, W.,</span> &nbsp; &nbsp;<br />
+<i>Jan. 8, 1888.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear Mr. Symons</span>,&mdash;I feel much flattered at your choosing me as
+an arbiter in the matter of your literary work, and thank you for
+the pleasure I have had in reading carefully the two poems you have
+sent me. I don't use the word 'arbiter' loosely for 'critic'; but
+suppose a real controversy, on the question whether you shall spend
+your best energies in writing verse, between your poetic
+aspirations on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> the one side, and prudence (calculating results) on
+the other. Well! judging by these two pieces, I should say that you
+have a poetic talent remarkable, especially at the present day, for
+precise and intellectual grasp on the matter it deals with.
+Rossetti, I believe, said that the value of every artistic product
+was in direct proportion to the amount of purely intellectual force
+that went to the initial conception of it: and it is just this
+intellectual conception which seems to me to be so conspicuously
+wanting in what, in some ways, is the most characteristic verse of
+our time, especially that of our secondary poets. In your own
+pieces, particularly in your MS. 'A Revenge,' I find Rossetti's
+requirement fulfilled, and should anticipate great things from one
+who has the talent of conceiving his motive with so much firmness
+and tangibility&mdash;with that close logic, if I may say so, which is
+an element in any genuinely imaginative process. It is clear to me
+that you aim at this, and it is what gives your verses, to my mind,
+great interest. Otherwise, I think the two pieces of unequal
+excellence, greatly preferring 'A Revenge' to 'Bell in Camp.'
+Reserving some doubt whether the watch, as the lover's gift, is not
+a little bourgeois, I think this piece worthy of any poet. It has
+that aim of concentration and organic unity which I value greatly
+both in prose and verse. 'Bell in Camp' pleases me less, for the
+same reason which makes me put Rossetti's 'Jenny,' and some of
+Browning's pathetic-satiric pieces, below the rank which many
+assign them. In no one of the poems I am thinking of, is the
+inherent sordidness of everything in the persons supposed, except
+the one poetic trait then under treatment, quite forgotten.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>Otherwise, I feel the pathos, the humour, of the piece (in the
+full sense of the word humour) and the skill with which you have
+worked out your motive therein. I think the present age an
+unfavourable one to poets, at least in England. The young poet
+comes into a generation which has produced a large amount of
+first-rate poetry, and an enormous amount of good secondary poetry.
+You know I give a high place to the literature of prose as a fine
+art, and therefore hope you won't think me brutal in saying that
+the admirable qualities of your verse are those also of imaginative
+prose; as I think is the case also with much of Browning's finest
+verse. I should say, make prose your principal <i>m&eacute;tier</i>, as a man
+of letters, and publish your verse as a more intimate gift for
+those who already value you for your pedestrian work in literature.
+I should think you ought to find no difficulty in finding a
+publisher for poems such as those you have sent to me.</p>
+
+<p>I am more than ever anxious to meet you. Letters are such poor
+means of communication. Don't come to London without making an
+appointment to come and see me here.&mdash;Very sincerely yours,</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Walter Pater</span>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>'Browning, one of my best-loved writers,' is a phrase I find in his
+first letter to me, in December 1886, thanking me for a little book on
+Browning which I had just published. There is, I think, no mention of
+any other writer except Shakespeare (besides the reference to Rossetti
+which I have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> just quoted) in any of the fifty or sixty letters which I
+have from him. Everything that is said about books is a direct matter of
+business: work which he was doing, of which he tells me, or which I was
+doing, about which he advises and encourages me.</p>
+
+<p>In practical things Pater was wholly vague, troubled by their
+persistence when they pressed upon him. To wrap up a book to send by
+post was an almost intolerable effort, and he had another reason for
+hesitating. 'I take your copy of Shakespeare's sonnets with me,' he
+writes in June 1889, 'hoping to be able to restore it to you there lest
+it should get bruised by transit through the post.' He wrote letters
+with distaste, never really well, and almost always with excuses or
+regrets in them: 'Am so over-burdened (my time, I mean) just now with
+pupils, lectures, and the making thereof'; or, with hopes for a meeting:
+'Letters are such poor means of communication: when are we to meet?' or,
+as a sort of hasty makeshift: 'I send this prompt answer, for I know by
+experience that when I delay my delays are apt to be lengthy.' A review
+took him sometimes a year to get through;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> and remained in the end, like
+his letters, a little cramped, never finished to the point of ease, like
+his published writings. To lecture was a great trial to him. Two of the
+three lectures which I have heard in my life were given by Pater, one on
+M&eacute;rim&eacute;e, at the London Institution, in November 1890, and the other on
+Raphael, at Toynbee Hall, in 1892. I never saw a man suffer a severer
+humiliation. The act of reading his written lecture was an agony which
+communicated itself to the main part of the audience. Before going into
+the hall at Whitechapel he had gone into a church to compose his mind a
+little, between the discomfort of the underground railway and the
+distress of the lecture-hall.</p>
+
+<p>In a room, if he was not among very intimate friends, Pater was rarely
+quite at his ease, but he liked being among people, and he made the
+greater satisfaction overcome the lesser reluctance. He was particularly
+fond of cats, and I remember one evening, when I had been dining with
+him in London, the quaint, solemn, and perfectly natural way in which he
+took up the great black Persian, kissed it, and set it down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> carefully
+again on his way upstairs. Once at Oxford he told me that M. Bourget had
+sent him the first volume of his <i>Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine</i>,
+and that the cat had got hold of the book and torn up the part
+containing the essay on Baudelaire, 'and as Baudelaire was such a lover
+of cats I thought she might have spared him!'</p>
+
+<p>We were talking once about fairs, and I had been saying how fond I was
+of them. He said: 'I am fond of them, too. I always go to fairs. I am
+getting to find they are very similar.' Then he began to tell me about
+the fairs in France, and I remember, as if it were an unpublished
+fragment in one of his stories, the minute, coloured impression of the
+booths, the little white horses of the 'roundabouts,' and the little
+wild beast shows, in which what had most struck him was the interest of
+the French peasant in the wolf, a creature he might have seen in his own
+woods. 'An English clown would not have looked at a wolf if he could
+have seen a tiger.'</p>
+
+<p>I once asked Pater if his family was really connected with that of the
+painter, Jean-Baptiste Pater. He said: 'I think so, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> believe so, I
+always say so.' The relationship has never been verified, but one would
+like to believe it; to find something lineally Dutch in the English
+writer. It was, no doubt, through this kind of family interest that he
+came to work upon Goncourt's essay and the contemporary <i>Life of
+Watteau</i> by the Count de Caylus, printed in the first series of <i>L'Art
+du XVIII<sup>e</sup> Si&egrave;cle</i>, out of which he has made certainly the most living
+of his <i>Imaginary Portraits</i>, that <i>Prince of Court Painters</i> which is
+supposed to be the journal of a sister of Jean-Baptiste Pater, whom we
+see in one of Watteau's portraits in the Louvre. As far back as 1889<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
+Pater was working towards a second volume of <i>Imaginary Portraits</i>, of
+which <i>Hippolytus Veiled</i> was to have been one. He had another subject
+in Moroni's <i>Portrait of a Tailor</i> in the National Gallery, whom he was
+going to make a Burgomaster; and another was to have been a study of
+life in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> the time of the Albigensian persecution. There was also to be a
+modern study: could this have been <i>Emerald Uthwart</i>? No doubt <i>Apollo
+in Picardy</i>, published in 1893, would have gone into the volume. <i>The
+Child in the House</i>, which was printed as an <i>Imaginary Portrait</i>, in
+<i>Macmillans Magazine</i> in 1878, was really meant to be the first chapter
+of a romance which was to show 'the poetry of modern life,' something,
+he said, as <i>Aurora Leigh</i> does. There is much personal detail in it,
+the red hawthorn, for instance, and he used to talk to me of the old
+house at Tunbridge, where his great-aunt lived, and where he spent much
+of his time when a child. He remembered the gipsies there, and their
+caravans, when they came down for the hop-picking; and the old lady in
+her large cap going out on the lawn to do battle with the surveyors who
+had come to mark out a railway across it; and his terror of the train,
+and of 'the red flag, which meant <i>blood</i>.' It was because he always
+dreamed of going on with it that he did not reprint this imaginary
+portrait in the book of <i>Imaginary Portraits</i>; but he did not go on with
+it because, having begun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> the long labour of <i>Marius</i>, it was out of his
+mind for many years, and when, in 1889, he still spoke of finishing it,
+he was conscious that he could never continue it in the same style, and
+that it would not be satisfactory to rewrite it in his severer, later
+manner. It remains, perhaps fortunately, a fragment, to which no
+continuation could ever add a more essential completeness.</p>
+
+<p>Style, in Pater, varied more than is generally supposed, in the course
+of his development, and, though never thought of as a thing apart from
+what it expresses, was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers,
+he said, 'make time to write English more as a learned language.' It has
+been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and Flaubert were among the chief
+'origins' of Pater's style; it is curiously significant that matter, in
+Pater, was developed before style, and that in the bare and angular
+outlines of the earliest fragment, <i>Diaphan&eacute;it&eacute;</i>, there is already the
+substance which is to be clothed upon by beautiful and appropriate flesh
+in the <i>Studies in the Renaissance</i>. Ruskin, I never heard him mention,
+but I do not doubt that there, to the young man beginning to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> concern
+himself with beauty in art and literature, was at least a quickening
+influence. Of De Quincey he spoke with an admiration which I had
+difficulty in sharing, and I remember his showing me with pride a set of
+his works bound in half-parchment, with pale gold lettering on the white
+backs, and with the cinnamon edges which he was so fond of. Of Flaubert
+we rarely met without speaking. He thought <i>Julien l'Hospitalier</i> as
+perfect as anything he had done. <i>L'Education Sentimentale</i> was one of
+the books which he advised me to read; that, and <i>Le Rouge et le Noir</i>
+of Stendhal; and he spoke with particular admiration of two episodes in
+the former, the sickness and the death of the child. Of the Goncourts he
+spoke with admiration tempered by dislike. Their books often repelled
+him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things
+should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read
+<i>Madame Gervaisais</i>, and he spoke of <i>Ch&eacute;rie</i> (for all its 'immodesty')
+as an admirable thing, and a model for all such studies.</p>
+
+<p>Once, as we were walking in Oxford, he pointed to a window and said,
+with a slow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> smile: 'That is where I get my Zolas.' He was always a
+little on his guard in respect of books; and, just as he read Flaubert
+and Goncourt because they were intellectual neighbours, so he could read
+Zola for mere pastime, knowing that there would be nothing there to
+distract him. I remember telling him about <i>The Story of an African
+Farm</i>, and of the wonderful human quality in it. He said, repeating his
+favourite formula: 'No doubt you are quite right; but I do not suppose I
+shall ever read it.' And he explained to me that he was always writing
+something, and that while he was writing he did not allow himself to
+read anything which might possibly affect him too strongly, by bringing
+a new current of emotion to bear upon him. He was quite content that his
+mind should 'keep as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world'; it
+was that prisoner's dream of a world that it was his whole business as a
+writer to remember, to perpetuate.</p>
+
+<p>1906.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> In this same year he intended to follow the <i>Appreciations</i>
+by a volume of <i>Studies of Greek Remains</i>, in which he then meant to
+include the studies in Platonism, not yet written; and he had thought of
+putting together a volume of 'theory,' which was to include the essay on
+Style. In two or three years' time, he thought, <i>Gastom de Latour</i> would
+be finished.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_GONCOURTS" id="THE_GONCOURTS"></a>THE GONCOURTS</h2>
+
+<p>My first visit to Edmond de Goncourt was in May 1892. I remember my
+immense curiosity about that 'House Beautiful,' at Auteuil, of which I
+had heard so much, and my excitement as I rang the bell, and was shown
+at once into the garden, where Goncourt was just saying good-bye to some
+friends. He was carelessly dressed, without a collar, and with the usual
+loosely knotted large white scarf rolled round his neck. He was wearing
+a straw hat, and it was only afterwards that I could see the fine sweep
+of the white hair, falling across the forehead. I thought him the most
+distinguished-looking man of letters I had ever seen; for he had at once
+the distinction of race, of fine breeding, and of that delicate artistic
+genius which, with him, was so intimately a part of things beautiful and
+distinguished. He had the eyes of an old eagle; a general air of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>
+dignified collectedness; a rare, and a rarely charming, smile, which
+came out, like a ray of sunshine, in the instinctive pleasure of having
+said a witty or graceful thing to which one's response had been
+immediate. When he took me indoors, into that house which was a museum,
+I noticed the delicacy of his hands, and the tenderness with which he
+handled his treasures, touching them as if he loved them, with little,
+unconscious murmurs: <i>Quel go&ucirc;t! quel go&ucirc;t!</i> These rose-coloured rooms,
+with their embroidered ceilings, were filled with cabinets of beautiful
+things, Japanese carvings, and prints (the miraculous 'Plongeuses'!),
+always in perfect condition (<i>Je cherche le beau</i>); albums had been made
+for him in Japan, and in these he inserted prints, mounting others upon
+silver and gold paper, which formed a sort of frame. He showed me his
+eighteenth-century designs, among which I remember his pointing out one
+(a Chardin, I think) as the first he had ever bought; he had been
+sixteen at the time, and he bought it for twelve francs.</p>
+
+<p>When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me all
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions of
+Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me, of
+the men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother with a
+serene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and appropriate;
+and I remember his speaking (with a parenthetic disdain of the
+<i>brouillard scandinave</i>, in which it seemed to him that France was
+trying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but <i>un mauvais
+brouillard</i>) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to
+represent the only thing worth representing, <i>la vie v&eacute;cue, la vraie
+v&eacute;rit&eacute;</i>. As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing,
+<i>l'optique</i>: out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have all
+seen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way of
+expressing it. 'There is a true thing I have said in my journal,' he
+went on. 'The thing is, to find a lorgnette' (and he put up his hands to
+his eyes, adjusting them carefully) 'through which to see things. My
+brother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it from
+us.'</p>
+
+<p>How true that is, and how significantly it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> states just what is most
+essential in the work of the Goncourts! It is a new way of seeing,
+literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented; and it is in
+the invention of this that they have invented that 'new language' of
+which purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly complained.
+You remember that saying of Masson, the mask of Gautier, in <i>Charles
+Demailly:</i> 'I am a man for whom the visible world exists.' Well, that is
+true, also, of the Goncourts; but in a different way.</p>
+
+<p>'The delicacies of fine literature,' that phrase of Pater always comes
+into my mind when I think of the Goncourts; and indeed Pater seems to me
+the only English writer who has ever handled language at all in their
+manner or spirit. I frequently heard Pater refer to certain of their
+books, to <i>Madame Gervaisais</i>, to <i>L'Art du XVIII Si&egrave;cle</i>, to <i>Ch&eacute;rie</i>;
+with a passing objection to what he called the 'immodesty' of this last
+book, and a strong emphasis in the assertion that 'that was how it
+seemed to him a book should be written.' I repeated this once to
+Goncourt, trying to give him some idea of what Pater's work was like;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>
+and he lamented that his ignorance of English prevented him from what he
+instinctively realised would be so intimate an enjoyment. Pater was of
+course far more scrupulous, more limited, in his choice of epithet, less
+feverish in his variations of cadence; and naturally so, for he dealt
+with another subject-matter and was careful of another kind of truth.
+But with both there was that passionately intent preoccupation with 'the
+delicacies of fine literature'; both achieved a style of the most
+personal sincerity: <i>tout grand &eacute;crivain de tous les temps</i>, said
+Goncourt, <i>ne se reconna&icirc;t absolument qu'&agrave; cela, c'est qu'il a une
+langue personnelle, une langue dont chaque page, chaque ligne, est
+sign&eacute;e, pour le lecteur lettr&eacute;, comme si son nom &eacute;tait au bas de cette
+page, de cette ligne</i>: and this style, in both, was accused, by the
+'literary' criticism of its generation, of being insincere, artificial,
+and therefore reprehensible.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult, in speaking of Edmond de Goncourt, to avoid attributing
+to him the whole credit of the work which has so long borne his name
+alone. That is an error which he himself would never have pardoned.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>
+<i>Mon fr&egrave;re et moi</i> was the phrase constantly on his lips, and in his
+journal, his prefaces, he has done full justice to the vivid and
+admirable qualities of that talent which, all the same, would seem to
+have been the lesser, the more subservient, of the two. Jules, I think,
+had a more active sense of life, a more generally human curiosity; for
+the novels of Edmond, written since his brother's death, have, in even
+that excessively specialised world of their common observation, a yet
+more specialised choice and direction. But Edmond, there is no doubt,
+was in the strictest sense the writer; and it is above all for the
+qualities of its writing that the work of the Goncourts will live. It
+has been largely concerned with truth&mdash;truth to the minute details of
+human character, sensation, and circumstance, and also of the document,
+the exact words, of the past; but this devotion to fact, to the
+curiosities of fact, has been united with an even more persistent
+devotion to the curiosities of expression. They have invented a new
+language: that was the old reproach against them; let it be their
+distinction. Like all writers of an elaborate carefulness,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> they have
+been accused of sacrificing both truth and beauty to a deliberate
+eccentricity. Deliberate their style certainly was; eccentric it may,
+perhaps, sometimes have been; but deliberately eccentric, no. It was
+their belief that a writer should have a personal style, a style as
+peculiar to himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see in the
+handwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics of his style.
+Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a certain elegant
+stiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the 'continual slight
+novelty' of its form to be quite clear at a glance: very personal, very
+distinguished writing.</p>
+
+<p>It may be asserted that the Goncourts are not merely men of genius, but
+are perhaps the typical men of letters of the close of our century. They
+have all the curiosities and the acquirements, the new weaknesses and
+the new powers, that belong to our age; and they sum up in themselves
+certain theories, aspirations, ways of looking at things, notions of
+literary duty and artistic conscience, which have only lately become at
+all actual, and some of which owe to them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> their very origin. To be not
+merely novelists (inventing a new kind of novel), but historians; not
+merely historians, but the historians of a particular century, and of
+what was intimate and what is unknown in it; to be also discriminating,
+indeed innovating, critics of art, but of a certain section of art, the
+eighteenth century, in France and in Japan; to collect pictures and
+<i>bibelots</i>, beautiful things, always of the French and Japanese
+eighteenth century: these excursions in so many directions, with their
+audacities and their careful limitations, their bold novelty and their
+scrupulous exactitude in detail, are characteristic of what is the
+finest in the modern, conception of culture and the modern ideal in art.
+Look, for instance, at the Goncourts' view of history. <i>Quand les
+civilisations commencent, quand les peuples se forment, l'histoire est
+drame ou geste.... Les si&egrave;cles qui ont pr&eacute;c&eacute;d&eacute; notre si&egrave;cle ne
+demandaient &agrave; l'historien que le personnage de l'homme, et le portrait
+de son g&eacute;nie.... Le XIX<sup>e</sup> si&egrave;cle demande l'homme qui &eacute;tait cet homme
+d'&Eacute;tat, cet homme de guerre, ce po&egrave;te, ce peintre, ce grand homme de
+science ou de m&eacute;tier. L'&acirc;me qui &eacute;tait en</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span><i>cet acteur, le c&oelig;ur qui a
+v&eacute;cu derri&egrave;re cet esprit, il les exige et les r&eacute;clame; et s'il ne peut
+recueillir tout cet &ecirc;tre moral, toute la vie int&eacute;rieure, il commande du
+moins qu'on lui en apporte une trace, un jour, un lambeau, une relique.</i>
+From this theory, this conviction, came that marvellous series of
+studies in the eighteenth century in France (<i>La Femme au XVIII<sup>e</sup>
+Si&egrave;cle</i>, <i>Portraits intimes du XVIII<sup>e</sup> Si&egrave;cle</i>, <i>La du Barry</i>, and the
+others), made entirely out of documents, autograph letters, scraps of
+costume, engravings, songs, the unconscious self-revelations of the
+time, forming, as they justly say, <i>l'histoire intime; c'est ce roman
+vrai que la post&eacute;rit&eacute; appellera peut-&ecirc;tre un jour l'histoire humaine</i>.
+To be the bookworm and the magician; to give the actual documents, but
+not to set barren fact by barren fact; to find a soul and a voice in
+documents, to make them more living and more charming than the charm of
+life itself: that is what the Goncourts have done. And it is through
+this conception of history that they have found their way to that new
+conception of the novel which has revolutionised the entire art of
+fiction.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span></p><p><i>Aujourd'hui</i>, they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to <i>Germinie
+Lacerteux</i>, <i>que le Roman s'&eacute;largit et grandit, qu'il commence &agrave; &ecirc;tre la
+grande forme s&eacute;rieuse, passionn&eacute;e, vivante, de l'&eacute;tude litt&eacute;raire et de
+l'enqu&ecirc;te sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche
+psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman
+s'est impos&eacute; les &eacute;tudes et les devoirs de la science, il pent en
+revendiquer les libert&eacute;s et les franchises</i>. <i>Le public aime les romans
+faux</i>, is another brave declaration in the same preface; <i>ce roman est
+un roman vrai</i>. But what, precisely, is it that the Goncourts understood
+by <i>un roman vrai</i>? The old notion of the novel was that it should be an
+entertaining record of incidents or adventures told for their own sake;
+a plain, straightforward narrative of facts, the aim being to produce as
+nearly as possible an effect of continuity, of nothing having been
+omitted, the statement, so to speak, of a witness on oath; in a word, it
+is the same as the old notion of history, <i>drame ou geste</i>. That is not
+how the Goncourts apprehend life, or how they conceive it should be
+rendered. As in the study of history they seek mainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> the <i>in&eacute;dit</i>,
+caring only to record that, so it is the <i>in&eacute;dit</i> of life that they
+conceive to be the main concern, the real 'inner history.' And for them
+the <i>in&eacute;dit</i> of life consists in the noting of the sensations; it is of
+the sensations that they have resolved to be the historians; not of
+action, nor of emotion, properly speaking, nor of moral conceptions, but
+of an inner life which is all made up of the perceptions of the senses.
+It is scarcely too paradoxical to say that they are psychologists for
+whom the soul does not exist. One thing, they know, exists: the
+sensation flashed through the brain, the image on the mental retina.
+Having found that, they bodily omit all the rest as of no importance,
+trusting to their instinct of selection, of retaining all that really
+matters. It is the painter's method, a selection made almost visually;
+the method of the painter who accumulates detail on detail, in his
+patient, many-sided observation of his subject, and then omits
+everything which is not an essential part of the <i>ensemble</i> which he
+sees. Thus the new conception of what the real truth of things consists
+in has brought with it, inevitably, an entirely new form, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> breaking-up
+of the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which are
+generally quite disconnected, and sometimes of less than a page in
+length. A very apt image for this new, curious manner of narrative has
+been found, somewhat maliciously, by M. Lema&icirc;tre. <i>Un homme qui marche &agrave;
+l'int&eacute;rieur d'une maison, si nous regardons du dehors, appara&icirc;t
+successivement &agrave; chaque fen&ecirc;tre, et dans les intervalles nous &eacute;chappe.
+Ces fen&ecirc;tres, ce sont les chapitres de MM. de Goncourt. Encore</i>, he
+adds, <i>y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fen&ecirc;tres o&ugrave; l'homme que nous attendions
+ne passe point</i>. That, certainly, is the danger of the method. No doubt
+the Goncourts, in their passion for the <i>in&eacute;dit</i>, leave out certain
+things because they are obvious, even if they are obviously true and
+obviously important; that is the defect of their quality. To represent
+life by a series of moments, and to choose these moments for a certain
+subtlety and rarity in them, is to challenge grave perils. Nor are these
+the only perils which the Goncourts have constantly before them. There
+are others, essential to their natures, to their preferences. And, first
+of all, as we may see on every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> page of that miraculous <i>Journal</i>, which
+will remain, doubtless, the truest, deepest, most poignant piece of
+human history that they have ever written, they are sick men, seeing
+life through the medium of diseased nerves. <i>Notre &oelig;uvre entier</i>,
+writes Edmond de Goncourt, <i>repose sur la maladie nerveuse; les
+peintures de la maladie, nous les avons tir&eacute;es de nous-m&ecirc;mes, et, &agrave;
+force de nous diss&eacute;quer, nous sommes arriv&eacute;s &agrave; une sensitivit&eacute;
+supra-aigu&euml; que blessaient les infiniment petits de la vie</i>. This
+unhealthy sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well as
+certain shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts' vision
+of reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth of
+things; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpening the
+acuteness of every sensation; or somewhat such a sense as one derives
+from haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and fragrant
+way, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the notion of
+time, the notion of space. What the Goncourts paint is the subtler
+poetry of reality, its unusual aspects, and they evoke it, fleetingly,
+like Whistler;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> they do not render it in hard outline, like Flaubert,
+like Manet. As in the world of Whistler, so in the world of the
+Goncourts, we see cities in which there are always fireworks at
+Cremorne, and fair women reflected beautifully and curiously in mirrors.
+It is a world which is extraordinarily real; but there is choice, there
+is curiosity, in the aspect of reality which it presents.</p>
+
+<p>Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of the work of the
+Goncourts, with those of Th&eacute;ophile Gautier, who may reasonably be said
+to have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, and
+also the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, but
+it is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or,
+rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell you
+the things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points of
+view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute,
+distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things as
+an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might see
+them; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> deliberate
+attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in
+which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture.
+In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, from
+no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction, archaism, barbarous
+epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render a
+sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should
+palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in
+expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in their
+relations with language, which they would have not merely a passionate
+and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately
+depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of French
+critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that the
+language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless French of
+the past. It is true; it is their distinction; it is the most wonderful
+of all their inventions: in order to render new sensations, a new vision
+of things, they have invented a new language.</p>
+
+<p>1894, 1896.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="COVENTRY_PATMORE" id="COVENTRY_PATMORE"></a>COVENTRY PATMORE</h2>
+
+<p>There are two portraits of Coventry Patmore by Mr. Sargent. One, in the
+National Portrait Gallery, gives us the man as he ordinarily was: the
+straggling hair, the drooping eyelid, the large, loose-lipped mouth, the
+long, thin, furrowed throat, the whole air of gentlemanly ferocity. But
+the other, a sketch of the head in profile, gives us more than that;
+gives us, in the lean, strong, aquiline head, startlingly, all that was
+abrupt, fiery, and essential in the genius of a rare and misunderstood
+poet. There never was a man less like the popular idea of him than the
+writer of <i>The Angel in the House</i>. Certainly an autocrat in the home,
+impatient, intolerant, full of bracing intellectual scorn, not always
+just, but always just in intention, a disdainful recluse, judging all
+human and divine affairs from a standpoint of imperturbable
+omniscience,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> Coventry Patmore charmed one by his whimsical energy, his
+intense sincerity, and, indeed, by the childlike egoism of an absolutely
+self-centred intelligence. Speaking of Patmore as he was in 1879, Mr.
+Gosse says, in his admirable memoir:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Three things were in those days particularly noticeable in the head
+of Coventry Patmore: the vast convex brows, arched with vision; the
+bright, shrewd, bluish-grey eyes, the outer fold of one eyelid
+permanently and humorously drooping; and the wilful, sensuous
+mouth. These three seemed ever at war among themselves; they spoke
+three different tongues; they proclaimed a man of dreams, a canny
+man of business, a man of vehement determination. It was the
+harmony of these in apparently discordant contrast which made the
+face so fascinating; the dwellers under this strange mask were
+three, and the problem was how they contrived the common life.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>That is a portrait which is also an interpretation, and many of the
+pages on this 'angular, vivid, discordant, and yet exquisitely
+fascinating person,' are full of a similar insight. They contain many of
+those anecdotes which indicate crises, a thing very different from the
+merely decorative anecdotes of the ordinary biographer. The book,
+written by one who has been a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> good friend to many poets, and to none a
+more valuable friend than to Patmore, gives us a more vivid sense of
+what Patmore was as a man than anything except Mr. Sargent's two
+portraits, and a remarkable article by Mr. Frederick Greenwood,
+published after the book, as a sort of appendix, which it completes on
+the spiritual side.</p>
+
+<p>To these portraits of Patmore I have nothing of importance to add; and I
+have given my own estimate of Patmore as a poet in an essay published in
+1897, in <i>Studies in Two Literatures</i>. But I should like to supplement
+these various studies by a few supplementary notes, and the discussion
+of a few points, chiefly technical, connected with his art as a poet. I
+knew Patmore only during the last ten years of his life, and never with
+any real intimacy; but as I have been turning over a little bundle of
+his letters, written with a quill on greyish-blue paper, in the fine,
+careless handwriting which had something of the distinction of the
+writer, it seems to me that there are things in them characteristic
+enough to be worth preserving.</p>
+
+<p>The first letter in my bundle is not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> addressed to me, but to the friend
+through whom I was afterwards to meet him, the kindest and most helpful
+friend whom I or any man ever had, James Dykes Campbell. Two years
+before, when I was twenty-one, I had written an <i>Introduction to the
+Study of Browning</i>. Campbell had been at my elbow all the time,
+encouraging and checking me; he would send back my proof-sheets in a
+network of criticisms and suggestions, with my most eloquent passages
+rigorously shorn, my pet eccentricities of phrase severely straightened.
+At the beginning of 1888 Campbell sent the book to Patmore. His opinion,
+when it came, seemed to me, at that time, crushing; it enraged me, I
+know, not on my account, but on Browning's. I read it now with a clearer
+understanding of what he meant, and it is interesting, certainly, as a
+more outspoken and detailed opinion on Browning than Patmore ever
+printed.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><span class="smcap">My Dear Mr. Campbell</span>,&mdash;I have read enough of Mr. Arthur Symons'
+clever book on Browning to entitle me to judge of it as well as if
+I had read the whole. He does not seem to me to be quite qualified,
+as yet, for this kind of criticism. He does not seem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> to have
+attained to the point of view from which all great critics have
+judged poetry and art in general. He does not see that, in art, the
+style in which a thing is said or done is of more importance than
+the thing said or done. Indeed, he does not appear to know what
+style means. Browning has an immense deal of mannerism&mdash;which in
+art is always bad;&mdash;he has, in his few best passages, manner, which
+as far as it goes is good; but of style&mdash;that indescribable
+reposeful 'breath of a pure and unique individuality'&mdash;I recognise
+no trace, though I find it distinctly enough in almost every other
+English poet who has obtained so distinguished a place as Browning
+has done in the estimation of the better class of readers. I do not
+pretend to say absolutely that style does not exist in Browning's
+work; but, if so, its 'still small voice' is utterly overwhelmed,
+for me, by the din of the other elements. I think I can see, in
+Browning's poetry, all that Mr. Symons sees, though not perhaps all
+that he fancies he sees. But I also discern a want of which he
+appears to feel nothing; and those defects of manner which he
+acknowledges, but thinks little of, are to me most distressing, and
+fatal to all enjoyment of the many brilliant qualities they are
+mixed up with.&mdash;Yours very truly,</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Coventry Patmore</span>.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Campbell, I suppose, protested in his vigorous fashion against the
+criticism of Browning, and the answer to that letter, dated May 7, is
+printed on p. 264 of the second volume of Mr. Basil Champneys' <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span><i>Life of
+Patmore</i>. It is a reiteration, with further explanations, such as that</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>When I said that manner was more important than matter in poetry, I
+really meant that the true matter of poetry could only be expressed
+by the manner. I find the brilliant thinking and the deep feeling
+in Browning, but no true individuality&mdash;though of course his manner
+is marked enough.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Another letter in the same year, to Campbell, after reading the proofs
+of my first book of verse, <i>Days and Nights</i>, contained a criticism
+which I thought, at the time, not less discouraging than the criticism
+of my <i>Browning</i>. It seems to me now to contain the truth, the whole
+truth, and nothing but the truth, about that particular book, and to
+allow for whatever I may have done in verse since then. The first letter
+addressed to me is a polite note, dated March 16, 1889, thanking me for
+a copy of my book, and saying 'I send herewith a little volume of my
+own, which I hope may please you in some of your idle moments.' The book
+was a copy of <i>Florilegium Amantis</i>, a selection of his own poems,
+edited by Dr. Garnett. Up to that time I had read nothing of Patmore
+except<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> fragments of <i>The Angel in the House</i>, which I had not had the
+patience to read through. I dipped into these pages, and as I read for
+the first time some of the odes of <i>The Unknown Eros</i>, I seemed to have
+made a great discovery: here was a whole glittering and peaceful tract
+of poetry which was like a new world to me. I wrote to him full of my
+enthusiasm; and, though I heard nothing then in reply, I find among my
+books a copy of <i>The Unknown Eros</i> with this inscription: 'Arthur
+Symons, from Coventry Patmore, July 23, 1890.'</p>
+
+<p>The date is the date of his sixty-seventh birthday, and the book was
+given to me after a birthday-dinner at his house at Hastings, when, I
+remember, a wreath of laurel had been woven in honour of the occasion,
+and he had laughingly, but with a quite na&iuml;ve gratification, worn it for
+a while at the end of dinner. He was one of the very few poets I have
+seen who could wear a laurel wreath and not look ridiculous.</p>
+
+<p>In the summer of that year I undertook to look after the <i>Academy</i> for a
+few weeks (a wholly new task to me) while Mr. Cotton, the editor, went
+for a holiday. The death<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> of Cardinal Newman occurred just then, and I
+wrote to Patmore, asking him if he would do an obituary notice for me.
+He replied, in a letter dated August 13, 1890:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>I should have been very glad to have complied with your request,
+had I felt myself at all able to do the work effectively; but my
+acquaintance with Dr. Newman was very slight, and I have no sources
+of knowledge about his life, but such as are open to all. I have
+never taken much interest in contemporary Catholic history and
+politics. There are a hundred people who could do what you want
+better than I could, and I can never stir my lazy soul to take up
+the pen, unless I fancy that I have something to say which makes it
+a matter of conscience that I should say it.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Failing Patmore, I asked Dr. Greenhill, who was then living at Hastings,
+and Patmore wrote on August 16:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Dr. Greenhill will do your work far better than I could have done
+it. What an intellect we have lost in Newman&mdash;so delicately capable
+of adjustment that it could crush a Hume or crack a Kingsley! And
+what an example both in literature and in life. But that we have
+not lost.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Patmore's memory was retentive of good phrases which had once come up
+under his pen, as that witty phrase about crushing and cracking had come
+up in the course of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> brief note scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.
+The phrase reappears five years afterwards, elaborated into an
+impressive sentence, in the preface to <i>The Rod, the Root, and the
+Flower</i>, dated Lymington, May 1895:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>The steam-hammer of that intellect which could be so delicately
+adjusted to its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or
+cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work, that tongue which had the
+weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent; but its
+mighty task of so representing truth as to make it credible to the
+modern mind, when not interested in unbelief, has been done.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>In the same preface will be found a phrase which Mr. Gosse quotes from a
+letter of June 17, 1888, in which Patmore says that the reviewers of his
+forthcoming book, <i>Principle in Art</i>, 'will say, or at least feel, "Ugh,
+Ugh! the horrid thing! It's alive!" and think it their duty to set their
+heels on it accordingly.' By 1895 the reviewers were replaced by
+'readers, zealously Christian,' and the readers, instead of setting
+their heels on it, merely 'put aside this little volume with a cry.'</p>
+
+<p>I find no more letters, beyond mere notes and invitations, until the end
+of 1893, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> it was during these years that I saw Patmore most often,
+generally when I was staying with Dykes Campbell at St. Leonards. When
+one is five-and-twenty, and writing verse, among young men of one's own
+age, also writing verse, the occasional companionship of an older poet,
+who stands aside, in a dignified seclusion, acknowledged, respected, not
+greatly loved or, in his best work at least, widely popular, can hardly
+fail to be an incentive and an invigoration. It was with a full sense of
+my privilege that I walked to and fro with Coventry Patmore on that high
+terrace in his garden at Hastings, or sat in the house watching him
+smoke cigarette after cigarette, or drove with him into the country, or
+rowed with him round the moat of Bodiam Castle, with Dykes Campbell in
+the stern of the boat; always attentive to his words, learning from him
+all I could, as he talked of the things I most cared for, and of some
+things for which I cared nothing. Yes, even when he talked of politics,
+I listened with full enjoyment of his bitter humour, his ferocious
+gaiety of onslaught; though I was glad when he changed from Gladstone to
+St.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> Thomas Aquinas, and gladder still when he spoke of that other
+religion, poetry. I think I never heard him speak long without some
+reference to St. Thomas Aquinas, of whom he has written so often and
+with so great an enthusiasm. It was he who first talked to me of St.
+John of the Cross, and when, eight years later, at Seville, I came upon
+a copy of the first edition of the <i>Obras Espirituales</i> on a stall of
+old books in the Sierpes, and began to read, and to try to render in
+English, that extraordinary verse which remains, with that of S. Teresa,
+the finest lyrical verse which Spain has produced, I understood how much
+the mystic of the prose and the poet of <i>The Unknown Eros</i> owed to the
+<i>Noche Escura</i> and the <i>Llama de Amor Viva</i>. He spoke of the Catholic
+mystics like an explorer who has returned from the perils of far
+countries, with a remembering delight which he can share with few.</p>
+
+<p>If Mr. Gosse is anywhere in his book unjust to Patmore it is in speaking
+of the later books of prose, the <i>Religio Poetae</i> and <i>The Rod, the
+Root, and the Flower</i>, some parts of which seem to him 'not very
+important<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> except as extending our knowledge of' Patmore's 'mind, and as
+giving us a curious collection of the raw material of his poetry.' To
+this I can only reply in some words which I used in writing of the
+<i>Religio Poetae</i>, and affirm with an emphasis which I only wish to
+strengthen, that, here and everywhere, and never more than in the
+exquisite passage which Mr. Gosse only quotes to depreciate, the prose
+of Patmore is the prose of a poet; not prose 'incompletely executed,'
+and aspiring after the 'nobler order' of poetry, but adequate and
+achieved prose, of a very rare kind. Thought, in him, is of the very
+substance of poetry, and is sustained throughout at almost the lyrical
+pitch. There is, in these essays, a rarefied air as of the mountain-tops
+of meditation; and the spirit of their sometimes remote contemplation is
+always in one sense, as Pater has justly said of Wordsworth,
+impassioned. Only in the finest of his poems has he surpassed these
+pages of chill and ecstatic prose.</p>
+
+<p>But if Patmore spoke, as he wrote, of these difficult things as a
+traveller speaks of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> the countries from which he has returned, when he
+spoke of poetry it was like one who speaks of his native country. At
+first I found it a little difficult to accustom myself to his permanent
+mental attitude there, with his own implied or stated pre-eminence
+(Tennyson and Barnes on the lower slopes, Browning vaguely in sight, the
+rest of his contemporaries nowhere), but, after all, there was an
+undisguised simplicity in it, which was better, because franker, than
+the more customary 'pride that apes humility,' or the still baser
+affectation of indifference. A man of genius, whose genius, like
+Patmore's, is of an intense and narrow kind, cannot possibly do justice
+to the work which has every merit but his own. Nor can he, when he is
+conscious of its equality in technical skill, be expected to
+discriminate between what is more or less valuable in his own work;
+between, that is, his own greater or less degree of inspiration. And
+here I may quote a letter which Patmore wrote to me, dated Lymington,
+December 31, 1893, about a review of mine in which I had greeted him as
+'a poet, one of the most essential poets of our time,' but had ventured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>
+to say, perhaps petulantly, what I felt about a certain part of his
+work.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>I thank you for the copy of the <i>Athen&aelig;um</i>, containing your
+generous and well-written notice of 'Religio Poetae.' There is much
+in it that must needs be gratifying to me, and nothing that I feel
+disposed to complain of but your allusion to the 'dinner-table
+domesticities of the "Angel in the House."' I think that you have
+been a little misled&mdash;as almost everybody has been&mdash;by the
+differing characters of the metres of the 'Angel' and 'Eros.' The
+meats and wines of the two are, in very great part, almost
+identical in character; but, in one case, they are served on the
+deal table of the octo-syllabic quatrain, and, in the other, they
+are spread on the fine, irregular rock of the free tetrameter.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>In his own work he could see no flaw; he knew, better than any one, how
+nearly it answered almost everywhere to his own intention; and of his
+own intentions he could be no critic. It was from this standpoint of
+absolute satisfaction with what he had himself done that he viewed other
+men's work; necessarily, in the case of one so certain of himself, with
+a measure of dissatisfaction. He has said in print fundamentally foolish
+things about writers living and dead; and yet remains, if not a great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span>
+critic, at least a great thinker on the first principles of art. And, in
+those days when I used to listen to him while he talked to me of the
+basis of poetry, and of metres and cadences, and of poetical methods,
+what meant more to me than anything he said, though not a word was
+without its value, was the profound religious gravity with which he
+treated the art of poetry, the sense he conveyed to one of his own
+reasoned conception of its immense importance, its divinity.</p>
+
+<p>It was partly, no doubt, from this reverence for his art that Patmore
+wrote so rarely, and only under an impulse which could not be withstood.
+Even his prose was written with the same ardour and reluctance, and a
+letter which he wrote to me from Lymington, dated August 7, 1894, in
+answer to a suggestion that he should join some other writers in a
+contemplated memorial to Walter Pater, is literally exact in its
+statement of his own way of work, not only during his later life:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>I should have liked to make one of the honourable company of
+commentators upon Pater, were it not that the faculty of writing,
+or, what amounts to the same thing, interest in writing, has quite
+deserted me.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> Some accidental motive wind comes over me, once in a
+year or so, and I find myself able to write half a dozen pages in
+an hour or two: but all the rest of my time is hopelessly sterile.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>To what was this curious difficulty or timidity in composition due? In
+the case of the poetry, Mr. Gosse attributes it largely to the fact of a
+poet of lyrical genius attempting to write only philosophical or
+narrative poetry; and there is much truth in the suggestion. Nothing in
+Patmore, except his genius, is so conspicuous as his limitations.
+Herrick, we may remember from his essay on Mrs. Meynell, seemed to him
+but 'a splendid insect'; Keats, we learn from Mr. Champneys' life,
+seemed to him 'to be greatly deficient in first-rate imaginative power';
+Shelley 'is all unsubstantial splendour, like the transformation scene
+of a pantomime, or the silvered globes hung up in a gin-palace'; Blake
+is 'nearly all utter rubbish, with here and there not so much a gleam as
+a trick of genius.' All this, when he said it, had a queer kind of
+delightfulness, and, to those able to understand him, never seemed, as
+it might have seemed in any one else, mere arrogant bad taste, but a
+necessary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> part of a very narrow and very intense nature. Although
+Patmore was quite ready to give his opinion on any subject, whether on
+'Wagner, the musical impostor,' or on 'the grinning woman, in every
+canvas of Leonardo,' he was singularly lacking in the critical faculty,
+even in regard to his own art; and this was because, in his own art, he
+was a poet of one idea and of one metre. He did marvellous things with
+that one idea and that one metre, but he saw nothing beyond them; all
+thought must be brought into relation with nuptial love, or it was of no
+interest to him, and the iambic metre must do everything that poetry
+need concern itself about doing.</p>
+
+<p>In a memorandum for prayer made in 1861, we read this petition:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>That I may be enabled to write my poetry from immediate perception
+of the truth and delight of love at once divine and human, and that
+all events may so happen as shall best advance this my chief work
+and probable means of working out my own salvation.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>In his earlier work, it is with human love only that he deals; in his
+later, and inconceivably finer work, it is not with human love only, but
+with 'the relation of the soul<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> to Christ as his betrothed wife': 'the
+burning heart of the universe,' as he realises it. This conception of
+love, which we see developing from so tamely domestic a level to so
+incalculable a height of mystic rapture, possessed the whole man,
+throughout the whole of his life, shutting him into a 'solitude for two'
+which has never perhaps been apprehended with so complete a
+satisfaction. He was a married monk, whose monastery was the world; he
+came and went in the world, imagining he saw it more clearly than any
+one else; and, indeed, he saw things about him clearly enough, when they
+were remote enough from his household prejudices. But all he really ever
+did was to cultivate a little corner of a garden, where he brought to
+perfection a rare kind of flower, which some thought too pretty to be
+fine, and some too colourless to be beautiful, but in which he saw the
+seven celestial colours, faultlessly mingled, and which he took to be
+the image of the flower most loved by the Virgin in heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Patmore was a poet profoundly learned in the technique of his art, and
+the <i>Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law</i>, which fills<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> the first
+eighty-five pages of the <i>Amelia</i> volume of 1878, is among the subtlest
+and most valuable of such studies which we have in English. In this
+essay he praises the simplest metres for various just reasons, but yet
+is careful to define the 'rhyme royal,' or stanza of seven ten-syllable
+lines, as the most heroic of measures; and to admit that blank verse,
+which he never used, 'is, of all recognised English metres, the most
+difficult to write well in.' But, in his expressed aversion for trochaic
+and dactylic measures, is he not merely recording his own inability to
+handle them? and, in setting more and more rigorous limits to himself in
+his own dealing with iambic measures, is he not accepting, and making
+the best of, a lack of metrical flexibility? It is nothing less than
+extraordinary to note that, until the publication of the nine <i>Odes</i> in
+1868, not merely was he wholly tied to the iambic measure, but even
+within those limits he was rarely quite so good in the four-line stanza
+of eights and sixes as in the four-line stanza of eights; that he was
+usually less good in the six-line than in the four-line stanza of eights
+and sixes; and that he was invariably least<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> good in the stanza of three
+long lines which, to most practical intents and purposes, corresponds
+with this six-line stanza. The extremely slight licence which this
+rearrangement into longer lines affords was sufficient to disturb the
+balance of his cadences, and nowhere else was he capable of writing
+quite such lines as:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>One friend was left, a falcon, famed for beauty, skill and size,</div>
+<div>Kept from his fortune's ruin, for the sake of its great eyes.</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>All sense, not merely of the delicacy, but of the correctness of rhythm,
+seems to have left him suddenly, without warning.</p>
+
+<p>And then, the straightening and tightening of the bonds of metre having
+had its due effect, an unprecedented thing occurred. In the <i>Odes</i> of
+1868, absorbed finally into <i>The Unknown Eros</i> of 1877, the iambic metre
+is still used; but with what a new freedom, and at the summons of how
+liberating an inspiration! At the same time Patmore's substance is
+purged and his speech loosened, and, in throwing off that burden of
+prose stuff which had tied down the very wings of his imagination, he
+finds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> himself rising on a different movement. Never was a development
+in metre so spiritually significant.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of Patmore's insistence to the contrary, as in the letter which
+I have already quoted, there is no doubt that the difference between
+<i>The Angel in the House</i> and <i>The Unknown Eros</i> is the difference
+between what is sometimes poetry in spite of itself, and what is poetry
+alike in accident and essence. In all his work before the <i>Odes</i> of
+1868, Patmore had been writing down to his conception of what poetry
+ought to be; when, through I know not what suffering, or contemplation,
+or actual inner illumination, his whole soul had been possessed by this
+new conception of what poetry could be, he began to write as finely, and
+not only as neatly, as he was able. The poetry which came, came fully
+clothed, in a form of irregular but not lawless verse, which Mr. Gosse
+states was introduced into English by the <i>Pindarique Odes</i> of Cowley,
+but which may be more justly derived, as Patmore himself, in one of his
+prefaces, intimates, from an older and more genuine poet, Drummond of
+Hawthornden.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span></p><p>Mr. Gosse is cruel enough to say that Patmore had 'considerable
+affinities' with Cowley, and that 'when Patmore is languid and Cowley is
+unusually felicitous, it is difficult to see much difference in the form
+of their odes.' But Patmore, in his essay on metre, has said,</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>If there is not sufficient motive power of passionate thought, no
+typographical aids will make anything of this sort of verse but
+metrical nonsense&mdash;which it nearly always is&mdash;even in Cowley, whose
+brilliant wit and ingenuity are strangely out of harmony with most
+of his measures;</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>and it seems to me that he is wholly right in saying so. The difference
+between the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows the
+contours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; in
+Cowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need not
+surprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verse
+of Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose.' The fault of
+his own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. The
+pauses in Patmore, left as they are to be a kind of breathing, or pause
+for breath, may not seem to be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>everywhere faultless to all ears; but
+they <i>are</i> the pauses in breathing, while in Cowley the structure of his
+verse, when it is irregular, remains as external, as mechanical, as the
+couplets of the <i>Davideis</i>.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Whether Patmore ever acknowledged it or no, or indeed whether [says
+Mr. Gosse] the fact has ever been observed, I know not, but the
+true analogy of the <i>Odes</i> is with the Italian lyric of the early
+Renaissance. It is in the writings of Petrarch and Dante, and
+especially in the <i>Canzoniere</i> of the former, that we must look for
+examples of the source of Patmore's later poetic form.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Here again, while there may be a closer 'analogy,' at least in spirit,
+there is another, and even clearer difference in form. The canzoni of
+Petrarch are composed in stanzas of varying, but in each case uniform,
+length, and every stanza corresponds precisely in metrical arrangement
+with every other stanza in the same canzone. In English the
+<i>Epithalamion</i> and the <i>Prothalamion</i> of Spenser (except for their
+refrain) do exactly what Petrarch had done in Italian; and whatever
+further analogy there may be between the spirit of Patmore's writing and
+that of Spenser in these two poems, the form<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> is essentially different.
+The resemblance with <i>Lycidas</i> is closer, and closer still with the
+poems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit of
+mingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, like
+Goethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly unrhymed irregular
+lyrical verse.</p>
+
+<p>Patmore's endeavour, in <i>The Unknown Eros</i>, is certainly towards a form
+of <i>vers libre</i>, but it is directed only towards the variation of the
+normal pause in the normal English metre, the iambic 'common time,' and
+is therefore as strictly tied by law as a metre can possibly be when it
+ceases to be wholly regular. Verse literally 'free,' as it is being
+attempted in the present day in France, every measure being mingled, and
+the disentangling of them left wholly to the ear of the reader, has
+indeed been attempted by great metrists in many ages, but for the most
+part only very rarely and with extreme caution. The warning, so far, of
+all these failures, or momentary half-successes, is to be seen in the
+most monstrous and magnificent failure of the nineteenth century, the
+<i>Leaves of Grass</i> of Walt Whitman. Patmore<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> realised that without law
+there can be no order, and thus no life; for life is the result of a
+harmony between opposites. For him, cramped as he had been by a
+voluntary respect for far more than the letter of the law, the discovery
+of a freer mode of speech was of incalculable advantage. It removed from
+him all temptation to that 'cleverness' which Mr. Gosse rightly finds in
+the handling of 'the accidents of civilised life,' the unfortunate part
+of his subject-matter in <i>The Angel in the House</i>; it allowed him to
+abandon himself to the poetic ecstasy, which in him was almost of the
+same nature as philosophy, without translating it downward into the
+terms of popular apprehension; it gave him a choice, formal, yet
+flexible means of expression for his uninterrupted contemplation of
+divine things.</p>
+
+<p>1906.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SAROJINI_NAIDU" id="SAROJINI_NAIDU"></a>SAROJINI NAIDU</h2>
+
+<p>It was at my persuasion that <i>The Golden Threshold</i> was published. The
+earliest of the poems were read to me in London in 1896, when the writer
+was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when
+she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those
+two periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their
+own, I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. 'Your
+letter made me very proud and very sad,' she wrote. 'Is it possible that
+I have written verses that are "filled with beauty," and is it possible
+that you really think them worthy of being given to the world? You know
+how high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual little poems seem
+to be less than beautiful&mdash;I mean with that final enduring beauty that I
+desire.' And, in another letter, she writes: 'I am not a poet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> really. I
+have the vision and the desire, but not the voice. If I could write just
+one poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be
+exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my
+songs are as ephemeral.' It is for this bird-like quality of song, it
+seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of
+delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of a
+woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language and
+under partly Western influences. They do not express the whole of that
+temperament; but they express, I think, its essence; and there is an
+Eastern magic in them.</p>
+
+<p>Sarojini Chattop&acirc;dhy&acirc;y was born at Hyderabad on February 13, 1879. Her
+father, Dr. Aghorenath Chattop&acirc;dhy&acirc;y, is descended from the ancient
+family of Chattorajes of Bhramangram, who were noted throughout Eastern
+Bengal as patrons of Sanskrit learning, and for their practice of Yoga.
+He took his degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Edinburgh
+in 1877, and afterwards studied brilliantly at Bonn. On his return to
+India he founded the Nizam<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> College at Hyderabad, and has since laboured
+incessantly, and at great personal sacrifice, in the cause of education.</p>
+
+<p>Sarojini was the eldest of a large family, all of whom were taught
+English at an early age. 'I,' she writes, 'was stubborn and refused to
+speak it. So one day, when I was nine years old, my father punished
+me&mdash;the only time I was ever punished&mdash;by shutting me in a room alone
+for a whole day. I came out of it a full-blown linguist. I have never
+spoken any other language to him, or to my mother, who always speaks to
+me in Hindustani. I don't think I had any special hankering to write
+poetry as a little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy
+nature. My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific
+character. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician or a
+scientist, but the poetic instinct, which I inherited from him and also
+from my mother (who wrote some lovely Bengali lyrics in her youth),
+proved stronger. One day, when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in
+algebra; it <i>wouldn't</i> come right; but instead a whole poem came to me
+suddenly. I wrote it down.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span></p><p>'From that day my "poetic career" began. At thirteen I wrote a long
+poem <i>&agrave; la</i> "Lady of the Lake"&mdash;1300 lines in six days. At thirteen I
+wrote a drama of 2000 lines, a full-fledged passionate thing that I
+began on the spur of the moment, without forethought, just to spite my
+doctor, who said I was very ill and must not touch a book. My health
+broke down permanently about this time, and, my regular studies being
+stopped, I read voraciously. I suppose the greater part of my reading
+was done between fourteen and sixteen. I wrote a novel, I wrote fat
+volumes of journals: I took myself very seriously in those days.'</p>
+
+<p>Before she was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr.
+Govindurajulu Naidu, now her husband, is, though of an old and
+honourable family, not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused an
+equal opposition, not only on the side of her family, but of his; and in
+1895 she was sent to England, against her will, with a special
+scholarship from the Nizam. She remained in England, with an interval of
+travel in Italy, till 1898, studying first at King's College, London,
+then, till her health again broke down, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> Girton. She returned to
+Hyderabad in September 1898, and in the December of that year, to the
+scandal of all India, broke through the bonds of caste, and married Dr.
+Naidu. 'Do you know I have some very beautiful poems floating in the
+air,' she wrote to me in 1904; 'and if the gods are kind I shall cast my
+soul like a net and capture them, this year. If the gods are kind&mdash;and
+grant me a little measure of health. It is all I need to make my life
+perfect, for the very "Spirit of Delight" that Shelley wrote of dwells
+in my little home; it is full of the music of birds in the garden and
+children in the long-arched verandah.' There are songs about the
+children in this book; they are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun of
+Victory, the Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight.</p>
+
+<p>'My ancestors for thousands of years,' I find written in one of her
+letters, 'have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves, great
+dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a dreamer
+himself, a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been a magnificent
+failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are few men whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span>
+learning is greater than his, and I don't think there are many men more
+beloved. He has a great white beard, and the profile of Homer, and a
+laugh that brings the roof down. He has wasted all his money on two
+great objects: to help others, and on alchemy. He holds huge courts
+every day in his garden of all the learned men of all religions&mdash;Rajahs
+and beggars and saints, and downright villains, all delightfully mixed
+up, and all treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day
+the experiments are going on, and every man who brings a new
+prescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you know,
+only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for Beauty, the
+eternal Beauty. "The makers of gold and the makers of verse," they are
+the twin creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery; and
+what in my father is the genius of curiosity&mdash;the very essence of all
+scientific genius&mdash;in me is the desire for beauty. Do you remember
+Pater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, "curiosity and the desire of
+beauty"?'</p>
+
+<p>It was the desire of beauty that made her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> a poet; her 'nerves of
+delight' were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To those who
+knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure seemed to
+concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards beauty as the
+sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and wider until one saw
+nothing but the eyes. She was dressed always in clinging dresses of
+Eastern silk, and, as she was so small, and her long black hair hung
+straight down her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
+little, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed, wherever
+she was, to be alone.</p>
+
+<p>Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East. And
+first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known any one who
+seemed to exist on such 'large draughts of intellectual day' as this
+child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's personal troubles
+and agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the East maturity comes
+early; and this child had already lived through all a woman's life. But
+there was something else, something hardly personal, something which
+belonged to a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span>consciousness older than the Christian, which I realised,
+wondered at, and admired, in her passionate tranquillity of mind, before
+which everything mean and trivial and temporary caught fire and burnt
+away in smoke. Her body was never without suffering, or her heart
+without conflict; but neither the body's weakness nor the heart's
+violence could disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on his
+lotus-throne.</p>
+
+<p>And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race, there was
+what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation. Pain or pleasure
+transported her, and the whole of pain or pleasure might be held in a
+flower's cup or the imagined frown of a friend. It was never found in
+those things which to others seemed things of importance. At the age of
+twelve she passed the Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke
+to find herself famous throughout India. 'Honestly,' she said to me, 'I
+was not pleased; such things did not appeal to me.' But here, in a
+letter from Hyderabad, bidding one 'share a March morning' with her,
+there is, at the mere contact of the sun, this outburst: 'Come and share
+my exquisite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span> March morning with me: this sumptuous blaze of gold and
+sapphire sky; these scarlet lilies that adorn the sunshine; the
+voluptuous scents of neem and champak and serisha that beat upon the
+languid air with their implacable sweetness; the thousand little gold
+and blue and silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy of
+life in nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and
+unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and love. And,
+do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by petal from my
+heart's blood, these little quivering birds are my soul made incarnate
+music, these heavy perfumes are my emotions dissolved into aerial
+essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is the "very me," that part of
+me that incessantly and insolently, yes, and a little deliberately,
+triumphs over that other part&mdash;a thing of nerves and tissues that
+suffers and cries out, and that must die to-morrow perhaps, or twenty
+years hence.'</p>
+
+<p>Then there was her humour, which was part of her strange wisdom, and was
+always awake and on the watch. In all her letters,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> written in exquisite
+English prose, but with an ardent imagery and a vehement sincerity of
+emotion which make them, like the poems, indeed almost more directly,
+un-English, Oriental, there was always this intellectual, critical sense
+of humour, which could laugh at one's own enthusiasm as frankly as that
+enthusiasm had been set down. And partly the humour, like the delicate
+reserve of her manner, was a mask or a shelter. 'I have taught myself,'
+she writes to me from India, 'to be commonplace and like everybody else
+superficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and cheerful, so "brave,"
+all the banal things that are so comfortable to be. My mother knows me
+only as "such a tranquil child, but so strong-willed." A tranquil
+child!' And she writes again, with deeper significance: 'I too have
+learnt the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is
+a subtle philosophy though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine:
+"Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." I have gone through so
+many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its
+full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of
+speech,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> but a literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcely
+two months since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to be
+anything but radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps my
+temperament has given me I prize the gift of laughter as beyond price.'</p>
+
+<p>Her desire, always, was to be 'a wild free thing of the air like the
+birds, with a song in my heart.' A spirit of too much fire in too frail
+a body, it was rarely that her desire was fully granted. But in Italy
+she found what she could not find in England, and from Italy her letters
+are radiant. 'This Italy is made of gold,' she writes from Florence,
+'the gold of dawn and daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancing
+in weird enchanting rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold of
+fireflies in the perfumed darkness&mdash;"aerial gold." I long to catch the
+subtle music of their fairy dances and make a poem with a rhythm like
+the quick irregular wild flash of their sudden movements. Would it not
+be wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in my
+hair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of darkness. It gave
+me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> a strange sensation, as if I were not human at all, but an elfin
+spirit. I wonder why these little things move me so deeply? It is
+because I have a most "unbalanced intellect," I suppose.' Then, looking
+out on Florence, she cries, 'God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I am
+that I am alive to-day!' And she tells me that she is drinking in the
+beauty like wine, 'wine, golden and scented, and shining, fit for the
+gods; and the gods have drunk it, the dead gods of Etruria, two thousand
+years ago. Did I say dead? No, for the gods are immortal, and one might
+still find them loitering in some solitary dell on the grey hillsides of
+Fiesole. Have I seen them? Yes, looking with dreaming eyes, I have found
+them sitting under the olives, in their grave, strong, antique
+beauty&mdash;Etruscan gods!'</p>
+
+<p>In Italy she watches the faces of the monks, and at one moment longs to
+attain to their peace by renunciation, longs for Nirvana; 'then, when
+one comes out again into the hot sunshine that warms one's blood, and
+sees the eager hurrying faces of men and women in the street, dramatic
+faces over which the disturbing experiences of life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> have passed and
+left their symbols, one's heart thrills up into one's throat. No, no,
+no, a thousand times no! how can one deliberately renounce this
+coloured, unquiet, fiery human life of the earth?' And, all the time,
+her subtle criticism is alert, and this woman of the East marvels at the
+women of the West, 'the beautiful worldly women of the West,' whom she
+sees walking in the Cascine, 'taking the air so consciously attractive
+in their brilliant toilettes, in the brilliant coquetry of their
+manner!' She finds them 'a little incomprehensible,' 'profound artists
+in all the subtle intricacies of fascination,' and asks if these
+'incalculable frivolities and vanities and coquetries and caprices' are,
+to us, an essential part of their charm? And she watches them with
+amusement as they flutter about her, petting her as if she were a nice
+child, a child or a toy, not dreaming that she is saying to herself
+sorrowfully: 'How utterly empty their lives must be of all spiritual
+beauty <i>if</i> they are nothing more than they appear to be.'</p>
+
+<p>She sat in our midst, and judged us, and few knew what was passing
+behind that face<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> 'like an awakening soul,' to use one of her own
+epithets. Her eyes were like deep pools, and you seemed to fall through
+them into depths below depths.</p>
+
+<p>1905.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="WELSH_POETRY" id="WELSH_POETRY"></a>WELSH POETRY</h2>
+
+<p>There is certainly a reason for at least suggesting to those who concern
+themselves, for good or evil, with Celtic literature, what Celtic
+literature really is when it is finest; what a 'reaction against the
+despotism of fact' really means; what 'natural magic' really means, and
+why the phrase 'Celtic glamour' is perhaps the most unfortunate that
+could well have been chosen to express the character of a literature
+which is above all things precise, concrete, definite.</p>
+
+<p>Lamartine, in the preface to the <i>M&eacute;ditations</i>, describes the
+characteristics of Ossian, very justly, as <i>le vague, la r&ecirc;verie,
+l'an&eacute;antissement dans la contemplation, le regard fix&eacute; sur des
+apparitions confuses dans le lointain</i>; and it is those very qualities,
+still looked upon by so many as the typically Celtic qualities, which
+prove the spuriousness of Ossian. That gaze fixed on formless and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span>
+distant shadows, that losing of oneself in contemplation, that vague
+dreaminess, which Lamartine admired in Ossian, will be found nowhere in
+the <i>Black Book of Carmarthen</i>, in the <i>Book of Taliesin</i>, in the <i>Red
+Book of Hergest</i>, however much a doubtful text, uncertain readings, and
+confusing commentators may leave us in uncertainty as to the real
+meaning of many passages. Just as the true mystic is the man who sees
+obscure things clearly, so the Welsh poets (whom I take for the moment
+as representing the 'Celtic note,' the quality which we find in the work
+of primitive races) saw everything in the universe, the wind itself,
+under the images of mortality, hands and feet and the ways and motions
+of men. They filled human life with the greatness of their imagination,
+they ennobled it with the pride of their expectancy of noble things,
+they were boundless in praising and in cursing; but poetical excitement,
+in them, only taught them the amplitude and splendour of real things. A
+chief is an eagle, a serpent, the bull of battle, an oak; he is the
+strength of the ninth wave, an uplifted pillar of wrath, impetuous as
+the fire through a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> chimney; the ruddy reapers of war are his desire.
+The heart of Cyndyllan was like the ice of winter, like the fire of
+spring; the horses of Geraint are ruddy ones, with the assault of
+spotted eagles, of black eagles, of red eagles, of white eagles; an
+onset in battle is like the roaring of the wind against the ashen
+spears. These poets are the poets of 'tumults, shouting, swords, and men
+in battle-array.' The sound of battle is heard in them; they are 'where
+the ravens screamed over blood'; they are among 'crimsoned hair and
+clamorous sorrow'; they praise 'war with the shining wing,' and they
+know all the piteousness of the death of heroes, the sense of the
+'delicate white body,' 'the lovely, slender, blood-stained body,' that
+will be covered with earth, and sand, and stones, and nettles, and the
+roots of the oak. They know too the piteousness of the hearth left
+desolate, the hearth that will be covered with nettles, and slender
+brambles, and thorns, and dock-leaves, and scratched up by fowls, and
+turned up by swine. And they praise the gentleness of strength and
+courage: 'he was gentle, with a hand eager for battle.' Women are known<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span>
+chiefly as the widows and the 'sleepless' mothers of heroes; rarely so
+much esteemed as to be a snare, rarely a desire, rarely a reward; 'a
+soft herd.' They praise drunkenness for its ecstasy, its uncalculating
+generosity, and equal with the flowing of blood in battle, and the
+flowing of mead in the hall, is the flowing of song. They have the
+haughtiness of those who, if they take rewards, 'ale for the drinking,
+and a fair homestead, and beautiful clothing,' give rewards: 'I am
+Taliesin, who will repay thee thy banquet.'</p>
+
+<p>And they have their philosophy, always a close, vehemently definite
+thing, crying out for precise images, by which alone it can apprehend
+the unseen. Taliesin knows that 'man is oldest when he is born, and is
+younger and younger continually.' He wonders where man is when he is
+sleeping, and where the night waits until the passing of day. He is
+astonished that books have not found out the soul, and where it resides,
+and the air it breathes, and its form and shape. He thinks, too, of the
+dregs of the soul, and debates what is the best intoxication for its
+petulance and wonder and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> mockery. And, in a poem certainly late, or
+interpolated with fragments of a Latin hymn, he uses the eternal
+numeration of the mystics, and speaks of 'the nine degrees of the
+companies of heaven, and the tenth, saints a preparation of sevens';
+numbers that are 'clean and holy.' And even in poems plainly Christian
+there is a fine simplicity of imagination; as when, at the day of
+judgment, an arm reaches out, and hides the sea and the stars; or when
+Christ, hanging on the cross, laments that the bones of his feet are
+stretched with extreme pain.</p>
+
+<p>It is this sharp physical apprehension of things that really gives its
+note to Welsh poetry; a sense of things felt and seen, so intense, that
+the crutch on which an old man leans becomes the symbol of all the
+bodily sorrow of the world. In the poem attributed to Llywarch Hen there
+is a fierce, loud complaint, in which mere physical sickness and the
+intolerance of age translate themselves into a limitless hunger, and
+into that wisdom which is the sorrowful desire of beauty. The cuckoos at
+Aber Cuawg, singing 'clamorously' to the sick man: 'there are that hear
+them that will not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> hear them again!' the sound of the large wave
+grating sullenly on the pebbles,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>The birds are clamorous; the strand is wet:</div>
+<div>Clear is the sky; large the wave:</div>
+<div>The heart is palsied with longing:</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>all these bright, wild outcries, in which wind and wave and leaves and
+the song of the cuckoo speak the same word, as if all came from the same
+heart of things; and, through it all, the remembrance: 'God will not
+undo what he is doing'; have indeed, and supremely, the 'Celtic note.'
+'I love the strand, but I hate the sea,' says the <i>Black Book of
+Carmarthen</i>, and in all these poems we find a more than medi&aelig;val hatred
+of winter and cold (so pathetic, yet after all so temperate, in the
+Latin students' songs), with a far more unbounded hatred of old age and
+sickness and the disasters which are not bred in the world, but are a
+blind part of the universe itself; older than the world, as old as
+chaos, out of which the world was made.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, wild and sorrowful as so much of this poetry is, with its praise of
+slaughter and its lament over death, there is much also of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> a gentle
+beauty, a childlike saying over of wind and wave and the brightness in
+the tops of green things, as a child counts over its toys. In the 'Song
+of Pleasant Things' there is no distinction between the pleasantness of
+sea-gulls playing, of summer and slow long days, of the heath when it is
+green, of a horse with a thick mane in a tangle, and of 'the word that
+utters the Trinity.' 'The beautiful I sang of, I will sing,' says
+Taliesin; and with him the seven senses become in symbol 'fire and
+earth, and water and air, and mist and flowers, and southerly wind.' And
+touches of natural beauty come irrelevantly into the most tragical
+places, like the 'sweet apple-tree of delightful branches' in that song
+of battles and of the coming of madness, where Myrddin says: 'I have
+been wandering so long in darkness and among spirits that it is needless
+now for darkness and spirits to lead me astray.' The same sense of the
+beauty of earth and of the elements comes into those mysterious
+riddle-rhymes, not so far removed from the riddle-rhymes which children
+say to one another in Welsh cottages to this day: 'I have been a tear in
+the air, I have been the dullest of stars; I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> was made of the flower of
+nettles, and of the water of the ninth wave; I played in the twilight, I
+slept in purple; my fingers are long and white, it is long since I was a
+herdsman.'</p>
+
+<p>And now, after looking at these characteristics of Welsh poetry, look at
+Ossian, and that 'gaze fixed on formless and distant shadows,' which
+seemed so impressive and so Celtic to Lamartine. 'In the morning of
+Saturday,' or 'On Sunday, at the time of dawn, there was a great
+battle'; that is how the Welsh poet tells you what he had to sing about.
+And he tells you, in his definite way, more than that; he tells you: 'I
+have been where the warriors were slain, from the East to the North, and
+from the East to the South: I am alive, they are in their graves!' It is
+human emotion reduced to its elements; that instinct of life and death,
+of the mystery of all that is tangible in the world, of its personal
+meaning, to one man after another, age after age, which in every age
+becomes more difficult to feel simply, more difficult to say simply. 'I
+am alive, they are in their graves!' and nothing remains to be said in
+the face of that immense problem. Well, the Welsh poet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> leaves you with
+his thought, and that simple emphasis of his seems to us now so large
+and remote and impressive, just because it was once so passionately
+felt, and set down as it was felt. And so with his sense for nature,
+with that which seems like style in him; it is a wonderful way of
+trusting instinct, of trusting the approaches of natural things. He
+says, quite simply: 'I was told by a sea-gull that had come a great
+way,' as a child would tell you now. And when he tells you that 'Cynon
+rushed forward with the green dawn,' it is not what we call a figure of
+speech: it is his sensitive, literal way of seeing things. More
+definite, more concrete, closer to the earth and to instinctive emotion
+than most other poets, the Welsh poet might have said of himself, in
+another sense than that in which he said it of Alexander: 'What he
+desired in his mind he had from the world.'</p>
+
+<p>1898.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p class="center">Printed in Great Britain by<br />
+T. and A. <span class="smcap">Constable</span>, Printers to His Majesty<br />at the University Press, Edinburgh</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Figures of Several Centuries
+
+Author: Arthur Symons
+
+Release Date: May 9, 2007 [EBook #21407]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES
+
+BY
+
+ARTHUR SYMONS
+
+LONDON
+CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
+1917
+
+
+_First published, December 1916._
+
+_Reprinted, January, June 1917._
+
+
+TO
+
+JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+WITH A FRIEND'S ADMIRATION
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+SAINT AUGUSTINE                                                     1
+
+CHARLES LAMB                                                       13
+
+VILLON                                                             37
+
+CASANOVA AT DUX                                                    41
+
+JOHN DONNE                                                         80
+
+EMILY BRONTE                                                      109
+
+EDGAR ALLAN POE                                                   115
+
+THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES                                             122
+
+GUSTAVE FLAUBERT                                                  130
+
+GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET                                         141
+
+ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE                                        153
+
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI                                            201
+
+A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY                              207
+
+LEON CLADEL                                                       216
+
+HENRIK IBSEN                                                      222
+
+JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS                                               268
+
+TWO SYMBOLISTS                                                    300
+
+CHARLES BAUDELAIRE                                                310
+
+WALTER PATER                                                      316
+
+THE GONCOURTS                                                     336
+
+COVENTRY PATMORE                                                  351
+
+SAROJINI NAIDU                                                    376
+
+WELSH POETRY                                                      390
+
+
+
+
+SAINT AUGUSTINE
+
+The _Confessions_ of St. Augustine are the first autobiography, and they
+have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that they
+are addressed directly to God. Rousseau's unburdening of himself is the
+last, most effectual manifestation of that nervous, defiant
+consciousness of other people which haunted him all his life. He felt
+that all the men and women whom he passed on his way through the world
+were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions.
+The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the
+protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him,
+in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to
+the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himself
+was after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He felt
+the silent voices within him too acutely to keep silence. Cellini wrote
+his autobiography because he heard within him such trumpeting voices of
+praise, exultation, and the supreme satisfaction of a violent man who
+has conceived himself to be always in the right, that it shocked him to
+think of going down into his grave without having made the whole world
+hear those voices. He hurls at you this book of his own deeds that it
+may smite you into acquiescent admiration. Casanova, at the end of a
+long life in which he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth,
+with a simplicity of pleasure in which the sense of their being
+forbidden was only the least of their abounding flavours, looked back
+upon his past self with a slightly pathetic admiration, and set himself
+to go all over those successful adventures, in love and in other arts,
+firstly, in order that he might be amused by recalling them, and then
+because he thought the record would do him credit. He neither intrudes
+himself as a model, nor acknowledges that he was very often in the
+wrong. Always passionate after sensations, and for their own sake, the
+writing of an autobiography was the last, almost active, sensation that
+was left to him, and he accepted it energetically.
+
+Probably St. Augustine first conceived of the writing of an
+autobiography as a kind of penance, which might be fruitful also to
+others. By its form it challenges the slight difficulty that it appears
+to be telling God what God knew already. But that is the difficulty
+which every prayer also challenges. To those we love, are we not fond of
+telling many things about ourselves which they know already? A prayer,
+such confessions as these, are addressed to God by one of those
+subterfuges by which it is necessary to approach the unseen and
+infinite, under at least a disguise of mortality. And the whole book, as
+no other such book has ever been, is lyrical. This prose, so simple, so
+familiar, has in it the exaltation of poetry. It can pass, without a
+change of tone, from the boy's stealing of pears: 'If aught of those
+pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender
+human affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that be
+which is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius, my sweet
+friend'; and from that to the saint's rare, last ecstasy: 'And sometimes
+Thou admittedst me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul,
+rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know
+not what in it would not belong to the life to come.' And even
+self-analysis, of which there is so much, becoming at times a kind of
+mathematics, even those metaphysical subtleties which seem, to sharpen
+thought upon thought to an almost invisible fineness of edge, become
+also lyrical, inter-penetrated as they are with this sense of the
+divine.
+
+To St. Augustine all life is seen only in its relation to the divine;
+looked at from any other side, it has no meaning, and, looked at even
+with this light upon it, is but for the most part seen as a blundering
+in the dark, a wandering from the right path. In so far as it is
+natural, it is evil. In so far as it is corrected by divine grace, it
+leaves the human actors in it without merit; since all virtue is God's,
+though all vice is man's.
+
+This conception of life is certainly valuable in giving harmony to the
+book, presenting as it does a sort of background. It brings with it a
+very impressive kind of symbolism into its record of actual facts, to
+all of which it gives a value, not in themselves, if you please to put
+it so, or, perhaps more properly, their essential value. When nothing
+which happens, happens except under God's direct responsibility, when
+nothing is said which is not one of your 'lines' in the drama which is
+being played, not so much by as through you, there can be no
+exteriorities, nothing can be trivial, in a record of life so conceived.
+And this point of view also helps the writer to keep all his details in
+proportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least,
+being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because they happened
+to him. To St. Augustine, while not the smallest human event is without
+significance, in its relation to eternity, not the greatest human event
+is of importance, in its relation to time; and his own share in it would
+but induce a special, it may seem an exaggerated, humility on his part.
+Thus, speaking of his early studies, his triumphs in them, not without a
+certain _naivete_: 'Whatever was written, either in rhetoric or logic,
+geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty or
+any instruction, I understood, Thou knowest, O Lord my God; because both
+quickness and understanding and acuteness in discerning is Thy gift.'
+Or, again, speaking of the youthful excellences ('excellently hadst Thou
+made him') of that son who was the son of his beloved mistress: 'I had
+no part in that boy, but the sin.'
+
+Intellectual pride, one sees in him indeed, at all times, by the very
+force with which it is repressed into humility; and, in all that relates
+to that mistress, in the famous cry: 'Give me chastity, but not yet!' in
+all those insurgent memories of 'these various and shadowy loves,' we
+see the force of the flesh, in one who lived always with so passionate a
+life, alike of the spirit and the senses. Now, recalling what was sinful
+in him, in his confessions to God, he is reluctant to allow any value to
+the most honourable of human sentiments, to so much as forgive the most
+estimable of human weaknesses. 'And now, Lord, in writing I confess it
+unto Thee. Read it who will, and interpret it how he will: and if any
+finds sin therein, that I wept my mother for a small portion of an hour
+(the mother who for the time was dead to mine eyes, who had for many
+years wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes), let him not deride
+me; but rather, if he be one of large charity, let him weep for himself
+for my sins unto Thee, the Father of all the brethren of Thy Christ.'
+And yet it is of this mother that he writes his most tender, his most
+beautiful pages. 'The day was now approaching whereon she was to depart
+this life (which day Thou well knewest, we knew not), it came to pass,
+Thyself, as I believe, by Thy secret ways so ordering it, that she and I
+stood alone, leaning in a certain window, which looked into the garden
+of the house where we now lay, at Ostia....' It is not often that
+memory, in him, is so careful of 'the images of earth, and water, and
+air,' as to call up these delicate pictures. They too had become for him
+among the desirable things which are to be renounced for a more
+desirable thing.
+
+That sense of the divine in life, and specially of the miracles which
+happen a certain number of times in every existence, the moments which
+alone count in the soul's summing-up of itself, St. Augustine has
+rendered with such significance, with such an absolute wiping out from
+the memory of everything else, just because he has come to that, it
+might seem, somewhat arid point of spiritual ascent. That famous moment
+of the _Tolle, lege_: 'I cast myself down I know not how, under a
+certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears ... when lo! I heard from
+a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting,
+and oft repeating, "Take up and read, take up and read"'; the Bishop's
+word to Monnica ('as if it had sounded from heaven'), 'It is not
+possible that the son of those tears should perish'; the beggar-man,
+'joking and joyous,' in the streets of Milan: it is by these, apparently
+trifling, these all-significant moments that his narrative moves, with a
+more reticent and effective symbolism than any other narrative known to
+me. They are the moments in which the soul has really lived, or has
+really seen; and the rest of life may well be a blindness and a troubled
+coming and going.
+
+I said that the height from which St. Augustine apprehends these truths
+may seem a somewhat arid one. That is perhaps only because it is nearer
+the sky, more directly bathed in what he calls, beautifully, 'this queen
+of colours, the light.' There is a passage in the tenth book which may
+almost be called a kind of aesthetics. They are aesthetics indeed of
+renunciation, but a renunciation of the many beauties for the one
+Beauty, which shall contain as well as eclipse them; 'because those
+beautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into their
+cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls.' And it
+is not a renunciation by one who had never enjoyed what he renounces, or
+who feels himself, even now, quite safe from certain forms of its
+seduction. He is troubled especially by the fear that 'those melodies
+which Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet and attuned
+voice,' may come to move him 'more with the voice than with the words
+sung.' Yet how graciously he speaks of music, allowing 'that the several
+affections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper
+measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence
+wherewith they are stirred up.' It is precisely because he feels so
+intimately the beauty of all things human, though it were but 'a dog
+coursing in the field, a lizard catching flies,' that he desires to pass
+through these to that passionate contemplation which is the desire of
+all seekers after the absolute, and which for him is God. He asks of all
+the powers of the earth: 'My questioning them, was my thoughts on them;
+and their form of beauty gave the answer.' And by how concrete a series
+of images does he strive to express the inexpressible, in that passage
+of pure poetry on the love of God! 'But what do I love, when I love
+thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the
+brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of
+varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and
+spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of
+flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind
+of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement, when I
+love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my
+inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain,
+and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what
+breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not,
+and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love
+when I love my God.'
+
+Mentioning in his confessions only such things as he conceives to be of
+import to God, it happens, naturally, that St. Augustine leaves unsaid
+many things that would have interested most men, perhaps more. 'What,
+then, have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions--as if
+they could heal my infirmities,--a race curious to know the lives of
+others, slothful to amend their own?' Finding, indeed, many significant
+mentions of things and books and persons, Faustus the Manichee, the
+'Hortensius' of Cicero, the theatre, we shall find little pasture here
+for our antiquarian, our purely curious, researches. We shall not even
+find all that we might care to know, in St. Augustine himself, of the
+surface of the mind's action, which we call character, or the surface
+emotions, which we call temperament. Here is a soul, one of the supreme
+souls of humanity, speaking directly to that supreme soul which it has
+apprehended outside humanity. Be sure that, if it forgets many things
+which you, who overhear, would like it to have remembered, it will
+remember everything which it is important to remember, everything which
+the recording angel, who is the soul's finer criticism of itself, has
+already inscribed in the book of the last judgment.
+
+1897.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB
+
+I
+
+
+There is something a little accidental about all Lamb's finest work.
+Poetry he seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but the
+supreme criticism of the _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ arose out
+of the casual habit of setting down an opinion of an extract just copied
+into one's note-book, and the book itself, because, he said, 'the book
+is such as I am glad there should be.' The beginnings of his
+miscellaneous prose are due to the 'ferreting' of Coleridge. 'He ferrets
+me day and night,' Lamb complains to Manning in 1800, 'to do something.
+He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressing
+occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip.... He has lugged me to
+the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a
+first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the
+anatomist of melancholy'; which was done, in the consummate way we know,
+and led in its turn to all the rest of the prose. And Barry Cornwall
+tells us that 'he was almost teased into writing the _Elia_ essays.'
+
+He had begun, indeed, deliberately, with a story, as personal really as
+the poems, but, unlike them, set too far from himself in subject and
+tangled with circumstances outside his knowledge. He wrote _Rosamund
+Gray_ before he was twenty-three, and in that 'lovely thing,' as Shelley
+called it, we see most of the merits and defects of his early poetry. It
+is a story which is hardly a story at all, told by comment, evasion, and
+recurrence, by 'little images, recollections, and circumstances of past
+pleasures' or distresses; with something vague and yet precise, like a
+dream partially remembered. Here and there is the creation of a mood and
+moment, almost like Coleridge's in the _Ancient Mariner_; but these
+flicker and go out. The style would be laughable in its simplicity if
+there were not in it some almost awing touch of innocence; some hint of
+that divine goodness which, in Lamb, needed the relief and savour of
+the later freakishness to sharpen it out of insipidity. There is already
+a sense of what is tragic and endearing in earthly existence, though no
+skill as yet in presenting it; and the moral of it is surely one of the
+morals or messages of _Elia_: 'God has built a brave world, but methinks
+he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they may.'
+
+Lamb had no sense of narrative, or, rather, he cared in a story only for
+the moments when it seemed to double upon itself and turn into irony.
+All his attempts to write for the stage (where his dialogue might have
+been so telling) were foiled by his inability to 'bring three together
+on the stage at once,' as he confessed in a letter to Mrs. Shelley;
+'they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there
+they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw
+them.' Narrative he could manage only when it was prepared for him by
+another, as in the _Tales from Shakespeare_ and the _Adventures of
+Ulysses_. Even in _Mrs. Leicester's School_, where he came nearest to
+success in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have less
+than the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb's: of _Father's
+Wedding-Day_, which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called
+'with the sole exception of the _Bride of Lammermoor_, the most
+beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern.'
+There is something of an incomparable kind of story-telling in most of
+the best essays of _Elia_, but it is a kind which he had to find out, by
+accident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly through
+letter-writing. 'Us dramatic geniuses,' he speaks of, in a letter to
+Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it was
+this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessential
+part of himself. 'Truth,' he says in this letter, 'is one and poor, like
+the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that
+multiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not
+believe it could be put to such purposes.' It was to his correspondents,
+indeed to the incitement of their wakeful friendship, that he owes more
+perhaps than the mere materials of his miracles.
+
+To be wholly himself, Lamb had to hide himself under some disguise, a
+name, 'Elia,' taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout
+borrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heighten
+and soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In
+the letter in which he announces the first essays of _Elia_, he writes
+to Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction,
+impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, the
+partitions perfectly invisible.' The correspondents were already
+accustomed to this 'heavenly mingle.' Few of the letters, those works of
+nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken on
+oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of
+sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of a
+preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays.
+What began in mischief ends in art.
+
+
+II
+
+'I am out of the world of readers,' Lamb wrote to Coleridge, 'I hate all
+that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather
+myself up into the old things.' 'I am jealous for the actors who
+pleased my youth,' he says elsewhere. And again: 'For me, I do not know
+whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately
+to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the
+usual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since
+seems of any value or importance compared to the colours which
+imagination gave to everything then.' In Lamb this love of old things,
+this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which imagination
+came to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves all
+through his life that child's attitude of wonder, before 'this good
+world, which he knows--which was created so lovely, beyond his
+deservings.' He loves the old, the accustomed, the things that people
+have had about them since they could remember. 'I am in love,' he says
+in the most profoundly serious of his essays, 'with this green earth;
+the face of town and country; and the sweet security of streets.' He was
+a man to whom mere living had zest enough to make up for everything that
+was contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not unhappy.
+Happiness came to him out of the little things that meant nothing to
+others, or were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living,
+and his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he left
+to others to remember him by.
+
+Lamb's religion, says Pater, was 'the religion of men of letters,
+religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last
+century'; and Hood says of him: 'As he was in spirit an Old Author, so
+was he in faith an Ancient Christian.' He himself tells Coleridge that
+he has 'a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit,' and,
+later in life, writes to a friend: 'Much of my seriousness has gone
+off.' On this, as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more into
+himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent with
+him. 'Such religion as I have,' he said, 'has always acted on me more by
+way of sentiment than argumentative process'; and we find him preferring
+churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done.
+To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over
+it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not
+lightly, or with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude,
+that he asked: 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer
+holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats
+and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and
+fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony
+itself_--do these things go out with life?'
+
+It was what I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so
+humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of
+all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of
+him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that
+species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this
+moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a
+'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical,
+'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and
+sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone
+stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth
+of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the
+most religious sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy.
+
+Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid
+out before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of the
+most precious, and after books came pictures. 'What any man can write,
+surely I may read!' he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios.
+'I like books about books,' he confesses, the test of the book-lover. 'I
+love,' he says, 'to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not
+walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.' He
+was the finest of all readers, far more instant than Coleridge; not to
+be taken unawares by a Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most
+extraordinary persons of the age,' he says of him, on but a slight and
+partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the _Lyrical Ballads_ are
+confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Among
+the Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it,' and can define precisely
+the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of
+escape, to Manning: 'It is full of original thought, but it does not
+often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of
+expression.' I choose these instances because the final test of a critic
+is in his reception of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found it
+much easier to be right, before every one else, about Webster, and Ford,
+and Cyril Tourneur, than to be the accurate critic that he was of
+Coleridge, at the very time when he was under the 'whiff and wind' of
+Coleridge's influence. And in writing of pictures, though his knowledge
+is not so great nor his instinct so wholly 'according to knowledge,' he
+can write as no one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that his
+very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantly
+detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of a
+would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin.
+
+Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has
+been no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, so
+intimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he
+speaks of the stage, as in that tiny masterpiece, _On the Acting of
+Munden_, which ends the book of _Elia_, with its great close, the
+Beethoven soft wondering close, after all the surges: 'He understands a
+leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace
+materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.'
+He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of Miss Kelly.
+When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the very
+wires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in love
+with Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words that
+might apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying of
+Mrs. Jordan, that 'she seemed one whom care could not come near; a
+privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness.'
+Then he goes on: 'This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit,
+escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I may
+use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good
+and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are
+visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she
+does so, I am not sure that she is not greatest.' Is not this, with all
+its precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a poetry made up of
+no poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but 'of imagination all
+compact,' poetry in substance?
+
+Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. 'The earth,
+and sea, and sky (when all is said),' he admitted, 'is but as a house to
+live in'; and, 'separate from the pleasure of your company,' he assured
+Wordsworth, 'I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I
+have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and
+intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with
+dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the
+innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons,
+play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden,
+the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles--life
+awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of
+being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun
+shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls,
+parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens,
+the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
+things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of
+satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks
+about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand
+from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of
+London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's
+catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he
+could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death),
+'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter
+not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets,
+their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his
+friends, 'the very streets, he says,' writes Mary, 'altering every day.'
+London was to him the new, better Eden. 'A garden was the primitive
+prison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself out
+of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers,
+goldsmiths, taverns, play-houses, satires, epigrams, puns--these all
+came in on the town part, and thither side of innocence.' To love London
+so was part of his human love, and in his praise of streets he has done
+as much for the creation and perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth ('by
+whose system,' Mary Lamb conjectured, 'it was doubtful whether a liver
+in towns had a soul to be saved') has done by his praise of flowers and
+hills.
+
+And yet, for all his 'disparagement of heath and highlands,' as he
+confessed to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciation
+of natural things, once brought before them, as he was in his
+appreciation of the things of art and the mind and man's making. He was
+a great walker, and sighs once, before his release from the desk: 'I
+wish I were a caravan driver or a penny post man, to earn my bread in
+air and sunshine.' We have seen what he wrote to Wordsworth about his
+mountains, before he had seen them. This is what he writes of them to
+Manning, after he has seen them: 'Such an impression I never received
+from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again.... In
+fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which
+tourists call _romantic_, which I very much suspected before.' And to
+Coleridge he writes: 'I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the
+last day I live. They haunt me perpetually.' All this Lamb saw and felt,
+because no beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But he
+wrote of it only in his letters, which were all of himself; because he
+put into his published writings only the best or the rarest or the
+accustomed and familiar part of himself, the part which he knew by
+heart.
+
+
+III
+
+Beyond any writer pre-eminent for charm, Lamb had salt and sting. There
+is hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere
+exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with
+something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says,
+briefly: 'Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by
+Affectation'; but then he is also never more himself than when he
+expands and develops, as in this rendering of the hisses which damned
+his play in Drury Lane:
+
+
+     It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a
+     congregation of mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows
+     and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness.
+     'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should
+     give His favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to
+     discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to
+     encourage warmly, to counsel wisely: to sing with, to drink with,
+     and to kiss with: and that they should turn them into the mouths of
+     adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit
+     breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse
+     and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow creatures who are
+     desirous to please them!
+
+
+Or it may be a cold in the head which starts the heroic agility of his
+tongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as
+full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly
+fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an
+idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake,
+which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some
+unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite
+through the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad,
+keeps double motion, like the earth--running the primary circuit of the
+tune, and still revolving upon its own axis'; and he can condense into
+six words the whole life-history and the soul's essential secret of
+Coleridge, when he says of him, in almost the last fragment of prose
+that he wrote, 'he had a hunger for eternity.'
+
+To read Lamb makes a man more humane, more tolerant, more dainty;
+incites to every natural piety, strengthens reverence; while it clears
+his brain of whatever dull fumes may have lodged there, stirs up all his
+senses to wary alertness, and actually quickens his vitality, like high
+pure air. It is, in the familiar phrase, 'a liberal education'; but it
+is that finer education which sets free the spirit. His natural piety,
+in the full sense of the word, seems to me deeper and more sensitive
+than that of any other English writer. Kindness, in him, embraces
+mankind, not with the wide engulfing arms of philanthropy, but with an
+individual caress. He is almost the sufficient type of virtue, so far as
+virtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in him which is
+not the bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had an
+unsocial origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noble
+things, or light up an unsuspected 'soul of goodness in things evil.'
+
+No man ever so loved his friends, or was so honest with them, or made
+such a religion of friendship. His character of Hazlitt in the 'Letter
+to Southey' is the finest piece of emotional prose which he ever wrote,
+and his pen is inspired whenever he speaks of Coleridge. 'Good people,
+as they are called,' he writes to Wordsworth, 'won't serve. I want
+individuals. I am made up of queer points and want so many answering
+needles.' He counts over his friends in public, like a child counting
+over his toys, when some one has offered an insult to one of them. He
+has delicacies and devotions towards his friends, so subtle and so noble
+that they make every man his friend. And, that love may deepen into awe,
+there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was
+made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with
+what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that
+paradox of his position, by which he supports that by which he is
+supported.
+
+It is, then, this 'human, too human' creature, who comes so close to our
+hearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or at
+least in the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact,
+flawless in technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of
+'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well become
+despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so
+occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastly
+vest of white patchwork,' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; what is it
+that gives to a style, which no man can analyse, its 'terseness, its
+jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?' Those are his own
+words, not used of himself; but do they not do something to define what
+can, after all, never be explained?
+
+
+IV
+
+Lamb's defects were his qualities, and nature drove them inward,
+concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or
+healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering
+tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the
+brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find Lamb writing to Godwin,
+
+
+     'cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an
+     author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common
+     letter into sane prose.... Ten thousand times I have confessed to
+     you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any
+     comprehensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or
+     perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This
+     infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two
+     little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader,
+     however partial, can find any story.'
+
+
+'My brain,' he says, in a letter to Wordsworth, 'is desultory, and
+snatches off hints from things.' And, in a wise critical letter to
+Southey, he says, summing up himself in a single phrase: 'I never judge
+system-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars.'
+
+Is he, in these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, really
+apologising for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne,
+who (it is Lamb that says it) 'anticipated all the discoveries of
+succeeding essayists,' affected no humility in the statement of almost
+exactly the same mental complexion. 'I take the first argument that
+fortune offers me,' he tells us; 'they are all equally good for me; I
+never design to treat them in their totality, for I never see the whole
+of anything, nor do those see it who promise to show it to me.... In
+general I love to seize things by some unwonted lustre.' There, in the
+two greatest of the essayists, one sees precisely what goes to the
+making of the essayist. First, a beautiful disorder: the simultaneous
+attack and appeal of contraries, a converging multitude of dreams,
+memories, thoughts, sensations, without mental preference, or conscious
+guiding of the judgment; and then, order in disorder, a harmony more
+properly musical than logical, a separating and return of many elements,
+which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of _Elia_ called _Old
+China_, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You
+will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle
+memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the
+actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant,
+lovely last sentence is like the refrain which returns at the end of a
+poem.
+
+Lamb was a mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; he
+saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of
+social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney,
+a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked
+exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the
+rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his
+excesses something of 'the good clerk.'
+
+Lamb seemed to his contemporaries notably eccentric, but he was nearer
+than them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from the
+very heart of light, and returned thither after the circuit. Where
+Coleridge lost himself in clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearest
+short-cut, and, having reached the goal, went no step beyond it.
+
+And he was a bee for honey, not, like Coleridge, a browsing ox. To him
+the essence of delight was choice; and choice, with him, was readier
+when the prize was far-fetched and dear bought: a rarity of manners,
+books, pictures, or whatever was human or touched humanity. 'Opinion,'
+he said, 'is a species of property; and though I am always desirous to
+share with my friends to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keep
+some tenets and some property properly my own.' And then he found, in
+rarity, one of the qualities of the best; and was never, like most
+others, content with the good, or in any danger of confusing it with the
+best. He was the only man of that great age, which had Coleridge, and
+Wordsworth, and Shelley, and the rest, whose taste was flawless. All the
+others, who seemed to be marching so straight to so determined a goal,
+went astray at one time or other; only Lamb, who was always wandering,
+never lost sense of direction, or failed to know how far he had strayed
+from the road.
+
+The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden
+in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the
+tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to
+the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and,
+also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike,
+was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with
+the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling;
+madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense.
+In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider
+well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the
+intellect. I know one who read the essays of _Elia_ with intense
+delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She
+had seen so well through the fun to its deep inner meaning that the fun
+had not detained her. She had found in all of it nothing but a pure
+intellectual reason, beyond logic, where reason is one with intuition.
+
+1905.
+
+
+
+
+VILLON
+
+
+Villon was the first modern poet; he remains the most modern of poets.
+One requires a certain amount of old French, together with some
+acquaintance with the argot of the time, to understand the words in
+which he has written down his poems; many allusions to people and things
+have only just begun to be cleared up, but, apart from these things, no
+poet has ever brought himself closer to us, taken us into his confidence
+more simply, than this _personnage peu recommandable, faineant, ivrogne,
+joueur, debauche, ecornifleur, et, qui pis est, souteneur de filles,
+escroc, voleur, crocheteur de portes et de coffres_. The most
+disreputable of poets, he confesses himself to us with a frankness in
+which shamelessness is difficult to distinguish from humility. M. Gaston
+Paris, who for the most part is content to take him as he is, for better
+for worse, finds it necessary to apologise for him when he comes to the
+ballad of _La Grosse Margot_: this, he professes, we need not take as a
+personal confession, but as a mere exercise in composition! But if we
+are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even _la grosse
+Margot_ from her place in his life. He was no dabbler in infamy, but one
+who loved infamous things for their own sake. He loved everything for
+its own sake: _la grosse Margot_ in the flesh, _les dames du temps
+jadis_ in the spirit,
+
+
+     Sausses, brouets et gros poissons,
+     Tartes, flaons, oefs frits et pochez,
+     Perdus, et en toutes facons,
+
+
+his mother, _le bon royaume de France_, and above all, Paris. _Il a
+parcouru toute la France sans rapporter une seule impression de
+campagne. C'est un poete de ville, plus encore: un poete de quartier. Il
+n'est vraiment chez lui que sur la Montague Sainte-Genevieve, entre le
+Palais, les colleges, le Chatelet, les tavernes, les rotisseries, les
+tripots et les rues ou Marion l'Idole et la grande Jeanne de Bretagne
+tiennent leur 'publique ecole'._ It is in this world that he lived, for
+this world that he wrote. _Fils du peuple, entre par l'instruction dans
+la classe lettree, puis declasse par ses vices, il dut a son humble
+origine de rester en communication constante avec les sources eternelles
+de toute vraie poesie._ And so he came into a literature of formalists,
+like a child, a vigorous, unabashed, malicious child, into a company of
+greybeards.
+
+Villon, before any one in French literature, called things by their
+names, made poetry as Homer made it, with words that meant facts. He was
+a thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to be
+sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him,
+to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his
+soul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit,
+forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in the
+cloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dream
+exquisitely over the dead ladies who had once been young, and who had
+gone like last year's snow, and then turn to the account-book of his
+satirical malice against the clerks and usurers for whom he was making
+the testament of his poverty. He knew winter, 'when the wolves live on
+wind,' and how the gallows looks when one stands under it. And he knew
+all the secrets of the art of verse-making which courtly poets, like the
+King, used for the stringing together of delicate trifles, ornamental
+evasions of facts. He was no poet of the people, but a scholar vagabond,
+loving the gutter; and so he has the sincerity of the artist as well as
+the only half-convincing sincerity of the man. There has been no greater
+artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main
+part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long
+forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself.
+
+1901.
+
+
+
+
+CASANOVA AT DUX: AN UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER OF HISTORY
+
+I
+
+
+The _Memoirs_ of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a
+bad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students
+of literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr.
+Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books
+in the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova,
+published in _Affirmations_, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety.
+But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to
+take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in
+his relation to human problems. And yet these _Memoirs_ are perhaps the
+most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth
+century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality,
+one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they
+are more entertaining than _Gil Blas_, or _Monte Cristo_, or any of the
+imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been
+written in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved
+life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the
+most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
+indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows
+us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm
+resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an
+adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester,
+one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a
+vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his
+own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live
+to write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no
+longer.
+
+And his _Memoirs_ take one all over Europe, giving sidelights, all the
+more valuable in being almost accidental, upon many of the affairs and
+people most interesting to us during two-thirds of the eighteenth
+century. Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice, of Spanish and Italian
+parentage, on April 2, 1725; he died at the Chateau of Dux, in Bohemia,
+on June 4, 1798. In that lifetime of seventy-three years he travelled,
+as his _Memoirs_ show us, in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, England,
+Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Turkey; he met
+Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Montmorency, Fontenelle, d'Alembert and
+Crebillon at Paris, George III. in London, Louis XV. at Fontainebleau,
+Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg, Benedict XII. at Rome, Joseph II.
+at Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci. Imprisoned by the
+Inquisitors of State in the _Piombi_ at Venice, he made, in 1755, the
+most famous escape in history. His _Memoirs_, as we have them, break off
+abruptly at the moment when he is expecting a safe conduct, and the
+permission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings. He did
+return, as we know from documents in the Venetian archives; he returned
+as secret agent of the Inquisitors, and remained in their service from
+1774 until 1782. At the end of 1782 he left Venice; and next year we
+find him in Paris, where, in 1784, he met Count Waldstein at the
+Venetian Ambassador's, and was invited by him to become his librarian at
+Dux. He accepted, and for the fourteen remaining years of his life lived
+at Dux, where he wrote his _Memoirs_.
+
+Casanova died in 1798, but nothing was heard of the _Memoirs_ (which the
+Prince de Ligne, in his own _Memoirs_, tells us that Casanova had read
+to him, and in which he found _du dramatique, de la rapidite, du
+comique, de la philosophie, des choses neuves, sublimes, inimitables
+meme_) until the year 1820, when a certain Carlo Angiolini brought to
+the publishing house of Brockhaus, in Leipzig, a manuscript entitled
+_Histoire de ma vie jusqu'a l'an_ 1797, in the handwriting of Casanova.
+This manuscript, which I have examined at Leipzig, is written on
+foolscap paper, rather rough and yellow; it is written on both sides of
+the page, and in sheets or quires; here and there the paging shows that
+some pages have been omitted, and in their place are smaller sheets of
+thinner and whiter paper, all in Casanova's handsome, unmistakable
+handwriting. The manuscript is done up in twelve bundles, corresponding
+with the twelve volumes of the original edition; and only in one place
+is there a gap. The fourth and fifth chapters of the twelfth volume are
+missing, as the editor of the original edition points out, adding: 'It
+is not probable that these two chapters have been withdrawn from the
+manuscript of Casanova by a strange hand; everything leads us to believe
+that the author himself suppressed them, in the intention, no doubt, of
+re-writing them, but without having found time to do so.' The manuscript
+ends abruptly with the year 1774, and not with the year 1797, as the
+title would lead us to suppose.
+
+This manuscript, in its original state, has never been printed. Herr
+Brockhaus, on obtaining possession of the manuscript, had it translated
+into German by Wilhelm Schuetz, but with many omissions and alterations,
+and published this translation, volume by volume, from 1822 to 1828,
+under the title, _Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de
+Seingalt_. While the German edition was in course of publication, Herr
+Brockhaus employed a certain Jean Laforgue, a professor of the French
+language at Dresden, to revise the original manuscript, correcting
+Casanova's vigorous, but at times incorrect, and often somewhat Italian,
+French according to his own notions of elegant writing, suppressing
+passages which seemed too free-spoken from the point of view of morals
+and of politics, and altering the names of some of the persons referred
+to, or replacing those names by initials. This revised text was
+published in twelve volumes, the first two in 1826, the third and fourth
+in 1828, the fifth to the eighth in 1832, and the ninth to the twelfth
+in 1837; the first four bearing the imprint of Brockhaus at Leipzig and
+Ponthieu et Cie at Paris; the next four the imprint of Heideloff et
+Campe at Paris; and the last four nothing but _A Bruxelles_. The volumes
+are all uniform, and were all really printed for the firm of Brockhaus.
+This, however far from representing the real text, is the only
+authoritative edition, and my references throughout this article will
+always be to this edition.
+
+In turning over the manuscript at Leipzig, I read some of the suppressed
+passages, and regretted their suppression; but Herr Brockhaus, the
+present head of the firm, assured me that they are not really very
+considerable in number. The damage, however, to the vivacity of the
+whole narrative, by the persistent alterations of M. Laforgue, is
+incalculable. I compared many passages, and found scarcely three
+consecutive sentences untouched. Herr Brockhaus (whose courtesy I cannot
+sufficiently acknowledge) was kind enough to have a passage copied out
+for me, which I afterwards read over, and checked word by word. In this
+passage Casanova says, for instance: _Elle venoit presque tous les jours
+lui faire une belle visite._ This is altered into: _Cependant chaque
+jour Therese venait lui faire une visite._ Casanova says that some one
+_avoit, comme de raison, forme le projet d'allier Dieu avec le diable_.
+This is made to read: _Qui, comme de raison, avait saintement forme le
+projet d'allier les interets du ciel aux oeuvres de ce monde._
+Casanova tell us that Therese would not commit a mortal sin _pour
+devenir reine du monde_: _pour une couronne_, corrects the indefatigable
+Laforgue. _Il ne savoit que lui dire_ becomes _Dans cet etat de
+perplexite_; and so forth. It must, therefore, be realised that the
+_Memoirs_, as we have them, are only a kind of pale tracing of the vivid
+colours of the original.
+
+When Casanova's _Memoirs_ were first published, doubts were expressed as
+to their authenticity, first by Ugo Foscolo (in the _Westminster
+Review_, 1827), then by Querard, supposed to be an authority in regard
+to anonymous and pseudonymous writings, finally by Paul Lacroix, _le
+bibliophile Jacob_, who suggested, or rather expressed his 'certainty,'
+that the real author of the _Memoirs_ was Stendhal, whose 'mind,
+character, ideas and style' he seemed to recognise on every page. This
+theory, as foolish and as unsupported as the Baconian theory of
+Shakespeare, has been carelessly accepted, or at all events accepted as
+possible, by many good scholars who have never taken the trouble to look
+into the matter for themselves. It was finally disproved by a series of
+articles of Armand Baschet, entitled _Preuves curieuses de
+l'authenticite des Memoires de Jacques Casanova de Seingalt_, in _Le
+Livre_, January, February, April and May, 1881; and these proofs were
+further corroborated by two articles of Alessandro d'Ancona, entitled
+_Un Avventuriere del Secolo XVIII._, in the _Nuova Antologia_, February
+1 and August 1, 1882. Baschet had never himself seen the manuscript of
+the _Memoirs_, but he had learnt all the facts about it from Messrs.
+Brockhaus, and he had himself examined the numerous papers relating to
+Casanova in the Venetian archives. A similar examination was made at the
+Frari at about the same time by the Abbe Fulin; and I myself, in 1894,
+not knowing at the time that the discovery had been already made, made
+it over again for myself. There the arrest of Casanova, his imprisonment
+in the _Piombi_, the exact date of escape, the name of the monk who
+accompanied him, are all authenticated by documents contained in the
+_riferte_ of the Inquisition of State; there are the bills for the
+repairs of the roof and walls of the cell from which he escaped; there
+are the reports of the spies on whose information he was arrested, for
+his too dangerous free-spokenness in matters of religion and morality.
+The same archives contain forty-eight letters of Casanova to the
+Inquisitors of State, dating from 1763 to 1782, among the _Riferte dei
+Confidenti_, or reports of secret agents; the earliest asking
+permission to return to Venice, the rest giving information in regard to
+the immoralities of the city, after his return there; all in the same
+handwriting as the _Memoirs_. Further proof could scarcely be needed,
+but Baschet has done more than prove the authenticity, he has proved the
+extraordinary veracity, of the _Memoirs_. F. W. Barthold, in _Die
+Geschichtlichen Persoenlichkeiten in J. Casanova's Memoiren_, 2 vols.,
+1846, had already examined about a hundred of Casanova's allusions to
+well-known people, showing the perfect exactitude of all but six or
+seven, and out of these six or seven inexactitudes ascribing only a
+single one to the author's intention. Baschet and d'Ancona both carry on
+what Barthold had begun; other investigators, in France, Italy and
+Germany, have followed them; and two things are now certain, first, that
+Casanova himself wrote the _Memoirs_ published under his name, though
+not textually in the precise form in which we have them; and, second,
+that as their veracity becomes more and more evident as they are
+confronted with more and more independent witnesses, it is only fair to
+suppose that they are equally truthful where the facts are such as could
+only have been known to Casanova himself.
+
+
+II
+
+For more than two-thirds of a century it has been known that Casanova
+spent the last fourteen years of his life at Dux, that he wrote his
+_Memoirs_ there, and that he died there. During all this time people
+have been discussing the authenticity and the truthfulness of the
+_Memoirs_, they have been searching for information about Casanova in
+various directions, and yet hardly any one has ever taken the trouble,
+or obtained the permission, to make a careful examination in precisely
+the one place where information was most likely to be found. The very
+existence of the manuscripts at Dux was known only to a few, and to most
+of these only on hearsay; and thus the singular good fortune was
+reserved for me, on my visit to Count Waldstein in September 1899, to be
+the first to discover the most interesting things contained in these
+manuscripts. M. Octave Uzanne, though he had not himself visited Dux,
+had indeed procured copies of some of the manuscripts, a few of which
+were published by him in _Le Livre_, in 1887 and 1889. But with the
+death of _Le Livre_ in 1889 the _Casanova inedit_ came to an end, and
+has never, so far as I know, been continued elsewhere. Beyond the
+publication of these fragments, nothing has been done with the
+manuscripts at Dux, nor has an account of them ever been given by any
+one who has been allowed to examine them.
+
+For five years, ever since I had discovered the documents in the
+Venetian archives, I had wanted to go to Dux; and in 1899, when I was
+staying with Count Luetzow at Zampach, in Bohemia, I found the way kindly
+opened for me. Count Waldstein, the present head of the family, with
+extreme courtesy, put all his manuscripts at my disposal, and invited me
+to stay with him. Unluckily, he was called away on the morning of the
+day that I reached Dux. He had left everything ready for me, and I was
+shown over the castle by a friend of his, Dr. Kittel, whose courtesy I
+should like also to acknowledge. After a hurried visit to the castle we
+started on the long drive to Oberleutensdorf, a smaller Schloss near
+Komotau, where the Waldstein family was then staying. The air was sharp
+and bracing; the two Russian horses flew like the wind; I was whirled
+along in an unfamiliar darkness, through a strange country, black with
+coal mines, through dark pine woods, where a wild peasantry dwelt in
+little mining towns. Here and there, a few men and women passed us on
+the road, in their Sunday finery; then a long space of silence, and we
+were in the open country, galloping between broad fields; and always in
+a haze of lovely hills, which I saw more distinctly as we drove back
+next morning.
+
+The return to Dux was like a triumphal entry, as we dashed through the
+market-place filled with people come for the Monday market, pots and
+pans and vegetables strewn in heaps all over the ground, on the rough
+paving stones, up to the great gateway of the castle, leaving but just
+room for us to drive through their midst. I had the sensation of an
+enormous building: all Bohemian castles are big, but this one was like a
+royal palace. Set there in the midst of the town, after the Bohemian
+fashion, it opens at the back upon great gardens, as if it were in the
+midst of the country. I walked through room after room, along corridor
+after corridor; everywhere there were pictures, everywhere portraits of
+Wallenstein, and battle-scenes in which he led on his troops. The
+library, which was formed, or at least arranged, by Casanova, and which
+remains as he left it, contains some 25,000 volumes, some of them of
+considerable value; one of the most famous books in Bohemian literature,
+Skala's _History of the Church_, exists in manuscript at Dux, and it is
+from this manuscript that the two published volumes of it were printed.
+The library forms part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing
+of the castle. The first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms
+are arranged, in a decorative way, covering the ceiling and the walls
+with strange patterns. The second room contains pottery, collected by
+Casanova's Waldstein on his Eastern travels. The third room is full of
+curious mechanical toys, and cabinets, and carvings in ivory. Finally,
+we come to the library, contained in the two innermost rooms. The
+book-shelves are painted white, and reach to the low-vaulted ceilings,
+which are white-washed. At the end of a bookcase, in the corner of one
+of the windows, hangs a fine engraved portrait of Casanova.
+
+After I had been all over the castle, so long Casanova's home, I was
+taken to Count Waldstein's study, and left there with the manuscripts. I
+found six huge cardboard cases, large enough to contain foolscap paper,
+lettered on the back: _Graefl. Waldstein-Wartenberg'sches Real
+Fideicommiss. Dux-Oberleutensdorf: Handschriftlicher Nachlass Casanova_.
+The cases were arranged so as to stand like books; they opened at the
+side; and on opening them, one after another, I found series after
+series of manuscripts roughly thrown together, after some pretence at
+arrangement, and lettered with a very generalised description of
+contents. The greater part of the manuscripts were in Casanova's
+handwriting, which I could see gradually beginning to get shaky with
+years. Most were written in French, a certain number in Italian. The
+beginning of a catalogue in the library, though said to be by him, was
+not in his handwriting. Perhaps it was taken down at his dictation.
+There were also some copies of Italian and Latin poems not written by
+him. Then there were many big bundles of letters addressed to him,
+dating over more than thirty years. Almost all the rest was in his own
+handwriting.
+
+I came first upon the smaller manuscripts, among which I found, jumbled
+together on the same and on separate scraps of paper, washing-bills,
+accounts, hotel bills, lists of letters written, first drafts of letters
+with many erasures, notes on books, theological and mathematical notes,
+sums, Latin quotations, French and Italian verses, with variants, a long
+list of classical names which have and have not been _francises_, with
+reasons for and against; 'what I must wear at Dresden'; headings without
+anything to follow, such as: 'Reflexions on respiration, on the true
+cause of youth--the crows'; a new method of winning the lottery at Rome;
+recipes, among which is a long printed list of perfumes sold at Spa; a
+newspaper cutting, dated Prague, 25th October 1790, on the
+thirty-seventh balloon ascent of Blanchard; thanks to some 'noble donor'
+for the gift of a dog called 'Finette'; a passport for _Monsieur de
+Casanova, Venitien, allant d'ici en Hollande_, October 13, 1758 (_Ce
+Passeport bon pour quinze jours_), together with an order for
+post-horses, gratis, from Paris to Bordeaux and Bayonne.[1]
+
+Occasionally, one gets a glimpse into his daily life at Dux, as in this
+note, scribbled on a fragment of paper (here and always I translate the
+French literally): 'I beg you to tell my servant what the biscuits are
+that I like to eat, dipped in wine, to fortify my stomach. I believe
+that they can all be found at Roman's.' Usually, however, these notes,
+though often suggested by something closely personal, branch off into
+more general considerations; or else begin with general considerations,
+and end with a case in point. Thus, for instance, a fragment of three
+pages begins: 'A compliment which is only made to gild the pill is a
+positive impertinence, and Monsieur Bailli is nothing but a charlatan;
+the monarch ought to have spit in his face, but the monarch trembled
+with fear.' A manuscript entitled _Essai d'Egoisme_, dated, 'Dux, this
+27th June, 1769,' contains, in the midst of various reflections, an
+offer to let his _appartement_ in return for enough money to
+'tranquillise for six months two Jew creditors at Prague.' Another
+manuscript is headed 'Pride and Folly,' and begins with a long series of
+antitheses, such as: 'All fools are not proud, and all proud men are
+fools. Many fools are happy, all proud men are unhappy.' On the same
+sheet follows this instance or application:
+
+
+     Whether it is possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest
+     beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We
+     must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards
+     see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for
+     there are extraordinary people in the world. My brother, in short,
+     ought to have composed the distich, because he says so, and because
+     he confided it to me tete-a-tete. I had, it is true, difficulty in
+     believing him; but what is one to do? Either one must believe, or
+     suppose him capable of telling a lie which could only be told by a
+     fool; and that is impossible, for all Europe knows that my brother
+     is not a fool.
+
+
+Here, as so often in these manuscripts, we seem to see Casanova thinking
+on paper. He uses scraps of paper (sometimes the blank page of a letter,
+on the other side of which we see the address) as a kind of informal
+diary; and it is characteristic of him, of the man of infinitely curious
+mind, which this adventurer really was, that there are so few merely
+personal notes among these casual jottings. Often, they are purely
+abstract; at times, metaphysical _jeux d'esprit_, like the sheet of
+fourteen 'Different Wagers,' which begins:
+
+
+     I wager that it is not true that a man who weighs a hundred pounds
+     will weigh more if you kill him. I wager that if there is any
+     difference, he will weigh less. I wager that diamond powder has not
+     sufficient force to kill a man.
+
+
+Side by side with these fanciful excursions into science, come more
+serious ones, as in the note on Algebra, which traces its progress since
+the year 1494, before which 'it had only arrived at the solution of
+problems of the second degree, inclusive.' A scrap of paper tells us
+that Casanova 'did not like regular towns.' 'I like,' he says, 'Venice,
+Rome, Florence, Milan, Constantinople, Genoa.' Then he becomes abstract
+and inquisitive again, and writes two pages, full of curious,
+out-of-the-way learning, on the name of Paradise:
+
+
+     The name of Paradise is a name in Genesis which indicates a place
+     of pleasure (_lieu voluptueux_): this term is Persian. This place
+     of pleasure was made by God before he had created man.
+
+
+It may be remembered that Casanova quarrelled with Voltaire, because
+Voltaire had told him frankly that his translation of _L'Ecossaise_ was
+a bad translation. It is piquant to read another note written in this
+style of righteous indignation:
+
+
+     Voltaire, the hardy Voltaire, whose pen is without bit or bridle;
+     Voltaire, who devoured the Bible, and ridiculed our dogmas, doubts,
+     and after having made proselytes to impiety, is not ashamed, being
+     reduced to the extremity of life, to ask for the sacraments, and to
+     cover his body with more relics than St. Louis had at Amboise.
+
+
+Here is an argument more in keeping with the tone of the _Memoirs_:
+
+
+     A girl who is pretty and good, and as virtuous as you please, ought
+     not to take it ill that a man, carried away by her charms, should
+     set himself to the task of making their conquest. If this man
+     cannot please her by any means, even if his passion be criminal,
+     she ought never to take offence at it, nor treat him unkindly; she
+     ought to be gentle, and pity him, if she does not love him, and
+     think it enough to keep invincibly hold upon her own duty.
+
+
+Occasionally he touches upon aesthetical matters, as in a fragment which
+begins with liberal definition of beauty:
+
+
+     Harmony makes beauty, says M. de S. P. (Bernardin de St. Pierre),
+     but the definition is too short, if he thinks he has said
+     everything. Here is mine. Remember that the subject is
+     metaphysical. An object really beautiful ought to seem beautiful to
+     all whose eyes fall upon it. That is all; there is nothing more to
+     be said.
+
+
+At times we have an anecdote and its commentary, perhaps jotted down for
+use in that latter part of the _Memoirs_ which was never written, or
+which has been lost. Here is a single sheet, dated 'this 2nd September,
+1791,' and headed _Souvenir_:
+
+
+     The Prince de Rosenberg said to me, as we went down stairs, that
+     Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de
+     Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa
+     d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city
+     library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal
+     laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the
+     Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret.' 'Is His
+     Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (_sic_) he
+     will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is a
+     monument there which relates to him when he was Grand Duke.' 'In
+     that case, His Majesty can also see my critical remarks on the
+     Egyptian prints.'
+
+     The Emperor asked me this morning, 6th October, how I employed my
+     time at Dux, and I told him that I was making an Italian anthology.
+     'You have all the Italians, then?' 'All, sire.' See what a lie
+     leads to. If I had not lied in saying that I was making an
+     anthology, I should not have found myself obliged to lie again in
+     saying that we have all the Italian poets. If the Emperor comes to
+     Dux, I shall kill myself.
+
+
+'They say that this Dux is a delightful spot,' says Casanova in one of
+the most personal of his notes, 'and I see that it might be for many;
+but not for me, for what delights me in my old age is independent of the
+place which I inhabit. When I do not sleep I dream, and when I am tired
+of dreaming I blacken paper, then I read, and most often reject all that
+my pen has vomited.' Here we see him blackening paper, on every
+occasion, and for every purpose. In one bundle I found an unfinished
+story about Roland, and some adventure with women in a cave; then a
+'Meditation on arising from sleep, 19th May 1789'; then a 'Short
+Reflection of a Philosopher who finds himself thinking of procuring his
+own death. At Dux, on getting out of bed on 13th October 1793, day
+dedicated to St. Lucy, memorable in my too long life.' A big budget,
+containing cryptograms, is headed 'Grammatical Lottery'; and there is
+the title-page of a treatise on _The Duplication of the Hexahedron,
+demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies
+of Europe_.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all
+stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear
+in half a dozen tentative forms:
+
+
+     _Sans mystere point de plaisirs,_
+     _Sans silence point de mystere._
+     _Charme divin de mes loisirs,_
+     _Solitude! que tu m'es chere!_
+
+
+Then there are a number of more or less complete manuscripts of some
+extent. There is the manuscript of the translation of Homer's _Iliad, in
+ottava rima_ (published in Venice, 1775-8); of the _Histoire de Venise_,
+of the _Icosameron_, a curious book published in 1787, purporting to be
+'translated from English,' but really an original work of Casanova;
+_Philocalies sur les Sottises des Mortels_, a long manuscript never
+published; the sketch and beginning of _Le Polemarque, ou la Calomnie
+demasquee par la presence d'esprit. Tragicomedie en trois actes,
+composee a Dux dans le mois de Juin de l'Annee, 1791_, which recurs
+again under the form of the _Polemoscope: La Lorgnette menteuse ou la
+Calomnie demasquee_, acted before the Princess de Ligne, at her chateau
+at Teplitz, 1791. There is a treatise in Italian, _Delle Passioni_;
+there are long dialogues, such as _Le Philosophe et le Theologien_, and
+_Reve: Dieu-Moi_; there is the _Songe d'un Quart d'Heure_, divided into
+minutes; there is the very lengthy criticism of _Bernardin de
+Saint-Pierre_; there is the _Confutation d'une Censure indiscrete qu'on
+lit dans la Gazette de Iena, 19 Juin 1789_; with another large
+manuscript, unfortunately imperfect, first called _L'Insulte_, and then
+_Placet au Public_, dated 'Dux, this 2nd March, 1790,' referring to the
+same criticism on the _Icosameron_ and the _Fuite des Prisons_.
+_L'Histoire de ma Fuite des Prisons de la Republique de Venise, qu'on
+appelle les Plombs_, which is the first draft of the most famous part of
+the _Memoirs_, was published at Leipzig in 1788; and, having read it in
+the Marcian Library at Venice, I am not surprised to learn from this
+indignant document that it was printed 'under the care of a young Swiss,
+who had the talent to commit a hundred faults of orthography.'
+
+
+III
+
+We come now to the documents directly relating to the _Memoirs_, and
+among these are several attempts at a preface, in which we see the
+actual preface coming gradually into form. One is entitled _Casanova au
+Lecteur_, another _Histoire de mon Existence_, and a third _Preface_.
+There is also a brief and characteristic _Precis de ma vie_, dated
+November 17, 1797. Some of these have been printed in _Le Livre_, 1887.
+But by far the most important manuscript that I discovered, one which,
+apparently, I am the first to discover, is a manuscript entitled
+_Extrait du Chapitre 4 et 5_. It is written on paper similar to that on
+which the _Memoirs_ are written; the pages are numbered 104-148; and
+though it is described as _Extrait_, it seems to contain, at all events,
+the greater part of the missing chapters to which I have already
+referred, Chapters IV. and V. of the last volume of the _Memoirs_. In
+this manuscript we find Armelline and Scolastica, whose story is
+interrupted by the abrupt ending of Chapter III.; we find Mariuccia of
+Vol. VII., Chapter IX., who married a hairdresser; and we find also
+Jaconine, whom Casanova recognises as his daughter, 'much prettier than
+Sophia, the daughter of Therese Pompeati, whom I had left at London.'[3]
+It is curious that this very important manuscript, which supplies the
+one missing link in the _Memoirs_, should never have been discovered by
+any of the few people who have had the opportunity of looking over the
+Dux manuscripts. I am inclined to explain it by the fact that the case
+in which I found this manuscript contains some papers not relating to
+Casanova. Probably, those who looked into this case looked no further. I
+have told Herr Brockhaus of my discovery, and I hope to see Chapters IV.
+and V. in their places when the long-looked-for edition of the complete
+text is at length given to the world.
+
+Another manuscript which I found tells with great piquancy the whole
+story of the Abbe de Brosses' ointment, the curing of the Princess de
+Conti's pimples, and the birth of the Duc de Montpensier, which is told
+very briefly, and with much less point, in the _Memoirs_ (vol. iii., p.
+327). Readers of the _Memoirs_ will remember the duel at Warsaw with
+Count Branicki in 1766 (vol. x., pp. 274-320), an affair which attracted
+a good deal of attention at the time, and of which there is an account
+in a letter from the Abbe Taruffi to the dramatist, Francesco Albergati,
+dated Warsaw, March 19, 1766, quoted in Ernesto Masi's _Life of
+Albergati_, Bologna, 1878. A manuscript at Dux in Casanova's handwriting
+gives an account of this duel in the third person; it is entitled,
+_Description de l'affaire arrivee a Varsovie le 5 Mars, 1766_. D'Ancona,
+in the _Nuova Antologia_ (vol. lxvii., p. 412), referring to the Abbe
+Taruffi's account, mentions what he considers to be a slight
+discrepancy: that Taruffi refers to the _danseuse_, about whom the duel
+was fought, as La Casacci, while Casanova refers to her as La Catai. In
+this manuscript Casanova always refers to her as La Casacci; La Catai is
+evidently one of M. Laforgue's arbitrary alterations of the text.
+
+In turning over another manuscript, I was caught by the name Charpillon,
+which every reader of the _Memoirs_ will remember as the name of the
+harpy by whom Casanova suffered so much in London, in 1763-4. This
+manuscript begins by saying: 'I have been in London for six months and
+have been to see them (that is, the mother and daughter) in their own
+house,' where he finds nothing but 'swindlers, who cause all who go
+there to lose their money in gambling.' This manuscript adds some
+details to the story told in the ninth and tenth volumes of the
+_Memoirs_, and refers to the meeting with the Charpillons four and a
+half years before, described in Volume V., pages 482-485. It is written
+in a tone of great indignation. Elsewhere, I found a letter written by
+Casanova, but not signed, referring to an anonymous letter which he had
+received in reference to the Charpillons, and ending: 'My handwriting is
+known.' It was not until the last that I came upon great bundles of
+letters addressed to Casanova, and so carefully preserved that little
+scraps of paper, on which postscripts are written, are still in their
+places. One still sees the seals on the backs of many of the letters, on
+paper which has slightly yellowed with age, leaving the ink, however,
+almost always fresh. They come from Venice, Paris, Rome, Prague,
+Bayreuth, The Hague, Genoa, Fiume, Trieste, etc., and are addressed to
+as many places, often _poste restante_. Many are letters from women,
+some in beautiful handwriting, on thick paper; others on scraps of
+paper, in painful hands, ill-spelt. A Countess writes pitifully,
+imploring help; one protests her love, in spite of the 'many chagrins'
+he has caused her; another asks 'how they are to live together'; another
+laments that a report has gone about that she is secretly living with
+him, which may harm _his_ reputation. Some are in French, more in
+Italian. _Mon cher Giacometto_, writes one woman, in French; _Carissimo
+e Amatissimo_, writes another, in Italian. These letters from women are
+in some confusion, and are in need of a good deal of sorting over and
+rearranging before their full extent can be realised. Thus I found
+letters in the same handwriting separated by letters in other
+handwritings; many are unsigned, or signed only by a single initial;
+many are undated, or dated only with the day of the week or month. There
+are a great many letters, dating from 1779 to 1786, signed 'Francesca
+Buschini,' a name which I cannot identify; they are written in Italian,
+and one of them begins: _Unico Mio vero Amico_ ('my only true friend').
+Others are signed 'Virginia B.'; one of these is dated, 'Forli, October
+15, 1773.' There is also a 'Theresa B.,' who writes from Genoa. I was at
+first unable to identify the writer of a whole series of letters in
+French, very affectionate and intimate letters, usually unsigned,
+occasionally signed 'B.' She calls herself _votre petite amie_; or she
+ends with a half-smiling, half-reproachful 'good-night, and sleep better
+than I.' In one letter, sent from Paris in 1759, she writes: 'Never
+believe me, but when I tell you that I love you, and that I shall love
+you always.' In another letter, ill-spelt, as her letters often are, she
+writes: 'Be assured that evil tongues, vapours, calumny, nothing can
+change my heart, which is yours entirely, and has no will to change its
+master.' Now, it seems to me that these letters must be from Manon
+Baletti, and that they are the letters referred to in the sixth volume
+of the _Memoirs_. We read there (page 60) how on Christmas Day, 1759,
+Casanova receives a letter from Manon in Paris, announcing her marriage
+with 'M. Blondel, architect to the King, and member of his Academy'; she
+returns him his letters, and begs him to return hers, or burn them.
+Instead of doing so he allows Esther to read them, intending to burn
+them afterwards. Esther begs to be allowed to keep the letters,
+promising to 'preserve them religiously all her life.' 'These letters,'
+he says, 'numbered more than two hundred, and the shortest were of four
+pages.' Certainly there are not two hundred of them at Dux, but it seems
+to me highly probable that Casanova made a final selection from Manon's
+letters, and that it is these which I have found.
+
+But, however this may be, I was fortunate enough to find the set of
+letters which I was most anxious to find: the letters from Henriette,
+whose loss every writer on Casanova has lamented. Henriette, it will be
+remembered, makes her first appearance at Cesena, in the year 1748;
+after their meeting at Geneva, she reappears, romantically _a propos_,
+twenty-two years later, at Aix in Provence; and she writes to Casanova
+proposing _un commerce epistolaire_, asking him what he has done since
+his escape from prison, and promising to do her best to tell him all
+that has happened to her during the long interval. After quoting her
+letter, he adds: 'I replied to her, accepting the correspondence that
+she offered me, and telling her briefly all my vicissitudes. She related
+to me in turn, in some forty letters, all the history of her life. If
+she dies before me, I shall add these letters to these _Memoirs_; but
+to-day she is still alive, and always happy, though now old.' It has
+never been known what became of these letters, and why they were not
+added to the _Memoirs_. I have found a great quantity of them, some
+signed with her married name in full, 'Henriette de Schnetzmann,' and I
+am inclined to think that she survived Casanova, for one of the letters
+is dated Bayreuth, 1798, the year of Casanova's death. They are
+remarkably charming, written with a mixture of piquancy and
+distinction; and I will quote the characteristic beginning and end of
+the last letter I was able to find. It begins: 'No, it is impossible to
+be sulky with you!' and ends: 'If I become vicious, it is you, my
+Mentor, who make me so, and I cast my sins upon you. Even if I were
+damned I should still be your most devoted friend, Henriette de
+Schnetzmann.' Casanova was twenty-three when he met Henriette; now,
+herself an old woman, she writes to him when he is seventy-three, as if
+the fifty years that had passed were blotted out in the faithful
+affection of her memory. How many more discreet and less changing lovers
+have had the quality of constancy in change, to which this life-long
+correspondence bears witness? Does it not suggest a view of Casanova not
+quite the view of all the world? To me it shows the real man, who
+perhaps of all others best understood what Shelley meant when he said:
+
+
+     True love in this differs from gold or clay,
+     That to divide is not to take away.
+
+
+But, though the letters from women naturally interested me the most,
+they were only a certain proportion of the great mass of correspondence
+which I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was
+afterwards to bring the manuscript of the _Memoirs_ to Brockhaus; from
+Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the _Piombi_; from the
+Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is
+some account in the _Memoirs_; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished
+man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same
+volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from
+Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, _bel
+homme, ayant de l'esprit, le ton et le gout de la bonne societe_, who
+came to settle at Gorizia in 1773, while Casanova was there; from the
+Procurator Morosini, whom he speaks of in the _Memoirs_ as his
+'protector,' and as one of those through whom he obtained permission to
+return to Venice. His other 'protector,' the _avogador_ Zaguri, had,
+says Casanova, 'since the affair of the Marquis Albergati, carried on a
+most interesting correspondence with me'; and in fact I found a bundle
+of no less than a hundred and thirty-eight letters from him, dating
+from 1784 to 1798. Another bundle contains one hundred and seventy-two
+letters from Count Lamberg. In the _Memoirs_ Casanova says, referring to
+his visit to Augsburg at the end of 1761:
+
+
+     I used to spend my evenings in a very agreeable manner at the house
+     of Count Max de Lamberg, who resided at the court of the
+     Prince-Bishop with the title of Grand Marshal. What particularly
+     attached me to Count Lamberg was his literary talent. A first-rate
+     scholar, learned to a degree, he has published several much
+     esteemed works. I carried on an exchange of letters with him which
+     ended only with his death four years ago in 1792.
+
+
+Casanova tells us that, at his second visit to Augsburg in the early
+part of 1767, he 'supped with Count Lamberg two or three times a week,'
+during the four months he was there. It is with this year that the
+letters I have found begin: they end with the year of his death, 1792.
+In his _Memorial d'un Mondain_ Lamberg refers to Casanova as 'a man
+known in literature, a man of profound knowledge.' In the first edition
+of 1774, he laments that 'a man such as M. de S. Galt' should not yet
+have been taken back into favour by the Venetian government, and in the
+second edition, 1775, rejoices over Casanova's return to Venice. Then
+there are letters from Da Ponte, who tells the story of Casanova's
+curious relations with Mme. d'Urfe, in his _Memorie scritte da esso_,
+1829; from Pittoni, Bono, and others mentioned in different parts of the
+_Memoirs_, and from some dozen others who are not mentioned in them. The
+only letters in the whole collection that have been published are those
+from the Prince de Ligne and from Count Koenig.
+
+
+IV
+
+Casanova tells us in his _Memoirs_ that, during his later years at Dux,
+he had only been able to 'hinder black melancholy from devouring his
+poor existence, or sending him out of his mind,' by writing ten or
+twelve hours a day. The copious manuscripts at Dux show us how
+persistently he was at work on a singular variety of subjects, in
+addition to the _Memoirs_, and to the various books which he published
+during those years. We see him jotting down everything that comes into
+his head, for his own amusement, and certainly without any thought of
+publication; engaging in learned controversies, writing treatises on
+abstruse mathematical problems, composing comedies to be acted before
+Count Waldstein's neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages,
+indeed with more patience than success, writing philosophical dialogues
+in which God and himself are the speakers, and keeping up an extensive
+correspondence, both with distinguished men and with delightful women.
+His mental activity, up to the age of seventy-three, is as prodigious as
+the activity which he had expended in living a multiform and
+incalculable life. As in life everything living had interested him, so
+in his retirement from life every idea makes its separate appeal to him;
+and he welcomes ideas with the same impartiality with which he had
+welcomed adventures. Passion has intellectualised itself, and remains
+not less passionate. He wishes to do everything, to compete with every
+one; and it is only after having spent seven years in heaping up
+miscellaneous learning, and exercising his faculties in many directions,
+that he turns to look back over his own past life, and to live it over
+again in memory, as he writes down the narrative of what had interested
+him most in it. 'I write in the hope that my history will never see the
+broad daylight of publication,' he tells us, scarcely meaning it, we may
+be sure, even in the moment of hesitancy which may naturally come to
+him. But if ever a book was written for the pleasure of writing it, it
+was this one; and an autobiography written for oneself is not likely to
+be anything but frank.
+
+'Truth is the only God I have ever adored,' he tells us: and we now know
+how truthful he was in saying so. I have only summarised in this article
+the most important confirmations of his exact accuracy in facts and
+dates; the number could be extended indefinitely. In the manuscripts we
+find innumerable further confirmations; and their chief value as
+testimony is that they tell us nothing which we should not have already
+known, if we had merely taken Casanova at his word. But it is not always
+easy to take people at their own word, when they are writing about
+themselves; and the world has been very loth to believe in Casanova as
+he represents himself. It has been specially loth to believe that he is
+telling the truth when he tells us about his adventures with women. But
+the letters contained among these manuscripts show us the women of
+Casanova writing to him with all the fervour and all the fidelity which
+he attributes to them; and they show him to us in the character of as
+fervid and faithful a lover. In every fact, every detail, and in the
+whole mental impression which they convey, these manuscripts bring
+before us the Casanova of the _Memoirs_. As I seemed to come upon
+Casanova at home, it was as if I came upon an old friend, already
+perfectly known to me, before I had made my pilgrimage to Dux.
+
+1902.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] See the account of this visit to Holland, and the reference to
+taking a passport, _Memoirs_, v. 238.
+
+[2] See Charles Henry, _Les Connaissances Mathematiques de Casanova_.
+Rome 1883.
+
+[3] See _Memoirs_, ix. 272, _et seq._
+
+
+
+
+JOHN DONNE
+
+I
+
+
+Biography as a fine art can go no further than Walton's _Life and Death
+of Dr. Donne_. From the 'good and virtuous parents' of the first line to
+the 'small quantity of Christian dust' of the last, every word is the
+touch of a cunning brush painting a picture. The picture lives, and with
+so vivid and gracious a life that it imposes itself upon us as the
+portrait of a real man, faithfully copied from the man as he lived. But
+that is precisely the art of the painter. Walton's picture is so
+beautiful because everything in it is sacrificed to beauty; because it
+is a convention, a picture in which life is treated almost as theme for
+music. And so there remains an opportunity, even after this masterpiece,
+for a life of Donne which shall make no pretence to harmonise a
+sometimes discordant existence, or indeed to produce, properly speaking,
+a piece of art at all; but which shall be faithful to the document, a
+piece of history. Such a book has now been written by Mr. Gosse, in his
+_Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's_. It is perhaps the
+most solid and serious contribution which Mr. Gosse has made to English
+literature, and we may well believe that it will remain the final
+authority on so interesting and so difficult a subject. For the first
+time, in the light of this clear analysis, and of these carefully
+arranged letters, we are able, if not indeed to see Donne as he really
+was, at all events to form our own opinion about every action of his
+life. This is one of the merits of Mr. Gosse's book; he has collected
+his documents, and he has given them to us as they are, guiding us
+adroitly along the course of the life which they illustrate, but not
+allowing himself to dogmatise on what must still remain conjectural. And
+he has given us a series of reproductions of portraits, of the highest
+importance in the study of one who is not merely a difficult poet, but a
+very ambiguous human being. They begin with the eager, attractive,
+somewhat homely youth of eighteen, grasping the hilt of his sword so
+tightly that his knuckles start out from the thin covering of flesh;
+passing into the mature Donne as we know him, the lean, humorous,
+large-browed, courtly thinker, with his large intent eyes, a cloak
+folded elegantly about his uncovered throat, or the ruff tightening
+about his carefully trimmed beard; and ending with the ghastly emblem
+set as a frontispiece to _Death's Duel_, the dying man wrapped already
+in his shroud, which gathers into folds above his head, as if tied
+together like the mouth of a sack, while the sunken cheeks and hollow
+closed eyelids are mocked by the shapely moustache, brushed upwards from
+the lips. In the beautiful and fanciful monument in St. Paul's done
+after the drawing from which this frontispiece was engraved, there is
+less ghastliness and a more harmonious beauty in the brave attitude of a
+man who dresses for death as he would dress for Court, wearing the last
+livery with an almost foppish sense of propriety. Between them these
+portraits tell much, and Mr. Gosse, in his narrative, tells us
+everything else that there is to tell, much of it for the first time;
+and the distinguished and saintly person of Walton's narrative, so
+simple, so easily explicable, becomes more complex at every moment, as
+fresh light makes the darkness more and more visible. At the end we seem
+to have become singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzling
+creature, whom each of us may try to understand after his fashion, as we
+try to understand the real secrets of the character of our friends.
+
+Donne's mind, then, if I may make my own attempt to understand him, was
+the mind of the dialectician, of the intellectual adventurer; he is a
+poet almost by accident, or at least for reasons with which art in the
+abstract has but little to do. He writes verse, first of all, because he
+has observed keenly, and because it pleases the pride of his intellect
+to satirise the pretensions of humanity. Then it is the flesh which
+speaks in his verse, the curiosity of woman, which he has explored in
+the same spirit of adventure; then passion, making a slave of him for
+love's sake, and turning at last to the slave's hatred; finally,
+religion, taken up with the same intellectual interest, the same subtle
+indifference, and, in its turn, passing also into passionate reality. A
+few poems are inspired in him by what he has seen in remote countries;
+some are marriage songs and funeral elegies, written for friendship or
+for money. But he writes nothing 'out of his own head,' as we say;
+nothing lightly, or, it would seem, easily; nothing for the song's sake.
+He speaks, in a letter, of 'descending to print anything in verse'; and
+it is certain that he was never completely absorbed by his own poetry,
+or at all careful to measure his achievements against those of others.
+He took his own poems very seriously, he worked upon them with the whole
+force of his intellect; but to himself, even before he became a divine,
+he was something more than a poet. Poetry was but one means of
+expressing the many-sided activity of his mind and temperament. Prose
+was another, preaching another; travel and contact with great events and
+persons scarcely less important to him, in the building up of himself.
+
+And he was interested in everything. At one moment he is setting himself
+to study Oriental languages, a singularly difficult task in those days.
+Both in poetry and divinity he has more Spanish than English books in
+his library. Scientific and technical terms are constantly found in his
+verse, where we should least expect them, where indeed they are least
+welcome. In _Ignatius--his Conclave_ he speaks with learned enthusiasm
+of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and of his own immediate contemporaries,
+then but just become famous, Galileo ('who of late hath summoned the
+other worlds, the stars, to come nearer to him, and to give an account
+of themselves') and Kepler ('who hath received it into his care, that no
+new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge'). He rebukes
+himself for his abandonment to 'the worst voluptuousness, which is an
+hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages.' At
+twenty-three he was a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went on
+the 'Islands Voyage'; later on, at different periods, he travelled over
+many parts of the Continent, with rich patrons or on diplomatic offices.
+Born a Catholic, he became a Protestant, deliberately enough; wrote
+books on controversial subjects, against his old party, before he had
+taken orders in the Church of England; besides a strange, morbid
+speculation on the innocence of suicide. He used his lawyer's training
+for dubious enough purposes, advising the Earl of Somerset in the dark
+business of his divorce and re-marriage. And, in a mournful pause in the
+midst of many harrowing concerns, he writes to a friend: 'When I must
+shipwreck, I would fain do it in a sea where mine own impotency might
+have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so
+much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something,
+but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a
+planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he
+confesses later in the same letter.
+
+No doubt some of this feverish activity, this uncertainty of aim, was a
+matter of actual physical health. It is uncertain at what time the
+wasting disease, of which he died, first settled upon him; but he seems
+to have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at times
+depressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon the whole
+organisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led him
+to write his _Biathanatos_, with its elaborate apology for suicide, and
+at the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying,
+was but one symptom of a morbid state of body and brain and nerves, to
+which so many of his poems and so many of his letters bear witness.
+'Sometimes,' he writes, in a characteristic letter, 'when I find myself
+transported with jollity and love of company, I hang lead to my heels,
+and reduce to my thoughts my fortunes, my years, the duties of a man, of
+a friend, of a husband, of a father, and all the incumbencies of a
+family; when sadness dejects me, either I countermine it with another
+sadness, or I kindle squibs about me again, and fly into sportfulness
+and company.'
+
+At the age of thirty-five he writes from his bed describing every detail
+of what he frantically calls 'a sickness which I cannot name or
+describe,' and ends his letter: 'I profess to you truly, that my
+loathness to give over now, seems to myself an ill sign that I shall
+write no more.' It was at this time that he wrote the _Biathanatos_,
+with its explicit declaration in the preface: 'Whensoever any
+affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own
+hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own
+sword.' Fifteen years later, when one of his most serious illnesses was
+upon him, and his life in real danger, he notes down all his symptoms as
+he lies awake night after night, with an extraordinary and, in itself,
+morbid acuteness. 'I observe the physician with the same diligence as he
+the disease; I see he fears, and I fear with him; I overtake him, I
+over-run him in his fear, because he makes his pace slow; I fear the
+more because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpness
+because he would not have me see it.' As he lies in bed, he realises 'I
+am mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct them.
+They conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me for
+dead now, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight, and ask
+how I do to-morrow. Miserable and inhuman posture, where I must practise
+my lying in the grave by lying still.' This preying upon itself of the
+brain is but one significant indication of a temperament, neurotic
+enough indeed, but in which the neurosis is still that of the curious
+observer, the intellectual casuist, rather than of the artist. A
+wonderful piece of self-analysis, worthy of St. Augustine, which occurs
+in one of his funeral sermons, gives poignant expression to what must
+doubtless have been a common condition of so sensitive a brain. 'I throw
+myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and His angels
+together; 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 prayer, eyes lifted up, knees bowed
+down, as though I prayed to God; and if God should ask me when I last
+thought of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I
+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 chimera in my brain, troubles me
+in my prayer.' It is this brain, turned inward upon itself, and darting
+out on every side in purely random excursions, that was responsible, I
+cannot doubt, for all the contradictions of a career in which the inner
+logic is not at first apparent.
+
+Donne's career divides itself sharply into three parts: his youth, when
+we see him a soldier, a traveller, a lover, a poet, unrestrained in all
+the passionate adventures of youth; then a middle period, in which he is
+a lawyer and a theologian, seeking knowledge and worldly advancement,
+without any too restraining scruple as to the means which come to his
+hand; and then a last stage of saintly living and dying. What then is
+the link between these successive periods, the principle of development,
+the real Donne in short? 'He was none of these, or all of these, or
+more,' says Mr. Gosse. But, surely, he was indeed all of these, and his
+individuality precisely the growth from one stage to another, the subtle
+intelligence being always there, working vividly, but in each period
+working in a different direction. 'I would fain do something, but that I
+cannot tell what is no wonder.' Everything in Donne seems to me to
+explain itself in that fundamental uncertainty of aim, and his
+uncertainty of aim partly by a morbid physical condition. He searches,
+nothing satisfies him, tries everything, in vain; finding satisfaction
+at last in the Church, as in a haven of rest. Always it is the curious,
+insatiable brain searching. And he is always wretchedly aware that he
+'can do nothing constantly.'
+
+His three periods, then, are three stages in the search after a way to
+walk in, something worthy of himself to do. Thus, of his one printed
+collection of verse he writes: 'Of my _Anniversaries_, the fault which I
+acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse,
+which, though it have excuse, even in our times, by example of men,
+which one would think should as little have done it as I, yet I confess
+I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself.' Of his legal
+studies he writes in the same letter: 'For my purpose of proceeding in
+the profession of the law, so far as to a title, you may be pleased to
+correct that imagination where you find it. I ever thought the study of
+it my best entertainment and pastime, but I have no ambition nor design
+upon the style.' Until he accepts religion, with all its limitations and
+encouragements, he has not even sure landmarks on his way. So
+speculative a brain, able to prove, and proving for its own uneasy
+satisfaction, that even suicide is 'not so naturally sin, that it may
+never be otherwise,' could allow itself to be guided by no fixed rules;
+and to a brain so abstract, conduct must always have seemed of less
+importance than it does to most other people, and especially conduct
+which is argument, like the demonstrations on behalf of what seems, on
+the face of it, a somewhat iniquitous divorce and re-marriage, or like
+those unmeasured eulogies, both of this 'blest pair of swans,' and of
+the dead child of a rich father. He admits, in one of his letters, that
+in his elegies, 'I did best when I had least truth for my subjects'; and
+of the _Anniversaries_ in honour of little Mistress Drury, 'But for the
+other part of the imputation of having said so much, my defence is, that
+my purpose was to say as well as I could; for since I never saw the
+gentlewoman, I cannot be understood to have bound myself to have spoken
+the just truth.' He is always the casuist, always mentally impartial in
+the face of a moral problem, reserving judgment on matters which, after
+all, seem to him remote from an unimpassioned contemplation of things;
+until that moment of crisis comes, long after he has become a clergyman,
+when the death of his wife changed the world for him, and he became, in
+the words of Walton, 'crucified to the world, and all those vanities,
+those imaginary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage;
+and they were as perfectly crucified to him.' From that time to the end
+of his life he had found what he had all the while been seeking: rest
+for the restlessness of his mind, in a meditation upon the divine
+nature; occupation, in being 'ambassador of God,' through the pulpit;
+himself, as it seemed to him, at his fullest and noblest. It was
+himself, really, that he had been seeking all the time, conscious at
+least of that in all the deviations of the way; himself, the ultimate of
+his curiosities.
+
+
+II
+
+And yet, what remains to us out of this life of many purposes, which had
+found an end satisfying to itself in the Deanery of St. Paul's, is
+simply a bundle of manuscript verses, which the writer could bring
+himself neither to print nor to destroy. His first satire speaks
+contemptuously of 'giddy fantastic poets,' and, when he allowed himself
+to write poetry, he was resolved to do something different from what
+anybody had ever done before, not so much from the artist's instinctive
+desire of originality, as from a kind of haughty, yet really bourgeois,
+desire to be indebted to nobody. With what care he wrote is confessed in
+a passage of one of his letters, where, speaking of a sermon, he says:
+'For, as Cardinal Cusanus wrote a book, _Cribratio Alchorani_, I have
+cribrated, and re-cribrated, and post-cribrated the sermon, and must
+necessarily say, the King, who hath let fall his eye upon some of my
+poems, never saw, of mine, a hand, or an eye, or an affection, set down
+with so much study and diligence, and labour of syllables, as in this
+sermon I expressed those two points.' But he thought there were other
+things more important than being a poet, and this very labour of his was
+partly a sign of it. 'He began,' says Mr. Gosse with truth, 'as if
+poetry had never been written before.' To the people of his time, to
+those who came immediately after him, he was the restorer of English
+poetry.
+
+
+     The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
+     O'erspread, was purged by thee,
+
+
+says Carew, in those memorial verses in which the famous lines occur:
+
+
+     Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
+     The universal monarchy of wit.
+
+
+Shakespeare was living, remember, and it was Elizabethan poetry that
+Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system
+of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less
+arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,'
+said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet,
+if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasis
+of what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in at
+all events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way he meant
+them to be delivered is not always as beautiful as it is expressive.
+Donne would be original at all costs, preferring himself to his art. He
+treated poetry as AEsop's master treated his slave, and broke what he
+could not bend.
+
+But Donne's novelty of metre is only a part of his too deliberate
+novelty as a poet. As Mr. Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evident
+truth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's real
+position in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realistic
+writer, who makes a clean sweep of tradition, and puts everything down
+in the most modern words and with the help of the most trivial actual
+images.
+
+
+     To what a cumbersome unwieldiness,
+     And burdensome corpulence my love hath grown,
+
+
+he will begin a poem on _Love's Diet_. Of love, as the master of hearts,
+he declares seriously:
+
+
+     He swallows us and never chaws;
+     By him, as by chain'd shot, whole ranks do die;
+     He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.
+
+
+And, in his unwise insistence that every metaphor shall be absolutely
+new, he drags medical and alchemical and legal properties into verse
+really full of personal passion, producing at times poetry which is a
+kind of disease of the intellect, a sick offshoot of science. Like most
+poets of powerful individuality, Donne lost precisely where he gained.
+That cumulative and crowding and sweeping intellect which builds up his
+greatest poems into miniature Escurials of poetry, mountainous and
+four-square to all the winds of the world, 'purges' too often the
+flowers as well as the weeds out of 'the Muses' garden.' To write poetry
+as if it had never been written before is to attempt what the greatest
+poets never attempted. There are only two poets in English literature
+who thus stand out of the tradition, who are without ancestors, Donne
+and Browning. Each seems to have certain qualities almost greater than
+the qualities of the greatest; and yet in each some precipitation of
+arrogant egoism remains in the crucible, in which the draught has all
+but run immortally clear.
+
+Donne's quality of passion is unique in English poetry. It is a rapture
+in which the mind is supreme, a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a
+pitch of actual violence. The words themselves rarely count for much, as
+they do in Crashaw, for instance, where words turn giddy at the height
+of their ascension. The words mean things, and it is the things that
+matter. They can be brutal: 'For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let
+me love!' as if a long, pre-supposed self-repression gave way suddenly,
+in an outburst. 'Love, any devil else but you,' he begins, in his abrupt
+leap to the heart of the matter. Or else his exaltation will be grave,
+tranquil, measureless in assurance.
+
+
+     All kings, and all their favourites,
+     All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
+     The sun itself, which makes time, as they pass,
+     Is elder by a year now than it was
+     When thou and I first one another saw.
+     All other things to their destruction draw,
+     Only our love hath no decay;
+     This no to-morrow hath, no yesterday;
+     Running, it never runs from us away,
+     But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
+
+
+This lover loves with his whole nature, and so collectedly because
+reason, in him, is not in conflict with passion, but passion's ally. His
+senses speak with unparalleled directness, as in those elegies which
+must remain the model in English of masculine sensual sobriety. He
+distinguishes the true end of such loving in a forcible,
+characteristically prosaic image:
+
+
+     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.
+
+
+And he exemplifies every motion and the whole pilgrim's progress of
+physical love, with a deliberate, triumphant, unluxurious explicitness
+which 'leaves no doubt,' as we say 'of his intentions,' and can be no
+more than referred to passingly in modern pages. In a series of hate
+poems, of which I will quote the finest, he gives expression to a whole
+region of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, out
+of Catullus, with such intolerable truth.
+
+
+     When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead,
+     And that thou think'st thee free
+     From all solicitation from me,
+     Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
+     And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see:
+     Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
+     And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
+     Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
+     Thou call'st for more,
+     And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;
+     And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
+     Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
+     A verier ghost than I.
+     What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
+     Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
+     I'd rather thou should'st painfully repent,
+     Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.
+
+
+Yet it is the same lover, and very evidently the same, who winnows all
+this earthly passion to a fine, fruitful dust, fit to make bread for
+angels. Ecstatic reason, passion justifying its intoxication by
+revealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the
+quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to
+make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly
+abstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture of
+solution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called _The
+Ecstasy_, which seems to anticipate a metaphysical Blake; it is all
+close reasoning, step by step, and yet is what its title claims for it.
+
+It may be, though I doubt it, that other poets who have written personal
+verse in English, have known as much of women's hearts and the senses of
+men, and the interchanges of passionate intercourse between man and
+woman; but, partly by reason of this very method of saying things, no
+one has ever rendered so exactly, and with such elaborate subtlety,
+every mood of the actual passion. It has been done in prose; may one not
+think of Stendhal, for a certain way he has of turning the whole forces
+of the mind upon those emotions and sensations which are mostly left to
+the heat of an unreflective excitement? Donne, as he suffers all the
+colds and fevers of love, is as much the sufferer and the physician of
+his disease as we have seen him to be in cases of actual physical
+sickness. Always detached from himself, even when he is most helplessly
+the slave of circumstances, he has that frightful faculty of seeing
+through his own illusions; of having no illusions to the mind, only to
+the senses. Other poets, with more wisdom towards poetry, give us the
+beautiful or pathetic results of no matter what creeping or soaring
+passions. Donne, making a new thing certainly, if not always a thing of
+beauty, tells us exactly what a man really feels as he makes love to a
+woman, as he sits beside her husband at table, as he dreams of her in
+absence, as he scorns himself for loving her, as he hates or despises
+her for loving him, as he realises all that is stupid in her devotion,
+and all that is animal in his. 'Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to
+love,' he tells her, in a burst of angry contempt, priding himself on
+his superior craft in the art. And his devotions to her are exquisite,
+appealing to what is most responsive in woman, beyond those of tenderer
+poets. A woman cares most for the lover who understands her best, and is
+least taken in by what it is the method of her tradition to feign. So
+wearily conscious that she is not the abstract angel of her pretence and
+of her adorers, she will go far in sheer thankfulness to the man who can
+see so straight into her heart as to have
+
+
+               found something like a heart,
+     But colours it and corners had;
+     It was not good, it was not bad,
+     It was entire to none, and few had part.
+
+
+Donne shows women themselves, in delight, anger, or despair; they know
+that he finds nothing in the world more interesting, and they much more
+than forgive him for all the ill he says of them. If women most
+conscious of their sex were ever to read Donne, they would say, He was a
+great lover; he understood.
+
+And, in the poems of divine love, there is the same quality of mental
+emotion as in the poems of human love. Donne adores God reasonably,
+knowing why he adores Him. He renders thanks point by point, celebrates
+the heavenly perfections with metaphysical precision, and is no vaguer
+with God than with woman. Donne knew what he believed and why he
+believed, and is carried into no heat or mist as he tells over the
+recording rosary of his devotions. His _Holy Sonnets_ are a kind of
+argument with God; they tell over, and discuss, and resolve, such
+perplexities of faith and reason as would really occur to a speculative
+brain like his. Thought crowds in upon thought, in these tightly packed
+lines, which but rarely admit a splendour of this kind:
+
+
+     At the round earth's imagined corners blow
+     Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
+     From death, you numberless infinities
+     Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.
+
+
+More typical is this too knotted beginning of another sonnet:
+
+
+     Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
+     As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
+     That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
+     Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
+
+
+Having something very minute and very exact to say, he hates to leave
+anything out; dreading diffuseness, as he dreads the tame sweetness of
+an easy melody, he will use only the smallest possible number of words
+to render his thought; and so, as here, he is too often ingenious rather
+than felicitous, forgetting that to the poet poetry comes first, and all
+the rest afterwards.
+
+For the writing of great poetry something more is needed than to be a
+poet and to have great occasions. Donne was a poet, and he had the
+passions and the passionate adventures, in body and mind, which make the
+material for poetry; he was sincere to himself in expressing what he
+really felt under the burden of strong emotion and sharp sensation.
+Almost every poem that he wrote is written on a genuine inspiration, a
+genuine personal inspiration, but most of his poems seem to have been
+written before that personal inspiration has had time to fuse itself
+with the poetic inspiration. It is always useful to remember
+Wordsworth's phrase of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity,' for
+nothing so well defines that moment of crystallisation in which direct
+emotion or sensation deviates exquisitely into art. Donne is intent on
+the passion itself, the thought, the reality; so intent that he is not
+at the same time, in that half-unconscious way which is the way of the
+really great poet, equally intent on the form, that both may come to
+ripeness together. Again it is the heresy of the realist. Just as he
+drags into his verse words that have had no time to take colour from
+men's association of them with beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinking
+heart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He gives us
+the real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetry
+will have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated them
+into a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of ours
+as the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of the
+poet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supreme
+poetic language of Dante. But the personal or human reality and the
+imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the art
+will be at fault. Donne is too proud to abandon himself to his own
+inspiration, to his inspiration as a poet; he would be something more
+than a voice for deeper yet speechless powers; he would make poetry
+speak straight. Well, poetry will not speak straight, in the way Donne
+wished it to, and under the goading that his restless intellect gave it.
+
+He forgot beauty, preferring to it every form of truth, and beauty has
+revenged itself upon him, glittering miraculously out of many lines in
+which he wrote humbly, and leaving the darkness of a retreating shadow
+upon great spaces in which a confident intellect was conscious of
+shining.
+
+
+     For, though mind be the heaven, where love may sit,
+     Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it,
+
+
+he writes, in the _Valediction to his Book_, thus giving formal
+expression to his heresy. 'The greatest wit, though not the best poet of
+our nation,' Dryden called him; the greatest intellect, that is, which
+had expressed itself in poetry. Dryden himself was not always careful to
+distinguish between what material was fit and what unfit for verse; so
+that we can now enjoy his masterly prose with more equable pleasure than
+his verse. But he saw clearly enough the distinction in Donne between
+intellect and the poetical spirit; that fatal division of two forces,
+which, had they pulled together instead of apart, might have achieved a
+result wholly splendid. Without a great intellect no man was ever a
+great poet; but to possess a great intellect is not even a first step in
+the direction of becoming a poet at all.
+
+Compare Donne, for instance, with Herrick. Herrick has little enough of
+the intellect, the passion, the weight and the magnificence of Donne;
+but, setting out with so much less to carry, he certainly gets first to
+the goal, and partly by running always in the right direction. The most
+limited poet in the language, he is the surest. He knows the airs that
+weave themselves into songs, as he knows the flowers that twine best
+into garlands. Words come to him in an order which no one will ever
+alter, and no one will ever forget. Whether they come easily or not is
+no matter; he knows when they have come right, and they always come
+right before he lets them go. But Donne is only occasionally sure of his
+words as airs; he sets them doggedly to the work of saying something,
+whether or no they step to the beat of the music. Conscious writer
+though he was, I suppose he was more or less unconscious of his
+extraordinary felicities, more conscious probably of how they came than
+of what they were doing. And they come chiefly through a sudden
+heightening of mood, which brings with it a clearer and a more exalted
+mode of speech, in its merely accurate expression of itself. Even then I
+cannot imagine him quite reconciled to beauty, at least actually doing
+homage to it, but rather as one who receives a gift by the way.
+
+1899.
+
+
+
+
+EMILY BRONTE
+
+
+     This was a woman young and passionate,
+     Loving the Earth, and loving most to be
+     Where she might be alone with liberty;
+     Loving the beasts, who are compassionate;
+     The homeless moors, her home; the bright elate
+     Winds of the cold dawn; rock and stone and tree;
+     Night, bringing dreams out of eternity;
+     And memory of Death's unforgetting date.
+     She too was unforgetting: has she yet
+     Forgotten that long agony when her breath
+     Too fierce for living fanned the flame of death?
+     Earth for her heather, does she now forget
+     What pity knew not in her love from scorn,
+     And that it was an unjust thing to be born?
+
+
+The Stoic in woman has been seen once only, and that in the only woman
+in whom there has been seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness.
+Emily Bronte lived with an unparalleled energy a life of outward quiet,
+in a loneliness which she shared only with the moors and with the
+animals whom she loved. She required no passion-experience to endow her
+with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is
+alive in the earth. And the vehemence of that inner fire fed on itself,
+and wore out her body before its time, because it had no respite and no
+outlet. We see her condemned to self-imprisonment, and dying of too much
+life.
+
+Her poems are few and brief, and nothing more personal has ever been
+written. A few are as masterly in execution as in conception, and almost
+all have a direct truth of utterance, which rarely lacks at least the
+bare beauty of muscle and sinew, of a kind of naked strength and
+alertness. They are without heat or daylight, the sun is rarely in them,
+and then 'blood-red'; light comes as starshine, or comes as
+
+
+                  hostile light
+     That does not warm but burn.
+
+
+At times the landscape in this bare, grey, craggy verse, always a
+landscape of Yorkshire moors, with its touches of stern and tender
+memory, 'The mute bird sitting on the stone,' 'A little and a lone green
+lane,' has a quality more thrilling than that of Wordsworth. There is
+none of his observation, and none of his sense of a benignant 'presence
+far more deeply interfused'; but there is the voice of the heart's
+roots, crying out to its home in the earth.
+
+At first this unornamented verse may seem forbidding, may seem even to
+be ordinary, as an actual moorland may, to those for whom it has no
+special attraction. But in the verse, as on the moors, there is space,
+wind, and the smell of the earth; and there is room to be alone, that
+liberty which this woman cried for when she cried:
+
+
+     Leave the heart that now I bear,
+     And give me liberty.
+
+
+To be alone was for her to be alone with 'a chainless soul,' which asked
+of whatever powers might be only 'courage to endure,' constancy not to
+forget, and the right to leave the door wide open to those visions that
+came to her out of mere fixed contemplation: 'the God of Visions,' as
+she called her imagination, 'my slave, my comrade, and my king.' And we
+know that her courage was flawless, heroic, beyond praise; that she
+forgot nothing, not even that love for her unspeakable brother, for
+whom she has expressed in two of her poems a more than masculine
+magnanimity of pity and contempt; and that at all times she could turn
+inward to that world within, where her imagination waited for her,
+
+
+     Where thou, and I, and Liberty
+     Have undisputed sovereignty.
+
+
+Yet even imagination, though 'benignant,' is to her a form of 'phantom
+bliss' to which she will not trust herself wholly. 'So hopeless is the
+world without': but is the world within ever quite frankly accepted as a
+substitute, as a truer reality? She is always on her guard against
+imagination as against the outer world, whose 'lies' she is resolved
+shall not 'beguile' her. She has accepted reason as the final arbiter,
+and desires only to see clearly, to see things as they are. She really
+believed that
+
+
+     Earth reserves no blessing
+     For the unblest of heaven;
+
+
+and she had an almost Calvinistic sense of her own condemnation to
+unhappiness. That being so, she was suspicious of those opportunities of
+joy which did come to her, or at least resolute not to believe too
+implicitly in the good messages of the stars, which might be mere
+dreams, or of the earth, which was only certainly kind in preparing for
+her that often-thought-of grave. 'No coward soul is mine' is one of her
+true sayings; but it was with difficulty that she trusted even that
+message of life which she seemed to discover in death. She has to assure
+herself of it, again and again: 'Who once lives, never dies!' And that
+sense of personal identity which aches throughout all her poems is a
+sense, not of the delight, but of the pain and ineradicable sting of
+personal identity.
+
+Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, _Wuthering Heights_, is
+one long outcry. A soul on the rack seems to make itself heard at
+moments, when suffering has grown too acute for silence. Every poem is
+as if torn from her. Even when she does not write seemingly in her own
+person, the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner,' 'Honour's
+Martyr,' 'The Outcast Mother,' echoes of all the miseries and useless
+rebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dying
+faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely into
+the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always
+arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a
+clear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt is itself an
+affirmation, her defiance would be an entreaty but for the 'quenchless
+will' of her pride. She faces every terror, and to her pained
+apprehension birth and death and life are alike terrible. Only Webster's
+dirge might have been said over her coffin.
+
+
+     What my soul bore my soul alone
+     Within itself may tell,
+
+
+she says truthfully; but some of that long endurance of her life, in
+which exile, the body's weakness, and a sense of some 'divinest anguish'
+which clung about the world and all things living, had their share, she
+was able to put into ascetic and passionate verse. It is sad-coloured
+and desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the
+clouds that hang generally above it, a rare and stormy beauty comes into
+the bare outlines, quickening them with living splendour.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+EDGAR ALLAN POE
+
+
+The poems of Edgar Allan Poe are the work of a poet who thought
+persistently about poetry as an art, and would have reduced inspiration
+to a method. At their best they are perfectly defined by Baudelaire,
+when he says of Poe's poetry that it is a thing 'deep and shimmering as
+dreams, mysterious and perfect as crystal.' Not all the poems, few as
+they are, are flawless. In a few unequal poems we have the only
+essential poetry which has yet come from America, Walt Whitman's vast
+poetical nature having remained a nature only, not come to be an art.
+Because Poe was fantastically inhuman, a conscious artist doing strange
+things with strange materials, not every one has realised how fine, how
+rare, was that beauty which this artist brought into the world. It is
+true that there was in the genius of Poe something meretricious; it is
+the flaw in his genius; but then he had genius, and Whittier and Bryant
+and Longfellow and Lowell had only varying degrees of talent. Let us
+admit, by all means, that a diamond is flawed; but need we compare it
+with this and that fine specimen of quartz?
+
+Poetry Poe defined as 'the rhythmical creation of beauty'; and the first
+element of poetry he found in 'the thirst for supernal beauty.' 'It is
+not,' he repeats, 'the mere appreciation of the beauty before us. It is
+a wild effort to reach the beauty above.... Inspired with a prescient
+ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, it struggles by multiform
+novelty of combination among the things and thoughts of time, to
+anticipate some portions of that loveliness whose very elements,
+perhaps, appertain solely to eternity.' The poet, then, 'should limit
+his endeavours to the creation of novel moods of beauty, in form, in
+colour, in sound, in sentiment.' Note the emphasis upon novel: to Poe
+there was no beauty without strangeness. He makes his favourite
+quotation: '"But," says Lord Bacon (how justly!) "there is no exquisite
+beauty without some strangeness in the proportions." Take away this
+element of strangeness--of unexpectedness--of novelty--of
+originality--call it what we will--and all that is ethereal in
+loveliness is lost at once.... We lose, in short, all that assimilates
+the beauty of earth with what we dream of the beauty of heaven!' And, as
+another of the elements of this creation of beauty, there must be
+indefiniteness. 'I _know_,' he says, 'that indefiniteness is an element
+of the true music--I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any
+undue decision--imbue it with any very determinate tone--and you deprive
+it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential
+character.' Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine's
+'Art Poetique': '_Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance_'? And is not the
+essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarme and of the French
+Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation of 'that class
+of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current
+of meaning an under or _suggestive_ one'? To this 'mystic or secondary
+impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in
+music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always
+a distinct, but an august soul-exalting _echo_.' Has anything that has
+been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of
+verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more subtly or
+more precisely?
+
+And Poe does not end here, with what may seem generalities. 'Beyond the
+limits of beauty,' he says of poetry, 'its province does not extend. Its
+sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has
+only collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally,
+upon either Duty or Truth.' And of the poet who said, not meaning
+anything very different from what Poe meant, 'Beauty is truth, truth
+beauty,' he says: 'He is the sole British poet who has never erred in
+his themes.' And, as if still thinking of Keats, he says: 'It is chiefly
+amid forms of physical loveliness (we use the word _forms_ in its widest
+sense as embracing modifications of sound and colour) that the soul
+seeks the realisation of its dreams of Beauty.' And, with more earnest
+insistence on those limits which he knew to be so much more necessary to
+guard in poetry than its so-called freedom ('the true artist will avail
+himself of no "license" whatever'), he states, with categorical
+precision: 'A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by
+having, for its _immediate_ object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by
+having, for its object, an _indefinite_ instead of a _definite_
+pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance
+presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with _in_definite
+sensations, to which end music is an _essential_, since comprehension of
+sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with
+a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music;
+the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.'
+
+And he would set these careful limits, not only to the province of
+poetic pleasure, but to the form and length of actual poetry. 'A long
+poem,' he says, with more truth than most people are quite willing to
+see, 'is a paradox.' 'I hold,' he says elsewhere, 'that a long poem does
+not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat
+contradiction in terms.' And, after defining his ideal, 'a rhymed poem,
+not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour,' he says,
+very justly, that 'within this limit alone can the highest order of true
+poetry exist.' In another essay he narrows the duration to 'half an
+hour, at the very utmost'; and wisely. In yet another essay he suggests
+'a length of about one hundred lines' as the length most likely to
+convey that unity of impression, with that intensity of true poetical
+effect, in which he found the highest merit of poetry. Remember, that of
+true poetry we have already had his definition; and concede, that a
+loftier conception of poetry as poetry, poetry as lyric essence, cannot
+easily be imagined. We are too ready to accept, under the general name
+of poetry, whatever is written eloquently in metre; to call even
+Wordsworth's _Excursion_ a poem, and to accept _Paradise Lost_ as
+throughout a poem. But there are not thirty consecutive lines of
+essential poetry in the whole of _The Excursion_, and, while _Paradise
+Lost_ is crammed with essential poetry, that poetry is not consecutive;
+but the splendid workmanship comes in to fill up the gaps, and to hold
+our attention until the poetry returns. Essential poetry is an essence
+too strong for the general sense; diluted, it can be endured; and, for
+the most part, the poets dilute it. Poe could conceive of it only in the
+absolute; and his is the counsel of perfection, if of a perfection
+almost beyond mortal powers. He sought for it in the verse of all poets;
+he sought, as few have ever sought, to concentrate it in his own verse;
+and he has left us at least a few poems, '_ciascun distinto e di fulgore
+e d'arte_,' in which he has found, within his own limits, the absolute.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
+
+
+With the strange fortune that always accompanied him, in life and in
+death, Beddoes has not merely escaped the indiscriminate applause which
+he would never have valued, but he has remained a bibliographical rather
+than a literary rarity. Few except the people who collect first
+editions--not, as a rule, the public for a poet--have had the chance of
+possessing _Death's Jest-Book_ (1850) and the _Poems_ (1851). At last
+Beddoes has been made accessible, the real story of his death, that
+suicide so much in the casual and determined manner of one of his own
+characters.
+
+'The power of the man is immense and irresistible.' Browning's emphatic
+phrase comes first to the memory, and remains always the most
+appropriate word of eulogy. Beddoes has been rashly called a great poet.
+I do not think he was a great poet, but he was, in every sense of the
+word, an astonishing one. Read these lines, and remember that they were
+written just at that stagnant period (1821-1826) which comes between the
+period of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, and the period of Browning and
+Tennyson. It is a murderer who speaks:
+
+
+     I am unsouled, dishumanised, uncreated;
+     My passions swell and grow like brutes conceived;
+     My feet are fixing roots, and every limb
+     Is billowy and gigantic, till I seem
+     A wild, old, wicked mountain in the air:
+     And the abhorred conscience of this murder,
+     It will grow up a lion, all alone,
+     A mighty-maned, grave-mouthed prodigy,
+     And lair him in my caves: and other thoughts,
+     Some will be snakes, and bears, and savage wolves,
+     And when I lie tremendous in the desert,
+     Or abandoned sea, murderers and idiot men
+     Will come to live upon my rugged sides,
+     Die, and be buried in me. Now it comes;
+     I break, and magnify, and lose my form,
+     And yet I shall be taken for a man,
+     And never be discovered till I die.
+
+
+How much this has of the old, splendid audacity of the Elizabethans! How
+unlike timid modern verse! Beddoes is always large, impressive; the
+greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful
+consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have
+achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he
+is a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs.
+
+The one important work which Beddoes actually completed, _Death's
+Jest-Book_, is nominally a drama in five acts. All the rest of his work,
+except a few lyrics and occasional poems, is also nominally dramatic.
+But there never was anything less dramatic in substance than this mass
+of admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes' genius was essentially
+lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a
+strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic power
+he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a
+credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no
+conception of what character might be in men and women, he had no
+faculty of expressing emotion convincingly. Constantly you find the most
+beautiful poetry where it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do you
+find one of those brief and memorable phrases, words from the heart,
+for which one would give much beautiful poetry. To take one instance: an
+Arab slave wishes to say that he has caught sight of a sail nearing the
+coast. And this is how he says it:
+
+
+     I looked abroad upon the wide old world,
+     And in the sky and sea, through the same clouds,
+     The same stars saw I glistening, and nought else,
+     And as my soul sighed unto the world's soul,
+     Far in the north a wind blackened the waters,
+     And, after that creating breath was still,
+     A dark speck sat on the sky's edge: as watching
+     Upon the heaven-girt border of my mind
+     The first faint thought of a great deed arise,
+     With force and fascination I drew on
+     The wished sight, and my hope seemed to stamp
+     Its shade upon it. Not yet is it clear
+     What, or from whom, the vessel.
+
+
+In scenes which aim at being passionate one sees the same inability to
+be natural. What we get is always literature; it is never less than
+that, nor more than that. It is never frank, uncompromising nature. The
+fact is, that Beddoes wrote from the head, collectively, and without
+emotion, or without inspiration, save in literature. All Beddoes'
+characters speak precisely the same language, express the same desires;
+all in the same way startle us by their ghostly remoteness from flesh
+and blood. 'Man is tired of being merely human,' Siegfried says, in
+_Death's Jest-Book_, and Beddoes may be said to have grown tired of
+humanity before he ever came to understand it.
+
+Looked at from the normal standpoint, Beddoes' idea of the drama was
+something wildly amateurish. As a practical playwright he would be
+beneath contempt; but what he aimed at was something peculiar to
+himself, a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia. He would have admitted
+his obligations to Webster and Tourneur, to all the _macabre_
+Elizabethan work; he would have admitted that his foundations were based
+on literature, not on life; but he would have claimed, and claimed
+justly, that he had produced, out of many strange elements, something
+which has a place apart in English poetry. _Death's Jest-Book_ is
+perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page
+without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A
+slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable
+of death:
+
+
+         Sleeping, or feigning sleep,
+     Well done of her: 'tis trying on a garb
+     Which she must wear, sooner or later, long:
+     'Tis but a warmer, lighter death.
+
+
+Not Baudelaire was more amorous of corruption; not Poe was more
+spellbound by the scent of graveyard earth. So Beddoes has written a new
+Dance of Death, in poetry; has become the chronicler of the praise and
+ridicule of Death. 'Tired of being merely human,' he has peopled a play
+with confessed phantoms. It is natural that these eloquent speakers
+should pass us by with their words, that they should fail to move us by
+their sorrows or their hates: they are not intended to be human, except,
+indeed, in the wizard humanity of Death.
+
+I have said already that the genius of Beddoes is not dramatic, but
+lyrical. What was really most spontaneous in him (nothing was quite
+spontaneous) was the impulse of song-writing. And it seems to me that he
+is really most successful in sweet and graceful lyrics like this
+_Dirge_, so much more than 'half in love with easeful death.'
+
+
+     If thou wilt ease thine heart
+     Of love and all its smart,
+         Then sleep, dear, sleep;
+     And not a sorrow
+       Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
+         Lie still and deep,
+       Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
+     The rim o' the sun to-morrow,
+         In eastern sky.
+
+     But wilt thou cure thine heart
+     Of love and all its smart,
+         Then die, dear, die;
+     'Tis deeper, sweeter,
+       Than on a rose-bank to lie dreaming
+         With folded eye;
+       And then alone, amid the beaming
+     Of love's stars, thou'lt meet her
+         In eastern sky.
+
+
+A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming, morbid, and magnificent poetry
+in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, of
+English poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones and
+Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writer
+of more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had
+certainly a more personal passion to express in his rough and
+tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actual
+poetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts:
+actual poetical genius.
+
+1891.
+
+
+
+
+GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
+
+
+_Salammbo_ is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told
+us, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the
+modern novel.' By the modern novel he means the novel as he had
+reconstructed it; he means _Madame Bovary_. That perfect book is perfect
+because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject suited to his
+method, had made his method and his subject one. On his scientific side
+Flaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps a more intimately
+personal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in a large, sweeping way.
+The lyric poet in him made _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_, the analyst
+made _L'Education Sentimentale_; but in _Madame Bovary_ we find the
+analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman,
+as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and
+observed in surroundings of the most ordinary kind. But Flaubert finds
+the romantic material which he loved, the materials of beauty, in
+precisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly.
+Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical,
+incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile
+aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to
+Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of
+reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes
+exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a
+commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric
+in his rendering of it.
+
+In writing _Salammbo_ Flaubert set himself to renew the historical
+novel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted,
+doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible,
+by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of the
+reality of the things about us, only able to translate them
+approximately into any form of art. How much is left over, in the
+closest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a passing
+steamer, of one's next-door neighbour, of the point of view of a
+foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind, moment
+by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble Arch? Think,
+then, of the attempt to reconstruct no matter what period of the past,
+to distinguish the difference in the aspect of a world perhaps bossed
+with castles and ridged with ramparts, to two individualities encased
+within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his antiquity wisely: a period of
+which we know too little to confuse us, a city of which no stone is left
+on another, the minds of Barbarians who have left us no psychological
+documents. 'Be sure I have made no fantastic Carthage,' he says proudly,
+pointing to his documents; Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him
+with 'the _exact_ form of a door'; the Bible and Theophrastus, from
+which he obtains his perfumes and his precious stones; Gresenius, from
+whom he gets his Punic names; the _Memoires de l'Academie des
+Inscriptions_. 'As for the temple of Tanit, I am sure of having
+reconstructed it as it was, with the treatise of the Syrian Goddess,
+with the medals of the Duc de Luynes, with what is known of the temple
+at Jerusalem, with a passage of St. Jerome, quoted by Seldon (_De Diis
+Syriis_), with the plan of the temple of Gozzo, which is quite
+Carthaginian, and best of all, with the ruins of the temple of Thugga,
+which I have seen myself, with my own eyes, and of which no traveller or
+antiquarian, so far as I know, has ever spoken.' But that, after all, as
+he admits (when, that is, he has proved point by point his minute
+accuracy to all that is known of ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to
+every indication which can serve for his guidance, his patience in
+grouping rather than his daring in the invention of action and details),
+that is not the question. 'I care little enough for archaeology! If the
+colour is not uniform, if the details are out of keeping, if the manners
+do not spring from the religion and the actions from the passions, if
+the characters are not consistent, if the costumes are not appropriate
+to the habits and the architecture to the climate, if, in a word, there
+is not harmony, I am in error. If not, no.'
+
+And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can give
+a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time a definition
+of the merit which sets _Salammbo_ above all other historical novels.
+Everything in the book is strange, some of it might easily be
+bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony. The harmony is like
+that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying its charm, or even the
+secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a monotony coiling
+perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its own. Or rather, it is
+like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite colours, firmly
+detached from a background of burning sky; a procession of Barbarians,
+each in the costume of his country, passes across the wall; there are
+battles, in which elephants fight with men; an army besieges a great
+city, or rots to death in a defile between mountains; the ground is
+paved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living burden, stand
+against the sky; a few figures of men and women appear again and again,
+expressing by their gestures the soul of the story.
+
+Flaubert himself has pointed, with his unerring self-criticism, to the
+main defect of his book: 'The pedestal is too large for the statue.'
+There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more about Salammbo.
+He declares: 'There is not in my book an isolated or gratuitous
+description; all are useful to my characters, and have an influence,
+near or remote, on the action.' This is true, and yet, all the same, the
+pedestal is too large for the statue. Salammbo, 'always surrounded with
+grave and exquisite things,' has something of the somnambulism which
+enters into the heroism of Judith; she has a hieratic beauty, and a
+consciousness as pale and vague as the moon whom she worships. She
+passes before us, 'her body saturated with perfumes,' encrusted with
+jewels like an idol, her head turreted with violet hair, the gold chain
+tinkling between her ankles; and is hardly more than an attitude, a
+fixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom one sees passing, with
+oblique eyes and mouths painted into smiles, their faces curiously
+traced into a work of art, in the languid movements of a pantomimic
+dance. The soul behind those eyes? the temperament under that at times
+almost terrifying mask? Salammbo is as inarticulate for us as the
+serpent, to whose drowsy beauty, capable of such sudden awakenings, hers
+seems half akin; they move before us in a kind of hieratic pantomime, a
+coloured, expressive thing, signifying nothing. Matho, maddened with
+love, 'in an invincible stupor, like those who have drunk some draught
+of which they are to die,' has the same somnambulistic life; the prey of
+Venus, he has an almost literal insanity, which, as Flaubert reminds us,
+is true to the ancient view of that passion. He is the only quite vivid
+person in the book, and he lives with the intensity of a wild beast, a
+life 'blinded alike' from every inner and outer interruption to one or
+two fixed ideas. The others have their places in the picture, fall into
+their attitudes naturally, remain so many coloured outlines for us. The
+illusion is perfect; these people may not be the real people of history,
+but at least they have no self-consciousness, no Christian tinge in
+their minds.
+
+'The metaphors are few, the epithets definite,' Flaubert tells us, of
+his style in this book, where, as he says, he has sacrificed less 'to
+the amplitude of the phrase and to the period,' than in _Madame Bovary_.
+The movement here is in briefer steps, with a more earnest gravity,
+without any of the engaging weakness of adjectives. The style is never
+archaic, it is absolutely simple, the precise word being put always for
+the precise thing; but it obtains a dignity, a historical remoteness, by
+the large seriousness of its manner, the absence of modern ways of
+thought, which, in _Madame Bovary_, bring with them an instinctively
+modern cadence.
+
+_Salammbo_ is written with the severity of history, but Flaubert notes
+every detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural things.
+A slave is being flogged under a tree: Flaubert notes the movement of
+the thong as it flies, and tells us: 'The thongs, as they whistled
+through the air, sent the bark of the plane trees flying.' Before the
+battle of the Macar, the Barbarians are awaiting the approach of the
+Carthaginian army. First 'the Barbarians were surprised to see the
+ground undulate in the distance.' Clouds of dust rise and whirl over
+the desert, through which are seen glimpses of horns, and, as it seems,
+wings. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the desert? The
+Barbarians watch intently. 'At last they made out several transverse
+bars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser, larger;
+dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes came into
+view; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, "The
+Carthaginians!" arose.' Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes,
+unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves,
+taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert puts
+himself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them as
+to see for them.
+
+Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will find
+that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its
+subject-matter. That style, which has almost every merit and hardly a
+fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of most
+writers careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire,
+and you will find that the aim of these writers has been to construct a
+style which shall be adaptable to every occasion, but without structural
+change; the cadence is always the same. The most exquisite word-painting
+of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm into English, without
+difficulty; once you have mastered the tune, you have merely to go on;
+every verse will be the same. But Flaubert is so difficult to translate
+because he has no fixed rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regular
+march-music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his
+cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has no
+theory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a
+living thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and
+interprets. 'If I call stones blue, it is because blue is the precise
+word, believe me,' he replies to Sainte-Beuve's criticism. Beauty comes
+into his words from the precision with which they express definite
+things, definite ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where the
+material is so hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheer
+exactitude which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure and
+order, seen equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage, at the
+time of their flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on the
+corpses of the Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains.
+
+1901.
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET
+
+
+Meredith has always suffered from the curse of too much ability. He has
+both genius and talent, but the talent, instead of acting as a
+counterpoise to the genius, blows it yet more windily about the air. He
+has almost all the qualities of a great writer, but some perverse spirit
+in his blood has mixed them to their mutual undoing. When he writes
+prose, the prose seems always about to burst into poetry; when he writes
+verse, the verse seems always about to sink into prose. He thinks in
+flashes, and writes in shorthand. He has an intellectual passion for
+words, but he has never been able to accustom his mind to the slowness
+of their service; he tosses them about the page in his anger, tearing
+them open and gutting them with a savage pleasure. He has so fastidious
+a fear of dirtying his hands with what other hands have touched that he
+makes the language over again, so as to avoid writing a sentence or a
+line as any one else could have written it. His hatred of the
+commonplace becomes a mania, and it is by his head-long hunt after the
+best that he has lost by the way its useful enemy, good. In prose he
+would have every sentence shine, in verse he would have every line
+sparkle; like a lady who puts on all her jewellery at once, immediately
+after breakfast. As his own brain never rests, he does not realise that
+there are other brains which feel fatigue; and as his own taste is for
+what is hard, ringing, showy, drenched with light, he does not leave any
+cool shadows to be a home for gentle sounds, in the whole of his work.
+His books are like picture galleries, in which every inch of wall is
+covered, and picture screams at picture across its narrow division of
+frame. Almost every picture is good, but each suffers from its context.
+As time goes on, Meredith's mannerisms have grown rigid, like old bones.
+Exceptions have become rules, experiments have been accepted for
+solutions.
+
+In Meredith's earliest verse there is a certain harshness, which seems
+to come from a too urgent desire to be at once concise and explicit.
+_Modern Love_, published in 1862, remains Meredith's masterpiece in
+poetry, and it will always remain, beside certain things of Donne and of
+Browning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse.
+It is packed with imagination, but with imagination of so nakedly human
+a kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse:
+it is like scraps of broken, of heart-broken, talk, overheard and jotted
+down at random, hardly suggesting a story, but burning into one like the
+touch of a corroding acid. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no
+illusions, and their 'tragic hints' are like a fine, pained mockery of
+love itself, as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of
+passion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness more
+constant than that of Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensation
+carried to the point of agony at which Othello sweats words like these:
+
+
+                                   O thou weed,
+     Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet
+     That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!
+
+
+Meredith has written nothing more like _Modern Love_, and for twenty
+years after the publication of the volume containing it he published no
+other volume of verse. In 1883 appeared _Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of
+Earth_; in 1887 _Poems and Ballads of Tragic Life_; and, in 1888, _A
+Reading of Earth_, to which _A Reading of Life_ is a sort of companion
+volume. The main part of this work is a kind of nature-poetry unlike any
+other nature-poetry; but there are several groups which must be
+distinguished from it. One group contains _Cassandra_, from the volume
+of 1862, _The Nuptials of Attila, The Song of Theodolinda_, from the
+volume of 1887. There is something fierce, savage, convulsive, in the
+passion which informs these poems; a note sounded in our days by no
+other poet. The words rush rattling on one another, like the clashing of
+spears or the ring of iron on iron in a day of old-world battle. The
+lines are javelins, consonanted lines full of force and fury, as if sung
+or played by a northern skald harping on a field of slain. There is
+another group of romantic ballads, containing the early _Margaret's
+Bridal Eve_, and the later _Arch-duchess Anne_ and _The Young
+Princess_. There are also the humorous and pathetic studies in _Roadside
+Philosophers_ and the like, in which, forty years ago, Meredith
+anticipated, with the dignity of a poet, the vernacular studies of
+others. And, finally, there is a section containing poems of impassioned
+meditation, beginning with the lofty and sustained ode to _France,
+December_ 1870, and ending with the volcanic volume of _Odes in
+Contribution to the Song of French History_, published in 1900.
+
+But it is in the poems of nature that Meredith is most consistent to an
+attitude, most himself as he would have himself. There is in them an
+almost pagan sense of the nearness and intimacy of the awful and
+benignant powers of nature; but this sense, once sufficient for the
+making of poetry, is interpenetrated, in this modern poet, by an almost
+scientific consciousness of the processes of evolution. Earth seen
+through a brain, not a temperament, it might be defined; and it would be
+possible to gather a complete philosophy of life from these poems, in
+which, though 'the joy of earth' is sung, it is sung with the wise,
+collected ecstasy of Melampus, not with the irresponsible ecstasy of
+the Maenads. It is not what Browning calls 'the wild joy of living,' but
+the strenuous joy of living in perfect accordance with nature, with the
+sanity of animals who have climbed to reason, and are content to be
+guided by it. It is a philosophy which may well be contrasted with the
+transcendental theories of one with whom Meredith may otherwise be
+compared, Emerson. Both, in different ways, have tried to make poetry
+out of the brain, forgetting that poetry draws nourishment from other
+soil, and dies in the brain as in a vacuum. Both have taken the
+abstract, not the concrete, for their province; both have tortured words
+in the cause of ideas, both have had so much to say that they have had
+little time left over for singing.
+
+Meredith has never been a clear writer in verse; _Modern Love_ requires
+reading and re-reading; but at one time he had a somewhat exasperating
+semblance of lucidity, which still lurks mockingly about his work. A
+freshman who heard Mallarme lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I
+understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is sometimes
+equally tantalising. The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one,
+clearly visible on the other side of some hard transparency through
+which there is no passage. Have you ever seen a cat pawing at the glass
+from the other side of a window? It paws and paws, turns its head to the
+right, turns its head to the left, walks to and fro, sniffing at the
+corner of every pane; its claws screech on the glass, in a helpless
+endeavour to get through to what it sees before it; it gives up at last,
+in an evident bewilderment. That is how one figures the reader of
+Meredith's later verse. It is not merely that Meredith's meaning is not
+obvious at a glance, it is, when obscure, ugly in its obscurity, not
+beautiful. There is not an uglier line in the English language than:
+
+
+     Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate.
+
+
+It is almost impossible to say it at all. Often Meredith wishes to be
+too concise, and squeezes his thoughts together like this:
+
+
+                 and the totterer Earth detests,
+     Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
+
+
+In his desire to cram a separate sentence into every line, he writes
+such lines as:
+
+
+     Look I once back, a broken pinion I,
+
+
+He thinks differently from other people, and not only more quickly; and
+his mind works in a kind of double process. Take, for instance, this
+phrase:
+
+
+     Ravenous all the line for speed.
+
+
+An image occurs to him, the image of a runner, who, as we say, 'devours'
+the ground. Thereupon he translates this image into his own dialect,
+where it becomes intensely vivid if it can be caught in passing; only,
+to catch it in passing, you must go through two mental processes at
+once. That is why he cannot be read aloud. In a poem where every line is
+on the pattern of the line I have quoted, every line has to be
+unriddled; and no brain works fast enough to catch so many separate
+meanings, and to translate as it goes.
+
+Meredith has half the making of a great artist in verse. He has harmony
+without melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations upon
+verse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the
+swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to
+astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical
+skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical
+skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has
+written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud
+of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping
+as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the
+building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the
+delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his
+poems, the _Hymn to Colour_, he can begin one stanza with this ample
+magnificence:
+
+
+     Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes
+     The house of heaven splendid for the bride;
+
+
+and can end another stanza thus lumpishly:
+
+
+     With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,
+     Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged
+         Shall on through brave wars waged.
+
+
+Meredith is not satisfied with English verse as it is; he persists in
+trying to make it into something wholly different, and these
+eccentricities come partly from certain theories. He speaks in one place
+of
+
+
+     A soft compulsion on terrene
+     By heavenly,
+
+
+which is not English, but a misapplication of the jargon of science. In
+another place he speaks of
+
+
+     The posts that named the swallowed mile,
+
+
+which is a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference,
+liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and
+'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two
+lines from _The Woods of Westermain_, published in 1883 in the _Poems
+and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth_, sum up in themselves the whole theory:
+
+
+     Life, the small self-dragon ramped,
+     Thrill for service to be stamped.
+
+
+Here every word is harsh, prickly, hard of sense; the rhymes come like
+buffets in the face. It is possible that Meredith has more or less
+consciously imitated the French practice in the matter of rhymes, for in
+France rarity of rhyme is sought as eagerly as in England it is avoided.
+Rhyme in French poetry is an important part of the art of verse; in
+English poetry, except to some extent at the time of Pope, it has been
+accepted as a thing rather to be disguised than accentuated. There is
+something a little barbarous in rhyme itself, with its mnemonic click
+of emphasis, and the skill of the most skilful English poets has always
+been shown in the softening of that click, in reducing it to the
+inarticulate answer of an echo. Meredith hammers out his rhymes on the
+anvil on which he has forged his clanging and rigid-jointed words. His
+verse moves in plate-armour, 'terrible as an army with banners.'
+
+To Meredith poetry has come to be a kind of imaginative logic, and
+almost the whole of his later work is a reasoning in verse. He reasons,
+not always clearly to the eye, and never satisfyingly to the ear, but
+with a fiery intelligence which has more passion than most other poets
+put into frankly emotional verse. He reasons in pictures, every line
+having its imagery, and he uses pictorial words to express abstract
+ideas. Disdaining the common subjects of poetry, as he disdains common
+rhythms, common rhymes, and common language, he does much by his
+enormous vitality to give human warmth to arguments concerning humanity.
+He does much, though he attempts the impossible. His poetry is always
+what Rossetti called 'amusing'; it has, in other words, what Baudelaire
+called 'the supreme literary grace, energy'; but with what relief does
+one not lay down this _Reading of Life_ and take up the _Modern Love_ of
+forty years ago, in which life speaks! Meredith has always been in
+wholesome revolt against convention, against every deadening limitation
+of art, but he sometimes carries revolt to the point of anarchy. In
+finding new subjects and new forms for verse he is often throwing away
+the gold and gathering up the ore. In taking for his foundation the
+stone which the builders rejected he is sometimes only giving a proof of
+their wisdom in rejecting it.
+
+1901.
+
+
+
+
+ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
+
+I
+
+
+It is forty-four years since the publication of Swinburne's first
+volume, and it is scarcely to the credit of the English public that we
+should have had to wait so long for a collected edition of the poems of
+one of the greatest poets of this or any country. 'It is nothing to me,'
+Swinburne tells us, with a delicate precision in his pride, 'that what I
+write should find immediate or general acceptance.' And indeed
+'immediate' it can scarcely be said to have been; 'general' it is hardly
+likely ever to be. Swinburne has always been a poet writing for poets,
+or for those rare lovers of poetry who ask for poetry, and nothing more
+or less, in a poet. Such writers can never be really popular, any more
+than gold without alloy can ever really be turned to practical uses.
+Think of how extremely little the poetical merit of his poetry had to
+do with the immense success of Byron; think how very much besides
+poetical merit contributed to the surprising reputation of Tennyson.
+There was a time when the first series of _Poems and Ballads_ was read
+for what seemed startling in its subject-matter; but that time has long
+since passed, and it is not probable that any reviewer of the new
+edition now reprinted verbatim from the edition of 1866 will so much as
+allude to the timid shrieks which went up from the reviewers of that
+year, except perhaps as one of the curiosities of literature.
+
+A poet is always interesting and instructive when he talks about
+himself, and Swinburne, in his dedicatory epistle to his 'best and
+dearest friend,' Mr. Watts-Dunton, who has been the finest, the surest,
+and the subtlest critic of poetry now living, talks about himself, or
+rather about his work, with a proud and simple frankness. It is not only
+interesting, but of considerable critical significance, to know that,
+among his plays, Swinburne prefers _Mary Stuart_, and, among his lyrical
+poems, the ode on Athens and the ode on the Armada. 'By the test of
+these two poems,' he tells us, 'I am content that my claims should be
+decided and my station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of
+the term; a craftsman in the most ambitious line of his art that ever
+aroused or can arouse the emulous aspiration of his kind.'
+
+In one sense a poet is always the most valuable critic of his own work;
+in another sense his opinion is almost valueless. He knows, better than
+any one else, what he wanted to do, and he knows, better than any one
+else, how nearly he has done it. In judging his own technical skill in
+the accomplishment of his aim, it is easy for him to be absolutely
+unbiased, technique being a thing wholly apart from one's self, an
+acquirement. But, in a poem, the way it is done is by no means
+everything; something else, the vital element in it, the quality of
+inspiration, as we rightly call it, has to be determined. Of this the
+poet is rarely a judge. To him it is a part of himself, and he is
+scarcely more capable of questioning its validity than he is of
+questioning his own intentions. To him it is enough that it is his.
+Conscious, as he may rightly be, of genius, how can he discriminate, in
+his own work, between the presence or the absence of that genius, which,
+though it means everything, may be absent in a production technically
+faultless, or present in a production less strictly achieved according
+to rule? Swinburne, it is evident, grudges some of the fame which has
+set _Atalanta in Calydon_ higher in general favour than _Erechtheus_,
+and, though he is perfectly right in every reason which he gives for
+setting _Erechtheus_ above _Atalanta in Calydon_, the fact remains that
+there is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the same
+degree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth of
+inspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and the
+ode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is no
+more likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer of
+those two splendid poems than there is of Coleridge, to take Swinburne's
+own instance, being remembered as the writer of the ode to France rather
+than as the writer of the ode on Dejection. The ode to France is a
+product of the finest poetical rhetoric; the ode on Dejection is a
+growth of the profoundest poetical genius.
+
+Another point on which Swinburne takes for granted what is perhaps his
+highest endowment as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the
+'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the
+sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that
+marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English
+or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural
+command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne,
+'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or
+instinct as the greatest writer and the greatest versifier of our age
+must have felt at its highest possible degree when composing a musical
+exercise of such incomparable scope and fulness as _Les Djinns_.' In
+metrical inventiveness Swinburne is as much Victor Hugo's superior as
+the English language is superior to the French in metrical capability.
+His music has never the sudden bird's flight, the thrill, pause, and
+unaccountable ecstasy of the very finest lyrics of Blake or of
+Coleridge; one never wholly forgets the artist in the utterance. But
+where he is incomparable is in an 'arduous fulness' of intricate
+harmony, around which the waves of melody flow, foam and scatter like
+the waves of the sea about a rock. No poet has ever loved or praised the
+sea as Swinburne has loved and praised it; and to no poet has it been
+given to create music with words in so literal an analogy with the
+inflexible and vital rhythmical science of the sea.
+
+In his reference to the 'clatter aroused' by the first publication of
+the wonderful volume now reprinted, the first series of _Poems and
+Ballads_, Swinburne has said with tact, precision, and finality all that
+need ever be said on the subject. He records, with a touch of not
+unkindly humour, his own 'deep diversion of collating and comparing the
+variously inaccurate verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who
+insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted
+or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions
+of absolute fancy.' And, admitting that there was work in it of both
+kinds, he claims, with perfect justice, that 'if the two kinds cannot be
+distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an
+artist whose medium or material has more in common with a musician's
+than with a sculptor's.' Rarely has the prying ignorance of ordinary
+criticism been more absurdly evident than in the criticisms on _Poems
+and Ballads_, in which the question as to whether these poems were or
+were not the record of personal experience was debated with as much
+solemn fury as if it really mattered in the very least. When a poem has
+once been written, of what consequence is it to anybody whether it was
+inspired by a line of Sappho or by a lady living round the corner? There
+may be theoretical preferences, and these may be rationally enough
+argued, as to whether one should work from life or from memory or from
+imagination. But, the poem once written, only one question remains: is
+it a good or a bad poem? A poem of Coleridge or of Wordsworth is neither
+better nor worse because it came to the one in a dream and to the other
+in 'a storm, worse if possible, in which the pony could (or would) only
+make his way slantwise.' The knowledge of the circumstances or the
+antecedents of composition is, no doubt, as gratifying to human
+curiosity as the personal paragraphs in the newspapers; it can hardly
+be of much greater importance.
+
+A passage in Swinburne's dedicatory epistle which was well worth saying,
+a passage which comes with doubled force from a poet who is also a
+scholar, is that on books which are living things: 'Marlowe and
+Shakespeare, AEschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty
+shelves of libraries.' To Swinburne, as he says, the distinction between
+books and life is but a 'dullard's distinction,' and it may justly be
+said of him that it is with an equal instinct and an equal enthusiasm
+that he is drawn to whatever in nature, in men, in books, or in ideas is
+great, noble, and heroic. The old name of _Laudi_, which has lately been
+revived by d'Annunzio, might be given to the larger part of Swinburne's
+lyric verse: it is filled by a great praising of the universe. To the
+prose-minded reader who reads verse in the intervals of newspaper and
+business there must be an actual fatigue in merely listening to so
+unintermittent a hymn of thanksgiving. Here is a poet, he must say, who
+is without any moderation at all; birds at dawn, praising light, are not
+more troublesome to a sleeper.
+
+Reading the earlier and the later Swinburne on a high rock around which
+the sea is washing, one is struck by the way in which these cadences, in
+their unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm of
+the sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, a
+rhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebuked
+by the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked by the stars.
+'We are what suns and winds and waters make us,' as Landor knew: the
+whole essence of Swinburne seems to be made by the rush and soft flowing
+impetus of the sea. The sea has passed into his blood like a passion and
+into his verse like a transfiguring element. It is actually the last
+word of many of his poems, and it is the first and last word of his
+poetry.
+
+He does not make pictures, for he does not see the visible world without
+an emotion which troubles his sight. He sees as through a cloud of
+rapture. Sight is to him a transfiguring thrill, and his record of
+things seen is clouded over with shining words and broken into little
+separate shafts and splinters of light. He has still, undimmed, the
+child's awakenings to wonder, love, reverence, the sense of beauty in
+every sensation. He has the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost
+unparalleled abundance. There is for him no tedium in things, because,
+to his sense, books catch up and continue the delights of nature, and
+with books and nature he has all that he needs for a continual inner
+communing.
+
+In this new book there are poems of nature, poems of the sea, the lake,
+the high oaks, the hawthorn, a rosary, Northumberland; and there are
+poems of books, poems about Burns, Christina Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas,
+and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in
+this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism,
+and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater
+Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist,
+the poet of strenuous laughter.
+
+
+     But love and wine were moon and sun
+     For many a fame long since undone,
+     And sorrow and joy have lost and won
+         By stormy turns
+     As many a singer's soul, if none
+         More bright than Burns.
+
+     And sweeter far in grief and mirth
+     Have songs as glad and sad of birth
+     Found voice to speak of wealth or dearth
+         In joy of life:
+     But never song took fire from earth
+         More strong for strife.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Above the storms of praise and blame
+     That blur with mist his lustrous name,
+     His thunderous laughter went and came,
+         And lives and flies;
+     The war that follows on the flame
+         When lightning dies.
+
+
+Here the homage is given with splendid energy, but with fine justice.
+There are other poems of homage in this book, along with denunciations,
+as there are on so many pages of the _Songs before Sunrise_ and the
+_Songs of Two Nations_, in which the effect is far less convincing, as
+it is far less clear. Whether Mazzini or Nelson be praised, Napoleon
+III. or Gladstone be buffeted, little distinction, save of degree, can
+be discerned between the one and the other. The hate poems, it must be
+admitted, are more interesting, partly because they are more
+distinguishable, than the poems of adoration; for hate seizes upon the
+lineaments which love glorifies willingly out of recognition. There was
+a finely ferocious energy in the _Dirae_ ending with _The Descent into
+Hell_ of 9th January 1873, and there is a good swinging and slashing
+vigour in _The Commonweal_ of 1886. Why is it that this deeply felt
+political verse, like so much of the political verse of the _Songs
+before Sunrise_, does not satisfy the ear or the mind like the early
+love poetry or the later nature poetry? Is it not that one distinguishes
+only a voice, not a personality behind the voice? Speech needs weight,
+though song only needs wings.
+
+
+     I set the trumpet to my lips and blow,
+
+
+said Swinburne in the _Songs before Sunrise,_ when he was the trumpeter
+of Mazzini.
+
+And yet, it must be remembered, Swinburne has always meant exactly what
+he has said, and this fact points an amusing contrast between the
+attitude of the critics thirty years ago towards work which was then new
+and their attitude now towards the same work when it is thirty years
+old. There is, in the _Songs before Sunrise_, an arraignment of
+Christianity as deliberate as Leconte de Lisle's, as wholesale as
+Nietzsche's; in the _Poems and Ballads_, a learned sensuality without
+parallel in English poetry; and the critics, or the descendants of the
+critics, who, when these poems first appeared, could see nothing but
+these accidental qualities of substance, are now, thanks merely to the
+triumph of time, to the ease with which time forgets and forgives, able
+to take all such things for granted, and to acknowledge the genuine and
+essential qualities of lyric exaltation and generous love of liberty by
+which the poems exist, and have a right to exist, as poems. But when we
+are told that _Before a Crucifix_ is a poem fundamentally reverent
+towards Christianity, and that _Anactoria_ is an ascetic experiment in
+scholarship, a learned attempt at the reconstruction of the order of
+Sappho, it is difficult not to wonder with what kind of smile the writer
+of these poems reflects anew over the curiosities of criticism. I have
+taken the new book and the old book together, because there is
+surprisingly little difference between the form and manner of the old
+poems and the new. The contents of _A Channel Passage_ are unusually
+varied in subject, and the longest poem, _The Altar of Righteousness_, a
+marvellous piece of rhythmical architecture, is unusually varied in
+form. Technically the whole book shows Swinburne at his best; if,
+indeed, he may ever be said not to be at his best, technically. Is there
+any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so
+unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often
+foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is
+apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to
+me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the
+imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us
+and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poets
+present us with their best effects deliberately, giving them as weighty
+an accent as they can; Swinburne scatters them by the way. Take, for
+instance, the line:
+
+
+     The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness
+       fell.
+
+
+The line comes rearing like a wave, and has fallen and raced past us
+before we have properly grasped what is imaginatively fine in the
+latter clause. Presented to us in the manner of slower poets, thus:
+
+
+               The tyranny
+     Kindled in darkness fell,
+
+
+how much more easily do we realise the quality of the speech which goes
+to make this song.
+
+And yet there is no doubt that Swinburne has made his own moulds of
+language, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt,
+when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs to
+him, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead of
+creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in
+the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in
+translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated,
+he misses the naive quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version
+not in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtle
+way, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will not
+stop to think that 'wife,' though a good word for his rhyme scheme, is
+not a word that Villon could have used, and that
+
+
+     Deux estions et n'avions qu'ung cueur,
+
+
+though it is perfectly rendered by Rossetti in
+
+
+     Two we were and the heart was one,
+
+
+is turned into a wholly different, a Swinburnian thing, by
+
+
+     Twain we were, and our hearts one song,
+     One heart.
+
+
+Nor is 'Dead as the carver's figured throng' (for 'Comme les images, par
+cueur') either clear in meaning, or characteristic of Villon in form. Is
+it not one of the penalties of extreme technical ability that the hand
+at times works, as it were, blindly, without the delicate vigilance or
+direction of the brain?
+
+Of the poems contained in this new volume, the title-poem, _A Channel
+Passage_, is perhaps the finest. It is the record of a memory, fifty
+years old, and it is filled with a passionate ecstasy in the
+recollection of
+
+
+     Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal
+       joy,
+     Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's
+       heart in a boy.
+
+
+It may be that Swinburne has praised the sea more eloquently, or sung
+of it more melodiously, but not in the whole of his works is there a
+poem fuller of personal rapture in the communion of body and soul with
+the very soul of the sea in storm. _The Lake of Gaube_ is remarkable for
+an exultant and very definite and direct rendering of the sensation of a
+dive through deep water. There are other sea-poems in the two brief and
+concentrated poems in honour of Nelson; the most delicate of the poems
+of flowers in _A Rosary_; the most passionate and memorable of the
+political poems in _Russia: an Ode_; the Elizabethan prologues. These
+poems, so varied in subject and manner, are the work of many years; to
+those who love Swinburne most as a lyric poet they will come with
+special delight, for they represent, in almost absolute equality, almost
+every side of his dazzling and unique lyric genius.
+
+The final volume of the greatest lyrical poet since Shelley contains
+three books, each published at an interval of ten years: the _Midsummer
+Holiday_ of 1884, the _Astrophel_ of 1894, and the _Channel Passage_ of
+1904. Choice among them is as difficult as it is unnecessary. They are
+alike in their ecstatic singing of the sea, of great poets and great
+men, of England and liberty, and of children. One contains the finest
+poems about the sea from on shore, another the finest poem about the sea
+from at sea, and the other the finest poem about the earth from the
+heart of the woods. Even in Swinburne's work the series of nine ballades
+in long lines which bears the name of _A Midsummer Holiday_ stands out
+as a masterpiece of its kind, and of a unique kind. A form of French
+verse, which up to then had been used, since the time when Villon used
+it as no man has used it before or since, and almost exclusively in
+iambic measures, is suddenly transported from the hothouse into the open
+air, is stretched and moulded beyond all known limits, and becomes, it
+may almost be said, a new lyric form. After _A Midsummer Holiday_ no one
+can contend any longer that the ballade is a structure necessarily any
+more artificial than the sonnet. But then in the hands of Swinburne an
+acrostic would cease to be artificial.
+
+In this last volume the technique which is seen apparently perfected in
+the _Poems and Ballads_ of 1866 has reached a point from which that
+relative perfection looks easy and almost accidental. Something is lost,
+no doubt, and much has changed. But to compare the metrical qualities of
+_Dolores_ or even of _The Triumph of Time_ with the metrical qualities
+of _On the Verge_ is almost like comparing the art of Thomas Moore with
+the art of Coleridge. In Swinburne's development as a poet the metrical
+development is significant of every change through which the poet has
+passed. Subtlety and nobility, the appeal of ever homelier and loftier
+things, are seen more and more clearly in his work, as the metrical
+qualities of it become purified and intensified, with always more of
+subtlety and distinction, an energy at last tamed to the needs and paces
+of every kind of beauty.
+
+
+II
+
+'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his
+dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for
+antiquity: nor need you be assured that when I write plays it is with a
+view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black
+Friars.' In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if not
+my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly
+unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the
+pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had
+left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my
+first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore
+evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn
+four pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so close
+as this:
+
+
+     We are so more than poor,
+     The dear'st of all our spoil would profit you
+     Less than mere losing; so most more than weak
+     It were but shame for one to smite us, who
+     Could but weep louder.
+
+
+A Shakespearean trick is copied in such lines as:
+
+
+                    All other women's praise
+     Makes part of my blame, and things of least account
+     In them are all my praises.
+
+
+And there is a jester who talks in a metre that might have come
+straight out of Beaumont and Fletcher, as here:
+
+
+     I am considering of that apple still;
+     It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too
+     Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children,
+     Come, my sweet scraps; come, painted pieces; come.
+
+
+Touches of the early Browning come into this Elizabethan work, come and
+go there, as in these lines:
+
+
+     What are you made God's friend for but to have
+     His hand over your head to keep it well
+     And warm the rainy weather through, when snow
+     Spoils half the world's work?
+
+
+And does one not hear Beddoes in the grim line, spoken of the earth:
+
+
+     Naked as brown feet of unburied men?
+
+
+An influence still more closely contemporary seems to be felt in _Fair
+Rosamond_, the influence of that extraordinarily individual blank verse
+which William Morris had made his first and last experiment in, two
+years earlier, in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_.
+
+So many influences, then, are seen at work on the form at least of these
+two plays, published at the age of twenty-three. _Fair Rosamond_,
+though it has beautiful lines here and there, and shows some
+anticipation of that luxurious heat and subtle rendering of physical
+sensation which was to be so evident in the _Poems and Ballads_, is
+altogether a less mature piece of work, less satisfactory in every way,
+than the longer and more regular drama of _The Queen-Mother_. Swinburne
+speaks of the two pieces without distinction, and finds all that there
+is in them of promise or of merit 'in the language and the style of such
+better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches
+of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches
+is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations
+and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best
+speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of
+language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power
+to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive'
+which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic,
+reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardly
+possible to make the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however they
+were presented. Swinburne, however, has done so.' It seems to me, on the
+contrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict sense
+of the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The two great speeches of
+the play, the one beginning 'That God that made high things,' and the
+one beginning 'I would fain see rain,' are indeed more splendid in
+execution than significant as drama, but they have their dramatic
+significance, none the less. There is a Shakespearean echo, but is there
+not also a preparation of the finest Swinburnian harmonies, in such
+lines as these?
+
+
+                          I should be mad,
+     I talk as one filled through with wine; thou God,
+     Whose thunder is confusion of the hills,
+     And with wrath sown abolishes the fields,
+     I pray thee if thy hand would ruin us,
+     Make witness of it even this night that is
+     The last for many cradles, and the grave
+     Of many reverend seats; even at this turn,
+     This edge of season, this keen joint of time,
+     Finish and spare not.
+
+
+The verse is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurative
+meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less fluid,
+less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in
+reference to the verse of _Atalanta in Calydon_). He is ready to be
+harsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; he holds
+out against the enervating allurements of alliteration; he can stop when
+he has said the essential thing.
+
+In the first book of most poets there is something which will be found
+in no other book; some virginity of youth, lost with the first
+intercourse with print. In _The Queen-Mother_ and _Rosamond_ Swinburne
+is certainly not yet himself, he has not yet settled down within his own
+limits. But what happy strayings beyond those limits! What foreign
+fruits and flowers, brought back from far countries! In these two plays
+there is no evidence, certainly, of a playwright; but there is no
+evidence that their writer could never become one. And there is evidence
+already of a poet of original genius and immense accomplishment, a poet
+with an incomparable gift of speech. That this technical quality, at
+least, the sound of these new harmonies in English verse, awakened no
+ears to attention, would be more surprising if one did not remember
+that two years earlier the first and best of William Morris's books was
+saluted as 'a Manchester mystery, not a real vision,' and that two years
+later the best though not the first of George Meredith's books of verse,
+_Modern Love_, was noticed only to be hooted at. Rossetti waited, and
+was wise.
+
+The plays of Swinburne, full as they are of splendid poetry, and even of
+splendid dramatic poetry, suffer from a lack of that 'continual slight
+novelty' which great drama, more than any other poetical form, requires.
+There is, in the writing, a monotony of excellence, which becomes an
+actual burden upon the reader. Here is a poet who touches nothing that
+he does not transform, who can, as in _Mary Stuart_, fill scores of
+pages with talk of lawyers, conspirators, and statesmen, versifying
+history as closely as Shakespeare versified it, and leaving in the
+result less prose deposit than Shakespeare left. It is perhaps because
+in this play he has done a more difficult thing than in any other that
+the writer has come to prefer this to any other of his plays; as men in
+general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similar
+satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties,
+leads him to say of the modern play, _The Sisters_, that it is the only
+modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural
+dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse
+between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or
+made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.' This
+may be as true as that, in the astounding experiment of _Locrine_, none
+of 'the life of human character or the life-likeness of dramatic
+dialogue has suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificed
+to the exigences of metre.' But when all is said, when an unparalleled
+skill in language, versification, and everything that is verbal in form,
+has been admitted, and with unqualified admiration; when, in addition,
+one has admitted, with not less admiration, noble qualities of
+substance, superb qualities of poetic imagination, there still remains
+the question: is either substance or form consistently dramatic? and the
+further question: can work professedly dramatic which is not
+consistently dramatic in substance and form be accepted as wholly
+satisfactory from any other point of view?
+
+The trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots must remain the largest and most
+ambitious attempt which Swinburne has made. The first part,
+_Chastelard_, was published in 1865; the last, _Mary Stuart_, in 1881.
+And what Swinburne says in speaking of the intermediate play,
+_Bothwell_, may be said of them all: 'I will add that I took as much
+care and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history of
+the period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came
+within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of _Bothwell_, the
+longest of the three plays--indeed, the longest play in existence,
+Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece
+of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the
+old Shakespearean term of a chronicle history.' Definition is not
+defence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is in
+itself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use of
+it proves only that he found his way through chronicle to drama, and to
+take his work in the chronicle play as a model is hardly more
+reasonable than to take _Venus and Adonis_ as a model for narrative
+poetry. But, further, there is no play of Shakespeare's, chronicle or
+other, which might not at least be conceived of, if not on the stage of
+our time, at least on that of his, or on that of any time when drama was
+allowed to live its own life according to its own nature. Can we
+conceive of _Bothwell_ even on the stage which has seen _Les Burgraves_?
+The Chinese theatre, which goes on from morning to night without a
+pause, might perhaps grapple with it; but no other. Nor would cutting be
+of any use, for what the stage-manager would cut away would be largely
+just such parts as are finest in the printed play.
+
+There is, in most of Swinburne's plays, some scene or passage of vital
+dramatic quality, and in _Bothwell_ there is one scene, the scene
+leading to the death of Darnley, which is among the great single scenes
+in drama. But there is not even any such scene in the whole of the
+lovely and luxurious song of _Chastelard_ or in the severe and strenuous
+study of _Mary Stuart_. There are moments, in all, where speech is as
+simple, as explicit, as expressive as speech in verse can be; and no
+one will ever speak in verse more naturally than this:
+
+
+     Well, all is one to me: and for my part
+     I thank God I shall die without regret
+     Of anything that I have done alive.
+
+
+These simple beginnings are apt indeed to lead to their end by ways as
+tortuous as this:
+
+
+     Indeed I have done all this if aught I have,
+     And loved at all or loathed, save what mine eye
+     Hath ever loathed or loved since first it saw
+     That face which taught it faith and made it first
+     Think scorn to turn and look on change, or see
+     How hateful in my love's sight are their eyes
+     That give love's light to others.
+
+
+But, even when speech is undiluted, and expresses with due fire or
+calmness the necessary feeling of the moment, it is nearly always mere
+speech, a talking about action or emotion, not itself action or emotion.
+And every scene, even the finest, is thought of as a scene of talk, not
+as visible action; the writer hears his people speak, but does not see
+their faces or where or how they stand or move. It is this power of
+visualisation that is the first requirement of the dramatist; by itself
+it can go no further than the ordering of dumb show; but all drama must
+begin with the ordering of dumb show, and should be playable without
+words.
+
+It was once said by William Morris that Swinburne's poems did not make
+pictures. The criticism was just, but mattered little; because they make
+harmonies. No English poet has ever shown so great and various a mastery
+over harmony in speech, and it is this lyrical quality which has given
+him a place among the great lyrical poets of England. In drama the
+lyrical gift is essential to the making of great poetic drama, but to
+the dramatist it should be an addition rather than a substitute.
+Throughout all these plays it is first and last and all but everything.
+It is for this reason that a play like _Locrine_, which is confessedly,
+by its very form, a sequence of lyrics, comes more nearly to being
+satisfactory as a whole than any of the more 'ambitious, conscientious,
+and comprehensive' plays. _Marino Faliero_, though an episode of
+history, comes into somewhat the same category, and repeats with nobler
+energy the song-like character of _Chastelard_. The action is brief and
+concentrated, tragic and heroic. Its 'magnificent monotony,' its
+'fervent and inexhaustible declamation,' have a height and heat in them
+which turn the whole play into a poem rather than a play, but a poem
+comparable with the 'succession of dramatic scenes or pictures' which
+makes the vast lyric of _Tristram of Lyonesse_. To think of Byron's play
+on the same subject, to compare the actual scenes which can be
+paralleled in both plays, is to realise how much more can be done, in
+poetry and even in drama, by a great lyric poet with a passion for what
+is heroic in human nature and for what is ardent and unlimited in human
+speech, than by a poet who saw in Faliero only the politician, and in
+the opportunities of verse only the opportunity for thin and shrewish
+rhetoric pulled and lopped into an intermittent resemblance to metre.
+
+The form of _Locrine_ has something in common with the form of _Atalanta
+in Calydon_, with a kind of sombre savagery in the subject which recurs
+only once, and less lyrically, in _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_. It
+is written throughout in rhyme, and the dialogue twists and twines,
+without effort, through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene,
+beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet,
+Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line
+stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by
+Shakespeare in the _Rape of Lucrece_, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes,
+and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a
+third rhyme comes forward in the last line but one (after the manner of
+terza rima) and starts a new octave, which closes at the end in a stanza
+of two rhymes only, the last line but one turning back instead of
+forward, to lock the chain's circle. No other English poet who ever
+lived could have written dialogue under such conditions, and it is not
+less true than strange that these fetters act as no more than a beating
+of time to the feet that dance in them. The emotion is throughout at
+white heat; there is lyrical splendour even in the arguments: and a
+child's prattle, in nine-line stanzas of two rhymes apiece, goes as
+merrily as this:
+
+
+     That song is hardly even as wise as I--
+     Nay, very foolishness it is. To die
+     In March before its life were well on wing,
+     Before its time and kindly season--why
+     Should spring be sad--before the swallows fly--
+     Enough to dream of such a wintry thing?
+     Such foolish words were more unmeet for spring
+     Than snow for summer when his heart is high:
+     And why should words be foolish when they sing?
+
+
+Swinburne is a great master of blank verse; there is nothing that can be
+done with blank verse that he cannot do with it. Listen to these lines
+from _Mary Stuart_:
+
+
+     She shall be a world's wonder to all time,
+     A deadly glory watched of marvelling men
+     Not without praise, not without noble tears,
+     And if without what she would never have
+     Who had it never, pity--yet from none
+     Quite without reverence and some kind of love
+     For that which was so royal.
+
+
+There is in them something of the cadence of Milton and something of the
+cadence of Shakespeare, and they are very Swinburne. Yet, after reading
+_Locrine_, and with _Atalanta_ and _Erechtheus_ in memory, it is
+difficult not to wish that Swinburne had written all his plays in
+rhyme, and that they had all been romantic plays and not histories.
+_Locrine_ has been acted, and might well be acted again. Its rhyme would
+sound on the stage with another splendour than the excellent and
+well-sounding rhymes into which Mr. Gilbert Murray has translated
+Euripides. And there would be none of that difficulty which seems to be
+insuperable on the modern stage: the chorus, which, whether it speaks,
+or chants, or sings, seems alike out of place and out of key.
+
+The tragic anecdote which Swinburne has told in _Rosamund, Queen of the
+Lombards_, is told with a directness and conciseness unusual in his
+dramatic or lyric work. The story, simple, barbarous, and cruel--a story
+of the year 573--acts itself out before us in large clear outlines, with
+surprisingly little of modern self-consciousness. The book is a small
+one, the speeches are short, and the words for the most part short too;
+every speech tells like an action in words; there is scarcely a single
+merely decorative passage from beginning to end. Here and there the
+lines become lyric, as in
+
+
+                                  Thou rose,
+     Why did God give thee more than all thy kin,
+     Whose pride is perfume only and colour, this?
+     Music? No rose but mine sings, and the birds
+     Hush all their hearts to hearken. Dost thou hear not
+     How heavy sounds her note now?
+
+
+But even here the lyrical touch marks a point of 'business.' And for the
+most part the speeches are as straightforward as prose; are indeed
+written with a deliberate aim at a sort of prose effect. For instance:
+
+
+
+                         ALMACHILDES.
+
+                                God must be
+     Dead. Such a thing as thou could never else
+     Live.
+
+                           ROSAMUND.
+
+            That concerns not thee nor me. Be thou
+     Sure that my will and power to serve it live.
+     Lift now thine eyes to look upon thy lord.
+
+
+Compare these lines with the lines which end the fourth act:
+
+
+                         ALMACHILDES.
+
+                             I cannot slay him
+     Thus.
+
+                           ROSAMUND.
+
+            Canst thou slay thy bride by fire? He dies,
+     Or she dies, bound against the stake. His death
+     Were the easier. Follow him: save her: strike but once.
+
+                         ALMACHILDES.
+
+     I cannot. God requite thee this! I will.             [_Exit._
+
+                           ROSAMUND.
+
+     And I will see it. And, father, thou shalt see.      [_Exit._
+
+
+In both these instances one sees the quality which is most conspicuous
+in this play--a naked strength, which is the same kind of strength that
+has always been present in Swinburne's plays, but hitherto draped
+elaborately, and often more than half concealed in the draperies. The
+outline of every play has been hard, sharp, firmly drawn; the characters
+always forthright and unwavering; there has always been a real precision
+in the main drift of the speeches; but this is the first time in which
+the outlines have been left to show themselves in all their sharpness.
+Development or experiment, whichever it may be, this resolute simplicity
+brings a new quality into Swinburne's work, and a quality full of
+dramatic possibilities. All the luxuriousness of his verse has gone, and
+the lines ring like sword clashing against sword. These savage and
+simple people of the sixth century do not turn over their thoughts
+before concentrating them into words, and they do not speak except to
+tell their thoughts. Imagine what even Murray, in _Chastelard_, a
+somewhat curt speaker, would have said in place of Almachildes's one
+line, a whole conflict of love, hate, honour, and shame in eight words:
+
+
+     I cannot. God requite thee this! I will.
+
+
+Dramatic realism can go no further than such lines. The question remains
+whether dramatic realism is in itself an altogether desirable thing, and
+whether Swinburne in particular does not lose more than he gains by such
+self-restraint.
+
+The poetic drama is in itself a compromise. That people should speak in
+verse is itself a violation of probability; and so strongly is this felt
+by most actors that they endeavour, in acting a play in verse, to make
+the verse sound as much like prose as possible. But, as it seems to me,
+the aim of the poetic drama is to create a new world in a new
+atmosphere, where the laws of human existence are no longer recognised.
+The aim of the poetic drama is beauty, not truth; and Shakespeare, to
+take the supreme example, is great, not because he makes Othello
+probable as a jealous husband, or gives him exactly the words that a
+jealous husband might have used, but because he creates in him an image
+of more than human energy, and puts into his mouth words of a more
+splendid poetry than any one but Shakespeare himself could have found to
+say. Fetter the poetic drama to an imitation of actual speech, and you
+rob it of the convention which is its chief glory and best opportunity.
+A new colour may certainly be given to that convention, by which a
+certain directness, rather of Dante than of Shakespeare, may be employed
+for its novel kind of beauty, convention being still recognised as
+convention. No doubt that is really Swinburne's aim, and to have
+succeeded in it is to show that he can master every form, and do as he
+pleases with language. And there are passages in the play, like this
+one, which have a fervid colour of their own, fully characteristic of
+the writer who has put more Southern colouring into English verse than
+any other English poet:
+
+
+     This sun--no sun like ours--burns out my soul.
+     I would, when June takes hold on us like fire,
+     The wind could waft and whirl us northward: here
+     The splendour and the sweetness of the world
+     Eat out all joy of life or manhood. Earth
+     Is here too hard on heaven--the Italian air
+     Too bright to breathe, as fire, its next of kin,
+     Too keen to handle. God, whoe'er God be,
+     Keep us from withering as the lords of Rome--
+     Slackening and sickening toward the imperious end
+     That wiped them out of empire! Yea, he shall.
+
+
+The atmosphere of the play is that of June at Verona, and the sun's heat
+seems to beat upon us all through its brief and fevered action.
+Swinburne's words never make pictures, but they are unparalleled in
+their power of conveying atmosphere. He sees with a certain generalised
+vision--it might almost be said that he sees musically; but no English
+poet has ever presented bodily sensation with such curious and subtle
+intensity. And just as he renders bodily sensation carried to the point
+of agony, so he is at his best when dealing, as here, with emotion
+tortured to the last limit of endurance. Albovine, the king, sets bare
+his heart, confessing:
+
+
+     The devil and God are crying in either ear
+     One murderous word for ever, night and day,
+     Dark day and deadly night and deadly day,
+     Can she love thee who slewest her father? I
+     Love her.
+
+
+Rosamund, his wife, meditating her monstrous revenge, confesses:
+
+
+     I am yet alive to question if I live
+     And wonder what may ever bid me die.
+                         ... There is nought
+     Left in the range and record of the world
+     For me that is not poisoned: even my heart
+     Is all envenomed in me.
+
+
+And she recognises that
+
+
+     No healing and no help for life on earth
+     Hath God or man found out save death and sleep.
+
+
+The two young lovers, caught innocently in a net of intolerable shame,
+can but question and answer one another thus:
+
+
+                          HILDEGARD.
+
+     Hast thou forgiven me?
+
+                         ALMACHILDES.
+
+                            I have not forgiven God.
+
+
+And at the end Narsetes, the old councillor, the only one of the persons
+of the drama who is not the actor or the sufferer of some subtle horror,
+sums up all that has happened in a reflection which casts the
+responsibility of things further off than to the edge of the world:
+
+
+     Let none make moan. This doom is none of man's.
+
+
+As in the time of the great first volume of _Poems and Ballads_,
+Swinburne is still drawn to
+
+
+                               see
+     What fools God's anger makes of men.
+
+
+He has never been a philosophical thinker; but he has acquired the
+equivalent of a philosophy through his faithfulness to a single outlook
+upon human life and destiny. And in this brief and burning play, more
+than in much of his later writing, I find the reflection of that unique
+temperament, to which real things are so abstract, and abstract things
+so coloured and tangible; a temperament in which there is almost too
+much poetry for a poet--as pure gold, to be worked in, needs to be
+mingled with alloy.
+
+There is, perhaps, no more terrible story in the later history of the
+world, no actual tragedy more made to the hand of the dramatist, than
+the story of the Borgias. In its entirety it would make another _Cenci_,
+in the hands of another Shelley, and another Censor would prohibit the
+one as he prohibits the other. We are not permitted to deal with some
+form of evil on the stage. Yet what has Shelley said?
+
+
+     There must be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient
+     to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral
+     purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the
+     teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies,
+     the knowledge of itself.
+
+
+A great drama on the story of the Borgias could certainly have much to
+teach the human heart in the knowledge of itself. It would be moral in
+its presentation of the most ignobly splendid vices that have swayed the
+world; of the pride and defiance which rise like a strangling serpent,
+coiling about the momentary weakness of good; of that pageant in which
+the pagan gods came back, drunk and debauched with their long exile
+under the earth, and the garden-god assumed the throne of the Holy of
+Holies. Alexander, Caesar, Lucrezia, the threefold divinity, might be
+shown as a painter has shown one of them on the wall of one of his own
+chapels: a swinish portent in papal garments, kneeling, bloated,
+thinking of Lucrezia, with fingers folded over the purple of his rings.
+Or the family might have been shown as Rossetti, in one of the
+loveliest, most cruel, and most significant of his pictures, has shown
+it: a light, laughing masquerade of innocence, the boy and girl dancing
+before the cushioned idol and her two worshippers.
+
+Swinburne in _The Duke of Gandia_ has not dealt with the whole matter of
+the story--only, in a single act of four scenes, with the heart or
+essence of it. The piece is not drama for the stage, nor intended to be
+seen or heard outside the pages of a book; but it is meant to be, and
+is, a great, brief, dramatic poem, a lyric almost, of hate, ambition,
+fear, desire, and the conquest of ironic evil. Swinburne has written
+nothing like it before. The manner of it is new, or anticipated only in
+the far less effectual _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_; the style,
+speech, and cadence are tightened, restrained, full of sullen
+fierceness. Lucrezia, strangely, is no more than a pale image passing
+without consciousness through some hot feast-room; she is there, she is
+hidden under their speech, but we scarcely see her, and, like her
+historians, wonder if she was so evil, or only a scholar to whom learned
+men wrote letters, as if to a pattern of virtue. But in the father and
+son live a flame and a cloud, the flame rising steadily to beat back and
+consume the cloud. It is Caesar Borgia who is the flame, and Alexander
+the Pope who fills the Vatican and the world with his contagious clouds.
+The father, up to this moment, has held all his vices well in hand; he
+has no rival; his sons and his daughter he has made, and they live about
+him for their own pleasure, and he watches them, and is content. Now one
+steps out, the circle is broken; there is no longer a younger son, a
+cardinal, but the Duke of Gandia, eldest son and on the highest step of
+the Pope's chair. It is, in this brief, almost speechless moment of
+action, as if the door of a furnace had suddenly been thrown open and
+then shut. One scene stands out, only surpassed by the terrible and
+magnificent scene leading up to the death of Darnley--a scene itself
+only surpassed, in its own pitiful and pitiless kind, by that death of
+Marlowe's king in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle, which, to all who can
+endure to read it, 'moves pity and terror,' as to Lamb, 'beyond any
+scene ancient or modern.' And only in _Bothwell_, in the whole of
+Swinburne's drama, is there speech so adequate, so human, so full of
+fear and suspense. Take, for instance, the opening of the great final
+scene. The youngest son has had his elder brother drowned in the Tiber,
+and after seven days he appears calmly before his father.
+
+
+       ALEX. Thou hast done this deed.
+       CAESAR. Thou hast said it.
+       ALEX. Dost thou think
+     To live, and look upon me?
+       CAESAR. Some while yet.
+       ALEX. I would there were a God--that he might hear.
+       CAESAR. 'Tis pity there should be--for thy sake--none.
+       ALEX. Wilt thou slay me?
+       CAESAR. Why?
+       ALEX. Am I not thy sire?
+       CAESAR. And Christendom's to boot.
+       ALEX. I pray thee, man,
+     Slay me.
+       CAESAR. And then myself? Thou art crazed, but I
+     Sane.
+       ALEX. Art thou very flesh and blood?
+       CAESAR. They say,
+     Thine.
+       ALEX. If the heaven stand still and smite thee not,
+     There is no God indeed.
+       CAESAR. Nor thou nor I
+     Know.
+       ALEX. I could pray to God that God might be,
+     Were I but mad. Thou sayest I am mad: thou liest:
+     I do not pray.
+
+
+There, surely, is great dramatic speech, and the two men who speak face
+to face are seen clearly before us, naked to the sight. Yet even these
+lines do not make drama that would hold the stage. How is it that only
+one of our greater poets since the last of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
+and that one Shelley, has understood the complete art of the playwright,
+and achieved it? Byron, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, all wrote plays
+for the stage; all had their chance of being acted; Tennyson only made
+even a temporary success, and _Becket_ is likely to have gone out with
+Irving. Landor wrote plays full of sublime poetry, but not meant for the
+stage; and now we have Swinburne following his example, but with an
+unexampled lyrical quality. Why, without capacity to deal with it, are
+our poets so insistent on using the only form for which a special
+faculty, outside the pure poetic gift, is inexorably required?
+
+A poet so great as Swinburne, possessed by an ecstasy which turns into
+song as instinctively as the flawless inspiration of Mozart turned into
+divine melody, cannot be questioned. Mozart, without a special genius
+for dramatic music, wrote _Die Zauberfloete_ to a bad libretto with as
+great a perfection as the music to _Don Giovanni_, which had a good one.
+The same inspiration was there, always apt to the occasion. Swinburne is
+ready to write in any known form of verse, with an equal facility and
+(this is the all-important point) the same inspiration. Loving the form
+of the drama, and capable of turning it to his uses, not of bending it
+to its own, he has filled play after play with music, noble feeling,
+brave eloquence. Here in this briefest and most actual of his plays--an
+act, an episode--he has concentrated much of this floating beauty, this
+overflowing imagination, into a few stern and adequate words, and made a
+new thing, as always, in his own image. It is the irony that has given
+its precise form to this representation of a twofold Satan, as Blake
+might have seen him in vision, parodying God with unbreakable pride. The
+conflict between father and son ends in a kind of unholy litany. 'And
+now,' cries Caesar, fresh from murder,
+
+
+     Behoves thee rise again as Christ our God,
+     Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away
+     This grief from off thy godhead.
+
+
+And the old man, temporising with his grief, answers:
+
+
+     Thou art subtle and strong.
+     I would thou hadst spared him--couldst have spared him.
+
+
+And the son replies:
+
+
+                                         Sire,
+     I would so too. Our sire, his sire and mine,
+     I slew him not for lust of slaying, or hate,
+     Or aught less like thy wiser spirit and mine.
+
+
+But Caesar-Satan has already said the epilogue to the whole
+representation, when, speaking to his mother, he bids her leave the
+responsibility of things:
+
+
+     And God, who made me and my sire and thee,
+     May take the charge upon him.
+
+
+1899-1908.
+
+
+
+
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+
+Rossetti's phrase about poetry, that it must be 'amusing'; his
+'commandment' about verse translation, 'that a good poem shall not be
+turned into a bad one'; his roughest and most random criticisms about
+poets, are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse. Only Coleridge
+among English poets has anything like the same definite grasp upon
+whatever is essential in poetry. And it is this intellectual sanity
+partly, this complete knowledge of the medium in which he worked, that
+has given Rossetti a position of his own, a kind of leadership in art.
+
+And, technically, Rossetti has done much for English poetry. Such a line
+as
+
+
+     And when the night-vigil was done,
+
+
+is a perfectly good metrical line if read without any displacement of
+the normal accent in speaking, and the rhyme of 'of' to 'enough' is as
+satisfying to the ear as the more commonly accepted rhyme of 'love' and
+'move.' Rossetti did nothing but good by his troubling of many rhythms
+which had become stagnant, and it is in his extraordinary subtlety of
+rhythm, most accomplished where it seems most hesitating, that he has
+produced his finest emotional effects, effects before his time found but
+rarely, and for the most part accidentally, in English poetry.
+
+Like Baudelaire and like Mallarme in France, Rossetti was not only a
+wholly original poet, but a new personal force in literature. That he
+stimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true of
+Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not
+true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the
+greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on
+those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an
+unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one
+is without defence. It is the sound of a voice, rather than anything
+said; and, when Rossetti speaks, no other voice, for the moment, seems
+worth listening to. Even after one has listened, not very much seems to
+have been said; but the world is not quite the same. He has stimulated a
+new sense, by which a new mood of beauty can be apprehended.
+
+Dreams are precise; it is only when we awake, when we go outside, that
+they become vague. In a certain sense Rossetti, with all his keen
+practical intelligence, was never wholly awake, had never gone outside
+that house of dreams in which the only real things were the things of
+the imagination. In the poetry of most poets there is a double kind of
+existence, of which each half is generally quite distinct; a real world,
+and a world of the imagination. But the poetry of Rossetti knows but one
+world, and it inhabits a corner there, like a perfectly contented
+prisoner, or like a prisoner to whom the sense of imprisonment is a joy.
+The love of beauty, the love of love, because love is the supreme energy
+of beauty, suffices for an existence in which every moment is a crisis;
+for to him, as Pater has said, 'life is a crisis at every moment': life,
+that is to say, the inner life, the life of imagination, in which the
+senses are messengers from the outer world, from which they can but
+bring disquieting tidings.
+
+The whole of this poetry is tragic, though without pathos or even
+self-pity. Every human attempt to maintain happiness is foredoomed to be
+a failure, and this is an attempt to maintain ecstasy in a region where
+everything which is not ecstasy is pain. In reading every other poet who
+has written of love one is conscious of compensations: the happiness of
+loving or of being loved, the honour of defeat, the help and comfort of
+nature or of action. But here all energy is concentrated on the one
+ecstasy, and this exists for its own sake, and the desire of it is like
+thirst, which returns after every partial satisfaction. The desire of
+beauty, the love of love, can but be a form of martyrdom when, as with
+Rossetti, there is also the desire of possession.
+
+Circumstances have very little to do with the making of a poet's
+temperament or vision, and it would be enough to point to Christina
+Rossetti, who was hardly more in the country than her brother, but to
+whom a blade of grass was enough to summon the whole country about her,
+and whose poetry is full of the sense of growing things. Rossetti
+instinctively saw faces, and only faces, and he would have seen them if
+he had lived in the loneliest countryside, and he would never have
+learned to distinguish between oats and barley if he had had fields of
+them about his door from childhood. It was in the beauty of women, and
+chiefly in the mysterious beauty of faces, that Rossetti found the
+supreme embodiment of beauty; and it was in the love of women, and not
+in any more abstract love, of God, of nature, or of ideas, that he found
+the supreme revelation of love.
+
+With this narrowness, with this intensity, he has rendered in his
+painting as in his poetry one ideal, one obsession. He calls what is
+really the House of Love _The House of Life_, and this is because the
+house of love was literally to him the house of life. There is no mystic
+to whom love has not seemed to be the essence or ultimate expression of
+the soul. Rossetti's whole work is a parable of this belief, and it is a
+parable written with his life-blood. Of beauty he has said, 'I drew it
+in as simply as my breath,' but, as the desire of beauty possessed him,
+as he laboured to create it over again, with rebellious words or
+colours, always too vague for him when they were most precise, never the
+precise embodiment of a dream, the pursuit turned to a labour and the
+labour to a pain. Part of what hypnotises us in this work is, no doubt,
+that sense of personal tragedy which comes to us out of its elaborate
+beauty: the eternal tragedy of those who have loved the absolute in
+beauty too well, and with too mortal a thirst.
+
+1904.
+
+
+
+
+A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY
+
+
+He has a kind of naked face, in which you see the brain always working,
+with an almost painful simplicity--just saved from being painful by a
+humorous sense of external things, which becomes also a kind of
+intellectual criticism. He is a fatalist, and he studies the workings of
+fate in the chief vivifying and disturbing influence in life, women. His
+view of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel,
+not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not,
+as with Meredith, man's and woman's at once. He sees all that is
+irresponsible for good and evil in a woman's character, all that is
+unreliable in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her
+variability. He is her apologist, but always with a certain reserve of
+private judgment. No one has created more attractive women, women whom
+a man would have been more likely to love, or more likely to regret
+loving. _Jude the Obscure_ is perhaps the most unbiased consideration of
+the more complicated questions of sex which we can find in English
+fiction. At the same time, there is almost no passion in his work,
+neither the author nor any of his characters ever seeming able to pass
+beyond the state of curiosity, the most intellectually interesting of
+limitations, under the influence of any emotion. In his feeling for
+nature, curiosity sometimes seems to broaden into a more intimate kind
+of communion. The heath, the village with its peasants, the change of
+every hour among the fields and on the roads, mean more to him, in a
+sense, than even the spectacle of man and woman in their blind, and
+painful, and absorbing struggle for existence. His knowledge of woman
+confirms him in a suspension of judgment; his knowledge of nature brings
+him nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All the
+quite happy entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him from
+his contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth,
+translating the dumbness of the fields into humour. His peasants have
+been compared with Shakespeare's; that is, because he has the
+Shakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurrying
+animal life, to which they act the part of chorus, with an unconscious
+wisdom in their close, narrow, and undistracted view of things.
+
+In his verse there is something brooding, obscure, tremulous,
+half-inarticulate, as he meditates over man, nature, and destiny:
+Nature, 'waking by touch alone,' and Fate, who sees and feels. In _The
+Mother Mourns_, a strange, dreary, ironical song of science, Nature
+laments that her best achievement, man, has become discontented with her
+in his ungrateful discontent with himself. It is like the whimpering of
+a hurt animal, and the queer, ingenious metre, with its one rhyme set at
+wide but distinct and heavily recurrent intervals, beats on the ear like
+a knell. Blind and dumb forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out of
+sleep, turning back heavily to sleep again. Many poets have been sorry
+for man, angry with Nature on man's behalf. Here is a poet who is sorry
+for Nature, who feels the earth and its roots, as if he had sap in his
+veins instead of blood, and could get closer than any other man to the
+things of the earth.
+
+Who else could have written this crabbed, subtle, strangely impressive
+poem?
+
+
+                 AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT
+
+     A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
+     And the beat of a clock from a distant floor;
+     On this scene enter--winged, horned, and spined--
+     A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
+     While 'mid my page there idly stands
+     A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands.
+
+     Thus meet we five, in this still place,
+     At this point of time, at this point in space.
+     --My guests parade my new-penned ink,
+     Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.
+     'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why?
+     They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
+
+
+No such drama has been written in verse since Browning, and the people
+of the drama are condensed to almost as pregnant an utterance as _Adam,
+Lilith, and Eve_.
+
+Why is it that there are so few novels which can be read twice, while
+all good poetry can be read over and over? Is it something inherent in
+the form, one of the reasons in nature why a novel cannot be of the
+same supreme imaginative substance as a poem? I think it is, and that it
+will never be otherwise. But, among novels, why is it that one here and
+there calls us back to its shelf with almost the insistence of a lyric,
+while for the most part a story read is a story done with? Balzac is
+always good to re-read, but not Tolstoi: and I couple two of the giants.
+To take lesser artists, I would say that we can re-read _Lavengro_ but
+not _Romola_. But what seems puzzling is that Hardy, who is above all a
+story-teller, and whose stories are of the kind that rouse suspense and
+satisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite without
+novelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in _The Mayor
+of Casterbridge_, where the plot extends into almost inextricable
+entanglements; and yet that is precisely one of the books that can be
+re-read. Is it on account of that concealed poetry, never absent though
+often unseen, which gives to these fantastic or real histories a meaning
+beyond the meaning of the facts, beneath it like an under-current,
+around it like an atmosphere? Facts, once known, are done with; stories
+of mere action gallop through the brain and are gone; but in Hardy
+there is a vision or interpretation, a sense of life as a growth out of
+the earth, and as much a mystery between soil and sky as the corn is,
+which will draw men back to the stories with an interest which outlasts
+their interest in the story.
+
+It is a little difficult to get accustomed to Hardy, or to do him
+justice without doing him more than justice. He is always right, always
+a seer, when he is writing about 'the seasons in their moods, morning
+and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,
+waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate
+things.' (What gravity and intimacy in his numbering of them!) He is
+always right, always faultless in matter and style, when he is showing
+that 'the impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic
+life than the pachydermatous king.' But he requires a certain amount of
+emotion to shake off the lethargy natural to his style, and when he has
+merely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on his
+couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.' In the next
+sentence, where he is interested in expressing the impalpable emotion
+of the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'The
+night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent;
+the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now
+digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a
+thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.'
+
+No one has ever studied so scrupulously as Hardy the effect of emotion
+on inanimate things, or has ever seen emotion so visually in people. For
+instance: 'Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was
+flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole.'
+But so intense is his preoccupation with these visual effects that he
+sometimes cannot resist noting a minute appearance, though in the very
+moment of assuring us that the person looking on did not see it. 'She
+hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so
+large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like
+the object lens of a microscope.' And it is this power of seeing to
+excess, and being limited to sight which is often strangely revealing,
+that leaves him at times helpless before the naked words that a
+situation supremely seen demands for its completion. The one failure in
+what is perhaps his masterpiece, _The Return of the Native_, is in the
+words put into the mouth of Eustacia and Yeobright in the perfectly
+imagined scene before the mirror, a scene which should be the
+culminating scene of the book; and it is, all but the words: the words
+are crackle and tinsel.
+
+What is it, then, that makes up the main part of the value and
+fascination of Hardy, and how is it that what at first seem, and may
+well be, defects, uncouthnesses, bits of formal preaching, grotesque
+ironies of event and idea, come at last to seem either good in
+themselves or good where they are, a part of the man if not of the
+artist? One begins by reading for the story, and the story is of an
+attaching interest. Here is a story-teller of the good old kind, a
+story-teller whose plot is enough to hold his readers. With this point
+no doubt many readers stop and are content. But go on, and next after
+the story-teller one comes on the philosopher. He is dejected and a
+little sinister, and may check your pleasure in his narrative if you
+are too attentive to his criticism of it. But a new meaning comes into
+the facts as you observe his attitude towards them, and you may be well
+content to stop and be fed with thoughts by the philosopher. But if you
+go further still you will find, at the very last, the poet, and you need
+look for nothing beyond. I am inclined to question if any novelist has
+been more truly a poet without ceasing to be in the true sense a
+novelist. The poetry of Hardy's novels is a poetry of roots, and it is a
+voice of the earth. He seems often to be closer to the earth (which is
+at times, as in _The Return of the Native_, the chief person, or the
+chorus, of the story) than to men and women, and to see men and women
+out of the eyes of wild creatures, and out of the weeds and stones of
+the heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us
+to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual
+observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of
+birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the
+deprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep?
+
+1907.
+
+
+
+
+LEON CLADEL
+
+
+I hope that the life of Leon Cladel by his daughter Judith, which
+Lemerre has brought out in a pleasant volume, will do something for the
+fame of one of the most original writers of our time. Cladel had the
+good fortune to be recognised in his lifetime by those whose approval
+mattered most, beginning with Baudelaire, who discovered him before he
+had printed his first book, and helped to teach him the craft of
+letters. But so exceptional an artist could never be popular, though he
+worked in living stuff and put the whole savour of his countryside into
+his tragic and passionate stories. A peasant, who writes about peasants
+and poor people, with a curiosity of style which not only packs his
+vocabulary with difficult words, old or local, and with unheard of
+rhythms, chosen to give voice to some never yet articulated emotion, but
+which drives him into oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the very
+shape of his accents! A page of Cladel has a certain visible
+uncouthness, and at first this seems in keeping with his matter; but the
+uncouthness, when you look into it, turns out to be itself a refinement,
+and what has seemed a confused whirl, an improvisation, to be the result
+really of reiterated labour, whose whole aim has been to bring the
+spontaneity of the first impulse back into the laboriously finished
+work.
+
+In this just, sensitive, and admirable book, written by one who has
+inherited a not less passionate curiosity about life, but with more
+patience in waiting upon it, watching it, noting its surprises, we have
+a simple and sufficient commentary upon the books and upon the man. The
+narrative has warmth and reserve, and is at once tender and
+clear-sighted. _J'entrevois nettement_, she says with truth, _combien
+seront precieux pour les futurs historiens de la litterature du xix^e
+siecle, les memoires traces au contact immediat de l'artiste, exposes de
+ses faits et gestes particuliers, de ses origines, de la germination de
+ses croyances et de son talent; ses critiques a venir y trouveront de_
+_solides materiaux, ses admirateurs un aliment a leur piete et les
+philosophes un des aspects de l'Ame francaise._ The man is shown to us,
+_les elans de cette ame toujours grondante et fulgurante comme une
+forge, et les nuances de ce fievreux visage d'apotre, brun, fin et
+sinueux_, and we see the inevitable growth, out of the hard soil of
+Quercy and out of the fertilising contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of
+this whole literature, these books no less astonishing than their
+titles: _Ompdrailles-le-Tombeau-des-Lutteurs_, _Celui de la
+Croix-aux-Boeufs_, _La Fete Votive de Saint-Bartholomee-Porte-Glaive_.
+The very titles are an excitement. I can remember how mysterious and
+alluring they used to seem to me when I first saw them on the cover of
+what was perhaps his best book, _Les Va-Nu-Pieds_.
+
+It is by one of the stories, and the shortest, in _Les Va-Nu-Pieds_,
+that I remember Cladel. I read it when I was a boy, and I cannot think
+of it now without a shiver. It is called _L'Hercule_, and it is about a
+Sandow of the streets, a professional strong man, who kills himself by
+an over-strain; it is not a story at all, it is the record of an
+incident, and there is only the strong man in it and his friend the
+zany, who makes the jokes while the strong man juggles with bars and
+cannon-balls. It is all told in a breath, without a pause, as if some
+one who had just seen it poured it out in a flood of hot words. Such
+vehemence, such pity, such a sense of the cruelty of the spectacle of a
+man driven to death like a beast, for a few pence and the pleasure of a
+few children; such an evocation of the sun and the streets and this
+sordid tragic thing happening to the sound of drum and cymbals; such a
+vision in sunlight of a barbarous and ridiculous and horrible accident,
+lifted by the telling of it into a new and unforgettable beauty, I have
+never felt or seen in any other story of a like grotesque tragedy. It
+realises an ideal, it does for once what many artists have tried and
+failed to do; it wrings the last drop of agony out of that subject which
+it is so easy to make pathetic and effective. Dickens could not have
+done it, Bret Harte could not have done it, Kipling could not do it:
+Cladel did it only once, with this perfection.
+
+Something like it he did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence,
+with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and
+thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she
+calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this
+tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured
+to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. _La recherche
+du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la surabondance des
+vocables puises a toutes sources ... la condensation de l'action autour
+de ces quelques motifs eternels de l'epopee: combat, ripaille, palabre
+et luxure_, there, as she sees justly, are links with Rabelais.
+Goncourt, himself always aiming at an impossible closeness of written to
+spoken speech, noted with admiration _la vraie photographie de la parole
+avec ses tours, ses abbreviations ses ellipses, son essoufflement
+presque_. Speech out of breath, that is what Cladel's is always; his
+words, never the likely ones, do not so much speak as cry, gesticulate,
+overtake one another. _L'ame de Leon Cladel_, says his daughter, _etait
+dans un constant et flamboyant automne_. Something of the colour and
+fever of autumn is in all he wrote. Another writer since Cladel, who has
+probably never heard of him, has made heroes of peasants and vagabonds.
+But Maxim Gorki makes heroes of them, consciously, with a mental
+self-assertion, giving them ideas which he has found in Nietzsche.
+Cladel put into all his people some of his own passionate way of seeing
+'scarlet,' to use Barbey d'Aurevilly's epithet: _un rural ecarlate_.
+Vehement and voluminous, he overflowed: his whole aim as an artist, as a
+pupil of Baudelaire, was to concentrate, to hold himself back; and the
+effort added impetus to the checked overflow. To the realists he seemed
+merely extravagant; he saw certainly what they could not see; and his
+romance was always a fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be
+in conflict with the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant,
+extracted from that hard soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an
+extraordinary mingling of the peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the
+long hair and beard, the sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding
+eyes, in which wildness and delicacy, strength and a kind of
+stealthiness, seem to be grafted on an inflexible peasant stock.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+HENRIK IBSEN
+
+
+'Everything which I have created as a poet,' Ibsen said in a letter,
+'has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never
+wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.' Yet his chief
+aim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, and
+to stand aside, reserving his judgment. 'The method, the technique of
+the construction,' he says, speaking of what is probably his
+masterpiece, _Ghosts_, 'in itself entirely precludes the author's
+appearing in the speeches. My intention was to produce the impression in
+the mind of the reader that he was witnessing something real.' That, at
+his moment of most perfect balance, was his intention; that was what he
+achieved in an astonishing way. But his whole life was a development;
+and we see him moving from point to point, deliberately, and yet
+inevitably; reaching the goal which it was his triumph to reach, then
+going beyond the goal, because movement in any direction was a necessity
+of his nature.
+
+In Ibsen's letters we shall find invaluable help in the study of this
+character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none
+the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard,
+crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow,
+precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed
+himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense
+of duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom he hated
+and resembled.
+
+His creed, as man and as artist, was the cultivation, the realisation of
+self. In quite another sense that, too, was the creed of Nietzsche; but
+what in Nietzsche was pride, the pride of individual energy, in Ibsen
+was a kind of humility, or a practical deduction from the fact that only
+by giving complete expression to oneself can one produce the finest
+work. Duty to oneself: that was how he looked upon it; and though, in a
+letter to Bjoernson, he affirmed, as the highest praise, 'his life was
+his best work,' to himself it was the building-up of the artist in him
+that he chiefly cared for. And to this he set himself with a moral
+fervour and a scientific tenacity. There was in Ibsen none of the
+abundance of great natures, none of the ease of strength. He nursed his
+force, as a miser hoards his gold; and does he not give you at times an
+uneasy feeling that he is making the most of himself, as the miser makes
+the most of his gold by scraping up every farthing?
+
+'The great thing,' he says in a letter of advice, 'is to hedge about
+what is one's own, to keep it free and clear from everything outside
+that has no connexion with it.' He bids Brandes cultivate 'a genuine,
+full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what
+concerns you as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else
+as non-existent.' Yet he goes on to talk about 'benefiting society,' is
+conscious of the weight which such a conviction or compromise lays upon
+him, and yet cannot get rid of the burden, as Nietzsche does. He has
+less courage than Nietzsche, though no less logic, and is held back from
+a complete realisation of his own doctrine because he has so much
+worldly wisdom and is so anxious to make the best of all worlds.
+
+'In every new poem or play,' he writes, 'I have aimed at my own personal
+spiritual emancipation and purification, for a man shares the
+responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.' This
+queer entanglement in social bonds on the part of one whose main
+endeavour had always been to free the individual from the conventions
+and restrictions of society is one of those signs of parochialism which
+peep out in Ibsen again and again. 'The strongest man,' he says in a
+letter, anticipating the epilogue of one of his plays, 'is he who stands
+alone.' But Ibsen did not find it easy to stand alone, though he found
+pleasure in standing aloof. The influence of his environment upon him is
+marked from the first. He breaks with his father and mother, never
+writes to them or goes back to see them; partly because he feels it
+necessary to avoid contact with 'certain tendencies prevailing there.'
+'Friends are an expensive luxury,' he finds, because they keep him from
+doing what he wishes to do, out of consideration for them. Is not this
+intellectual sensitiveness the corollary of a practical
+cold-heartedness? He cannot live in Norway because, he says, 'I could
+never lead a consistent spiritual life there.' In Norway he finds that
+'the accumulation of small details makes the soul small.' How curious an
+admission for an individualist, for an artist! He goes to Rome, and
+feels that he has discovered a new mental world. 'After I had been in
+Italy I could not understand how I had been able to exist before I had
+been there.' Yet before long he must go on to Munich, because 'here one
+is too entirely out of touch with the movements of the day.'
+
+He insists, again and again: 'Environment has a great influence upon the
+forms in which the imagination creates'; and, in a tone of
+half-burlesque, but with something serious in his meaning, he declares
+that wine had something to do with the exaltation of _Brand_ and _Peer
+Gynt_, and sausages and beer with the satirical analysis of _The League
+of Youth_. And he adds: 'I do not intend by this to place the
+last-mentioned play on a lower level. I only mean that my point of view
+has changed, because here I am in a community well ordered even to
+weariness.' He says elsewhere that he could only have written _Peer
+Gynt_ where he wrote it, at Ischia and Sorrento, because it is 'written
+without regard to consequences--as I only dare to write far away from
+home.' If we trace him through his work we shall see him, with a strange
+docility, allowing not only 'frame of mind and situation in life,' but
+his actual surroundings, to mould his work, alike in form and in
+substance. If he had never left Norway he might have written verse to
+the end of his life; if he had not lived in Germany, where there is
+'up-to-date civilisation to study,' he would certainly never have
+written the social dramas; if he had not returned to Norway at the end
+of his life, the last plays would not have been what they were. I am
+taking him at his word; but Ibsen is a man who must be taken at his
+word.
+
+What is perhaps most individual in the point of view of Ibsen in his
+dramas is his sense of the vast importance trifles, of the natural human
+tendency to invent or magnify misunderstandings. A misunderstanding is
+his main lever of the tragic mischief; and he has studied and diagnosed
+this unconscious agent of destiny more minutely and persistently than
+any other dramatist. He found it in himself. We see just this brooding
+over trifles, this sensitiveness to wrongs, imaginary or insignificant,
+in the revealing pages of his letters. It made the satirist of his
+earlier years; it made him a satirist of non-essentials. A criticism of
+one of his books sets him talking of wide vengeance; and he admitted in
+later life that he said to himself, 'I am ruined,' because a newspaper
+had attacked him overnight.
+
+With all his desire to 'undermine the idea of the state,' he besieges
+king and government with petitions for money; and he will confess in a
+letter, 'I should very much like to write publicly about the mean
+behaviour of the government,' which, however, he refrains from doing. He
+gets sore and angry over party and parochial rights and wrongs, even
+when he is far away from them, and has congratulated himself on the
+calming and enlightening effect of distance. A Norwegian bookseller
+threatens to pirate one of his books, and he makes a national matter of
+it. 'If,' he says, 'this dishonest speculation really obtains sympathy
+and support at home, it is my intention, come what may, to sever all
+ties with Norway and never set foot on her soil again.' How petty, how
+like a hysterical woman that is! How, in its way of taking a possible
+trifling personal injustice as if it were a thing of vital and even
+national moment, he betrays what was always to remain narrow, as well as
+bitter, in the centre of his being! He has recorded it against himself
+(for he spared himself, as he proudly and truthfully said, no more than
+others) in an anecdote which is a profound symbol.
+
+
+     During the time I was writing _Brand_, I had on my desk a glass
+     with a scorpion in it. From time to time the little animal was ill.
+     Then I used to give it a piece of soft fruit, upon which it fell
+     furiously and emptied its poison into it--after which it was well
+     again. Does not something of the kind happen with us poets?
+
+
+Poets, no; but in Ibsen there is always some likeness of the sick
+scorpion in the glass.
+
+In one of his early letters to Bjoernson, he had written: 'When I read
+the news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimable
+narrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insane
+man staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot.' All his life Ibsen
+gazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less and
+less of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw the
+black spot at the core of the earth's fruit, of the whole apple of the
+earth; and as he became more hopeless, he became less angry; he learned
+something of the supreme indifference of art. He had learned much when
+he came to realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly the
+energy of the struggle that mattered. 'He who possesses liberty,' he
+said, 'otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead
+and soulless.... So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle
+and says, "Now I have it," thereby shows that he has lost it.' He had
+learned still more when he could add to his saying, 'The minority is
+always right,' this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectual
+vanguard can never collect a majority around him. 'At the point where I
+stood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a tolerably
+compact crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere; farther
+ahead, I hope.' 'That man is right,' he thought, 'who has allied
+himself most closely with the future.' The future, to Ibsen, was a
+palpable thing, not concerned merely with himself as an individual, but
+a constantly removing, continually occupied promised land, into which he
+was not content to go alone. Yet he would always have asked of a
+follower, with Zarathustra: 'This is my road; which is yours?' His
+future was to be peopled by great individuals.
+
+It was in seeking to find himself that Ibsen sought to find truth; and
+truth he knew was to be found only within him. The truth which he sought
+for himself was not at all truth in the abstract, but a truth literally
+'efficacious,' and able to work out the purpose of his existence. That
+purpose he never doubted. The work he had to do was the work of an
+artist, and to this everything must be subservient. 'The great thing is
+to become honest and truthful in dealing with oneself--not to determine
+to do this or determine to do that, but to do what one _must_ do because
+one is oneself. All the rest simply leads to falsehood.' He conceives of
+truth as being above all clear-sighted, and the approach to truth as a
+matter largely of will. No preacher of God and of righteousness and the
+kingdom to come was ever more centred, more convinced, more impregnably
+minded every time that he has absorbed a new idea or is constructing a
+new work of art. His conception of art often changes; but he never
+deviates at any one time from any one conception. There is something
+narrow as well as something intense in this certainty, this calmness,
+this moral attitude towards art. Nowhere has he expressed more of
+himself than in a letter to a woman who had written some kind of
+religious sequel to _Brand_. He tells her:
+
+
+     _Brand_ is an aesthetic work, pure and simple. What it may have
+     demolished or built up is a matter of absolute indifference to me.
+     It came into being as the result of something which I had not
+     observed, but experienced; it was a necessity for me to free myself
+     from something which my inner man had done with, by giving poetic
+     form to it; and, when by this means I had got rid of it, my book
+     had no longer any interest for me.
+
+
+It is in the same positive, dogmatic way that he assures us that _Peer
+Gynt_ is a poem, not a satire; _The League of Youth_ a 'simple comedy
+and nothing more'; _Emperor and Galilean_ an 'entirely realistic work';
+that in _Ghosts_ 'there is not a single opinion, a single utterance
+which can be laid to the account of the author.... My intention was to
+produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessing
+something real.... It preaches nothing at all.' Of _Hedda Gabler_ he
+says: 'It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called
+problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings,
+human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of the social
+conditions and principles of the present day.' 'My chief life-task,' he
+defines: 'to depict human characters and human destinies.'
+
+
+Ibsen's development has always lain chiefly in the perfecting of his
+tools. From the beginning he has had certain ideas, certain tendencies,
+a certain consciousness of things to express; he has been haunted, as
+only creative artists are haunted, by a world waiting to be born; and,
+from the beginning, he has built on a basis of criticism, a criticism of
+life. Part of his strength has gone out in fighting: he has had the
+sense of a mission. Part of his strength has gone out in the attempt to
+fly: he has had the impulse, without the wings, of the poet. And when he
+has been content to leave fighting and flying alone, and to build
+solidly on a solid foundation, it is then that he has achieved his great
+work. But he has never been satisfied, or never been able, to go on
+doing just that work, his own work; and the poet in him, the impotent
+poet who is full of a sense of what poetry is, but is never able, for
+more than a moment, to create poetry, has come whispering in the ear of
+the man of science, who is the new, unerring artist, the maker of a
+wonderful new art of prose, and has made him uneasy, and given
+uncertainty to his hand. The master-builder has altered his design, he
+has set up a tower here, 'too high for a dwelling-house,' and added a
+window there, with the stained glass of a church window, and fastened on
+ornaments in stucco, breaking the severe line of the original design.
+
+In Ibsen science has made its great stand against poetry; and the
+Germans have come worshipping, saying, 'Here, in our era of
+marvellously realistic politics, we have come upon correspondingly
+realistic poetry.... We received from it the first idea of a possible
+new poetic world.... We were adherents of this new school of realistic
+art: we had found our aesthetic creed.' But the maker of this creed, the
+creator of this school of realistic art, was not able to be content with
+what he had done, though this was the greatest thing he was able to do.
+It is with true insight that he boasts, in one of his letters, of what
+he can do 'if I am only careful to do what I am quite capable of,
+namely, combine this relentlessness of mind with deliberateness in the
+choice of means.' There lay his success: deliberateness in the choice of
+means for the doing of a given thing, the thing for which his best
+energies best fitted him. Yet it took him forty years to discover
+exactly what those means to that end were; and then the experimenting
+impulse, the sense of what poetry is, was soon to begin its
+disintegrating work. Science, which seemed to have conquered poetry, was
+to pay homage to poetry.
+
+Ibsen comes before us as a man of science who would have liked to be a
+poet; or who, half-equipped as a poet, is halved or hampered by the
+scientific spirit until he realises that he is essentially a man of
+science. From the first his aim was to express himself; and it was a
+long time before he realised that verse was not his native language. His
+first three plays were in verse, the fourth in verse alternating with
+prose; then came two plays, historic and legendary, written in more or
+less archaic prose; then a satire in verse, _Love's Comedy_, in which
+there is the first hint of the social dramas; then another prose play,
+the nearest approach that he ever made to poetry, but written in prose,
+_The Pretenders_; and then the two latest and most famous of the poems,
+_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. After this, verse is laid aside, and at last we
+find him condemning it, and declaring 'it is improbable that verse will
+be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate
+future.... It is therefore doomed.' But the doom was Ibsen's: to be a
+great prose dramatist, and only the segment of a poet.
+
+Nothing is more interesting than to study Ibsen's verse in the making.
+His sincerity to his innermost aim, the aim at the expression of
+himself, is seen in his refusal from the beginning to accept any poetic
+convention, to limit himself in poetic subject, to sift his material or
+clarify his metre. He has always insisted on producing something
+personal, thoughtful, fantastic, and essentially prosaic; and it is in a
+vain protest against the nature of things that he writes of _Peer Gynt_,
+'My book _is_ poetry; and if it is not, then it will be. The conception
+of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to the
+book.' His verse was the assertion of his individuality at all costs; it
+was a costly tool, which he cast aside only when he found that it would
+not carve every material.
+
+Ibsen's earliest work in verse has not been translated. Dr. Brandes
+tells us that it followed Danish models, the sagas, and the national
+ballads. In the prose play, _Lady Inger of Oestraat_, we see the
+dramatist, the clever playwright, still holding on to the skirts of
+romance, and ready with rhetoric enough on occasion, but more concerned
+with plot and stage effect than with even what is interesting in the
+psychology of the characters. _The Vikings_, also in prose, is a piece
+of strong grappling with a heroic subject, with better rhetoric, and
+some good poetry taken straight out of the sagas, with fervour in it,
+and gravity; yet an experiment only, a thing not made wholly personal,
+nor wholly achieved. It shows how well Ibsen could do work which was not
+his work. In _Love's Comedy_, a modern play in verse, he is already
+himself. Point of view is there; materials are there; the man of science
+has already laid his hand upon the poet. We are told that Ibsen tried to
+write it in prose, failed, and fell back upon verse. It is quite likely;
+he has already an accomplished technique, and can put his thoughts into
+verse with admirable skill. But the thoughts are not born in verse, and,
+brilliantly rhymed as they are, they do not make poetry.
+
+Dr. Brandes admits everything that can be said against Ibsen as a poet
+when he says, speaking of this play and of _Brand_:
+
+
+     Even if the ideas they express have not previously found utterance
+     in poetry, they have done so in prose literature. In other words,
+     these poems do not set forth new thoughts, but translate into metre
+     and rhyme thoughts already expressed.
+
+
+_Love's Comedy_ is a criticism of life; it is full of hard, scientific,
+prose thought about conduct, which has its own quality as long as it
+sticks to fact and remains satire; but when the prose curvets and tries
+to lift, when criticism turns constructive, we find no more than bubbles
+and children's balloons, empty and coloured, that soar and evaporate.
+There is, in this farce of the intellect, a beginning of social drama;
+realism peeps through the artificial point and polish of a verse which
+has some of the qualities of Pope and some of the qualities of Swift;
+but the dramatist is still content that his puppets shall have the air
+of puppets; he stands in the arena of his circus and cracks his whip;
+they gallop round grimacing, and with labels on their backs. The verse
+comes between him and nature, as the satire comes between him and
+poetry. Cynicism has gone to the making of poetry more than once, but
+only under certain conditions: that the poet should be a lyric poet,
+like Heine, or a great personality in action, like Byron, to whom
+cynicism should be but one of the tones of his speech, the gestures of
+his attitude. With Ibsen it is a petty anger, an anger against nature,
+and it leads to a transcendentalism which is empty and outside nature.
+
+The criticism of love, so far as it goes beyond what is amusing and
+Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile
+than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks
+he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a
+denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal
+suicide such as that in _Rosmersholm_, or may feed the brain on some air
+unbreathable by the body, as in _When we Dead Awaken_. It is the old
+idea of self-sacrifice creeping back under cover of a new idea of
+self-intensification; and it comes, like asceticism, from a contempt of
+nature, a distrust of nature, an abstract intellectual criticism of
+nature.
+
+Out of such material no poetry will ever come; and none has come in
+_Love's Comedy_. In the prose play which followed, _The Pretenders_,
+which is the dramatisation of an inner problem in the form of a
+historical drama, there is a much nearer approach to poetry. The
+stagecraft is still too obvious; effect follows effect like
+thunder-claps; there is melodrama in the tragedy; but the play is, above
+all, the working-out of a few deep ideas, and in these ideas there is
+both beauty and wisdom.
+
+It was with the publication of _Brand_ that Ibsen became famous, not
+only in his own country, but throughout Europe. The poem has been
+seriously compared, even in England, with _Hamlet_; even in Germany with
+_Faust_. A better comparison is that which Mr. Gosse has made with
+Sidney Dobell's _Balder_. It is full of satire and common-sense, of
+which there is little enough in _Balder_: but not _Balder_ is more
+abstract, or more inhuman in its action. Types, not people, move in it;
+their speech is doctrine, not utterance; it is rather a tract than a
+poem. The technique of the verse, if we can judge it from the brilliant
+translation of Professor Herford, which reads almost everywhere like an
+original, is more than sufficient for its purpose; all this
+argumentative and abstract and realistic material finds adequate
+expression in a verse which has aptly been compared with the verse of
+Browning's _Christmas-eve and Easter-day_. The comparison may be carried
+further, and it is disastrous to Ibsen. Browning deals with hard matter,
+and can be boisterous; but he is never, as Ibsen is always, pedestrian.
+The poet, though, like St. Michael, he carry a sword, must, like St.
+Michael, have wings. Ibsen has no wings.
+
+But there is another comparison by which I think we can determine more
+precisely the station and quality of _Brand_ as poetry. Take any one of
+the vigorous and vivid statements of dogma, which are the very kernel of
+the poem, and compare them with a few lines from Blake's _Everlasting
+Gospel_. There every line, with all its fighting force, is pure poetry;
+it was conceived as poetry, born as poetry, and can be changed into no
+other substance. Here we find a vigorous technique fitting striking
+thought into good swinging verse, with abundance of apt metaphor; but
+where is the vision, the essence, which distinguishes it from what,
+written in prose, would have lost nothing? Ibsen writes out of the
+intellect, adding fancy and emotion as he goes; but in Blake every line
+leaps forth like lightning from a cloud.
+
+The motto of _Brand_ was 'all or nothing'; that of _Peer Gynt_ 'to be
+master of the situation.' Both are studies of egoism, in the finding and
+losing of self; both are personal studies and national lessons. Of _Peer
+Gynt_ Ibsen said, 'I meant it to be a caprice.' It is Ibsen in high
+spirits; and it is like a mute dancing at a funeral. It is a harlequin
+of a poem, a thing of threads and patches; and there are gold threads in
+it and tattered clouts. It is an experiment which has hardly succeeded,
+because it is not one but a score of experiments. It is made up of two
+elements, an element of folklore and an element of satire. The first
+comes and goes for the most part with Peer and his mother; and all this
+brings Norwegian soil with it, and is alive. The satire is fierce,
+local, and fantastic. Out of the two comes a clashing thing which may
+itself suggest, as has been said, the immense contrast between Norwegian
+summer, which is day, and winter, which is night. Grieg's music,
+childish, mumbling, singing, leaping, and sombre, has aptly illustrated
+it. It was a thing done on a holiday, for a holiday. It was of this
+that Ibsen said he could not have written it any nearer home than Ischia
+and Sorrento. But is it, for all its splendid scraps and patches, a
+single masterpiece? is it, above all, a poem? The idea, certainly, is
+one and coherent; every scene is an illustration of that idea; but is it
+born of that idea? Is it, more than once or twice, inevitable? What
+touches at times upon poetry is the folk element; the irony at times has
+poetic substance in it; but this glimmer of poetic substance, which
+comes and goes, is lost for the most part among mists and vapours, and
+under artificial light. That poet which exists somewhere in Ibsen,
+rarely quite out of sight, never wholly at liberty, comes into this
+queer dance of ideas and humours, and gives it, certainly, the main
+value it has. But the 'state satirist' is always on the heels of the
+poet; and imagination, whenever it appears for a moment, is led away
+into bondage by the spirit of the fantastic, which is its prose
+equivalent or makeshift. It is the fantastic that Ibsen generally gives
+us in the place of imagination; and the fantastic is a kind of
+rhetoric, manufactured by the will, and has no place in poetry.
+
+
+In _The League of Youth_ Ibsen takes finally the step which he had half
+taken in _Loves Comedy_. 'In my new comedy,' he writes to Dr. Brandes,
+'you will find the common order of things--no strong emotions, no deep
+feelings, and, more particularly, no isolated thoughts.' He adds: 'It is
+written in prose, which gives it a strong realistic colouring. I have
+paid particular attention to form, and, among other things, I have
+accomplished the feat of doing without a single monologue, in fact
+without a single "aside." 'The play is hardly more than a good farce;
+the form is no more than the slightest of advances towards probability
+on the strict lines of the Scribe tradition; the 'common order of
+things' is there, in subject, language, and in everything but the
+satirical intention which underlies the whole trivial, stupid, and no
+doubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, the
+photographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relief
+from the photographic. The stage mechanism is still obvious; but the
+intention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps to
+get the mechanism in order.
+
+After _The League of Youth_ Ibsen tells us that he tried to 'seek
+salvation in remoteness of subject'; so he returned to his old scheme
+for a play on Julian the Apostate, and wrote the two five-act plays
+which make up _Emperor and Galilean_. He tells us that it is the first
+work which he wrote under German intellectual influences, and that it
+contains 'that positive theory of life which the critics have demanded
+of me so long.' In one letter he affirms that it is 'an entirely
+realistic work,' and in another, 'It is a part of my own spiritual life
+which I am putting into this book ... and the historical subject chosen
+has a much more intimate connexion with the movements of our own time
+than one might at first imagine.' How great a relief it must have been,
+after the beer and sausages of _The League of Youth_, to go back to an
+old cool wine, no one can read _Emperor and Galilean_ and doubt. It is a
+relief and an escape; and the sense of the stage has been put wholly on
+one side in both of these plays, of which the second reads almost like
+a parody of the first: the first so heated, so needlessly colloquial,
+the second so full of argumentative rhetoric. Ibsen has turned against
+his hero in the space between writing the one and the other; and the
+Julian of the second is more harshly satirised from within than ever
+_Peer Gynt_ was. In a letter to Dr. Brandes, Ibsen says: 'What the book
+is or is not, I have no desire to enquire. I only know that I saw a
+fragment of humanity plainly before my eyes, and that I tried to
+reproduce what I saw.' But in the play itself this intention comes and
+goes; and, while some of it reminds one of _Salammbo_ in its attempt to
+treat remote ages realistically, other parts are given up wholly to the
+exposition of theories, and yet others to a kind of spectacular romance,
+after the cheap method of George Ebers and the German writers of
+historical fiction. The satire is more serious, the criticism of ideas
+more fundamental than anything in _The League of Youth_; but, as in
+almost the whole of Ibsen's more characteristic work up to this point,
+satire strives with realism; it is still satire, not irony, and is not
+yet, as the later irony is to be, a deepening, and thus a
+justification, of the realism.
+
+Eight years passed between _The League of Youth_ and _The Pillars of
+Society_; but they are both woven of the same texture. Realism has made
+for itself a firmer footing; the satire has more significance; the
+mechanism of the stage goes much more smoothly, though indeed to a more
+conventionally happy ending; melodrama has taken some of the place of
+satire. Yet the 'state satirist' is still at his work, still concerned
+with society and bringing only a new detail of the old accusation
+against society. Like every play of this period, it is the unveiling of
+a lie. See yourselves as you are, the man of science seems to be saying
+to us. Here are your 'pillars of society'; they are the tools of
+society. Here is your happy marriage, and it is a doll's house. Here is
+your respected family, here is the precept of 'honour your father and
+your mother' in practice; and here is the little voice of heredity
+whispering 'ghosts!' There is the lie of respectability, the lie hidden
+behind marriage, the lie which saps the very roots of the world.
+
+Ibsen is no preacher, and he has told us expressly that _Ghosts_
+'preaches nothing at all.' This pursuit of truth to its most secret
+hiding-place is not a sermon against sin; it sets a scientific dogma
+visibly to work, and watches the effect of the hypothesis. As the dogma
+is terrible and plausible, and the logic of its working-out faultless,
+we get one of the deeper thrills that modern art has to give us. I would
+take _A Doll's House_, _Ghosts_, and _The Wild Duck_ as Ibsen's three
+central plays, the plays in which his method completely attained its
+end, in which his whole capacities are seen at their finest balance; and
+this work, this reality in which every word, meaningless in itself, is
+alive with suggestion, is the finest scientific work which has been done
+in literature. Into this period comes his one buoyant play, _An Enemy of
+the People_, his rebound against the traditional hypocrisy which had
+attacked _Ghosts_ for its telling of unseasonable truths; it is an
+allegory, in the form of journalism, or journalism in the form of
+allegory, and is the 'apology' of the man of science for his mission.
+Every play is a dissection, or a vivisection rather; for these people
+who suffer so helplessly, and are shown us so calmly in their agonies,
+are terribly alive. _A Doll's House_ is the first of Ibsen's plays in
+which the puppets have no visible wires. The playwright has perfected
+his art of illusion; beyond _A Doll's House_ and _Ghosts_ dramatic
+illusion has never gone. And the irony of the ideas that work these
+living puppets has now become their life-blood. It is the tragic irony
+of a playwright who is the greatest master of technique since Sophocles,
+but who is only the playwright in Sophocles, not the poet.
+
+For this moment, the moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic
+element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so
+sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With _The
+Wild Duck_ fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit
+symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is
+more disinterested than even in _Ghosts_, for it turns back on the
+reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the
+pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays
+which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the
+poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms of
+the fantastic in place of any simple and sufficing gift of imagination.
+The man of science has had his way, has fulfilled his aim, and is
+discontented with the limits within which he has fulfilled it. He would
+extend those limits; and at first it seems as if those limits are to be
+extended. But the exquisite pathos which humanises what is fantastic in
+_The Wild Duck_ passes, in _Rosmersholm_, in which the problems of
+_Love's Comedy_ are worked out to their logical conclusion, into a form,
+not of genuine tragedy, but of mental melodrama. In _The Lady from the
+Sea_, how far is the symbol which has eaten up reality really symbol? Is
+it not rather the work of the intelligence than of the imagination? Is
+it not allegory intruding into reality, disturbing that reality and
+giving us no spiritual reality in its place?
+
+_Hedda Gabler_ is closer to life; and Ibsen said about it in a letter:
+
+
+     It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called
+     problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human
+     beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of
+     certain of the social conditions and principles of the present
+     day.'
+
+
+The play might be taken for a study in that particular kind of
+'decadence' which has come to its perfection in uncivilised and
+overcivilised Russia; and the woman whom Ibsen studied as his model was
+actually half-Russian. Eleonora Duse has created Hedda over again, as a
+poet would have created her, and has made a wonderful creature whom
+Ibsen never conceived, or at least never rendered. Ibsen has tried to
+add his poetry by way of ornament, and gives us a trivial and
+inarticulate poet about whom float certain catchwords. Here the chief
+catchword is 'vine-leaves in the hair'; in _The Master-builder_ it is
+'harps in the air'; in _Little Eyolf_ it takes human form and becomes
+the Rat-wife; in _John Gabriel Borkman_ it drops to the tag of 'a dead
+man and two shadows'; in _When we Dead Awaken_ there is nothing but icy
+allegory. All that queer excitement of _The Master-builder_, that
+'ideal' awake again, is it not really a desire to open one's door to the
+younger generation? But is it the younger generation that finds itself
+at home there? is it not rather _Peer Gynt_ back again, and the ride
+through the air on the back of the reindeer?
+
+In his earlier plays Ibsen had studied the diseases of society, and he
+had considered the individual only in his relation to society. Now he
+turns to study the diseases of the individual conscience. Only life
+interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial
+irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental
+artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The
+man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back,
+though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife
+in _Little Eyolf_; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination,
+neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the offspring of a
+supernaturalism that does not believe in itself. In _John Gabriel
+Borkman_, which is the culmination of Ibsen's skill in construction, a
+play in four acts with only the pause of a minute between each, he is no
+longer content to concern himself with the old material, lies or
+misunderstandings, the irony of things happening as they do; but will
+have fierce hatreds, and a kind of incipient madness in things. In _When
+we Dead Awaken_ all the people are quite consciously insane, and act a
+kind of charade with perfectly solemn faces and a visible effort to look
+their parts.
+
+In these last plays, with their many splendid qualities, not bound
+together and concentrated as in _Ghosts_, we see the revenge of the
+imagination upon the realist, who has come to be no longer interested in
+the action of society upon the individual, but in the individual as a
+soul to be lost or saved. The man of science has discovered the soul,
+and does not altogether know what to do with it. He has settled its
+limits, set it to work in space and time, laid bare some of its secrets,
+shown its 'physical basis.' And now certain eccentricities in it begin
+to beckon to him; he would follow the soul into the darkness, but it is
+dark to him; he can but strain after it as it flutters. In the preface
+to the collected edition of his plays, published in 1901, Maeterlinck
+has pointed out, as one still standing at the cross-roads might point
+out to those who have followed him so far on his way, the great
+uncertainty in which the poet, the dramatist of to-day, finds himself,
+as what seems to be known or conjectured of 'the laws of nature' is
+forced upon him, making the old, magnificently dramatic opportunities of
+the ideas of fate, of eternal justice, no longer possible for him to
+use.
+
+
+     _Le poete dramatique est oblige de faire descendre dans la vie
+     reelle, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'idee qu'il se fait de
+     l'inconnu. Il faut qu'il nous montre de quelle facon, sous quelle
+     forme, dans quelles conditions, d'apres quelles lois, a quelle fin,
+     agissent sur nos destinees les puissances superieures, les
+     influences inintelligibles, les principes infinis, dont, en tant
+     que poete, il est persuade que l'univers est plein. Et comme il est
+     arrive a une heure ou loyalement il lui est a peu pres impossible
+     d'admettre les anciennes, et ou celles qui les doivent remplacer ne
+     sont pas encore determinees, n'ont pas encore de nom, il hesite,
+     tatonne, et s'il veut rester absolument sincere, il n'ose plus se
+     risquer hors de la realite immediate. Il se borne a etudier les
+     sentiments humains dans leurs effets materiels et psychologiques._
+
+
+So long as Ibsen does this, he achieves great and solid things; and in
+_Ghosts_ a scientific dogma, the law or theory of heredity, has for once
+taken the place of fate, and almost persuaded us that science, if it
+takes poetry from us, can restore to us a kind of poetry. But, as
+Maeterlinck has seen, as it is impossible not to see,
+
+
+     _quand Ibsen, dans d'autres drames, essaie de relier a d'autres
+     mysteres les gestes de ses hommes en mal de conscience
+     exceptionelle ou de ses femmes hallucinees, il faut convenir que,
+     si l'atmosphere qu'il parvient a creer est etrange et troublante,
+     elle est rarement saine et respirable, parce qu'elle est rarement
+     raisonnable et reele._
+
+
+From the time when, in _A Doll's House_, Ibsen's puppets came to life,
+they have refused ever since to be put back into their boxes. The
+manager may play what tricks with them he pleases, but he cannot get
+them back into their boxes. They are alive, and they live with a weird,
+spectacular, but irrevocable life. But, after the last play of all, the
+dramatic epilogue, _When we Dead Awaken_, the puppets have gone back
+into their boxes. Now they have come to obey the manager, and to make
+mysterious gestures which they do not understand, and to speak in images
+and take them for literal truths. Even their spectral life has gone out
+of them; they are rigid now, and only the strings set them dancing. The
+puppets had come to life, they had lived the actual life of the earth;
+and then a desire of the impossible, the desire of a life rarefied
+beyond human limits, took their human life from them, and they were
+puppets again. The epilogue to the plays is the apostasy of the man of
+science, and, as with all apostates, his new faith is not a vital thing;
+the poet was not really there to reawaken.
+
+
+Before Ibsen the drama was a part of poetry; Ibsen has made it prose.
+All drama up to Ibsen had been romantic; Ibsen made it science. Until
+Ibsen no playwright had ever tried to imitate life on the stage, or
+even, as Ibsen does, to interpret it critically. The desire of every
+dramatist had been to create over again a more abundant life, and to
+create it through poetry or through humour; through some form, that is,
+of the imagination. There was a time when Ibsen too would have made
+poetry of the drama; there was a time when verse seemed to him the only
+adequate form in which drama could be written. But his power to work in
+poetry was not equal to his desire to be a poet; and, when he revolted
+against verse and deliberately adopted as his material 'the common order
+of things,' when he set himself, for the first time in the history of
+the drama, to produce an illusion of reality rather than a translation
+or transfiguration of reality, he discovered his own strength, the
+special gift which he had brought into the world; but at the same time
+he set, for himself and for his age, his own limits to drama.
+
+It is quite possible to write poetic drama in prose, though to use prose
+rather than verse is to write with the left hand rather than with the
+right. Before Ibsen, prose had been but a serving-maid to verse; and no
+great dramatist had ever put forward the prose conception of the drama.
+Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had used prose as an escape or a
+side-issue, for variety, or for the heightening of verse. Moliere had
+used prose as the best makeshift for verse, because he was not himself a
+good craftsman in the art. And, along with the verse, and necessarily
+dependent upon it, there was the poetic, the romantic quality in drama.
+Think of those dramatists who seem to have least kinship with poetry;
+think, I will not say of Moliere, but of Congreve. What is more romantic
+than _The Way of the World_? But Ibsen extracts the romantic quality
+from drama as if it were a poison; and, in deciding to write
+realistically in prose, he gives up every aim but that which he defines,
+so early as 1874, as the wish 'to produce the impression on the reader
+that what he was reading was something that had really happened.' He is
+not even speaking of the effect in a theatre; he is defining his aim
+inside the covers of a book, his whole conception of drama.
+
+The art of imitation has never been carried further than it has been
+carried by Ibsen in his central plays; and with him, at his best, it is
+no mere imitation but a critical interpretation of life. How greatly
+this can be done, how greatly Ibsen has done it, there is _Ghosts_ to
+show us. Yet at what point this supreme criticism may stop, what remains
+beyond it in the treatment of the vilest contemporary material, we shall
+see if we turn to a play which seems at first sight more grossly
+realistic than the most realistic play of Ibsen--Tolstoi's _Powers of
+Darkness_. Though, as one reads and sees it, the pity and fear seem to
+weigh almost intolerably upon one, the impression left upon the mind
+when the reading or the performance is over, is that left by the hearing
+of noble and tragic music. How, out of such human discords, such a
+divine harmony can be woven I do not know; that is the secret of
+Tolstoi's genius, as it is the secret of the musician's. Here, achieved
+in terms of naked horror, we find some of the things which Maeterlinck
+has aimed at and never quite rendered through an atmosphere and through
+forms of vague beauty. And we find also another kind of achievement, by
+the side of which Ibsen's cunning adjustments of reality seem a little
+trivial or a little unreal. Here, for once, human life is islanded on
+the stage, a pin-point of light in an immense darkness; and the sense of
+that surrounding darkness is conveyed to us, as in no other modern play,
+by an awful sincerity and an unparalleled simplicity. Whether Tolstoi
+has learned by instinct some stagecraft which playwrights have been
+toiling after in vain, or by what conscious and deliberate art he has
+supplemented instinct, I do not know. But, out of horror and humour, out
+of some creative abundance which has taken the dregs of human life up
+into itself and transfigured them by that pity which is understanding,
+by that faith which is creation, Tolstoi has in this play done what
+Ibsen has never done--given us an interpretation of life which owes
+nothing to science, nothing to the prose conception of life, but which,
+in spite of its form, is essential poetry.
+
+Ibsen's concern is with character; and no playwright has created a more
+probable gallery of characters with whom we can become so easily and so
+completely familiar. They live before us, and with apparently so
+unconscious a self-revelation that we speculate about them as we would
+about real people, and sometimes take sides with them against their
+creator. Nora would, would not, have left her children! We know all
+their tricks of mind, their little differences from other people, their
+habits, the things that a novelist spends so much of his time in
+bringing laboriously before us. Ibsen, in a single stage direction,
+gives you more than you would find in a chapter of a novel. His
+characters, when they are most themselves, are modern, of the day or
+moment; they are average, and represent nothing which we have not met
+with, nothing which astonishes us because it is of a nobility, a
+heroism, a wildness beyond our acquaintance. It is for this that he has
+been most praised; and there is something marvellous in the precision of
+his measurements of just so much and no more of the soul.
+
+Yet there are no great characters in Ibsen; and do not great characters
+still exist? Ibsen's exceptional people never authenticate themselves as
+being greatly exceptional; their genius is vouched for on a report which
+they are themselves unable to confirm, as in the inarticulate poet
+Loevborg, or on their own assertion, as with John Gabriel Borkman, of
+whom even Dr. Brandes admits, 'His own words do not convince me, for
+one, that he has ever possessed true genius.' When he is most himself,
+when he has the firmest hold on his material, Ibsen limits himself to
+that part of the soul which he and science know. By taking the average
+man as his hero, by having no hero, no villain, only probable levels, by
+limiting human nature to the bounds within which he can clinically
+examine it, he shirks, for the most part, the greatest crisis of the
+soul. Can the greatest drama be concerned with less than the ultimate
+issues of nature, the ultimate types of energy? with Lear and with
+Oedipus? The world of Shakespeare and of the Greeks is the world; it
+is universal, whether Falstaff blubbers in the tavern or Philoctetes
+cries in the cave. But the world which Ibsen really knows is that little
+segment of the world which we call society; its laws are not those of
+nature, its requirements are not the requirements of God or of man; it
+is a business association for the capture and division of profits; it
+is, in short, a fit subject for scientific study, but no longer a part
+of the material of poetry. The characteristic plays of Ibsen are rightly
+known as 'social dramas.' Their problem, for the main part, is no longer
+man in the world, but man in society. That is why they have no
+atmosphere, no background, but are carefully localised.
+
+The rhythm of prose is physiological; the rhythm of poetry is musical.
+There is in every play of Ibsen a rhythm perfect of its kind, but it is
+the physiological rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespeare
+speaks to the blood like wine or music; it is with exultation, with
+intoxication, that we see or read _Antony and Cleopatra_, or even
+_Richard II_. But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of a
+diagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the
+purely mental exaltation of a problem solved. These people who are seen
+so clearly, moving about in a well-realised world, using probable words
+and doing necessary things, may owe some of their manner at least to the
+modern French stage, and to the pamphleteer's prose world of Dumas
+_fils_; yet, though they may illustrate problems, they no longer recite
+them. They are seen, not as the poet sees his people, naked against a
+great darkness, but clothed and contemporary, from the level of an
+ironical observer who sits in a corner of the same room. It is the
+doctor who sits there, watching his patients, and smiling ambiguously as
+he infers from his knowledge of their bodies what pranks their souls are
+likely to play.
+
+If Ibsen gets no other kind of beauty, does he not get beauty of
+emotion? Or can there be beauty in an intensity of emotion which can be
+at least approached, in the power of thrilling, by an Adelphi
+melodrama? Is the speech of his people, when it is most nearly a
+revelation of the obscure forces outside us or within us, more than a
+stammering of those to whom unconsciousness does not lend distinction
+but intensifies idiosyncrasy? Drama, in its essence, requires no speech;
+it can be played by marionettes, or in dumb show, and be enthralling.
+But, speech once admitted, must not that speech, if it is to collaborate
+in supreme drama, be filled with imagination, be itself a beautiful
+thing? To Ibsen beauty has always been of the nature of an ornament, not
+an end. He would concentrate it into a catchword, repeated until it has
+lost all emotional significance. For the rest, his speech is the
+language of the newspaper, recorded with the fidelity of the phonograph.
+Its whole aim is at economy, as if economy were an end rather than a
+means.
+
+Has not Ibsen, in the social dramas, tried to make poems without words?
+There is to be beauty of motive and beauty of emotion; but the words are
+to be the plainest of all the plain words which we use in talking with
+one another, and nothing in them is to speak greatly when great
+occasions arise. Men's speech in great drama is as much higher than the
+words they would use in real life as their thoughts are higher than
+those words. It says the unuttered part of our speech. Ibsen would
+suppress all this heightening as he has suppressed the soliloquy and the
+aside. But here what he suppresses is not a convention but a means of
+interpretation. It is suppressing the essence for the sake of the
+accident.
+
+Ibsen's genius for the invention of a situation has never been
+surpassed. More living characters than the characters of Ibsen have
+never moved on the stage. His women are at work now in the world,
+interpreting women to themselves, helping to make the women of the
+future. He has peopled a new world. But the inhabitants of this new
+world, before they begin to transgress its laws and so lose their own
+citizenship there, are so faithfully copied from the people about us
+that they share their dumbness, that dumbness to which it is the power
+and privilege of poetry to give speech. Given the character and the
+situation, what Ibsen asks at the moment of crisis is: What would this
+man be most likely to say? not, What would be the finest, the most
+deeply revealing thing that he could say? In that difference lies all
+the difference between prose and poetry.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS
+
+
+The novels of Huysmans, however we may regard them as novels, are, at
+all events, the sincere and complete expression of a very remarkable
+personality. From _Marthe_ to _La-Bas_ every story, every volume,
+disengages the same atmosphere--the atmosphere of a London November,
+when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little miseries of
+life loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable grotesqueness.
+Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation--and
+sensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be well
+or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for each
+of us, what each of us feels it to be. To Huysmans the world appears to
+be a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, ridiculous place, with a
+certain solace in various forms of art, and certain possibilities of at
+least temporary escape. Part of his work presents to us a picture of
+ordinary life as he conceives it, in its uniform trivial wretchedness;
+in another part he has made experiment in directions which have seemed
+to promise escape, relief; in yet other portions he has allowed himself
+the delight of his sole enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of art. He himself
+would be the first to acknowledge--indeed, practically, he has
+acknowledged--that the particular way in which he sees life is a matter
+of personal temperament and constitution, a matter of nerves. The
+Goncourts have never tired of insisting on the fact of their _nevrose_,
+of pointing out its importance in connection with the form and structure
+of their work, their touch on style, even. To them the _maladie fin de
+siecle_ has come delicately, as to the chlorotic fine ladies of the
+Faubourg Saint-Germain: it has sharpened their senses to a point of
+morbid acuteness, it has given their work a certain feverish beauty. To
+Huysmans it has given the exaggerated horror of whatever is ugly and
+unpleasant, with the fatal instinct of discovering, the fatal necessity
+of contemplating, every flaw and every discomfort that a somewhat
+imperfect world can offer for inspection. It is the transposition of the
+ideal. Relative values are lost, for it is the sense of the disagreeable
+only that is heightened; and the world, in this strange disorder of
+vision, assumes an aspect which can only be compared with that of a drop
+of impure water under the microscope. 'Nature seen through a
+temperament' is Zola's definition of all art. Nothing, certainly, could
+be more exact and expressive as a definition of the art of Huysmans.
+
+To realise how faithfully and how completely Huysmans has revealed
+himself in all he has written, it is necessary to know the man. 'He gave
+me the impression of a cat,' some interviewer once wrote of him;
+'courteous, perfectly polite, almost amiable, but all nerves, ready to
+shoot out his claws at the least word.' And, indeed, there is something
+of his favourite animal about him. The face is grey, wearily alert, with
+a look of benevolent malice. At first sight it is commonplace, the
+features are ordinary, one seems to have seen it at the Bourse or the
+Stock Exchange. But gradually that strange, unvarying expression, that
+look of benevolent malice, grows upon you as the influence of the man
+makes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office--he is an employe
+in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employe; I have seen him
+in a cafe, in various houses; but I always see him in memory as I used
+to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back on the
+sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive fingers, looking
+at no one and at nothing, while Madame X. moves about with solid
+vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of _bric-a-brac_.
+The spoils of all the world are there, in that incredibly tiny _salon_;
+they lie underfoot, they climb up walls, they cling to screens,
+brackets, and tables; one of your elbows menaces a Japanese toy, the
+other a Dresden china shepherdess; all the colours of the rainbow clash
+in a barbaric discord of notes. And in a corner of this fantastic room,
+Huysmans lies back indifferently on the sofa, with the air of one
+perfectly resigned to the boredom of life. Something is said by my
+learned friend who is to write for the new periodical, or perhaps it is
+the young editor of the new periodical who speaks, or (if that were not
+impossible) the taciturn Englishman who accompanies me; and Huysmans,
+without looking up, and without taking the trouble to speak very
+distinctly, picks up the phrase, transforms it, more likely transpierces
+it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of impromptu elaboration.
+Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a
+stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomes
+monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle of imbecility; the
+unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It
+is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the
+intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the
+sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an
+epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks
+with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of contempt, so
+profound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility.
+
+Yes, that is the true Huysmans, the Huysmans of _A Rebours_, and it is
+just such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality.
+With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passion
+for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusively
+an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, being
+produced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, would
+be, in a way, the quintessence of contemporary Decadence. And it is
+precisely such a book that Huysmans has written, in the extravagant,
+astonishing _A Rebours_. All his other books are a sort of unconscious
+preparation for this one book, a sort of inevitable and scarcely
+necessary sequel to it. They range themselves along the line of a
+somewhat erratic development, from Baudelaire, through Goncourt, by way
+of Zola, to the surprising originality of so disconcerting an exception
+to any and every order of things.
+
+The descendant of a long line of Dutch painters--one of whom, Cornelius
+Huysmans, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape men of the great
+period--Joris-Karl Huysmans was born at Paris, February 5, 1848. His
+first book, _Le Drageoir a Epices_, published at the age of twenty-six,
+is a _pasticcio_ of prose poems, done after Baudelaire, of little
+sketches, done after Dutch artists, together with a few studies of
+Parisian landscape, done after nature. It shows us the careful, laboured
+work of a really artistic temperament; it betrays, here and there, the
+spirit of acrimonious observation which is to count for so much with
+Huysmans--in the crude malice of 'L'Extase,' for example, in the
+notation of the 'richness of tone,' the 'superb colouring,' of an old
+drunkard. And one sees already something of the novelty and the
+precision of his description, the novelty and the unpleasantness of the
+subjects which he chooses to describe, in this vividly exact picture of
+the carcass of a cow hung up outside a butcher's shop: 'As in a
+hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shot
+out on every side like trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work
+extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurled
+their violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a sharp
+white, against the red medley of quivering flesh.'
+
+In _Marthe: histoire d'une fille_, which followed in 1876, two years
+later, Huysmans is almost as far from actual achievement as in _Le
+Drageoir a Epices_, but the book, in its crude attempt to deal
+realistically, and somewhat after the manner of Goncourt, with the life
+of a prostitute of the lowest depths, marks a considerable advance upon
+the somewhat casual experiments of his earlier manner. It is important
+to remember that _Marthe_ preceded _La Fille Elisa_ and _Nana_. 'I write
+what I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced,' says the brief
+and defiant preface, 'and I write it as well as I can: that is all. This
+explanation is not an excuse, it is simply the statement of the aim that
+I pursue in art.' Explanation or excuse notwithstanding, the book was
+forbidden to be sold in France. It is Naturalism in its earliest and
+most pitiless stage--Naturalism which commits the error of evoking no
+sort of interest in this unhappy creature who rises a little from her
+native gutter, only to fall back more woefully into the gutter again.
+Goncourt's Elisa at least interests us; Zola's Nana at all events
+appeals to our senses. But Marthe is a mere document, like her story.
+Notes have been taken--no doubt _sur le vif_--they have been strung
+together, and here they are, with only an interesting brutality, a
+curious sordidness to note, in these descriptions that do duty for
+psychology and incident alike, in the general flatness of character, the
+general dislocation of episode.
+
+_Les Soeurs Vatard_, published in 1879, and the short story _Sac au
+Dos_, which appeared in 1880 in the famous Zolaist manifesto, _Les
+Soirees de Medan_, show the influence of _Les Rougon-Macquart_ rather
+than of _Germinie Lacerteux_. For the time the 'formula' of Zola has
+been accepted: the result is, a remarkable piece of work, but a story
+without a story, a frame without a picture. With Zola, there is at all
+events a beginning and an end, a chain of events, a play of character
+upon incident. But in _Les Soeurs Vatard_ there is no reason for the
+narrative ever beginning or ending; there are miracles of
+description--the workroom, the rue de Sevres, the locomotives, the
+_Foire du pain d'epice_--which lead to nothing; there are interiors,
+there are interviews, there are the two work-girls, Celine and Desiree,
+and their lovers; there is what Zola himself described as _tout ce
+milieu ouvrier, ce coin de misere et d'ignorance, de tranquille ordure
+et d'air naturellement empeste_. And with it all there is a heavy sense
+of stagnancy, a dreary lifelessness. All that is good in the book
+reappears, in vastly better company, in _En Menage_ (1881), a novel
+which is, perhaps, more in the direct line of heritage from _L'Education
+Sentimentale_--the starting-point of the Naturalistic novel--than any
+other novel of the Naturalists.
+
+_En Menage_ is the story of '_Monsieur Tout-le-monde_, an insignificant
+personality, one of those poor creatures who have not even the supreme
+consolation of being able to complain of any injustice in their fate,
+for an injustice supposes at all events a misunderstood merit, a force.'
+Andre is the reduction to the bourgeois formula of the invariable hero
+of Huysmans. He is just enough removed from the commonplace to suffer
+from it with acuteness. He cannot get on either with or without a woman
+in his establishment. Betrayed by his wife, he consoles himself with a
+mistress, and finally goes back to the wife. And the moral of it all
+is: 'Let us be stupidly comfortable, if we can, in any way we can: but
+it is almost certain that we cannot.' In _A Vau-l'Eau_, a less
+interesting story which followed _En Menage_, the daily misery of the
+respectable M. Folantin, the government employe, consists in the
+impossible search for a decent restaurant, a satisfactory dinner: for M.
+Folantin, too, there is only the same counsel of a desperate, an
+inevitable resignation. Never has the intolerable monotony of small
+inconveniences been so scrupulously, so unsparingly chronicled, as in
+these two studies in the heroic degree of the commonplace. It happens to
+Andre, at a certain epoch in his life, to take back an old servant who
+had left him many years before. He finds that she has exactly the same
+defects as before, and 'to find them there again,' comments the author,
+'did not displease him. He had been expecting them all the time, he
+saluted them as old acquaintances, yet with a certain surprise,
+notwithstanding, to see them neither grown nor diminished. He noted for
+himself with satisfaction that the stupidity of his servant had remained
+stationary.' On another page, referring to the inventor of cards,
+Huysmans defines him as one who 'did something towards suppressing the
+free exchange of human imbecility.' Having to say in passing that a girl
+has returned from a ball, 'she was at home again,' he observes, 'after
+the half-dried sweat of the waltzes.' In this invariably sarcastic turn
+of the phrase, this absoluteness of contempt, this insistence on the
+disagreeable, we find the note of Huysmans, particularly at this point
+in his career, when, like Flaubert, he forced himself to contemplate and
+to analyse the more mediocre manifestations of _la betise humaine_.
+
+There is a certain perversity in this furious contemplation of
+stupidity, this fanatical insistence on the exasperating attraction of
+the sordid and the disagreeable; and it is by such stages that we come
+to _A Rebours_. But on the way we have to note a volume of _Croquis
+Parisiens_ (1880), in which the virtuoso who is a part of the artist in
+Huysmans has executed some of his most astonishing feats; and a volume
+on _L'Art Moderne_ (1883), in which the most modern of artists in
+literature has applied himself to the criticism--the revelation,
+rather--of modernity in art. In the latter, Huysmans was the first to
+declare the supremacy of Degas--'the greatest artist that we possess
+to-day in France'--while announcing with no less fervour the remote,
+reactionary, and intricate genius of Gustave Moreau. He was the first to
+discover Raffaelli, 'the painter of poor people and the open sky--a sort
+of Parisian Millet,' as he called him; the first to discover Forain, 'le
+veritable peintre de la fille'; the first to discover Odilon Redon, to
+do justice to Pissaro and Paul Gauguin. No literary artist since
+Baudelaire has made so valuable a contribution to art criticism, and the
+_Curiosites Esthetiques_ are, after all, less exact in their actual
+study, less revolutionary, and less really significant in their critical
+judgments, than _L'Art Moderne_. The _Croquis Parisiens_, which, in its
+first edition, was illustrated by etchings of Forain and Raffaelli, is
+simply the attempt to do in words what those artists have done in
+aquafortis or in pastel. There are the same Parisian types--the
+omnibus-conductor, the washerwoman, the man who sells hot chestnuts--the
+same impressions of a sick and sorry landscape, La Bievre, for
+preference, in all its desolate and lamentable attraction; there is a
+marvellously minute series of studies of that typically Parisian
+music-hall, the Folies-Bergere. Huysmans' faculty of description is here
+seen at its fullest stretch of agility; precise, suggestive, with all
+the outline and colour of actual brush-work, it might even be compared
+with the art of Degas, only there is just that last touch wanting, that
+breath of palpitating life, which is what we always get in Degas, what
+we never get in Huysmans.
+
+In _L'Art Moderne_, speaking of the water-colours of Forain, Huysmans
+attributes to them 'a specious and _cherche_ art, demanding, for its
+appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense.' To realise
+the full value, the real charm, of _A Rebours_, some such initiation
+might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its exquisite
+artificiality, it is the natural sequel of _En Menage_ and _A
+Vau-l'Eau_, which are so much more acutely sordid than the most sordid
+kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred and horror
+of human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence, which we have
+seen to be the special form of Huysmans' _nevrose_. The motto, taken
+from a thirteenth-century mystic, Rusbroeck the Admirable, is a cry for
+escape, for the 'something in the world that is there in no satisfying
+measure, or not at all': _Il faut que je me rejouisse au-dessus du temps
+... quoique le monde ait horreur de ma joie et que sa grossierete ne
+sache pas ce que je veux dire_. And the book is the history of a
+_Thebaide raffinee_--a voluntary exile from the world in a new kind of
+'Palace of Art.' Des Esseintes, the vague but typical hero, is one of
+those half-pathological cases which help us to understand the full
+meaning of the word _decadence_, which they partly represent. The last
+descendant of an ancient family, his impoverished blood tainted by all
+sorts of excesses, Des Esseintes finds himself at thirty _sur le chemin,
+degrise, seul, abominablement lasse_. He has already realised that 'the
+world is divided, in great part, into swaggerers and simpletons.' His
+one desire is to 'hide himself away, far from the world, in some
+retreat, where he might deaden the sound of the loud rumbling of
+inflexible life, as one covers the street with straw, for sick people.'
+This retreat he discovers, just far enough from Paris to be safe from
+disturbance, just near enough to be saved from the nostalgia of the
+unattainable. He succeeds in making his house a paradise of the
+artificial, choosing the tones of colour that go best with candle-light,
+for it need scarcely be said that Des Esseintes has effected a simple
+transposition of night and day. His disappearance from the world has
+been complete; it seems to him that the 'comfortable desert' of his
+exile need never cease to be just such a luxurious solitude; it seems to
+him that he has attained his desire, that he has attained to happiness.
+
+Disturbing physical symptoms harass him from time to time, but they
+pass. It is an effect of nerves that now and again he is haunted by
+remembrance; the recurrence of a perfume, the reading of a book, brings
+back a period of life when his deliberate perversity was exercised
+actively in matters of the senses. There are his fantastic banquets, his
+fantastic amours: the _repas de deuil_, Miss Urania the acrobat, the
+episode of the ventriloquist-woman and the reincarnation of the Sphinx
+and the Chimaera of Flaubert, the episode of the boy _chez_ Madame
+Laure. A casual recollection brings up the schooldays of his childhood
+with the Jesuits, and with that the beliefs of childhood, the fantasies
+of the Church, the Catholic abnegation of the _Imitatio_ joining so
+strangely with the final philosophy of Schopenhauer. At times his brain
+is haunted by social theories--his dull hatred of the ordinary in life
+taking form in the region of ideas. But in the main he feeds himself,
+with something of the satisfaction of success, on the strange food for
+the sensations with which he has so laboriously furnished himself. There
+are his books, and among these a special library of the Latin writers of
+the Decadence. Exasperated by Virgil, profoundly contemptuous of Horace,
+he tolerates Lucan (which is surprising), adores Petronius (as well he
+might), and delights in the neologisms and the exotic novelty of
+Apuleius. His curiosity extends to the later Christian poets--from the
+coloured verse of Claudian down to the verse which is scarcely verse of
+the incoherent ninth century. He is, of course, an amateur of exquisite
+printing, of beautiful bindings, and possesses an incomparable
+Baudelaire (_edition tiree a un exemplaire_), a unique Mallarme.
+Catholicism being the adopted religion of the Decadence--for its
+venerable age, valuable in such matters as the age of an old wine, its
+vague excitation of the senses, its mystical picturesqueness--Des
+Esseintes has a curious collection of the later Catholic literature,
+where Lacordaire and the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find
+their place side by side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello,
+the amalgam of a monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality,
+Barbey d'Aurevilly. His collection of 'profane' writers is small, but it
+is selected for the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be his
+only care in art--for the somewhat diseased, or the somewhat artificial
+beauty that alone can strike a responsive thrill from his exacting
+nerves. 'Considering within himself, he realised that a work of art, in
+order to attract him, must come to him with that quality of strangeness
+demanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route, and
+sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated
+deliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over which
+he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or of
+solid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. He
+delighted in a work of art, both for what it was in itself and for what
+it could lend him; he would fain go along with it, thanks to it, as
+though sustained by an adjuvant, as though borne in a vehicle, into a
+sphere where his sublimated sensations would wake in him an unaccustomed
+stir, the cause of which he would long and vainly seek to determine.' So
+he comes to care supremely for Baudelaire, 'who, more than any other,
+possessed the marvellous power of rendering, with a strange sanity of
+expression, the most fleeting, the most wavering morbid states of
+exhausted minds, of desolate souls.' In Flaubert he prefers _La
+Tentation de Saint-Antoine_; in Goncourt, _La Faustin_; in Zola, _La
+Faute de l'Abbe Mouret_--the exceptional, the most remote and
+_recherche_ outcome of each temperament. And of the three it is the
+novel of Goncourt that appeals to him with special intimacy--that novel
+which, more than any other, seems to express, in its exquisitely
+perverse charm, all that decadent civilisation of which Des Esseintes
+is the type and symbol. In poetry he has discovered the fine perfume,
+the evanescent charm, of Paul Verlaine, and near that great poet
+(forgetting, strangely, Arthur Rimbaud) he places two poets who are
+curious--the disconcerting, tumultuous Tristan Corbiere, and the painted
+and bejewelled Theodore Hannon. With Edgar Poe he has the instinctive
+sympathy which drew Baudelaire to the enigmatically perverse Decadent of
+America; he delights, sooner than all the world, in the astonishing,
+unbalanced, unachieved genius of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it is
+in Stephane Mallarme that he finds the incarnation of 'the decadence of
+a literature, irreparably affected in its organism, weakened in its
+ideas by age, exhausted by the excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the
+curiosity which fevers sick people, and yet hastening to say everything,
+now at the end, torn by the wish to atone for all its omissions of
+enjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest memories of sorrow on its
+death-bed.'
+
+But it is not on books alone that Des Esseintes nurses his sick and
+craving fancy. He pushes his delight in the artificial to the last
+limits, and diverts himself with a bouquet of jewels, a concert of
+flowers, an orchestra of liqueurs, an orchestra of perfumes. In flowers
+he prefers the real flowers that imitate artificial ones. It is the
+monstrosities of nature, the offspring of unnatural adulteries, that he
+cherishes in the barbarically coloured flowers, the plants with barbaric
+names, the carnivorous plants of the Antilles--morbid horrors of
+vegetation, chosen, not for their beauty, but for their strangeness. And
+his imagination plays harmonies on the sense of taste, like combinations
+of music, from the flute-like sweetness of anisette, the trumpet-note of
+kirsch, the eager yet velvety sharpness of curacao, the clarionet. He
+combines scents, weaving them into odorous melodies, with effects like
+those of the refrains of certain poems, employing, for example, the
+method of Baudelaire in _L'Irreparable_ and _Le Balcon_, where the last
+line of the stanza is the echo of the first, in the languorous
+progression of the melody. And above all he has his few, carefully
+chosen pictures, with their diverse notes of strange beauty and strange
+terror--the two Salomes of Gustave Moreau, the 'Religious Persecutions'
+of Jan Luyken, the opium-dreams of Odilon Redon. His favourite artist is
+Gustave Moreau, and it is on this superb and disquieting picture that he
+cares chiefly to dwell.
+
+
+     A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath
+     innumerable arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman
+     pillars, enamelled with vari-coloured bricks, set with mosaics,
+     incrusted with lapis lazuli and sardonyx, in a palace like the
+     basilica of an architecture at once Mussulman and Byzantine. In the
+     centre of the tabernacle surmounting the altar, fronted with rows
+     of circular steps, sat the Tetrarch Herod, the tiara on his head,
+     his legs pressed together, his hands on his knees. His face was
+     yellow, parchment-like, annulated with wrinkles, withered with age;
+     his long beard floated like a white cloud on the jewelled stars
+     that constellated the robe of netted gold across his breast. Around
+     this statue, motionless, frozen in the sacred pose of a Hindu god,
+     perfumes burned, throwing out clouds of vapour, pierced, as by the
+     phosphorescent eyes of animals, by the fire of precious stones set
+     in the sides of the throne; then the vapour mounted, unrolling
+     itself beneath arches where the blue smoke mingled with the
+     powdered gold of great sunrays, fallen from the domes.
+
+     In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of
+     this church, Salome, her left arm extended in a gesture of command,
+     her bent right arm holding at the level of the face a great lotus,
+     advances slowly to the sound of a guitar, thrummed by a woman who
+     crouches on the floor.
+
+     With collected, solemn, almost august countenance, she begins the
+     lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses of the aged
+     Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of the
+     whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her
+     skin, her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal
+     robe, sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold,
+     the jewelled breast-plate, whose every stitch is a precious stone,
+     bursts into flame, scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the
+     ivory-toned, tea-rose flesh, like splendid insects with dazzling
+     wings, marbled with carmine, dotted with morning gold, diapered
+     with steel-blue, streaked with peacock-green.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des
+     Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman
+     Salome that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing-girl
+     who, with the corrupt torsion of her limbs, tears a cry of desire
+     from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her palpitating
+     body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the will, of a
+     king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the
+     goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among
+     many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has
+     hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,
+     insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near to
+     her, all that look upon her, all that she touches.
+
+
+It is in such a 'Palace of Art' that Des Esseintes would recreate his
+already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion
+is only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. This
+one episode of action, this one touch of realism, in a book given over
+to the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projected
+voyage to London, a voyage that never occurs. Des Esseintes has been
+reading Dickens, idly, to quiet his nerves, and the violent colours of
+those ultra-British scenes and characters have imposed themselves upon
+his imagination. Days of rain and fog complete the picture of that _pays
+de brume et de boue_, and suddenly, stung by the unwonted desire for
+change, he takes the train to Paris, resolved to distract himself by a
+visit to London. Arrived in Paris before his time, he takes a cab to the
+office of _Galignani's Messenger_, fancying himself, as the rain-drops
+rattle on the roof and the mud splashes against the windows, already in
+the midst of the immense city, its smoke and dirt. He reaches
+_Galignani's Messenger_, and there, turning over Baedekers and Murrays,
+loses himself in dreams of an imagined London. He buys a Baedeker, and,
+to pass the time, enters the 'Bodega' at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli
+and the Rue Castiglione. The wine-cellar is crowded with Englishmen: he
+sees, as he drinks his port, and listens to the unfamiliar accents, all
+the characters of Dickens--a whole England of caricature; as he drinks
+his Amontillado, the recollection of Poe puts a new horror into the
+good-humoured faces about him. Leaving the 'Bodega,' he steps out again
+into the rain-swept street, regains his cab, and drives to the English
+tavern of the Rue d'Amsterdam. He has just time for dinner, and he finds
+a place beside the _insulaires_, with 'their porcelain eyes, their
+crimson cheeks,' and orders a heavy English dinner, which he washes down
+with ale and porter, seasoning his coffee, as he imagines we do in
+England, with gin. As time passes, and the hour of the train draws near,
+he begins to reflect vaguely on his project; he recalls the disillusion
+of the visit he had once paid to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion
+await him in London? 'Why travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a
+chair? Was he not at London already, since its odours, its atmosphere,
+its inhabitants, its food, its utensils, were all about him?' The train
+is due, but he does not stir. 'I have felt and seen,' he says to
+himself, 'what I wanted to feel and see. I have been saturated with
+English life all this time; it would be madness to lose, by a clumsy
+change of place, these imperishable sensations.' So he gathers together
+his luggage, and goes home again, resolving never to abandon the 'docile
+phantasmagoria of the brain' for the mere realities of the actual world.
+But his nervous malady, one of whose symptoms had driven him forth and
+brought him back so spasmodically, is on the increase. He is seized by
+hallucinations, haunted by sounds: the hysteria of Schumann, the morbid
+exaltation of Berlioz, communicate themselves to him in the music that
+besieges his brain. Obliged at last to send for a doctor, we find him,
+at the end of the book, ordered back to Paris, to the normal life, the
+normal conditions, with just that chance of escape from death or
+madness. So suggestively, so instructively, closes the record of a
+strange, attractive folly--in itself partly a serious ideal (which
+indeed is Huysmans' own), partly the caricature of that ideal. Des
+Esseintes, though studied from a real man, who is known to those who
+know a certain kind of society in Paris, is a type rather than a man: he
+is the offspring of the Decadent art that he adores, and this book a
+sort of breviary for its worshippers. It has a place of its own in the
+literature of the day, for it sums up, not only a talent, but a
+spiritual epoch.
+
+_A Rebours_ is a book that can only be written once, and since that date
+Huysmans has published a short story, _Un Dilemme_ (1887), which is
+merely a somewhat lengthy anecdote; two novels, _En Rade_ (1887) and
+_La-Bas_ (1891), both of which are interesting experiments, but neither
+of them an entire success; and a volume of art criticism, _Certains_
+(1890), notable for a single splendid essay, that on Felicien Rops, the
+etcher of the fantastically erotic. _En Rade_ is a sort of deliberately
+exaggerated record--vision rather than record--of the disillusions of a
+country sojourn, as they affect the disordered nerves of a town
+_nevrose_. The narrative is punctuated by nightmares, marvellously woven
+out of nothing, and with no psychological value--the human part of the
+book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representation
+of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of the
+country. There is a cat which becomes interesting in its agonies; but
+the long boredom of the man and woman is only too faithfully shared with
+the reader. _La-Bas_ is a more artistic creation, on a more solid
+foundation. It is a study of Satanism, a dexterous interweaving of the
+history of Gilles de Retz (the traditional Bluebeard) with the
+contemporary manifestations of the Black Art. 'The execration of
+impotence, the hate of the mediocre--that is perhaps one of the most
+indulgent definitions of Diabolism,' says Huysmans, somewhere in the
+book, and it is on this side that one finds the link of connection with
+the others of that series of pessimist studies in life. _Un naturalisme
+spiritualiste_, he defines his own art at this point in its development;
+and it is in somewhat the 'documentary' manner that he applies himself
+to the study of these strange problems, half of hysteria, half of a real
+mystical corruption that does actually exist in our midst. I do not
+know whether the monstrous tableau of the Black Mass--so marvellously,
+so revoltingly described in the central episode of the book--is still
+enacted in our days, but I do know that all but the most horrible
+practices of the sacrilegious magic of the Middle Ages are yet
+performed, from time to time, in a secrecy which is all but absolute.
+The character of Madame Chantelouve is an attempt, probably the first in
+literature, to diagnose a case of Sadism in a woman. To say that it is
+successful would be to assume that the thing is possible, which one
+hesitates to do. The book is even more disquieting, to the normal mind,
+than _A Rebours_. But it is not, like that, the study of an exception
+which has become a type. It is the study of an exception which does not
+profess to be anything but a disease.
+
+Huysmans' place in contemporary literature is not quite easy to
+estimate. There is a danger of being too much attracted, or too much
+repelled, by those qualities of deliberate singularity which make his
+work, sincere expression as it is of his own personality, so artificial
+and _recherche_ in itself. With his pronounced, exceptional
+characteristics, it would have been impossible for him to write fiction
+impersonally, or to range himself, for long, in any school, under any
+master. Interrogated one day as to his opinion of Naturalism, he had but
+to say in reply: _Au fond, il y a des ecrivains qui ont du talent et
+d'autres qui n'en ont pas, qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques,
+decadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, ca m'est egal! il s'agit pour moi
+d'avoir du talent, et voila tout!_ But, as we have seen, he has
+undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first he
+has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and, even in
+_Le Drageoir a Epices_, we find such daring combinations as this
+(_Camaieu Rouge_)--_Cette fanfare de rouge m'etourdissait; cette gamme
+d'une intensite furieuse, d'une violence inouie, m'aveuglait._ Working
+upon the foundation of Flaubert and of Goncourt, the two great modern
+stylists, he has developed an intensely personal style of his own, in
+which the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the sense of colour.
+He manipulates the French language with a freedom sometimes barbarous,
+'dragging his images by the heels or the hair' (in the admirable phrase
+of Leon Bloy) 'up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified
+syntax,' gaining, certainly, the effects at which he aims. He possesses,
+in the highest degree, that _style tachete et faisande_--high-flavoured
+and spotted with corruption--that he attributes to Goncourt and
+Verlaine. And with this audacious and barbaric profusion of
+words--chosen always for their colour and their vividly expressive
+quality--he is able to describe the essentially modern aspects of things
+as no one had ever described them before. No one before him had ever so
+realised the perverse charm of the sordid, the perverse charm of the
+artificial. Exceptional always, it is for such qualities as these,
+rather than for the ordinary qualities of the novelist, that he is
+remarkable. His stories are without incident, they are constructed to go
+on until they stop, they are almost without characters. His psychology
+is a matter of the sensations, and chiefly the visual sensations. The
+moral nature is ignored, the emotions resolve themselves for the most
+part into a sordid ennui, rising at times into a rage at existence. The
+protagonist of every book is not so much a character as a bundle of
+impressions and sensations--the vague outline of a single consciousness,
+his own. But it is that single consciousness--in this morbidly personal
+writer--with which we are concerned. For Huysmans' novels, with all
+their strangeness, their charm, their repulsion, typical too, as they
+are, of much beside himself, are certainly the expression of a
+personality as remarkable as that of any contemporary writer.
+
+1892.
+
+
+
+
+TWO SYMBOLISTS
+
+
+_Un livre comme je ne les aime pas_, says Mallarme characteristically
+(_ceux epars et prives d'architecture_) of this long expected first
+volume of collected prose, _Divagations_, in which we find the prose
+poems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers de
+l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; the
+marvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and the
+theatrical spectacle, comparatively early in date; _Richard Wagner:
+reverie d'un Poete francais, Le Mystere dans les Lettres_; and, under
+various titles, the surprising _Variations sur un Sujet_. The hesitation
+of a lifetime having been, it would seem, overcome, we are at last able
+to read Mallarme's 'doctrine,' if not altogether as he would have us
+read it. And we are at last able, without too much injustice, to judge
+him as a writer of prose.
+
+In saying that this volume is the most beautiful and the most valuable
+which has found its way into my hands for I know not how long, I shall
+not pretend to have read it with ease, or to have understood every word
+of it. _D'exhiber les choses a un imperturbable premier plan, en
+camelots, actives par la pression de l'instant, d'accord--ecrire, dans
+le cas pourquoi, indument, sauf pour etaler la banalite; plutot que
+tendre le nuage, precieux, flottant sur l'intime gouffre de chaque
+pensee, vu que vulgaire l'est ce a quoi on decerne, pas plus, un
+caractere immediat._ No, it has always been to that _labyrinthe illumine
+par des fleurs_ that Mallarme has felt it due to their own dignity to
+invite his readers. To their own dignity, and also to his. Mallarme is
+obscure, not so much because he writes differently as because he thinks
+differently from other people. His mind is elliptical, and (relying on
+the intelligence of his readers) he emphasises the effect of what is
+unlike other people in his mind by resolutely ignoring even the links of
+connection that exist between them. Never having aimed at popularity, he
+has never needed, as most writers need, to make the first advances. He
+has made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who after all
+need not read him. And when he has spoken he has not considered it
+needful or seemly to listen in order that he might hear whether he was
+heard. To the charge of obscurity he replies, with sufficient disdain,
+that there are many who do not know how to read--except the newspapers,
+he adds, in one of those disconcerting, oddly printed parentheses, which
+make his work, to those who can rightly apprehend it, so full of wise
+limitations, so safe from hasty or seemingly final conclusions. No one
+in our time has more significantly vindicated the supreme right of the
+artist in the aristocracy of letters; wilfully, perhaps, not always
+wisely, but nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk from that
+making of himself 'a motley to the view,' that handing over of his naked
+soul to the laughter of the multitude? but who in our time has wrought
+so subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick cloud
+on the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had the wisdom
+to hide their secret in the obscurity of double meanings or of what has
+seemed meaningless; and might it not after all be the finest epitaph for
+a self-respecting man of letters to be able to say, even after the
+writing of many books: I have kept my secret, I have not betrayed myself
+to the crowd?
+
+It has been the distinction of Mallarme that he has always aspired after
+an impossible liberation of the soul of literature from what is fretting
+and constraining in 'the body of that death,' which is the mere
+literature of words. Words, he has realised, are of value only as
+notations of the free breath of the spirit; words, therefore, must be
+employed with an extreme care in their choice and adjustment, in setting
+them to reflect and chime upon one another; yet least of all things for
+their own sake, for the sake of what they can never, except by
+suggestion, express. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use of
+words--that seeming artificiality which comes from using words as if
+they had never been used before, that chimerical search after the
+virginity of language--is but the paradoxical outward sign of an extreme
+discontent with even the best of their service. Writers who use words
+fluently, seeming to disregard their importance, do so from an
+unconscious confidence in their expressiveness, which the scrupulous
+thinker, the precise dreamer, can never place in the most carefully
+chosen among them. To evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of
+language, without the formality of an after all impossible description;
+to be, in fact, rather than to express; that is what Mallarme has
+consistently, and from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has
+sought this wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of
+dreams, over more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the
+depths of many forests, far from the sunlight. He would be the last to
+permit me to say that he has found what he sought; but (is it possible
+to avoid saying?) how heroic a search, and what marvellous discoveries,
+by the way!
+
+Yes, all these, he admits perhaps proudly, are divagations, and the
+secret, eternal, and only beauty is not yet found. Is it, perhaps, in a
+mood, a momentary mood, really of discouragement, that he has consented
+to the publication--the 'showing off,' within covers, as of goods in a
+shop-window: it is his own image--of these fragmentary suggestions
+towards a complete AEsthetic? Beautiful and invaluable I find them; here
+and there final; and always, in form, hieratic.
+
+Certain writers, in whom the artist's contempt for common things has
+been carried to its utmost limit, should only be read in books of
+beautiful and slightly unusual form. Perhaps of all modern writers
+Villiers and Mallarme have most carefully sought the most remote ideal,
+and seem most to require some elaborate presentation to the reader.
+Mallarme, indeed, delighted in heaping up obstacles in the reader's way,
+not only in the concealment of his meaning by style, but in a furtive,
+fragmentary, and only too luxurious method of publication, which made it
+difficult for most people to get his books at all, even for unlimited
+money. Villiers, on the contrary, after publishing his first book, the
+_Premieres Poesies_ of 1859, in the delicate type of Perrin of Lyons, on
+ribbed paper, with old gold covers, became careless as to how his books
+appeared, and has to be read in a disorderly crowd of volumes, some of
+them as hideous as the original edition of _L'Eve Future_, with its red
+stars and streaks, its Apollo and Cupid and grey city landscape. It is
+therefore with singular pleasure that one finds the two beautiful books
+which have lately been published by M. Deman, the well-known publisher
+of Rops: one, the fullest collection of Mallarme's poems which has ever
+been published, the other a selection of twenty stories by Villiers. The
+Mallarme is white and red, the poems printed in italics, a frontispiece
+by Rops; the Villiers is a large square volume in shimmering dark green
+and gold, with headpieces and tailpieces, in two tints, by Th. van
+Rysselberghe. These scrolls and titles are done with a sort of reverent
+self-suppression, as if, for once, decoration existed for a book and not
+the book for the decoration, which is hardly the quality for which
+modern decorators are most conspicuous.
+
+In the _Poesies_ we have, no doubt, Mallarme's final selection from his
+own poems. Some of it is even new. The magnificent and mysterious
+fragment of _Herodiade_, his masterpiece, perhaps, is, though not indeed
+completed, more than doubled in length by the addition of a long passage
+on which he was at work almost to the time of his death. It is curious
+to note that the new passage is written in exactly the style of the
+older passage, though in the interval between the writing of the one and
+the writing of the other Mallarme had completely changed his style. By
+an effort of will he had thought himself back into an earlier style, and
+the two fragments join without an apparent seam. There were, it appears,
+still a hymn or lyric spoken by St. John and a concluding monologue, to
+be added to the poem; but we have at least the whole of the dialogue
+between Herodiade and the Nurse, certainly a poem sufficiently complete
+in itself. The other new pieces are in the latest manner, mainly without
+punctuation; they would scarcely be alluring, one imagines, even if
+punctuated. In the course of a few centuries, I am convinced, every line
+of Mallarme will have become perfectly clear, as a corrupt Greek text
+becomes clear in time. Even now a learned commentator could probably do
+much to explain them, at the cost of a life-long labour; but scholars
+only give up their lives to the difficult authors of a remote past.
+Mallarme can afford to wait; he will not be forgotten; and for us of the
+present there are the clear and lovely early poems, so delightfully
+brought together in the white and red book.
+
+_L'insensibilite de l'azur et des pierres_: a serene and gem-like
+quality, entirely his own, is in all these poems, in which a particular
+kind of French verse realises its ideal. Mallarme is the poet of a few,
+a limited poet, perfect within his limits as the Chinese artist of his
+own symbol. In a beautiful poem he compares himself to the painter of
+tea-cups who spends his life in painting a strange flower
+
+
+     _Sur ses tasses de neige a la lune ravie_,
+
+
+a flower which has perfumed his whole existence, since, as a child, he
+had felt it graft itself upon the 'blue filigree of his soul.'
+
+A very different image must be sought if we wish to sum up the
+characteristics of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. An uncertain artist, he was
+a man of passionate and lofty genius, and he has left us a great mass of
+imperfect work, out of which we have to form for ourselves whatever
+notion we can of a man greater than his work. My first impression, on
+looking at the twenty stories which make up the present selection, was
+that the selection had been badly made. Where is _Les Demoiselles de
+Bienfilatre_? I asked myself, remembering that little ironical
+masterpiece; where is _Le Convive des Dernieres Fetes_, with its
+subtlety of horror; _Sentimentalisme_, with its tragic and tender
+modernity; _La Reine Ysabeau_, with its sombre and taciturn intensity?
+Story after story came into my mind, finer, it seemed to me, in the
+artistic qualities of the story than many of those selected. Second
+thoughts inclined me to think that the selection could scarcely have
+been better. For it is a selection made after a plan, and it shows us,
+not indeed always Villiers at his best as a story-teller, but,
+throughout, Villiers at his highest point of elevation; the man whom we
+are always trying to see through his work, and the man as he would have
+seen himself. There is not a collection of stories in French of greater
+nobility than these _Histoires Souveraines_ in which a regal pomp of
+speech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers who
+mocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; the
+idealist is at home in his own world, among his ideals.
+
+1897, 1899.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+
+
+Baudelaire is little known and much misunderstood in England. Only one
+English writer has ever done him justice, or said anything adequate
+about him. As long ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire to
+English readers: in the columns of the _Spectator_, it is amusing to
+remember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise in
+his book on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy on
+his death, _Ave atque Vale_. There have been occasional outbreaks of
+irrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generally
+mis-spelled) is the journalist's handiest brickbat for hurling at random
+in the name of respectability. Does all this mean that we are waking up,
+over here, to the consciousness of one of the great literary forces of
+the age, a force which has been felt in every other country but ours?
+
+It would be a useful influence for us. Baudelaire desired perfection,
+and we have never realised that perfection is a thing to aim at. He only
+did what he could do supremely well, and he was in poverty all his life,
+not because he would not work, but because he would work only at certain
+things, the things which he could hope to do to his own satisfaction. Of
+the men of letters of our age he was the most scrupulous. He spent his
+whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry
+has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a
+fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which
+his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a
+marvellous original. What would French poetry be to-day if Baudelaire
+had never existed? As different a thing from what it is as English
+poetry would be without Rossetti. Neither of them is quite among the
+greatest poets, but they are more fascinating than the greatest, they
+influence more minds. And Baudelaire was an equally great critic. He
+discovered Poe, Wagner, and Manet. Where even Sainte-Beuve, with his
+vast materials, his vast general talent for criticism, went wrong in
+contemporary judgments, Baudelaire was infallibly right. He wrote
+neither verse nor prose with ease, but he would not permit himself to
+write either without inspiration. His work is without abundance, but it
+is without waste. It is made out of his whole intellect and all his
+nerves. Every poem is a train of thought and every essay is the record
+of sensation. This 'romantic' had something classic in his moderation, a
+moderation which becomes at times as terrifying as Poe's logic. To
+'cultivate one's hysteria' so calmly, and to affront the reader
+(_Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere_) as a judge rather than
+as a penitent; to be a casuist in confession; to be so much a moralist,
+with so keen a sense of the ecstasy of evil: that has always bewildered
+the world, even in his own country, where the artist is allowed to live
+as experimentally as he writes. Baudelaire lived and died solitary,
+secret, a confessor of sins who has never told the whole truth, _le
+mauvais moine_ of his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the
+brothel.
+
+To understand, not Baudelaire, but what we can of him, we must read, not
+only the four volumes of his collected works, but every document in
+Crepet's _Oeuvres Posthumes_, and, above all, the letters, and these
+have only now been collected into a volume, under the care of an editor
+who has done more for Baudelaire than any one since Crepet. Baudelaire
+put into his letters only what he cared to reveal of himself at a given
+moment: he has a different angle to distract the sight of every
+observer; and let no one think that he knows Baudelaire when he has read
+the letters to Poulet-Malassis, the friend and publisher, to whom he
+showed his business side, or the letters to la Presidente, the
+touchstone of his _spleen et ideal_, his chief experiment in the higher
+sentiments. Some of his carefully hidden virtues peep out at moments, it
+is true, but nothing that everybody has not long been aware of. We hear
+of his ill-luck with money, with proof-sheets, with his own health. The
+tragedy of the life which he chose, as he chose all things (poetry,
+Jeanne Duval, the 'artificial paradises') deliberately, is made a little
+clearer to us; we can moralise over it if we like. But the man remains
+baffling, and will probably never be discovered.
+
+As it is, much of the value of the book consists in those glimpses into
+his mind and intentions which he allowed people now and then to see.
+Writing to Sainte-Beuve, to Flaubert, to Soulary, he sometimes lets out,
+through mere sensitiveness to an intelligence capable of understanding
+him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that he
+defines and explains the origin and real meaning of the _Petits Poemes
+en Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur
+constante (bonne humeur necessaire, meme pour traiter des sujets
+tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules,
+de musiques, de reverberes meme, voila ce que j'ai voulu faire!_ And,
+writing to some obscure person, he will take the trouble to be even more
+explicit, as in this symbol of the sonnet: _Avez-vous observe qu'un
+morceau de ciel apercu par un soupirail, ou entre deux cheminees, deux
+rochers, ou par une arcade, donnait une idee plus profonde de l'infini
+que le grand panorama vu du haul d'une montagne?_ It is to another
+casual person that he speaks out still more intimately (and the occasion
+of his writing is some thrill of gratitude towards one who had at last
+done 'a little justice,' not to himself, but to Manet): _Eh bien! on
+m'accuse, moi, d'imiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si
+patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il me ressemblait. La premiere fois que
+j'ai ouvert un livre de lui, j'ai vu avec epouvante et ravissement, non
+seulement des sujets reves par moi, mais des phrases, pensees par moi,
+et ecrites par lui, vingt ans auparavant._ It is in such glimpses as
+these that we see something of Baudelaire in his letters.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+WALTER PATER
+
+
+Writing about Botticelli, in that essay which first interpreted
+Botticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after naming the supreme
+artists, Michelangelo or Leonardo:
+
+
+     But, besides these great men, there is a certain number of artists
+     who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us
+     a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and
+     these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be
+     interpreted to it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and
+     are often the objects of a special diligence and a consideration
+     wholly affectionate, just because there is not about them the
+     stress of a great name and authority.
+
+
+It is among these rare artists, so much more interesting, to many, than
+the very greatest, that Pater belongs; and he can only be properly
+understood, loved, or even measured by those to whom it is 'the
+delicacies of fine literature' that chiefly appeal. There have been
+greater prose-writers in our language, even in our time; but he was, as
+Mallarme called him, 'le prosateur ouvrage par excellence de ce temps.'
+For strangeness and subtlety of temperament, for rarity and delicacy of
+form, for something incredibly attractive to those who felt his
+attraction, he was as unique in our age as Botticelli in the great age
+of Raphael. And he, too, above all to those who knew him, can scarcely
+fail to become, not only 'the object of a special diligence,' but also
+of 'a consideration wholly affectionate,' not lessened by the slowly
+increasing 'stress of authority' which is coming to be laid, almost by
+the world in general, on his name.
+
+In the work of Pater, thought moves to music, and does all its hard work
+as if in play. And Pater seems to listen for his thought, and to
+overhear it, as the poet overhears his song in the air. It is like
+music, and has something of the character of poetry, yet, above all, it
+is precise, individual, thought filtered through a temperament; and it
+comes to us as it does because the style which clothes and fits it is a
+style in which, to use some of his own words, 'the writer succeeds in
+saying what he _wills_.'
+
+The style of Pater has been praised and blamed for its particular
+qualities of colour, harmony, weaving; but it has not always, or often,
+been realised that what is most wonderful in the style is precisely its
+adaptability to every shade of meaning or intention, its extraordinary
+closeness in following the turns of thought, the waves of sensation, in
+the man himself. Everything in Pater was in harmony, when you got
+accustomed to its particular forms of expression: the heavy frame, so
+slow and deliberate in movement, so settled in repose; the timid and yet
+scrutinising eyes; the mannered, yet so personal, voice; the precise,
+pausing speech, with its urbanity, its almost painful conscientiousness
+of utterance; the whole outer mask, in short, worn for protection and
+out of courtesy, yet moulded upon the inner truth of nature like a mask
+moulded upon the features which it covers. And the books are the man,
+literally the man in many accents, turns of phrase; and, far more than
+that, the man himself, whom one felt through his few, friendly,
+intimate, serious words: the inner life of his soul coming close to us,
+in a slow and gradual revelation.
+
+He has said, in the first essay of his which we have:
+
+
+     The artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires
+     only to be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer
+     and nearer to perfection, the veil of an outer life, not simply
+     expressive of the inward, becomes thinner and thinner.
+
+
+And Pater seemed to draw up into himself every form of earthly beauty,
+or of the beauty made by men, and many forms of knowledge and wisdom,
+and a sense of human things which was neither that of the lover nor of
+the priest, but partly of both; and his work was the giving out of all
+this again, with a certain labour to give it wholly. It is all, the
+criticism, and the stories, and the writing about pictures and places, a
+confession, the _vraie verite_ (as he was fond of saying) about the
+world in which he lived. That world he thought was open to all; he was
+sure that it was the real blue and green earth, and that he caught the
+tangible moments as they passed. It was a world into which we can only
+look, not enter, for none of us have his secret. But part of his secret
+was in the gift and cultivation of a passionate temperance, an
+unrelaxing attentiveness to whatever was rarest and most delightful in
+passing things.
+
+In Pater logic is of the nature of ecstasy, and ecstasy never soars
+wholly beyond the reach of logic. Pater is keen in pointing out the
+liberal and spendthrift weakness of Coleridge in his thirst for the
+absolute, his 'hunger for eternity,' and for his part he is content to
+set all his happiness, and all his mental energies, on a relative basis,
+on a valuation of the things of eternity under the form of time. He asks
+for no 'larger flowers' than the best growth of the earth; but he would
+choose them flower by flower, and for himself. He finds life worth just
+living, a thing satisfying in itself, if you are careful to extract its
+essence, moment by moment, not in any calculated 'hedonism,' even of the
+mind, but in a quiet, discriminating acceptance of whatever is
+beautiful, active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew older he
+added something more like a Stoic sense of 'duty' to the old, properly
+and severely Epicurean doctrine of 'pleasure.' Pleasure was never, for
+Pater, less than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not
+merely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious from the first,
+and had always to be served with a strict ritual. 'Only be sure it is
+passion,' he said of that spirit of divine motion to which he appealed
+for the quickening of our sense of life, our sense of ourselves; be
+sure, he said, 'that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened,
+multiplied consciousness.' What he cared most for at all times was that
+which could give 'the highest quality to our moments as they pass'; he
+differed only, to a certain extent, in his estimation of what that was.
+'The herb, the wine, the gem' of the preface to the _Renaissance_ tended
+more and more to become, under less outward symbols of perfection, 'the
+discovery, the new faculty, the privileged apprehension' by which 'the
+imaginative regeneration of the world' should be brought about, or even,
+at times, a brooding over 'what the soul passes, and must pass, through,
+_aux abois_ with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious powers
+that may really occupy it.'
+
+
+When I first met Pater he was nearly fifty. I did not meet him for about
+two years after he had been writing to me, and his first letter reached
+me when I was just over twenty-one. I had been writing verse all my
+life, and what Browning was to me in verse Pater, from about the age of
+seventeen, had been to me in prose. Meredith made the third; but his
+form of art was not, I knew never could be, mine. Verse, I suppose,
+requires no teaching, but it was from reading Pater's _Studies in the
+History of the Renaissance_, in its first edition on ribbed paper (I
+have the feel of it still in my fingers), that I realised that prose
+also could be a fine art. That book opened a new world to me, or,
+rather, gave me the key or secret of the world in which I was living. It
+taught me that there was a beauty besides the beauty of what one calls
+inspiration, and comes and goes, and cannot be caught or followed; that
+life (which had seemed to me of so little moment) could be itself a work
+of art; from that book I realised for the first time that there was
+anything interesting or vital in the world besides poetry and music. I
+caught from it an unlimited curiosity, or, at least, the direction of
+curiosity into definite channels.
+
+The knowledge that there was such a person as Pater in the world, an
+occasional letter from him, an occasional meeting, and, gradually, the
+definite encouragement of my work in which, for some years, he was
+unfailingly generous and attentive, meant more to me, at that time, than
+I can well indicate, or even realise, now. It was through him that my
+first volume of verse was published; and it was through his influence
+and counsels that I trained myself to be infinitely careful in all
+matters of literature. Influence and counsel were always in the
+direction of sanity, restraint, precision.
+
+I remember a beautiful phrase which he once made up, in his delaying
+way, with 'wells' and 'no doubts' in it, to describe, and to describe
+supremely, a person whom I had seemed to him to be disparaging. 'He
+does,' he said meditatively, 'remind me of, well, of a steam-engine
+stuck in the mud. But he is so enthusiastic!' Pater liked people to be
+enthusiastic, but, with him, enthusiasm was an ardent quietude, guarded
+by the wary humour that protects the sensitive. He looked upon undue
+earnestness, even in outward manner, in a world through which the artist
+is bound to go on a wholly 'secret errand,' as bad form, which shocked
+him as much in persons as bad style did in books. He hated every form of
+extravagance, noise, mental or physical, with a temperamental hatred: he
+suffered from it, in his nerves and in his mind. And he had no less
+dislike of whatever seemed to him either morbid or sordid, two words
+which he often used to express his distaste for things and people. He
+never would have appreciated writers like Verlaine, because of what
+seemed to him perhaps unnecessarily 'sordid' in their lives. It pained
+him, as it pains some people, perhaps only because they are more acutely
+sensitive than others, to walk through mean streets, where people are
+poor, miserable, and hopeless.
+
+And since I have mentioned Verlaine, I may say that what Pater most
+liked in poetry was the very opposite of such work as that of Verlaine,
+which he might have been supposed likely to like. I do not think it was
+actually one of Verlaine's poems, but something done after his manner in
+English, that some reviewer once quoted, saying: 'That, to our mind,
+would be Mr. Pater's ideal of poetry.' Pater said to me, with a sad
+wonder, 'I simply don't know what he meant.' What he liked in poetry was
+something even more definite than can be got in prose; and he valued
+poets like Dante and like Rossetti for their 'delight in concrete
+definition,' not even quite seeing the ultimate magic of such things as
+_Kubla Khan_, which he omitted in a brief selection from the poetry of
+Coleridge. In the most interesting letter which I ever had from him, the
+only letter which went to six pages, he says:
+
+
+                                                12 EARL'S TERRACE,
+                                                    KENSINGTON, W.,
+                                                       _Jan. 8, 1888._
+
+     MY DEAR MR. SYMONS,--I feel much flattered at your choosing me as
+     an arbiter in the matter of your literary work, and thank you for
+     the pleasure I have had in reading carefully the two poems you have
+     sent me. I don't use the word 'arbiter' loosely for 'critic'; but
+     suppose a real controversy, on the question whether you shall spend
+     your best energies in writing verse, between your poetic
+     aspirations on the one side, and prudence (calculating results) on
+     the other. Well! judging by these two pieces, I should say that you
+     have a poetic talent remarkable, especially at the present day, for
+     precise and intellectual grasp on the matter it deals with.
+     Rossetti, I believe, said that the value of every artistic product
+     was in direct proportion to the amount of purely intellectual force
+     that went to the initial conception of it: and it is just this
+     intellectual conception which seems to me to be so conspicuously
+     wanting in what, in some ways, is the most characteristic verse of
+     our time, especially that of our secondary poets. In your own
+     pieces, particularly in your MS. 'A Revenge,' I find Rossetti's
+     requirement fulfilled, and should anticipate great things from one
+     who has the talent of conceiving his motive with so much firmness
+     and tangibility--with that close logic, if I may say so, which is
+     an element in any genuinely imaginative process. It is clear to me
+     that you aim at this, and it is what gives your verses, to my mind,
+     great interest. Otherwise, I think the two pieces of unequal
+     excellence, greatly preferring 'A Revenge' to 'Bell in Camp.'
+     Reserving some doubt whether the watch, as the lover's gift, is not
+     a little bourgeois, I think this piece worthy of any poet. It has
+     that aim of concentration and organic unity which I value greatly
+     both in prose and verse. 'Bell in Camp' pleases me less, for the
+     same reason which makes me put Rossetti's 'Jenny,' and some of
+     Browning's pathetic-satiric pieces, below the rank which many
+     assign them. In no one of the poems I am thinking of, is the
+     inherent sordidness of everything in the persons supposed, except
+     the one poetic trait then under treatment, quite forgotten.
+     Otherwise, I feel the pathos, the humour, of the piece (in the
+     full sense of the word humour) and the skill with which you have
+     worked out your motive therein. I think the present age an
+     unfavourable one to poets, at least in England. The young poet
+     comes into a generation which has produced a large amount of
+     first-rate poetry, and an enormous amount of good secondary poetry.
+     You know I give a high place to the literature of prose as a fine
+     art, and therefore hope you won't think me brutal in saying that
+     the admirable qualities of your verse are those also of imaginative
+     prose; as I think is the case also with much of Browning's finest
+     verse. I should say, make prose your principal _metier_, as a man
+     of letters, and publish your verse as a more intimate gift for
+     those who already value you for your pedestrian work in literature.
+     I should think you ought to find no difficulty in finding a
+     publisher for poems such as those you have sent to me.
+
+     I am more than ever anxious to meet you. Letters are such poor
+     means of communication. Don't come to London without making an
+     appointment to come and see me here.--Very sincerely yours,
+
+                                                      WALTER PATER.
+
+
+'Browning, one of my best-loved writers,' is a phrase I find in his
+first letter to me, in December 1886, thanking me for a little book on
+Browning which I had just published. There is, I think, no mention of
+any other writer except Shakespeare (besides the reference to Rossetti
+which I have just quoted) in any of the fifty or sixty letters which I
+have from him. Everything that is said about books is a direct matter of
+business: work which he was doing, of which he tells me, or which I was
+doing, about which he advises and encourages me.
+
+In practical things Pater was wholly vague, troubled by their
+persistence when they pressed upon him. To wrap up a book to send by
+post was an almost intolerable effort, and he had another reason for
+hesitating. 'I take your copy of Shakespeare's sonnets with me,' he
+writes in June 1889, 'hoping to be able to restore it to you there lest
+it should get bruised by transit through the post.' He wrote letters
+with distaste, never really well, and almost always with excuses or
+regrets in them: 'Am so over-burdened (my time, I mean) just now with
+pupils, lectures, and the making thereof'; or, with hopes for a meeting:
+'Letters are such poor means of communication: when are we to meet?' or,
+as a sort of hasty makeshift: 'I send this prompt answer, for I know by
+experience that when I delay my delays are apt to be lengthy.' A review
+took him sometimes a year to get through; and remained in the end, like
+his letters, a little cramped, never finished to the point of ease, like
+his published writings. To lecture was a great trial to him. Two of the
+three lectures which I have heard in my life were given by Pater, one on
+Merimee, at the London Institution, in November 1890, and the other on
+Raphael, at Toynbee Hall, in 1892. I never saw a man suffer a severer
+humiliation. The act of reading his written lecture was an agony which
+communicated itself to the main part of the audience. Before going into
+the hall at Whitechapel he had gone into a church to compose his mind a
+little, between the discomfort of the underground railway and the
+distress of the lecture-hall.
+
+In a room, if he was not among very intimate friends, Pater was rarely
+quite at his ease, but he liked being among people, and he made the
+greater satisfaction overcome the lesser reluctance. He was particularly
+fond of cats, and I remember one evening, when I had been dining with
+him in London, the quaint, solemn, and perfectly natural way in which he
+took up the great black Persian, kissed it, and set it down carefully
+again on his way upstairs. Once at Oxford he told me that M. Bourget had
+sent him the first volume of his _Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine_,
+and that the cat had got hold of the book and torn up the part
+containing the essay on Baudelaire, 'and as Baudelaire was such a lover
+of cats I thought she might have spared him!'
+
+We were talking once about fairs, and I had been saying how fond I was
+of them. He said: 'I am fond of them, too. I always go to fairs. I am
+getting to find they are very similar.' Then he began to tell me about
+the fairs in France, and I remember, as if it were an unpublished
+fragment in one of his stories, the minute, coloured impression of the
+booths, the little white horses of the 'roundabouts,' and the little
+wild beast shows, in which what had most struck him was the interest of
+the French peasant in the wolf, a creature he might have seen in his own
+woods. 'An English clown would not have looked at a wolf if he could
+have seen a tiger.'
+
+I once asked Pater if his family was really connected with that of the
+painter, Jean-Baptiste Pater. He said: 'I think so, I believe so, I
+always say so.' The relationship has never been verified, but one would
+like to believe it; to find something lineally Dutch in the English
+writer. It was, no doubt, through this kind of family interest that he
+came to work upon Goncourt's essay and the contemporary _Life of
+Watteau_ by the Count de Caylus, printed in the first series of _L'Art
+du XVIII^e Siecle_, out of which he has made certainly the most living
+of his _Imaginary Portraits_, that _Prince of Court Painters_ which is
+supposed to be the journal of a sister of Jean-Baptiste Pater, whom we
+see in one of Watteau's portraits in the Louvre. As far back as 1889[4]
+Pater was working towards a second volume of _Imaginary Portraits_, of
+which _Hippolytus Veiled_ was to have been one. He had another subject
+in Moroni's _Portrait of a Tailor_ in the National Gallery, whom he was
+going to make a Burgomaster; and another was to have been a study of
+life in the time of the Albigensian persecution. There was also to be a
+modern study: could this have been _Emerald Uthwart_? No doubt _Apollo
+in Picardy_, published in 1893, would have gone into the volume. _The
+Child in the House_, which was printed as an _Imaginary Portrait_, in
+_Macmillans Magazine_ in 1878, was really meant to be the first chapter
+of a romance which was to show 'the poetry of modern life,' something,
+he said, as _Aurora Leigh_ does. There is much personal detail in it,
+the red hawthorn, for instance, and he used to talk to me of the old
+house at Tunbridge, where his great-aunt lived, and where he spent much
+of his time when a child. He remembered the gipsies there, and their
+caravans, when they came down for the hop-picking; and the old lady in
+her large cap going out on the lawn to do battle with the surveyors who
+had come to mark out a railway across it; and his terror of the train,
+and of 'the red flag, which meant _blood_.' It was because he always
+dreamed of going on with it that he did not reprint this imaginary
+portrait in the book of _Imaginary Portraits_; but he did not go on with
+it because, having begun the long labour of _Marius_, it was out of his
+mind for many years, and when, in 1889, he still spoke of finishing it,
+he was conscious that he could never continue it in the same style, and
+that it would not be satisfactory to rewrite it in his severer, later
+manner. It remains, perhaps fortunately, a fragment, to which no
+continuation could ever add a more essential completeness.
+
+Style, in Pater, varied more than is generally supposed, in the course
+of his development, and, though never thought of as a thing apart from
+what it expresses, was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers,
+he said, 'make time to write English more as a learned language.' It has
+been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and Flaubert were among the chief
+'origins' of Pater's style; it is curiously significant that matter, in
+Pater, was developed before style, and that in the bare and angular
+outlines of the earliest fragment, _Diaphaneite_, there is already the
+substance which is to be clothed upon by beautiful and appropriate flesh
+in the _Studies in the Renaissance_. Ruskin, I never heard him mention,
+but I do not doubt that there, to the young man beginning to concern
+himself with beauty in art and literature, was at least a quickening
+influence. Of De Quincey he spoke with an admiration which I had
+difficulty in sharing, and I remember his showing me with pride a set of
+his works bound in half-parchment, with pale gold lettering on the white
+backs, and with the cinnamon edges which he was so fond of. Of Flaubert
+we rarely met without speaking. He thought _Julien l'Hospitalier_ as
+perfect as anything he had done. _L'Education Sentimentale_ was one of
+the books which he advised me to read; that, and _Le Rouge et le Noir_
+of Stendhal; and he spoke with particular admiration of two episodes in
+the former, the sickness and the death of the child. Of the Goncourts he
+spoke with admiration tempered by dislike. Their books often repelled
+him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things
+should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read
+_Madame Gervaisais_, and he spoke of _Cherie_ (for all its 'immodesty')
+as an admirable thing, and a model for all such studies.
+
+Once, as we were walking in Oxford, he pointed to a window and said,
+with a slow smile: 'That is where I get my Zolas.' He was always a
+little on his guard in respect of books; and, just as he read Flaubert
+and Goncourt because they were intellectual neighbours, so he could read
+Zola for mere pastime, knowing that there would be nothing there to
+distract him. I remember telling him about _The Story of an African
+Farm_, and of the wonderful human quality in it. He said, repeating his
+favourite formula: 'No doubt you are quite right; but I do not suppose I
+shall ever read it.' And he explained to me that he was always writing
+something, and that while he was writing he did not allow himself to
+read anything which might possibly affect him too strongly, by bringing
+a new current of emotion to bear upon him. He was quite content that his
+mind should 'keep as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world'; it
+was that prisoner's dream of a world that it was his whole business as a
+writer to remember, to perpetuate.
+
+1906.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[4] In this same year he intended to follow the _Appreciations_ by a
+volume of _Studies of Greek Remains_, in which he then meant to include
+the studies in Platonism, not yet written; and he had thought of putting
+together a volume of 'theory,' which was to include the essay on Style.
+In two or three years' time, he thought, _Gastom de Latour_ would be
+finished.
+
+
+
+
+THE GONCOURTS
+
+
+My first visit to Edmond de Goncourt was in May 1892. I remember my
+immense curiosity about that 'House Beautiful,' at Auteuil, of which I
+had heard so much, and my excitement as I rang the bell, and was shown
+at once into the garden, where Goncourt was just saying good-bye to some
+friends. He was carelessly dressed, without a collar, and with the usual
+loosely knotted large white scarf rolled round his neck. He was wearing
+a straw hat, and it was only afterwards that I could see the fine sweep
+of the white hair, falling across the forehead. I thought him the most
+distinguished-looking man of letters I had ever seen; for he had at once
+the distinction of race, of fine breeding, and of that delicate artistic
+genius which, with him, was so intimately a part of things beautiful and
+distinguished. He had the eyes of an old eagle; a general air of
+dignified collectedness; a rare, and a rarely charming, smile, which
+came out, like a ray of sunshine, in the instinctive pleasure of having
+said a witty or graceful thing to which one's response had been
+immediate. When he took me indoors, into that house which was a museum,
+I noticed the delicacy of his hands, and the tenderness with which he
+handled his treasures, touching them as if he loved them, with little,
+unconscious murmurs: _Quel gout! quel gout!_ These rose-coloured rooms,
+with their embroidered ceilings, were filled with cabinets of beautiful
+things, Japanese carvings, and prints (the miraculous 'Plongeuses'!),
+always in perfect condition (_Je cherche le beau_); albums had been made
+for him in Japan, and in these he inserted prints, mounting others upon
+silver and gold paper, which formed a sort of frame. He showed me his
+eighteenth-century designs, among which I remember his pointing out one
+(a Chardin, I think) as the first he had ever bought; he had been
+sixteen at the time, and he bought it for twelve francs.
+
+When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me all
+his own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions of
+Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me, of
+the men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother with a
+serene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and appropriate;
+and I remember his speaking (with a parenthetic disdain of the
+_brouillard scandinave_, in which it seemed to him that France was
+trying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but _un mauvais
+brouillard_) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to
+represent the only thing worth representing, _la vie vecue, la vraie
+verite_. As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing,
+_l'optique_: out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have all
+seen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way of
+expressing it. 'There is a true thing I have said in my journal,' he
+went on. 'The thing is, to find a lorgnette' (and he put up his hands to
+his eyes, adjusting them carefully) 'through which to see things. My
+brother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it from
+us.'
+
+How true that is, and how significantly it states just what is most
+essential in the work of the Goncourts! It is a new way of seeing,
+literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented; and it is in
+the invention of this that they have invented that 'new language' of
+which purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly complained.
+You remember that saying of Masson, the mask of Gautier, in _Charles
+Demailly:_ 'I am a man for whom the visible world exists.' Well, that is
+true, also, of the Goncourts; but in a different way.
+
+'The delicacies of fine literature,' that phrase of Pater always comes
+into my mind when I think of the Goncourts; and indeed Pater seems to me
+the only English writer who has ever handled language at all in their
+manner or spirit. I frequently heard Pater refer to certain of their
+books, to _Madame Gervaisais_, to _L'Art du XVIII Siecle_, to _Cherie_;
+with a passing objection to what he called the 'immodesty' of this last
+book, and a strong emphasis in the assertion that 'that was how it
+seemed to him a book should be written.' I repeated this once to
+Goncourt, trying to give him some idea of what Pater's work was like;
+and he lamented that his ignorance of English prevented him from what he
+instinctively realised would be so intimate an enjoyment. Pater was of
+course far more scrupulous, more limited, in his choice of epithet, less
+feverish in his variations of cadence; and naturally so, for he dealt
+with another subject-matter and was careful of another kind of truth.
+But with both there was that passionately intent preoccupation with 'the
+delicacies of fine literature'; both achieved a style of the most
+personal sincerity: _tout grand ecrivain de tous les temps_, said
+Goncourt, _ne se reconnait absolument qu'a cela, c'est qu'il a une
+langue personnelle, une langue dont chaque page, chaque ligne, est
+signee, pour le lecteur lettre, comme si son nom etait au bas de cette
+page, de cette ligne_: and this style, in both, was accused, by the
+'literary' criticism of its generation, of being insincere, artificial,
+and therefore reprehensible.
+
+It is difficult, in speaking of Edmond de Goncourt, to avoid attributing
+to him the whole credit of the work which has so long borne his name
+alone. That is an error which he himself would never have pardoned.
+_Mon frere et moi_ was the phrase constantly on his lips, and in his
+journal, his prefaces, he has done full justice to the vivid and
+admirable qualities of that talent which, all the same, would seem to
+have been the lesser, the more subservient, of the two. Jules, I think,
+had a more active sense of life, a more generally human curiosity; for
+the novels of Edmond, written since his brother's death, have, in even
+that excessively specialised world of their common observation, a yet
+more specialised choice and direction. But Edmond, there is no doubt,
+was in the strictest sense the writer; and it is above all for the
+qualities of its writing that the work of the Goncourts will live. It
+has been largely concerned with truth--truth to the minute details of
+human character, sensation, and circumstance, and also of the document,
+the exact words, of the past; but this devotion to fact, to the
+curiosities of fact, has been united with an even more persistent
+devotion to the curiosities of expression. They have invented a new
+language: that was the old reproach against them; let it be their
+distinction. Like all writers of an elaborate carefulness, they have
+been accused of sacrificing both truth and beauty to a deliberate
+eccentricity. Deliberate their style certainly was; eccentric it may,
+perhaps, sometimes have been; but deliberately eccentric, no. It was
+their belief that a writer should have a personal style, a style as
+peculiar to himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see in the
+handwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics of his style.
+Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a certain elegant
+stiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the 'continual slight
+novelty' of its form to be quite clear at a glance: very personal, very
+distinguished writing.
+
+It may be asserted that the Goncourts are not merely men of genius, but
+are perhaps the typical men of letters of the close of our century. They
+have all the curiosities and the acquirements, the new weaknesses and
+the new powers, that belong to our age; and they sum up in themselves
+certain theories, aspirations, ways of looking at things, notions of
+literary duty and artistic conscience, which have only lately become at
+all actual, and some of which owe to them their very origin. To be not
+merely novelists (inventing a new kind of novel), but historians; not
+merely historians, but the historians of a particular century, and of
+what was intimate and what is unknown in it; to be also discriminating,
+indeed innovating, critics of art, but of a certain section of art, the
+eighteenth century, in France and in Japan; to collect pictures and
+_bibelots_, beautiful things, always of the French and Japanese
+eighteenth century: these excursions in so many directions, with their
+audacities and their careful limitations, their bold novelty and their
+scrupulous exactitude in detail, are characteristic of what is the
+finest in the modern, conception of culture and the modern ideal in art.
+Look, for instance, at the Goncourts' view of history. _Quand les
+civilisations commencent, quand les peuples se forment, l'histoire est
+drame ou geste.... Les siecles qui ont precede notre siecle ne
+demandaient a l'historien que le personnage de l'homme, et le portrait
+de son genie.... Le XIX^e siecle demande l'homme qui etait cet homme
+d'Etat, cet homme de guerre, ce poete, ce peintre, ce grand homme de
+science ou de metier. L'ame qui etait en cet acteur, le coeur qui a
+vecu derriere cet esprit, il les exige et les reclame; et s'il ne peut
+recueillir tout cet etre moral, toute la vie interieure, il commande du
+moins qu'on lui en apporte une trace, un jour, un lambeau, une relique._
+From this theory, this conviction, came that marvellous series of
+studies in the eighteenth century in France (_La Femme au XVIII^e
+Siecle_, _Portraits intimes du XVIII^e Siecle_, _La du Barry_, and the
+others), made entirely out of documents, autograph letters, scraps of
+costume, engravings, songs, the unconscious self-revelations of the
+time, forming, as they justly say, _l'histoire intime; c'est ce roman
+vrai que la posterite appellera peut-etre un jour l'histoire humaine_.
+To be the bookworm and the magician; to give the actual documents, but
+not to set barren fact by barren fact; to find a soul and a voice in
+documents, to make them more living and more charming than the charm of
+life itself: that is what the Goncourts have done. And it is through
+this conception of history that they have found their way to that new
+conception of the novel which has revolutionised the entire art of
+fiction.
+
+_Aujourd'hui_, they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to _Germinie
+Lacerteux_, _que le Roman s'elargit et grandit, qu'il commence a etre la
+grande forme serieuse, passionnee, vivante, de l'etude litteraire et de
+l'enquete sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche
+psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman
+s'est impose les etudes et les devoirs de la science, il pent en
+revendiquer les libertes et les franchises_. _Le public aime les romans
+faux_, is another brave declaration in the same preface; _ce roman est
+un roman vrai_. But what, precisely, is it that the Goncourts understood
+by _un roman vrai_? The old notion of the novel was that it should be an
+entertaining record of incidents or adventures told for their own sake;
+a plain, straightforward narrative of facts, the aim being to produce as
+nearly as possible an effect of continuity, of nothing having been
+omitted, the statement, so to speak, of a witness on oath; in a word, it
+is the same as the old notion of history, _drame ou geste_. That is not
+how the Goncourts apprehend life, or how they conceive it should be
+rendered. As in the study of history they seek mainly the _inedit_,
+caring only to record that, so it is the _inedit_ of life that they
+conceive to be the main concern, the real 'inner history.' And for them
+the _inedit_ of life consists in the noting of the sensations; it is of
+the sensations that they have resolved to be the historians; not of
+action, nor of emotion, properly speaking, nor of moral conceptions, but
+of an inner life which is all made up of the perceptions of the senses.
+It is scarcely too paradoxical to say that they are psychologists for
+whom the soul does not exist. One thing, they know, exists: the
+sensation flashed through the brain, the image on the mental retina.
+Having found that, they bodily omit all the rest as of no importance,
+trusting to their instinct of selection, of retaining all that really
+matters. It is the painter's method, a selection made almost visually;
+the method of the painter who accumulates detail on detail, in his
+patient, many-sided observation of his subject, and then omits
+everything which is not an essential part of the _ensemble_ which he
+sees. Thus the new conception of what the real truth of things consists
+in has brought with it, inevitably, an entirely new form, a breaking-up
+of the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which are
+generally quite disconnected, and sometimes of less than a page in
+length. A very apt image for this new, curious manner of narrative has
+been found, somewhat maliciously, by M. Lemaitre. _Un homme qui marche a
+l'interieur d'une maison, si nous regardons du dehors, apparait
+successivement a chaque fenetre, et dans les intervalles nous echappe.
+Ces fenetres, ce sont les chapitres de MM. de Goncourt. Encore_, he
+adds, _y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fenetres ou l'homme que nous attendions
+ne passe point_. That, certainly, is the danger of the method. No doubt
+the Goncourts, in their passion for the _inedit_, leave out certain
+things because they are obvious, even if they are obviously true and
+obviously important; that is the defect of their quality. To represent
+life by a series of moments, and to choose these moments for a certain
+subtlety and rarity in them, is to challenge grave perils. Nor are these
+the only perils which the Goncourts have constantly before them. There
+are others, essential to their natures, to their preferences. And, first
+of all, as we may see on every page of that miraculous _Journal_, which
+will remain, doubtless, the truest, deepest, most poignant piece of
+human history that they have ever written, they are sick men, seeing
+life through the medium of diseased nerves. _Notre oeuvre entier_,
+writes Edmond de Goncourt, _repose sur la maladie nerveuse; les
+peintures de la maladie, nous les avons tirees de nous-memes, et, a
+force de nous dissequer, nous sommes arrives a une sensitivite
+supra-aigue que blessaient les infiniment petits de la vie_. This
+unhealthy sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well as
+certain shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts' vision
+of reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth of
+things; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpening the
+acuteness of every sensation; or somewhat such a sense as one derives
+from haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and fragrant
+way, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the notion of
+time, the notion of space. What the Goncourts paint is the subtler
+poetry of reality, its unusual aspects, and they evoke it, fleetingly,
+like Whistler; they do not render it in hard outline, like Flaubert,
+like Manet. As in the world of Whistler, so in the world of the
+Goncourts, we see cities in which there are always fireworks at
+Cremorne, and fair women reflected beautifully and curiously in mirrors.
+It is a world which is extraordinarily real; but there is choice, there
+is curiosity, in the aspect of reality which it presents.
+
+Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of the work of the
+Goncourts, with those of Theophile Gautier, who may reasonably be said
+to have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, and
+also the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, but
+it is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or,
+rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell you
+the things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points of
+view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute,
+distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things as
+an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might see
+them; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a deliberate
+attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in
+which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture.
+In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, from
+no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction, archaism, barbarous
+epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render a
+sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should
+palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in
+expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in their
+relations with language, which they would have not merely a passionate
+and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately
+depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of French
+critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that the
+language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless French of
+the past. It is true; it is their distinction; it is the most wonderful
+of all their inventions: in order to render new sensations, a new vision
+of things, they have invented a new language.
+
+1894, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+COVENTRY PATMORE
+
+
+There are two portraits of Coventry Patmore by Mr. Sargent. One, in the
+National Portrait Gallery, gives us the man as he ordinarily was: the
+straggling hair, the drooping eyelid, the large, loose-lipped mouth, the
+long, thin, furrowed throat, the whole air of gentlemanly ferocity. But
+the other, a sketch of the head in profile, gives us more than that;
+gives us, in the lean, strong, aquiline head, startlingly, all that was
+abrupt, fiery, and essential in the genius of a rare and misunderstood
+poet. There never was a man less like the popular idea of him than the
+writer of _The Angel in the House_. Certainly an autocrat in the home,
+impatient, intolerant, full of bracing intellectual scorn, not always
+just, but always just in intention, a disdainful recluse, judging all
+human and divine affairs from a standpoint of imperturbable
+omniscience, Coventry Patmore charmed one by his whimsical energy, his
+intense sincerity, and, indeed, by the childlike egoism of an absolutely
+self-centred intelligence. Speaking of Patmore as he was in 1879, Mr.
+Gosse says, in his admirable memoir:
+
+
+     Three things were in those days particularly noticeable in the head
+     of Coventry Patmore: the vast convex brows, arched with vision; the
+     bright, shrewd, bluish-grey eyes, the outer fold of one eyelid
+     permanently and humorously drooping; and the wilful, sensuous
+     mouth. These three seemed ever at war among themselves; they spoke
+     three different tongues; they proclaimed a man of dreams, a canny
+     man of business, a man of vehement determination. It was the
+     harmony of these in apparently discordant contrast which made the
+     face so fascinating; the dwellers under this strange mask were
+     three, and the problem was how they contrived the common life.
+
+
+That is a portrait which is also an interpretation, and many of the
+pages on this 'angular, vivid, discordant, and yet exquisitely
+fascinating person,' are full of a similar insight. They contain many of
+those anecdotes which indicate crises, a thing very different from the
+merely decorative anecdotes of the ordinary biographer. The book,
+written by one who has been a good friend to many poets, and to none a
+more valuable friend than to Patmore, gives us a more vivid sense of
+what Patmore was as a man than anything except Mr. Sargent's two
+portraits, and a remarkable article by Mr. Frederick Greenwood,
+published after the book, as a sort of appendix, which it completes on
+the spiritual side.
+
+To these portraits of Patmore I have nothing of importance to add; and I
+have given my own estimate of Patmore as a poet in an essay published in
+1897, in _Studies in Two Literatures_. But I should like to supplement
+these various studies by a few supplementary notes, and the discussion
+of a few points, chiefly technical, connected with his art as a poet. I
+knew Patmore only during the last ten years of his life, and never with
+any real intimacy; but as I have been turning over a little bundle of
+his letters, written with a quill on greyish-blue paper, in the fine,
+careless handwriting which had something of the distinction of the
+writer, it seems to me that there are things in them characteristic
+enough to be worth preserving.
+
+The first letter in my bundle is not addressed to me, but to the friend
+through whom I was afterwards to meet him, the kindest and most helpful
+friend whom I or any man ever had, James Dykes Campbell. Two years
+before, when I was twenty-one, I had written an _Introduction to the
+Study of Browning_. Campbell had been at my elbow all the time,
+encouraging and checking me; he would send back my proof-sheets in a
+network of criticisms and suggestions, with my most eloquent passages
+rigorously shorn, my pet eccentricities of phrase severely straightened.
+At the beginning of 1888 Campbell sent the book to Patmore. His opinion,
+when it came, seemed to me, at that time, crushing; it enraged me, I
+know, not on my account, but on Browning's. I read it now with a clearer
+understanding of what he meant, and it is interesting, certainly, as a
+more outspoken and detailed opinion on Browning than Patmore ever
+printed.
+
+
+     MY DEAR MR. CAMPBELL,--I have read enough of Mr. Arthur Symons'
+     clever book on Browning to entitle me to judge of it as well as if
+     I had read the whole. He does not seem to me to be quite qualified,
+     as yet, for this kind of criticism. He does not seem to have
+     attained to the point of view from which all great critics have
+     judged poetry and art in general. He does not see that, in art, the
+     style in which a thing is said or done is of more importance than
+     the thing said or done. Indeed, he does not appear to know what
+     style means. Browning has an immense deal of mannerism--which in
+     art is always bad;--he has, in his few best passages, manner, which
+     as far as it goes is good; but of style--that indescribable
+     reposeful 'breath of a pure and unique individuality'--I recognise
+     no trace, though I find it distinctly enough in almost every other
+     English poet who has obtained so distinguished a place as Browning
+     has done in the estimation of the better class of readers. I do not
+     pretend to say absolutely that style does not exist in Browning's
+     work; but, if so, its 'still small voice' is utterly overwhelmed,
+     for me, by the din of the other elements. I think I can see, in
+     Browning's poetry, all that Mr. Symons sees, though not perhaps all
+     that he fancies he sees. But I also discern a want of which he
+     appears to feel nothing; and those defects of manner which he
+     acknowledges, but thinks little of, are to me most distressing, and
+     fatal to all enjoyment of the many brilliant qualities they are
+     mixed up with.--Yours very truly,
+                                                COVENTRY PATMORE.
+
+
+Campbell, I suppose, protested in his vigorous fashion against the
+criticism of Browning, and the answer to that letter, dated May 7, is
+printed on p. 264 of the second volume of Mr. Basil Champneys' _Life of
+Patmore_. It is a reiteration, with further explanations, such as that
+
+
+     When I said that manner was more important than matter in poetry, I
+     really meant that the true matter of poetry could only be expressed
+     by the manner. I find the brilliant thinking and the deep feeling
+     in Browning, but no true individuality--though of course his manner
+     is marked enough.
+
+
+Another letter in the same year, to Campbell, after reading the proofs
+of my first book of verse, _Days and Nights_, contained a criticism
+which I thought, at the time, not less discouraging than the criticism
+of my _Browning_. It seems to me now to contain the truth, the whole
+truth, and nothing but the truth, about that particular book, and to
+allow for whatever I may have done in verse since then. The first letter
+addressed to me is a polite note, dated March 16, 1889, thanking me for
+a copy of my book, and saying 'I send herewith a little volume of my
+own, which I hope may please you in some of your idle moments.' The book
+was a copy of _Florilegium Amantis_, a selection of his own poems,
+edited by Dr. Garnett. Up to that time I had read nothing of Patmore
+except fragments of _The Angel in the House_, which I had not had the
+patience to read through. I dipped into these pages, and as I read for
+the first time some of the odes of _The Unknown Eros_, I seemed to have
+made a great discovery: here was a whole glittering and peaceful tract
+of poetry which was like a new world to me. I wrote to him full of my
+enthusiasm; and, though I heard nothing then in reply, I find among my
+books a copy of _The Unknown Eros_ with this inscription: 'Arthur
+Symons, from Coventry Patmore, July 23, 1890.'
+
+The date is the date of his sixty-seventh birthday, and the book was
+given to me after a birthday-dinner at his house at Hastings, when, I
+remember, a wreath of laurel had been woven in honour of the occasion,
+and he had laughingly, but with a quite naive gratification, worn it for
+a while at the end of dinner. He was one of the very few poets I have
+seen who could wear a laurel wreath and not look ridiculous.
+
+In the summer of that year I undertook to look after the _Academy_ for a
+few weeks (a wholly new task to me) while Mr. Cotton, the editor, went
+for a holiday. The death of Cardinal Newman occurred just then, and I
+wrote to Patmore, asking him if he would do an obituary notice for me.
+He replied, in a letter dated August 13, 1890:
+
+
+     I should have been very glad to have complied with your request,
+     had I felt myself at all able to do the work effectively; but my
+     acquaintance with Dr. Newman was very slight, and I have no sources
+     of knowledge about his life, but such as are open to all. I have
+     never taken much interest in contemporary Catholic history and
+     politics. There are a hundred people who could do what you want
+     better than I could, and I can never stir my lazy soul to take up
+     the pen, unless I fancy that I have something to say which makes it
+     a matter of conscience that I should say it.
+
+
+Failing Patmore, I asked Dr. Greenhill, who was then living at Hastings,
+and Patmore wrote on August 16:
+
+
+     Dr. Greenhill will do your work far better than I could have done
+     it. What an intellect we have lost in Newman--so delicately capable
+     of adjustment that it could crush a Hume or crack a Kingsley! And
+     what an example both in literature and in life. But that we have
+     not lost.
+
+
+Patmore's memory was retentive of good phrases which had once come up
+under his pen, as that witty phrase about crushing and cracking had come
+up in the course of a brief note scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.
+The phrase reappears five years afterwards, elaborated into an
+impressive sentence, in the preface to _The Rod, the Root, and the
+Flower_, dated Lymington, May 1895:
+
+
+     The steam-hammer of that intellect which could be so delicately
+     adjusted to its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or
+     cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work, that tongue which had the
+     weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent; but its
+     mighty task of so representing truth as to make it credible to the
+     modern mind, when not interested in unbelief, has been done.
+
+
+In the same preface will be found a phrase which Mr. Gosse quotes from a
+letter of June 17, 1888, in which Patmore says that the reviewers of his
+forthcoming book, _Principle in Art_, 'will say, or at least feel, "Ugh,
+Ugh! the horrid thing! It's alive!" and think it their duty to set their
+heels on it accordingly.' By 1895 the reviewers were replaced by
+'readers, zealously Christian,' and the readers, instead of setting
+their heels on it, merely 'put aside this little volume with a cry.'
+
+I find no more letters, beyond mere notes and invitations, until the end
+of 1893, but it was during these years that I saw Patmore most often,
+generally when I was staying with Dykes Campbell at St. Leonards. When
+one is five-and-twenty, and writing verse, among young men of one's own
+age, also writing verse, the occasional companionship of an older poet,
+who stands aside, in a dignified seclusion, acknowledged, respected, not
+greatly loved or, in his best work at least, widely popular, can hardly
+fail to be an incentive and an invigoration. It was with a full sense of
+my privilege that I walked to and fro with Coventry Patmore on that high
+terrace in his garden at Hastings, or sat in the house watching him
+smoke cigarette after cigarette, or drove with him into the country, or
+rowed with him round the moat of Bodiam Castle, with Dykes Campbell in
+the stern of the boat; always attentive to his words, learning from him
+all I could, as he talked of the things I most cared for, and of some
+things for which I cared nothing. Yes, even when he talked of politics,
+I listened with full enjoyment of his bitter humour, his ferocious
+gaiety of onslaught; though I was glad when he changed from Gladstone to
+St. Thomas Aquinas, and gladder still when he spoke of that other
+religion, poetry. I think I never heard him speak long without some
+reference to St. Thomas Aquinas, of whom he has written so often and
+with so great an enthusiasm. It was he who first talked to me of St.
+John of the Cross, and when, eight years later, at Seville, I came upon
+a copy of the first edition of the _Obras Espirituales_ on a stall of
+old books in the Sierpes, and began to read, and to try to render in
+English, that extraordinary verse which remains, with that of S. Teresa,
+the finest lyrical verse which Spain has produced, I understood how much
+the mystic of the prose and the poet of _The Unknown Eros_ owed to the
+_Noche Escura_ and the _Llama de Amor Viva_. He spoke of the Catholic
+mystics like an explorer who has returned from the perils of far
+countries, with a remembering delight which he can share with few.
+
+If Mr. Gosse is anywhere in his book unjust to Patmore it is in speaking
+of the later books of prose, the _Religio Poetae_ and _The Rod, the
+Root, and the Flower_, some parts of which seem to him 'not very
+important except as extending our knowledge of' Patmore's 'mind, and as
+giving us a curious collection of the raw material of his poetry.' To
+this I can only reply in some words which I used in writing of the
+_Religio Poetae_, and affirm with an emphasis which I only wish to
+strengthen, that, here and everywhere, and never more than in the
+exquisite passage which Mr. Gosse only quotes to depreciate, the prose
+of Patmore is the prose of a poet; not prose 'incompletely executed,'
+and aspiring after the 'nobler order' of poetry, but adequate and
+achieved prose, of a very rare kind. Thought, in him, is of the very
+substance of poetry, and is sustained throughout at almost the lyrical
+pitch. There is, in these essays, a rarefied air as of the mountain-tops
+of meditation; and the spirit of their sometimes remote contemplation is
+always in one sense, as Pater has justly said of Wordsworth,
+impassioned. Only in the finest of his poems has he surpassed these
+pages of chill and ecstatic prose.
+
+But if Patmore spoke, as he wrote, of these difficult things as a
+traveller speaks of the countries from which he has returned, when he
+spoke of poetry it was like one who speaks of his native country. At
+first I found it a little difficult to accustom myself to his permanent
+mental attitude there, with his own implied or stated pre-eminence
+(Tennyson and Barnes on the lower slopes, Browning vaguely in sight, the
+rest of his contemporaries nowhere), but, after all, there was an
+undisguised simplicity in it, which was better, because franker, than
+the more customary 'pride that apes humility,' or the still baser
+affectation of indifference. A man of genius, whose genius, like
+Patmore's, is of an intense and narrow kind, cannot possibly do justice
+to the work which has every merit but his own. Nor can he, when he is
+conscious of its equality in technical skill, be expected to
+discriminate between what is more or less valuable in his own work;
+between, that is, his own greater or less degree of inspiration. And
+here I may quote a letter which Patmore wrote to me, dated Lymington,
+December 31, 1893, about a review of mine in which I had greeted him as
+'a poet, one of the most essential poets of our time,' but had ventured
+to say, perhaps petulantly, what I felt about a certain part of his
+work.
+
+
+     I thank you for the copy of the _Athenaeum_, containing your
+     generous and well-written notice of 'Religio Poetae.' There is much
+     in it that must needs be gratifying to me, and nothing that I feel
+     disposed to complain of but your allusion to the 'dinner-table
+     domesticities of the "Angel in the House."' I think that you have
+     been a little misled--as almost everybody has been--by the
+     differing characters of the metres of the 'Angel' and 'Eros.' The
+     meats and wines of the two are, in very great part, almost
+     identical in character; but, in one case, they are served on the
+     deal table of the octo-syllabic quatrain, and, in the other, they
+     are spread on the fine, irregular rock of the free tetrameter.
+
+
+In his own work he could see no flaw; he knew, better than any one, how
+nearly it answered almost everywhere to his own intention; and of his
+own intentions he could be no critic. It was from this standpoint of
+absolute satisfaction with what he had himself done that he viewed other
+men's work; necessarily, in the case of one so certain of himself, with
+a measure of dissatisfaction. He has said in print fundamentally foolish
+things about writers living and dead; and yet remains, if not a great
+critic, at least a great thinker on the first principles of art. And, in
+those days when I used to listen to him while he talked to me of the
+basis of poetry, and of metres and cadences, and of poetical methods,
+what meant more to me than anything he said, though not a word was
+without its value, was the profound religious gravity with which he
+treated the art of poetry, the sense he conveyed to one of his own
+reasoned conception of its immense importance, its divinity.
+
+It was partly, no doubt, from this reverence for his art that Patmore
+wrote so rarely, and only under an impulse which could not be withstood.
+Even his prose was written with the same ardour and reluctance, and a
+letter which he wrote to me from Lymington, dated August 7, 1894, in
+answer to a suggestion that he should join some other writers in a
+contemplated memorial to Walter Pater, is literally exact in its
+statement of his own way of work, not only during his later life:
+
+
+     I should have liked to make one of the honourable company of
+     commentators upon Pater, were it not that the faculty of writing,
+     or, what amounts to the same thing, interest in writing, has quite
+     deserted me. Some accidental motive wind comes over me, once in a
+     year or so, and I find myself able to write half a dozen pages in
+     an hour or two: but all the rest of my time is hopelessly sterile.
+
+
+To what was this curious difficulty or timidity in composition due? In
+the case of the poetry, Mr. Gosse attributes it largely to the fact of a
+poet of lyrical genius attempting to write only philosophical or
+narrative poetry; and there is much truth in the suggestion. Nothing in
+Patmore, except his genius, is so conspicuous as his limitations.
+Herrick, we may remember from his essay on Mrs. Meynell, seemed to him
+but 'a splendid insect'; Keats, we learn from Mr. Champneys' life,
+seemed to him 'to be greatly deficient in first-rate imaginative power';
+Shelley 'is all unsubstantial splendour, like the transformation scene
+of a pantomime, or the silvered globes hung up in a gin-palace'; Blake
+is 'nearly all utter rubbish, with here and there not so much a gleam as
+a trick of genius.' All this, when he said it, had a queer kind of
+delightfulness, and, to those able to understand him, never seemed, as
+it might have seemed in any one else, mere arrogant bad taste, but a
+necessary part of a very narrow and very intense nature. Although
+Patmore was quite ready to give his opinion on any subject, whether on
+'Wagner, the musical impostor,' or on 'the grinning woman, in every
+canvas of Leonardo,' he was singularly lacking in the critical faculty,
+even in regard to his own art; and this was because, in his own art, he
+was a poet of one idea and of one metre. He did marvellous things with
+that one idea and that one metre, but he saw nothing beyond them; all
+thought must be brought into relation with nuptial love, or it was of no
+interest to him, and the iambic metre must do everything that poetry
+need concern itself about doing.
+
+In a memorandum for prayer made in 1861, we read this petition:
+
+
+     That I may be enabled to write my poetry from immediate perception
+     of the truth and delight of love at once divine and human, and that
+     all events may so happen as shall best advance this my chief work
+     and probable means of working out my own salvation.
+
+
+In his earlier work, it is with human love only that he deals; in his
+later, and inconceivably finer work, it is not with human love only, but
+with 'the relation of the soul to Christ as his betrothed wife': 'the
+burning heart of the universe,' as he realises it. This conception of
+love, which we see developing from so tamely domestic a level to so
+incalculable a height of mystic rapture, possessed the whole man,
+throughout the whole of his life, shutting him into a 'solitude for two'
+which has never perhaps been apprehended with so complete a
+satisfaction. He was a married monk, whose monastery was the world; he
+came and went in the world, imagining he saw it more clearly than any
+one else; and, indeed, he saw things about him clearly enough, when they
+were remote enough from his household prejudices. But all he really ever
+did was to cultivate a little corner of a garden, where he brought to
+perfection a rare kind of flower, which some thought too pretty to be
+fine, and some too colourless to be beautiful, but in which he saw the
+seven celestial colours, faultlessly mingled, and which he took to be
+the image of the flower most loved by the Virgin in heaven.
+
+Patmore was a poet profoundly learned in the technique of his art, and
+the _Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law_, which fills the first
+eighty-five pages of the _Amelia_ volume of 1878, is among the subtlest
+and most valuable of such studies which we have in English. In this
+essay he praises the simplest metres for various just reasons, but yet
+is careful to define the 'rhyme royal,' or stanza of seven ten-syllable
+lines, as the most heroic of measures; and to admit that blank verse,
+which he never used, 'is, of all recognised English metres, the most
+difficult to write well in.' But, in his expressed aversion for trochaic
+and dactylic measures, is he not merely recording his own inability to
+handle them? and, in setting more and more rigorous limits to himself in
+his own dealing with iambic measures, is he not accepting, and making
+the best of, a lack of metrical flexibility? It is nothing less than
+extraordinary to note that, until the publication of the nine _Odes_ in
+1868, not merely was he wholly tied to the iambic measure, but even
+within those limits he was rarely quite so good in the four-line stanza
+of eights and sixes as in the four-line stanza of eights; that he was
+usually less good in the six-line than in the four-line stanza of eights
+and sixes; and that he was invariably least good in the stanza of three
+long lines which, to most practical intents and purposes, corresponds
+with this six-line stanza. The extremely slight licence which this
+rearrangement into longer lines affords was sufficient to disturb the
+balance of his cadences, and nowhere else was he capable of writing
+quite such lines as:
+
+
+     One friend was left, a falcon, famed for beauty, skill and size,
+     Kept from his fortune's ruin, for the sake of its great eyes.
+
+
+All sense, not merely of the delicacy, but of the correctness of rhythm,
+seems to have left him suddenly, without warning.
+
+And then, the straightening and tightening of the bonds of metre having
+had its due effect, an unprecedented thing occurred. In the _Odes_ of
+1868, absorbed finally into _The Unknown Eros_ of 1877, the iambic metre
+is still used; but with what a new freedom, and at the summons of how
+liberating an inspiration! At the same time Patmore's substance is
+purged and his speech loosened, and, in throwing off that burden of
+prose stuff which had tied down the very wings of his imagination, he
+finds himself rising on a different movement. Never was a development
+in metre so spiritually significant.
+
+In spite of Patmore's insistence to the contrary, as in the letter which
+I have already quoted, there is no doubt that the difference between
+_The Angel in the House_ and _The Unknown Eros_ is the difference
+between what is sometimes poetry in spite of itself, and what is poetry
+alike in accident and essence. In all his work before the _Odes_ of
+1868, Patmore had been writing down to his conception of what poetry
+ought to be; when, through I know not what suffering, or contemplation,
+or actual inner illumination, his whole soul had been possessed by this
+new conception of what poetry could be, he began to write as finely, and
+not only as neatly, as he was able. The poetry which came, came fully
+clothed, in a form of irregular but not lawless verse, which Mr. Gosse
+states was introduced into English by the _Pindarique Odes_ of Cowley,
+but which may be more justly derived, as Patmore himself, in one of his
+prefaces, intimates, from an older and more genuine poet, Drummond of
+Hawthornden.
+
+Mr. Gosse is cruel enough to say that Patmore had 'considerable
+affinities' with Cowley, and that 'when Patmore is languid and Cowley is
+unusually felicitous, it is difficult to see much difference in the form
+of their odes.' But Patmore, in his essay on metre, has said,
+
+
+     If there is not sufficient motive power of passionate thought, no
+     typographical aids will make anything of this sort of verse but
+     metrical nonsense--which it nearly always is--even in Cowley, whose
+     brilliant wit and ingenuity are strangely out of harmony with most
+     of his measures;
+
+
+and it seems to me that he is wholly right in saying so. The difference
+between the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows the
+contours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; in
+Cowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need not
+surprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verse
+of Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose.' The fault of
+his own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. The
+pauses in Patmore, left as they are to be a kind of breathing, or pause
+for breath, may not seem to be everywhere faultless to all ears; but
+they _are_ the pauses in breathing, while in Cowley the structure of his
+verse, when it is irregular, remains as external, as mechanical, as the
+couplets of the _Davideis_.
+
+
+     Whether Patmore ever acknowledged it or no, or indeed whether [says
+     Mr. Gosse] the fact has ever been observed, I know not, but the
+     true analogy of the _Odes_ is with the Italian lyric of the early
+     Renaissance. It is in the writings of Petrarch and Dante, and
+     especially in the _Canzoniere_ of the former, that we must look for
+     examples of the source of Patmore's later poetic form.
+
+
+Here again, while there may be a closer 'analogy,' at least in spirit,
+there is another, and even clearer difference in form. The canzoni of
+Petrarch are composed in stanzas of varying, but in each case uniform,
+length, and every stanza corresponds precisely in metrical arrangement
+with every other stanza in the same canzone. In English the
+_Epithalamion_ and the _Prothalamion_ of Spenser (except for their
+refrain) do exactly what Petrarch had done in Italian; and whatever
+further analogy there may be between the spirit of Patmore's writing and
+that of Spenser in these two poems, the form is essentially different.
+The resemblance with _Lycidas_ is closer, and closer still with the
+poems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit of
+mingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, like
+Goethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly unrhymed irregular
+lyrical verse.
+
+Patmore's endeavour, in _The Unknown Eros_, is certainly towards a form
+of _vers libre_, but it is directed only towards the variation of the
+normal pause in the normal English metre, the iambic 'common time,' and
+is therefore as strictly tied by law as a metre can possibly be when it
+ceases to be wholly regular. Verse literally 'free,' as it is being
+attempted in the present day in France, every measure being mingled, and
+the disentangling of them left wholly to the ear of the reader, has
+indeed been attempted by great metrists in many ages, but for the most
+part only very rarely and with extreme caution. The warning, so far, of
+all these failures, or momentary half-successes, is to be seen in the
+most monstrous and magnificent failure of the nineteenth century, the
+_Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman. Patmore realised that without law
+there can be no order, and thus no life; for life is the result of a
+harmony between opposites. For him, cramped as he had been by a
+voluntary respect for far more than the letter of the law, the discovery
+of a freer mode of speech was of incalculable advantage. It removed from
+him all temptation to that 'cleverness' which Mr. Gosse rightly finds in
+the handling of 'the accidents of civilised life,' the unfortunate part
+of his subject-matter in _The Angel in the House_; it allowed him to
+abandon himself to the poetic ecstasy, which in him was almost of the
+same nature as philosophy, without translating it downward into the
+terms of popular apprehension; it gave him a choice, formal, yet
+flexible means of expression for his uninterrupted contemplation of
+divine things.
+
+1906.
+
+
+
+
+SAROJINI NAIDU
+
+
+It was at my persuasion that _The Golden Threshold_ was published. The
+earliest of the poems were read to me in London in 1896, when the writer
+was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when
+she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those
+two periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their
+own, I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. 'Your
+letter made me very proud and very sad,' she wrote. 'Is it possible that
+I have written verses that are "filled with beauty," and is it possible
+that you really think them worthy of being given to the world? You know
+how high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual little poems seem
+to be less than beautiful--I mean with that final enduring beauty that I
+desire.' And, in another letter, she writes: 'I am not a poet really. I
+have the vision and the desire, but not the voice. If I could write just
+one poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be
+exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my
+songs are as ephemeral.' It is for this bird-like quality of song, it
+seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of
+delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of a
+woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language and
+under partly Western influences. They do not express the whole of that
+temperament; but they express, I think, its essence; and there is an
+Eastern magic in them.
+
+Sarojini Chattopadhyay was born at Hyderabad on February 13, 1879. Her
+father, Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, is descended from the ancient
+family of Chattorajes of Bhramangram, who were noted throughout Eastern
+Bengal as patrons of Sanskrit learning, and for their practice of Yoga.
+He took his degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Edinburgh
+in 1877, and afterwards studied brilliantly at Bonn. On his return to
+India he founded the Nizam College at Hyderabad, and has since laboured
+incessantly, and at great personal sacrifice, in the cause of education.
+
+Sarojini was the eldest of a large family, all of whom were taught
+English at an early age. 'I,' she writes, 'was stubborn and refused to
+speak it. So one day, when I was nine years old, my father punished
+me--the only time I was ever punished--by shutting me in a room alone
+for a whole day. I came out of it a full-blown linguist. I have never
+spoken any other language to him, or to my mother, who always speaks to
+me in Hindustani. I don't think I had any special hankering to write
+poetry as a little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy
+nature. My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific
+character. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician or a
+scientist, but the poetic instinct, which I inherited from him and also
+from my mother (who wrote some lovely Bengali lyrics in her youth),
+proved stronger. One day, when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in
+algebra; it _wouldn't_ come right; but instead a whole poem came to me
+suddenly. I wrote it down.
+
+'From that day my "poetic career" began. At thirteen I wrote a long
+poem _a la_ "Lady of the Lake"--1300 lines in six days. At thirteen I
+wrote a drama of 2000 lines, a full-fledged passionate thing that I
+began on the spur of the moment, without forethought, just to spite my
+doctor, who said I was very ill and must not touch a book. My health
+broke down permanently about this time, and, my regular studies being
+stopped, I read voraciously. I suppose the greater part of my reading
+was done between fourteen and sixteen. I wrote a novel, I wrote fat
+volumes of journals: I took myself very seriously in those days.'
+
+Before she was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr.
+Govindurajulu Naidu, now her husband, is, though of an old and
+honourable family, not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused an
+equal opposition, not only on the side of her family, but of his; and in
+1895 she was sent to England, against her will, with a special
+scholarship from the Nizam. She remained in England, with an interval of
+travel in Italy, till 1898, studying first at King's College, London,
+then, till her health again broke down, at Girton. She returned to
+Hyderabad in September 1898, and in the December of that year, to the
+scandal of all India, broke through the bonds of caste, and married Dr.
+Naidu. 'Do you know I have some very beautiful poems floating in the
+air,' she wrote to me in 1904; 'and if the gods are kind I shall cast my
+soul like a net and capture them, this year. If the gods are kind--and
+grant me a little measure of health. It is all I need to make my life
+perfect, for the very "Spirit of Delight" that Shelley wrote of dwells
+in my little home; it is full of the music of birds in the garden and
+children in the long-arched verandah.' There are songs about the
+children in this book; they are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun of
+Victory, the Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight.
+
+'My ancestors for thousands of years,' I find written in one of her
+letters, 'have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves, great
+dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a dreamer
+himself, a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been a magnificent
+failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are few men whose
+learning is greater than his, and I don't think there are many men more
+beloved. He has a great white beard, and the profile of Homer, and a
+laugh that brings the roof down. He has wasted all his money on two
+great objects: to help others, and on alchemy. He holds huge courts
+every day in his garden of all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs
+and beggars and saints, and downright villains, all delightfully mixed
+up, and all treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day
+the experiments are going on, and every man who brings a new
+prescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you know,
+only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for Beauty, the
+eternal Beauty. "The makers of gold and the makers of verse," they are
+the twin creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery; and
+what in my father is the genius of curiosity--the very essence of all
+scientific genius--in me is the desire for beauty. Do you remember
+Pater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, "curiosity and the desire of
+beauty"?'
+
+It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her 'nerves of
+delight' were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To those who
+knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure seemed to
+concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards beauty as the
+sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and wider until one saw
+nothing but the eyes. She was dressed always in clinging dresses of
+Eastern silk, and, as she was so small, and her long black hair hung
+straight down her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
+little, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed, wherever
+she was, to be alone.
+
+Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East. And
+first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known any one who
+seemed to exist on such 'large draughts of intellectual day' as this
+child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's personal troubles
+and agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the East maturity comes
+early; and this child had already lived through all a woman's life. But
+there was something else, something hardly personal, something which
+belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian, which I realised,
+wondered at, and admired, in her passionate tranquillity of mind, before
+which everything mean and trivial and temporary caught fire and burnt
+away in smoke. Her body was never without suffering, or her heart
+without conflict; but neither the body's weakness nor the heart's
+violence could disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on his
+lotus-throne.
+
+And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race, there was
+what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation. Pain or pleasure
+transported her, and the whole of pain or pleasure might be held in a
+flower's cup or the imagined frown of a friend. It was never found in
+those things which to others seemed things of importance. At the age of
+twelve she passed the Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke
+to find herself famous throughout India. 'Honestly,' she said to me, 'I
+was not pleased; such things did not appeal to me.' But here, in a
+letter from Hyderabad, bidding one 'share a March morning' with her,
+there is, at the mere contact of the sun, this outburst: 'Come and share
+my exquisite March morning with me: this sumptuous blaze of gold and
+sapphire sky; these scarlet lilies that adorn the sunshine; the
+voluptuous scents of neem and champak and serisha that beat upon the
+languid air with their implacable sweetness; the thousand little gold
+and blue and silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy of
+life in nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and
+unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and love. And,
+do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by petal from my
+heart's blood, these little quivering birds are my soul made incarnate
+music, these heavy perfumes are my emotions dissolved into aerial
+essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is the "very me," that part of
+me that incessantly and insolently, yes, and a little deliberately,
+triumphs over that other part--a thing of nerves and tissues that
+suffers and cries out, and that must die to-morrow perhaps, or twenty
+years hence.'
+
+Then there was her humour, which was part of her strange wisdom, and was
+always awake and on the watch. In all her letters, written in exquisite
+English prose, but with an ardent imagery and a vehement sincerity of
+emotion which make them, like the poems, indeed almost more directly,
+un-English, Oriental, there was always this intellectual, critical sense
+of humour, which could laugh at one's own enthusiasm as frankly as that
+enthusiasm had been set down. And partly the humour, like the delicate
+reserve of her manner, was a mask or a shelter. 'I have taught myself,'
+she writes to me from India, 'to be commonplace and like everybody else
+superficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and cheerful, so "brave,"
+all the banal things that are so comfortable to be. My mother knows me
+only as "such a tranquil child, but so strong-willed." A tranquil
+child!' And she writes again, with deeper significance: 'I too have
+learnt the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is
+a subtle philosophy though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine:
+"Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." I have gone through so
+many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its
+full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of
+speech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcely
+two months since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to be
+anything but radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps my
+temperament has given me I prize the gift of laughter as beyond price.'
+
+Her desire, always, was to be 'a wild free thing of the air like the
+birds, with a song in my heart.' A spirit of too much fire in too frail
+a body, it was rarely that her desire was fully granted. But in Italy
+she found what she could not find in England, and from Italy her letters
+are radiant. 'This Italy is made of gold,' she writes from Florence,
+'the gold of dawn and daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancing
+in weird enchanting rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold of
+fireflies in the perfumed darkness--"aerial gold." I long to catch the
+subtle music of their fairy dances and make a poem with a rhythm like
+the quick irregular wild flash of their sudden movements. Would it not
+be wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in my
+hair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of darkness. It gave
+me a strange sensation, as if I were not human at all, but an elfin
+spirit. I wonder why these little things move me so deeply? It is
+because I have a most "unbalanced intellect," I suppose.' Then, looking
+out on Florence, she cries, 'God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I am
+that I am alive to-day!' And she tells me that she is drinking in the
+beauty like wine, 'wine, golden and scented, and shining, fit for the
+gods; and the gods have drunk it, the dead gods of Etruria, two thousand
+years ago. Did I say dead? No, for the gods are immortal, and one might
+still find them loitering in some solitary dell on the grey hillsides of
+Fiesole. Have I seen them? Yes, looking with dreaming eyes, I have found
+them sitting under the olives, in their grave, strong, antique
+beauty--Etruscan gods!'
+
+In Italy she watches the faces of the monks, and at one moment longs to
+attain to their peace by renunciation, longs for Nirvana; 'then, when
+one comes out again into the hot sunshine that warms one's blood, and
+sees the eager hurrying faces of men and women in the street, dramatic
+faces over which the disturbing experiences of life have passed and
+left their symbols, one's heart thrills up into one's throat. No, no,
+no, a thousand times no! how can one deliberately renounce this
+coloured, unquiet, fiery human life of the earth?' And, all the time,
+her subtle criticism is alert, and this woman of the East marvels at the
+women of the West, 'the beautiful worldly women of the West,' whom she
+sees walking in the Cascine, 'taking the air so consciously attractive
+in their brilliant toilettes, in the brilliant coquetry of their
+manner!' She finds them 'a little incomprehensible,' 'profound artists
+in all the subtle intricacies of fascination,' and asks if these
+'incalculable frivolities and vanities and coquetries and caprices' are,
+to us, an essential part of their charm? And she watches them with
+amusement as they flutter about her, petting her as if she were a nice
+child, a child or a toy, not dreaming that she is saying to herself
+sorrowfully: 'How utterly empty their lives must be of all spiritual
+beauty _if_ they are nothing more than they appear to be.'
+
+She sat in our midst, and judged us, and few knew what was passing
+behind that face 'like an awakening soul,' to use one of her own
+epithets. Her eyes were like deep pools, and you seemed to fall through
+them into depths below depths.
+
+1905.
+
+
+
+
+WELSH POETRY
+
+
+There is certainly a reason for at least suggesting to those who concern
+themselves, for good or evil, with Celtic literature, what Celtic
+literature really is when it is finest; what a 'reaction against the
+despotism of fact' really means; what 'natural magic' really means, and
+why the phrase 'Celtic glamour' is perhaps the most unfortunate that
+could well have been chosen to express the character of a literature
+which is above all things precise, concrete, definite.
+
+Lamartine, in the preface to the _Meditations_, describes the
+characteristics of Ossian, very justly, as _le vague, la reverie,
+l'aneantissement dans la contemplation, le regard fixe sur des
+apparitions confuses dans le lointain_; and it is those very qualities,
+still looked upon by so many as the typically Celtic qualities, which
+prove the spuriousness of Ossian. That gaze fixed on formless and
+distant shadows, that losing of oneself in contemplation, that vague
+dreaminess, which Lamartine admired in Ossian, will be found nowhere in
+the _Black Book of Carmarthen_, in the _Book of Taliesin_, in the _Red
+Book of Hergest_, however much a doubtful text, uncertain readings, and
+confusing commentators may leave us in uncertainty as to the real
+meaning of many passages. Just as the true mystic is the man who sees
+obscure things clearly, so the Welsh poets (whom I take for the moment
+as representing the 'Celtic note,' the quality which we find in the work
+of primitive races) saw everything in the universe, the wind itself,
+under the images of mortality, hands and feet and the ways and motions
+of men. They filled human life with the greatness of their imagination,
+they ennobled it with the pride of their expectancy of noble things,
+they were boundless in praising and in cursing; but poetical excitement,
+in them, only taught them the amplitude and splendour of real things. A
+chief is an eagle, a serpent, the bull of battle, an oak; he is the
+strength of the ninth wave, an uplifted pillar of wrath, impetuous as
+the fire through a chimney; the ruddy reapers of war are his desire.
+The heart of Cyndyllan was like the ice of winter, like the fire of
+spring; the horses of Geraint are ruddy ones, with the assault of
+spotted eagles, of black eagles, of red eagles, of white eagles; an
+onset in battle is like the roaring of the wind against the ashen
+spears. These poets are the poets of 'tumults, shouting, swords, and men
+in battle-array.' The sound of battle is heard in them; they are 'where
+the ravens screamed over blood'; they are among 'crimsoned hair and
+clamorous sorrow'; they praise 'war with the shining wing,' and they
+know all the piteousness of the death of heroes, the sense of the
+'delicate white body,' 'the lovely, slender, blood-stained body,' that
+will be covered with earth, and sand, and stones, and nettles, and the
+roots of the oak. They know too the piteousness of the hearth left
+desolate, the hearth that will be covered with nettles, and slender
+brambles, and thorns, and dock-leaves, and scratched up by fowls, and
+turned up by swine. And they praise the gentleness of strength and
+courage: 'he was gentle, with a hand eager for battle.' Women are known
+chiefly as the widows and the 'sleepless' mothers of heroes; rarely so
+much esteemed as to be a snare, rarely a desire, rarely a reward; 'a
+soft herd.' They praise drunkenness for its ecstasy, its uncalculating
+generosity, and equal with the flowing of blood in battle, and the
+flowing of mead in the hall, is the flowing of song. They have the
+haughtiness of those who, if they take rewards, 'ale for the drinking,
+and a fair homestead, and beautiful clothing,' give rewards: 'I am
+Taliesin, who will repay thee thy banquet.'
+
+And they have their philosophy, always a close, vehemently definite
+thing, crying out for precise images, by which alone it can apprehend
+the unseen. Taliesin knows that 'man is oldest when he is born, and is
+younger and younger continually.' He wonders where man is when he is
+sleeping, and where the night waits until the passing of day. He is
+astonished that books have not found out the soul, and where it resides,
+and the air it breathes, and its form and shape. He thinks, too, of the
+dregs of the soul, and debates what is the best intoxication for its
+petulance and wonder and mockery. And, in a poem certainly late, or
+interpolated with fragments of a Latin hymn, he uses the eternal
+numeration of the mystics, and speaks of 'the nine degrees of the
+companies of heaven, and the tenth, saints a preparation of sevens';
+numbers that are 'clean and holy.' And even in poems plainly Christian
+there is a fine simplicity of imagination; as when, at the day of
+judgment, an arm reaches out, and hides the sea and the stars; or when
+Christ, hanging on the cross, laments that the bones of his feet are
+stretched with extreme pain.
+
+It is this sharp physical apprehension of things that really gives its
+note to Welsh poetry; a sense of things felt and seen, so intense, that
+the crutch on which an old man leans becomes the symbol of all the
+bodily sorrow of the world. In the poem attributed to Llywarch Hen there
+is a fierce, loud complaint, in which mere physical sickness and the
+intolerance of age translate themselves into a limitless hunger, and
+into that wisdom which is the sorrowful desire of beauty. The cuckoos at
+Aber Cuawg, singing 'clamorously' to the sick man: 'there are that hear
+them that will not hear them again!' the sound of the large wave
+grating sullenly on the pebbles,--
+
+
+     The birds are clamorous; the strand is wet:
+     Clear is the sky; large the wave:
+     The heart is palsied with longing:
+
+
+all these bright, wild outcries, in which wind and wave and leaves and
+the song of the cuckoo speak the same word, as if all came from the same
+heart of things; and, through it all, the remembrance: 'God will not
+undo what he is doing'; have indeed, and supremely, the 'Celtic note.'
+'I love the strand, but I hate the sea,' says the _Black Book of
+Carmarthen_, and in all these poems we find a more than mediaeval hatred
+of winter and cold (so pathetic, yet after all so temperate, in the
+Latin students' songs), with a far more unbounded hatred of old age and
+sickness and the disasters which are not bred in the world, but are a
+blind part of the universe itself; older than the world, as old as
+chaos, out of which the world was made.
+
+Yet, wild and sorrowful as so much of this poetry is, with its praise of
+slaughter and its lament over death, there is much also of a gentle
+beauty, a childlike saying over of wind and wave and the brightness in
+the tops of green things, as a child counts over its toys. In the 'Song
+of Pleasant Things' there is no distinction between the pleasantness of
+sea-gulls playing, of summer and slow long days, of the heath when it is
+green, of a horse with a thick mane in a tangle, and of 'the word that
+utters the Trinity.' 'The beautiful I sang of, I will sing,' says
+Taliesin; and with him the seven senses become in symbol 'fire and
+earth, and water and air, and mist and flowers, and southerly wind.' And
+touches of natural beauty come irrelevantly into the most tragical
+places, like the 'sweet apple-tree of delightful branches' in that song
+of battles and of the coming of madness, where Myrddin says: 'I have
+been wandering so long in darkness and among spirits that it is needless
+now for darkness and spirits to lead me astray.' The same sense of the
+beauty of earth and of the elements comes into those mysterious
+riddle-rhymes, not so far removed from the riddle-rhymes which children
+say to one another in Welsh cottages to this day: 'I have been a tear in
+the air, I have been the dullest of stars; I was made of the flower of
+nettles, and of the water of the ninth wave; I played in the twilight, I
+slept in purple; my fingers are long and white, it is long since I was a
+herdsman.'
+
+And now, after looking at these characteristics of Welsh poetry, look at
+Ossian, and that 'gaze fixed on formless and distant shadows,' which
+seemed so impressive and so Celtic to Lamartine. 'In the morning of
+Saturday,' or 'On Sunday, at the time of dawn, there was a great
+battle'; that is how the Welsh poet tells you what he had to sing about.
+And he tells you, in his definite way, more than that; he tells you: 'I
+have been where the warriors were slain, from the East to the North, and
+from the East to the South: I am alive, they are in their graves!' It is
+human emotion reduced to its elements; that instinct of life and death,
+of the mystery of all that is tangible in the world, of its personal
+meaning, to one man after another, age after age, which in every age
+becomes more difficult to feel simply, more difficult to say simply. 'I
+am alive, they are in their graves!' and nothing remains to be said in
+the face of that immense problem. Well, the Welsh poet leaves you with
+his thought, and that simple emphasis of his seems to us now so large
+and remote and impressive, just because it was once so passionately
+felt, and set down as it was felt. And so with his sense for nature,
+with that which seems like style in him; it is a wonderful way of
+trusting instinct, of trusting the approaches of natural things. He
+says, quite simply: 'I was told by a sea-gull that had come a great
+way,' as a child would tell you now. And when he tells you that 'Cynon
+rushed forward with the green dawn,' it is not what we call a figure of
+speech: it is his sensitive, literal way of seeing things. More
+definite, more concrete, closer to the earth and to instinctive emotion
+than most other poets, the Welsh poet might have said of himself, in
+another sense than that in which he said it of Alexander: 'What he
+desired in his mind he had from the world.'
+
+1898.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Printed in Great Britain by
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+T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the University Press,
+Edinburgh
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