<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<h1>The Art of Letters</h1>
<h4>by</h4>
<h1>Robert Lynd</h1>
<h3>New York</h3>
<h3>1921</h3>
<hr class="full" />
<div class="quote">
<p>TO J.C. SQUIRE</p>
<p>My Dear Jack,</p>
<p>You were godfather to a good many of the chapters in this book
when they first appeared in the <em>London Mercury</em>, the
<em>New Statesman</em>, and the <em>British Review</em>. Others of
the chapters appeared in the <em>Daily News</em>, the
<em>Nation</em>, the <em>Athenæum</em>, the
<em>Observer</em>, and <em>Everyman</em>. Will it embarrass you if
I now present you with the entire brood in the name of a friendship
that has lasted many midnights?</p>
<p>Yours,<br/>
Robert Lynd.</p>
<p>Steyning,<br/>
30th August 1920</p>
</div>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Contents" id="Contents">Contents</SPAN></h2>
<ol type="I">
<li><SPAN href="#Pepys"><span class="sc">Mr. Pepys</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Bunyan"><span class="sc">John Bunyan</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Campion"><span class="sc">Thomas
Campion</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Donne"><span class="sc">John Donne</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Walpole"><span class="sc">Horace
Walpole</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Cowper"><span class="sc">William
Cowper</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Plays"><span class="sc">A Note on Elizabethan
Plays</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Poets"><span class="sc">The Office of the
Poets</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Young"><span class="sc">Edward Young as
Critic</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Gray"><span class="sc">Gray and
Collins</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Shelley0"><span class="sc">Aspects of
Shelley</span></SPAN>
<ol>
<li><SPAN href="#Shelley1"><span class="sc">The Character
Half-Comic</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Shelley2"><span class="sc">The
Experimentalist</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Shelley3"><span class="sc">The Poet of
Hope</span></SPAN></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><SPAN href="#Coleridge0"><span class="sc">The Wisdom of
Coleridge</span></SPAN>
<ol>
<li><SPAN href="#Coleridge1"><span class="sc">Coleridge as
Critic</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Coleridge2"><span class="sc">Coleridge as a
Talker</span></SPAN></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><SPAN href="#Tennyson"><span class="sc">Tennyson: A Temporary
Criticism</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#SwiftShakes"><span class="sc">The Politics of Swift
and Shakespeare</span></SPAN>
<ol>
<li><SPAN href="#Swift"><span class="sc">Swift</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Shakespeare"><span class="sc">Shakespeare</span></SPAN></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><SPAN href="#Morris"><span class="sc">The Personality of
Morris</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Meredith0"><span class="sc">George
Meredith</span></SPAN>
<ol>
<li><SPAN href="#Meredith1"><span class="sc">The
Egoist</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Meredith2"><span class="sc">The Olympian
Unbends</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Meredith3"><span class="sc">The Anglo-Irish
Aspect</span></SPAN></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><SPAN href="#Wilde"><span class="sc">Oscar Wilde</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Critics"><span class="sc">Two English
Critics</span></SPAN>
<ol>
<li><SPAN href="#Saintsbury"><span class="sc">Mr.
Saintsbury</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Gosse"><span class="sc">Mr. Gosse</span></SPAN></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><SPAN href="#Babbitt"><span class="sc">An American Critic:
Professor Irving Babbitt</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Georgians"><span class="sc">Georgians</span></SPAN>
<ol>
<li><SPAN href="#delaMare"><span class="sc">Mr. de la
Mare</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Group"><span class="sc">The Group</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Satirists"><span class="sc">The Young
Satirists</span></SPAN></li>
</ol>
</li>
<li><SPAN href="#Authorship"><span class="sc">Labour of
Authorship</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Theory"><span class="sc">The Theory of
Poetry</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Destroyer"><span class="sc">The Critic as
Destroyer</span></SPAN></li>
<li><SPAN href="#Reviewing"><span class="sc">Book
Reviewing</span></SPAN></li>
</ol>
<hr class="full" />
<h1>The Art of Letters</h1>
<hr />
<h2><SPAN name="Pepys" name="Pepys">I.—Mr. Pepys</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Mr. Pepys was a Puritan. Froude once painted a portrait of
Bunyan as an old Cavalier. He almost persuaded one that it was true
till the later discovery of Bunyan’s name on the muster-roll
of one of Cromwell’s regiments showed that he had been a
Puritan from the beginning. If one calls Mr. Pepys a Puritan,
however, one does not do so for the love of paradox or at a guess.
He tells us himself that he “was a great Roundhead when I was
a boy,” and that, on the day on which King Charles was
beheaded, he said: “Were I to preach on him, my text should
be—‘the memory of the wicked shall rot.’”
After the Restoration he was uneasy lest his old schoolfellow, Mr.
Christmas, should remember these strong words. True, when it came
to the turn of the Puritans to suffer, he went, with a fine
impartiality, to see General Harrison disembowelled at Charing
Cross. “Thus it was my chance,” he comments, “to
see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood
shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross. From
thence to my Lord’s, and took Captain Cuttance and Mr.
Shepley to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters.”
Pepys was a spectator and a gourmet even more than he was a
Puritan. He was a Puritan, indeed, only north-north-west. Even when
at Cambridge he gave evidence of certain susceptibilities to the
sins of the flesh. He was “admonished” on one occasion
for “having been scandalously overserved with drink ye night
before.” He even began to write a romance entitled <em>Love a
Cheate</em>, which he tore up ten years later, though he
“liked it very well.” At the same time his writing
never lost the tang of Puritan speech. “Blessed be God”
are the first words of his shocking Diary. When he had to give up
keeping the Diary nine and a half years later, owing to failing
sight, he wound up, after expressing his intention of dictating in
the future a more seemly journal to an amanuensis, with the
characteristic sentences:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Or, if there be anything, which cannot be much, now my amours to
Deb. are past, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open,
to add, here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand.</p>
<p>And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much
as to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the
discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God
prepare me.</p>
</div>
<p>With these words the great book ends—the diary of one of
the godliest and most lecherous of men.</p>
<p>In some respects Mr. Pepys reminds one of a type that is now
commoner in Scotland, I fancy, than elsewhere. He himself seems at
one time to have taken the view that he was of Scottish descent.
None of the authorities, however, will admit this, and there is
apparently no doubt that he belonged to an old Cambridgeshire
family that had come down in the world, his father having dwindled
into a London tailor. In temperament, however, he seems to me to
have been more Scottish than the very Scottish Boswell. He led a
double life with the same simplicity of heart. He was Scottish in
the way in which he lived with one eye on the “lassies”
and the other on “the meenister.” He was notoriously
respectable, notoriously hard-working, a judge of sermons, fond of
the bottle, cautious, thrifty. He had all the virtues of a K.C.B.
He was no scapegrace or scallywag such as you might find nowadays
crowing over his sins in Chelsea. He lived, so far as the world was
concerned, in the complete starch of rectitude. He was a pillar of
Society, and whatever age he had been born in, he would have
accepted its orthodoxy. He was as grave a man as Holy Willie.
Stevenson has commented on the gradual decline of his primness in
the later years of the Diary. “His favourite ejaculation,
‘Lord!’ occurs,” he declares, “but once
that I have observed in 1660, never in ‘61, twice in
‘62, and at least five times in ‘63; after which the
‘Lords’ may be said to pullulate like herrings, with
here and there a solitary ‘damned,’ as it were a whale
among the shoal.” As a matter of fact, Mr. Pepys’s use
of the expression “Lord!” has been greatly exaggerated,
especially by the parodists. His primness, if that is the right
word, never altogether deserted him. We discover this even in the
story of his relations with women. In 1665, for instance, he writes
with surprised censoriousness of Mrs. Penington:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>There we drank and laughed [he relates], and she willingly
suffered me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it
there long. Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon
myself as a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have
thought she could have suffered it by her former discourse with me;
so modest she seemed and I know not what.</p>
</div>
<p>It is a sad world for idealists.</p>
<p>Mr. Pepys’s Puritanism, however, was something less than
Mr. Pepys. It was but a pair of creaking Sunday boots on the feet
of a pagan. Mr. Pepys was an appreciator of life to a degree that
not many Englishmen have been since Chaucer. He was a walking
appetite. And not an entirely ignoble appetite either. He reminds
one in some respects of the poet in Browning’s “How it
strikes a Contemporary,” save that he had more worldly
success. One fancies him with the same inquisitive ferrule on the
end of his stick, the same “scrutinizing hat,” the same
eye for the bookstall and “the man who slices lemon into
drink.” “If any cursed a woman, he took note.”
Browning’s poet, however, apparently “took note”
on behalf of a higher power. It is difficult to imagine Mr. Pepys
sending his Diary to the address of the Recording Angel. Rather,
the Diary is the soliloquy of an egoist, disinterested and daring
as a bad boy’s reverie over the fire.</p>
<p>Nearly all those who have written about Pepys are perplexed by
the question whether Pepys wrote his Diary with a view to its
ultimate publication. This seems to me to betray some ignorance of
the working of the human mind.</p>
<p>Those who find one of the world’s puzzles in the fact that
Mr. Pepys wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as
though he meant no other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex
their brains unnecessarily. Pepys was not the first human being to
make his confession in an empty confessional. Criminals, lovers and
other egoists, for lack of a priest, will make their confessions to
a stone wall or a tree. There is no more mystery in it than in the
singing of birds. The motive may be either to obtain discharge from
the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store up the very echoes
and last drops of pleasure. Human beings keep diaries for as many
different reasons as they write lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy,
the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of
pleasure. The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept
secret from the world made it all the more necessary for him to
babble when alone. True, in the early days his confidences are
innocent enough. Pepys began to write in cipher some time before
there was any purpose in it save the common prudence of a secretive
man. Having built, however, this secret and solitary fastness, he
gradually became more daring. He had discovered a room to the walls
of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see the respectable man
liberated. He no longer needs to be on his official behaviour, but
may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind the safety
of shorthand. And how he takes advantage of his opportunities! He
remains to the end something of a Puritan in his standards and his
public carriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from
the sty of Epicurus, naked and only half-ashamed. He never, it must
be admitted, entirely shakes off his timidity. At a crisis he dare
not confess in English even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad
French with a blush. In some instances the French may be for
facetiousness rather than concealment, as in the reference to the
ladies of Rochester Castle in 1665:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Thence to Rochester, walked to the Crowne, and while dinner was
getting ready, I did then walk to visit the old Castle ruines,
which hath been a noble place, and there going up I did upon the
stairs overtake three pretty mayds or women and took them up with
me, and I did <em>baiser sur mouches et toucher leur mains</em> and
necks to my great pleasure; but lord! to see what a dreadfull thing
it is to look down the precipices, for it did fright me mightily,
and hinder me of much pleasure which I would have made to myself in
the company of these three, if it had not been for that.</p>
</div>
<p>Even here, however, Mr. Pepys’s French has a suggestion of
evasion. He always had a faint hope that his conscience would not
understand French.</p>
<p>Some people have written as though Mr. Pepys, in confessing
himself in his Diary, had confessed us all. They profess to see in
the Diary simply the image of Everyman in his bare skin. They think
of Pepys as an ordinary man who wrote an extraordinary book. To me
it seems that Pepys’s Diary is not more extraordinary as a
book than Pepys himself is as a man. Taken separately, nine out of
ten of his characteristics may seem ordinary enough—his
fears, his greeds, his vices, his utilitarian repentances. They
were compounded in him, however, in such proportion as to produce
an entirely new mixture—a character hardly less original than
Dr. Johnson or Charles Lamb. He had not any great originality of
virtue, as these others had, but he was immensely original in his
responsiveness—his capacity for being interested, tempted and
pleased. The voluptuous nature of the man may be seen in such a
passage as that in which, speaking of “the wind-musique when
the angel comes down” in <em>The Virgin Martyr</em>, he
declares:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>It ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so
that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in
love with my wife.</p>
</div>
<p>Writing of Mrs. Knipp on another occasion, he says:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>She and I singing, and God forgive me! I do still see that my
nature is not to be quite conquered, but will esteem pleasure above
all things, though yet in the middle of it, it has reluctances
after my business, which is neglected by my following my pleasure.
However, musique and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my
business is.</p>
</div>
<p>Within a few weeks of this we find him writing again:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>So abroad to my ruler's of my books, having, God forgive me! a
mind to see Nan there, which I did, and so back again, and then out
again to see Mrs. Bettons, who were looking out of the window as I
came through Fenchurch Streete. So that, indeed, I am not, as I
ought to be, able to command myself in the pleasures of my eye.</p>
</div>
<p>Though page after page of the Diary reveals Mr. Pepys as an
extravagant pleasure-lover, however, he differed from the majority
of pleasure-lovers in literature in not being a man of taste. He
had a rolling rather than a fastidious eye. He kissed
promiscuously, and was not aspiring in his lusts. He once held Lady
Castlemaine in his arms, indeed, but it was in a dream. He
reflected, he tells us,</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>that since it was a dream, and that I took so much real pleasure
in it, what a happy thing it would be if when we are in our graves
(as Shakespeare resembles it) we could dream, and dream but such
dreams as this, that then we should not need to be so fearful of
death, as we are this plague time.</p>
</div>
<p>He praises this dream at the same time as “the best that
ever was dreamt.” Mr. Pepys’s idea of Paradise, it
would be seen, was that commonly attributed to the Mohammedans.
Meanwhile he did his best to turn London into an anticipatory
harem. We get a pleasant picture of a little Roundhead Sultan in
such a sentence as “At night had Mercer comb my head and so
to supper, sing a psalm and to bed.”</p>
<hr class="short" />
<p>It may seem unfair to over-emphasize the voluptuary in Mr.
Pepys, but it is Mr. Pepys, the promiscuous amourist; stringing his
lute (God forgive him!) on a Sunday, that is the outstanding figure
in the Diary. Mr. Pepys attracts us, however, in a host of other
aspects—Mr. Pepys whose nose his jealous wife attacked with
the red-hot tongs as he lay in bed; Mr. Pepys who always held an
anniversary feast on the date on which he had been cut for the
stone; Mr. Pepys who was not “troubled at it at all” as
soon as he saw that the lady who had spat on him in the theatre was
a pretty one; Mr. Pepys drinking; Mr. Pepys among his dishes; Mr.
Pepys among princes; Mr. Pepys who was “mightily
pleased” as he listened to “my aunt Jenny, a poor,
religious, well-meaning good soul, talking of nothing but God
Almighty”; Mr. Pepys, as he counts up his blessings in
wealth, women, honour and life, and decides that “all these
things are ordered by God Almighty to make me contented”; Mr.
Pepys as, having just refused to see Lady Pickering, he comments,
“But how natural it is for us to slight people out of
power!”; Mr. Pepys who groans as he sees his office clerks
sitting in more expensive seats than himself at the theatre. Mr.
Pepys is a man so many-sided, indeed, that in order to illustrate
his character one would have to quote the greater part of his
Diary. He is a mass of contrasts and contradictions. He lives
without sequence except in the business of getting-on (in which he
might well have been taken as a model by Samuel Smiles). One thinks
of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimes as the most
innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal and
snobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry
and a grateful heart. He felt that God had created the world for
the pleasure of Samuel Pepys, and had no doubt that it was
good.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Bunyan" name="Bunyan">II.—John Bunyan</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Once, when John Bunyan had been preaching in London, a friend
congratulated him on the excellence of his sermon. “You need
not remind me of that,” replied Bunyan. “The Devil told
me of it before I was out of the pulpit.” On another
occasion, when he was going about in disguise, a constable who had
a warrant for his arrest spoke to him and inquired if he knew that
devil Bunyan. “Know him?” said Bunyan. “You might
call him a devil if you knew him as well as I once did.” We
have in these anecdotes a key to the nature of Bunyan’s
genius. He was a realist, a romanticist, and a humourist. He was as
exact a realist (though in a different way) as Mr. Pepys, whose
contemporary he was. He was a realist both in his self-knowledge
and in his sense of the outer world. He had the acute eye of the
artist which was aware of the stones of the street and the crows in
the ploughed field. As a preacher, he did not guide the thoughts of
his hearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. He recalled
them from orthodox abstractions to the solid earth. “Have you
forgot,” he asked his followers, “the close, the
milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where God did visit
your souls?” He himself could never be indifferent to the
place or setting of the great tragi-comedy of salvation. When he
relates how he gave up swearing as a result of a reproof from a
“loose and ungodly” woman, he begins the story:
“One day, as I was standing at a neighbour’s
shop-window, and there cursing and swearing after my wonted manner,
there sat within the woman of the house, who heard me.” This
passion for locality was always at his elbow. A few pages further
on in <em>Grace Abounding</em>, when he tells us how he abandoned
not only swearing but the deeper-rooted sins of bell-ringing and
dancing, and nevertheless remained self-righteous and
“ignorant of Jesus Christ,” he introduces the next
episode in the story of his conversion with the sentence:
“But upon a day the good providence of God called me to
Bedford to work at my calling, and in one of the streets of that
town I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a
door in the sun, talking about the things of God.” That seems
to me to be one of the most beautiful sentences in English
literature. Its beauty is largely due to the hungry eyes with which
Bunyan looked at the present world during his progress to the next.
If he wrote the greatest allegory in English literature, it is
because he was able to give his narrative the reality of a
travel-book instead of the insubstantial quality of a dream. He
leaves the reader with the feeling that he is moving among real
places and real people. As for the people, Bunyan can give even an
abstract virtue—still more, an abstract vice—the skin
and bones of a man. A recent critic has said disparagingly that
Bunyan would have called Hamlet Mr. Facing-both-ways. As a matter
of fact, Bunyan’s secret is the direct opposite of this. His
great and singular gift was the power to create an atmosphere in
which a character with a name like Mr. Facing-both-ways is accepted
on the same plane of reality as Hamlet.</p>
<p>If Bunyan was a realist, however, as regards place and
character, his conception of life was none the less romantic. Life
to him was a story of hairbreadth escapes—of a quest beset
with a thousand perils. Not only was there that great dragon the
Devil lying in wait for the traveller, but there was Doubting
Castle to pass, and Giant Despair, and the lions. We have in
<em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em> almost every property of
romantic adventure and terror. We want only a map in order to bring
home to us the fact that it belongs to the same school of fiction
as <em>Treasure Island</em>. There may be theological contentions
here and there that interrupt the action of the story as they
interrupt the interest of <em>Grace Abounding</em>. But the tedious
passages are extraordinarily few, considering that the author had
the passions of a preacher. No doubt the fact that, when he wrote
<em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em>, he was not definitely
thinking of the edification of his neighbours, goes far towards
explaining the absence of commonplace arguments and exhortations.
“I did it mine own self to gratify,” he declared in his
rhymed “apology for his book.” Later on, in reply to
some brethren of the stricter sort who condemned such dabbling in
fiction, he defended his book as a tract, remarking that, if you
want to catch fish,</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>They must be groped for, and be tickled too,</p>
<p>Or they will not be catch’t, whate’er you do.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>But in its origin <em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em> was not
a tract, but the inevitable image of the experiences of the
writer’s soul. And what wild adventures those were every
reader of <em>Grace Abounding</em> knows. There were terrific
contests with the Devil, who could never charm John Bunyan as he
charmed Eve. To Bunyan these contests were not metaphorical
battles, but were as struggles with flesh and blood. “He
pulled, and I pulled,” he wrote in one place; “but, God
be praised, I overcame him—I got sweetness from it.”
And the Devil not only fought him openly, but made more subtle
attempts to entice him to sin. “Sometimes, again, when I have
been preaching, I have been violently assaulted with thoughts of
blasphemy, and strongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth
before the congregation.” Bunyan, as he looked back over the
long record of his spiritual torments, thought of it chiefly as a
running fight with the Devil. Outside the covers of the Bible,
little existed save temptations for the soul. No sentence in
<em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em> is more suggestive of
Bunyan’s view of life than that in which the merchandise of
Vanity Fair is described as including “delights of all sorts,
as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants,
lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones,
and what not.” It is no wonder that one to whom so much of
the common life of man was simply Devil’s traffic took a
tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, and applied to
himself, on account of his love of strong language, Sunday sports
and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strong
if he had committed all the crimes of the latest Bluebeard. He
himself, indeed, seems to have become alarmed when—probably
as a result of his own confessions—it began to be rumoured
that he was a man with an unspeakable past. He now demanded that
“any woman in heaven, earth or hell” should be produced
with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage. “My
foes,” he declared, “have missed their mark in this
shooting at me. I am not the man. I wish that they themselves be
guiltless. If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were
hanged up by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan, the object of
their envy, would still be alive and well.” Bunyan, one
observes, was always as ready to defend as to attack himself. The
verses he prefixed to <em>The Holy War</em> are an indignant reply
to those who accused him of not being the real author of <em>The
Pilgrim’s Progress</em>. He wound up a fervent defence of his
claims to originality by pointing out the fact that his name, if
“anagrammed,” made the words: “NU HONY IN A
B.” Many worse arguments have been used in the quarrels of
theologians.</p>
<p>Bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of
countenance, quick of eye, and mild of speech. His mildness of
speech, I fancy, must have been an acquired mildness. He loved
swearing as a boy, and, as <em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em>
shows, even in his later life he had not lost the humour of calling
names. No other English author has ever invented a name of the
labelling kind equal to that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman—a
character, by the way, who does not appear in the first edition of
<em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em>, but came in later as an
afterthought. Congreve’s “Tribulation Spintext”
and Dickens’s “Lord Frederick Verisopht” are mere
mechanical contrivances compared to this triumph of imagination and
phrase. Bunyan’s gift for names was in its kind supreme. His
humorous fancy chiefly took that form. Even atheists can read him
with pleasure for the sake of his names. The modern reader, no
doubt, often smiles at these names where Bunyan did not mean him to
smile, as when Mrs. Lightmind says: “I was yesterday at Madam
Wantons, when we were as merry as the maids. For who do you think
should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-flesh, and three or four
more, with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth, and some others?”
Bunyan’s fancifulness, however, gives us pleasure quite apart
from such quaint effects as this. How delightful is Mr.
By-ends’s explanation of the two points in regard to which he
and his family differ in religion from those of the stricter sort:
“First, we never strive against wind and tide. Secondly, we
are always most zealous when Religion goes in his silver slippers;
we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, and
the people applaud him.” What a fine grotesque, again, Bunyan
gives us in toothless Giant Pope sitting in the mouth of the cave,
and, though too feeble to follow Christian, calling out after him:
“You will never mend till more of you be burnt.” We do
not read <em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em>, however, as a
humorous book. Bunyan’s pains mean more to us than the play
of his fancy. His books are not seventeenth-century grotesques, but
the story of his heart. He has written that story twice
over—with the gloom of the realist in <em>Grace
Abounding</em>, and with the joy of the artist in <em>The
Pilgrim’s Progress</em>. Even in <em>Grace Abounding</em>,
however, much as it is taken up with a tale of almost lunatic
terror, the tenderness of Bunyan’s nature breaks out as he
tells us how, when he was taken off to prison, “the parting
with my wife and four children hath often been to me in the place
as the pulling the flesh from the bones … especially my poor
blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the
thoughts of the hardship I thought my poor blind one might go under
would break my heart to pieces!” At the same time, fear and
not love is the dominating passion in <em>Grace Abounding</em>. We
are never far from the noise of Hell in its pages. In <em>Grace
Abounding</em> man is a trembling criminal. In <em>The
Pilgrim’s Progress</em> he has become, despite his immense
capacity for fear, a hero. The description of the fight with
Apollyon is a piece of heroic literature equal to anything in those
romances of adventure that went to the head of Don Quixote.
“But, as God would have it, while Apollyon was fetching his
last blow, thereby to make a full end of this good man, Christian
nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and caught it, saying:
‘Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy! when I fall I shall
arise’; and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made
him give back, as one that had received a mortal wound.”
Heroic literature cannot surpass this. Its appeal is universal.
When one reads it, one ceases to wonder that there exists even a
Catholic version of <em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em>, in which
Giant Pope is discreetly omitted, but the heroism of Christian
remains. Bunyan disliked being called by the name of any sect. His
imagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of a
seventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily
not a Baptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a
resemblance to Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his
speech save him from sinking into a pulpit generalization.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Campion" name="Campion">III.—Thomas Campion</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Thomas Campion is among English poets the perfect minstrel. He
takes love as a theme rather than is burned by it. His most
charming, if not his most beautiful poem begins: “Hark, all
you ladies.” He sings of love-making rather than of love. His
poetry, like Moore’s—though it is infinitely better
poetry than Moore’s—is the poetry of flirtation. Little
is known about his life, but one may infer from his work that his
range of amorous experience was rather wide than deep. There is no
lady “with two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes”
troubling his pages with a constant presence. The Mellea and
Caspia—the one too easy of capture, the other too
difficult—to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are
addressed, are said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in
love. But he has buried most of his erotic woes, such as they were,
in a dead language. His English poems do not portray him as a man
likely to die of love, or even to forget a meal on account of it.
His world is a happy land of song, in which ladies all golden in
the sunlight succeed one another as in a pageant of beauties.
Lesbia, Laura, and Corinna with her lute equally inhabit it. They
are all characters in a masque of love, forms and figures in a
revel. Their maker is an Epicurean and an enemy to “the sager
sort”:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,</p>
<p>And, though the sager sort our deeps reprove,</p>
<p>Let us not weigh them. Heav’n’s great lamps do
dive</p>
<p>Into their west, and straight again revive.</p>
<p>But, soon as once is set our little light,</p>
<p>Then must we sleep our ever-during night.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Ladies in so bright and insecure a day must not be permitted to
“let their lovers moan.” If they do, they will incur
the just vengeance of the Fairy Queen Proserpina, who will send her
attendant fairies to pinch their white hands and pitiless arms.
Campion is the Fairy Queen’s court poet. He claims all
men—perhaps, one ought rather to say all women—as her
subjects:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>In myrtle arbours on the downs</p>
<p class="i2">The Fairy Queen Proserpina,</p>
<p>This night by moonshine leading merry rounds,</p>
<p class="i2">Holds a watch with sweet love,</p>
<p>Down the dale, up the hill;</p>
<p class="i2">No plaints or groans may move</p>
<p class="i6">Their holy vigil.</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>All you that will hold watch with love,</p>
<p class="i2">The Fairy Queen Proserpina</p>
<p>Will make you fairer than Dione’s dove;</p>
<p class="i2">Roses red, lilies white</p>
<p>And the clear damask hue,</p>
<p class="i2">Shall on your cheeks alight:</p>
<p class="i6">Love will adorn you.</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>All you that love, or lov’d before,</p>
<p class="i2">The Fairy Queen Proserpina</p>
<p>Bids you increase that loving humour more:</p>
<p class="i2">They that have not fed</p>
<p>On delight amorous,</p>
<p class="i2">She vows that they shall lead</p>
<p class="i6">Apes in Avernus.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>It would be folly to call the poem that contains these three
verses one of the great English love-songs. It gets no nearer love
than a ballet does. There are few lyrics of “delight
amorous” in English, however, that can compare with it in
exquisite fancy and still more exquisite music.</p>
<p>Campion, at the same time, if he was the poet of the higher
flirtation, was no mere amorous jester, as Moore was. His affairs
of the heart were also affairs of the imagination. Love may not
have transformed the earth for him, as it did Shakespeare and Donne
and Browning, but at least it transformed his accents. He sang
neither the “De Profundis” of love nor the triumphal
ode of love that increases from anniversary to anniversary; but he
knew the flying sun and shadow of romantic love, and staged them in
music of a delicious sadness, of a fantastic and playful gravity.
His poems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little insincere.
They are the compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. He
exaggerates the burden of his sigh, the incurableness of his
wounded heart. But beneath these conventional excesses there is a
flow of sincere and beautiful feeling. He may not have been a
worshipper, but his admirations were golden. In one or two of his
poems, such as:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;</p>
<p>Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>admiration treads on the heels of worship.</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>All that I sung still to her praise did tend;</p>
<p>Still she was first, still she my song did end—</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>in these lines we find a note of triumphant fidelity rare in
Campion’s work. Compared with this, that other song
beginning:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,</p>
<p>Though thou be black as night,</p>
<p>And she made all of light,</p>
<p>Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow—</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines. Others of
the songs hesitate between compliment and the finer ecstasy. The
compliment is certainly of the noblest in the lyric which sets
out—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>When thou must home to shades of underground,</p>
<p>And, there arriv’d, a new admired guest,</p>
<p>The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round,</p>
<p>White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest,</p>
<p>To hear the stories of thy finisht love</p>
<p>From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>but it fades by way of beauty into the triviality of convention
in the second verse:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,</p>
<p>Of masks and revels which sweet youth did make,</p>
<p>Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,</p>
<p>And all these triumphs for thy beauty’s sake:</p>
<p>When thou hast told these honours done to thee,</p>
<p>Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murther me.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>There is more of jest than of sorrow in the last line. It is an
act of courtesy. Through all these songs, however, there is a
continuous expense of beauty, of a very fortune of admiration, that
entitles Campion to a place above any of the other contemporaries
of Shakespeare as a writer of songs. His dates (1567-1620) almost
coincide with those of Shakespeare. Living in an age of music, he
wrote music that Shakespeare alone could equal and even Shakespeare
could hardly surpass. Campion’s words are themselves airs.
They give us at once singer and song and stringed instrument.</p>
<p>It is only in music, however, that Campion is in any way
comparable to Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the nonpareil among
song-writers, not merely because of his music, but because of the
imaginative riches that he pours out in his songs. In contrast with
his abundance, Campion’s fortune seems lean, like his person.
Campion could not see the world for lovely ladies. Shakespeare in
his lightest songs was always aware of the abundant background of
the visible world. Campion seems scarcely to know of the existence
of the world apart from the needs of a masque-writer. Among his
songs there is nothing comparable to “When daisies pied and
violets blue,” or “Where the bee sucks,” or
“You spotted snakes with double tongue,” or “When
daffodils begin to peer,” or “Full fathom five,”
or “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” He had
neither Shakespeare’s eye nor Shakespeare’s
experiencing soul. He puts no girdle round the world in his verse.
He knows but one mood and its sub-moods. Though he can write</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>There is a garden in her face,</p>
<p>Where roses and white lilies grow,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>he brings into his songs none of the dye and fragrance of
flowers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it was because he suspected a certain levity and
thinness in his genius that Campion was so contemptuous of his
English verse. His songs he dismissed as “superfluous
blossoms of his deeper studies.” It is as though he thought,
like Bacon, that anything written for immortality should be written
in Latin. Bacon, it may be remembered, translated his essays into
Latin for fear they might perish in so modern and barbarous a
tongue as English. Campion was equally inclined to despise his own
language in comparison with that of the Greeks and Romans. His main
quarrel with it arose, however, from the obstinacy with which
English poets clung to “the childish titillation of
rhyming.” “Bring before me now,” he wrote,
“any the most self-loved rhymer, and let me see if without
blushing he be able to read his lame, halting rhymes.” There
are few more startling paradoxes in literature than that it should
have been this hater of rhymes who did more than any other writer
to bring the art of rhyme to perfection in the English language.
The bent of his intellect was classical, as we see in his
astonishing <em>Observations on the Art of English Poesy</em>, in
which he sets out to demonstrate “the unaptness of rhyme in
poesy.” The bent of his genius, on the other hand, was
romantic, as was shown when, desiring to provide certain airs with
words, he turned out—that seems, in the circumstances, to be
the proper word—“after the fashion of the time,
ear-pleasing rhymes without art.” His songs can hardly be
called “pot-boilers,” but they were equally the
children of chance. They were accidents, not fulfilments of desire.
Luckily, Campion, writing them with music in his head, made his
words themselves creatures of music. “In these English
airs,” he wrote in one of his prefaces, “I have chiefly
aimed to couple my words and notes lovingly together.” It
would be impossible to improve on this as a description of his
achievement in rhyme. Only one of his good poems,
“Rosecheek’d Laura,” is to be found among those
which he wrote according to his pseudo-classical theory. All the
rest are among those in which he coupled his words and notes
lovingly together, not as a duty, but as a diversion.</p>
<p>Irish critics have sometimes hoped that certain qualities in
Campion’s music might be traced to the fact that his
grandfather was “John Campion of Dublin, Ireland.” The
art—and in Campion it was art, not artlessness—with
which he made use of such rhymes as “hill” and
“vigil,” “sing” and “darling,”
besides his occasional use of internal rhyme and assonance (he
rhymed “licens’d” and “silence,”
“strangeness” and “plainness,” for
example), has seemed to be more akin to the practices of Irish than
of English poets. No evidence exists, however, as to whether
Campion’s grandfather was Irish in anything except his
adventures. Of Campion himself we know that his training was
English. He went to Peterhouse, and, though he left it without
taking a degree, he was apparently regarded as one of the promising
figures in the Cambridge of his day. “I know,
Cambridge,” apostrophized a writer of the time,
“howsoever now old, thou hast some young. Bid them be chaste,
yet suffer them to be witty. Let them be soundly learned, yet
suffer them to be gentlemanlike qualified”; and the
admonitory reference, though he had left Cambridge some time
before, is said to have been to “sweet master
Campion.”</p>
<p>The rest of his career may be summarized in a few sentences. He
was admitted to Gray’s Inn, but was never called to the Bar.
That he served as a soldier in France under Essex is inferred by
his biographers. He afterwards practised as a doctor, but whether
he studied medicine during his travels abroad or in England is not
known. The most startling fact recorded of his maturity is that he
acted as a go-between in bribing the Lieutenant of the Tower to
resign his post and make way for a more pliable successor on the
eve of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. This he did on behalf of
Sir Thomas Monson, one of whose dependants, as Mr. Percival Vivian
says, “actually carried the poisoned tarts and
jellies.” Campion afterwards wrote a masque in celebration of
the nuptials of the murderers. Both Monson and he, however, are
universally believed to have been innocent agents in the crime.
Campion boldly dedicated his <em>Third Book of Airs</em> to Monson
after the first shadow of suspicion had passed.</p>
<p>As a poet, though he was no Puritan, he gives the impression of
having been a man of general virtue. It is not only that he added
piety to amorousness. This might be regarded as flirting with
religion. Did not he himself write, in explaining why he mixed
pious and light songs; “He that in publishing any work hath a
desire to content all palates must cater for them
accordingly”? Even if the spiritual depth of his graver songs
has been exaggerated, however, they are clearly the expression of a
charming and tender spirit.</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore,</p>
<p>Never tired pilgrim’s limbs affected slumber more,</p>
<p>Than my wearied sprite now longs to fly out of my troubled
breast.</p>
<p>O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>What has the “sweet master Campion” who wrote these
lines to do with poisoned tarts and jellies? They are not ecstatic
enough to have been written by a murderer.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Donne" name="Donne">IV.—John Donne</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Izaak Walton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of
almost seraphic beauty. When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it
was said that the age had brought forth another Pico della
Mirandola. As a young man in his twenties, he was a prince among
lovers, who by his secret marriage with his patron’s
niece—“for love,” says Walton, “is a
flattering mischief”—purchased at first only the ruin
of his hopes and a term in prison. Finally, we have the later Donne
in the pulpit of St. Paul’s represented, in a beautiful
adaptation of one of his own images, as “always preaching to
himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none; carrying some,
as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by
a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives.” The picture
is all of noble charm. Walton speaks in one place of “his
winning behaviour—which, when it would entice, had a strange
kind of elegant irresistible art.” There are no harsh phrases
even in the references to those irregularities of Donne’s
youth, by which he had wasted the fortune of
£3,000—equal, I believe, to more than £30,000 of
our money—bequeathed to him by his father, the ironmonger.
“Mr. Donne’s estate,” writes Walton gently,
referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, “was the
greatest part spent in many and chargeable travels, books, and
dear-bought experience.” It is true that he quotes
Donne’s own confession of the irregularities of his early
life. But he counts them of no significance. He also utters a sober
reproof of Donne’s secret marriage as “the remarkable
error of his life.” But how little he condemned it in his
heart is clear when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne
and his wife “with so mutual and cordial affections, as in
the midst of their sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more
pleasantly than the banquets of dull and low-spirited
people.” It was not for Walton to go in search of small
blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the
world—him whose grave, mournful friends “strewed
… with an abundance of curious and costly flowers,” as
Alexander the Great strewed the grave of “the famous
Achilles.” In that grave there was buried for Walton a whole
age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety and beauty.
More than that, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an
inimitable Christian. He mourns over “that body, which once
was a Temple of the Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity
of Christian dust,” and, as he mourns, he breaks off with the
fervent prophecy, “But I shall see it reanimated.” That
is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed three hundred years after
his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan, this is
because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his
biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his
<em>Songs and Sonnets</em> and <em>Elegies</em> rather than in his
<em>Divine Poems</em>. We find, in some of these, abundant evidence
of the existence of a dark angel at odds with the good angel of
Walton’s raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the
temptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but for
experience—experience of the intellect and experience of
sensation. He has left it on record in one of his letters that he
was a victim at one period of “the worst voluptuousness, an
hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and
languages.” Faust in his cell can hardly have been a more
insatiate student than Donne. “In the most unsettled days of
his youth,” Walton tells us, “his bed was not able to
detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and it was no
common business that drew him out of his chamber till past ten; all
which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty
after it.” His thoroughness of study may be judged from the
fact that “he left the resultance of 1,400 authors, most of
them abridged and analyzed with his own hand.” But we need
not go beyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning
that he had made his own. He was versed in medicine and the law as
well as in theology. He subdued astronomy, physiology, and
geography to the needs of poetry. Nine Muses were not enough for
him, even though they included Urania. He called in to their aid
Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and the springs
for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the
library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the
works of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with
whom London may almost be said to have been peopled during his
lifetime. I do not think his verse or correspondence contains a
single reference to Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being
born only nine years later. The only great Elizabethan poet whom he
seems to have regarded with interest and even friendship was Ben
Jonson. Jonson’s Catholicism may have been a link between
them. But, more important than that, Jonson was, like Donne
himself, an inflamed pedant. For each of them learning was the
necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the
classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike
ate to a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was, I
think, because Donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the
Renaissance, loving the proud things of the intellect more than the
treasures of the humble, that he found it easy to abandon the
Catholicism of his family for Protestantism. He undoubtedly became
in later life a convinced and passionate Christian of the
Protestant faith, but at the time when he first changed his
religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious convert. He
wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had liberated
from dogma-worship. Nor did he ever lose this rationalist
tolerance. “You know,” he once wrote to a friend,
“I have never imprisoned the word religion….
They” (the churches) “are all virtual beams of one
sun.” Few converts in those days of the wars of religion
wrote with such wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the
lines:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>To adore or scorn an image, or protest,</p>
<p>May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way</p>
<p>To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;</p>
<p>To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill,</p>
<p>Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will</p>
<p>Reach her, about must and about must go;</p>
<p>And what the hill’s suddenness resists win so.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood
of a theologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent
doubt, not from ardent faith.</p>
<p>It is all in keeping with one’s impression of the young
Donne as a man setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the
oceans of knowledge and experience. He travels, though he knows not
why he travels. He loves, though he knows not why he loves. He must
escape from that “hydroptic, immoderate” thirst of
experience by yielding to it. One fancies that it was in this
spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596 and
afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit, for he
himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had
something to do with it. In the second of those prematurely
realistic descriptions of storm and calm relating to the Azores
voyage, he writes:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain,</p>
<p>Or to disuse me from the queasy pain</p>
<p>Of being belov’d, and loving, or the thirst</p>
<p>Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted
most interest in recent years—the Donne who experienced more
variously than any other poet of his time “the queasy pain of
being beloved and loving.” Donne was curious of adventures of
many kinds, but in nothing more than in love. As a youth he leaves
the impression of having been an Odysseus of love, a man of many
wiles and many travels. He was a virile neurotic, comparable in
some points to Baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mind even
more than of the body. His sensibilities were different as well as
less of a piece, but he had something of Baudelaire’s taste
for hideous and shocking aspects of lust. One is not surprised to
find among his poems that “heroical epistle of Sappho to
Philaenis,” in which he makes himself the casuist of
forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, are for the
most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him more of
the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in
his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan
Swift. Donne and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They
laughed more frequently from disillusion than from happiness.
Donne, it must be admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as
well as hideous uses. <em>Go and Catch a Falling Star</em> is but
one of a series of delightful lyrics in disparagement of women. In
several of the <em>Elegies</em>, however, he throws away his lute
and comes to the satirist’s more prosaic business. He writes
frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Whoever loves, if he do not propose</p>
<p>The right true end of love, he’s one that goes</p>
<p>To sea for nothing but to make him sick.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>In <em>Love Progress</em> he lets his fancy dwell on the
detailed geography of a woman’s body, with the sick
imagination of a schoolboy, till the beautiful seems almost
beastly. In <em>The Anagram</em> and <em>The Comparison</em> he
plays the Yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses
in insulting two of them. In <em>The Perfume</em> he relates the
story of an intrigue with a girl whose father discovered his
presence in the house as a result of his using scent. Donne’s
jest about it is suggestive of his uncontrollable passion for
ugliness:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought</p>
<p>That his own feet, or breath, that smell had brought.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>It may be contended that in <em>The Perfume</em> he was
describing an imaginary experience, and indeed we have his own
words on record: “I did best when I had least truth for my
subjects.” But even if we did not accept Mr. Gosse’s
common-sense explanation of these words, we should feel that the
details of the story have a vividness that springs straight from
reality. It is difficult to believe that Donne had not actually
lived in terror of the gigantic manservant who was set to spy on
the lovers:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The grim eight-foot-high iron-bound serving-man</p>
<p>That oft names God in oaths, and only then;</p>
<p>He that to bar the first gate doth as wide</p>
<p>As the great Rhodian Colossus stride,</p>
<p>Which, if in hell no other pains there were,</p>
<p>Makes me fear hell, because he must be there.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>But the most interesting of all the sensual intrigues of Donne,
from the point of view of biography, especially since Mr. Gosse
gave it such commanding significance in that <em>Life of John
Donne</em> in which he made a living man out of a mummy, is that of
which we have the story in <em>Jealousy</em> and <em>His Parting
from Her</em>. It is another story of furtive and forbidden love.
Its theme is an intrigue carried on under a</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i10">Husband’s towering eyes,</p>
<p>That flamed with oily sweat of jealousy.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>A characteristic touch of grimness is added to the story by
making the husband a deformed man. Donne, however, merely laughs at
his deformity, as he bids the lady laugh at the jealousy that
reduces her to tears:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>O give him many thanks, he is courteous,</p>
<p>That in suspecting kindly warneth us.</p>
<p>We must not, as we used, flout openly,</p>
<p>In scoffing riddles, his deformity;</p>
<p>Nor at his board together being set,</p>
<p>With words nor touch scarce looks adulterate.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>And he proposes that, now that the husband seems to have
discovered them, they shall henceforth carry on their intrigue at
some distance from where</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i6">He, swol’n and pampered with great fare,</p>
<p>Sits down and snorts, cag’d in his basket chair.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>It is an extraordinary story, if it is true. It throws a
scarcely less extraordinary light on the nature of Donne’s
mind, if he invented it. At the same time, I do not think the
events it relates played the important part which Mr. Gosse assigns
to them in Donne’s spiritual biography. It is impossible to
read Mr. Gosse’s two volumes without getting the impression
that “the deplorable but eventful liaison,” as he calls
it, was the most fruitful occurrence in Donne’s life as a
poet. He discovers traces of it in one great poem after
another—even in the <em>Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s
Day</em>, which is commonly supposed to relate to the Countess of
Bedford, and in <em>The Funeral</em>, the theme of which Professor
Grierson takes to be the mother of George Herbert. I confess that
the oftener I read the poetry of Donne the more firmly I become
convinced that, far from being primarily the poet of desire
gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet of frustrated
love. He is often described by the historians of literature as the
poet who finally broke down the tradition of Platonic love. I
believe that, so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme
example of a Platonic lover among the English poets. He was usually
Platonic under protest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether
he finally overcame the more consistent Platonism of his mistress
by the impassioned logic of <em>The Ecstasy</em> we have no means
of knowing. If he did, it would be difficult to resist the
conclusion that the lady who wished to continue to be his
passionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love was Anne
More, whom he afterwards married. If not, we may look for her where
we will, whether in Magdalen Herbert (already a young widow who had
borne ten children when he first met her) or in the Countess of
Bedford or in another. The name is not important, and one is not
concerned to know it, especially when one remembers Donne’s
alarming curse on:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows</p>
<p class="i8">Who is my mistress.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>One sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover
real people in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift’s
Stella and Vanessa, and his relations to them. It is enough for us
to feel, however, that these poems railing at or glorying in
Platonic love are no mere goldsmith’s compliments, like the
rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford. Miracles of this
sort are not wrought save by the heart. We do not find in them the
underground and sardonic element that appears in so much of
Donne’s merely amorous work. We no longer picture him as a
sort of Vulcan hammering out the poetry of base love, raucous,
powerful, mocking. He becomes in them a child Apollo, as far as his
temperament will allow him. He makes music of so grave and stately
a beauty that one begins to wonder at all the critics who have
found fault with his rhythms—from Ben Jonson, who said that
“for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging,” down
to Coleridge, who declared that his “muse on dromedary
trots,” and described him as “rhyme’s sturdy
cripple.” Coleridge’s quatrain on Donne is, without
doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But
Donne rode no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus
like a master, even if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by
carrying an encyclopædia in his saddle-bags.</p>
<p>Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus,
however: he also remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour
and passion pursue each other through the labyrinth of his being,
as we find in those two beautiful poems, <em>The Relic</em> and
<em>The Funeral</em>, addressed to the lady who had given him a
bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells what will happen
if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton discovered with</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>People will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of
lovers</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>To make their souls at the last busy day</p>
<p>Meet at the grave and make a little stay.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics—the relics
of a Magdalen and her lover. He conjectures with a quiet smile:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>All women shall adore us, and some men.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>He warns his worshippers, however, that the facts are far
different from what they imagine, and tells the miracle seekers
what in reality were “the miracles we harmless lovers
wrought”:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>First we loved well and faithfully,</p>
<p>Yet knew not what we lov’d, nor why;</p>
<p>Difference of sex no more we knew</p>
<p>Than our guardian angels do;</p>
<p class="i4">Coming and going, we</p>
<p>Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;</p>
<p class="i4">Our hands ne’er touch’d the seals,</p>
<p>Which nature, injur’d by late law, sets free:</p>
<p>These miracles we did; but now, alas!</p>
<p>All measure, and all language I should pass,</p>
<p>Should I tell what a miracle she was.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>In <em>The Funeral</em> he returns to the same theme:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Whoever comes to shroud me do not harm</p>
<p class="i4">Nor question much</p>
<p>That subtle wreath of hair that crowns my arm;</p>
<p>The mystery, the sign you must not touch,</p>
<p class="i4">For ’tis my outward soul.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>In this poem, however, he finds less consolation than before in
the too miraculous nobleness of their love:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Whate’er she meant by it, bury it with me,</p>
<p class="i4">For since I am</p>
<p>Love’s martyr, it might breed idolatry,</p>
<p>If into other hands these relics came;</p>
<p class="i4">As ’twas humility</p>
<p>To afford to it all that a soul can do,</p>
<p class="i4">So, ’tis some bravery,</p>
<p>That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>In <em>The Blossom</em> he is in a still more earthly mood, and
declares that, if his mistress remains obdurate, he will return to
London, where he will find a mistress:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>As glad to have my body as my mind.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p><em>The Primrose</em> is another appeal for a less intellectual
love:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i10">Should she</p>
<p>Be more than woman, she would get above</p>
<p>All thought of sex, and think to move</p>
<p>My heart to study her, and not to love.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>If we turn back to <em>The Undertaking</em>, however, we find
Donne boasting once more of the miraculous purity of a love which
it would be useless to communicate to other men, since, there being
no other mistress to love in the same kind, they “would love
but as before.” Hence he will keep the tale a secret:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>If, as I have, you also do,</p>
<p class="i2">Virtue attir’d in woman see,</p>
<p>And dare love that, and say so too,</p>
<p class="i2">And forget the He and She.</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>And if this love, though placed so,</p>
<p class="i2">From profane men you hide,</p>
<p>Which will no faith on this bestow,</p>
<p class="i2">Or, if they do, deride:</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>Then you have done a braver thing</p>
<p class="i2">Than all the Worthies did;</p>
<p>And a braver thence will spring,</p>
<p class="i2">Which is, to keep that hid.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that
it is useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to
love. His poems take us round the entire compass of love as the
work of no other English poet—not even, perhaps,
Browning’s—does. He was by destiny the complete
experimentalist in love in English literature. He passed through
phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase
of the love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect
marriage. In his youth he was a gay—but was he ever really
gay?—free-lover, who sang jestingly:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>How happy were our sires in ancient time,</p>
<p>Who held plurality of loves no crime!</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>But even then he looks forward, not with cynicism, to a time
when he</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Shall not so easily be to change dispos’d,</p>
<p>Nor to the arts of several eyes obeying;</p>
<p>But beauty with true worth securely weighing,</p>
<p>Which, being found assembled in some one,</p>
<p>We’ll love her ever, and love her alone.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>By the time he writes <em>The Ecstasy</em> the victim of the
body has become the protesting victim of the soul. He cries out
against a love that is merely an ecstatic friendship:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>But O alas, so long, so far,</p>
<p>Our bodies why do we forbear?</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is
not the enemy but the companion of the soul:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Soul into the soul may flow</p>
<p class="i4">Though it to body first repair.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with
greater intellectual vehemence:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>So must pure lovers’ souls descend</p>
<p class="i2">T’ affections and to faculties,</p>
<p>Which sense may reach and apprehend,</p>
<p class="i2">Else a great Prince in prison lies.</p>
<p>To our bodies turn we then, that so</p>
<p class="i2">Weak men on love reveal’d may look;</p>
<p>Love’s mysteries in souls do grow</p>
<p class="i2">But yet the body is the book.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this
passionate verse—verse in which we find the quintessence of
Donne’s genius—was a mere utterance of abstract
thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been pointed out, was more
than most writers a poet of personal experience. His greatest
poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of
the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in
the history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal
importance to his meeting with the lady who first set going in his
brain that fevered dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he
been less of a frustrated lover, less of a martyr, in whom
love’s</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i10">Art did express</p>
<p>A quintessence even from nothingness,</p>
<p>From dull privations and lean emptiness,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have
been written.</p>
<p>One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of
Donne’s genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were
not, with some unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime.
He did not arrange them in chronological or in any sort of order.
His poem on the flea that has bitten both him and his inamorata
comes after the triumphant <em>Anniversary</em>, and but a page or
two before the <em>Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day</em>. Hence
there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to the
Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for
the enrichment of his genius. Such a poem as <em>The
Canonisation</em> can be interpreted either in a Platonic sense or
as a poem written to Anne More, who was to bring him both
imprisonment and the liberty of love. It is, in either case,
written in defence of his love against some who censured him for
it:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>For God’s sake, hold your tongue, and let me love.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love
cannot be measured by the standards of the vulgar:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>We can die by it, if not live by love,</p>
<p class="i2">And if unfit for tombs or hearse</p>
<p>Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;</p>
<p class="i2">And, if no piece of chronicle we prove,</p>
<p class="i4">We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;</p>
<p class="i4">As well a well-wrought urn becomes</p>
<p>The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs,</p>
<p class="i4">And by these hymns all shall approve</p>
<p class="i4">Us canoniz’d by love:</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>And thus invoke us: “You whom reverend love</p>
<p class="i2">Made one another’s hermitage;</p>
<p>You to whom love was peace, that now is rage;</p>
<p class="i2">Who did the whole world’s soul contract and
drove</p>
<p class="i4">Into the glasses of your eyes</p>
<p class="i4">(So made such mirrors, and such spies,</p>
<p>That they did all to you epitomize),</p>
<p class="i4">Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above</p>
<p class="i4">A pattern of your love!”</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the
beautiful verses beginning:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Sweetest love, I do not go</p>
<p class="i6">For weariness of thee;</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>as well as the series of <em>Valedictions</em>. Of many of the
other love-poems, however, we can measure the intensity but not
guess the occasion. All that we can say with confidence when we
have read them is that, after we have followed one tributary on
another leading down to the ultimate Thames of his genius, we know
that his progress as a lover was a progress from infidelity to
fidelity, from wandering amorousness to deep and enduring passion.
The image that is finally stamped on his greatest work is not that
of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist of love. It is true that
there is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to have led even Sir
Thomas Browne to think of Donne’s verse rather as a
confession of his sins than as a golden book of love.
Browne’s quaint poem, <em>To the deceased Author, before the
Promiscuous printing of his Poems, the Looser Sort, with the
Religious</em>, is so little known that it may be quoted in full as
the expression of one point of view in regard to Donne’s
work:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>When thy loose raptures, Donne, shall meet with those</p>
<p class="i4">That do confine</p>
<p class="i4">Tuning unto the duller line,</p>
<p>And sing not but in sanctified prose,</p>
<p class="i4">How will they, with sharper eyes,</p>
<p class="i4">The foreskin of thy fancy circumcise,</p>
<p>And fear thy wantonness should now begin</p>
<p>Example, that hath ceased to be sin!</p>
<p class="i4">And that fear fans their heat; whilst knowing
eyes</p>
<p class="i8">Will not admire</p>
<p class="i8">At this strange fire</p>
<p class="i4">That here is mingled with thy sacrifice,</p>
<p class="i8">But dare read even thy wanton story</p>
<p class="i8">As thy confession, not thy glory;</p>
<p>And will so envy both to future times,</p>
<p>That they would buy thy goodness with thy crimes.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there
is as much divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of
the religious ones. Donne’s last word as a secular poet may
well be regarded as having been uttered in that great poem in
celebration of lasting love, <em>The Anniversary</em>, which closes
with so majestic a sweep:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Here upon earth we are kings, and none but we</p>
<p>Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.</p>
<p>Who is so safe as we, where none can do</p>
<p>Treason to us, except one of us two?</p>
<p class="i4">True and false fears let us refrain;</p>
<p>Let us love nobly, and live, and add again</p>
<p>Years and years unto years, till we attain</p>
<p>To write three-score: this is the second of our reign.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Donne’s conversion as a lover was obviously as complete
and revolutionary as his conversion in religion.</p>
<p>It is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate
religion. When his marriage with Sir George More’s
sixteen-year-old daughter brought him at first only imprisonment
and poverty, he summed up the sorrows of the situation in the
famous line—a line which has some additional interest as
suggesting the correct pronunciation of his name:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>His married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries
due to ill-health, debt and thwarted ambition, seems to have been
happy beyond prophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his
wife died in childbed, after having borne him twelve children, a
religious crisis resulted that turned his conventional
churchmanship into sanctity. His original change from Catholicism
to Protestantism has been already mentioned. Most of the
authorities are agreed, however, that this was a conversion in a
formal rather than in a spiritual sense. Even when he took Holy
Orders in 1615, at the age of forty-two, he appears to have done so
less in answer to any impulse to a religious life from within than
because, with the downfall of Somerset, all hope of advancement
through his legal attainments was brought to an end. Undoubtedly,
as far back as 1612, he had thought of entering the Church. But we
find him at the end of 1613 writing an epithalamium for the
murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is a curious fact that three
great poets—Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion—appear,
though innocently enough, in the story of the Countess of
Essex’s sordid crime. Donne’s temper at the time is
still clearly that of a man of the world. His jest at the expense
of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower, is the jest of an
ungenerous worldling. Even after his admission into the Church he
reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess of
Bedford, in trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no
more than £30 to pay his debts. The truth is, to be forty and
a failure is an affliction that might sour even a healthy nature.
The effect on a man of Donne’s ambitious and melancholy
temperament, together with the memory of his dissipated health and
his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a long family in
constant process of increase, must have been disastrous. To such a
man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were to
Swift. One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing
less and less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in
them some volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped
through the bars and sung above the ground. Donne and Swift were
morbid men suffering from claustrophobia. They were pent and
imprisoned spirits, hating the walls that seemed to threaten to
close in on them and crush them. In his poems and letters Donne is
haunted especially by three images—the hospital, the prison,
and the grave. Disease, I think, preyed on his mind even more
terrifyingly than warped ambition. “Put all the miseries that
man is subject to together,” he exclaims in one of the
passages in that luxuriant anthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith
has made from the <em>Sermons</em>; “sickness is more than
all …. In poverty I lack but other things; in banishment I
lack but other men; but in sickness I lack myself.” Walton
declares that it was from consumption that Donne suffered; but he
had probably the seeds of many diseases. In some of his letters he
dwells miserably on the symptoms of his illnesses. At one time, his
sickness “hath so much of a cramp that it wrests the sinews,
so much of tetane that it withdraws and pulls the mouth, and so
much of the gout … that it is not like to be cured….
I shall,” he adds, “be in this world, like a porter in
a great house, but seldomest abroad; I shall have many things to
make me weary, and yet not get leave to be gone.” Even after
his conversion he felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details
of his ill-health. Those amazing records which he wrote while lying
ill in bed in October, 1623, give us a realistic study of a
sick-bed and its circumstances, the gloom of which is hardly even
lightened by his odd account of the disappearance of his sense of
taste: “My taste is not gone away, but gone up to sit at
David’s table; my stomach is not gone, but gone upwards
toward the Supper of the Lamb.” “I am mine own
ghost,” he cries, “and rather affright my beholders
than interest them…. Miserable and inhuman fortune, when I
must practise my lying in the grave by lying still.”</p>
<p>It does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by
wretchedness and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily
corruptions was often tempted, by “a sickly
inclination,” to commit suicide, and that he even wrote,
though he did not dare to publish, an apology for suicide on
religious grounds, his famous and little-read <em>Biathanatos</em>.
The family crest of the Donnes was a sheaf of snakes, and these
symbolize well enough the brood of temptations that twisted about
in this unfortunate Christian’s bosom. Donne, in the days of
his salvation, abandoned the family crest for a new
one—Christ crucified on an anchor. But he might well have
left the snakes writhing about the anchor. He remained a tempted
man to the end. One wishes that the <em>Sermons</em> threw more
light on his later personal life than they do. But perhaps that is
too much to expect of sermons. There is no form of literature less
personal except a leading article. The preacher usually regards
himself as a mouthpiece rather than a man giving expression to
himself. In the circumstances what surprises us is that the
<em>Sermons</em> reveal, not so little, but so much of Donne.
Indeed, they make us feel far more intimate with Donne than do his
private letters, many of which are little more than exercises in
composition. As a preacher, no less than as a poet, he is inflamed
by the creative heat. He shows the same vehemence of fancy in the
presence of the divine and infernal universe—a vehemence that
prevents even his most far-sought extravagances from disgusting us
as do the lukewarm follies of the Euphuists. Undoubtedly the modern
reader smiles when Donne, explaining that man can be an enemy of
God as the mouse can be an enemy to the elephant, goes on to speak
of “God who is not only a multiplied elephant, millions of
elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied world, a multiplied
all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite many times over; nay
(if we may dare to say so) a multiplied God, a God that hath the
millions of the heathens’ gods in Himself alone.” But
at the same time one finds oneself taking a serious pleasure in the
huge sorites of quips and fancies in which he loves to present the
divine argument. Nine out of ten readers of the <em>Sermons</em>, I
imagine, will be first attracted to them through love of the poems.
They need not be surprised if they do not immediately enjoy them.
The dust of the pulpit lies on them thickly enough. As one goes on
reading them, however, one becomes suddenly aware of their florid
and exiled beauty. One sees beyond their local theology to the
passion of a great suffering artist. Here are sentences that
express the Paradise, the Purgatory, and the Hell of John
Donne’s soul. A noble imagination is at work—a
grave-digging imagination, but also an imagination that is at home
among the stars. One can open Mr. Pearsall Smith’s anthology
almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passage which gives
us a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror and hope
that was Donne’s contribution to the art of prose. Listen to
this, for example, from a sermon preached in St. Paul’s in
January, 1626:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Let me wither and wear out mine age in a discomfortable, in an
unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my
bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth with the beggary
of mine age; let me wither in a spittle under sharp, and foul, and
infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth
with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if God withdraw not his
spiritual blessings, his grace, his patience, if I can call my
suffering his doing, my passion his action, all this that is
temporal, is but a caterpillar got into one corner of my garden,
but a mildew fallen upon one acre of my corn: the body of all, the
substance of all is safe, so long as the soul is safe.</p>
</div>
<p>The self-contempt with which his imagination loved to intoxicate
itself finds more lavish expression in a passage in a sermon
delivered on Easter Sunday two years later:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>When I consider what I was in my parents’ loins (a
substance unworthy of a word, unworthy of a thought), when I
consider what I am now (a volume of diseases bound up together; a
dry cinder, if I look for natural, for radical moisture; and yet a
sponge, a bottle of overflowing Rheums, if I consider accidental;
an aged child, a grey-headed infant, and but the ghost of mine own
youth), when I consider what I shall be at last, by the hand of
death, in my grave (first, but putrefaction, and, not so much as
putrefaction; I shall not be able to send forth so much as ill air,
not any air at all, but shall be all insipid, tasteless,
savourless, dust; for a while, all worms, and after a while, not so
much as worms, sordid, senseless, nameless dust), when I consider
the past, and present, and future state of this body, in this
world, I am able to conceive, able to express the worst that can
befall it in nature, and the worst that can be inflicted on it by
man, or fortune. But the least degree of glory that God hath
prepared for that body in heaven, I am not able to express, not
able to conceive.</p>
</div>
<p>Excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final
beauty which we expect in a work of art; and the reader of
Donne’s <em>Sermons</em> in their latest form will be wise if
he comes to them expecting to find beauty piecemeal and tarnished
though in profusion. He will be wise, too, not to expect too many
passages of the same intimate kind as that famous confession in
regard to prayer which Mr. Pearsall Smith quotes, and which no
writer on Donne can afford not to quote:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite
God, and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God
and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a
coach, for the whining of a door. I talk on, in the same posture of
praying; eyes lifted up; knees bowed down; as though I prayed to
God; and, if God, or his Angels should ask me, when I thought last
of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I had
forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot
tell. A memory of yesterday’s pleasures, a fear of
to-morrow’s dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine
ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a
chimera in my brain troubles me in my prayer.</p>
</div>
<p>If Donne had written much prose in this kind, his
<em>Sermons</em> would be as famous as the writings of any of the
saints since the days of the Apostles.</p>
<p>Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters
whose personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us
into a thousand bays and creeks and river-mouths, to the same
degree as the personality that expressed itself in the poems,
sermons, and life of John Donne. It is a mysterious and at times
repellent island. It lies only intermittently in the sun. A fog
hangs around its coast, and at the base of its most radiant
mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp. There
are jewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its
surface, and by miners in the dark. It is richer, indeed, in jewels
and precious metals and curious ornaments than in flowers. The
shepherd on the hillside seldom tells his tale uninterrupted.
Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal deities that delight in
death are practised in hidden places, and the echo of these reaches
him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even as he looks
at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. The chief
figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is, no
doubt, Walton’s story of the last days of Donne’s life
that makes us, as we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so
aware of this ghostly apparition. Donne, it will be remembered,
almost on the eve of his death, dressed himself in a winding-sheet,
“tied with knots at his head and feet,” and stood on a
wooden urn with his eyes shut, and “with so much of the sheet
turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like
face,” while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral
monument. He then had the picture placed at his bedside, to which
he summoned his friends and servants in order to bid them farewell.
As he lay awaiting death, he said characteristically, “I were
miserable if I might not die,” and then repeatedly, in a
faint voice, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.” At
the very end he lost his speech, and “as his soul ascended
and his last breath departed from him he closed his eyes, and then
disposed his hands and body into such a posture as required not the
least alteration by those that came to shroud him.” It was a
strange chance that preserved his spectral monument almost
uninjured when St. Paul’s was burned down in the Great Fire,
and no other monument in the cathedral escaped. Among all his
fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than
this last fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all
respects a fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which
he wrote eight days before the end, tricked out with queer
geography, and so anciently egoistic amid its worship, as in the
verse:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Whilst my physicians by their love are grown</p>
<p class="i2">Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie</p>
<p>Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown</p>
<p class="i2">That this is my south-west discovery,</p>
<p class="i2"><em>Per fretum febris</em>, by these straits to
die.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and
his God. Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater
altitudes, but none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such
out-of-the-way places, now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and
now in the exultation of the first man in a new found land.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Walpole" name="Walpole">V.—Horace Walpole</SPAN><sup>1</sup></h2>
<p><span class="sidenote">1. <em>Letters of Horace Walpole</em>;
Oxford University Press, 16 vols., 96s. <em>Supplementary
Letters</em>, 1919; Oxford University Press, 2 vols.,
17s.</span></p>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Horace Walpole was “a dainty rogue in porcelain” who
walked badly. In his best days, as he records in one of his
letters, it was said of him that he “tripped like a
pewit.” “If I do not flatter myself,” he wrote
when he was just under sixty, “my march at present is more
like a dab-chick’s.” A lady has left a description of
him entering a room, “knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if
afraid of a wet floor.” When his feet were not swollen with
the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he “could dance
a minuet on a silver penny.” He was ridiculously lean, and
his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease. An invalid, a
caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed in spite
of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has
nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of
almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a beau.
He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a
china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and
regarded everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke
that could not be helped. He warmed into humanity in his
friendships and in his defence of the house of Walpole; but if he
descended from his mantelpiece, it was more likely to be in order
to feed a squirrel than to save an empire. His most common image of
the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime ministers, and men
of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George II. died, he
wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: “Dear Brand—You
love laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to
town?” That represents his measure of things. Those who love
laughing will laugh all the more when they discover that, a week
earlier, Walpole had written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the
language of the bended knee, begging Lord Bute to be allowed to
kiss the Prince of Wales’s hand. His attitude to the Court he
described to George Montagu as “mixing extreme politeness
with extreme indifference.” His politeness, like his
indifference, was but play at the expense of a solemn world.
“I wrote to Lord Bute,” he informed Montagu;
“thrust all the <em>unexpecteds, want of ambition,
disinterestedness, etc.</em>, that I could amass, gilded with as
much duty, affection, zeal, etc., as possible.” He frankly
professed relief that he had not after all to go to Court and act
out the extravagant compliments he had written. “Was ever so
agreeable a man as King George the Second,” he wrote,
“to die the very day it was necessary to save me from
ridicule?” “For my part,” he adds later in the
same spirit, “my man Harry will always be a favourite; he
tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the late Prince
of Wales’s death, and to-day of the King’s.” It
is not that Walpole was a republican of the school of Plutarch. He
was merely a toy republican who enjoyed being insolent at the
expense of kings, and behind their backs. He was scarcely capable
of open rudeness in the fashion of Beau Brummell’s
“Who’s your fat friend?” His ridicule was never a
public display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was
the greatest private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he
ridiculed the great, as people say, for the love of diversion.
“I always write the thoughts of the moment,” he told
the dearest of his friends, Conway, “and even laugh to divert
the person I am writing to, without any ill will on the subjects I
mention.” His letters are for the most part those of a
good-natured man.</p>
<p>It is not that he was above the foible—it was barely more
than that—of hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies
of his own, but he never could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert
Walpole. His ridicule of the Duke of Newcastle goes far beyond
diversion. It is the baiting of a mean and treacherous animal,
whose teeth were “tumbling out,” and whose mouth was
“tumbling in.” He rejoices in the exposure of the
dribbling indignity of the Duke, as when he describes him going to
Court on becoming Prime Minister in 1754:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for
the first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down;
the yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms.
When the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the
King’s feet, sobbed, and cried, “God bless your
Majesty! God preserve your Majesty!” and lay there howling,
embracing the King’s knees, with one foot so extended that my
Lord Coventry, who was <em>luckily</em> in waiting, and begged the
standers-by to retire, with, “For God’s sake,
gentlemen, don’t look at a great man in distress!”
endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace’s foot, and
made him roar with pain.</p>
</div>
<p>The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the
description of George II.’s funeral in the Abbey, in which
the “burlesque Duke” is introduced as comic relief into
the solemn picture:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel,
and flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him
with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the
better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass
to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping
his eyes with the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold;
and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself
weighed down, and turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle
standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble.</p>
</div>
<p>Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in
his persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a
ball at Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the
pitiful old creature, who “wriggled, and shuffled, and
lisped, and winked, and spied” his way through the company,
with a conversation at his expense carried on in stage whispers.
There was never a more loyal son than Horace Walpole. He offered up
a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at Sir Robert’s
tomb.</p>
<p>At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part
of a family inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of
men and women outside the circle of his affections. It was his
first instinct to disparage. He even described his great friend
Madame du Deffand, at the first time of meeting her, as “an
old blind débauchée of wit.” His comments on
the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a vein of
satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, of
Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he
found “silly”; he was “an idiot with once or
twice a fit of parts.” Boswell’s <em>Tour of the
Hebrides</em> was “the story of a mountebank and his
zany.” Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson
owing to the criticism of Gray in the <em>Lives of the Poets</em>.
He would not even, when Johnson died, subscribe to a monument. A
circular letter asking for a subscription was sent to him, signed
by Burke, Boswell, and Reynolds. “I would not deign to write
an answer,” Walpole told the Miss Berrys, “but sent
down word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers
with a brief, that I would not subscribe.” Walpole does not
appear in this incident the “sweet-tempered creature”
he had earlier claimed to be. His pose is that of a schoolgirl in a
cutting mood. At the same time his judgment of Johnson has an
element of truth in it. “Though he was good-natured at
bottom,” he said of him, “he was very ill-natured at
top.” It has often been said of Walpole that, in his attitude
to contemporary men of genius, he was influenced mainly by their
position in Society—that he regarded an author who was not a
gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author. This is hardly
fair. The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was Gray, the
son of a money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
any more than Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it was
more likely to be owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than
to an aristocratic distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism
was the lowest of low life. It was certainly Fielding’s
Bohemianism that disgusted him. He relates how two of his friends
called on Fielding one evening and found him “banqueting with
a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a
bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth.”
Horace Walpole’s daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an
author who did not know how to sup decently. If he found
Boswell’s <em>Johnson</em> tedious, it was no doubt partly
due to his inability to reconcile himself to Johnson’s table
manners. It can hardly be denied that he was unnaturally sensitive
to surface impressions. He was a great observer of manners, but not
a great portrayer of character. He knew men in their absurd actions
rather than in their motives—even their absurd motives. He
never admits us into the springs of action in his portraits as
Saint-Simon does. He was too studied a believer in the puppetry of
men and women to make them more than ridiculous. And unquestionably
the vain race of authors lent itself admirably to his love of
caricature. His account of the vanity of Gibbon, whose history he
admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in playing
with an egoistic author as with a trout:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>You will be diverted to hear that Mr. Gibbon has quarrelled with
me. He lent me his second volume in the middle of November. I
returned it with a most civil panegyric. He came for more incense.
I gave it, but, alas, with too much sincerity! I added, “Mr.
Gibbon, I am sorry <em>you</em> should have pitched on so
disgusting a subject as the Constantinopolitan History. There is so
much of the Arians and Eumonians, and semi-Pelagians; and there is
such a strange contrast between Roman and Gothic manners, and so
little harmony between a Consul Sabinus and a Ricimer, Duke of the
palace, that though you have written the story as well as it could
be written, I fear few will have patience to read it.” He
coloured; all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp
angles; he screwed up his button mouth, and rapping his snuff-box,
said, “It had never been put together
before”—<em>so well</em> he meant to add—but
gulped it. He meant <em>so well</em> certainly, for Tillemont, whom
he quotes in every page, has done the very thing. Well, from that
hour to this I have never seen him, though he used to call once or
twice a week; nor has he sent me the third volume, as he promised.
I well knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person,
but thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably.</p>
</div>
<p>“So much,” he concludes, “for literature and
its fops.” The comic spirit leans to an under-estimate rather
than an over-estimate of human nature, and the airs the authors
gave themselves were not only a breach of his code, but an
invitation to his contempt. “You know,” he once wrote,
“I shun authors, and would never have been one myself if it
obliged me to keep such bad company. They are always in earnest and
think their profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and
reverence learning. I laugh at all these things, and write only to
laugh at them and divert myself. None of us are authors of any
consequence, and it is the most ridiculous of all vanities to be
vain of being <em>mediocre.”</em> He followed the Chinese
school of manners and made light of his own writings. “What
have I written,” he asks, “that was worth remembering,
even by myself?” “It would be affected,” he tells
Gray, “to say I am indifferent to fame. I certainly am not,
but I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to acquire it.
The greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they are, as
you say, incorrect when they were commonly written with people in
the room.”</p>
<p>It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself,
Walpole was merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere
enough. He had a sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by
his reverence of Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not
to see that his own writings at their best were trifles beside the
monuments of the poets. He felt that he was doing little things in
a little age. He was diffident both for his times and for himself.
So difficult do some writers find it to believe that there was any
deep genuineness in him that they ask us to regard even his
enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence. They do not realize
that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was an
enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion. His
airs and graces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure
in wearing a mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable, and only
withdrew into, the similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes into
his tub, through philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who are
tolerable are those whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our
interest in character is largely an interest in contradictions of
this kind. The beau capable of breaking into excitement awakens our
curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a humane action, the
Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the pacifist in a rage
of violence. The average man, whom one knows superficially, is a
formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. That is why we
find him dull. The characters who interest us in history and
literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to
the formulae we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They
give us pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It
seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole’s air of
indifference as the only real thing about him and to question his
raptures. From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to
his senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we
see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his
sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his
sensations like an æsthete. He wrote of himself as “I,
who am as constant at a fire as George Selwyn at an
execution.” If he cared for the crownings of kings and such
occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in the
fireworks and illuminations.</p>
<p>He had the keen spirit of a masquerader. Masquerades, he
declared, were “one of my ancient passions,” and we
find him as an elderly man dressing out “a thousand young
Conways and Cholmondeleys” for an entertainment of the kind,
and going “with more pleasure to see them pleased than when I
formerly delighted in that diversion myself.” He was equally
an enthusiast in his hobbies and his tastes. He rejoiced to get
back in May to Strawberry Hill, “where my two passions,
lilacs and nightingales, are in bloom.” He could not have
made his collections or built his battlements in a mood of
indifference. In his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself
a Goth-intoxicated man. As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result
may have been a ridiculous mouse, but it took a mountain of
enthusiasm to produce it. Walpole’s own description of his
house and its surroundings has an exquisite charm that almost makes
one love the place as he did. “It is a little plaything
house,” he told Conway, “that I got out of Mrs.
Chenevix’s shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It
is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>“A small Euphrates through the piece is roll’d,</p>
<p>And little finches wave their wings in gold.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>He goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful
properties:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Two delightful roads that you would call dusty supply me
continually with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as barons of
the exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham-walks
bound my prospect; but, thank God, the Thames is between me and the
Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all
around, and Pope’s ghost is just now skimming under my window
by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such
a farm as Noah’s when he set up in the Ark with a pair of
each kind.</p>
</div>
<p>It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination
into playing with a Noah’s Ark that he describes his queer
house. It is in this spirit that he sees the fields around his
house “speckled with cows, horses and sheep.” The very
phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared at the age of
seventy-three: “My best wisdom has consisted in forming a
baby-house full of playthings for my second childhood.” That
explains why one almost loves the creature. Macaulay has severely
censured him for devoting himself to the collection of
knick-knacks, such as King William III.’s spurs, and it is
apparently impossible to defend Walpole as a collector to be taken
seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy
as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself quite
seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up
Magna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the warrant for the
execution of King Charles I., on which he had written “Major
Charta.” Who can question the fantastic quality of the mind
that wrote to Conway: “Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor
you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my new divine closet, nor the
billiard-sticks with which the Countess of Pembroke and Arcadia
used to play with her brother, Sir Philip,” and ended:
“I never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old
ward-robe there still? There was one from the time of Cain, but
Adam’s breeches and Eve’s under-petticoat were eaten by
a goat in the ark. Good-night.” He laughed over the
knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends. “As to
snuff-boxes and toothpick cases,” he wrote to the Countess of
Ossory from Paris in 1771, “the vintage has entirely failed
this year.” Everything that he turned his mind to in
Strawberry Hill he regarded in the same spirit of comic delight. He
stood outside himself, like a spectator, and nothing gave him more
pleasure than to figure himself as a master of the ceremonies among
the bantams, and the squirrels and the goldfish. In one of his
letters he describes himself and Bentley fishing in the pond for
goldfish with “nothing but a pail and a basin and a
tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese
method.” This was in order to capture some of the fish for
Bentley, who “carried a dozen to town t’other day in a
decanter.” Walpole is similarly amused by the spectacle of
himself as a planter and gardener. “I have made great
progress,” he boasts, “and talk very learnedly with the
nursery-men, except that now and then a lettuce runs to seed,
overturns all my botany, and I have more than once taken it for a
curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the deliberation with
which trees grow is extremely inconvenient to my natural
impatience.” He goes on enviously to imagine the discovery by
posterity of a means of transplanting oaks of a hundred and fifty
years as easily as tulip-bulbs. This leads him to enlarge upon the
wonders that the Horace Walpole of posterity will be able to
possess when the miraculous discoveries have been made.</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds,
tatne tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to
see all that is doing in China, and a thousand other toys, which we
now look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would
laugh in our face for staring at.</p>
</div>
<p>Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround
himself, it is impossible to forget either the little black
spaniel, Tony, that the wolf carried off near a wood in the Alps
during his first travels, or the more imperious little dog, Tonton,
which he has constantly to prevent from biting people at Madame du
Deffand’s, but which with Madame du Deffand herself
“grows the greater favourite the more people he
devours.” “T’other night,” writes Walpole,
to whom Madame du Deffand afterwards bequeathed the dog in her
will, “he flew at Lady Barrymore’s face, and I thought
would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting her finger. She
was terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand, who has too
much parts not to see everything in its true light, perceiving that
she had not beaten Tonton half enough, immediately told us a story
of a lady whose dog having bitten a piece out of a
gentleman’s leg, the tender dame, in a great fright, cried
out, ‘Won’t it make him sick?’” In the most
attractive accounts we possess of Walpole in his old age, we see
him seated at the breakfast-table, drinking tea out of “most
rare and precious ancient porcelain of Japan,” and sharing
the loaf and butter with Tonton (now grown almost too fat to move,
and spread on a sofa beside him), and afterwards going to the
window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to the squirrels in
the garden.</p>
<p>Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was
an excitable creature where small things were concerned—a
parroquet or the prospect of being able to print original letters
of Ninon de l’Enclos at Strawberry, or the discovery of a
poem by the brother of Anne Boleyn, or Ranelagh, where “the
floor is all of beaten princes.” What is not generally
realized is that he was also a high-strung and eager spectator of
the greater things. I have already spoken of his enthusiasm for
wild nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is true he
grew weary of them. “Such uncouth rocks,” he wrote,
“and such uncomely inhabitants.” “I am as
surfeited with mountains and inns as if I had eat them,” he
groaned in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was at least as
genuine as the fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves only that
there were two Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic
enthusiasms was insincere. He was a devotee of romance, but it was
romance under the control of the comic spirit. He was always amused
to have romance brought down to reality, as when, writing of Mary
Queen of Scots, he said: “I believe I have told you that, in
a very old trial of her, which I bought for Lord Oxford’s
collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Take
sentiments out of their <em>pantaufles</em>, and reduce them to the
infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is!” But
see him in the picture-gallery in his father’s old house at
Houghton, after an absence of sixteen years, and the romantic mood
is upper-most. “In one respect,” he writes, speaking of
the pictures, “I am very young; I cannot satiate myself with
looking,” and he adds, “Not a picture here but calls a
history; not one but I remember in Downing Street or Chelsea, where
queens and crowds admired them.” And, if he could not
“satiate himself with looking” at the Italian and
Flemish masters, he similarly preserved the heat of youth in his
enthusiasm for Shakespeare. “When,” he wrote, during
his dispute with Voltaire on the point, “I think over all the
great authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and English
(and I know no other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone
and then begin anew.” One is astonished to find that he was
contemptuous of Montaigne. “What signifies what a man
thought,” he wrote, “who never thought of anything but
himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did
anything?” This sentence might have served as a condemnation
of Walpole himself, and indeed he meant it so. Walpole, however,
was an egoist of an opposite kind to Montaigne. Walpole lived for
his eyes, and saw the world as a masque of bright and amusing
creatures. Montaigne studied the map of himself rather than the map
of his neighbours’ vanities. Walpole was a social being, and
not finally self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know
himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by
Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity.
Like Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in
his literary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple as
regards Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the
other hand, how foolish it is to regard him as being critically a
fashionable trifler.</p>
<p>Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything
Dionysiac in his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to
say that he was a man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering
nerves. Capricious in little things, he was faithful in great. His
warmth of nature as a son, as a friend, as a humanitarian, as a
believer in tolerance and liberty, is so unfailing that it is
curious it should ever have been brought in question by any reader
of the letters. His quarrels are negligible when put beside his
ceaseless extravagance of good humour to his friends. His letters
alone were golden gifts, but we also find him offering his fortune
to Conway when the latter was in difficulties. “I have sense
enough,” he wrote, “to have real pleasure in denying
myself baubles, and in saving a very good income to make a man
happy for whom I have a just esteem and most sincere
friendship.” “Blameable in ten thousand other
respects,” he wrote to Conway seventeen years later,
“may not I almost say I am perfect with regard to you? Since
I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?” “I
am,” he claimed towards the end of his life, “very
constant and sincere to friends of above forty years.” In his
friendships he was more eager to give than to receive. Madame du
Deffand was only dissuaded from making him her heir by his threat
that if she did so he would never visit her again. Ever since his
boyhood he was noted for his love of giving pleasure and for his
thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. The earliest of his
published letters was until recently one written at the age of
fourteen. But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of
Walpole letters, recently published, has been able to print one to
Lady Walpole written at the age of eight, which suggests that
Walpole was a delightful sort of child, incapable of forgetting a
parent, a friend, or a pet:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop
papa is wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens
like there pla things vary wall</p>
<p>and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray give my Duty to
papa.</p>
<p class="rgt"><span class="sc">Horace Walpole.</span></p>
<p>and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all
wall. and Mrs. Selwyn has sprand her Fot and givs her Sarves to you
and I dind ther yester Day.</p>
</div>
<p>At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of
friendship—the “Triumvirate,” as it was called,
which included the two Montagus, and the “Quadruple
Alliance,” in which one of his fellows was Gray. The truth
is, Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being
loved. “One loves to find people care for one,” he
wrote to Conway, “when they can have no view in it.”
His friendship in his old age for the Miss Berrys—his
“twin wifes,” his “dear Both”—to each
of whom he left an annuity of £4,000, was but a continuation
of that kindliness which ran like a stream (ruffled and sparkling
with malice, no doubt) through his long life. And his kindness was
not limited to his friends, but was at the call of children and, as
we have seen, of animals. “You know,” he explains to
Conway, apologizing for not being able to visit him on account of
the presence of a “poor little sick girl” at Strawberry
Hill, “how courteous a knight I am to distrest virgins of
five years old, and that my castle gates are always open to
them.” One does not think of Walpole primarily as a squire of
children, and certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp with
the young, there was little in him of a Dickens character. But he
was what is called “sympathetic.” He was sufficient of
a man of imagination to wish to see an end put to the sufferings of
“those poor victims, chimney-sweepers.” So far from
being a heartless person, as he has been at times portrayed, he had
a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist. This was shown in
his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a great terror of
mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all dogs found in
the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of
Strafford:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the
Russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the
innocents—one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The
dear, good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! how can
anybody hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees the English,
who desire no better than to be halloo’d to blood—one
day Samuel Byng, the next Lord George Sackville, and to-day the
poor dogs!</p>
</div>
<p>As for Walpole’s interest in politics, we are told by
writer after writer that he never took them seriously, but was
interested in them mainly for gossip’s sake. It cannot be
denied that he made no great fight for good causes while he sat in
the House of Commons. Nor had he the temper of a ruler of men. But
as a commentator on politics and a spreader of opinion in private,
he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious, humane, and
sensitive to the meaning of events. His detestation of the
arbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion. He
detested it alike in a government and in a mob. He loathed the
violence that compassed the death of Admiral Byng and the violence
that made war on America. He raged against a public world that he
believed was going to the devil. “I am not surprised,”
he wrote in 1776, “at the idea of the devil being always at
our elbows. They who invented him no doubt could not conceive how
men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention
of a fiend. Don’t you think, if he had never been heard of
before, that he would have been invented on the late partition of
Poland?” “Philosophy has a poor chance with me,”
he wrote a little later in regard to America, “when my warmth
is stirred—and yet I know that an angry old man out of
Parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous
animal.” The war against America he described as “a
wretched farce of fear daubed over with airs of bullying.”
War at any time was, in his eyes, all but the unforgivable sin. In
1781, however, his hatred had lightened into contempt. “The
Dutch fleet is hovering about,” he wrote, “but it is a
pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty
larceny.” As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in
his comment on the Wilkes riots, when he declares:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the
destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that
terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power—which cowards call out
for as protection, and knaves are so ready to grant.</p>
</div>
<p>Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded
them with an aristocrat’s scorn. The only mob that almost won
his tolerance was that which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral
Keppel in 1779. It was of the mob at this time that he wrote to the
Countess of Ossory: “They were, as George Montagu said of our
earthquakes, <em>so tame you might have stroked them</em>.”
When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out in
Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the French
with the hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce
the Bolshevists. He called them “<em>inferno-human</em>
beings,” “that atrocious and detestable nation,”
and declared that “France must be abhorred to latest
posterity.” His letters on the subject to “Holy
Hannah,” whatever else may be said against them, are not
those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They are the letters of the
same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row
had broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane
Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried
angrily from his box, “He is an impudent rascal!” But
his politics never got beyond an angry cry. His conduct in Drury
Lane was characteristic of him:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my
being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow
of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the
chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat,
and pulling off his hat, said, “Mr. Walpole, what would you
please to have us do next?” It is impossible to describe to
you the confusion into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down
into the box, and have never since ventured to set my foot into the
playhouse.</p>
</div>
<p>There you have the fable of Walpole’s life. He always in
the end sank down into his box or clambered back to his
mantelpiece. Other men might save the situation. As for him, he had
to look after his squirrels and his friends.</p>
<p>This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an
artist. He was a connoisseur of great actions, not a practicer of
them. At Strawberry Hill he could at least keep himself in
sufficient health with the aid of iced water and by not wearing a
hat when out of doors to compose the greatest works of art of their
kind that have appeared in English. Had he written his letters for
money we should have praised him as one of the busiest and most
devoted of authors, and never have thought of blaming him for
abstaining from statesmanship as he did from wine. Possibly he had
the constitution for neither. His genius was a genius, not of
Westminster, but of Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry Hill that
one finally prefers to see him framed, an extraordinarily likeable,
charming, and whimsical figure. He himself has suggested his
kingdom entrancingly for us in a letter describing his return to
Strawberry after a visit to Paris in 1769:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I feel myself here like a swan, that after living six weeks in a
nasty pool upon a common, is got back into its own Thames. I do
nothing but plume and clean myself, and enjoy the verdure and
silent waves. Neatness and greenth are so essential in my opinion
to the country, that in France, where I see nothing but chalk and
dirty peasants, I seem in a terrestrial purgatory that is neither
town or country. The face of England is so beautiful, that I do not
believe Tempe or Arcadia were half so rural; for both lying in hot
climates, must have wanted the turf of our lawns. It is unfortunate
to have so pastoral a taste, when I want a cane more than a crook.
We are absurd creatures; at twenty I loved nothing but London.</p>
</div>
<p>Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among
correspondents. One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and
men of a deeper and more imaginative tenderness. But how
incomparable he is as an acquaintance! How exquisite a
specimen—hand-painted—for the collector of the choice
creatures of the human race!</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Cowper" name="Cowper">VI.—William Cowper</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Cowper has the charm of littleness. His life and genius were on
the miniature scale, though his tragedy was a burden for Atlas. He
left several pictures of himself in his letters, all of which make
one see him as a veritable Tom Thumb among Christians. He wrote, he
tells us, at Olney, in “a summerhouse not much bigger than a
sedan-chair.” At an earlier date, when he was living at
Huntingdon, he compared himself to “a Thames wherry in a
world full of tempest and commotion,” and congratulated
himself on “the creek I have put into and the snugness it
affords me.” His very clothes suggested that he was the
inhabitant of a plaything world. “Green and buff,” he
declared, “are colours in which I am oftener seen than in any
others, and are become almost as natural to me as a parrot.”
“My thoughts,” he informed the Rev. John Newton,
“are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave as
that of a bishop’s servants”; but his body was dressed
in parrot’s colours, and his bald head was bagged or in a
white cap. If he requested one of his friends to send him anything
from town, it was usually some little thing, such as a
“genteelish toothpick case,” a handsome stock-buckle, a
new hat—“not a round slouch, which I abhor, but a smart
well-cocked fashionable affair”—or a cuckoo-clock. He
seems to have shared Wordsworth’s taste for the last of
these. Are we not told that Wordsworth died as his favourite
cuckoo-clock was striking noon? Cowper may almost be said, so far
as his tastes and travels are concerned, to have lived in a cage.
He never ventured outside England, and even of England he knew only
a few of the southern counties. “I have lived much at
Southampton,” boasted at the age of sixty, “have slept
and caught a sore throat at Lyndhurst, and have swum in the Bay of
Weymouth.” That was his grand tour. He made a journey to
Eastham, near Chichester, about the time of this boast, and
confessed that, as he drove with Mrs. Unwin over the downs by
moonlight, “I indeed myself was a little daunted by the
tremendous height of the Sussex hills in comparison of which all I
had seen elsewhere are dwarfs.” He went on a visit to some
relations on the coast of Norfolk a few years later, and, writing
to Lady Hesketh, lamented: “I shall never see Weston more. I
have been tossed like a ball into a far country, from which there
is no rebound for me.” Who but the little recluse of a little
world could think of Norfolk as a far country and shake with alarm
before the “tremendous height” of the Sussex downs?</p>
<p>“We are strange creatures, my little friend,” Cowper
once wrote to Christopher Rowley; “everything that we do is
in reality important, though half that we do seems to be
push-pin.” Here we see one of the main reasons of
Cowper’s eternal attractiveness. He played at push-pin during
most of his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the
background of doom. He trifled because he knew, if he did not
trifle, he would go mad with thinking about Heaven and Hell. He
sought in the infinitesimal a cure for the disease of brooding on
the infinite. His distractions were those not of too light, but of
too grave, a mind. If he picnicked with the ladies, it was in order
to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come. He was gay, but on
the edge of the precipice.</p>
<p>I do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to
trifling. Even in the days when he was studying law in the Temple
he dined every Thursday with six of his old school-fellows at the
Nonsense Club. His essays in Bonnell Thornton and Coleman’s
paper, <em>The Connoisseur</em>, written some time before he went
mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, lead one to believe
that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might have equalled
or surpassed Addison as a master of light prose. He was something
of the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during his first years
in a solicitor’s office, as we gather from the letter in
which he reminds Lady Hesketh how he and Thurlow used to pass the
time with her and her sister, Theodora, the object of his fruitless
love. “There was I, and the future Lord Chancellor,” he
wrote, “constantly employed from morning to night in giggling
and making giggle, instead of studying the law.” Such was his
life till the first attack of madness came at the age of
thirty-two. He had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an
ominous shock as a schoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up
by a gravedigger at St. Margaret’s rolled towards him and
struck him on the leg. Again, in his chambers in the Middle Temple,
he suffered for a time from religious melancholy, which he did his
best to combat with the aid of the poems of George Herbert. Even at
the age of twenty-three he told Robert Lloyd in a rhymed epistle
that he “addressed the muse,” not in order to show his
genius or his wit,</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>But to divert a fierce banditti</p>
<p>(Sworn foe to everything that’s witty)</p>
<p>That, in a black infernal train,</p>
<p>Make cruel inroads in my brain,</p>
<p>And daily threaten to drive thence</p>
<p>My little garrison of sense.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>It was not till after his release from the St. Alban’s
madhouse in his thirties, however, that he began to build a little
new world of pleasures on the ruins of the old. He now set himself
of necessity to the task of creating a refuge within sight of the
Cross, where he could live, in his brighter moments, a sort of
Epicurean of evangelical piety. He was a damned soul that must
occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still deeper in the
process. His round of recreation, it must be admitted, was for the
most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seeker
quail worse than any inferno of miseries. Only a nature of peculiar
sweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and
hymns in which Cowper learned to be happy in the Unwins’
Huntingdon home. Breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and
nine. Then, “till eleven, we read either the Scripture, or
the sermons of some faithful preacher of those holy
mysteries.” Church was at eleven. After that he was at
liberty to read, walk, ride, or work in the garden till the three
o’clock dinner. Then to the garden, “where with Mrs.
Unwin and her son I have generally the pleasure of religious
conversation till tea-time.” After tea came a four-mile walk,
and “at night we read and converse, as before, till supper,
and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon; and
last of all the family are called to prayers.” In those days,
it may be, evangelical religion had some of the attractions of a
new discovery. Theories of religion were probably as exciting a
theme of discussion in the age of Wesley as theories of art and
literature in the age of cubism and <em>vers libre</em>. One has to
remember this in order to be able to realize that, as Cowper said,
“such a life as this is consistent with the utmost
cheerfulness.” He unquestionably found it so, and, when the
Rev. Morley Unwin was killed as the result of a fall from his
horse, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin moved to Olney in order to enjoy
further evangelical companionship in the neighbourhood of the Rev.
John Newton, the converted slave-trader, who was curate in that
town. At Olney Cowper added at once to his terrors of Hell and to
his amusements. For the terrors, Newton, who seems to have wielded
the Gospel as fiercely as a slaver’s whip, was largely
responsible. He had earned a reputation for “preaching people
mad,” and Cowper, tortured with shyness, was even subjected
to the ordeal of leading in prayer at gatherings of the faithful.
Newton, however, was a man of tenderness, humour, and literary
tastes, as well as of a somewhat savage piety. He was not only
Cowper’s tyrant, but Cowper’s nurse, and, in setting
Cowper to write the Olney Hymns, he gave a powerful impulse to a
talent hitherto all but hidden. At the same time, when, as a result
of the too merciless flagellation of his parishioners on the
occasion of some Fifth of November revels, Newton was attacked by a
mob and driven out of Olney, Cowper undoubtedly began to breathe
more freely. Even under the eye of Newton, however, Cowper could
enjoy his small pleasures, and we have an attractive picture of him
feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons every morning on the gravel
walk in the garden. He shared with Newton his amusements as well as
his miseries. We find him in 1780 writing to the departed Newton to
tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener. “I
draw,” he said, “mountains, valleys, woods, and
streams, and ducks, and dab-chicks.” He represents himself in
this lively letter as a Christian lover of baubles, rather to the
disadvantage of lovers of baubles who are not Christians:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and
viewed without a reference to their author, what is the
earth—what are the planets—what is the sun itself but a
bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them
with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he
beholds, than not to be able to say, “The Maker of all these
wonders is my friend!” Their eyes have never been opened to
see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they
are closed for ever. They think a fine estate, a large
conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of
consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten
times more. I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful
whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing;
amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute’s gardener
could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid
it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to
myself: “This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the
present; I must leave it soon.”</p>
</div>
<p>In this and the following year we find him turning his thoughts
more and more frequently to writing as a means of forgetting
himself. “The necessity of amusement,” he wrote to Mrs.
Unwin’s clergyman son, “makes me sometimes write
verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, a gardener; and
has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with …
surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance
of it two months ago.” His impulse towards writing verses,
however, was an impulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning
imagination. “I have no more right to the name of
poet,” he once said, “than a maker of mouse-traps has
to that of an engineer…. Such a talent in verse as mine is
like a child’s rattle—very entertaining to the trifler
that uses it, and very disagreeable to all beside.”
“Alas,” he wrote in another letter, “what can I
do with my wit? I have not enough to do great things with, and
these little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at
the subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke. I must do with
it as I do with my linnet; I keep him for the most part in a cage,
but now and then set open the door, that he may whisk about the
room a little, and then shut him up again.” It may be doubted
whether, if subjects had not been imposed on him from without, he
would have written much save in the vein of “dear Mat
Prior’s easy jingle” or the Latin trifles of Vincent
Bourne, of whom Cowper said: “He can speak of a magpie or a
cat in terms so exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws
that one would suppose him animated by the spirit of the creature
he describes.”</p>
<p>Cowper was not to be allowed to write, except occasionally, on
magpies and cats. Mrs. Unwin, who took a serious view of the
poet’s art, gave him as a subject <em>The Progress of
Error</em>, and is thus mainly responsible for the now little-read
volume of moral satires, with which he began his career as a poet
at the age of fifty in 1782. It is not a book that can be read with
unmixed, or even with much, delight. It seldom rises above a good
man’s rhetoric. Cowper, instead of writing about himself and
his pets, and his cucumber-frames, wrote of the wicked world from
which he had retired, and the vices of which he could not attack
with that particularity that makes satire interesting. The satires
are not exactly dull, but they are lacking in force, either of wit
or of passion. They are hardly more than an expression of sentiment
and opinion. The sentiments are usually sound—for Cowper was
an honest lover of liberty and goodness—but even the cause of
liberty is not likely to gain much from such a couplet as:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Man made for kings! those optics are but dim</p>
<p>That tell you so—say, rather, they for him.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of
such an attack on the “pleasant-Sunday-afternoon” kind
of pastor as is contained in the lines:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>If apostolic gravity be free</p>
<p>To play the fool on Sundays, why not we?</p>
<p>If he the tinkling harpsichord regards</p>
<p>As inoffensive, what offence in cards?</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>These, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best
in the moral satires; but the latter is worth quoting as evidence
of the way in which Cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a
rather narrow creed. The satires are hardly more than
denominational in their interest. They belong to the religious
fashion of their time, and are interesting to us now only as the
old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. The
subject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere
almost always remains evangelical. The Rev. John Newton wrote a
preface for the volume, suggesting this and claiming that the
author “aims to communicate his own perceptions of the truth,
beauty and influence of the religion of the Bible.” The
publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of the piety of
the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the first edition.
Cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal his
pious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this
reason opened the book, not with <em>The Progress of Error</em>,
but with the more attractively-named <em>Table Talk</em>. “My
sole drift is to be useful,” he told a relation, however.
“… My readers will hardly have begun to laugh before
they will be called upon to correct that levity, and peruse me with
a more serious air.” He informed Newton at the same time:
“Thinking myself in a measure obliged to tickle, if I meant
to please, I therefore affected a jocularity I did not feel.”
He also told Newton: “I am merry that I may decoy people into
my company.” On the other hand, Cowper did not write <em>John
Gilpin</em> which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a
man using wit as a decoy. He wrote it because it irresistibly
demanded to be written. “I wonder,” he once wrote to
Newton, “that a sportive thought should ever knock at the
door of my intellects, and still more that it should gain
admittance. It is as if harlequin should intrude himself into the
gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state.”
Harlequin, luckily for us, took hold of his pen in <em>John
Gilpin</em> and in many of the letters. In the moral satires,
harlequin is dressed in a sober suit and sent to a theological
seminary. One cannot but feel that there is something incongruous
in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had “found occasion
towards the close of my last poem, called <em>Retirement</em>, to
take some notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments,
and to direct the means by which they might be made useful as well
as agreeable.” This might serve well enough as a theme for a
“letter to the editor” of <em>The Baptist
Eye-opener</em>. One cannot imagine, however, its causing a flutter
in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses.</p>
<p>Cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a
letter-writer. The interest of his verse is chiefly historical. He
was a poet of the transition to Wordsworth and the revolutionists,
and was a mouthpiece of his time. But he has left only a tiny
quantity of memorable verse. Lamb has often been quoted in his
favour. “I have,” he wrote to Coleridge in 1796,
“been reading <em>The Task</em> with fresh delight. I am glad
you love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but
I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the
‘divine chit-chat of Cowper.’” Lamb, it should be
remembered, was a youth of twenty-one when he wrote this, and
Cowper’s verse had still the attractions of early blossoms
that herald the coming of spring. There is little in <em>The
Task</em> to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of
literary history. Like the Olney Hymns and the moral satires it was
a poem written to order. Lady Austen, the vivacious widow who had
meanwhile joined the Olney group, was anxious that Cowper should
show what he could do in blank verse. He undertook to humour her if
she would give him a subject. “Oh,” she said,
“you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon
any; write upon this sofa!” Cowper, in his more ambitious
verse, seems seldom to have written under the compulsion of the
subject as the great poets do. Even the noble lines <em>On the Loss
of the Royal George</em> were written, as he confessed, “by
desire of Lady Austen, who wanted words to the March in
<em>Scipio</em>.” For this Lady Austen deserves the
world’s thanks, as she does for cheering him up in his low
spirits with the story of John Gilpin. He did not write <em>John
Gilpin</em> by request, however. He was so delighted on hearing the
story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and the next
day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad.
“Strange as it may seem,” he afterwards said of it,
“the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in
the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never
been written at all.” “The grinners at <em>John
Gilpin</em>,” he said in another letter, “little dream
what the author sometimes suffers. How I hated myself yesterday for
having ever wrote it!” It was the publication of <em>The
Task</em> and <em>John Gilpin</em> that made Cowper famous. It is
not <em>The Task</em> that keeps him famous to-day. There is, it
seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good
letters than there is in the entire six books of <em>The Task</em>.
One has only to read the argument at the top of the third book,
called <em>The Garden</em>, in order to see in what a dreary
didactic spirit it is written. Here is the argument in full:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Self-recollection and reproof—Address to domestic
happiness—Some account of myself—The vanity of many of
the pursuits which are accounted wise—Justification of my
censures—Divine illumination necessary to the most expert
philosopher—The question, what is truth? answered by other
questions—Domestic happiness addressed again—Few lovers
of the country—My tame hare—Occupations of a retired
gentleman in the
garden—Pruning—Framing—Greenhouse—Sowing of
flower-seeds—The country preferable to the town even in the
winter—Reasons why it is deserted at that
season—Ruinous effects of gaming and of expensive
improvement—Book concludes with an apostrophe to the
metropolis.</p>
</div>
<p>It is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic
happiness and apostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of
room here for Virgilian verse if Cowper had had the genius for it.
Unfortunately, when he writes about his garden, he too often writes
about it as prosaically as a contributor to a gardening paper. His
description of the making of a hot frame is merely a blank-verse
paraphrase of the commonest prose. First, he tells us:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The stable yields a stercoraceous heap,</p>
<p>Impregnated with quick fermenting salts,</p>
<p>And potent to resist the freezing blast;</p>
<p>For, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf,</p>
<p>Deciduous, when now November dark</p>
<p>Checks vegetation in the torpid plant,</p>
<p>Expos’d to his cold breath, the task begins.</p>
<p>Warily therefore, and with prudent heed</p>
<p>He seeks a favour’d spot; that where he builds</p>
<p>Th’ agglomerated pile his frame may front</p>
<p>The sun’s meridian disk, and at the back</p>
<p>Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge</p>
<p>Impervious to the wind.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Having further prepared the ground:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Th’ uplifted frame, compact at every joint,</p>
<p>And overlaid with clear translucent glass,</p>
<p>He settles next upon the sloping mount,</p>
<p>Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure</p>
<p>From the dash’d pane the deluge as it falls.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test,
and Cowper does not survive the test. Had <em>The Task</em> been
written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by
the necessity of rhyme. As it is, he is merely ponderous—a
snail of imagination labouring under a heavy shell of eloquence. In
the fragment called <em>Yardley Oak</em> he undoubtedly achieved
something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not
think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good
poet. He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in
earnest to write it. “I reckon it,” he wrote in 1781,
“among my principal advantages, as a composer of verses, that
I have not read an English poet these thirteen years, and but one
these thirteen years.” So mild was his interest in his
contemporaries that he had never heard Collins’s name till he
read about him in Johnson’s <em>Lives of the Poets</em>.
Though descended from Donne—his mother was Anne
Donne—he was apparently more interested in Churchill and
Beattie than in him. His one great poetical master in English was
Milton, Johnson’s disparagement of whom he resented with
amusing vehemence. He was probably the least bookish poet who had
ever had a classical education. He described himself in a letter to
the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later years, as “a poor man who
has but twenty books in the world, and two of them are your brother
Chester’s.” The passages I have quoted give, no doubt,
an exaggerated impression of Cowper’s indifference to
literature. His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in
many of his letters. But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for
the great things in literature as Keats showed, for instance, in
his sonnet on Chapman’s Homer. Though Cowper, disgusted with
Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer into English
verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical
reservations. “I should not have chosen to have been the
original author of such a business,” he declared, while he
was translating the nineteenth book of the <em>Iliad</em>,
“even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow. Time has
wonderful effects. We admire that in an ancient for which we should
send a modern bard to Bedlam.” It is hardly to be wondered at
that his translation of Homer has not survived, while his
delightful translation of Vincent Bourne’s <em>Jackdaw</em>
has.</p>
<p>Cowper’s poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing
else, because it played so great a part in giving the world a
letter-writer of genius. It brought him one of the best of his
correspondents, his cousin, Lady Hesketh, and it gave various other
people a reason for keeping his letters. Had it not been for his
fame as a poet his letters might never have been published, and we
should have missed one of the most exquisite histories of small
beer to be had outside the pages of Jane Austen. As a letter-writer
he does not, I think, stand in the same rank as Horace Walpole and
Charles Lamb. He has less wit and humour, and he mirrors less of
the world. His letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothing
charm. Cowper’s occupations amuse one, while his nature
delights one. His letters, like Lamb’s, have a soul of
goodness—not of mere virtue, but of goodness—and we
know from his biography that in life he endured the severest test
to which a good nature can be subjected. His treatment of Mrs.
Unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its
way as Lamb’s treatment of his sister. Mrs. Unwin, who had
supported Cowper through so many dark and suicidal hours,
afterwards became palsied and lost her mental faculties. “Her
character,” as Sir James Frazer writes in the introduction to
his charming selection from the letters,<sup>2</sup> <span class="sidenote">2. <em>Letters of William Cowper</em>. Chosen and edited
by J.G. Frazer. Two vols. Eversley Series. Macmillan. 12s.
net.</span>“underwent a great change, and she who for years
had found all her happiness in ministering to her afflicted friend,
and seemed to have no thought but for his welfare, now became
querulous and exacting, forgetful of him and mindful, apparently,
only of herself. Unable to move out of her chair without help, or
to walk across the room unless supported by two people, her speech
at times almost unintelligible, she deprived him of all his wonted
exercises, both bodily and mental, as she did not choose that he
should leave her for a moment, or even use a pen or a book, except
when he read to her. To these demands he responded with all the
devotion of gratitude and affection; he was assiduous in his
attentions to her, but the strain told heavily on his
strength.” To know all this does not modify our opinion of
Cowper’s letters, except is so far as it strengthens it. It
helps us, however, to explain to ourselves why we love them. We
love them because, as surely as the writings of Shakespeare and
Lamb, they are an expression of that sort of heroic gentleness
which can endure the fires of the most devastating tragedy.
Shakespeare finally revealed the strong sweetness of his nature in
<em>The Tempest</em>. Many people are inclined to over-estimate
<em>The Tempest</em> as poetry simply because it gives them so
precious a clue to the character of his genius, and makes clear
once more that the grand source and material of poetry is the
infinite tenderness of the human heart. Cowper’s letters are
a tiny thing beside Shakespeare’s plays. But the same light
falls on them. They have an eighteenth-century restraint, and
freedom from emotionalism and gush. But behind their chronicle of
trifles, their small fancies, their little vanities, one is aware
of an intensely loving and lovable personality. Cowper’s
poem, <em>To Mary</em>, written to Mrs. Unwin in the days of her
feebleness, is, to my mind, made commonplace by the odious
reiteration of “my Mary!” at the end of every verse.
Leave the “my Marys” out, however, and see how
beautiful, as well as moving, a poem it becomes. Cowper was at one
time on the point of marrying Mrs. Unwin, when an attack of madness
prevented him. Later on Lady Austen apparently wished to marry him.
He had an extraordinary gift for commanding the affections of those
of both sexes who knew him. His friendship with the poet Hayley,
then a rocket fallen to earth, towards the close of his life,
reveals the lovableness of both men.</p>
<p>If we love Cowper, then, it is not only because of his little
world, but because of his greatness of soul that stands in contrast
to it. He is like one of those tiny pools among the rocks, left
behind by the deep waters of ocean and reflecting the blue height
of the sky. His most trivial actions acquire a pathos from what we
know of the <em>De Profundis</em> that is behind them. When we read
of the Olney household—“our snug parlour, one lady
knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding
worsted”—we feel that this marionette-show has some
second and immortal significance. On another day, “one of the
ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, with the other,
have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock.” It is a
game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result
of belonging to the pious English upper-middle classes. The poet,
inclined to be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is “to
walk ten times in a day from the fireside to his cucumber frame and
back again,” is busy enough on a heavenly errand. With his
pet hares, his goldfinches, his dog, his carpentry, his
greenhouse—“Is not our greenhouse a cabinet of
perfumes?”—his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he
is not only constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret
battle, with all the terrors of Hell. He is, indeed, a pilgrim who
struggles out of one slough of despond only to fall waist-deep into
another. This strange creature who passed so much of his time
writing such things as <em>Verses written at Bath on Finding the
Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-glass almost dried in the
Sun, Lines sent with Two Cockscombs to Miss Green</em>, and <em>On
the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s Bullfinch</em>, stumbled
along under a load of woe and repentance as terrible as any of the
sorrows that we read of in the great tragedies. The last of his
original poems, <em>The Castaway</em>, is an image of his utter
hopelessness. As he lay dying in 1880 he was asked how he felt. He
replied, “I feel unutterable despair.” To face
damnation with the sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare
and saintly accomplishment. It gives him a place in the company of
the beloved authors with men of far greater genius than
himself—with Shakespeare and Lamb and Dickens.</p>
<p>Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed
the opinion that of all the English poets “the one who, but
for a stroke of madness, would have become our English Horace was
William Cowper. He had the wit,” he added, “with the
underlying moral seriousness.” As for the wit, I doubt it.
Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into “jewels
five words long.” Laboriously as he sought after perfection
in his verse, he was never a master of the Horatian phrase. Such
phrases of his—and there are not many of them—as have
passed into the common speech flash neither with wit nor with
wisdom. Take the best-known of them:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i10">“The cups</p>
<p>That cheer but not inebriate;”</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>“God made the country and man made the town;”</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>“I am monarch of all I survey;”</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>“Regions Cæsar never knew;” and</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>“England, with all thy faults, I love thee
still!”</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>This is lead for gold. Horace, it is true, must be judged as
something more than an inventor of golden tags. But no man can hope
to succeed Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that
naturally pass into golden tags. This, I know, is a matter not only
of style but of temper. But it is in temper as much as in style
that Cowper differs from Horace. Horace mixed on easy terms with
the world. He enjoyed the same pleasures; he paid his respects to
the same duties. He was a man of the world above all other poets.
Cowper was in comparison a man of the parlour. His sensibilities
would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat, even if he had been
neither mad nor pious. He was the very opposite of a worldling. He
was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, “of a very
singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever
conversed with.” While claiming that he was not an absolute
fool, he added: “If I was as fit for the next world as I am
unfit for this—and God forbid I should speak it in
vanity—I would not change conditions with any saint in
Christendom.” Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he
would almost certainly have been a Deist. Cowper was very nearly a
Methodist. The difference, indeed, between them is fundamental.
Horace was a pig, though a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon.</p>
<p>This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a
Horace <em>manqué</em>, instead of being content with his
miraculous achievement as a letter-writer. It may well be that his
sufferings, so far from destroying his real genius, harrowed and
fertilized the soil in which it grew. He unquestionably was more
ambitious for his verse than for his prose. He wrote his letters
without labour, while he was never weary of using the file on his
poems. “To touch and retouch,” he once wrote to the
Rev. William Unwin, “is, though some writers boast of
negligence, and others would be ashamed to show their foul copies,
the secret of almost all good writing, especially in verse. I am
never weary of it myself.” Even if we count him only a
middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his
fastidiousness of composition was wasted. He acquired in the
workshop of verse the style that stood him in such good stead in
the field of familiar prose. It is because of this hard-won ease of
style that readers of English will never grow weary of that
epistolary autobiography in which he recounts his maniacal fear
that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed wonder at balloons;
the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of his stomach
by Lady Hesketh’s gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at
the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to
thrash Dr. Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the
mildly fascinated tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph
as:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical
save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our
birds and fowls please me without one exception. I should not
indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up
in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a
common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer.</p>
</div>
<p>Here he is no missfire rival of Horace or Milton or Prior, or
any of the other poets. Here he has arrived at the perfection for
which he was born. How much better he was fitted to be a
letter-writer than a poet may be seen by anyone who compares his
treatment of the same incidents in verse and in prose. There is,
for instance, that charming letter about the escaped goldfinch,
which is not spoiled for us even though we may take Blake’s
view of caged birds:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I have two goldfinches, which in the summer occupy the
greenhouse. A few days since, being employed in cleaning out their
cages, I placed that which I had in hand upon the table, while the
other hung against the wall; the windows and the doors stood wide
open. I went to fill the fountain at the pump, and on my return was
not a little surprised to find a goldfinch sitting on the top of
the cage I had been cleaning, and singing to and kissing the
goldfinch within. I approached him, and he discovered no fear;
still nearer, and he discovered none. I advanced my hand towards
him, and he took no notice of it. I seized him, and supposed I had
caught a new bird, but casting my eye upon the other cage perceived
my mistake. Its inhabitant, during my absence, had contrived to
find an opening, where the wire had been a little bent, and made no
other use of the escape it afforded him, than to salute his friend,
and to converse with him more intimately than he had done before. I
returned him to his proper mansion, but in vain. In less than a
minute he had thrust his little person through the aperture again,
and again perched upon his neighbour’s cage, kissing him, as
at the first, and singing, as if transported with the fortunate
adventure. I could not but respect such friendship, as for the sake
of its gratification had twice declined an opportunity to be free,
and consenting to their union, resolved that for the future one
cage should hold them both. I am glad of such incidents; for at a
pinch, and when I need entertainment, the versification of them
serves to divert me….</p>
</div>
<p>Cowper’s “versification” of the incident is
vapid compared to this. The incident of the viper and the kittens
again, which he “versified” in <em>The Colubriad</em>,
is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. His quiet prose
gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which
was the deepest need of his nature. He made a full confession of
himself only to his friends. In one of his letters he compares
himself, as he rises in the morning to “an infernal frog out
of Acheron, covered with the ooze and mud of melancholy.” In
his most ambitious verse he is a frog trying to blow himself out
into a bull. It is the frog in him, not the intended bull, that
makes friends with us to-day.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Plays" name="Plays">VII.—A Note on Elizabethan Plays</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Voltaire’s criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous
has only one fault. It does not fit Shakespeare. Shakespeare,
however, is the single dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a
measure applicable. “He was a savage,” said Voltaire,
“who had imagination. He has written many happy lines; but
his pieces can please only in London and in Canada.” Had this
been said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning),
or Cyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that
perhaps there was something in it. Again, Voltaire’s boast
that he had been the first to show the French “some pearls
which I had found” in the “enormous dunghill” of
Shakespeare’s plays was the sort of thing that might
reasonably have been said by an anthologist who had made selections
from Dekker or Beaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under
Elizabeth and James except William Shakespeare. One reads the
average Elizabethan play in the certainty that the pearls will be
few and the rubbish-heap practically five acts high. There are,
perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from Shakespeare’s
that are as great as his third-best work. But there are no
<em>Hamlets</em> or <em>Lears</em> among them. There are no
<em>Midsummer Night’s Dreams</em>. There is not even a
<em>Winter’s Tale</em>.</p>
<p>If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the
Elizabethans in general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning
himself and Shakespeare his claim would have been just. Lamb,
however, was free from Voltaire’s vanity. He did not feel
that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans as a patron: he
regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated by the
suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb
probably looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in
this as wide of the mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise
has made famous among virgins and boys many an old dramatist who
but for him would long ago have been thrown to the antiquaries, and
have deserved it. Everyone goes to the Elizabethans at some time or
another in the hope of coming on a long succession of sleeping
beauties. The average man retires disappointed from the quest. He
would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be
disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man
can read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb’s enthusiasm,
however, who never could have read them with his own.</p>
<p>One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse’s
books, he took down Lamb’s <em>Specimens of the English
Dramatic Poets</em>, and, turning to Mr. Gosse, said, “That
book taught me more than any other book in the world—that and
the Bible.” Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other
men’s enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and
Mazzini, the Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb.
He had not, as Lamb had, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had
the Elizabethan love of phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies
discovered in a cave. Swinburne had none of this rich taste in
speech. He used words riotously, but he did not use great words
riotously. He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb was carefully
extravagant. He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a
beautiful noise. Nor was this the only point on which he was
opposed to Lamb and the Elizabethans. He differed fundamentally
from them in his attitude to the spectacle of life. His mood was
the mood not of a spectator but of a revivalist. He lectured his
generation on the deadly virtues. He was far more anxious to shock
the drawing-room than to entertain the bar-parlour. Lamb himself
was little enough of a formal Puritan. He felt that the wings both
of the virtues and the vices had been clipped by the descendants of
the Puritans. He did not scold, however, but retired into the
spectacle of another century. He wandered among old plays like an
exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle.
Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much
for saying things. As a result, a great deal of his verse—and
still more of his prose—has the heat of an argument rather
than the warmth of life.</p>
<p>His posthumous book on the Elizabethans is liveliest when it is
most argumentative. Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting
the Elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet
aversion. His style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but
is less suitable for intimate conversation. He writes in
superlatives that give one the impression that he is furious about
something or other even when he is being fairly sensible. His
criticism has thus an air of being much more insane than it is. His
estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both far more moderate
and reasonable than appears at first reading. He out-Lambs Lamb in
his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious
excess when he says of Brome:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able competitor
in their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as
Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris.</p>
</div>
<p>Brome, I think, is better than this implies. Swinburne is not
going many miles too far when he calls <em>The Antipodes</em>
“one of the most fanciful and delightful farces in the
world.” It is a piece of poetic low comedy that will almost
certainly entertain and delight any reader who goes to it expecting
to be bored.</p>
<p>It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the
average reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be
disappointed in them. He must not expect to find them giants on the
Shakespeare scale. Better still, he must turn to them as to a
continent or age of poetry rather than for the genius of separate
plays. Of most of them it may be said that their age is greater
than they—that they are glorified by their period rather than
glorify it. They are figures in a golden and teeming landscape, and
one moves among them under the spell of their noble
circumstances.</p>
<p>They are less great individually than in the mass. If they are
giants, few of them are giants who can stand on their own legs.
They prop one another up. There are not more than a dozen
Elizabethan plays that are individually worth a superlative, as a
novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by Wordsworth is. The Elizabethan
lyrics are an immensely more precious possession than the plays.
The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets by destiny and
dramatists by accident. It is conceivable that the greatest of them
apart from Shakespeare—Marlowe and Jonson and Webster and
Dekker—might have been greater writers if the English theatre
had never existed. Shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as
in poetry. Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. <em>The
Alchemist</em> is a brilliant heavy-weight comedy, which one would
hardly sacrifice even for another of Jonson’s songs. As for
Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the excellent style
in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy which
survive in his dialogue, his <em>Sweet Content</em> is worth all
the purely dramatic work he ever wrote.</p>
<p>One thing that differentiates the other Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists from Shakespeare is their comparative indifference to
human nature. There is too much mechanical malice in their
tragedies and too little of the passion that every man recognizes
in his own breast. Even so good a play as <em>The Duchess of
Malfi</em> is marred by inadequacy of motive on the part of the
duchess’s persecutors. Similarly, in Chapman’s
<em>Bussy d’Ambois</em>, the villains are simply a
dramatist’s infernal machines. Shakespeare’s own plays
contain numerous examples of inadequacy of motive—the
casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and in part
the revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act of <em>King
Lear</em> as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion
of Lear in the other four acts is not only adequate out
overwhelming. <em>Othello</em> breaks free from mechanism of Plot
in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer of the fiction of human
nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was Gulliver
among the Lilliputians.</p>
<p>Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan
dramatists again. Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying
flat, and it was natural that they should raise them up and set
them affectionately on pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent
world. The modern reader, accustomed to seeing them on their
pedestals, however, is tempted to wish that they were lying flat
again. Most of the Elizabethans deserve neither fate. They should
be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals, but
leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees—resting
against the base of Shakespeare’s colossal statue.</p>
<p>Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has
written of Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they
often are, would have added to one’s enjoyment of them. His
<em>Chapman</em> gives us a portrait of a character. Several of the
chapters in <em>Contemporaries of Shakespeare</em>, however, are,
apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than the
summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature.
Even Mr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in his <em>Life of
Swinburne</em>, described one of the chapters as
“unreadable.” The book as a whole is not that. But it
unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fog
rather than by the full light of day.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Poets" name="Poets">VIII.—The Office of the Poets</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>There is—at least, there seems to be—more cant
talked about poetry just now than at any previous time. Tartuffe is
to-day not a priest but a poet—or a critic. Or, perhaps,
Tartuffe is too lively a prototype for the curates of poetry who
swarm in the world’s capitals at the present hour. There is a
tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it on the
world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing. In
medicine, as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into
which the members can retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate.
In the same way, the theologians took possession of the temple of
religion and refused admittance to laymen, except as a meek and
awe-struck audience. This largely resulted from the Pharisaic
instinct that assumes superiority over other men. Pharisaism is
simply an Imperialism of the spirit—joyless and domineering.
Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is a denial
of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons.
All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the
part of the immortal souls against the superior persons. Religion,
the reformers have proclaimed, is the common possession of mankind.
Christ came into the world not to afford a career to theological
pedants, but that the mass of mankind might have life and might
have it more abundantly.</p>
<p>Poetry is in constant danger of suffering the same fate as
religion. In the great ages of poetry, poetry was what is called a
popular subject. The greatest poets, both of Greece and of England,
took their genius to that extremely popular institution, the
theatre. They wrote not for pedants or any exclusive circle, but
for mankind. They were, we have reason to believe, under no
illusions as to the imperfections of mankind. But it was the best
audience they could get, and represented more or less the same kind
of world that they found in their own bosoms. It is a difficult
thing to prove that the ordinary man can appreciate poetry, just as
it is a difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man has an
immortal soul. But the great poets, like the great saints, gave him
the benefit of the doubt. If they had not, we should not have had
the Greek drama or Shakespeare.</p>
<p>That they were right seems probable in view of the excellence of
the poems and songs that survive among a peasantry that has not
been de-educated in the schools. If the arts were not a natural
inheritance of simple people, neither the Irish love-songs
collected by Dr. Douglas Hyde nor the Irish music edited by Moore
could have survived. I do not mean to suggest that any art can be
kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet, the
singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily
alive without the popular audience. Tolstoy’s use of the
unspoiled peasant as the test of art may lead to absurdities, if
carried too far. But at least it is an error in the right
direction. It is an affirmation of the fact that every man is
potentially an artist just as Christianity is an affirmation of the
fact that every man is potentially a saint. It is also an
affirmation of the fact that art, like religion, makes its appeal
to feelings which are shared by the mass of men rather than the
feelings which are the exclusive possession of the few. Where
Tolstoy made his chief mistake was in failing to see that the
artistic sense, like the religious sense, is something that, so far
from being born perfect, even in the unspoiled peasant, passes
though stage after stage of labour and experience on the way to
perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed: he is not an artist
in the flower. He may pass all his life without ever coming to
flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universal
potentiality of beauty. Tolstoy’s most astounding paradox
came <em>to</em> nothing more than this—that art exists, not
for the hundreds of people who are artists in name, but for the
millions of people who are artists in embryo.</p>
<p>At the same time, there is no use in being too confident that
the average man will ever be a poet, even in the sense of being a
reader of poetry. All that one can ask is that the doors of
literature shall be thrown open to him, as the doors of religion
are in spite of the fact that he is not a perfect saint. The
histories of literature and religion, it seems likely, both go back
to a time in which men expressed their most rapturous emotions in
dances. In time the inarticulate shouts of the
dancers—Scottish dancers still utter those shouts, do they
not?—gave place to rhythmic words. It may have been the
genius of a single dancer that first broke into speech, but his
genius consisted not so much in his separateness from the others as
in his power to express what all the others felt. He was the
prophet of a rapture that was theirs as much as his own.</p>
<p>Men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order
to liberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember
things. Poetry has a double origin in joy and utility. The
“Thirty days hath September” rhyme of the English child
suggests the way in which men must have turned to verse in
prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial wisdom,
of legend and narrative. Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from his
<em>New Study of English Poetry</em>, would deny the name of poetry
to all verse that is not descended from the choric dance. In my
opinion it is better to recognize the two lines, as of the father
and the mother, in the pedigree of poetry. We find abundant traces
of them not only in Hesiod and Virgil, but in Homer and Chaucer.
The utility of form and the joy of form have in all these poets
become inextricably united. The objection to most of the
“free verse” that is being written to-day is that in
form it is neither delightful nor memorable. The truth is, the
memorableness of the writings of a man of genius becomes a part of
their delight. If Pope is a delightful writer it is not merely
because he expressed interesting opinions; it is because he threw
most of the energies of his being into the task of making them
memorable and gave them a heightened vitality by giving them
rhymes. His satires and <em>The Rape of the Lock</em> are, no
doubt, better poetry than the <em>Essay on Man</em>, because he
poured into them a still more vivid energy. But I doubt if there is
any reasonable definition of poetry which would exclude even Pope
the “essayist” from the circle of the poets. He was a
puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they are to-day, of
all shapes and sizes.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, “poetry,” like
“religion,” is a word that we are almost bound to use
in several senses. Sometimes we speak of “poetry” in
contradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad
poetry. Similarly, “religion” would in one sense
include the Abode of Love as opposed to rationalism, and in another
sense would exclude the Abode of Love as opposed to the religion of
St. James. In a common-sense classification, it seems to me, poetry
includes every kind of literature written in verse or in rhythms
akin to verse. Sir Thomas Browne may have been more poetic than
Erasmus Darwin, but in his best work he did not write poetry.
Erasmus Darwin may have been more prosaic than Sir Thomas Browne,
but in his most famous work he did not write prose. Sir Henry
Newbolt will not permit a classification of this kind. For him
poetry is an expression of intuitions—an emotional
transfiguration of life—while prose is the expression of a
scientific fact or a judgment. I doubt if this division is
defensible. Everything that is literature is, in a sense, poetry as
opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a great deal
of work that is preponderantly the result of observation and
judgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly
imaginative. Poetry is a house of many mansions. It includes fine
poetry and foolish poetry, noble poetry and base poetry. The chief
duty of criticism is the praise—the infectious
praise—of the greatest poetry. The critic has the right to
demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a noble
transfiguration of life. Swinburne transfigures life in
<em>Anactoria</em> no less than Shakespeare transfigures it in
<em>King Lear</em>. But Swinburne’s is an ignoble,
Shakespeare’s a noble transfiguration. Poetry may be divine
or devilish, just as religion may be. Literary criticism is so
timid of being accused of Puritanism that it is chary of admitting
that there may be a Heaven and a Hell of poetic genius as well as
of religious genius. The moralists go too far on the other side and
are tempted to judge literature by its morality rather than by its
genius. It seems more reasonable to conclude that it is possible to
have a poet of genius who is nevertheless a false poet, just as it
is possible to have a prophet of genius who is nevertheless a false
prophet. The lover of literature will be interested in them all,
but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to the fact that
the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well as
aesthetically, great. If Shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of
the Elizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the
greatest; it is also because he had a soul incomparably noble and
generous. Sir Henry Newbolt deals in an interesting way with this
ennoblement of life that is the mark of great poetry. He does not
demand of poetry an orthodox code of morals, but he does contend
that great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of
life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism.</p>
<p>The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that
he treats poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that
poetry must be able to meet the challenge to its right to exist.
The extreme moralist would deny that it had a right to exist unless
it could be proved to make men more moral. The hedonist is content
if it only gives him pleasure. The greatest poets, however, do not
accept the point of view either of the extreme moralist or of the
hedonist. Poetry exists for the purpose of delivering us neither to
good conduct nor to pleasure. It exists for the purpose of
releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this scene
of wonder, beauty and terror. It is consonant both with the world
of good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice
and an enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between
earth and heaven. Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why
hymns almost always fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns
turn their eyes away so resolutely from the earth we know to the
world that is only a formula. Poetry, in his view, is a
transfiguration of life heightened by the home-sickness of the
spirit from a perfect world. But it must always use the life we
live as the material of its joyous vision. It is born of our double
attachment to Earth and to Paradise. There is no formula for
absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of
it in the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. It is
open to question whether</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>There is a fountain filled with blood</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>And now my heart with pleasure fills</p>
<p>And dances with the daffodils.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>There are many details on which one would like to join issue
with Sir Henry Newbolt, but his main contentions are so suggestive,
his sympathies so catholic and generous, that it seems hardly worth
while arguing with him about questions of scansion or of the
relation of Blake to contemporary politics, or of the evil of
anthologies. His book is the reply of a capable and honest man of
letters to the challenge uttered to poets by Keats in <em>The Fall
of Hyperion</em>, where Moneta demands:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>What benfits canst thou, or all thy tribe</p>
<p>To the great world?</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>and declares:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>None can usurp this height …</p>
<p>But those to whom the miseries of the world</p>
<p>Are misery, and will not let them rest.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold
that here Keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. But
how noble is Keats’s dissatisfaction with himself! It is such
noble dissatisfaction as this that distinguishes the great poets
from the amateurs. Poetry and religion—the impulse is very
much the same. The rest is but a parlour-game.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Young" name="Young">IX.—Edward Young as Critic</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost
forgotten how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. It
was not merely that he was popular in England, where his satires,
<em>The Love of Fame, the Universal Passion</em>, are said to have
made him £3,000. He was also a power on the Continent. His
<em>Night Thoughts</em> was translated not only into all the major
languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. It was adopted
as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France. Even his
<em>Conjectures on Original Composition</em>, written in 1759 in
the form of a letter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign
countries a fame that has lasted till our own day. A new edition of
the German translation was published at Bonn so recently as 1910.
In England there is no famous author more assiduously neglected.
Not so much as a line is quoted from him in <em>The Oxford Book of
English Verse</em>. I recently turned up a fairly full anthology of
eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has room for
Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not been allowed
to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. I look round my
own shelves, and they tell the same story. Small enough poets stand
there in shivering neglect. Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have
all been thought worth keeping. But not on the coldest, topmost
shelf has space been found for Young. He scarcely survives even in
popular quotations. The copy-books have perpetuated one line:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Procrastination is the thief of time.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Apart from that, <em>Night Thoughts</em> have been swallowed up
in an eternal night.</p>
<p>And certainly a study of the titles of his works will not
encourage the average reader to go to him in search of treasures of
the imagination. At the age of thirty, in 1713, he wrote a <em>Poem
on the Last Day</em>, which he dedicated to Queen Anne. In the
following year he wrote <em>The Force of Religion, or
Vanquish’d Love</em>, a poem about Lady Jane Grey, which he
dedicated to the Countess of Salisbury. And no sooner was Queen
Anne dead than he made haste to salute the rising sun in an epistle
<em>On the Late Queen’s Death and His Majesty’s
Accession to the Throne</em>. Passing over a number of years, we
find him, in 1730, publishing a so-called Pindaric ode,
<em>Imperium Pelagi; a Naval Lyric</em>, in the preface to which he
declares with characteristic italics: “<em>Trade</em> is a
very <em>noble</em> subject in itself; more <em>proper</em> than
any for an Englishman; and particularly <em>seasonable</em> at this
juncture.” Add to this that he was the son of a dean, that he
married the daughter of an earl, and that, other means of
advancement having failed, he became a clergyman at the age of
between forty and fifty, and the suggested portrait is that of a
prudent hanger-on rather than a fiery man of genius. His prudence
was rewarded with a pension of £200 a year, a Royal
Chaplaincy, and the position (after George III.’s accession)
of Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager. In the opinion of
Young himself, who lived till the age of 82, the reward was
inadequate. At the age of 79, however, he had conquered his
disappointment to a sufficient degree to write a poem on
<em>Resignation</em>.</p>
<p>Readers who, after a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined
to look satirically on Young as a time-server, oily with the
mediocrity of self-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read
his <em>Conjectures on Original Composition</em> for the first
time. It is a bold and masculine essay on literary criticism,
written in a style of quite brilliant, if old-fashioned, rhetoric.
Mrs. Thrale said of it: “In the <em>Conjectures upon Original
Composition</em> … we shall perhaps read the wittiest piece
of prose our whole language has to boast; yet from its
over-twinkling, it seems too little gazed at and too little admired
perhaps.” This is an exaggerated estimate. Dr. Johnson, who
heard Young read the <em>Conjectures</em> at Richardson’s
house, said that “he was surprised to find Young receive as
novelties what he thought very common maxims.” If one tempers
Mrs. Thrale’s enthusiasms and Dr. Johnson’s scorn, one
will have a fairly just idea of the quality of Young’s
book.</p>
<p>It is simply a shot fired with a good aim in the eternal war
between authority and liberty in literature. This is a controversy
for which, were men wise, there would be no need. We require in
literature both the authority of tradition and the liberty of
genius to such new conquests. Unfortunately, we cannot agree as to
the proportions in which each of them is required. The French
exaggerated the importance of tradition, and so gave us the
classical drama of Racine and Corneille. Walt Whitman exaggerated
the importance of liberty, and so gave us <em>Leaves of Grass</em>.
In nearly all periods of literary energy, we find writers rushing
to one or other of these extremes. Either they declare that the
classics are perfect and cannot be surpassed but only imitated; or,
like the Futurists, they want to burn the classics and release the
spirit of man for new adventures. It is all a prolonged duel
between reaction and revolution, and the wise man of genius doing
his best, like a Liberal, to bring the two opponents to terms.</p>
<p>Much of the interest of Young’s book is due to the fact
that in an age of reaction he came out on the revolutionary side.
There was seldom a time at which the classics were more slavishly
idolized and imitated. Miss Morley quotes from Pope the saying that
“all that is left us is to recommend our productions by the
imitation of the ancients.” Young threw all his eloquence on
the opposite side. He uttered the bold paradox: “The less we
copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more.”
“Become a noble collateral,” he advised, “not a
humble descendant from them. Let us build our compositions in the
spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients, but not with their
materials. Thus will they resemble the structures of Pericles at
Athens, which Plutarch commends for having had an air of antiquity
as soon as they were built.” He refuses to believe that the
moderns are necessarily inferior to the ancients. If they are
inferior, it is because they plagiarize from the ancients instead
of emulating them. “If ancients and moderns,” he
declares, “were no longer considered as masters, and pupils,
but as hard-matched rivals for renown, then moderns, by the
longevity of their labours, might one day become ancients
themselves.”</p>
<p>He deplores the fact that Pope should have been so content to
indenture his genius to the work of translation and imitation:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Though we stand much obliged to him for giving us an Homer, yet
had he doubled our obligation by giving us—a Pope. He had a
strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might
have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life;
for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks
before his decease.</p>
</div>
<p>For ourselves, we hold that Pope showed himself to be as
original as needs be in his epistles to Martha Blount and Dr.
Arbuthnot. None the less, the general philosophy of Young’s
remarks is sound enough. We should reverence tradition in
literature, but not superstitiously. Too much awe of the old
masters may easily scare a modern into hiding his talent in a
napkin. True, we are not in much danger of servitude to tradition
in literature to-day. We no longer imitate the ancients; we only
imitate each other. On the whole, we wish there was rather more
sense of the tradition in contemporary writing. The danger of
arbitrary egoism is quite as great as the danger of classicism.
Luckily, Young, in stating the case against the classicists, has at
the same time stated perfectly the case for familiarity with the
classics. “It is,” he declares, “but a sort of
noble contagion, from a general familiarity with their writings,
and not by any particular sordid theft, that we can be the better
for those who went before us,” However we may deride a
servile classicism, we should always set out assuming the necessity
of the “noble contagion for every man of letters.”</p>
<p>The truth is, the man of letters must in some way reconcile
himself to the paradox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival
of the ancients. Young is optimistic enough to believe that it is
possible to surpass them. In the mechanic arts, he complains, men
are always attempting to go beyond their predecessors; in the
liberal arts, they merely try to follow them. The analogy between
the continuous advance of science and a possible continuous advance
in literature is perhaps, a misleading one. Professor Gilbert
Murray, in <em>Religio Grammatici</em>, bases much of his argument
on a denial that such an analogy should be drawn. Literary genius
cannot be bequeathed and added to as a scientific discovery can.
The modern poet does not stand on Shakespeare’s shoulders as
the modern astronomer stands on Galileo’s shoulders.
Scientific discovery is progressive. Literary genius, like
religious genius, is a miracle less dependent on time. None the
less, we may reasonably believe that literature, like science, has
ever new worlds to conquer—that, even if Æschylus and
Shakespeare cannot be surpassed, names as great as theirs may one
day be added to the roll of literary fame. And this will be
possible only if men in each generation are determined, in the
words of Goldsmith, “bravely to shake off admiration, and,
undazzled by the splendour of another’s reputation, to chalk
out a path to fame for themselves, and boldly cultivate untried
experiment.” Goldsmith wrote these words in <em>The Bee</em>
in the same year in which Young’s <em>Conjectures</em> was
published. I feel tolerably certain that he wrote them as a result
of reading Young’s work. The reaction against traditionalism,
however, was gathering general force by this time, and the desire
to be original was beginning to oust the desire to copy. Both
Young’s and Goldsmith’s essays are exceedingly
interesting as anticipations of the romantic movement. Young was a
true romantic when he wrote that Nature “brings us into the
world all Originals—no two faces, no two minds, are just
alike; but all bear evident marks of separation on them. Born
Originals, how comes it to pass that we are Copies?” Genius,
he thinks, is commoner than is sometimes supposed, if we would make
use of it. His book is a plea for giving genius its head. He wants
to see the modern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil,
staking out a claim in the perfectly virgin field of his own
experience. He cannot teach you to be a man of genius; he could not
even teach himself to be one. But at least he lays down many of the
right rules for the use of genius. His book marks a most
interesting stage in the development of English literary
criticism.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Gray" name="Gray">X.—Gray and Collins</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>There seems to be a definite connection between good writing and
indolence. The men whom we call stylists have, most of them, been
idlers. From Horace to Robert Louis Stevenson, nearly all have been
pigs from the sty of Epicurus. They have not, to use an excellent
Anglo-Irish word, “industered” like insects or
millionaires. The greatest men, one must admit, have mostly been as
punctual at their labours as the sun—as fiery and
inexhaustible. But, then, one does not think of the greatest
writers as stylists. They are so much more than that. The style of
Shakespeare is infinitely more marvellous than the style of Gray.
But one hardly thinks of style in presence of the sea or a range of
mountains or in reading Shakespeare. His munificent and gorgeous
genius was as far above style as the statesmanship of Pericles or
the sanctity of Joan of Arc was above good manners. The world has
not endorsed Ben Jonson’s retort to those who commended
Shakespeare for never having “blotted out” a line:
“Would he had blotted out a thousand!” We feel that so
vast a genius is beyond the perfection of control we look for in a
stylist. There may be badly-written scenes in Shakespeare, and
pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but with all this there are
enchanted continents left in him which we may continue to explore
though we live to be a hundred.</p>
<p>The fact that the noble impatience of a Shakespeare is above our
fault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy
patience of good writing. An Æschylus or a Shakespeare, a
Browning or a Dickens, conquers us with an abundance like
nature’s. He feeds us out of a horn, of plenty. This,
unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first order. The
others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than
abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. Who
does not agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would
have been a better poet if he had learned:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The last and greatest art—the art to blot?</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of
Gray’s than all the poetical works of Southey? If
voluminousness alone made a man a great writer, we should have to
canonize Lord Lytton. The truth is, literary genius has no rule
either of voluminousness or of the opposite. The genius of one
writer is a world ever moving. The genius of another is a garden
often still. The greatest genius is undoubtedly of the former kind.
But as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall,
much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to
cultivate their gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult
of creation, to delight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and
quiet thought.</p>
<p>Gray and Collins were both writers who labored in little
gardens. Collins, indeed, had a small flower-bed—perhaps only
a pot, indeed—rather than a garden. He produced in it one
perfect bloom—the <em>Ode to Evening</em>. The rest of his
work is carefully written, inoffensive, historically interesting.
But his continual personification of abstract ideas makes the
greater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in
a graveyard. He was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his
own day. He seems academic to ours. His work is that of a man
striking an attitude rather than of one expressing the deeps of a
passionate nature. He is always careful not to confess. His <em>Ode
to Fear</em> does not admit us to any of the secrets of his
maniacal and melancholy breast. It is an anticipation of the
factitious gloom of Byron, not of the nerve-shattered gloom of
Dostoevsky. Collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what he
does not really think. He glorifies fear as though it were the
better part of imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the
lines:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>O thou whose spirit most possessed,</p>
<p>The sacred seat of Shakespeare’s breast!</p>
<p>By all that from thy prophet broke</p>
<p>In thy divine emotions spoke:</p>
<p>Hither again thy fury deal,</p>
<p>Teach me but once, like him, to feel;</p>
<p>His cypress wreath my meed decree,</p>
<p>And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>We have only to compare these lines with Claudio’s
terrible speech about death in <em>Measure for Measure</em> to see
the difference between pretence and passion in literature.
Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew about fear.
Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob off
a disease on us as an accomplishment. What perpetually delights us
in the <em>Ode to Evening</em> is that here at least Collins can
tell the truth without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he
is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by
it. He still makes use of personifications, but they have been
transmuted by his emotion into imagery. In these exquisite formal
unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up his view and dream of life.
One knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any other
man’s experiences but his own when he described how the</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,</p>
<p>With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,</p>
<p class="i6">Or where the beetle winds</p>
<p class="i6">His small but sullen horn.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>He speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the
liberty of a new mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed
before. As far as all the rest of his work is concerned, his
passion for style is more or less wasted. But the <em>Ode to
Evening</em> justifies both his pains and his indolence. As for the
pains he took with his work, we have it on the authority of Thomas
Warton that “all his odes … had the marks of repeated
correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets.” As for
his indolence, his uncle, Colonel Martin, thought him “too
indolent even for the Army,” and advised him to enter the
Church—a step from which he was dissuaded, we are told, by
“a tobacconist in Fleet Street.” For the rest, he was
the son of a hatter, and went mad. He is said to have haunted the
cloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia,
and to have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls
during the playing of the organ. The Castle of Indolence was for
Collins no keep of the pleasures. One may doubt if it is ever this
for any artist. Did not even Horace attempt to escape into
Stoicism? Did not Stevenson write <em>Pulvis et Umbra</em>?</p>
<p>Assuredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as
Collins was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the
Castle of Indolence a happy place. “Low spirits,” he
wrote, when he was still an undergraduate, “are my true and
faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make
journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even
affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me.” The
end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his
verses on the drowning of Horace Walpole’s cat) that his
indolent melancholy was not without its compensations. He was a
wit, an observer of himself and the world about him, a man who
wrote letters that have the genius of the essay. Further, he was
Horace Walpole’s friend, and (while his father had a devil in
him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness
into which he could always retire. “I do not remember,”
Mr. Gosse has said of Gray, “that the history of literature
presents us with the memoirs of any other poet favoured by nature
with so many aunts as Gray possessed.” This delicious
sentence contains an important criticism of Gray. Gray was a poet
of the sheltered life. His genius was shy and retiring. He had no
ambition to thrust himself upon the world. He kept himself to
himself, as the saying is. He published the <em>Elegy in a Country
Churchyard</em> in 1751 only because the editors of the
<em>Magazine of Magazines</em> had got hold of a copy and Gray was
afraid that they would publish it first. How lethargic a poet Gray
was may be gathered from the fact that he began the <em>Elegy</em>
as far back as 1746—Mason says it was begun in August,
1742—and did not finish it until June 12, 1750. Probably
there is no other short poem in English literature which was
brooded over for so many seasons. Nor was there ever a greater
justification for patient brooding. Gray in this poem liberated the
English imagination after half a century of prose and rhetoric. He
restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an
individual soul. Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at
least, assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into
English literature. But poetic diction was in use long before Gray.
He is remarkable among English poets, not for having succumbed to
poetic diction, but for having triumphed over it. It is poetic
feeling, not poetic diction, that distinguishes him from the mass
of eighteenth-century writers. It is an interesting coincidence
that Gray and Collins should have brought about a poetic revival by
the rediscovery of the beauty of evening, just as Mr. Yeats and
“A.E.” brought about a poetic revival in our own day by
the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight. Both schools of poetry
(if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillness
of the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from the
tyrannical prose of common day. There have been critics, including
Matthew Arnold, who have denied that the <em>Elegy</em> is the
greatest of Gray’s poems. This, I think, can only be because
they have been unable to see the poetry for the quotations. No
other poem that Gray ever wrote was a miracle. <em>The Bard</em> is
a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric. But the <em>Elegy</em> is
more than this. It is an autobiography and the creation of a world
for the hearts of men. Here Gray delivers the secret doctrine of
the poets. Here he escapes out of the eighteenth century into
immortality. One realizes what an effort it must have been to rise
above his century when one reads an earlier version of some of his
most famous lines:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Some village Cato (——) with dauntless breast</p>
<p class="i2">The little tyrant of his fields withstood;</p>
<p>Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest;</p>
<p class="i2">Some Cæsar guiltless of his country’s
blood.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Could there be a more effective example of the return to reality
than we find in the final shape of this verse?</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast</p>
<p class="i2">The little tyrant of his fields withstood;</p>
<p>Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,</p>
<p class="i2">Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s
blood.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>It is as though suddenly it had been revealed to Gray that
poetry is not a mere literary exercise but the image of reality;
that it does not consist in vain admiration of models far off in
time and place, but that it is as near to one as one’s breath
and one’s country. Not that the <em>Elegy</em> would have
been one of the great poems of the world if it had never plunged
deeper into the heart than in this verse. It is a poem of beauty
and sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as
Cromwell and Milton. Here the genius of the parting day, and all
that it means to the imagination, its quiet movement and its music,
its pensiveness and its regrets, have been given a form more
lasting than bronze. Perhaps the poem owes a part of its popularity
to the fact that it is a great homily, though a homily
transfigured. But then does not <em>Hamlet</em> owe a great part of
its popularity to the fact that it is (among other things) a great
blood-and-thunder play with duels and a ghost?</p>
<p>One of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that
Gray, having written so greatly, should have written so little. He
spoke of himself as a “shrimp of an author,” and
expressed the fear that his works might be mistaken for those of
“a pismire or a flea.” But to make a mystery of the
indolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who
was blessed with more fastidiousness than passion, is absurd. To
say perfectly once and for all what one has to say is surely as
fine an achievement as to keep restlessly trying to say it a
thousand times over. Gray was no blabber. It is said that he did
not even let his mother and his aunts know that he wrote poetry. He
lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy. He stood aside from
life. He would not even take money from his publishers for his
poetry. No wonder that he earned the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who said
of him to Boswell, “Sir, he was dull in his company, dull in
his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that
made many think him great.” Luckily, Gray’s reserve
tempted him into his own heart and into external nature for safety
and consolation. Johnson could see in him only a “mechanical
poet.” To most of us he seems the first natural poet in
modern literature.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Shelley0" name="Shelley0">XI.—Aspects of Shelley</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<h3><SPAN name="Shelley1" name="Shelley1">(1) The Character Half-Comic</SPAN></h3>
<p>Shelley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to
portray. It is easy enough to attack him or defend him—to
damn him as an infidel or to praise him because he made Harriet
Westbrook so miserable that she threw herself into the Serpentine.
But this is an entirely different thing from recapturing the
likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nine anecdotes
that are told of him. These for the most part leave him with an air
of absurdity. In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again and
again to one’s sense of the comic, like a drunken man who
fails to see the kerb or who walks into a wall. He was indeed
drunken with doctrine. He lived almost as much from doctrine as
from passion. He pursued theories as a child chases butterflies.
There is a story told of his Oxford days which shows how
eccentrically his theories converted themselves into conduct.
Having been reading Plato with Hogg, and having soaked himself in
the theory of pre-existence and reminiscence, he was walking on
Magdalen Bridge when he met a woman with a child in her arms. He
seized the child, while its mother, thinking he was about to throw
it into the river, clung on to it by the clothes. “Will your
baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?” he asked,
in a piercing voice and with a wistful look. She made no answer,
but on Shelley repeating the question she said, “He cannot
speak.” “But surely,” exclaimed Shelley,
“he can if he will, for he is only a few weeks old! He may
fancy perhaps that he cannot, but it is only a silly whim; he
cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so short a
time; the thing is absolutely impossible.” The woman,
obviously taking him for a lunatic, replied mildly: “It is
not for me to dispute with you gentlemen, but I can safely declare
that I never heard him speak, nor any child, indeed, of his
age.” Shelley walked away with his friend, observing, with a
deep sigh: “How provokingly close are these new-born
babes!” One can, possibly, discover similar anecdotes in the
lives of other men of genius and of men who thought they had
genius. But in such cases it is usually quite clear that the action
was a jest or a piece of attitudinizing, or that the person who
performed it was, as the vulgar say, “a little above
himself.” In any event it almost invariably appears as an
abnormal incident in the life of a normal man. Shelley’s
life, on the other hand, is largely a concentration of abnormal
incidents. He was habitually “a bit above himself.” In
the above incident he may have been consciously behaving comically.
But many of his serious actions were quite as comically
extraordinary.</p>
<p>Godwin is related to have said that “Shelley was so
beautiful, it was a pity he was so wicked.” I doubt if there
is a single literate person in the world to-day who would apply the
word “wicked” to Shelley. It is said that Browning, who
had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt the same regard for
Shelley after reading the full story of his desertion of Harriet
Westbrook and her suicide. But Browning did not know the full
story. No one of us knows the full story. On the face of it, it
looks a peculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when
she is about to become a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a
man has an income of £1,000 a year to make an annual
allowance of only £200 to a deserted wife and her two
children. Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love. A
nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old
girl in order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father.
At the end of three years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides
this, she had an intolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated.
Harriet’s sister, it is suggested, influenced her in the
direction of a taste for bonnet-shops instead of supporting
Shelley’s exhortations to her that she should cultivate her
mind. “Harriet,” says Mr. Ingpen in <em>Shelley in
England</em>, “foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by
her sister, under whose advice she probably acted when, some months
earlier, she prevailed upon Shelley to provide her with a carriage,
silver plate and expensive clothes.” We cannot help
sympathizing a little with Harriet. At the same time, she was
making a breach with Shelley inevitable. She wished him to remain
her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even
to pretend to “live up to him” any longer. As Mr.
Ingpen says, “it was love, not matrimony,” for which
Shelley yearned. “Marriage,” Shelley had once written,
echoing Godwin, “is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable,
sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most
despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to
confine its energies.” Having lived for years in a theory of
“anti-matrimonialism,” he now saw himself doomed to one
of those conventional marriages which had always seemed to him a
denial of the holy spirit of love. This, too, at a time when he had
found in Mary Godwin a woman belonging to the same intellectual and
spiritual race as himself—a woman whom he loved as the great
lovers in all the centuries have loved. Shelley himself expressed
the situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peacock:
“Everyone who knows me,” he said, “must know that
the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and
understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do
neither.” “It always appeared to me,” said
Peacock, “that you were very fond of Harriet.” Shelley
replied: “But you did not know how I hated her sister.”
And so Harriet’s marriage-lines were, torn up, as people say
nowadays, like a scrap of paper. That Shelley did not feel he had
done anything inconsiderate is shown by the fact that, within three
weeks of his elopement with Mary Godwin, he was writing to Harriet,
describing the scenery through which Mary and he had travelled, and
urging her to come and live near them in Switzerland. “I
write,” his letter runs—</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least find
one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be always
dear—by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured.
From none can you expect this but me—all else are unfeeling,
or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own, as Mrs.
B[oinville], to whom their attention and affection is confined.</p>
</div>
<p>He signed this letter (the Ianthe of whom he speaks was his
daughter):</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most affectionately
yours, S.</p>
</div>
<p>This letter, if it had been written by an amorist, would seem
either base or priggish. Coming from Shelley, it is a miracle of
what can only be called innocence.</p>
<p>The most interesting of the “new facts and letters”
in Mr. Ingpen’s book relate to Shelley’s expulsion from
Oxford and his runaway match with Harriet, and to his
father’s attitude on both these occasions. Shelley’s
father, backed by the family solicitor, cuts a commonplace figure
in the story. He is simply the conventional grieved parent. He made
no effort to understand his son. The most he did was to try to save
his respectability. He objected to Shelley’s studying for the
Bar, but was anxious to make him a member of Parliament; and
Shelley and he dined with the Duke of Norfolk to discuss the
matter, the result being that the younger man was highly indignant
“at what he considered an effort to shackle his mind, and
introduce him into life as a mere follower of the Duke.” How
unpromising as a party politician Shelley was may be gathered from
the fact that in 1811, the same year in which he dined with the
Duke, he not only wrote a satire on the Regent <em>à
propos</em> of a Carlton House fête, but “amused
himself with throwing copies into the carriages of persons going to
Carlton House after the fête.” Shelley’s methods
of propaganda were on other occasions also more eccentric than is
usual with followers of dukes. His journey to Dublin to preach
Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the Union was, the beginning of
a brief but extraordinary period of propaganda by pamphlet. Having
written a fivepenny pamphlet, <em>An Address to the Irish
People</em>, he stood in the balcony of his lodgings in Lower
Sackville Street, and threw copies to the passers-by. “I
stand,” he wrote at the time, “at the balcony of our
window, and watch till I see a man <em>who looks likely</em>; I
throw a book to him.” Harriet, it is to be feared, saw only
the comic side of the adventure. Writing to Elizabeth
Hitchener—“the Brown Demon,” as Shelley called
her when he came to hate her—she said:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I’m sure you would laugh were you to see us give the
pamphlets. We throw them out of the window, and give them to men
that we pass in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of
laughter when it is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he
put one into a woman’s hood and cloak. She knew nothing of
it, and we passed her. I could hardly get on: my muscles were so
irritated.</p>
</div>
<p>Shelley, none the less, was in regard to Ireland a wiser
politician than the politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid
or fanciful prose in his <em>Address</em> when he described the Act
of Union as “the most successful engine that England ever
wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland.” Godwin, with whom
Shelley had been corresponding for some time, now became alarmed at
his disciple’s reckless daring. “Shelley, you are
preparing a scene of blood!” he wrote to him in his anxiety.
It is evidence of the extent of Godwin’s influence over
Shelley that the latter withdrew his Irish publications and
returned to England, having spent about six weeks on his mission to
the Irish people.</p>
<p>Mr. Ingpen has really written a new biography of Shelley rather
than a compilation of new material. The new documents incorporated
in the book were discovered by the successors to Mr. William
Whitton, the Shelleys’ family solicitor, but they can hardly
be said to add much to our knowledge of the facts about Shelley.
They prove, however, that his marriage to Harriet Westbrook took
place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and that, at a later
period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holds that they
also prove that Shelley “appeared on the boards of the
Windsor Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama.” But we
have only William Whitton, the solicitor’s words for this,
and it is clear that he had been at no pains to investigate the
matter. “It was mentioned to me yesterday,” he wrote to
Shelley’s father in November, 1815, “that Mr. P.B.
Shelley was exhibiting himself on the Windsor stage in the
character of Shakespeare’s plays, under the figured name of
Cooks.” “The character of Shakespeare’s
plays” sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he
was talking about, unless he was referring to allegorical
“tableaux vivants” of some sort. Certainly, so vague a
rumour as this—the sort of rumour that would naturally arise
in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to the
bad—is no trustworthy evidence that Shelley was ever
“an actor in Shakespearean drama.” At the same time,
Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiastic praise for the untiring pursuit of
facts which has enabled him to add an indispensable book to the
Shelley library. I wish that, as he has to some extent followed the
events of Shelley’s life until the end, he had filled in the
details of the life abroad as well as the life in England. His book
is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a
biography with gaps. He writes, it should be added, in the spirit
of a collector of facts rather than of a psychologist. One has to
create one’s own portrait of Shelley out of the facts he has
brought together.</p>
<p>One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of
Shelley—a student to whom every lover of literature is
indebted for his edition of Shelley’s letters as well as for
the biography—referring to Shelley again and again as
“Bysshe.” Shelley’s family, it may be admitted,
called him “Bysshe.” But never was a more inappropriate
name given to a poet who brought down music from heaven. At the
same time, as we read his biography over again, we feel that it is
possible that the two names do somehow express two incongruous
aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great extent, Bysshe;
in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley wrote <em>The Skylark</em>
and <em>Pan</em> and <em>The West Wind</em>. It was Bysshe who
imagined that a fat old woman in a train had infected him with
incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpen quotes Peacock’s account
of this characteristic illusion:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were
to swell to the size of an elephant’s, and his skin was to be
crumpled over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own
hands arms, and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any
deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him
and endeavour, by a corresponding pressure, to see if any
corresponding deviation existed. He often startled young ladies in
an evening party by this singular process, which was as
instantaneous as a flash of lightning.</p>
</div>
<p>Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however
ludicrous. After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic
narrative, however, one has to read <em>Prometheus</em> again in
order to recall that divine song of a freed spirit, the incarnation
of which we call Shelley.</p>
<hr />
<h3><SPAN name="Shelley2" name="Shelley2">(2) The Experimentalist</SPAN></h3>
<p>Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to
our notice. In an introduction to Medwin’s <em>Life of Percy
Bysshe Shelley</em> he begins by frankly telling us that it is a
bad book, and that the only point of controversy in regard to it is
as to the kind of bad book it is. “Last century,” he
declares, “produced a plethora of bad books that were
valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value.
Medwin’s distinction is that he left two bad books which were
and still are valuable, but whether the <em>Byron
Conversations</em> and the <em>Life of Shelley</em> should be
called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two
worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in
casuistry.” Medwin, we may admit, even if he was not the
“perfect idiot” he has been called, would have been a
dull fellow enough if he had never met Shelley or Byron. But he did
meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or near
it, a little gilded by their rays. He was not, Mr. Forman contends,
the original of the man who “saw Shelley plain” in
Browning’s lyric. None the less, he is precisely that man in
the imaginations of most of us. A relative of Shelley, a school
friend, an intimate of the last years in Italy, even though we know
him to have been one of those men who cannot help lying because
they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a treasury of
sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in the
history of English literature.</p>
<p>Shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from
fairyland, continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic
realities of earth. Here and in his poetry, however, we see him
rather as the herald of the age of science: he was a born
experimentalist; he experimented, not only in chemistry, but in
life and in politics. At school, he and his solar microscope were
inseparable. Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we are
told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin’s father,
but his own father sent it back with a note saying: “I have
returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at
Eton.” During his life at University College, Oxford, his
delight in chemical experiments continued.</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to
premise nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He
had inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared
had seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he
should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his
furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids—more
than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena
of combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the
floor had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid
in a crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by
rents, for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in
pursuit of truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot.</p>
</div>
<p>The same eagerness of discovery is shown in his passion for
kite-flying as a boy:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>He was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place made an
electrical one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw
lightning from The clouds—fire from Heaven, like a new
Prometheus.</p>
</div>
<p>And his generous dream of bringing science to the service of
humanity is revealed in his reflection:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>What a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and
especially in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could
at will furnish them with a constant supply!</p>
</div>
<p>Shelley’s many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth
naturally led him early to invade theology. From his Eton days, he
used to enter into controversies by letter with learned divines.
Medwin declares that he saw one such correspondence in which
Shelley engaged in argument with a bishop “under the assumed
name of a woman.” It must have been in a somewhat similar
mood that “one Sunday after we had been to Rowland
Hill’s chapel, and were dining together in the city, he wrote
to him under an assumed name, proposing to preach to his
congregation.”</p>
<p>Certainly, Shelley loved mystification scarcely less than he
loved truth itself. He was a romanticist as well as a philosopher,
and the reading in his childhood of novels like <em>Zofloya the
Moor</em>—a work as wild, apparently, as anything Cyril
Tourneur ever wrote—excited his imagination to impossible
flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to study the
effects of this ghostly reading in Shelley’s own
work—his forgotten novels, <em>Zastrossi</em>, and <em>St.
Irvyne or the Rosicrucian</em>—but we can see how his life
itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. Many of his
recorded adventures are supposed to have been hallucinations, like
the story of the “stranger in a military cloak,” who,
seeing him in a post-office at Pisa, said, “What! Are you
that d—d atheist, Shelley?” and felled him to the
ground. On the other hand, Shelley’s story of his being
attacked by a midnight assassin in Wales, after being disbelieved
for three-quarters of a century, has in recent years been
corroborated in the most unexpected way. Wild a fiction as his life
was in many respects, it was a fiction he himself sincerely and
innocently believed. His imaginative appetite, having devoured
science by day and sixpenny romances by night, still remained
unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mix up reality and
make-believe past all recognition for its next dish. Francis
Thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when he noted
what a complete playfellow Shelley was in his life. When he was in
London after his expulsion from the University, he could throw
himself with all his being into childish games like skimming stones
on the Serpentine, “counting with the utmost glee the number
of bounds, as the flat stones flew skimming over the surface of the
water.” He found a perfect pleasure in paper boats, and we
hear of his making a sail on one occasion out of a ten-pound
note—one of those myths, perhaps, which gather round poets.
It must have been the innocence of pleasure shown in games like
these that made him an irresistible companion to so many
comparatively prosaic people. For the idea that Shelley in private
life was aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely
false one. As Medwin points out, in referring to his school-days,
he “must have had a rather large circle of friends, since his
parting breakfast at Eton cost £50.”</p>
<p>Even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the
fascination of that boyish figure with the “stag eyes,”
so enthusiastically in pursuit of truth and of dreams, of trifles
light as air and of the redemption of the human race. “His
figure,” Hogg tells us, “was slight and fragile, and
yet his bones were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so
much that he seemed of low stature.” And, in Medwin’s
book, we even become reconciled to that shrill voice of his, which
Lamb and most other people found so unpleasant. Medwin gives us
nothing in the nature of a portrait of Shelley in these heavy and
incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable materials for such a
portrait—in descriptions, for instance, of how he used to go
on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would get so
absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, “Mary, have
I dined?” More important, as revealing his too exquisite
sensitiveness, is the account of how Medwin saw him, “after
threading the carnival crowd in the Lung’ Arno Corsos, throw
himself, half-fainting, into a chair, overpowered by the atmosphere
of evil passions, as he used to say, in that sensual and
unintellectual crowd.” Some people, on reading a passage like
this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the
prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by
the miseries and imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was
more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the same
fine genius in English history. He did not indulge in repentance,
like Burns and Byron. On the other hand, he was not in the smallest
degree an egolator. He had not even such an innocent egoism as
Thoreau’s. He was always longing to give himself to the
world. In the Italian days we find him planning an expedition with
Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of being
burnt alive for sacrilege. He has often been denounced for his
heartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not
judge him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved
differently. But it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that
he went through the marriage service with both his wives, in spite
of his principles, that he so long endured Harriet’s sister
as the tyrant of his house, and that he neglected none of his
responsibilities to her, in so far as they were consistent with his
deserting her for another woman. This may seem a <em>bizarre</em>
defence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Shelley
behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have
done, given the same principles and the same circumstances. He was
a man who never followed the line of least resistance or of
self-indulgence, as most men do in their love affairs. He fought a
difficult fight all his life in a world that ignored him, except
when it was denouncing him as a polluter of Society. Whatever
mistakes we may consider him to have made, we can hardly fail to
admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans.</p>
<hr />
<h3><SPAN name="Shelley3" name="Shelley3">(3) The Poet of Hope</SPAN></h3>
<p>Shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age. He is the poet of
hope, as Wordsworth is the poet of wisdom. He has been charged with
being intangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in
which the future is intangible and unearthly. He is no more
unearthly than the skylark or the rainbow or the dawn. His world,
indeed, is a universe of skylarks and rainbows and dawns—a
universe in which</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Like a thousand dawns on a single night</p>
<p>The splendours rise and spread.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music. He is
unearthly in the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new
element. We lose to some extent the gravity of flesh and find
ourselves wandering among stars and sunbeams, or diving under sea
or stream to visit the buried day of some wonder-strewn cave. There
are other great poets besides Shelley who have had a vision of the
heights and depths. Compared with him, however, they have all about
them something of Goliath’s disadvantageous bulk. Shelley
alone retains a boyish grace like David’s, and does not seem
to groan under the burden of his task. He does not round his
shoulders in gloom in the presence of Heaven and Hell. His cosmos
is a constellation. His thousand dawns are shaken out over the
earth with a promise that turns even the long agony of Prometheus
into joy. There is no other joy in literature like Shelley’s.
It is the joy not of one who is blind or untroubled, but of one
who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of the unselfish, has
learned</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i10">… to hope till Hope creates</p>
<p>From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>To write like this is to triumph over death. It is to cease to
be a victim and to become a creator. Shelley recognized that the
world had been bound into slavery by the Devil, but he more than
anyone else believed that it was possible for the human race in a
single dayspring to recover the first intention of God.</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>In the great morning of the world,</p>
<p>The Spirit of God with might unfurled</p>
<p class="i2">The flag of Freedom over Chaos.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the
past of God. He lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will
sacrifice the perfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect
yesterday. He was the devoted enemy of that dark spirit of Power
which holds fast to the old greed as to a treasure. In
<em>Hellas</em> he puts into the mouth of Christ a reproof of
Mahomet which is a reproof to all the Carsons and those who are
haters of a finer future to-day.</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i10">Obdurate spirit!</p>
<p>Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.</p>
<p>Pride is thy error and thy punishment.</p>
<p>Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds</p>
<p>Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops</p>
<p>Before the Power that wields and kindles them.</p>
<p>True greatness asks not space.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>There are some critics who would like to separate
Shelley’s politics from his poetry. But Shelley’s
politics are part of his poetry. They are the politics of hope as
his poetry is the poetry of hope. Europe did not adopt his politics
in the generation that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the result
is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred years
later. Every generation rejects Shelley; it prefers incredulity to
hope, fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when
the logic of its common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as
even the wildest orgy of idealism could not have produced. Shelley
must, no doubt, still seem a shocking poet to an age in which the
limitation of the veto of the House of Lords was described as a
revolutionary step. To Shelley even the new earth for which the
Bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed an extravagant demand.
He was almost the only English poet up to his own time who believed
that the world had a future. One can think of no other poet to whom
to turn for the prophetic music of a real League of Nations.
Tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his
passion was not for that but for the British Empire. He had the
craven fear of being great on any but the old Imperialist lines.
His work did nothing to make his country more generous than it was
before. Shelley, on the other hand, creates for us a new atmosphere
of generosity. His patriotism was love of the people of England,
not love of the Government of England. Hence, when the Government
of England allied itself with the oppressors of mankind, he saw
nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would have arraigned a
German or a Russian Government in the same circumstances.</p>
<p>He arraigned it, indeed, in the preface to <em>Hellas</em> in a
paragraph which the publisher nervously suppressed, and which was
only restored in 1892 by Mr. Buxton Forman. The seditious paragraph
ran:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect
upon the part which those who presume to represent them will have
played in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings
which it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the
war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those
ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers,
called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common
enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a
mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth
are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe,
nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and
she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that
destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.</p>
</div>
<p>It is nearly a hundred years since Shelley proclaimed this birth
of a new race throughout Europe. Would he have turned pessimist if
he had lived to see the world infected with Prussianism as it has
been in our time? I do not think he would. He would have been the
singer of the new race to-day as he was then. To him the
resurrection of the old despotism, foreign and domestic, would have
seemed but a fresh assault by the Furies on the body of Prometheus.
He would have scattered the Furies with a song.</p>
<p>For Shelley has not failed. He is one of those who have brought
down to earth the creative spirit of freedom. And that spirit has
never ceased to brood, with however disappointing results, over the
chaos of Europe until our own time. His greatest service to freedom
is, perhaps, that he made it seem, not a policy, but a part of
Nature. He made it desirable as the spring, lovely as a cloud in a
blue sky, gay as a lark, glad as a wave, golden as a star, mighty
as a wind. Other poets speak of freedom, and invite the birds on to
the platform. Shelley spoke of freedom and himself became a bird in
the air, a wave of the sea. He did not humiliate beauty into a
lesson. He scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as a
spirit—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought</p>
<p>To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>His politics are implicit in <em>The Cloud</em> and <em>The
Skylark</em> and <em>The West Wind</em>, no less than in <em>The
Mask of Anarchy</em>. His idea of the State as well as his idea of
sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberant imagination
of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in the
strictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a Book of
Revelation.</p>
<p>It is impossible to say whether he might not have been a greater
poet if he had not been in such haste to rebuild the world. He
would, one fancies, have been a better artist if he had had a finer
patience of phrase. On the other hand, his achievement even in the
sphere of phrase and music is surpassed by no poet since
Shakespeare. He may hurry along at intervals in a cloud of
second-best words, but out of the cloud suddenly comes a song like
Ariel’s and a radiance like the radiance of a new day. With
him a poem is a melody rather than a manuscript. Not since Prospero
commanded songs from his attendant spirits has there been singing
heard like the <em>Hymn of Pan</em> and <em>The Indian
Serenade</em>. <em>The Cloud</em> is the most magical transmutation
of things seen into things heard in the English language. Not that
Shelley misses the wonder of things seen. But he sees things, as it
were, musically.</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i2">My soul is an enchanted boat</p>
<p class="i2">Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float</p>
<p>Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>There is more of music than painting in this kind of
writing.</p>
<p>There is no other music but Shelley’s which seems to me
likely to bring healing to the madness of the modern Saul. For this
reason I hope that Professor Herford’s fine edition of the
shorter poems (arranged for the first time in chronological order)
will encourage men and women to turn to Shelley again. Professor
Herford promises us a companion volume on the same lines,
containing the dramas and longer poems, if sufficient interest is
shown in his book. The average reader will probably be content with
Mr. Hutchinson’s cheap and perfect “Oxford
Edition” of Shelley. But the scholar, as well as the lover of
a beautiful page, will find in Professor Herford’s edition a
new pleasure in old verse.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Coleridge0" name="Coleridge0">XII.—The Wisdom of Coleridge</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<h3><SPAN name="Coleridge1" name="Coleridge1">(1) Coleridge as Critic</SPAN></h3>
<p>Coleridge was the thirteenth child of a rather queer clergyman.
The Rev. John Coleridge was queer enough in having thirteen
children: he was queerer still in being the author of a Latin
grammar in which he renamed the “ablative” the
“quale-quare-quidditive case.” Coleridge was thus born
not only with an unlucky number, but trailing clouds of
definitions. He was in some respects the unluckiest of all
Englishmen of literary genius. He leaves on us an impression of
failure as no other writer of the same stature does. The impression
may not be justified. There are few writers who would not prefer
the magnificent failure of a Coleridge to their own little
mole-hill of success. Coleridge was a failure in comparison not
with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own
genius. His imperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god. Charles
Lamb summed up the truth about his genius as well as about his
character in that final phrase, “an archangel a little
damaged.” This was said at a time when the archangel was much
more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum; but even then
Lamb wrote: “His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its
ancient glory.” Most of Coleridge’s great
contemporaries were aware of that glory. Even those who were
afterwards to be counted among his revilers, such as Hazlitt and De
Quincey, had known what it was to be disciples at the feet of this
inspired ruin. They spoke not only of his mind, but even of his
physical characteristics—his voice and his hair—as
though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was
ambrosia. Even as a boy at Christ’s Hospital, according to
Lamb, he used to make the “casual passer through the
Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed
the disproportion between the <em>speech</em> and the <em>garb</em>
of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet
intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus … or
reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar—while the walls of the
old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the <em>inspired
charity-boy!</em>”</p>
<p>It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we
should constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of
his contemporaries. <em>Christabel</em> and <em>Kubla Kahn</em> we
could read, no doubt, in perfect enjoyment even if we did not know
the author’s name. For the rest, there is so much flagging of
wing both in his verse and in his prose that, if we did not remind
ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might persuade
ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull
flappings and slitherings of a penguin. His genius is intermittent
and comes arbitrarily to an end. He is inspired only in fragments
and aphorisms. He was all but incapable of writing a complete book
or a complete poem at a high level. His irresponsibility as an
author is described in that sentence in which he says: “I
have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the
world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.” His
literary plans had a ludicrous way of breaking down. It was
characteristic of him that, in 1817, when he projected a complete
edition of his poems, under the title <em>Sibylline Leaves</em>, he
omitted to publish Volume I. and published only Volume II. He would
announce a lecture on Milton, and then give his audience “a
very eloquent and popular discourse on the general character of
Shakespeare.” His two finest poems he never finished. He
wrote not by an act of the will but according to the wind, and when
the wind dropped he came to earth. It was as though he could soar
but was unable to fly. It is this that differentiates him from
other great poets or critics. None of them has left such a record
of unfulfilled purposes. It is not that he did not get through an
enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in Mr.
Chesterton’s poem, he “went to Birmingham by way of
Beachy Head,” and in the end he did not get to Birmingham.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives an amusing account of the way in
which <em>Biographia Literaria</em> came to be written. Originally,
in 1815, it was conceived as a preface—to be “done in
two, or at farthest three days”—to a collection of some
“scattered and manuscript poems.” Two months later the
plan had changed. Coleridge was now busy on a preface to an
<em>Autobiographia Literaria, sketches of my literary Life and
Opinions</em>. This in turn developed into “a full account
(<em>raisonné</em>) of the controversy concerning
Wordsworth’s poems and theory,” with a
“disquisition on the powers of Association … and on
the generic difference between the Fancy and the
Imagination.” This ran to such a length that he decided not
to use it as a preface, but to amplify it into a work in three
volumes. He succeeded in writing the first volume, but he found
himself unable to fill the second. “Then, as the volume
obstinately remained too small, he tossed in <em>Satyrane</em>, an
epistolary account of his wanderings in Germany, topped up with a
critique of a bad play, and gave the whole painfully to the world
in July, 1817.” It is one of the ironies of literary history
that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in literature, the
vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the haphazard
inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the
“shaping imagination,” should himself have given us in
his greatest book of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and
shapeless jumble. It is but another proof of the fact that, while
talent cannot safely ignore what is called technique, genius almost
can. Coleridge, in spite of his formlessness, remains the wisest
man who ever spoke in English about literature. His place is that
of an oracle among controversialists.</p>
<p>Even so, <em>Biographia Literaria</em> is a disappointing book.
It is the porch, but it is not the temple. It may be that, in
literary criticism, there can be no temple. Literary criticism is
in its nature largely an incitement to enter, a hint of the
treasures that are to be found within. Persons who seek rest in
literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written upon the
walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing. It is
extremely easy to invent ten such commandments—it was done in
the age of Racine and in the age of Pope—but the wise critic
knows that in literature the rules are less important than the
“inner light.” Hence, criticism at its highest is not a
theorist’s attempt to impose iron laws on writers: it is an
attempt to capture the secret of that “inner light” and
of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. It is also
an attempt to define the conditions in which the “inner
light” has most happily manifested itself, and to judge new
writers of promise according to the measure in which they have been
true to the spirit, though not necessarily to the technicalities,
of the great tradition. Criticism, then, is not the Roman father of
good writing: it is the disciple and missionary of good writing.
The end of criticism is less law-giving than conversion. It teaches
not the legalities, but the love, of literature. <em>Biographia
Literaria</em> does this in its most admirable parts by interesting
us in Coleridge’s own literary beginnings, by emphasizing the
strong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty
animosities of little ones, by pointing out the signs of the
miracle of genius in the young Shakespeare, and by disengaging the
true genius of Wordsworth from a hundred extravagances of theory
and practice. Coleridge’s remarks on the irritability of
minor poets—“men of undoubted talents, but not of
genius,” whose tempers are “rendered yet more irritable
by their desire to <em>appear</em> men of
genius”—should be written up on the study walls of
everyone commencing author. His description, too, of his period as
“this age of personality, this age of literary and political
gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with sort of
Egyptian superstition if only the brainless head be atoned for by
the sting of personal malignity in the tail,” conveys a
warning to writers that is not of an age but for all time.
Coleridge may have exaggerated the “manly hilarity” and
“evenness and sweetness of temper” of men of genius.
But there is no denying that, the smaller the genius, the greater
is the spite of wounded self-love. “Experience informs
us,” as Coleridge says, “that the first defence of weak
minds is to recriminate.” As for Coleridge’s great
service to Wordsworth’s fame, it was that of a gold-washer.
He cleansed it from all that was false in Wordsworth’s
reaction both in theory and in practice against “poetic
diction.” Coleridge pointed out that Wordsworth had
misunderstood the ultimate objections to eighteenth-century verse.
The valid objection to a great deal of eighteenth-century verse was
not, he showed, that it was written in language different from that
of prose, but that it consisted of “translations of prose
thoughts into poetic language.” Coleridge put it still more
strongly, indeed, when he said that “the language from
Pope’s translation of Homer to Darwin’s <em>Temple of
Nature</em> may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be
too faithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no
better reason than that it would be intolerable in conversation or
in prose.” Wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against
the meretricious garb of mean thoughts, wished to deny verse its
more splendid clothing altogether. If we accepted his theories we
should have to condemn his <em>Ode</em>, the greatest of his
sonnets, and, as Coleridge put it, “two-thirds at least of
the marked beauties of his poetry.” The truth is, Wordsworth
created an engine that was in danger of destroying not only Pope
but himself. Coleridge destroyed the engine and so helped to save
Wordsworth. Coleridge may, in his turn, have gone too far in
dividing language into three groups—language peculiar to
poetry, language peculiar to prose, and language common to both,
though there is much to be said for the division; but his jealousy
for the great tradition in language was the jealousy of a sound
critic. “Language,” he declared, “is the armoury
of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past,
and the weapons of its future conquests.”</p>
<p>He, himself, wrote idly enough at times: he did not shrink from
the phrase, “literary man,” abominated by Mr. Birrell.
But he rises in sentence after sentence into the great manner, as
when he declares:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time
a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy
of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions,
language.</p>
</div>
<p>How excellently, again, he describes Wordsworth’s early
aim as being—</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to
excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the
mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it
to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.</p>
</div>
<p>He explains Wordsworth’s gift more fully in another
passage:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought, the fine
balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in
modifying the objects observed, and, above all, the original gift
of spreading the tone, the <em>atmosphere</em>, and with it the
depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and
situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all
the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew-drops.</p>
</div>
<p>Coleridge’s censures on Wordsworth, on the other hand,
such as that on <em>The Daffodil</em>, may not all be endorsed by
us to-day. But in the mass they have the insight of genius, as when
he condemns “the approximation to what might be called
<em>mental</em> bombast, as distinguished from verbal.” His
quotations of great passages, again, are the very flower of good
criticism.</p>
<p>Mr. George Sampson’s editorial selection from
<em>Biographia Literaria</em> and his pleasant as well as
instructive notes give one a new pleasure in re-reading this
classic of critical literature. The
“quale-quare-quidditive” chapters have been removed,
and Wordsworth’s revolutionary prefaces and essays given in
their place. In its new form, <em>Biographia Literaria</em> may not
be the best book that could be written, but there is good reason
for believing that it is the best book that has been written on
poetry in the English tongue.</p>
<hr />
<h3><SPAN name="Coleridge2" name="Coleridge2">(2) Coleridge as a Talker</SPAN></h3>
<p>Coleridge’s talk resembles the movements of one of the
heavenly bodies. It moves luminously on its way without impediment,
without conflict. When Dr. Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due
to our sense of conflict. His sentences are knobby sticks. We love
him as a good man playing the bully even more than as a wise man
talking common sense. He is one of the comic characters in
literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the same company as
Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention of a
Scottish humourist named Boswell. “Burke,” we read in
Coleridge’s <em>Table Talk</em>, “said and wrote more
than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing,
and greater in Boswell than in real life.” Coleridge’s
conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression of
personality. He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than
struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. At
his best, he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he
says: “To most men experience is like the stern lights of a
ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.” He can
give us in a sentence the central truth of politics, reconciling
what is good in Individualism with what is good in Socialism in a
score or so of words:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>That is the most excellent state of society in which the
patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the
individual energy of the man.</p>
</div>
<p>And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form,
as in the sentence:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the
heels of error, lest you get your brains knocked out.</p>
</div>
<p>“I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner,” said
Coleridge, and he explained that he did not mean by this “an
arguer.” He was a discoverer of order, of laws, of causes,
not a controversialist. He sought after principles, whether in
politics or literature. He quarrelled with Gibbon because his
<em>Decline and Fall</em> was “little else but a disguised
collection of … splendid anecdotes” instead of a
philosophic search for the ultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman
Empire. Coleridge himself formulated these causes in sentences that
are worth remembering at a time when we are debating whether the
world of the future is to be a vast boxing ring of empires or a
community of independent nations. He said:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire—which
is not to be found in all Gibbon’s immense work—may be
stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally
destroying, the <em>national</em> character. Rome under Trajan was
an empire without a nation.</p>
</div>
<p>One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however. He was a
seer with his head among the stars, but he was also a human being
with uneven gait, stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and
unhappinesses. He himself boasted in a delightful sentence:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance—that, with
all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like
the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine.</p>
</div>
<p>It is to be feared that Coleridge’s “gastric and
bowel distempers” had more effect on his head than he was
aware of. Like other men, he often spoke out of a heart full of
grievances. He uttered the bitterness of an unhappily married
dyspeptic when he said: “The most happy marriage I can
picture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a
blind woman.” It is amusing to reflect that one of the many
books which he wished to write was “a book on the duties of
women, more especially to their husbands.” One feels, again,
that in his defence of the egoism of the great reformers, he was
apologizing for a vice of his own rather than making an impersonal
statement of truth. “How can a tall man help thinking of his
size,” he asked, “when dwarfs are constantly standing
on tiptoe beside him?” The personal note that occasionally
breaks in upon the oracular rhythm of the <em>Table Talk</em>,
however, is a virtue in literature, even if a lapse in philosophy.
The crumbs of a great man’s autobiography are no less
precious than the crumbs of his wisdom. There are moods in which
one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts. It is pleasant to
hear Coleridge boasting; “The <em>Ancient Mariner</em> cannot
be imitated, nor the poem <em>Love</em>. <em>They may be excelled;
they are not imitable</em>.” One is amused to know that he
succeeded in offending Lamb on one occasion by illustrating
“the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and the
predominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of
Lamb and himself.” It is amusing, too, to find that, while
Wordsworth regarded <em>The Ancient Mariner</em> as a dangerous
drag on the popularity of <em>Lyrical Ballads</em>, Coleridge
looked on his poem as the feature that had sold the greatest number
of the copies of the book. It is only fair to add that in taking
this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I was told by Longmans that the greater part of the <em>Lyrical
Ballads</em> had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of
the <em>Ancient Mariner</em>, concluded that it was a naval
song-book, or, at all events, that it had some relation to nautical
matters.</p>
</div>
<p>Of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in
<em>Table Talk</em> as one would like. At the same time, there are
one or two which throw light on the nature of Coleridge’s
imagination. We get an idea of one of the chief differences between
the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry of Wordsworth when we read
the confession:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I had the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim
one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but
where I saw them I mostly forget.</p>
</div>
<p>The nephew who collected Coleridge’s talk declared that
there was no man whom he would more readily have chosen as a guide
in morals, but “I would not take him as a guide through
streets or fields or earthly roads.” The author of <em>Kubla
Khan</em> asserted still more strongly on another occasion his
indifference to locality:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact but harmonious
opposites in this—that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree
called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical
associations, just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said
to attract the swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding
Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon
without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of
similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the
account of the battle, in Herodotus, as anyone can. Charles Lamb
wrote an essay on a man who lived in past time: I thought of adding
another to it on one who lived not <em>in time</em> at all, past,
present, or future—but beside or collaterally.</p>
</div>
<p>Some of Coleridge’s other memories are of a more trifling
and amusing sort. He recalls, for instance, the occasion of his
only flogging at school. He had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be
taken on as an apprentice. The shoemaker, “being an honest
man,” had at once told the boy’s master:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I
answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I
hated the thought of being a clergyman. “Why so?” said
he. “Because, to tell you the truth, sir,” said I,
“I am an infidel!” For this, without more ado, Bowyer
flogged me—wisely, as I think—soundly, as I know. Any
whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and
confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I laughed at, and got
heartily ashamed of my folly.</p>
</div>
<p>Among the reminiscences of Coleridge no passage is more famous
than that in which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane near
Highgate one day, a “loose, slack, not well-dressed
youth” was introduced to him:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or
so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said:
“Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed
your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said
to ——, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe,
before the consumption showed itself distinctly.</p>
</div>
<p>Another famous anecdote relates to the time at which Coleridge,
like Wordsworth, carried the fires of the French Revolution about
him into the peace of the West Country. Speaking of a
fellow-disciple of the liberty of those days, Coleridge afterwards
said:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>John Thelwall had something very good about him. We were once
sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him:
“Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason
in!” “Nay! Citizen Samuel,” replied he, “it
is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity
for treason!”</p>
</div>
<p>Is there any prettier anecdote in literary history?</p>
<p>Besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the
<em>Table Talk</em>, however, there are a great number of opinions
which show us Coleridge not as a seer, but as a
“character”—a crusty gentleman, every whit as
ready to express an antipathy as a principle. He shared Dr.
Johnson’s quarrel with the Scots, and said of them:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very
disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The
Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the
English.</p>
</div>
<p>He had no love for Jews, or Dissenters, or Catholics, and
anticipated Carlyle’s hostility to the emancipation of the
negroes. He raged against the Reform Bill, Catholic Emancipation,
and the education of the poor in schools. He was indignant with
Belgium for claiming national independence. One cannot read much of
his talk about politics without amazement that so wise a man should
have been so frequently a fool. At the same time, he generally
remained an original fool. He never degenerated into a mere
partisan. He might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was
not taken in by reactionary leaders. He was no more capable than
Shelley of mistaking Castlereagh for a great man, and he did not
join in the glorification of Pitt. Like Dr. Johnson, he could be a
Tory without feeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully
Ireland. Coleridge, indeed, went so far as to wish to cut the last
link with Ireland as the only means of saving England. Discussing
the Irish question, he said:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from
the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with
the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by
the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from
our association with Ireland…. Mr. Pitt has received great
credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or
later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon
which, he effected it made it the most fatal blow that ever was
levelled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came
the Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform
Bill! And what next?</p>
</div>
<p>When one thinks of the injury that the subjection of Ireland has
done the English name in America, in Russia, in Australia, and
elsewhere in quite recent times, one can hardly deny that on this
matter Coleridge was a sound prophet.</p>
<p>It is the literary rather than the political opinions, however,
that will bring every generation of readers afresh to
Coleridge’s <em>Table Talk</em>. No man ever talked better in
a few sentences on Shakespeare, Sterne, and the tribe of authors.
One may not agree with Coleridge in regarding Jeremy Taylor as one
of the four chief glories of English literature, or in thinking
Southey’s style “next door to faultless.” But one
listens to his <em>obiter dicta</em> eagerly as the sayings of one
of the greatest minds that have interested themselves in the
criticism of literature. There are tedious pages in <em>Table
Talk</em>, but these are, for the most part, concerned with
theology. On the whole, the speech of Coleridge was golden. Even
the leaden parts are interesting because they are Coleridge’s
lead. One wishes the theology was balanced, however, by a few more
glimpses of his lighter interests, such as we find in the passage:
“Never take an iambus for a Christian name. A trochee, or
tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names
for women.” What we want most of all in table talk is to get
an author into the confession album. Coleridge’s <em>Table
Talk</em> would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it
not for the fact that he occasionally came down out of the pulpit
and babbled.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Tennyson" name="Tennyson">XIII.—Tennyson: A Temporary Criticism</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>If Tennyson’s reputation has diminished, it is not that it
has fallen before hostile criticism: it has merely faded through
time. Perhaps there was never an English poet who loomed so large
to his own age as Tennyson—who represented his contemporaries
with the same passion and power. Pope was sufficiently
representative of his age, but his age meant, by comparison, a
limited and aristocratic circle. Byron represented and shocked his
age by turns. Tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to the
educated middle-class men and women of his time as the family
clergyman. That is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did
to them. That he was ahead of his age on many points on which this
could not be said of the family clergyman one need not dispute. He
was a kind of “new theologian.” He stood, like Dean
Farrar, for the larger hope and various other heresies. Every
representative man is ahead of his age—a little, but not
enough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people.
It may be objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a
thinker, and that he should be judged not by his message but by his
song. But his message and his song sprang from the same
vision—a vision of the world seen, not <em>sub specie
æternitatis</em>, but <em>sub specie</em> the reign of Queen
Victoria. Before we appreciate Tennyson’s real place in
literature, we must frankly recognize the fact that his muse wore a
crinoline. The great mass of his work bears its date stamped upon
it as obviously almost as a copy of <em>The Times</em>. How
topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in
<em>Locksley Hall:</em></p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so
young.</p>
<p>And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.</p>
<p>And I said “My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to
me,</p>
<p>Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>One would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of
Tennyson’s genius. I think, however, they may be fairly
quoted as lines suggesting the mid-Victorian atmosphere that clings
round all but his greatest work. They bring before our minds the
genteel magazine illustrations of other days. They conjure up a
world of charming, vapid faces, where there is little life apart
from sentiment and rhetoric. Contrast such a poem as <em>Locksley
Hall</em> with <em>The Flight of the Duchess</em>. Each contains at
once a dramatization of human relations, and the statement of a
creed. The human beings in Browning’s poem, however, are not
mere shadows out of old magazines; they are as real as the men and
women in the portraits of the masters, as real as ourselves.
Similarly, in expressing his thought, Browning gives it imaginative
dignity as philosophy, while Tennyson writes what is after all
merely an exalted leading article. There is more in common between
Tennyson and Lytton than is generally realized. Both were fond of
windy words. They were slaves of language to almost as great an
extent as Swinburne. One feels that too often phrases like
“moor and fell” and “bower and hall” were
mere sounding substitutes for a creative imagination. I have heard
it argued that the lines in <em>Maud</em>:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>All night have the roses heard</p>
<p>The flute, violin, bassoon;</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ball-room
orchestra merely for the sake of euphony. The mistake about the
bassoon is a small one, and is, I suppose, borrowed from Coleridge,
but it is characteristic.</p>
<p>Tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he
was generally accepted as being. He was an artist of lines rather
than of poems. He seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring
full-armed from the imagination as the great poems of the world do.
He built them up haphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels. They are
full of sententious padding and prettiness, and the wordiness is
not merely a philosopher’s vacuous babbling in his sleep, as
so much of Wordsworth is; it is the word-spinning of a man who
loves words more than people, or philosophy, or things. Let us
admit at once that when Tennyson is word perfect he takes his place
among the immortals. One may be convinced that the bulk of his work
is already as dead as the bulk of Longfellow’s work. But in
his great poems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect
form, and expressed it perfectly. He did this in <em>Ulysses</em>,
which comes nearer a noble perfection, perhaps, than anything else
he ever wrote. One can imagine the enthusiasm of some literary
discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson is as little known
as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines hackneyed for us by
much quotation:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:</p>
<p>The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep</p>
<p>Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,</p>
<p>’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.</p>
<p>Push off, and sitting well in order smite</p>
<p>The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds</p>
<p>To sail beyond the sunset and the baths</p>
<p>Of all the western stars, until I die.</p>
<p>It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;</p>
<p>It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,</p>
<p>And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>There, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makes
Browning’s people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy
illustrating an old story. One of the most beautiful lines Tennyson
ever wrote:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The horns of Elfland faintly blowing,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of
the world’s romance.</p>
<p>Tennyson’s art at its best, however, and in these two
instances is art founded upon art, not art founded upon life. We
used to be asked to admire the vivid observation shown in such
lines as:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>More black than ashbuds in the front of March;</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that Tennyson had a
quick eye for the facts of nature. But such lines, however
accurate, do not make a man a poet. It is in his fine ornamental
moods that Tennyson means most to our imaginations
nowadays—in the moods of such lines as:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>The truth is, Tennyson, with all his rhetoric and with all his
prosaic Victorian opinions, was an æsthete in the immortal
part of him no less than were Rossetti and Swinburne. He seemed
immense to his contemporaries, because he put their doubts and
fears into music, and was master of the fervid rhetoric of the new
gospel of Imperialism. They did not realize that great poetry
cannot be founded on a basis of perishable doubts and perishable
gospels. It was enough for them to feel that <em>In Memoriam</em>
gave them soothing anchorage and shelter from the destructive
hurricanes of science. It was enough for them to thrill to the
public-speech poetry of <em>Of old sat Freedom on the Heights</em>,
the patriotic triumph of <em>The Relief of Lucknow</em>, the
glorious contempt for foreigners exhibited in his references to
“the red fool-fury of the Seine.” Is it any wonder that
during a great part of his life Tennyson was widely regarded as not
only a poet, but a teacher and a statesman? His sneering caricature
of Bright as the “broad-brimmed hawker of holy things”
should have made it clear that in politics he was but a party man,
and that his political intelligence was commonplace.</p>
<p>He was too deficient in the highest kind of imagination and
intellect to achieve the greatest things. He seldom or never stood
aloof from his own time, as Wordsworth did through his philosophic
imagination, as Keats did through his æsthetic imagination,
as Browning did through his dramatic imagination. He wore a
poetical cloak, and avoided the vulgar crowd physically; he had
none of Browning’s taste for tea-parties. But Browning had
not the tea-party imagination; Tennyson, in a great degree, had. He
preached excellent virtues to his time; but they were respectable
rather than spiritual virtues. Thus, <em>The Idylls of the
King</em> have become to us mere ancient fashion-plates of the
virtues, while the moral power of <em>The Ring and the Book</em> is
as commanding to-day as in the year in which the poem was first
published.</p>
<p>It is all the more surprising that no good selection from
Tennyson has yet appeared. His “complete works” contain
so much that is ephemeral and uninspired as to be a mere book of
reference on our shelves. When will some critic do for him what
Matthew Arnold did for Wordsworth, and separate the gold from the
dross—do it as well as Matthew Arnold did it for Wordsworth?
Such a volume would be far thinner than the Wordsworth selection.
But it would entitle Tennyson to a much higher place among the
poets than in these years of the reaction he is generally
given.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="SwiftShakes" name="SwiftShakes">XIV.—The Politics of Swift and Shakespeare</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<h3><SPAN name="Swift" name="Swift">(1) Swift</SPAN></h3>
<p>There are few greater ironies in history than that the modern
Conservatives should be eager to claim Swift as one of themselves.
One finds even the <em>Morning Post</em>—which someone has
aptly enough named the <em>Morning Prussian</em>—cheerfully
counting the author of <em>A Voyage to Houyhnhnms</em> in the list
of sound Tories. It is undeniable that Swift wrote pamphlets for
the Tory Party of his day. A Whig, he turned from the Whigs of
Queen Anne in disgust, and carried the Tory label for the rest of
his life. If we consider realities rather than labels, however,
what do we find were the chief political ideals for which Swift
stood? His politics, as every reader of his pamphlets knows, were,
above all, the politics of a pacifist and a Home Ruler—the
two things most abhorrent to the orthodox Tories of our own time.
Swift belonged to the Tory Party at one of those rare periods at
which it was a peace party. <em>The Conduct of the Allies</em> was
simply a demand for a premature peace. Worse than this, it was a
pamphlet against England’s taking part in a land-war on the
Continent instead of confining herself to naval operations.
“It was the kingdom’s misfortune,” wrote Swift,
“that the sea was not the Duke of Marlborough’s
element, otherwise the whole force of the war would infallibly have
been bestowed there, infinitely to the advantage of his
country.” Whether Swift and the Tories were right in their
attack on Marlborough and the war is a question into which I do not
propose to enter. I merely wish to emphasize the fact that <em>The
Conduct of the Allies</em> was, from the modern Tory point of view,
not merely a pacifist, but a treasonable, document. Were anything
like it to appear nowadays, it would be suppressed under the
Defence of the Realm Act. And that Swift was a hater of war, not
merely as a party politician, but as a philosopher, is shown by the
discourse on the causes of war which he puts into the mouth of
Gulliver when the latter is trying to convey a picture of human
society to his Houyhnhnm master:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of
them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of
them pretends to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with
another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war
is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes
because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things
which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight
till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable
cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been
wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence or embroiled by factions
among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war with our
nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a
territory of land that would render our dominions round and
complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people
are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or
make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from
their barbarous way of living.</p>
</div>
<p>There you have “Kultur” wars, and “white
man’s burden” wars, and wars for “places of
strategic importance,” satirized as though by a
twentieth-century humanitarian. When the <em>Morning Post</em>
begins to write leaders in the same strain, we shall begin to
believe that Swift was a Tory in the ordinary meaning of the
word.</p>
<p>As for Swift’s Irish politics, Mr. Charles Whibley, like
other Conservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential
Nationalism by suggesting that Swift was merely a just man
righteously indignant at the destruction of Irish manufactures. At
least, one would never gather from the present book that Swift was
practically the father of the modern Irish demand for
self-government. Swift was an Irish patriot in the sense in which
Washington was an American patriot. Like Washington, he had no
quarrel with English civilization. He was not an eighteenth-century
Sinn Feiner. He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism
was Colonial Nationalism. As such he was the forerunner of Grattan
and Flood, and also, in a measure, of Parnell and Redmond. While
not a Separatist, he had the strongest possible objection to being
either ruled or ruined from London. In his <em>Short View of the
State of Ireland</em>, published in 1728, he preached the whole
gospel of Colonial Nationalism as it is accepted by Irishmen like
Sir Horace Plunkett to-day. He declared that one of the causes of a
nation’s thriving—</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>… is by being governed only by laws made with their own
consent, for otherwise they are not a free people. And, therefore,
all appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment,
to another country are so many grievous impoverishments.</p>
</div>
<p>He said of the Irish:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>We are in the condition of patients who have physic sent to them
by doctors at a distance, strangers to their constitution and the
nature of their disease.</p>
</div>
<p>In the <em>Drapier’s Letters</em> he denied the right of
the English Parliament to legislate for Ireland. He declared that
all reason was on the side of Ireland’s being free, though
power and the love of power made for Ireland’s servitude.
“The arguments on both sides,” he said in a passage
which sums up with perfect irony the centuries-old controversy
between England and Ireland, were “invincible”:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>For in reason all government without the consent of the governed
is slavery. But, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly
subdue one single man in his shirt.</p>
</div>
<p>It would be interesting to know how the modern Tory, whose
gospel is the gospel of the eleven men well armed, squares this
with Swift’s passionate championship of the “one single
man in his shirt.” One wishes very earnestly that the Toryism
of Swift were in fact the Toryism of the modern Conservative party.
Had it been so, there would have been no such thing as Carsonism in
pre-war England; and, had there been no Carsonism, one may infer
from Mr. Gerard’s recent revelations, there might have been
no European war.</p>
<p>Mr. Whibley, it is only fair to say, is concerned with Swift as
a man of letters and a friend, rather than with Swift as a party
politician. The present book is a reprint of the Leslie Stephen
lecture which he delivered at Cambridge a few months ago. It was
bound, therefore, to be predominantly literary in interest. At the
same time, Mr. Whibley’s political bias appears both in what
he says and in what he keeps silent about. His defence of Swift
against the charge of misanthropy is a defence with which we find
ourselves largely in agreement. But Mr. Whibley is too
single-minded a party politician to be able to defend the Dean
without clubbing a number of his own pet antipathies in the
process. He seems to think that the only alternative to the
attitude of Dean Swift towards humanity is the attitude of persons
who, “feigning a bland and general love of abtract humanity
… wreak a wild revenge upon individuals.” He
apparently believes that it is impossible for one human being to
wish well to the human race in general, and to be affectionate to
John, Peter and Thomas in particular. Here are some of Mr.
Whibley’s rather wild comments on this topic. He writes:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>We know well enough whither universal philanthropy leads us. The
Friend of Man is seldom the friend of men. At his best he is
content with a moral maxim, and buttons up his pocket in the
presence of poverty. “I <em>give</em> thee sixpence! I will
see thee damned first!” It is not for nothing that
Canning’s immortal words were put in the mouth of the Friend
of Humanity, who, finding that he cannot turn the Needy Knife
Grinder to political account, give him kicks for ha’pence,
and goes off in “a transport of Republican enthusiasm.”
Such is the Friend of Man at his best.</p>
</div>
<p>“At his best” is good. It makes one realize that Mr.
Whibley is merely playing a game of make-believe, and playing it
very hard. His indictment of humanitarians has about as much, or as
little, basis in fact as would an indictment of wives or seagulls
or fields of corn. One has only to mention Shelley with his
innumerable personal benevolences to set Mr. Whibley’s
card-castle of abuse tumbling.</p>
<p>With Mr. Whibley’s general view of Swift as opposed to his
general view of politics, I find myself for the most part in
harmony. I doubt, however, whether Swift has been pursued in his
grave with such torrential malignity as Mr. Whibley imagines.
Thackeray’s denigration, I admit, takes the breath away. One
can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift’s
writings or his life. Of course he had done so, but his passion for
the sentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a
genius of saturnine realism such as Swift’s. The truth is,
though Swift was among the staunchest of friends, he is not among
the most sociable of authors. His writings are seldom in the vein
either of tenderness or of merriment. We know of the tenderness of
Swift only from a rare anecdote or from the prattle of the
<em>Journal to Stella</em>. As for his laughter, as Mr. Whibley
rightly points out, Pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of
Swift as laughing and shaking in Rabelais’s easy chair.
Swift’s humour is essentially of the intellect. He laughs out
of his own bitterness rather than to amuse his fellow-men. As Mr.
Whibley says, he is not a cynic. He is not sufficiently indifferent
for that. He is a satirist, a sort of perverted and suffering
idealist: an idealist with the cynic’s vision. It is the
essential nobleness of Swift’s nature which makes the voyage
to the Houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature.
There are people who pretend that this section of
<em>Gulliver’s Travels</em> is almost too terrible for
sensitive persons to read. This is sheer affectation. It can only
be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too
terrible for sensitive persons to live!</p>
<hr />
<h3><SPAN name="Shakespeare" name="Shakespeare">(2) Shakespeare</SPAN></h3>
<p>Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering
bill-poster. He plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only
on Fox’s House of Commons but on Shakespeare’s Theatre.
He is apparently interested in men of genius chiefly as regards
their attitude to his electioneering activities. Shakespeare, he
seems to imagine, was the sort of person who would have asked for
nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in New Place than a
scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as “Vote for
Podgkins and Down with the Common People” or “Vote for
Podgkins and No League of Nations.” Mr. Whibley thinks
Shakespeare was like that, and so he exalts Shakespeare. He has, I
do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but that has made no difference, He
would clearly have taken much the same view of Shakespeare if he
had never read him. To be great, said Emerson, is to be
misunderstood. To be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by Mr.
Whibley.</p>
<p>I do not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single
out the chapter on “Shakespeare: Patriot and Tory” as
the most representative in his volume of <em>Political
Portraits</em>. It would be unjust if one were to suggest that Mr.
Whibley could write nothing better than this. His historical
portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever illustrator,
even if we cannot accept them as portraits. Those essays in which
he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most
successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful
writer. His studies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and
Melbourne are all of them good entertainment. If I comment on the
Shakespeare essay rather than on these, it is because here more
than anywhere else in the book the author’s skill as a
portrait-painter is put to the test. Here he has to depend almost
exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of
human nature. Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or
anecdotes to quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist
and a critic, or a pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words.
Mr. Whibley, I fear, comes badly off from the test. One does not
blame him for having written on the theme that “Shakespeare,
being a patriot, was a Tory also.” It would be easy to
conceive a scholarly and amusing study of Shakespeare on these
lines. Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare to
offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an
intelligent Tory should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman
deplored in him. There is every reason, however, why the
portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it is to be done, should
be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of touch. Mr.
Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, especially
the second. The proof of Shakespeare’s Toryism, for instance,
which he draws from <em>Troilus and Cressida</em>, is based on a
total misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses
about the necessity of observing “degree, priority and
place.” Mr. Whibley, plunging blindly about in Tory blinkers,
imagines that in this speech Ulysses, or rather Shakespeare, is
referring to the necessity of keeping the democracy in its place.
“Might he not,” he asks, “have written these
prophetic lines with his mind’s eye upon France of the Terror
or upon modern Russia?” Had Mr. Whibley read the play with
that small amount of self-forgetfulness without which no man has
ever yet been able to appreciate literature, he would have
discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but of
the aristocracy against which Ulysses—or, if you prefer it,
Shakespeare—inveighs in this speech. The speech is aimed at
the self-will and factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to
Agamemnon. If there are any moderns who come under the noble lash
of Ulysses, they must be sought for not among either French or
Russian revolutionists, but in the persons of such sound Tories as
Sir Edward Carson and such sound patriots as Mr. Lloyd George. It
is tolerably certain that neither Ulysses nor Shakespeare foresaw
Sir Edward Carson’s escapades or Mr. Lloyd George’s
insurbordinate career as a member of Mr. Asquith’s Cabinet.
But how admirably they sum up all the wild statesmanship of these
later days in lines which Mr. Whibley, accountably enough, fails to
quote:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>They tax our policy, and call it cowardice;</p>
<p>Count wisdom as no member of the war;</p>
<p>Forestall prescience, and esteem no act</p>
<p>But that of hand; the still and mental parts—</p>
<p>That do contrive how many hands shall strike,</p>
<p>When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure</p>
<p>Of their observant toil, the enemies’ weight—</p>
<p>Why, this hath not a finger’s dignity.</p>
<p>They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war:</p>
<p>So that the ram, that batters down the wall,</p>
<p>For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,</p>
<p>They place before his hand that made the engine,</p>
<p>Or those that with the fineness of their souls</p>
<p>By reason guide his execution.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>There is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to
the soul of the author of the <em>Letters of an
Englishman</em>.</p>
<p>Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to
grasp the point of <em>Troilus and Cressida</em>. He blunders with
equal assiduity in regard to <em>Coriolanus</em>. He treats this
play, not as a play about Coriolanus, but as a pamphlet in favour
of Coriolanus. He has not been initiated, it seems, into the first
secret of imaginative literature, which is that one may portray a
hero sympathetically without making believe that his vices are
virtues. Shakespeare no more endorses Coriolanus’s patrician
pride than he endorses Othello’s jealousy or Macbeth’s
murderous ambition. Shakespeare was concerned with painting noble
natures, not with pandering to their vices. He makes us sympathize
with Coriolanus in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to
his better nature, in his death; but from Shakespeare’s point
of view, as from most men’s the Nietzschean arrogance which
led Coriolanus to become a traitor to his city is a theme for
sadness, not (as apparently with Mr. Whibley) for enthusiasm.
“Shakespeare,” cries Mr. Whibley, as he quotes some of
Coriolanus’s anti-popular speeches, “will not let the
people off. He pursues it with an irony of scorn.”
“There in a few lines,” he writes of some other
speeches, “are expressed the external folly and shame of
democracy. Ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not
even the courage of its own opinions.” It would be
interesting to know whether in Mr. Whibley’s eyes
Coriolanus’s hatred of the people is a sufficiently splendid
virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor. That good Tories
have the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often
enough in regard to the Ulster trouble before the war. It may be
doubted, however, whether Shakespeare was sufficiently a Tory to
foresee the necessity of such a gospel in <em>Coriolanus</em>.
Certainly, the mother of Coriolanus, who was far from being a
Radical, or even a mild Whig, preached the very opposite of the
gospel of treason. She warned Coriolanus that his triumph over Rome
would be a traitor’s triumph, that his name would be
“dogg’d with curses,” and that his character
would be summed up in history in one fatal sentence:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i10">The man was noble,</p>
<p>But with his last attempt he wiped it out,</p>
<p>Destroyed his country, and his name remains</p>
<p>To the ensuing age abhorr’d.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Mr. Whibley appears to loathe the mass of human beings so
excessively that he does not quite realize the enormity (from the
modern point of view) of Coriolanus’s crime. It would, I
agree, be foolish to judge Coriolanus too scrupulously from a
modern point of view. But Mr. Whibley has asked us to accept the
play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as such in
order to discover what Mr. Whibley means.</p>
<p>But, after all, Mr. Whibley’s failure as a
portrait-painter is a failure of the spirit even more than of the
intellect. A narrow spirit cannot comprehend a magnanimous spirit,
and Mr. Whibley’s imagination does not move in that large
Shakespearean world in which illustrious men salute their mortal
enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>He was the noblest Roman of them all.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>The author who is capable of writing Mr. Whibley’s
character-study of Fox does not understand enough about the
splendour and the miseries of human nature to write well on
Shakespeare. Of Fox Mr. Whibley says:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>He put no bounds upon his hatred of England, and he thought it
not shameful to intrigue with foreigners against the safety and
credit of the land to which he belonged. Wherever there was a foe
to England, there was a friend of Fox. America, Ireland, France,
each in turn inspired his enthusiasm. When Howe was victorious at
Brooklyn, he publicly deplored “the terrible news.”
After Valmy he did not hesitate to express his joy. “No
public event,” he wrote, “not excepting Yorktown and
Saratoga, ever happened that gave me so much delight. I could not
allow myself to believe it for some days for fear of
disappointment.”</p>
</div>
<p>It does not seem to occur to Mr. Whibley that in regard to
America, Ireland, and France, Fox was, according to the standard of
every ideal for which the Allies professed to fight, tremendously
right, and that, were it not for Yorktown and Valmy, America and
France would not in our own time have been great free nations
fighting against the embattled Whibleys of Germany. So far as Mr.
Whibley’s political philosophy goes, I see no reason why he
should not have declared himself on the side of Germany. He
believes in patriotism, it is true, but he is apparently a patriot
of the sort that loves his country and hates his fellow-countrymen
(if that is what he means by “the people,” and
presumably it must be). Mr. Whibley has certainly the mind of a
German professor. His vehemence against the Germans for
appreciating Shakespeare is strangely like a German
professor’s vehemence against the English for not
appreciating him. “Why then,” he asks,</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>should the Germans have attempted to lay violent hands upon our
Shakespeare? It is but part of their general policy of pillage.
Stealing comes as easy to them as it came to Bardolph and Nym, who
in Calais stole a fire-shovel. Wherever they have gone they have
cast a thievish eye upon what does not belong to them. They hit
upon the happy plan of levying tolls upon starved Belgium. It was
not enough for their greed to empty a country of food; they must
extract something from its pocket, even though it be dying of
hunger…. No doubt, if they came to these shores, they would
feed their fury by scattering Shakespeare’s dust to the winds
of heaven. As they are unable to sack Stratford, they do what seems
to them the next best thing: they hoist the Jolly Roger over
Shakespeare’s works.</p>
<p>Their arrogance is busy in vain. Shakespeare shall never be
theirs. He was an English patriot, who would always have refused to
bow the knee to an insolent alien.</p>
</div>
<p>This is mere foaming at the mouth—the tawdry violence of a
Tory Thersites. This passage is a measure of the good sense and
imagination Mr. Whibley brings to the study of Shakespeare. It is
simply theatrical Jolly-Rogerism.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Morris" name="Morris">XV.—The Personality of Morris</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>One thinks of William Morris as a man who wished to make the
world as beautiful as an illuminated manuscript. He loved the
bright colours, the gold, the little strange insets of landscape,
the exquisite craftsmanship of decoration, in which the genius of
the medieval illuminators expressed itself. His Utopia meant the
restoration, not so much of the soul of man, as of the selected
delights of the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages. His passion for
trappings—and what fine trappings!—is admirably
suggested by Mr. Cunninghame Graham in his preface to Mr.
Compton-Rickett’s <em>William Morris: a Study in
Personality</em>. Morris he declares, was in his opinion “no
mystic, but a sort of symbolist set in a medieval frame, and it
appeared to me that all his love of the old times of which he wrote
was chiefly of the setting; of tapestries well wrought; of
needlework, rich colours of stained glass falling upon old
monuments, and of fine work not scamped.” To emphasize the
preoccupation of Morris with the very handiwork, rather than with
the mystic secrets, of beauty is not necessarily to diminish his
name. He was essentially a man for whom the visible world existed,
and in the manner in which he wore himself out in his efforts to
reshape the visible world he proved himself one of the great men of
his century. His life was, in its own way, devotional ever since
those years in which Burne-Jones, his fellow-undergraduate at
Oxford, wrote to him: “We must enlist you in this Crusade and
Holy Warfare against the age.” Like all revolutions, of
course, the Morris revolution was a prophecy rather than an
achievement. But, perhaps, a prophecy of Utopia is itself one of
the greatest achievements of which humanity is capable.</p>
<p>It is odd that one who spilled out his genius for the world of
men should have been so self-sufficing, so little dependent on
friendships and ordinary human relationships as Morris is depicted
both in Mr. Mackail’s biography and Mr.
Compton-Rickett’s study. Obviously, he was a man with whom
generosity was a second nature. When he became a Socialist, he sold
the greater part of his precious library in order to help the
cause. On the other hand, to balance this, we have Rossetti’s
famous assertion: “Top”—the general nickname for
Morris—“never gives money to a beggar.” Mr.
Mackail, if I remember right, accepted Rossetti’s statement
as expressive of Morris’s indifference to men as compared
with causes. Mr. Compton-Rickett, however, challenges the truth of
the observation. “The number of ‘beggars,’”
he affirms, “who called at his house and went away rewarded
were legion.”</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Mr. Belfort Bax declares that he kept a drawerful of half-crowns
for foreign anarchists, because, as he explained apologetically:
“They always wanted half-a-crown, and it saved time to have a
stock ready.”</p>
</div>
<p>But this is no real contradiction of Rossetti. Morris’s
anarchists represented his life’s work to him. He did not
help them from that personal and irrational charity which made
Rossetti want to give a penny to a beggar in the street. This may
be regarded as a supersubtle distinction; but it is necessary if we
are to understand the important fact about Morris that—to
quote Mr. Compton-Rickett—“human nature in the concrete
never profoundly interested him.” Enthusiastic as were the
friendships of his youth—when he gushed into
“dearests” in his letters—we could imagine him as
living without friends and yet being tolerably happy. He was, as
Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, like a child with a new toy in his
discovery of ever-fresh pursuits in the three worlds of Politics,
Literature and Art. He was a person to whom even duties were
Pleasures. Mr. Mackail has spoken of him as “the rare
distance of a man who, without ever once swerving from truth or
duty, knew what he liked and did what he liked, all his life
long.” One thinks of him in his work as a child with a box of
paints—an inspired child with wonderful paints and the skill
to use them. He was such a child as accepts companions with
pleasure, but also accepts the absence of companions with pleasure.
He could absorb himself in his games of genius anywhere and
everywhere. “Much of his literary work was done on buses and
in trains.” His poetry is often, as it were, the delightful
nursery-work of a grown man. “His best work,” as Mr.
Compton-Rickett says, “reads like happy
improvisations.” He had a child’s sudden and impulsive
temper, too. Once, having come into his studio in a rage, he
“took a flying kick at the door, and smashed in a
panel.” “It’s all right,” he assured the
scared model, who was preparing to fly; “it’s all
right—<em>something</em> had to give way.” The same
violence of impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion,
when he was staying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to
his hostess’s curtains, and tore them down during the night.
His judgments were often much the same kind of untempered emotions
as he showed in the matter of the curtains—his complaint, for
example, that a Greek temple was “like a table on four legs:
a damned dull thing!” He was a creature of whims: so much so
that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, “Unstable as
water, thou shalt not excel,” flung at him. He enjoyed the
expression of knock-out opinions such as: “I always bless God
for making anything so strong as an onion!” He laughed
easily, not from humour so much as from a romping playfulness. He
took a young boy’s pleasure in showing off the strength of
his mane of dark brown hair. He would get a child to get hold of
it, and lift him off the ground by it “with no apparent
inconvenience.” He was at the same time nervous and restless.
He was given to talking to himself; his hands were never at peace;
“if he read aloud, he punched his own head in the exuberance
of his emotions.” Possibly there was something high-strung
even about his play, as when, Mr. Mackail tells us, “he would
imitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to
a chair and, after a sullen pause, coming down with a soft, heavy
flop.” It seems odd that Mr. John Burns could say of this
sensitive and capricious man of genius, as we find him saying in
Mr. Compton-Rickett’s book, that “William Morris was a
chunk of humanity in the rough; he was a piece of good, strong,
unvarnished oak—nothing of the elm about him.” But we
can forgive Mr. Burns’s imperfect judgment in gratitude for
the sentences that follow:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>There is no side of modern life which he has not touched for
good. I am sure he would have endorsed heartily the House and Town
Planning Act for which I am responsible.</p>
</div>
<p>Morris, by the way, would have appreciated Mr. Burns’s
reference to him as a fellow-craftsman: did he not once himself
boast of being “a master artisan, if I may claim that
dignity”?</p>
<p>The buoyant life of this craftsman-preacher—whose
craftsmanship, indeed, was the chief part of his
preaching—who taught the labourers of his age, both by
precept and example, that the difference between success and
failure in life was the difference between being artisans of
loveliness and poor hackworkers of profitable but hideous
things—has a unique attractiveness in the history of the
latter half of the nineteenth century. He is a figure of whom we
cannot be too constantly and vividly reminded. When I took up Mr.
Compton-Rickett’s book I was full of hope that it would
reinterpret for a new generation Morris’s evangelistic
personality and ideals. Unfortunately, it contains very little of
importance that has not already appeared in Mr. Mackail’s
distinguished biography; and the only interpretation of first-rate
interest in the book occurs in the bold imaginative prose of Mr.
Cunninghame Graham’s introduction. More than once the author
tells us the same things as Mr. Mackail, only in a less life-like
way. For example, where Mr. Mackail says of Morris that “by
the time he was seven years old he had read all the Waverley
novels, and many of Marryat’s,” Mr. Compton-Rickett
vaguely writes: “He was suckled on Romance, and knew his
Scott and Marryat almost before he could lisp their names.”
That is typical of Mr. Compton-Rickett’s method. Instead of
contenting himself with simple and realistic sentences like Mr.
Mackail’s, he aims at—and certainly achieves—a
kind of imitative picturesqueness. We again see his taste for the
high-flown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that “a
common bond unites all these men—Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and
Morris. They differed in much; but, like great mountains lying
apart in the base, they converge high up in the air.” The
landscape suggested in these sentences is more topsy-turvy than the
imagination likes to dwell upon. And the criticisms in the book are
seldom lightning-flashes of revelation. For instance:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>A more polished artistry we find in Tennyson; a greater
intellectual grip in Browning; a more haunting magic in Rossetti;
but for easy mastery over his material and general diffusion of
beauty Morris has no superior.</p>
</div>
<p>That, apart from the excellent “general diffusion of
beauty,” is the kind of conventional criticism that might
pass in a paper read to a literary society. But somehow, in a
critic who deliberately writes a book, we look for a greater and
more personal mastery of his authors than Mr. Compton-Rickett gives
evidence of in the too facile eloquence of these pages.</p>
<p>The most interesting part of the book is that which is devoted
to personalia. But even in the matter of personalia Mr. Cunninghame
Graham tells us more vital things in a page of his introduction
than Mr. Compton-Rickett scatters through a chapter. His
description of Morris’s appearance, if not a piece of heroic
painting, gives us a fine grotesque design of the man:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>His face was ruddy, and his hair inclined to red, and grew in
waves like water just before it breaks over a fall. His beard was
of the same colour as his hair. His eyes were blue and fiery. His
teeth, small and irregular, but white except upon the side on which
he hew his pipe, where they were stained with brown. When he walked
he swayed a little, not like (<em>sic</em>) a sailor sways, but as
a man who lives a sedentary life toddles a little in his gait. His
ears were small, his nose high and well-made, his hands and feet
small for a man of his considerable bulk. His speech and address
were fitting the man; bold, bluff, and hearty.… He was
quick-tempered and irritable, swift to anger and swift to
reconciliation, and I should think never bore malice in his
life.</p>
<p>When he talked he seldom looked at you, and his hands were
always twisting, as if they wished to be at work.</p>
</div>
<p>Such was the front the man bore. The ideal for which he lived
may be summed up, in Mr. Compton-Rickett’s expressive phrase,
as “the democratization of beauty.” Or it may be stated
more humanly in the words which Morris himself spoke at the grave
of a young man who died of injuries received at the hands of the
police in Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday.”
“Our friend,” he then said:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Our friend who lies here has had a hard life, and met with a
hard death; and, if society had been differently constituted, his
life might have been a delightful, a beautiful, and a happy one. It
is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that
such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a
beautiful and happy place.</p>
</div>
<p>There you have the sum of all Morris’s teaching. Like so
many fine artists since Plato, he dreamed of a society which would
be as beautiful as a work of art. He saw the future of society as a
radiant picture, full of the bright light of hope, as he saw the
past of society as a picture steeped in the charming lights of
fancy. He once explained Rossetti’s indifference to politics
by saying that he supposed “it needs a person of hopeful mind
to take disinterested notice of politics, and Rossetti was
certainly not hopeful.” Morris was the very illuminator of
hope. He was as hopeful a man as ever set out with words and
colours to bring back the innocent splendours of the Golden
Age.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Meredith0" name="Meredith0">XVI.—George Meredith</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<h3><SPAN name="Meredith1" name="Meredith1">(1) The Egoist</SPAN></h3>
<p>George Meredith, as his friends used to tell one with amusement,
was a vain man. Someone has related how, in his later years, he
regarded it as a matter of extreme importance that his visitors
should sit in a position from which they would see his face in
profile. This is symbolic of his attitude to the world. All his
life he kept one side of his face hidden. Mr. Ellis, who is the son
of one of Meredith’s cousins, now takes us for a walk round
Meredith’s chair. No longer are we permitted to remain in
restful veneration of “a god and a Greek.” Mr. Ellis
invites us—and we cannot refuse the invitation—to look
at the other side of the face, to consider the full face and the
back of the head. He encourages us to feel Meredith’s bumps,
and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel can continue for five
minutes the pretence of being an Olympian. He becomes a human being
under a criticizing thumb. We discover that he had a genius for
imposture, an egoist’s temper, and a stomach that fluttered
greedily at the thought of dainty dishes. We find all those
characteristics that prevented him from remaining on good terms
first with his father, next with his wife, and then with his son.
At first, when one reads the full story of Meredith’s
estrangements through three generations, one has the feeling that
one is in the presence of an idol in ruins. Certainly, one can
never mistake Box Hill for Olympus again. On the other hand, let us
but have time to accustom ourselves to see Meredith in other
aspects than that which he himself chose to present to his
contemporaries—let us begin to see in him not so much one of
the world’s great comic censors, as one of the world’s
great comic subjects, and we shall soon find ourselves back among
his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a new
passion of interest in the figure-in-the-background of the complex
human being who wrote them.</p>
<p>For Meredith was his own great subject. Had he been an Olympian
he could not have written <em>The Egoist</em> or <em>Harry
Richmond</em>. He was an egoist and pretender, coming of a line of
egoists and pretenders, and his novels are simply the confession
and apology of such a person. Meredith concealed the truth about
himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in his novels. He
made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought he was
a cousin of Queen Victoria’s or at least a son of Bulwer
Lytton’s. It was only in <em>Evan Harrington</em> that he
told the essentials of the truth about the tailor’s shop in
Portsmouth above which he was born. Outside his art, nothing would
persuade him to own up to the tailor’s shop. Once, when Mr.
Clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, Meredith told him to
put “near Petersfield” as his place of birth. The fact
that he was born at Portsmouth was not publicly known, indeed,
until some time after his death. And not only was there the
tailor’s shop to live down, but on his mother’s side he
was the grandson of a publican, Michael Macnamara. Meredith liked
to boast that his mother was “pure Irish”—an
exaggeration, according to Mr. Ellis—but he said nothing
about Michael Macnamara of “The Vine.” At the same time
it was the presence not of a bar sinister but of a yardstick
sinister in his coat of arms that chiefly filled him with shame.
When he was marrying his first wife he wrote “Esquire”
in the register as a description of his father’s profession.
There is no evidence, apparently, as to whether Meredith himself
ever served in the tailor’s shop after his father moved from
Portsmouth to St. James’s Street, London. Nothing is known of
his life during the two years after his return from the Moravian
school at Neuwied. As for his hapless father (who had been trained
as a medical student but went into the family business in order to
save it from ruin), he did not succeed in London any better than in
Portsmouth, and in 1849 he emigrated to South Africa and opened a
shop in Cape Town. It was while in Cape Town that he read
Meredith’s ironical comedy on the family tailordom, <em>Evan
Harrington; or He Would be a Gentleman</em>. Naturally, he regarded
the book (in which his father and himself were two of the chief
figures) with horror. It was as though George had washed the family
tape-measure in public. Augustus Meredith, no less than George,
blushed for the tape-measure daily. Probably, Melchizedek Meredith,
who begat Augustus, who begat George, had also blushed for it in
his day. As the “great Mel” in <em>Evan Harrington</em>
he is an immortal figure of genteel imposture. His lordly practice
of never sending in a bill was hardly that of a man who accepted
the conditions of his trade. In <em>Evan Harrington</em> three
generations of a family’s shame were held up to ridicule. No
wonder that Augustus Meredith, when he was congratulated by a
customer on his son’s fame, turned away silently with a look
of pain.</p>
<p>The comedy of the Meredith family springs, of course, not from
the fact that they were tailors, but that they pretended not to be
tailors. Whether Meredith himself was more ashamed of their
tailoring or their pretentiousness it is not easy to decide. Both
<em>Evan Harrington</em> and <em>Harry Richmond</em> are in a
measure, comedies of imposture, in which the vice of imposture is
lashed as fiercely as Molière lashes the vice of hypocrisy
in <em>Tartuffe</em>. But it may well be that in life Meredith was
a snob, while in art he was a critic of snobs. Mr. Yeats, in his
last book of prose, put forward the suggestion that the artist
reveals in his art not his “self” (which is expressed
in his life), but his “anti-self,” a complementary and
even contrary self. He might find in the life and works of Meredith
some support for his not quite convincing theory. Meredith was an
egoist in his life, an anti-egoist in his books. He was pretentious
in his life, anti-pretentious in his books. He took up the attitude
of the wronged man in his life; he took up the case of the wronged
woman in his books. In short, his life was vehemently
pro-George-Meredith, while his books were vehemently
anti-George-Meredith. He knew himself more thoroughly, so far as we
can discover from his books, than any other English novelist has
ever done.</p>
<p>He knew himself comically, no doubt, rather than tragically. In
<em>Modern Love</em> and <em>Richard Feverel</em> he reveals
himself as by no means a laughing philosopher; but he strove to
make fiction a vehicle of philosophic laughter rather than of
passionate sympathy. Were it not that a great poetic imagination is
always at work—in his prose, perhaps, even more than in his
verse—his genius might seem a little cold and
head-in-the-air. But his poet’s joy in his characters saves
his books from inhumanity. As Diana Warwick steps out in the dawn
she is not a mere female human being undergoing critical
dissection; she is bird-song and the light of morning and the
coming of the flowers. Meredith had as great a capacity for rapture
as for criticism and portraiture. He has expressed in literature as
no other novelist has done the rapturous vision of a boy in love.
He knew that a boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet.
<em>Love in a Valley</em> is the incomparable music of a
boy’s ecstasy. Much of <em>Richard Feverel</em> is its
incomparable prose. Rapture and criticism, however, make a more
practical combination in literature than in life. In literature,
criticism may add flavour to rapture; in life it is more than
likely to destroy the flavour. One is not surprised, then, to learn
the full story of Meredith’s first unhappy marriage. A boy of
twenty-one, he married a widow of thirty, high-strung, hot and
satirical like himself; and after a depressing sequence of dead
babies, followed by the birth of a son who survived, she found life
with a man of genius intolerable, and ran away with a painter.
Meredith apparently refused her request to go and see her when she
was dying. His imaginative sympathy enabled him to see the
woman’s point of view in poetry and fiction; it does not seem
to have extended to his life. Thus, his biography is to a great
extent a “showing-up” of George Meredith. He proved as
incapable of keeping the affection of his son Arthur, as of keeping
that of his wife. Much as he loved the boy he had not been married
again long before he allowed him to become an alien presence. The
boy felt he had a grievance. He said—probably without
justice—that his father kept him short of money. Possibly he
was jealous for his dead mother’s sake. Further, though put
into business, he had literary ambitions—a prolific source of
bitterness. When Arthur died, Meredith did not even attend his
funeral.</p>
<p>Mr. Ellis has shown Meredith up not only as a husband and a
father, but as a hireling journalist and a lark-devouring gourmet.
On the whole, the poet who could eat larks in a pie seems to me to
be a more shocking “great man” than the Radical who
could write Tory articles in a newspaper for pay. At the same time,
it is only fair to say that Meredith remains a sufficiently
splendid figure in. Mr. Ellis’s book even when we know the
worst about him. Was his a generous genius? It was at least a
prodigal one. As poet, novelist, correspondent, and
conversationalist, he leaves an impression of beauty, wit, and
power in a combination without a precedent.</p>
<hr />
<h3><SPAN name="Meredith2" name="Meredith2">(2) The Olympian Unbends</SPAN></h3>
<p>Lady Butcher’s charming <em>Memoirs of George
Meredith</em> is admittedly written in reply to Mr. Ellis’s
startling volume. It seems to me, however, that it is a supplement
rather than a reply. Mr. Ellis was not quite fair to Meredith as a
man, but he enabled us to understand the limitations which were the
conditions of Meredith’s peculiar genius. Many readers were
shocked by the suggestion that characters, like countries, must
have boundaries. Where Mr. Ellis failed, in my opinion, was not in
drawing these as carefully as possible, but in the rather
unfriendly glee with which, one could not help feeling, he did so.
It is also true that he missed some of the grander mountain-peaks
in Meredith’s character. Lady Butcher, on the other hand, is
far less successful than Mr. Ellis in drawing a portrait which
makes us feel that now we understand something of the events that
gave birth to <em>The Egoist</em> and <em>Richard Feverel</em> and
<em>Modern Love</em>. Her book tells us nothing of the seed-time of
genius, but is a delightful account of its autumn.</p>
<p>At the same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular
fallacy about Meredith. Meredith, like most all the wits, has been
accused of straining after image and epigram. Wit acts as an
irritant on many people. They forget the admirable saying of
Coleridge: “Exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest
and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and
the greatest of men is but an aphorism.” They might as well
denounce a hedge for producing wild roses or a peacock for growing
tail feathers with pretty eyes as a witty writer for flowering into
aphorism, epigram and image. Even so artificial a writer as Wilde
had not to labour to be witty. It has often been laid to his charge
that his work smells of the lamp, whereas what is really the matter
with it is that it smells of the drawing-room gas. It was the
result of too much “easy-goingness,” not of too much
strain. As for Meredith, his wit was the wit of an abounding
imagination. Lady Butcher gives some delightful examples of it. He
could not see a baby in long robes without a witty image leaping
into his mind. He said he adored babies “in the comet
stage.”</p>
<p>Of a lady of his acquaintance he said: “She is a woman who
has never had the first tadpole wriggle of an idea,” adding,
“She has a mind as clean and white and flat as a plate: there
are no eminences in it.” Lady Butcher tells of a picnic-party
on Box Hill at which Meredith was one of the company. “After
our picnic … it came on to rain, and as we drearily trudged
down the hill with cloaks and umbrellas, and burdened with our tea
baskets, Mr. Meredith, with a grimace, called out to a passing
friend: ‘Behold! the funeral of picnic!’”</p>
<p>If Meredith is to some extent an obscure author, it is clear
that this was not due to his over-reaching himself in laborious
efforts after wit. His obscurity is not that of a man straining
after expression, but the obscurity of a man deliberately hiding
something. Meredith believed in being as mysterious as an oracle.
He assumed the Olympian manner, and objected to being mistaken for
a frequenter of the market-place. He was impatient of ordinary
human witlessness, and spoke to his fellows, not as man to man, but
as Apollo from his seat. This was probably a result of the fact
that his mind marched much too fast for the ordinary man to keep
pace with it. “How I leaped through leagues of thought when I
could walk!” he once said when he had lost the power of his
legs. Such buoyancy of the imagination and intellect separated him
more and more from a world in which most of the athletics are
muscular, not mental; and he began to take a malicious pleasure in
exaggerating the difference that already existed between himself
and ordinary mortals. He dressed his genius in a mannerism, and, as
he leaped through his leagues of thought, the flying skirts of his
mannerism were all that the average reader panting desperately
after him could see. Shakespeare and the greatest men of genius are
human enough to wait for us, and give us time to recover our
breath. Meredith, however, was a proud man, and a mocker.</p>
<p>In the ordinary affairs of life, Lady Butcher tells us, he was
so proud that it was difficult to give him even trifling gifts.
“I remember,” she says, “bringing him two silver
flat poached-egg spoons from Norway, and he implored me to take
them back with me to London, and looked much relieved when I
consented to do so!” He would always “prefer to bestow
rather than to accept gifts.” Lady Butcher, replying to the
charge that he was ungrateful, suggests that “no one should
expect an eagle to be grateful.” But then, neither can one
love an eagle, and one would like to be able to love the author of
<em>Love in a Valley</em> and <em>Richard Feverel</em>. Meredith
was too keenly aware what an eagle he was. Speaking of the
reviewers who had attacked him, he said: “They have always
been abusing me. I have been observing them. It is the crueller
process.” It is quite true, but it was a superior person who
said it.</p>
<p>Meredith, however, among his friends and among the young, loses
this air of superiority, and becomes something of a radiant romp as
well as an Olympian. Lady Butcher’s first meeting with him
took place when she was a girl of thirteen. She was going up Box
Hill to see the sun rise with a sixteen-year-old cousin, when the
latter said: “I know a madman who lives on Box Hill.
He’s quite mad, but very amusing; he likes walks and
sunrises. Let’s go and shout him up!” It does Meredith
credit that he got out of bed and joined them, “his
nightshirt thrust into brown trousers.” Even when the small
girl insisted on “reading aloud to him one of the hymns from
Keble’s <em>Christian Year</em>,” he did not, as the
saying is, turn a hair. His attachment to his daughter
Mariette—his “dearie girl,” as he spoke of her
with unaffected softness of phrase—also helps one to realize
that he was not all Olympian. Meredith, the condemner of the
“guarded life,” was humanly nervous in guarding his own
little daughter. “He would never allow Mariette to travel
alone, even the very short distance by train from Box Hill to
Ewell; a maid had always to be sent with her or to fetch her. He
never allowed her to walk by herself.” One likes Meredith the
better for Lady Butcher’s picture of him as a “harassed
father.”</p>
<p>One likes him, too, as he converses with his dogs, and for his
thoughtfulness in giving some of his MSS., including that of
<em>Richard Feverel</em>, to Frank Cole, his gardener, in the hope
that “some day the gardener would be able to sell them”
and so get some reward for his devotion. As to the underground
passages in Meredith’s life and character, Lady Butcher is
not concerned with them. She writes of him merely as she knew him.
Her book is a friend’s tribute, though not a blind tribute.
It may not be effective as an argument against those who are bent
on disparaging the greatest lyrical wit in modern English
literature. But it will be welcomed by those for whom
Meredith’s genius is still a bubbling spring of good sense
and delight.</p>
<hr />
<h3><SPAN name="Meredith3" name="Meredith3">(3) The Anglo-Irish Aspect</SPAN></h3>
<p>Meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel than
<em>Celt and Saxon</em>. It is only a fragment of a book. It is so
much a series of essays and sharp character-sketches, however, that
the untimely fall of the curtain does not greatly trouble us. There
is no excitement of plot, no gripping anxiety as to whether this or
that pair of lovers will ever reach the altar. Philip
O’Donnell and Patrick, his devoted brother, and their
caricature relative, the middle-aged Captain Con, all interest us
as they abet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as
they discuss their native country or the temperament of the country
which oppresses it; but they are chiefly desirable as performers in
an Anglo-Irish fantasia, a Meredithian piece of comic music, with
various national anthems, English, Welsh, and Irish, running
through and across it in all manner of guises, and producing all
manner of agreeable disharmonies.</p>
<p>In the beginning we have Patrick O’Donnell, an enthusiast,
a Celt, a Catholic, setting out for the English mansion of the
father of Adiante Adister to find if the girl cannot be pleaded
over to reconsider her refusal of his brother Philip. He arrives in
the midst of turmoil in the house, the cause of it being a hasty
marriage which Adiante had ambitiously contracted with a hook-nosed
foreign prince. Patrick, a broken-hearted proxy, successfully begs
her family for a miniature of the girl to take back to his brother,
but he falls so deeply in love with her on seeing the portrait that
his loyalty to Philip almost wavers, when the latter carelessly
asks him to leave the miniature on a more or less public table
instead of taking it off to the solitude of his own room for a long
vigil of adoration.</p>
<p>In the rest of the story we have an account of the brothers in
the London house of Captain Con, the happy husband married to a
stark English wife of mechanical propriety—a rebellious
husband, too, when in the sociable atmosphere of his own upper
room, amid the blackened clay pipes and the friendly fumes of
whiskey, he sings her praises, while at the same time full of
grotesque and whimsical criticisms of all those things, Saxon and
more widely human, for which she stands. There is a touch of farce
in the relations of these two, aptly symbolized by the bell which
rings for Captain Con, and hastens him away from his midnight
eloquence with Patrick and Philip. “He groaned, ‘I must
go. I haven’t heard the tinkler for months. It signifies
she’s cold in her bed. The thing called circulation is
unknown to her save by the aid of outward application, and
I’m the warming-pan, as legitimately as I should be,
I’m her husband and her Harvey in one.’”</p>
<p>It is in the house of Captain Con, it should be added, that
Philip and Patrick meet Jane Mattock, the Saxon woman; and the
story as we have it ends with Philip invalided home from service in
India, and Jane, a victim of love, catching “glimpses of the
gulfs of bondage, delicious, rose-enfolded, foreign.” There
are nearly three hundred pages of it altogether, some of them as
fantastic and lyrical as any that Meredith ever wrote.</p>
<p>As one reads <em>Celt and Saxon</em>, however, one seems to get
an inkling of the reason why Meredith has so often been set down as
an obscure author. It is not entirely that he is given to using
imagery as the language of explanation—a subtle and personal
sort of hieroglyphics. It is chiefly, I think, because there is so
little direct painting of men and women in his books. Despite his
lyricism, he had something of an X-ray’s imagination. The
details of the modelling of a face, the interpreting lines and
looks, did not fix themselves with preciseness on his vision
enabling him to pass them on to us with the surface reality we
generally demand in prose fiction.</p>
<p>It is as though he painted some of his men and women upon air:
they are elusive for all we know of their mental and spiritual
processes. Even though he is at pains to tell us that Diana’s
hair is dark, we do not at once accept the fact but are at liberty
to go on believing she is a fair woman, for he himself was general
rather than insistently particular in his vision of such matters.
In the present book, again, we have a glimpse of Adiante in her
miniature—“this lighted face, with the dark raised eyes
and abounding auburn tresses, where the contrast of colours was in
itself thrilling,” “the light above beauty
distinguishing its noble classic lines and the energy of radiance,
like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the eyes”—and,
despite the details mentioned, the result is to give us only the
lyric aura of the woman where we wanted a design.</p>
<p>Ultimately, these women of Meredith’s become intensely
real to us—the most real women, I think, in English
fiction—but, before we come to handshaking terms with them,
we have sometimes to go to them over bogs and rocky places with the
sun in our eyes. Before this, physically, they are apt to be
exquisite parts of a landscape, sharers of a lyric beauty with the
cherry-trees and the purple crocuses.</p>
<p>Coming to the substance of the book—the glance from many
sides at the Irish and English temperaments—we find Meredith
extremely penetrating in his criticism of John Bullishness, but
something of a foreigner in his study of the Irish character. The
son of an Irishwoman, he chose an Irishwoman as his most conquering
heroine, but he writes of the race as one who has known the men and
women of it entirely, or almost entirely, in an English
setting—a setting, in other words, which shows up their
strangeness and any surface eccentricities they may have, but does
not give us an ordinary human sense of them. Captain Con is vital,
because Meredith imagined him vitally, but when all is said and
done, he is largely a stage-Irishman, winking over his whiskey that
has paid no excise—a better-born relative of Captain
Costigan.</p>
<p>Politically, <em>Celt and Saxon</em> seems to be a plea for Home
Rule—Home Rule, with a view towards a “consolidation of
the union.” Its diagnosis of the Irish difficulty is one
which has long been popular with many intellectual men on this side
of the Irish Sea. Meredith sees, as the roots of the trouble,
misunderstanding, want of imagination, want of sympathy. It has
always seemed curious to me that intelligent men could persuade
themselves that Ireland was chiefly suffering from want of
understanding and want of sympathy on the part of England, when all
the time her only ailment has been want of liberty. To adapt the
organ-grinder’s motto,</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Sympathy without relief</p>
<p>Is like mustard without beef.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>As a matter of fact, Meredith realized this, and was a friend to
many Irish national movements from the Home Rule struggle down to
the Gaelic League, to the latter of which the Irish part of him
sent a subscription a year or two ago. He saw things from the point
of view of an Imperial Liberal idealist, however, not of a
Nationalist. In the result, he did not know the every-day and
traditional setting of Irish life sufficiently well to give us an
Irish Nationalist central figure as winning and heroic, even in his
extravagances, as, say, the patriotic Englishman, Neville
Beauchamp.</p>
<p>At the same time, one must be thankful for a book so obviously
the work of a great abundant mind—a mind giving out its
criticisms like flutters of birds—a heroic intellect always
in the service of an ideal liberty, courage, and gracious
manners—a characteristically island brain, that was yet not
insular.</p>
<hr />
<h2><SPAN name="Wilde" name="Wilde">XVII—Oscar Wilde</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Oscar Wilde is a writer whom one must see through in order to
appreciate. One must smash the idol in order to preserve the god.
If Mr. Ransome’s estimate of Wilde in his clever and
interesting and seriously-written book is a little unsatisfactory,
it is partly because he is not enough of an iconoclast. He has not
realized with sufficient clearness that, while Wilde belonged to
the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better than second-rate as
anything else. Consequently, it is not Wilde the beau of literature
who dominates his book. Rather, it is Wilde the
egoistic,—æsthetic philosopher, and Wilde the
imaginative artist.</p>
<p>This is, of course, as Wilde would have liked it to be. For, as
Mr. Ransome says, “though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful
laughter, he preferred to think of himself as a person with
magnificent dreams.” Indeed, so much was this so, that it is
even suggested that, if <em>Salomé</em> had not been
censored, the social comedies might never have been written.
“It is possible,” observes Mr. Ransome, “that we
owe <em>The Importance of Being Earnest</em> to the fact that the
Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from playing
<em>Salomé</em> at the Palace Theatre.” If this
conjecture is right, one can never think quite so unkindly of the
Censor again, for in <em>The Importance of Being Earnest</em>, and
in it alone, Wilde achieved a work of supreme genius in its
kind.</p>
<p>It is as lightly-built as a house of cards, a frail edifice of
laughter for laughter’s sake. Or you might say that, in the
literature of farce, it has a place as a “dainty rogue in
porcelain.” It is even lighter and more fragile than that. It
is a bubble, or a flight of bubbles. It is the very ecstasy of
levity. As we listen to Lady Bracknell discussing the possibility
of parting with her daughter to a man who had been “born, or
at least bred, in a handbag,” or as we watch Jack and
Algernon wrangling over the propriety of eating muffins in an hour
of gloom, we seem somehow to be caught up and to sail through an
exhilarating mid-air of nonsense. Some people will contend that
Wilde’s laughter is always the laughter not of the open air
but of the salon. But there is a spontaneity in the laughter of
<em>The Importance of Being Earnest</em> that seems to me to
associate it with running water and the sap rising in the green
field.</p>
<p>It is when he begins to take Wilde seriously as a serious writer
that one quarrels with Mr. Ransome. Wilde was much better at
showing off than at revealing himself, and, as the comedy of
showing off is much more delightful than the solemn vanity of it,
he was naturally happiest as a wit and persifleur. On his serious
side he ranks, not as an original artist, but as a
popularizer—the most accomplished popularizer, perhaps, in
English literature. He popularized William Morris, both his
domestic interiors and his Utopias, in the æsthetic lectures
and in <em>The Soul of Man under Socialism</em>—a wonderful
pamphlet, the secret of the world-wide fame of which Mr. Ransome
curiously misses. He popularized the cloistral æstheticism of
Pater and the cultural egoism of Goethe in <em>Intentions</em> and
elsewhere. In <em>Salomé</em> he popularized the gorgeous
processionals of ornamental sentences upon which Flaubert had
expended not the least marvellous portion of his genius.</p>
<p>Into an age that guarded respectability more closely than virtue
and ridiculed beauty because it paid no dividend came Wilde, the
assailant of even the most respectable ugliness, parrying the
mockery of the meat tea with a mockery that sparkled like wine.
Lighting upon a world that advertised commercial wares, he set
himself to advertise art with, as heroic an extravagance, and who
knows how much his puce velvet knee-breeches may have done to make
the British public aware of the genius, say, of Walter Pater? Not
that Wilde was not a finished egoist, using the arts and the
authors to advertise himself rather than himself to advertise them.
But the time-spirit contrived that the arts and the authors should
benefit by his outrageous breeches.</p>
<p>It is in the relation of a great popularizer, then—a
popularizer who, for a new thing, was not also a
vulgarizer—that Wilde seems to me to stand to his age. What,
then, of Mr. Ransome’s estimate of <em>Salomé</em>?
That it is a fascinating play no lover of the pageantry of words
can deny. But of what quality is this fascination? It is, when all
is said and done, the fascination of the lust of painted faces.
Here we have no tragedy, but a mixing of degenerate philtres. Mr.
Ransome hears “the beating of the wings of the angel of
death” in the play; but that seems to me to be exactly the
atmosphere that Wilde fails to create. As the curtain falls on the
broken body of <em>Salomé</em> one has a sick feeling, as
though one had been present where vermin were being crushed. There
is not a hint of the elation, the liberation, of real tragedy. The
whole thing is simply a wonderful piece of coloured sensationalism.
And even if we turn to the costly sentences of the play, do we not
find that, while in his choice of colour and jewel and design
Flaubert wrought in language like a skilled artificer, Wilde, in
his treatment of words, was more like a lavish amateur about town
displaying his collection of splendid gems?</p>
<p>Wilde speaks of himself in <em>De Profundis</em> as a lord of
language. Of course, he was just the opposite. Language was a vice
with him. He took to it as a man might take to drink. He was
addicted rather than devoted to language. He had a passion for it,
but too little sense of responsibility towards it, and, in his
choice of beautiful words, we are always conscious of the indolence
as well as the extravagance of the man of pleasure. How
beautifully, with what facility of beauty, he could use words,
everyone knows who has read his brief <em>Endymion</em> (to name
one of the poems), and the many hyacinthine passages in
<em>Intentions</em>. But when one is anxious to see the man himself
as in <em>De Profundis</em>—that book of a soul imprisoned in
embroidered sophistries—one feels that this cloak of strange
words is no better than a curse.</p>
<p>If Wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its
bejewelled slave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because
there is so much laughter as well as language in
<em>Intentions</em> that I am inclined to agree with Mr. Ransome
that <em>Intentions</em> is “that one of Wilde’s books
that most nearly represents him.” Even here, however, Mr.
Ransome will insist on taking Wilde far too seriously. For
instance, he tells us that “his paradoxes are only unfamiliar
truths.” How horrified Wilde would have been to hear him say
so! His paradoxes are a good deal more than truths—or a good
deal less. They helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many of
them were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion. Mr.
Ransome’s attitude on the question of Wilde’s sincerity
seems to me as impossible as his attitude in regard to the
paradoxes. He draws up a code of artistic sincerity which might
serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of which every great
artist is a living denial. But there is no room to go into that.
Disagree as we may with many of Mr. Ransome’s conclusions, we
must be grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and
ambitious study of one of the most brilliant personalities and
wits, though by no means one of the most brilliant imaginative
artists, of the nineteenth century.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Critics" name="Critics">XVIII.—Two English Critics</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<h3><SPAN name="Saintsbury" name="Saintsbury">(1) Mr. Saintsbury</SPAN></h3>
<p>Mr. Saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift
of sending the reader post-haste to the works he criticizes. His
<em>Peace of the Augustans</em> is an almost irresistible
incitement to go and forget the present world among the poets and
novelists and biographers and letter-writers of the eighteenth
century. His enthusiasm weaves spells about even the least of them.
He does not merely remind us of the genius of Pope and Swift, of
Fielding and Johnson and Walpole. He also summons us to
Armory’s <em>John Buncle</em> and to the Reverend Richard
Graves’s <em>Spiritual Quixote</em> as to a feast. Of the
latter novel he declares that “for a book that is to be
amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being
ponderous, <em>The Spiritual Quixote</em> may, perhaps, be
commended above all its predecessors and contemporaries outside the
work of the great Four themselves.” That is characteristic of
the wealth of invitations scattered through <em>The Peace of the
Augustans</em>. After reading the book, one can scarcely resist the
temptation to spend an evening over Young’s <em>Night
Thoughts</em> and one will be almost more likely to turn to Prior
than to Shakespeare himself—Prior who, “with the
eternal and almost unnecessary exception of Shakespeare … is
about the first to bring out the true English humour which involves
sentiment and romance, which laughs gently at its own, tears, and
has more than half a tear for its own laughter”—Prior,
of whom it is further written that “no one, except Thackeray,
has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit of
<em>Ecclesiastes</em>.” It does not matter that in a later
chapter of the book it is <em>Rasselas</em> which is put with
<em>Ecclesiastes</em>, and, after <em>Rasselas</em>, <em>The Vanity
of Human Wishes</em>. One does not go to Mr. Saintsbury as an
inspector of literary weights and measures. His estimates of
authors are the impressions of a man talking in a hurry, and his
method is the method of exaggeration rather than of precise
statement. How deficient he is in the sense of proportion may be
judged from the fact that he devotes slightly more space to Collins
than to Pope, unless the pages in which he assails “Grub
Street” as a malicious invention of Pope’s are to be
counted to the credit of the latter. But Mr. Saintsbury’s
book is not so much a thorough and balanced survey of
eighteenth-century literature as a confession, an almost garrulous
monologue on the delights of that literature. How pleasant and
unexpected it is to see a critic in his seventies as incautious, as
pugnacious, as boisterous as an undergraduate! It is seldom that we
find the apostolic spirit of youth living in the same breast with
the riches of experience and memory, as we do in the present
book.</p>
<p>One of the great attractions of the eighteenth century for the
modern world is that, while it is safely set at an historical
distance from us, it is, at the same time, brought within range of
our everyday interests. It is not merely that about the beginning
of it men began to write and talk according to the simple rules of
modern times. It is rather that about this time the man of letters
emerges from the mists of legend and becomes as real as one’s
uncle in his daily passions and his train of little interests. One
has not to reconstruct the lives of Swift and Pope from a handful
of myths and references in legal documents. There is no room for
anything akin to Baconianism in their regard. They live in a
thousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well
be an agnostic about Mr. Asquith as about either of them. Pope was
a champion liar, and Swift spun mystifications about himself. But,
in spite of lies and Mystifications and gossip, they are both as
real to us as if we met them walking down the Strand. One could not
easily imagine Shakespeare walking down the Strand. The Strand
would have to be rebuilt, and the rest of us would have to put on
fancy dress in order to receive him. But though Swift and Pope
lived in a century of wig and powder and in a London strangely
unlike the London of to-day, we do not feel that similar
preparations would be needed in their case. If Swift came back, one
can without difficulty imagine him pamphleteering about war as
though he had merely been asleep for a couple of centuries; and
Pope, we may be sure, would resume, without too great perplexity,
his attack on the egoists and dunces of the world of letters. But
Shakespeare’s would be a return from legendary Elysian
fields.</p>
<p>Hence Mr. Saintsbury may justly hope that his summons to the
modern random reader, no less than to the scholar, to go and enjoy
himself among the writers of the eighteenth century will not fall
on entirely deaf ears. At the same time, it is only fair to warn
the general reader not to follow Mr. Saintsbury’s
recommendations and opinions too blindly. He will do well to take
the author’s advice and read Pope, but he will do very ill to
take the author’s advice as regards what in Pope is best
worth reading. Mr. Saintsbury speaks with respect, for instance, of
the <em>Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady</em>—an insincere piece
of tombstone rhetoric. “There are some,” he declared in
a footnote, “to whom this singular piece is Pope’s
strongest atonement, both as poet and man, for his faults as
both.” It seems to me to be a poem which reveals Pope’s
faults as a poet, while of Pope the man it tells us simply nothing.
It has none of Pope’s wit, none of his epigrammatic
characterization, none of his bewigged and powdered fancies, none
of his malicious self-revelation. Almost the only interesting thing
about it is the notes the critics have written on it, discussing
whether the lady ever lived, and, if so, whether she was a Miss
Wainsbury or a lady of title, whether she was beautiful or
deformed, whether she was in love with Pope or the Duke of
Buckingham or the Duc de Berry, whether Pope was in love with her,
or even knew her, or whether she killed herself with a sword or by
hanging herself. One can find plenty of “rest and
refreshment” among the conjectures of the commentators, but
in the verse itself one can find little but a good example of the
technique of the rhymed couplet. But Mr. Saintsbury evidently loves
the heroic couplet for itself alone. The only long example of
Pope’s verse which he quotes is merely ding-dong, and might
have been written by any capable imitator of the poet later in the
century. Surely, if his contention is true that Pope’s
reputation as a poet is now lower than it ought to be, he ought to
have quoted something from the <em>Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot</em> or
<em>The Rape of the Lock</em>, or even <em>The Essay on Man</em>.
The two first are almost flawless masterpieces. Here Pope suddenly
becomes a star. Here he gilds his age and his passions with wit and
fancy; he ceases to be a mere rhymed moralist, a mechanician of
metre. Mr. Saintsbury, I regret to see, contends that the first
version of <em>The Rape of the Lock</em> is the best. One can
hardly forgive this throwing overboard of the toilet and the
fairies which Pope added in the later edition. We may admit that
the gnomes are a less happy invention than the sylphs, and that
their introduction lets the poem down from its level of magic
illusion. But in the second telling the poem is an infinitely
richer and more peopled thing. Had we only known the first version,
we should, no doubt, have felt with Addison that it was madness to
tamper with such exquisite perfection. But Pope, who foolishly
attributed Addison’s advice to envy, proved that Addison was
wrong. His revision of <em>The Rape of the Lock</em> is one of the
few magnificently successful examples in literature of painting the
lily.</p>
<p>One differs from Mr. Saintsbury, however, less in liking a
different garden from his than in liking a different seat in the
same garden. One who is familiar as he is with all the literature
he discusses in the present volume is bound to indulge all manner
of preferences, whims and even eccentricities. An instance of Mr.
Saintsbury’s whims is his complaint that the
eighteenth-century essays are almost always reprinted only in
selections and without the advertisements that appeared with them
on their first publication. He is impatient of J. R. Green’s
dismissal of the periodical essayist as a “mass of
rubbish,” and he demands his eighteenth-century essayists in
full, advertisements and all. “Here,” he insists,
“these things fringe and vignette the text in the most
appropriate manner, and so set off the quaint variety and the
other-worldly character as nothing else could do.” Is not the
author’s contention, however, as to the great loss the
Addisonian essay suffers when isolated from its context a severe
criticism on that essay as literature? The man of letters likes to
read from a complete <em>Spectator</em> as he does from a complete
Wordsworth. At the same time, the best of Addison, as of
Wordsworth, can stand on its own feet in an anthology, and this is
the final proof of its literary excellence. The taste for
eighteenth century advertisements is, after all, only literary
antiquarianism—a delightful indulgence, a by-path, but hardly
necessary to the enjoyment of Addison’s genius.</p>
<p>But it is neither Pope nor Addison who is ultimately Mr.
Saintsbury’s idol among the poets and prose-writers of the
eighteenth century. His idol of idols is Swift, and next to him he
seems most wholeheartedly to love and admire Dr. Johnson and
Fielding. He makes no bones about confessing his preference of
Swift to Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière. Swift does
not at once fascinate and cold-shoulder him as he does to so many
people. Mr. Saintsbury glorifies <em>Gulliver</em>, and wisely so,
right down to the last word about the Houyhnhnms, and he demands
for the <em>Journal to Stella</em> recognition as “the first
great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely
genuine autobiography.” His ultimate burst of appreciation is
a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called
Saintsburyese—not because of any obscurity in it, but because
of its oddity of phrase and metaphor:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Swift never wearies, for, as Bossuet said of human passion
generally, there is in this greatest master of one of its most
terrible forms, <em>quelque chose d’infini</em>, and the
refreshment which he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest
froth of pure nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger to
the most drastic restoratives—the very strychnine and
capsicum of irony.</p>
</div>
<p>But what, above all, attracts Mr. Saintsbury in Swift, Fielding
and Johnson is their eminent manliness. He is an enthusiast within
limits for the genius of Sterne and the genius of Horace Walpole.
But he loves them in a grudging way. He is disgusted with their
lack of muscle. He admits of the characters in <em>Tristrom
Shandy</em> that “they are … much more intrinsically
true to life than many, if not almost all, the characters of
Dickens,” but he is too greatly shocked by Sterne’s
humour to be just to his work as a whole. It is the same with
Walpole’s letters. Mr. Saintsbury will heap sentence after
sentence of praise upon them, till one would imagine they were his
favourite eighteenth-century literature. He even defends
Walpole’s character against Macaulay, but in the result he
damns him with faint praise quite as effectively as Macaulay did.
That he has an enviable appetite for Walpole’s letters is
shown by the fact that, in speaking of Mrs. Toynbee’s huge
sixteen-volume edition of them, he observes that “even a
single reading of it will supply the evening requirements of a man
who does not go to bed very late, and has learnt the last lesson of
intellectual as of other enjoyment—to enjoy
<em>slowly</em>—for nearer a month than a week, and perhaps
for longer still.” The man who can get through Horace Walpole
in a month of evenings without sitting up late seems to me to be
endowed not only with an avarice of reading, but with an avarice of
Walpole. But, in spite of this, Mr. Saintsbury does not seem to
like his author. His ideal author is one of whom he can say, as he
does of Johnson, that he is “one of the greatest of
Englishmen, one of the greatest men of letters, and one of the
greatest of <em>men</em>.” One of his complaints against Gray
is that, though he liked <em>Joseph Andrews</em>, he “had
apparently not enough manliness to see some of Fielding’s
real merits.” As for Fielding, Mr. Saintsbury’s verdict
is summed up in Dryden’s praise of Chaucer. “Here is
God’s plenty.” In <em>Tom Jones</em> he contends that
Fielding “puts the whole plant of the pleasure-giver in
motion, as no novel-writer—not even Cervantes—had ever
done before.” For myself, I doubt whether the exaltation of
Fielding has not become too much a matter of orthodoxy in recent
years. Compare him with Swift, and he is long-winded in his
sentences. Compare him with Sterne, and his characters are
mechanical. Compare him with Dickens, and he reaches none of the
depths, either of laughter or of sadness. This is not to question
the genius of Fielding’s vivid and critical picture of
eighteenth-century manners and morals. It is merely to put a drag
on the wheel of Mr Saintsbury’s galloping enthusiasm.</p>
<p>But, however one may quarrel with it, <em>The Peace of the
Augustans</em> is a book to read with delight—an eccentric
book, an extravagant book, a grumpy book, but a book of rare and
amazing enthusiasm for good literature. Mr. Saintsbury’s
constant jibes at the present age, as though no one had ever been
unmanly enough to make a joke before Mr. Shaw, become amusing in
the end like Dr. Johnson’s rudenesses. And Mr.
Saintsbury’s one attempt to criticize contemporary
fiction—where he speaks of <em>Sinister Street</em> in the
same breath with <em>Waverley</em> and <em>Pride and
Prejudice</em>—is both amusing and rather appalling. But, in
spite of his attitude to his own times, one could not ask for more
genial company on going on a pilgrimage among the Augustans. Mr.
Saintsbury has in this book written the most irresistible
advertisement of eighteenth-century literature that has been
published for many years.</p>
<hr />
<h3><SPAN name="Gosse" name="Gosse">(2) Mr. Gosse</SPAN></h3>
<p>Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are the two kings of Sparta among
English critics of to-day. They stand preeminent among those of our
contemporaries who have served literature in the capacity of
law-givers during the past fifty years. I do not suggest that they
are better critics than Mr. Birrell or Sir Sidney Colvin or the
late Sir E.T. Cook. But none of these three was ever a professional
and whole-time critic, as Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are. One
thinks of the latter primarily as the authors of books about books,
though Mr. Gosse is a poet and biographer as well, and Mr.
Saintsbury, it is said, once dreamed of writing a history of wine.
One might say of Mr. Gosse that even in his critical work he writes
largely as a poet and biographer, while Mr. Saintsbury writes of
literature as though he were writing a history of wine. Mr.
Saintsbury seeks in literature, above all things, exhilarating
qualities. He can read almost anything and in any language,
provided it is not non-intoxicating. He has a good head, and it
cannot be said that he ever allows an author to go to it. But the
authors whom he has collected in his wonderful cellar
unquestionably make him merry. In his books he always seems to be
pressing on us “another glass of Jane Austen,” or
“just a thimbleful of Pope,” or “a drop of
‘42 Tennyson.” No other critic of literature writes
with the garrulous gusto of a boon-companion as Mr. Saintsbury
does. In our youth, when we demand style as well as gusto, we
condemn him on account of his atrocious English. As we grow older,
we think of his English merely as a rather eccentric sort of coat,
and we begin to recognize that geniality such as his is a part of
critical genius. True, he is not over-genial to new authors. He
regards them as he might 1916 claret. Perhaps he is right. Authors
undoubtedly get mellower with age. Even great poetry is, we are
told, a little crude to the taste till it has stood for a few
seasons.</p>
<p>Mr. Gosse is at once more grave and more deferential in his
treatment of great authors. One cannot imagine Mr. Saintsbury
speaking in a hushed voice before Shakespeare himself. One can
almost hear him saying, “Hullo, Shakespeare!” To Mr.
Gosse, however, literature is an almost sacred subject. He glows in
its presence. He is more lyrical than Mr. Saintsbury, more
imaginative and more eloquent. His short history of English
literature is a book that fills a young head with enthusiasm. He
writes as a servant of the great tradition. He is a Whig, where Mr.
Saintsbury is an heretical old Jacobite. He is, however, saved from
a professorial earnestness by his sharp talent for portraiture. Mr.
Gosse’s judgments may or may not last: his portraits
certainly will. It is to be hoped that he will one day write his
reminiscences. Such a book would, we feel sure, be among the great
books of portraiture in the history of English literature. He has
already set Patmore and Swinburne before us in comic reality, and
who can forget the grotesque figure of Hans Andersen, sketched in a
few lines though it is, in <em>Two Visits to Denmark</em>? It may
be replied that Mr. Gosse has already given us the best of his
reminiscences in half a dozen books of essay and biography. Even
so, there were probably many things which it was not expedient to
tell ten or twenty years ago, but which might well be related for
the sake of truth and entertainment to-day. Mr. Gosse in the past
has usually told the truth about authors with the gentleness of a
modern dentist extracting a tooth. He keeps up a steady
conversation of praise while doing the damage. The truth is out
before you know. One becomes suddenly aware that the author has
ceased to be as coldly perfect as a tailor’s model, and is a
queer-looking creature with a gap in his jaw. It is possible that
the author, were he alive, would feel furious, as a child sometimes
feels with the dentist. None the less, Mr. Gosse has done him a
service. The man who extracts a truth is as much to be commended as
the man who extracts a tooth. It is not the function of the
biographer any more than it is that of a dentist to prettify his
subject. Each is an enemy of decay, a furtherer of life. There is
such a thing as painless biography, but it is the work of quacks.
Mr. Gosse is one of those honest dentists who reassure you by
allowing it to hurt you “just a little.”</p>
<p>This gift for telling the truth is no small achievement in a man
of letters. Literature is a broom that sweeps lies out of the mind,
and fortunate is the man who wields it. Unhappily, while Mr. Gosse
is daring in portraiture, he is the reverse in comment. In comment,
as his writings on the war showed, he will fall in with the cant of
the times. He can see through the cant of yesterday with a sparkle
in his eyes, but he is less critical of the cant of to-day. He is
at least fond of throwing out saving clauses, as when, writing of
Mr. Sassoon’s verse, he says: “His temper is not
altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments must tend to relax
the effort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when
conducted with so much honesty and courage.” Mr. Gosse again
writes out of the official rather than the imaginative mind when,
speaking of the war poets, he observes:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>It was only proper that the earliest of all should be the Poet
Laureate's address to England, ending with the prophecy:</p>
<div class="poem" style="font-size:100%;">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Much suffering shall cleanse thee!</p>
<p class="i2">But thou through the flood</p>
<p>Shall win to salvation,</p>
<p class="i2">To Beauty through blood.</p>
</div>
</div></div>
<p>Had a writer of the age of Charles II. written a verse like
that, Mr. Gosse’s chortles would have disturbed the somnolent
peace of the House of Peers. Even if it had been written in the
time of Albert the Good, he would have rent it with the destructive
dagger of a phrase. As it is, one is not sure that Mr. Gosse
regards this appalling scrap from a bad hymnal as funny. One hopes
that he quoted it with malicious intention. But did he? Was it not
Mr. Gosse who early in the war glorified the blood that was being
shed as a cleansing stream of Condy’s Fluid? The truth is,
apart from his thoughts about literature, Mr. Gosse thinks much as
the leader-writers tell him. He is sensitive to beauty of style and
to idiosyncrasy of character, but he lacks philosophy and that
tragic sense that gives the deepest sympathy. That, we fancy, is
why we would rather read him on Catherine Trotter, the precursor of
the bluestockings, than on any subject connected with the war.</p>
<p>Two of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Gosse’s
<em>Diversions of a Man of Letters</em> are the essay on Catherine
Trotter and that on “the message of the Wartons.” Here
he is on ground on which there is no leader-writer to take him by
the hand and guide him into saying “the right thing.”
He writes as a disinterested scholar and an entertainer. He forgets
the war and is amused. How many readers are there in England who
know that Catherine Trotter “published in 1693 a copy of
verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his
recovery from the smallpox,” and that “she was then
fourteen years of age”? How many know even that she wrote a
blank-verse tragedy in five acts, called <em>Agnes de Cestro</em>,
and had it produced at Drury Lane at the age of sixteen? At the age
of nineteen she was the friend of Congreve, and was addressed by
Farquhar as “one of the fairest of her sex and the best
judge.” By the age of twenty-five, however, she had
apparently written herself out, so far as the stage was concerned,
and after her tragedy, <em>The Revolution in Sweden</em>, the
theatre knows her no more. Though described as “the Sappho of
Scotland” by the Queen of Prussia, and by the Duke of
Marlborough as “the wisest virgin I ever knew,” her
fame did not last even as long as her life. She married a
clergyman, wrote on philosophy and religion, and lived till
seventy. Her later writings, according to Mr. Gosse, “are so
dull that merely to think of them brings tears into one’s
eyes.” Her husband, who was a bit of a Jacobite, lost his
money on account of his opinions, even though—“a
perfect gentleman at heart—‘he always prayed for the
King and Royal Family by name.’”
“Meanwhile,” writes Mr. Gosse, “to uplift his
spirits in this dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a
treatise on the Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher
to print. He reminds us of Dr. Primrose in <em>The Vicar of
Wakefield</em>, and, like him, Mr. Cockburn probably had strong
views on the Whistonian doctrine.” Altogether the essay on
Catherine Trotter is an admirable example of Mr. Gosse in a playful
mood.</p>
<p>The study of Joseph and Thomas Warton as “two pioneers of
romanticism” is more serious in purpose, and is a scholarly
attempt to discover the first symptoms of romanticism in
eighteenth-century literature. Mr. Gosse finds in <em>The
Enthusiast</em>, written by Joseph Warton at the age of eighteen,
“the earliest expression of full revolt against the classical
attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature for
nearly a century.” He does not pretend that it is a good
poem, but “here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly
emphasized and repeated what was entirely new in literature, the
essence of romantic hysteria.” It is in Joseph Warton,
according to Mr. Gosse, that we first meet with “the
individualist attitude to nature.” Readers of Horace
Walpole’s letters, however, will remember still earlier
examples of the romantic attitude to nature. But these were not
published for many years afterwards.</p>
<p>The other essays in the book range from the charm of Sterne to
the vivacity of Lady Dorothy Nevill, from a eulogy of Poe to a
discussion of Disraeli as a novelist. The variety, the scholarship,
the portraiture of the book make it a pleasure to read; and, even
when Mr. Gosse flatters in his portraits, his sense of truth impels
him to draw the features correctly, so that the facts break through
the praise. The truth is Mr. Gosse is always doing his best to
balance the pleasure of saying the best with the pleasure of saying
the worst. His books are all the more vital because they bear the
stamp of an appreciative and mildly cruel personality.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Babbitt" name="Babbitt">XIX.—An American Critic: Professor Irving Babbitt</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>It is rather odd that two of the ablest American critics should
also be two of the most unsparing enemies of romanticism in
literature. Professor Babbitt and Mr. Paul Elmer More cannot get
over the French Revolution. They seem to think that the rights of
man have poisoned literature. One suspects that they have their
doubts even about the American Revolution; for there, too, the
rights of man were asserted against the lust of power. It is only
fair to Professor Babbitt to say that he does not defend the lust
of power. On the contrary, he damns it, and explains it as the
logical and almost inevitable outcome of the rights of man! The
steps of the process by which the change is effected are these.
First, we have the Rousseaus asserting that the natural man is
essentially good, but that he has been depraved by an artificial
social system imposed on him from without. Instead of the quarrel
between good and evil in his breast, they see only the quarrel
between the innate good in man and his evil environment. They hold
that all will be well if only he is set free—if his genius or
natural impulses are liberated. “Rousseauism is … an
emancipation of impulse—especially of the impulse of
sex.” It is a gospel of egoism and leaves little room for
conscience. Hence it makes men mengalomaniacs, and the lust for
dominion is given its head no less than the lust of the flesh.
“In the absence of ethical discipline,” writes
Professor Babbitt in <em>Rousseau and Romanticism</em>, “the
lust for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at
least practically, compared with the third main lust of human
nature—the lust for power. Hence the emergence of that most
sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac.” In the
result it appears that not only Rousseau and Hugo, but Wordsworth,
Keats, and Shelley, helped to bring about the European War! Had
there been no wars, no tyrants, and no lascivious men before
Rousseau, one would have been ready to take Professor
Babbitt’s indictment more seriously.</p>
<p>Professor Babbitt, however, has a serious philosophic idea at
the back of all he says. He believes that man at his noblest lives
the life of obligation rather than of impulse; and that romantic
literature discourages him in this. He holds that man should rise
from the plane of nature to the plane of humanism or the plane of
religion, and that to live according to one’s temperament, as
the romanticists preach, is to sink back from human nature, in the
best sense, to animal nature. He takes the view that men of science
since Bacon, by the great conquests they have made in the material
sphere, have prepared man to take the romantic and boastful view of
himself. “If men had not been so heartened by scientific
progress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen
to Rousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good.”
Not that Professor Babbitt looks on us as utterly evil and worthy
of damnation. He objects to the gloomy Jonathan-Edwards view,
because it helps to precipitate by reaction the opposite
extreme—“the boundless sycophancy of human nature from
which we are now suffering.” It was, perhaps, in reaction
against the priests that Rousseau made the most boastful
announcements of his righteousness. “Rousseau feels himself
so good that he is ready, as he declares, to appear before the
Almighty at the sound of the trump of the Last Judgment, with the
book of his <em>Confessions</em> in his hand, and there to issue a
challenge to the whole human race, ‘Let a single one assert
to Thee if he dare: “I am better than that
man.”’” Rousseau would have been saved from this
fustian virtue, Professor Babbitt thinks, if he had accepted either
the classic or the religious view of life: for the classic view
imposes on human nature the discipline of decorum, while the
religious view imposes the discipline of humility. Human nature, he
holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting
“No.” Virtue is a struggle within iron limitations, not
an easy gush of feeling. At the same time, Professor Babbitt does
not offer us as a cure for our troubles the decorum of the
Pharisees and the pseudo-classicists, who bid us obey outward rules
instead of imitating a spirit. He wishes our men of letters to
rediscover the ethical imagination of the Greeks. “True
classicism,” he observes, “does not rest on the
observance of rules or the imitation of modes, but on an immediate
insight into the universal.” The romanticists, he thinks,
cultivate not the awe we find in the great writers, but mere
wonder. He takes Poe as a typical romanticist. “It is not
easy to discover in either the personality or writings of Poe an
atom of awe or reverence. On the other hand, he both experiences
wonder and seeks in his art to be a pure wonder-smith.”</p>
<p>One of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the
romanticists unduly praise the ignorant—the savage, the
peasant, and the child. Wordsworth here comes in for denunciation
for having hailed a child of six as “Mighty Prophet! Seer
blest!” Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us, praised the child
not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom from sin. The
romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush of
wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He
begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled
character. He tries all sorts of false gods—nature-worship,
art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As
regards the last of these, romanticism, according to the author,
has meant the rehabilitation of the ass, and the Rousseauists are
guilty of onolatry. “Medical men have given a learned name to
the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and
gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis). But Rousseau already
exhibits this ‘psychosis.’ He abandoned his five
children one after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable
affection for his dog.” As for the worship of nature, it
leads to a “wise passiveness” instead of the wise
energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle in
pantheistic reveries. “In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts
to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine
illumination.” Professor Babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he
distrusts Arcadianism. He perceives the mote of Arcadianism even in
“the light that never was on sea or land.” He has no
objection to a “return to nature,” if it is for
purposes of recreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up
as a cult or “a substitute for philosophy and
religion.” He denounces, indeed, every kind of
“painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort.” He
admires the difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy
or pity or fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having.</p>
<p>On points of this kind, I fancy, he would have had on his side
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, and many of the other
“Rousseauists” whom he attacks. Professor Babbitt,
however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of the nineteenth
century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics, are
to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientific
complacency. “The nineteenth century,” he declares,
“may very well prove to have been the most wonderful and the
least wise of centuries.” He admits the immense materialistic
energy of the century, but this did not make up for the lack of a
genuine philosophic insight in life and literature. Man is a
morally indolent animal, and he was never more so than when he was
working “with something approaching frenzy according to the
natural law.” Faced with the spectacle of a romantic
spiritual sloth accompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even
intellectual energy, the author warns us that “the discipline
that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important
bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a
mastery of physical nature.” He sees a peril to our
civilization in our absorption in the temporal and our failure to
discover that “something abiding” on which civilization
must rest. He quotes Aristotle’s anti-romantic saying that
“most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober
manner.” He feels that in conduct, politics, and the arts, we
have, as the saying is, “plumped for” the disorderly
manner to-day.</p>
<p>His book is a very useful challenge to the times, though it is a
dangerous book to put in the hands of anyone inclined to
Conservatism. After all, romanticism was a great liberating force.
It liberated men, not from decorum, but from
pseudo-decorum—not from humility, but from subserviency. It
may be admitted that, without humility and decorum of the true
kind, liberty is only pseudo-liberty, equality only
pseudo-equality, and fraternity only pseudo-fraternity. I am
afraid, however, that in getting rid of the vices of romanticism
Professor Babbitt would pour away the baby with the bath water.</p>
<p>Where Professor Babbitt goes wrong is in not realizing that
romanticism with its emphasis on rights is a necessary counterpart
to classicism with its emphasis on duties. Each of them tries to do
without the other. The most notorious romantic lovers were men who
failed to realize the necessity of fidelity, just as the minor
romantic artists to-day fail to realize the necessity of tradition.
On the other hand, the classicist-in-excess prefers a world in
which men preserve the decorum of servants to a world in which they
might attain to the decorum of equals. Professor Babbitt refers to
the pseudo-classical drama of seventeenth-century France, in which
men confused nobility of language with the language of the
nobility. He himself unfortunately is not free from similar
prejudices. He is antipathetic, so far as one can see, to any
movement for a better social system than we already possess. He is
definitely in reaction against the whole forward movement of the
last two centuries. He has pointed out certain flaws in the
moderns, but he has failed to appreciate their virtues. Literature
to-day is less noble than the literature of Shakespeare, partly, I
think, because men have lost the “sense of sin.”
Without the sense of sin we cannot have the greatest tragedy. The
Greeks and Shakespeare perceived the contrast between the pure and
the impure, the noble and the base, as no writer perceives it
to-day. Romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values.
On the other hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism. In
the great books of the world, in <em>Isaiah</em> and the Gospels,
the best elements of both the classic and the romantic are found
working together in harmony. If Christ were living to-day, is
Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himself would not have
censured the anthophilpsychosis of “Consider the lilies of
the field”?</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Georgians" name="Georgians">XX.—Georgians</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<h3><SPAN name="delaMare" name="delaMare">(1) Mr. de la Mare</SPAN></h3>
<p>Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song. His genius is
scarcely more than a rill. But how the rill shines! How sweet a
music it makes! Into what lands of romance does it flow, and
beneath what hedges populous with birds! It seems at times as
though it were a little fugitive stream attempting to run as far
away as possible from the wilderness of reality and to lose itself
in quiet, dreaming places. There never were shyer songs than
these.</p>
<p>Mr. de la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at
ease with experience as Browning and Whitman. He has no cheers or
welcome for the labouring universe on its march. He is interested
in the daily procession only because he seeks in it one face, one
figure. He is love-sick for love, for beauty, and longs to save it
from the contamination of the common world. Like the lover in
<em>The Tryst</em>, he dreams always of a secret place of love and
beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and space we
know:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,</p>
<p>There, out of all remembrance, make our home:</p>
<p>Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair,</p>
<p>Hollowed by Noah’s mouse beneath the chair</p>
<p>Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound,</p>
<p>Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound.</p>
<p>Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea</p>
<p>Would lease a lost mermaiden’s grot to me,</p>
<p>There of your beauty we would joyance make—</p>
<p>A music wistful for the sea-nymph’s sake:</p>
<p>Haply Elijah, o’er his spokes of fire,</p>
<p>Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre,</p>
<p>Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space,</p>
<p>Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace,</p>
<p>Where two might happy be—just you and I—</p>
<p>Lost in the uttermost of Eternity.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the
waltz-songs of the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the
longing of lovers for an impossible loneliness. Mr. de la Mare
touches our hearts, however, not because he shares our sentimental
day-dreams, but because he so mournfully turns back from them to
the bitterness of reality:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep</p>
<p>Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep.</p>
<p>Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man</p>
<p>Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective
vagueness of phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare’s peculiar vice
as a poet) suggests something of the sad philosophy which runs
through the verse in <em>Motley</em>. The poems are, for the most
part, praise of beauty sought and found in the shadow of death.</p>
<p>Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare’s book
is, as we have said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He
triumphantly announces that, if he were to begin to write of
earth’s wonders:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Flit would the ages</p>
<p>On soundless wings</p>
<p>Ere unto Z</p>
<p>My pen drew nigh;</p>
<p>Leviathan told,</p>
<p>And the honey-fly.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a “thing of
light,” in a bush without realizing that—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>All the throbbing world</p>
<p class="i2">Of dew and sun and air</p>
<p>By this small parcel of life</p>
<p class="i2">Is made more fair.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>He bids us in <em>Farewell</em>:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Look thy last on all things lovely</p>
<p class="i2">Every hour. Let no night</p>
<p>Seal thy sense in deathly slumber</p>
<p class="i2">Till to delight</p>
<p>Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare’s
melancholy. His sorrow is idealist’s sorrow. He has the heart
of a worshipper, a lover.</p>
<p>We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the
outbreak of the war he evidently shared with other lovers and
idealists the feeling of elation in the presence of noble
sacrifices made for the world.</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Now each man’s mind all Europe is,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>he cries, in the first line in <em>Happy England</em>, and, as
he remembers the peace of England, “her woods and wilds, her
loveliness,” he exclaims:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>O what a deep contented night</p>
<p class="i2">The sun from out her Eastern seas</p>
<p>Would bring the dust which in her sight</p>
<p class="i2">Had given its all for these!</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>So beautiful a spirit as Mr. de la Mare’s, however, could
not remain content with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and
heroism of dying men. In the long poem called <em>Motley</em> he
turns from the heroism to the madness of war, translating his
vision into a fool’s song:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Nay, but a dream I had</p>
<p>Of a world all mad,</p>
<p>Not simply happy mad like me,</p>
<p>Who am mad like an empty scene</p>
<p>Of water and willow-tree,</p>
<p>Where the wind hath been;</p>
<p>But that foul Satan-mad,</p>
<p>Who rots in his own head.…</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>The fool’s vision of men going into battle is not a vision
of knights of the Holy Ghost nobly falling in the lists with their
country looking on, but of men’s bodies—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Dragging cold cannon through a mire</p>
<p>Of rain and blood and spouting fire,</p>
<p>The new moon glinting hard on eyes</p>
<p>Wide with insanities!</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>In <em>The Marionettes</em> Mr. de la Mare turns to tragic
satire for relief from the bitterness of a war-maddened world:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Let the foul scene proceed:</p>
<p class="i2">There's laughter in the wings;</p>
<p>’Tis sawdust that they bleed,</p>
<p class="i2">But a box Death brings.</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>How rare a skill is theirs</p>
<p class="i2">These extreme pangs to show,</p>
<p>How real a frenzy wears</p>
<p class="i2">Each feigner of woe!</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>And the poem goes on in perplexity of anger and anguish:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Strange, such a Piece is free,</p>
<p class="i2">While we spectators sit,</p>
<p>Aghast at its agony,</p>
<p class="i2">Yet absorbed in it!</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>Dark is the outer air,</p>
<p class="i2">Coldly the night draughts blow,</p>
<p>Mutely we stare, and stare,</p>
<p class="i2">At the frenzied Show.</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroud</p>
<p class="i2">Of deep, immutable blue—</p>
<p>We cry, “The end!” We are bowed</p>
<p class="i2">By the dread, “’Tis true!”</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>While the Shape who hoofs applause</p>
<p class="i2">Behind our deafened ear,</p>
<p>Hoots—angel-wise—“the Cause”!</p>
<p class="i2">And affrights even fear.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>There is something in these lines that reminds one of Mr. Thomas
Hardy’s black-edged indictment of life.</p>
<p>As we read Mr. de la Mare, indeed, we are reminded again and
again of the work of many other poets—of the ballad-writers,
the Elizabethan song-writers, Blake and Wordsworth, Mr. Hardy and
Mr. W.B. Yeats. In some instances it is as though Mr. de la Mare
had deliberately set himself to compose a musical variation on the
same theme as one of the older masters. Thus, <em>April Moon</em>,
which contains the charming verse—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>“The little moon that April brings,</p>
<p class="i2">More lovely shade than light,</p>
<p>That, setting, silvers lonely hills</p>
<p class="i2">Upon the verge of night”—</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>is merely Wordsworth’s “She dwelt among the
untrodden ways” turned into new music. New music, we should
say, is Mr. de la Mare’s chief gift to literature—a
music not regular or precise or certain, but none the less a music
in which weak rhymes and even weak phrases are jangled into a
strange beauty, as in <em>Alexander</em>, which begins:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>It was the Great Alexander,</p>
<p class="i2">Capped with a golden helm,</p>
<p>Sate in the ages, in his floating ship,</p>
<p class="i2">In a dead calm.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>One finds Mr. de la Mare’s characteristic, unemphatic
music again in the opening lines of <em>Mrs. Grundy</em>:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot,</p>
<p>Stumble not, whisper not, smile not,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>where “foot” and “not” are rhymes.</p>
<p>It is the stream of music flowing through his verses rather than
any riches of imagery or phrase that makes one rank the author so
high among living poets. But music in verse can hardly be separated
from intensity and sincerity of vision. This music of Mr. de la
Mare’s is not a mere craftsman’s tune: it is an echo of
the spirit. Had he not seen beautiful things passionately, Mr. de
la Mare could never have written:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Thou with thy cheek on mine,</p>
<p>And dark hair loosed, shalt see</p>
<p>Take the far stars for fruit</p>
<p>The cypress tree,</p>
<p>And in the yew’s black</p>
<p>Shall the moon be.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Beautiful as Mr. de la Mare’s vision is, however, and
beautiful as is his music, we miss in his work that frequent
perfection of phrase which is part of the genius of (to take
another living writer) Mr. Yeats. One has only to compare Mr.
Yeats’s <em>I Heard the Old, Old Men Say</em> with Mr. de la
Mare’s <em>The Old Men</em> to see how far the latter falls
below verbal mastery. Mr. Yeats has found the perfect embodiment
for his imagination. Mr. de la Mare seems in comparison to be
struggling with his medium, and contrives in his first verse to be
no more than just articulate:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Old and alone, sit we,</p>
<p class="i2">Caged, riddle-rid men,</p>
<p>Lost to earth’s “Listen!” and
“See!”</p>
<p class="i2">Thought’s “Wherefore?” and
“When?”</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>There is vision in some of the later verses in the poem, but, if
we read it alongside of Mr. Yeats’s, we get an impression of
unsuccess of execution. Whether one can fairly use the word
“unsuccess” in reference to verse which succeeds so
exquisitely as Mr. de la Mare’s in being literature is a nice
question. But how else is one to define the peculiar quality of his
style—its hesitations, its vaguenesses, its obscurities? On
the other hand, even when his lines leave the intellect puzzled and
the desire for grammar unsatisfied, a breath of original romance
blows through them and appeals to us like the illogical burden of a
ballad. Here at least are the rhythms and raptures of poetry, if
not always the beaten gold of speech. Sometimes Mr. de la
Mare’s verse reminds one of piano-music, sometimes of
bird-music: it wavers so curiously between what is composed and
what is unsophisticated. Not that one ever doubts for a moment that
Mr. de la Mare has spent on his work an artist’s pains. He
has made a craft out of his innocence. If he produces in his verse
the effect of the wind among the reeds, it is the result not only
of his artlessness, but of his art. He is one of the modern poets
who have broken away from the metrical formalities of Swinburne and
the older men, and who, of set purpose, have imposed upon poetry
the beauty of a slightly irregular pulse.</p>
<p>He is typical of his generation, however, not only in his form,
but in the pain of his unbelief (as shown in <em>Betrayal</em>),
and in that sense of half-revelation that fills him always with
wonder and sometimes with hope. His poems tell of the visits of
strange presences in dream and vacancy. In <em>A Vacant Day</em>,
after describing the beauty of a summer moon, with clear waters
flowing under willows, he closes with the verses:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>I listened; and my heart was dumb</p>
<p class="i2">With praise no language could express;</p>
<p>Longing in vain for him to come</p>
<p class="i2">Who had breathed such blessedness.</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>On this fair world, wherein we pass</p>
<p class="i2">So chequered and so brief a stay,</p>
<p>And yearned in spirit to learn, alas!</p>
<p class="i2">What kept him still away.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>In these poems we have the genius of the beauty of gentleness
expressing itself as it is doing nowhere else just now in verse.
Mr. de la Mare’s poetry is not only lovely, but lovable. He
has a personal possession—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The skill of words to sweeten despair,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>such as will, we are confident, give him a permanent place in
English literature.</p>
<hr />
<h3><SPAN name="Group" name="Group">(2) The Group</SPAN></h3>
<p>The latest collection of Georgian verse has had a mixed
reception. One or two distinguished critics have written of it in
the mood of a challenge to mortal combat. Men have begun to quarrel
over the question whether we are living in an age of poetic dearth
or of poetic plenty—whether the world is a nest of
singing-birds or a cage in which the last canary has been dead for
several years.</p>
<p>All this, I think, is a good sign. It means that poetry is
interesting people sufficiently to make them wish to argue about
it. Better a breeze—even a somewhat excessive
breeze—than stagnant air. It is good both for poets and for
the reading public. It prevents the poets from resting on their
wings, as they might be tempted to do by a consistent calm of
praise. It compels them to examine their work more critically.
Anyhow, “fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,”
and a reasonable amount of sharp censure will do a true poet more
good than harm. It will not necessarily injure even his sales. I
understand the latest volume of <em>Georgian Poetry</em> is already
in greater demand than its predecessor.</p>
<p>It is a good anthology of the poetry of the last two years
without being an ideal anthology. Some good poets and some good
poems have been omitted. And they have been omitted, in some
instances, in favour of inferior work. Many of us would prefer an
anthology of the best poems rather than an anthology of authors. At
the same time, with all its faults, <em>Georgian Poetry</em> still
remains the best guide we possess to the poetic activities of the
time. I am glad to see that the editor includes the work of a woman
in his new volume. This helps to make it more representative than
the previous selections. But there are several other living women
who are better poets, at the lowest estimate, than at least a
quarter of the men who have gained admission.</p>
<p>Mr. W.H. Davies is by now a veteran among the Georgians, and one
cannot easily imagine a presence more welcome in a book of verse.
Among poets he is a bird singing in a hedge. He communicates the
same sense of freshness while he sings. He has also the quick eye
of a bird. He is, for all his fairy music, on the look-out for
things that will gratify his appetite. He looks to the earth rather
than the sky, though he is by no means deaf to the lark that</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Raves in his windy heights above a cloud.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>At the same time, at his best, he says nothing about his
appetite, and sings in the free spirit of a child at play. His best
poems are songs of innocence. At least, that is the predominant
element in them. He warned the public in a recent book that he is
not so innocent as he sounds. But his genius certainly is. He has
written greater poems than any that are included in the present
selection. <em>Birds</em>, however, is a beautiful example of his
gift for joy. We need not fear for contemporary poetry while the
hedges contain a poet such as Mr. Davies.</p>
<p>Mr. de la Mare does not sing from a hedge. He is a child of the
arts. He plays an instrument. His music is the music of a lute of
which some of the strings have been broken. It is so
extraordinarily sweet, indeed, that one has to explain him to
oneself as the perfect master of an imperfect instrument. He is at
times like Watts’s figure of Hope listening to the faint
music of the single string that remains unbroken. There is always
some element of hope, or of some kindred excuse for joy, even in
his deepest melancholy. But it is the joy of a spirit, not of a
“super-tramp.” Prospero might have summoned just such a
spirit through the air to make music for him. And Mr. de la
Mare’s is a spirit perceptible to the ear rather than to the
eye. One need not count him the equal of Campion in order to feel
that he has something of Campion’s beautiful genius for
making airs out of words. He has little enough of the Keatsian
genius for choosing the word that has the most meaning for the
seeing imagination. But there is a secret melody in his words that,
when once one has recognized it, one can never forget.</p>
<p>How different the Georgian poets are from each other may be seen
if we compare three of the best poems in this book, all of them on
similar subjects—Mr. Davies’s <em>Birds</em>, Mr. de la
Mare’s <em>Linnet</em>, and Mr. Squire’s
<em>Birds</em>. Mr. Squire would feel as out of place in a hedge as
would Mr. de la Mare. He has an aquiline love of soaring and
surveying immense tracts with keen eyes. He loves to explore both
time and the map, but he does this without losing his eyehold on
the details of the Noah’s Ark of life on the earth beneath
him. He does not lose himself in vaporous abstractions; his eye, as
well as his mind, is extraordinarily interesting. This poem of his,
<em>Birds</em>, is peopled with birds. We see them in flight and in
their nests. At the same time, the philosophic wonder of Mr.
Squire’s poem separates him from Mr. Davies and Mr. de la
Mare. Mr. Davies, I fancy, loves most to look at birds; Mr. de la
Mare to listen to birds; Mr. Squire to brood over them with the
philosophic imagination. It would, of course, be absurd to offer
this as a final statement of the poetic attitude of the three
writers. It is merely an attempt to differentiate among them with
the help of a prominent characteristic of each.</p>
<p>The other poets in the collection include Mr. Robert Graves
(with his pleasant bias towards nursery rhymes), Mr. Sassoon (with
his sensitive, passionate satire), and Mr. Edward Shanks (with his
trembling responsiveness to beauty). It is the first time that Mr.
Shanks appears among the Georgians, and his <em>Night Piece</em>
and <em>Glow-worm</em> both show how exquisite is his sensibility.
He differs from the other poets by his quasi-analytic method. He
seems to be analyzing the beauty of the evening in both these
poems. Mrs. Shove’s <em>A Man Dreams that He is the
Creator</em> is a charming example of fancy toying with a great
theme.</p>
<hr />
<h3><SPAN name="Satirists" name="Satirists">(3) The Young Satirists</SPAN></h3>
<p>Satire, it has been said, is an ignoble art; and it is probable
that there are no satirists in Heaven. Probably there are no
doctors either. Satire and medicine are our responses to a diseased
world—to our diseased selves. They are responses, however,
that make for health. Satire holds the medicine-glass up to human
nature. It also holds the mirror up in a limited way. It does not
show a man what he looks like when he is both well and good. It
does show a man what he looks like, however, when he breaks out
into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of making a
beast of himself. It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them
with a purpose. It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were
a hospital for incurables. To write satire is an act of faith, not
a luxurious exercise. The despairing Swift was a fighter, as the
despairing Anatole France is a fighter. They may have uttered the
very Z of melancholy about the animal called man; but at least they
were sufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw
themselves into defeated causes.</p>
<p>It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure
mankind of the disease of war. It is a good sign, however, that
satires on war have begun to be written. War has affected with
horror or disgust a number of great imaginative writers in the last
two or three thousand years. The tragic indictment of war in
<em>The Trojan Women</em> and the satiric indictment in <em>The
Voyage to the Houyhnhnms</em> are evidence that some men at least
saw through the romance of war before the twentieth century. In the
war that has just ended, however—or that would have ended if
the Peace Conference would let it—we have seen an imaginative
revolt against war, not on the part of mere men of letters, but on
the part of soldiers. Ballads have survived from other wars,
depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier left to beg:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,</p>
<p>You’re an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg,</p>
<p>You ought to be put in a bowl to beg—</p>
<p class="i4">Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment,
basing itself neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of
ex-soldiers, but on the right of common men not to be forced into
mutual murder by statesmen who themselves never killed anything
more formidable than a pheasant. Soldiers—or some of
them—see that wars go on only because the people who cause
them do not realize what war is like. I do not mean to suggest that
the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not
themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should
be no fighting at all. The people who cause wars, however, are
ultimately the people who endure kings, statesmen and journalists
of the exploiting and bullying kind. The satire of the soldiers is
an appeal not to the statesmen and journalists, but to the general
imagination of mankind. It is an attempt to drag our imaginations
away from the heroics of the senate-house into the filth of the
slaughter-house. It does not deny the heroism that exists in the
slaughter-house any more than it denies the heroism that exists in
the hospital ward. But it protests that, just as the heroism of a
man dying of cancer must not be taken to justify cancer, so the
heroism of a million men dying of war must not be taken to justify
war. There are some who believe that neither war nor cancer is a
curable disease. One thing we can be sure of in this connection: we
shall never get rid either of war or of cancer if we do not learn
to look at them realistically and see how loathsome they are. So
long as war was regarded as inevitable, the poet was justified in
romanticizing it, as in that epigram in the <em>Greek
Anthology:</em></p>
<div class="quote">
<p>Demætia sent eight sons to encounter the phalanx of the
foe, and she buried them all beneath one stone. No tear did she
shed in her mourning, but said this only: “Ho, Sparta, I bore
these children for thee.”</p>
</div>
<p>As soon as it is realized, however, that wars are not
inevitable, men cease to idealize Demætia, unless they are
sure she did her best to keep the peace. To a realistic poet of war
such as Mr. Sassoon, she is an object of pity rather than praise.
His sonnet, <em>Glory of Women</em>, suggests that there is another
point of view besides Demætia’s:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,</p>
<p>Or wounded in a mentionable place.</p>
<p>You worship decorations; you believe</p>
<p>That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.</p>
<p>You make us shells. You listen with delight,</p>
<p>By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.</p>
<p>You crown our distant ardours while we fight,</p>
<p>And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>You can’t believe that British troops
“retire”</p>
<p>When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,</p>
<p>Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.</p>
<p><em>O German mother dreaming by the fire,</em></p>
<p><em>While you, are knitting socks to send your son</em></p>
<p><em>His face is trodden deeper in the mud.</em></p>
</div>
</div>
<p>To Mr. Sassoon and the other war satirists, indeed, those stay
at home and incite others to go out and kill or get killed seem
either pitifully stupid or pervertedly criminal. Mr. Sassoon has
now collected all his war poems into one volume, and one is struck
by the energetic hatred of those who make war in safety that finds
expression in them. Most readers will remember the bitter joy of
the dream that one day he might hear “the yellow pressmen
grunt and squeal,” and see the Junkers driven out of
Parliament by the returned soldiers. Mr. Sassoon cannot endure the
enthusiasm of the stay-at-home—especially the enthusiasm that
pretends that soldiers not only behave like music-hall clowns, but
are incapable of the more terrible emotional experiences. He would
like, I fancy, to forbid civilians to make jokes during war-time.
His hatred of the jesting civilian attains passionate expression in
the poem called <em>Blighters</em>:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin</p>
<p>And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks</p>
<p>Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;</p>
<p>“We’re sure the Kaiser loves the dear old
Tanks!”</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,</p>
<p>Lurching to rag-time tunes, or “Home, sweet
Home,”—</p>
<p>And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls</p>
<p>To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Mr. Sassoon himself laughs on occasion, but it is the laughter
of a man being driven insane by an insane world. The spectacle of
lives being thrown away by the hundred thousand by statesmen and
generals without the capacity to run a village flower-show, makes
him find relief now and then in a hysteria of mirth, as in <em>The
General</em>:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>“Good-morning; good-morning!” the General said</p>
<p>When we met him last week on our way to the Line,</p>
<p>Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,</p>
<p>And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.</p>
<p>“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to
Jack</p>
<p>As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.</p>
<p class="i10">…</p>
<p>But he did for them both by his plan of attack.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Mr. Sassoon’s verse is also of importance because it
paints life in the trenches with a realism not to be found
elsewhere in the English poetry of the war. He spares us nothing
of:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i10">The strangled horror</p>
<p>And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>He gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the
agony of the trenches. His book is in its aim destructive. It is a
great pamphlet against war. If posterity wishes to know what war
was like during this period, it will discover the truth, not in
<em>Barrack-room Ballads</em>, but in Mr. Sassoon’s verse.
The best poems in the book are poems of hatred. This means that Mr.
Sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry. His poems have
not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary poems
of Shelley. They are utterances of pain rather than of vision. Many
of them, however, rise to a noble pity—<em>The Prelude</em>,
for instance, and <em>Aftermath</em>, the latter of which ends:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at
Mametz,—</p>
<p>The night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on
parapets?</p>
<p>Do you remember the rats; and the stench</p>
<p>Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,—</p>
<p>And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless
rain?</p>
<p>Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen
again?”</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>Do you remember that hour of din before the attack—</p>
<p>And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you
then</p>
<p>As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?</p>
<p>Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back</p>
<p>With dying eyes and lolling heads,—those ashen-grey</p>
<p>Masks of the lad who once were keen and kind and gay?</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p><em>Have you forgotten yet?…</em></p>
<p><em>Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that
you’ll never forget.</em></p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Mr. Sitwell’s satires—which occupy the most
interesting pages of <em>Argonaut and Juggernaut</em>—seldom
take us into the trenches. Mr. Sitwell gets all the subjects he
wants in London clubs and drawing-rooms. These
“free-verse” satires do not lend themselves readily to
quotation, but both the manner and the mood of them can be guessed
from the closing verses of <em>War-horses</em>, in which the
“septuagenarian butterflies” of Society return to their
platitudes and parties after seeing the war through:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>But now</p>
<p>They have come out.</p>
<p>They have preened</p>
<p>And dried themselves</p>
<p>After their blood bath.</p>
<p>Old men seem a little younger,</p>
<p>And tortoise-shell combs</p>
<p>Are longer than ever;</p>
<p>Earrings weigh down aged ears;</p>
<p>And Golconda has given them of its best.</p>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<p>They have seen it through!</p>
<p>Theirs is the triumph,</p>
<p>And, beneath</p>
<p>The carved smile of the Mona Lisa,</p>
<p>False teeth</p>
<p>Rattle</p>
<p>Like machine-guns,</p>
<p>In anticipation</p>
<p>Of food and platitudes.</p>
<p>Les Vieilles Dames Sans Merci!</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Mr. Sitwell’s hatred of war is seldom touched with pity.
It is arrogant hatred. There is little emotion in it but that of a
young man at war with age. He pictures the dotards of two thousand
years ago complaining that Christ did not die—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i10">Like a hero</p>
<p>With an oath on his lips,</p>
<p>Or the refrain from a comic song—</p>
<p>Or a cheerful comment of some kind.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>His own verse, however, seems to me to be hardly more in
sympathy with the spirit of Christ than with the spirit of those
who mocked him. He is moved to write by unbelief in the ideals of
other people rather than by the passionate force of ideals of his
own. He is a sceptic, not a sufferer. His work proceeds less from
his heart than from his brain. It is a clever brain, however, and
his satirical poems are harshly entertaining and will infuriate the
right people. They may not kill Goliath, but at least they will
annoy Goliath’s friends. David’s weapon, it should be
remembered, was a sling, with some pebbles from the brook, not a
pea-shooter.</p>
<p>The truth is, so far as I can see, Mr. Sitwell has not begun to
take poetry quite seriously. His non-satirical verse is full of
bright colour, but it has the brightness, not of the fields and the
flowers, but of captive birds in an aviary. It is as though Mr.
Sitwell had taken poetry for his hobby. I suspect his Argonauts of
being ballet dancers. He enjoys amusing little
decorations—phrases such as “concertina waves”
and—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The ocean at a toy shore</p>
<p>Yaps like a Pekinese.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>His moonlight owl is surely a pretty creature from the unreality
of a ballet:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>An owl, horned wizard of the night,</p>
<p>Flaps through the air so soft and still;</p>
<p>Moaning, it wings its flight</p>
<p>Far from the forest cool,</p>
<p>To find the star-entangled surface of a pool,</p>
<p>Where it may drink its fill</p>
<p>Of stars.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>At the same time, here and there are evidences that Mr. Sitwell
has felt as well as fancied. The opening verse of <em>Pierrot
Old</em> gives us a real impression of shadows:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The harvest moon is at its height,</p>
<p>The evening primrose greets its light</p>
<p>With grace and joy: then opens up</p>
<p>The mimic moon within its cup.</p>
<p>Tall trees, as high as Babel tower,</p>
<p>Throw down their shadows to the flower—</p>
<p>Shadows that shiver—seem to see</p>
<p>An ending to infinity.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>But there is too much of Pan, the fauns and all those other
ballet-dancers in his verse. Mr. Sitwell’s muse wears some
pretty costumes. But one wonders when she will begin to live for
something besides clothes.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Authorship" name="Authorship">XXI.—Labour Of Authorship</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Literature maintains an endless quarrel with idle sentences.
Twenty years ago this would have seemed too obvious to bear saying.
But in the meantime there has been a good deal of dipping of pens
in chaos, and authors have found excuses for themselves in a theory
of literature which is impatient of difficult writing. It would not
matter if it were only the paunched and flat-footed authors who
were proclaiming the importance of writing without style.
Unhappily, many excellent writers as well have used their gift of
style to publish the praise of stylelessness. Within the last few
weeks I have seen it suggested by two different critics that the
hasty writing which has left its mark on so much of the work of
Scott and Balzac was a good thing and almost a necessity of genius.
It is no longer taken for granted, as it was in the days of
Stevenson, that the starry word is worth the pains of discovery.
Stevenson, indeed, is commonly dismissed as a pretty-pretty writer,
a word-taster without intellect or passion, a juggler rather than
an artist. Pater’s bust also is mutilated by irreverent
schoolboys: it is hinted that he may have done well enough for the
days of Victoria, but that he will not do at all for the world of
George. It is all part of the reaction against style which took
place when everybody found out the æsthetes. It was, one may
admit, an excellent thing to get rid of the æsthetes, but it
was by no means an excellent thing to get rid of the virtue which
they tried to bring into English art and literature. The
æsthetes were wrong in almost everything they said about art
and literature, but they were right in impressing upon the children
of men the duty of good drawing and good words. With the
condemnation of Oscar Wilde, however, good words became suspected
of kinship with evil deeds. Style was looked on as the sign of
minor poets and major vices. Possibly, on the other hand, the
reaction against style had nothing to do with the Wilde
condemnation. The heresy of the stylelessness is considerably older
than that. Perhaps it is not quite fair to call it the heresy of
stylelessness: it would be more accurate to describe it as the
heresy of style without pains. It springs from the idea that great
literature is all a matter of first fine careless raptures, and it
is supported by the fact that apparently much of the greatest
literature is so. If lines like</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>Hark, hark! the lark at Heaven’s gate sings,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>or</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>When daffodils begin to peer,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>or</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>His golden locks time hath to silver turned,</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>shape themselves in the poet’s first thoughts, he would be
a manifest fool to trouble himself further. Genius is the
recognition of the perfect line, the perfect phrase, the perfect
word, when it appears, and this perfect line or phrase or word is
quite as likely to appear in the twinkling of an eye as after a
week of vigils. But the point is that it does not invariably so
appear. It sometimes cost Flaubert three days’ labour to
write one perfect sentence. Greater writers have written more
hurriedly. But this does not justify lesser writers in writing
hurriedly too.</p>
<p>Of all the authors who have exalted the part played in
literature by inspiration as compared with labour, none has written
more nobly or with better warrant than Shelley. “The
mind,” he wrote in the <em>Defence of Poetry</em>—</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a
flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its
approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its
original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the
greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration
is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has
ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of
the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest
poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that
the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study.</p>
</div>
<p>He then goes on to interpret literally Milton’s reference
to <em>Paradise Lost</em> as an “unpremeditated song”
“dictated” by the Muse, and to reply scornfully to
those “who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the
first line of the <em>Orlando Furioso</em>.” Who is there who
would not agree with Shelley quickly if it were a question of
having to choose between his inspirational theory of literature and
the mechanical theory of the arts advocated by writers like Sir
Joshua Reynolds? Literature without inspiration is obviously even a
meaner thing than literature without style. But the idea that any
man can become an artist by taking pains is merely an exaggerated
protest against the idea that a man can become an artist without
taking pains. Anthony Trollope, who settled down industriously to
his day’s task of literature as to bookkeeping, did not grow
into an artist in any large sense; and Zola, with the motto
“Nulle dies sine linea” ever facing him on his desk,
made himself a prodigious author, indeed, but never more than a
second-rate writer. On the other hand, Trollope without industry
would have been nobody at all, and Zola without pains might as well
have been a waiter. Nor is it only the little or the clumsy artists
who have found inspiration in labour. It is a pity we have not
first drafts of all the great poems in the world: we might then see
how much of the magic of literature is the result of toil and how
much of the unprophesied wind of inspiration. Sir Sidney Colvin
recently published an early draft of Keats’s sonnet,
“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,” which
showed that in the case of Keats at least the mind in creation was
not “as a fading coal,” but as a coal blown to
increasing flame and splendour by sheer “labour and
study.” And the poetry of Keats is full of examples of the
inspiration not of first but of second and later thoughts. Henry
Stephens, a medical student who lived with him for time, declared
that an early draft of <em>Endymion</em> opened with the line:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>A thing of beauty is a constant joy</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>—a line which, Stephens observed on hearing it, was
“a fine line, but wanting something.” Keats thought
over it for a little, then cried out, “I have it,” and
wrote in its place:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Nor is this an exceptional example of the studied miracles of
Keats. The most famous and, worn and cheapened by quotation though
it is, the most beautiful of all his phrases—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i2">magic casements, opening on the foam</p>
<p>Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn—</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>did not reach its perfect shape without hesitation and thinking.
He originally wrote “the wide casements” and
“keelless seas”:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p class="i2">the wide casements, opening on the foam</p>
<p>Of keelless seas, in fairy lands forlorn.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>That would probably have seemed beautiful if the perfect version
had not spoiled it for us. But does not the final version go to
prove that Shelley’s assertion that “when composition
begins, inspiration is already on the decline” does not hold
good for all poets? On the contrary, it is often the heat of labour
which produces the heat of inspiration. Or rather it is often the
heat of labour which enables the writer to recall the heat of
inspiration. Ben Jonson, who held justly that “the poet must
be able by nature and instinct to pour out the treasure of his
mind,” took care to add the warning that no one must think he
“can leap forth suddenly a poet by dreaming he hath been in
Parnassus.” Poe has uttered a comparable warning against an
excessive belief in the theory of the plenary inspiration of poets
in his <em>Marginalia</em>, where he declares that “this
untenable and paradoxical idea of the incompatibility of genius and
<em>art</em>” must be “kick[ed] out of the
world’s way.” Wordsworth’s saying that poetry has
its origin in “emotion recollected in tranquillity”
also suggests that the inspiration of poetry is an inspiration that
may be recaptured by contemplation and labour. How eagerly one
would study a Shakespeare manuscript, were it unearthed, in which
one could see the shaping imagination of the poet at work upon his
lines! Many people have the theory—it is supported by an
assertion of Jonson’s—that Shakespeare wrote with a
current pen, heedless of blots and little changes. He was, it is
evident, not one of the correct authors. But it seems unlikely that
no pains of rewriting went to the making of the speeches in <em>A
Midsummer Night’s Dream</em> or Hamlet’s address to the
skull. Shakespeare, one feels, is richer than any other author in
the beauty of first thoughts. But one seems to perceive in much of
his work the beauty of second thoughts too. There have been few
great writers who have been so incapable of revision as Robert
Browning, but Browning with all his genius is not a great stylist
to be named with Shakespeare. He did indeed prove himself to be a
great stylist in more than one poem, such as <em>Childe
Roland</em>—which he wrote almost at a sitting. His
inspiration, however, seldom raised his work to the same beauty of
perfection. He is, as regards mere style, the most imperfect of the
great poets. If only Tennyson had had his genius! If only Browning
had had Tennyson’s desire for golden words!</p>
<p>It would be absurd, however, to suggest that the main labour of
an author consists in rewriting. The choice of words may have been
made before a single one of them has been written down, as
tradition tells us was the case with Menander, who described one of
his plays as “finished” before he had written a word of
it. It would be foolish, too, to write as though perfection of form
in literature were merely a matter of picking and choosing among
decorative words. Style is a method, not of decoration, but of
expression. It is an attempt to make the beauty and energy of the
imagination articulate. It is not any more than is construction the
essence of the greatest art: it is, however, a prerequisite of the
greatest art. Even those writers whom we regard as the least
decorative labour and sorrow after it no less than the
æsthetes. We who do not know Russian do not usually think of
Tolstoy as a stylist, but he took far more trouble with his writing
than did Oscar Wilde (whose chief fault is, indeed, that in spite
of his theories his style is not laboured and artistic but
inspirational and indolent). Count Ilya Tolstoy, the son of the
novelist, published a volume of reminiscences of his father last
year, in which he gave some interesting particulars of his
father’s energetic struggle for perfection in writing:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>When <em>Anna Karénina</em> began to come out in the
<em>Russki Vyéstnik</em> [he wrote], long galley-proofs were
posted to my father, and he looked them through and corrected them.
At first, the margins would be marked with the ordinary
typographical signs, letters omitted, marks of punctuation, and so
on; then individual words would be changed, and then whole
sentences; erasures and additions would begin, till in the end the
proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches, quite black in
places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood
because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle
of conventional signs, transpositions, and erasures.</p>
<p>My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out
afresh.</p>
<p>In the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled
together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and
everything ready, so that when “Lyóvotchka” came
down he could send the proof-sheets out by post.</p>
<p>My father would carry them off to his study to have “just
one last look,” and by the evening it was worse than before;
the whole thing had been rewritten and messed up once more.</p>
<p>“Sonya, my dear, I am very sorry, but I’ve spoilt
all your work again; I promise I won’t do it any more,”
he would say, showing her the passages with a guilty air.
“We’ll send them off to-morrow without fail.” But
his to-morrow was put off day by day for weeks or months
together.</p>
<p>“There’s just one bit I want to look through
again,” my father would say; but he would get carried away
and rewrite the whole thing afresh. There were even occasions when,
after posting the Proofs, my father would remember some particular
words next day and correct them by telegraph.</p>
</div>
<p>There, better than in a thousand generalizations, you see what
the artistic conscience is. In a world in which authors, like
solicitors, must live, it is, of course, seldom possible to take
pains in this measure. Dostoevsky used to groan that his poverty
left him no time or chance to write his best as Tolstoy and
Turgenev could write theirs. But he at least laboured all that he
could. Novel-writing has since his time become as painless as
dentistry, and the result may be seen in a host of books that,
while affecting to be fine literature, have no price except as
merchandise.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Theory" name="Theory">XXII.—The Theory of Poetry</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>Matthew Arnold once advised people who wanted to know what was
good poetry not to trouble themselves with definitions of poetry,
but to learn by heart passages, or even single lines, from the
works of the great poets, and to apply these as touchstones.
Certainly a book like Mr. Cowl’s <em>Theory of Poetry in
England</em>, which aims at giving us a representative selection of
the theoretical things which were said in England about poetry
between the time of Elizabeth and the time of Victoria, makes one
wonder at the barrenness of men’s thoughts about so fruitful
a world as that of the poets. Mr. Cowl’s book is not intended
to be read as an anthology of fine things. Its value is not that of
a book of golden thoughts. It is an ordered selection of documents
chosen, not for their beauty, but simply for their use as
milestones in the progress of English poetic theory. It is a work,
not of literature, but of literary history; and students of
literary history are under a deep debt of gratitude to the author
for bringing together and arranging the documents of the subject in
so convenient and lucid a form. The arrangement is under subjects,
and chronological. There are forty-one pages on the theory of
poetic creation, beginning with George Gascoigne and ending with
Matthew Arnold. These are followed by a few pages of representative
passages about poetry as an imitative art, the first of the authors
quoted being Roger Ascham and the last F.W.H. Myers. The hook is
divided into twelve sections of this kind, some of which have a
tendency to overlap. Thus, in addition to the section on poetry as
an imitative art, we have a section on imitation of nature, another
on external nature, and another on imitation. Imitation, in the
last of these, it is true, means for the most part imitation of the
ancients, as in the sentence in which Thomas Rymer urged the
seventeenth-century dramatists to imitate Attic tragedy even to the
point of introducing the chorus.</p>
<p>Mr. Cowl’s book is interesting, however, less on account
of the sections and subsections into which it is divided than
because of the manner in which it enables us to follow the flight
of English poetry from the romanticism of the Elizabethans to the
neo-classicism of the eighteenth century, and from this on to the
romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and from this to a newer
neo-classicism whose prophet was Matthew Arnold. There is not much
of poetry captured in these cold-blooded criticisms, but still the
shadow of the poetry of his time occasionally falls on the
critic’s formulae and aphorisms. How excellently Sir Philip
Sidney expresses the truth that the poet does not imitate the
world, but creates a world, in his observation that Nature’s
world “is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden!”
This, however, is a fine saying rather than an interpretation. It
has no importance as a contribution to the theory of poetry to
compare with a passage like that so often quoted from
Wordsworth’s preface to <em>Lyrical Ballads</em>:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in
tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.</p>
</div>
<p>As a theory of poetic creation this may not apply universally.
But what a flood of light it throws on the creative genius of
Wordsworth himself! How rich in psychological insight it is, for
instance, compared with Dryden’s comparable reference to the
part played by the memory in poetry:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit
in the poet … is no other than the faculty of imagination in
the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges
through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted
after.</p>
</div>
<p>As a matter of fact, few of these generalizations carry one far.
Ben Jonson revealed more of the secret of poetry when he said
simply: “It utters somewhat above a mortal mouth.” So
did Edgar Allan Poe, when he said: “It is no mere
appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach
the beauty above.” Coleridge, again, initiates us into the
secrets of the poetic imagination when he speaks of it as something
which—</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness,
tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human
feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its
principle and fountain, which is alone truly one.</p>
</div>
<p>On the other hand, the most dreadful thing that was ever written
about poetry was also written by Coleridge, and is repeated in Mr.
Cowl’s book:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>How excellently the German <em>Einbildungskraft</em> expresses
this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the
faculty that forms the many into one—<em>Ineins-bildung</em>!
Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from
fantasy, either catoptric or metoptric—repeating simply, or
by transposition—and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in
dreams, or by an act of the will.</p>
</div>
<p>The meaning is simple enough: it is much the same as that of the
preceding paragraph. But was there ever a passage written
suggesting more forcibly how much easier it is to explain poetry by
writing it than by writing about it?</p>
<p>Mr. Cowl’s book makes it clear that fiercely as the
critics may dispute about poetry, they are practically all agreed
on at least one point—that it is an imitation. The schools
have differed less over the question whether it is an imitation
than over the question how, in a discussion on the nature of
poetry, the word “imitation” must be qualified.
Obviously, the poet must imitate something—either what he
sees in nature, or what he sees in memory, or what he sees in other
poets, or what he sees in his soul, or it may me, all together.
There arise schools every now and then—classicists,
Parnassians, realists, and so forth—who believe in imitation,
but will not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen in the
imaginative world. In the result their work is no true imitation of
life. Pope’s poetry is not as true an imitation of life as
Shakespeare’s. Nor is Zola’s, for all its fidelity, as
close an imitation of life as Victor Hugo’s. Poetry, or prose
either, without romance, without liberation, can never rise above
the second order. The poet must be faithful not only to his
subject, but to his soul. Poe defined art as the
“reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through
the veil of the soul,” and this, though like most definitions
of art, incomplete, is true in so far as it reminds us that art at
its greatest is the statement of a personal and ideal vision. That
is why the reverence of rules in the arts is so dangerous. It puts
the standards of poetry not in the hands of the poet, but in the
hands of the grammarians. It is a Procrustes’ bed which
mutilates the poet’s vision. Luckily, England has always been
a rather lawless country, and we find even Pope insisting that
“to judge … of Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules
is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under
those of another.” Dennis might cry: “Poetry is either
an art or whimsy and fanaticism…. The great design of the
arts is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the
fall, by restoring order.” But, on the whole, the English
poets and critics have realized the truth that it is not an order
imposed from without, but an order imposed from within at which the
poet must aim. He aims at bringing order into chaos, but that does
not mean that he aims at bringing Aristotle into chaos. He is, in a
sense, “beyond good and evil,” so far as the
orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in a
nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics
who condemned Shakespeare as “a sort of African nature, rich
in beautiful monsters,” lay “in the confounding
mechanical regularity with organic form.” And he states the
whole duty of poets as regards form in another sentence in the same
lecture:</p>
<div class="quote">
<p>As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even
this that constitutes its genius—the power of acting
creatively under laws of its own origination.</p>
</div>
<p>Mr. Cowl enables us to follow, as in no other book we know, the
endless quarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit
and the letter, among the English authorities on poetry. It is a
quarrel which will obviously never be finally settled in any
country. The mechanical theory is a necessary reaction against
romance that has decayed into windiness, extravagance, and
incoherence. It brings the poets back to literature again. The
romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminder that
the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision. It
brings the poets back to nature again. No one but a Dennis will
hesitate an instant in deciding which of the theories is the more
importantly and eternally true one.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Destroyer" name="Destroyer">XXIII.—The Critic as Destroyer</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>It has been said often enough that all good criticism is praise.
Pater boldly called one of his volumes of critical essays
<em>Appreciations</em>. There are, of course, not a few brilliant
instances of hostility in criticism. The best-known of these in
English is Macaulay’s essay on Robert Montgomery. In recent
years we have witnessed the much more significant assault by
Tolstoy upon almost the whole army of the authors of the civilized
world from Æschylus down to Mallarmé. <em>What is
Art?</em> was unquestionably the most remarkable piece of sustained
hostile criticism that was ever written. At the same time, it was
less a denunciation of individual authors than an attack on the
general tendencies of the literary art. Tolstoy quarrelled with
Shakespeare not so much for being Shakespeare as for failing to
write like the authors of the Gospels. Tolstoy would have made
every book a Bible. He raged against men of letters because with
them literature was a means not to more abundant life but to more
abundant luxury. Like so many inexorable moralists, he was
intolerant of all literature that did not serve as a sort of
example of his own moral and social theories. That is why he was
not a great critic, though he was immeasurably greater than a great
critic. One would not turn to him for the perfect appreciation even
of one of the authors he spared, like Hugo or Dickens. The good
critic must in some way begin by accepting literature as it is,
just as the good lyric poet must begin by accepting life as it is.
He may be as full of revolutionary and reforming theories as he
likes, but he must not allow any of these to come like a cloud
between him and the sun, moon and stars of literature. The man who
disparages the beauty of flowers and birds and love and laughter
and courage will never be counted among the lyric poets; and the
man who questions the beauty of the inhabited world the imaginative
writers have made—a world as unreasonable in its loveliness
as the world of nature—is not in the way of becoming a critic
of literature.</p>
<p>Another argument which tells in favour of the theory that the
best criticism is praise is the fact that almost all the memorable
examples of critical folly have been denunciations. One remembers
that Carlyle dismissed Herbert Spencer as a “never-ending
ass.” One remembers that Byron thought nothing of
Keats—“Jack Ketch,” as he called him. One
remembers that the critics damned Wagner’s operas as a new
form of sin. One remembers that Ruskin denounced one of
Whistler’s nocturnes as a pot of paint flung in the face of
the British public. In the world of science we have a thousand
similar examples of new genius being hailed by the critics as folly
and charlatanry. Only the other day a biographer of Lord Lister was
reminding us how, at the British Association in 1869,
Lister’s antiseptic treatment was attacked as a “return
to the dark ages of surgery,” the “carbolic
mania,” and “a professional criminality.” The
history of science, art, music and literature is strewn with the
wrecks of such hostile criticisms. It is an appalling spectacle for
anyone interested in asserting the intelligence of the human race.
So appalling is it, indeed, that most of us nowadays labour under
such a terror of accidentally condemning something good that we
have not the courage to condemn anything at all. We think of the
way in which Browning was once taunted for his obscurity, and we
cannot find it in our hearts to censure Mr. Doughty. We recall the
ignorant attacks on Manet and Monet, and we will not risk an
onslaught on the follies of Picasso and the worse-than-Picassos of
contemporary art. We grow a monstrous and unhealthy plant of
tolerance in our souls, and its branches drop colourless good words
on the just and on the unjust—on everybody, indeed, except
Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, and a few others whom we know
to be second-rate because they have such big circulations. This is
really a disastrous state of affairs for literature and the other
arts. If criticism is, generally speaking, praise, it is, more
definitely, praise of the right things. Praise for the sake of
praise is as great an evil as blame for the sake of blame.
Indiscriminate praise, in so far as it is the result of distrust of
one’s own judgment or of laziness or of insincerity, is one
of the deadly sins in criticism. It is also one of the deadly dull
sins. Its effect is to make criticism ever more unreadable, and in
the end even the publishers, who love silly sentences to quote
about their bad books, will open their eyes to the futility of it.
They will realize that, when once criticism has become unreal and
unreadable, people will no more be bothered with it than they will
with drinking lukewarm water. I mention the publisher in especial,
because there is no doubt that it is with the idea of putting the
publishers in a good, open-handed humour that so many papers and
reviews have turned criticism into a kind of stagnant pond.
Publishers, fortunately, are coming more and more to see that this
kind of criticism is of no use to them. Reviews in such-and-such a
paper, they will tell you, do not sell books. And the papers to
which they refer in such cases are always papers in which praise is
disgustingly served out to everybody, like spoonfuls of
treacle-and-brimstone to a mob of schoolchildren.</p>
<p>Criticism, then, is praise, but it is praise of literature.
There is all the difference in the world between that and the
praise of what pretends to be literature. True criticism is a
search for beauty and truth and an announcement of them. It does
not care twopence whether the method of their revelation is new or
old, academic or futuristic. It only asks that the revelation shall
be genuine. It is concerned with form, because beauty and truth
demand perfect expression. But it is a mere heresy in
æsthetics to say that perfect expression is the whole of art
that matters. It is the spirit that breaks through the form that is
the main interest of criticism. Form, we know, has a permanence of
its own: so much so that it has again and again been worshipped by
the idolators of art as being in itself more enduring than the
thing which it embodies. Robert Burns, by his genius for perfect
statement, can give immortality to the joys of being drunk with
whiskey as the average hymn-writer cannot give immortality to the
joys of being drunk with the love of God. Style, then, does seem
actually to be a form of life. The critic may not ignore it any
more than he may exaggerate its place in the arts. As a matter of
fact, he could not ignore it if he would, for style and spirit have
a way of corresponding to one another like health and sunlight.</p>
<p>It is to combat the stylelessness of many contemporary writers
that the destructive kind of criticism is just now most necessary.
For, dangerous as the heresy of style was forty or fifty years ago,
the newer heresy of sylelessness is more dangerous still. It has
become the custom even of men who write well to be as ashamed of
their style as a schoolboy is of being caught in an obvious piece
of goodness. They keep silent about it as though it were a kind of
powdering or painting. They do not realize that it is merely a form
of ordinary truthfulness—the truthfulness of the word about
the thought. They forget that one has no more right to misuse words
than to beat one’s wife. Someone has said that in the last
analysis style is a moral quality. It is a sincerity, a refusal to
bow the knee to the superficial, a passion for justice in language.
Stylelessness, where it is not, like colour-blindness, an accident
of nature, is for the most part merely an echo of the commercial
man’s world of hustle. It is like the rushing to and fro of
motor-buses which save minutes with great loss of life. It is like
the swift making of furniture with unseasoned wood. It is a kind of
introduction of the quick-lunch system into literature. One cannot
altogether acquit Mr. Masefield of a hasty stylelessness in some of
those long poems which the world has been raving about in the last
year or two. His line in <em>The Everlasting Mercy:</em></p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>And yet men ask, “Are barmaids chaste?”</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>is a masterpiece of inexpertness. And the couplet:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza">
<p>The Bosun turned: “I’ll give you a thick ear!</p>
<p>Do it? I didn’t. Get to hell from here!”</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>is like a Sunday-school teacher’s lame attempt to repeat a
blasphemous story. Mr. Masefield, on the other hand, is, we always
feel, wrestling with language. If he writes in a hurry, it is not
because he is indifferent, but because his soul is full of
something that he is eager to express. He does not gabble; he is,
as it were, a man stammering out a vision. So vastly greater are
his virtues than his faults as a poet, indeed, that the latter
would only be worth the briefest mention if it were not for the
danger of their infecting other writers who envy him his method but
do not possess his conscience. One cannot contemplate with
equanimity the prospect of a Masefield school of poetry with all
Mr. Masefield’s ineptitudes and none of his genius.</p>
<p>Criticism, however, it is to be feared, is a fight for a lost
cause if it essays to prevent the founding of schools upon the
faults of good writers. Criticism will never kill the copyist.
Nothing but the end of the world can do that. Still, whatever the
practical results of his work may be, it is the function of the
critic to keep the standard of writing high—to insist that
the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences are like
torn strips of newspaper for commonness. He is the enemy of
sloppiness in others—especially of that airy sloppiness which
so often nowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel. It
was amazing to find with what airiness a promising writer like Mr.
Compton Mackenzie gave us some years ago <em>Sinister Street</em>,
a novel containing thousands of sentences that only seemed to be
there because he had not thought it worth his while to leave them
out, and thousands of others that seemed to be mere hurried
attempts to express realities upon which he was unable to spend
more time. Here is a writer who began literature with a sense of
words, and who is declining into a mere sense of wordiness. It is
simply another instance of the ridiculous rush of writing that is
going on all about us—a rush to satisfy a public which
demands quantity rather than quality in its books. I do not say
that Mr. Mackenzie consciously wrote down to the public, but the
atmosphere obviously affected him. Otherwise he would hardly have
let his book go out into the world till he had rewritten
it—till he had separated his necessary from his unnecessary
sentences and given his conversations the tones of reality.</p>
<p>There is no need, however, for criticism to lash out
indiscriminately at all hurried writing. There are a multitude of
books turned out every year which make no claim to be
literature—the “thrillers,” for example, of Mr.
Phillips Oppenheim and of that capable firm of feuilletonists,
Coralie Stanton and Heath Hosken. I do not think literature stands
to gain anything, even though all the critics in Europe were
suddenly to assail this kind of writing. It is a frankly commercial
affair, and we have no more right to demand style from those who
live by it than from the authors of the weather reports in the
newspapers. Often, one notices, when the golden youth, fresh from
college and the reading of Shelley and Anatole France, commences
literary critic, he begins damning the sensational novelists as
though it were their business to write like Jane Austen. This is a
mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to
what pretends to be literature. That is why one is often impelled
to attack really excellent writers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
or Mr. Galsworthy, as one would never dream of attacking, say, Mr.
William Le Queux. To attack Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is, indeed, a
form of appreciation, for the only just criticism that can be
levelled against him is that his later work does not seem to be
written with that singleness of imagination and that deliberate
rightness of phrase which made <em>Noughts and Crosses</em> and
<em>The Ship of Stars</em> books to be kept beyond the end of the
year. If one attacks Mr. Galsworthy, again, it is usually because
one admires his best work so whole-heartedly that one is not
willing to accept from him anything but the best. One cannot,
however, be content to see the author of <em>The Man of
Property</em> dropping the platitudes and the false fancifulness of
<em>The Inn of Tranquillity</em>. It is the false pretences in
literature which criticism must seek to destroy. Recognizing Mr.
Galsworthy’s genius for the realistic representation of men
and women, it must not be blinded by that genius to the essential
second-rateness and sentimentality of much of his presentation of
ideas. He is a man of genius in the black humility with which he
confesses strength and weakness through the figures of men and
women. He achieves too much of a pulpit complacency—therefore
of condescendingness—therefore of falseness to the deep
intimacy of good literature—when he begins to moralize about
time and the universe. One finds the same complacency, the same
condescendingness, in a far higher degree in the essays of Mr. A.C.
Benson. Mr. Benson, I imagine, began writing with a considerable
literary gift, but his later work seems to me to have little in it
but a good man’s pretentiousness. It has the air of going
profoundly into the secrecies of love and joy and truth, but it
contains hardly a sentence that would waken a ruffle on the surface
of the shallowest spirit. It is not of the literature that awakens,
indeed, but of the literature that puts to sleep, and that is
always a danger unless it is properly labelled and recognizable.
Sleeping-draughts may be useful to help a sick man through a bad
night, but one does not recommend them as a cure for ordinary
healthy thirst. Nor will Mr. Benson escape just criticism on the
score of his manner of writing. He is an absolute master of the
otiose word, the superfluous sentence. He pours out pages as easily
as a bird sings, but, alas! it is a clockwork bird in this
instance. He lacks the true innocent absorption in his task which
makes happy writing and happy reading.</p>
<p>It is not always the authors, on the other hand, whose pretences
it is the work of criticism to destroy. It is frequently the wild
claims of the partisans of an author that must be put to the test.
This sort of pretentiousness often happens during
“booms,” when some author is talked of as though he
were the only man who had ever written well. How many of these
booms have we had in recent years—booms of Wilde, of Synge,
of Donne, of Dostoevsky! On the whole, no doubt, they do more good
than harm. They create a vivid enthusiasm for literature that
affects many people who might not otherwise know that to read a
fine book is as exciting an experience as going to a horse-race.
Hundreds of people would not have the courage to sit down to read a
book like <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em> unless they were
compelled to do so as a matter of fashionable duty. On the other
hand, booms more than anything else make for false estimates. It
seems impossible with many people to praise Dostoevsky without
saying that he is greater than Tolstoy or Turgenev. Oscar Wilde
enthusiasts, again, invite us to rejoice, not only over that pearl
of triviality, <em>The Importance of Being Earnest</em>, but over a
blaze of paste jewelry like <em>Salomé</em>. Similarly,
Donne worshippers are not content to ask us to praise Donne’s
gifts of fancy, analysis and idiosyncratic music. They insist that
we shall also admit that he knew the human heart better than
Shakespeare. It may be all we like sheep have gone astray in this
kind of literary riot. And so long as the exaggeration of a good
writer’s genius is an honest personal affair, one resents it
no more than one resents the large nose or the bandy legs of a
friend. It is when men begin to exaggerate in herds—to repeat
like a lesson learned the enthusiasm of others—that the boom
becomes offensive. It is as if men who had not large noses were to
begin to pretend that they had, or as if men whose legs were not
bandy were to pretend that they were, for fashion’s sake.
Insincerity is the one entirely hideous artistic sin—whether
in the creation or in the appreciation of art. The man who enjoys
reading <em>The Family Herald</em>, and admits it, is nearer a true
artistic sense than the man who is bored by Henry James and denies
it: though, perhaps, hypocrisy is a kind of homage paid to art as
well as to virtue. Still, the affectation of literary rapture
offends like every other affectation. It was the chorus of
imitative rapture over Synge a few years ago that helped most to
bring about a speedy reaction against him. Synge was undoubtedly a
man of fine genius—the genius of gloomy comedy and ironic
tragedy. His mind delved for strangenesses in speech and
imagination among people whom the new age had hardly touched, and
his discoveries were sufficiently magnificent to make the eyes of
any lover of language brighten. His work showed less of the mastery
of life, however, than of the mastery of a theme. It was a curious
by-world of literature, a little literature of death’s-heads,
and, therefore, no more to be mentioned with the work of the
greatest than the stories of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.
Unfortunately, some disturbances in Dublin at the first production
of <em>The Playboy</em> turned the play into a battle-cry, and the
artists, headed by Mr. Yeats, used Synge to belabour the
Philistinism of the mob. In the excitement of the fight they were
soon talking about Synge as though Dublin had rejected a
Shakespeare. Mr. Yeats even used the word “Homeric”
about him—surely the most inappropriate word it would be
possible to imagine. Before long Mr. Yeats’s enthusiasm had
spread to England, where people who ignored the real magic of
Synge’s work, as it is to be found in <em>Riders to the
Sea</em>, <em>In the Shadow of the Glen</em>, and <em>The Well of
the Saints</em>, went into ecstasies over the inferior
<em>Playboy</em>. Such a boom meant not the appreciation of Synge
but a glorification of his more negligible work. It was almost as
if we were to boom Swinburne on the score of his later political
poetry. Criticism makes for the destruction of such booms. I do not
mean that the critic has not the right to fling about superlatives
like any other man. Criticism, in one aspect, is the art of
flinging about superlatives finely. But they must be personal
superlatives, not boom superlatives. Even when they are showered on
an author who is the just victim of a boom—and, on a
reasonable estimate, at least fifty per cent of the booms have some
justification—they are as unbeautiful as rotten apples unless
they have this personal kind of honesty.</p>
<p>It may be thought that an attitude of criticism like this may
easily sink into Pharisaism—a sort of
“superior-person” aloofness from other people. And no
doubt the critic, like other people, needs to beat his breast and
pray, “God be merciful to me, a—critic.” On the
whole, however, the critic is far less of a professional
faultfinder than is sometimes imagined. He is first of all a
virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He is not concerned with getting
rid of the dross except in so far as it hides the gold. In other
words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a subsidiary
affair. None of the best critics have been men of destructive
minds. They are like gardeners whose business is more with the
flowers than with the weeds. If I may change the metaphor, the
whole truth about criticism is contained in the Eastern proverb
which declares that “Love is the net of Truth.” It is
as a lover that the critic, like the lyric poet and the mystic,
will be most excellently symbolized.</p>
<hr class="full" />
<h2><SPAN name="Reviewing" name="Reviewing">XXIV.—Book Reviewing</SPAN></h2>
<p class="returnTOC"><SPAN href="#Contents">Return to Table of
Contents</SPAN></p>
<p>I notice that in Mr. Seekers’ <em>Art and Craft of
Letters</em> series no volume on book-reviewing has yet been
announced. A volume on criticism has been published, it is true,
but book-reviewing is something different from criticism. It swings
somewhere between criticism on the one hand and reporting on the
other. When Mr. Arthur Bourchier a few years ago, in the course of
a dispute about Mr. Walkley’s criticisms, spoke of the
dramatic critic as a dramatic reporter, he did a very insolent
thing. But there was a certain reasonableness in his phrase. The
critic on the Press is a news-gatherer as surely as the man who is
sent to describe a public meeting or a strike. Whether he is asked
to write a report on a play of Mr. Shaw’s or an exhibition of
etchings by Mr. Bone or a volume of short stories by Mr. Conrad or
a speech by Mr. Asquith or a strike on the Clyde, his function is
the same. It is primarily to give an account, a description, of
what he has seen or heard or read. This may seem to many
people—especially to critics—a degrading conception of
a book-reviewer’s work. But it is quite the contrary. A great
deal of book-reviewing at the present time is dead matter.
Book-reviews ought at least to be alive as news.</p>
<p>At present everybody is ready to write book-reviews. This is
because nearly everybody believes that they are the easiest kind of
thing to write. People who would shrink from offering to write
poems or leading articles or descriptive sketches of football
matches, have an idea that reviewing books is something with the
capacity for which every man is born, as he is born with the
capacity for talking prose. They think it is as easy as having
opinions. It is simply making a few remarks at the end of a couple
of hours spent with a book in an armchair. Many men and
women—novelists, barristers, professors and
others—review books in their spare time, as they look on this
as work they can do when their brains are too tired to do anything
which is of genuine importance. A great deal of book-reviewing is
done contemptuously, as though to review books well were not as
difficult as to do anything else well. This is perhaps due in some
measure to the fact that, for the amount of hard work it involves,
book-reviewing is one of the worst-paid branches of journalism. The
hero of Mr. Beresford’s new novel, <em>The Invisible
Event</em>, makes an income of £250 a year as an outside
reviewer, and it is by no means every outside reviewer who makes as
much as that from reviewing alone. It is not that there is not an
immense public which reads book-reviews. Mr. T.P. O’Connor
showed an admirable journalistic instinct when twenty years or so
ago he filled the front page of the <em>Weekly Sun</em> with a long
book-review. The sale of the <em>Times Literary Supplement</em>,
since it became a separate publication, is evidence that, for good
or bad, many thousands of readers have acquired the habit of
reading criticism of current literature.</p>
<p>But I do not think that the mediocre quality of most
book-reviewing is due to low payment. It is a result, I believe, of
a wrong conception of what a book-review should be. My own opinion
is that a review should be, from one point of view, a portrait of a
book. It should present the book instead of merely presenting
remarks about the book. In reviewing, portraiture is more important
than opinion. One has to get the reflexion of the book, and not a
mere comment on it, down on paper. Obviously, one must not press
this theory of portraiture too far. It is useful chiefly as a
protest against the curse of comment. Many clever writers, when
they come to write book-reviews, instead of portraying the book,
waste their time in remarks to the effect that the book should
never have been written, and so forth. That, in fact, is the usual
attitude of clever reviewers when they begin. They are so horrified
to find that Mr. William Le Queux does not write like Dostoevsky
and that Mrs. Florence Barclay lacks the grandeur of Æschylus
that they run amok among their contemporaries with something of the
furious destructiveness of Don Quixote on his adventures. It is the
noble intolerance of youth; but how unreasonable it is! Suppose a
portrait-painter were suddenly to take his sitter by the throat on
the ground that he had no right to exist. One would say to him that
that was not his business: his business is to take the man’s
existence for granted, and to paint him until he becomes in a new
sense alive. If he is worthless, paint his worthlessness, but do
not merely comment on it. There is no reason why a portrait should
be flattering, but it should be a portrait. It may be a portrait in
the grand matter, or a portrait in caricature: if it expresses its
subject honestly and delightfully, that is all we can ask of it. A
critical portrait of a book by Mr. Le Queux may be amazingly alive:
a censorious comment can only be dull. Mr. Hubert Bland was at one
time an almost ideal portrait-painter of commonplace novels. He
obviously liked them, as the caricaturist likes the people in the
street. The novels themselves might not be readable, but Mr.
Bland’s reviews of them were. He could reveal their
characteristics in a few strokes, which would tell you more of what
you wanted to know about them than a whole dictionary of adjectives
of praise and blame. One could tell at a glance whether the book
had any literary value, whether it was worth turning to as a
stimulant, whether it was even intelligent of its kind. One would
not like to see Mr. Bland’s method too slavishly adopted by
reviewers: it was suitable only for portraying certain kinds of
books. But it is worth recalling as the method of a man who,
dealing with books that were for the most part insipid and
worthless, made his reviews delightfully alive as well as admirably
interpretative.</p>
<p>The comparison of a review to a portrait fixes attention on one
essential quality of a book-review. A reviewer should never forget
his responsibility to his subject. He must allow nothing to
distract him from his main task of setting down the features of his
book vividly and recognizably. One may say this even while
admitting that the most delightful book-reviews of modern
times—for the literary causeries of Anatole France may fairly
be classified as book-reviews—were the revolt of an escaped
angel against the limitations of a journalistic form. But Anatole
France happens to be a man of genius, and genius is a justification
of any method. In the hands of a pinchbeck Anatole France, how
unendurable the review conceived as a causerie would become!
Anatole France observes that “all books in general, and even
the most admirable, seem to me infinitely less precious for what
they contain than for what he who reads puts into them.”
That, in a sense, is true. But no reviewer ought to believe it. His
duty is to his author: whatever he “puts into him” is a
subsidiary matter. “The critic,” says Anatole France
again, “must imbue himself thoroughly with the idea that
every book has as many different aspects as it has readers, and
that a poem, like a landscape, is transformed in all the eyes that
see it, in all the souls that conceive it.” Here he gets
nearer the idea of criticism as portraiture, and practically every
critic of importance has been a portrait-painter. In this respect
Saint-Beuve is at one with Macaulay, Pater with Matthew Arnold,
Anatole France (occasionally) with Henry James. They may portray
authors rather than books, artists rather than their work, but this
only means that criticism at its highest is a study of the mind of
the artist as reflected in his art.</p>
<p>Clearly, if the reviewer can paint the portrait of an author, he
is achieving something better even than the portrait of a book. But
what, at all costs, he must avoid doing is to substitute for a
portrait of one kind or another the rag-bag of his own moral,
political or religious opinions. It is one of the most difficult
things in the world for anyone who happens to hold strong opinions
not to make the mind of Shakespeare himself a pulpit from which to
roar them at the world. Reviewers with theories about morality and
religion can seldom be induced to come to the point of portraiture
until they have enjoyed a preliminary half-column of
self-explanation. In their eyes a review is a moral essay rather
than an imaginative interpretation. In dissenting from this view,
one is not pleading for a race of reviewers without moral or
religious ideas, or even prepossessions. One is merely urging that
in a review, as in a novel or a play, the moral should be seated at
the heart instead of sprawling all over the surface. In the
well-worn phrase it should be implicit, not explicit. Undoubtedly a
rare critic of genius can make an interesting review-article out of
a statement of his own moral and political ideas. But that only
justifies the article as an essay, not as a review. To many
reviewers—especially in the bright days of youth—it
seems an immensely more important thing to write a good essay than
a good review. And so it is, but not when a review is wanted. It is
a far, far better thing to write a good essay about America than a
good review of a book on America. But the one should not be
substituted for the other. If one takes up a review of a book on
America by Mr. Wells or Mr. Bennett, it is in ninety-nine cases out
of a hundred in order to find out what the author thinks, not what
the reviewer thinks. If the reviewer begins with a paragraph of
general remarks about America—or, worse still, about some
abstract thing like liberty—he is almost invariably wasting
paper. I believe it is a sound rule to destroy all preliminary
paragraphs of this kind. They are detestable in almost all writing,
but most detestable of all in book-reviews, where it is important
to plunge all at once into the middle of things. I say this, though
there is an occasional book-reviewer whose preliminary paragraphs I
would not miss for worlds. But one has even known book-reviewers
who wrote delightful articles, though they made scarcely any
reference to the books under review at all.</p>
<p>To my mind, nothing more clearly shows the general misconception
of the purpose of a book-review than the attitude of the majority
of journalists to the quotational review. It is the custom to
despise the quotational review—to dismiss is as mere
“gutting.” As a consequence, it is generally very badly
done. It is done as if under the impression that it does not matter
what quotations one gives so long as one fills the space. One great
paper lends support to this contemptuous attitude towards
quotational criticism by refusing to pay its contributors for space
taken up by quotations. A London evening newspaper was once guilty
of the same folly. A reviewer on the staff of the latter confessed
to me that to the present day he finds it impossible, without an
effort, to make quotations in a review, because of the memory of
those days when to quote was to add to one’s poverty.
Despised work is seldom done well, and it is not surprising that it
is almost more seldom that one finds a quotational review well done
than any other sort. Yet how critically illuminating a quotation
may be! There are many books in regard to which quotation is the
only criticism necessary. Books of memoirs and books of
verse—the least artistic as well as the most artistic forms
of literature—both lend themselves to it. To criticize verse
without giving quotations is to leave one largely in ignorance of
the quality of the verse. The selection of passages to quote is at
least as fine a test of artistic judgment as any comment the critic
can make. In regard to books of memoirs, gossip, and so forth, one
does not ask for a test of delicate artistic judgment. Books of
this kind should simply be rummaged for entertaining
“news.” To review them well is to make an anthology of
(in a wide sense) amusing passages. There is no other way to
portray them. And yet I have known a very brilliant reviewer take a
book of gossip about the German Court and, instead of quoting any
of the numerous things that would interest people, fill half a
column with abuse of the way in which the book was written, of the
inconsequence of the chapters, of the second-handedness of many of
the anecdotes. Now, I do not object to any of these charges being
brought. It is well that “made” books should not be
palmed off on the public as literature. On the other hand, a
mediocre book (from the point of view of literature or history) is
no excuse for a mediocre review. No matter how mediocre a book is,
if it is on a subject of great interest, it usually contains enough
vital matter to make an exciting half-column. Many reviewers
despise a bad book so heartily that, instead of squeezing every
drop of interest out of it, as they ought to do, they refrain from
squeezing a single drop of interest out of it. They are frequently
people who suffer from anecdotophobia. “Scorn not the
anecdote” is a motto that might be modestly hung up in the
heart of every reviewer. After all, Montaigne did not scorn it, and
there is no reason why the modern journalist should be ashamed of
following so respectable an example. One can quite easily
understand how the gluttony of many publishers for anecdotes has
driven writers with a respect for their intellect into revolt. But
let us not be unjust to the anecdote because it has been cheapened
through no fault of its own. We may be sure of one thing. A
review—a review, at any rate, of a book of memoirs or any
similar kind of non-literary book—which contains an anecdote
is better than a review which does not contain an anecdote. If an
anecdotal review is bad, it is because it is badly done, not
because it is anecdotal. This, one might imagine, is too obvious to
require saying; but many men of brains go through life without ever
being able to see it.</p>
<p>One of the chief virtues of the anecdote is that it brings the
reviewer down from his generalizations to the individual instances.
Generalizations mixed with instances make a fine sort of review,
but to flow on for a column of generalizations without ever pausing
to light them into life with instances, concrete examples,
anecdotes, is to write not a book-review but a sermon. Of the two,
the sermon is much the easier to write: it does not involve the
trouble of constant reference to one’s authorities. Perhaps,
however, someone with practice in writing sermons will argue that
the sermon without instances is as somniferous as the book-review
with the same want. Whether that it so or not, the book-review is
not, as a rule, the place for abstract argument. Not that one wants
to shut out controversy. There is no pleasanter review to read than
a controversial review. Even here, however, one demands portrait as
well as argument. It is, in nine cases out of ten, waste of time to
assail a theory when you can portray a man. It always seems to me
to be hopelessly wrong for the reviewer of biographies, critical
studies, or books of a similar kind, to allow his mind to wander
from the main figure in the book to the discussion of some theory
or other that has been incidentally put forward. Thus, in a review
of a book on Stevenson, the important thing is to reconstruct the
figure of Stevenson, the man and the artist. This is much more
vitally interesting and relevant than theorizing on such questions
as whether the writing of prose or of poetry is the more difficult
art, or what are the essential characteristics of romance. These
and many other questions may arise, and it is the proper task of
the reviewer to discuss them, so long as their discussion is kept
subordinate to the portraiture of the central figure. But they must
not be allowed to push the leading character in the whole business
right out of the review. If they are brought in at all, they must
be brought in, like moral sentiments, inoffensively by the way.</p>
<p>In pleading that a review should be a portrait of a book to a
vastly greater degree than it is a direct comment on the book, I am
not pleading that it should be a mere bald summary. The summary
kind of review is no more a portrait than is the Scotland Yard
description of a man wanted by the police. Portraiture implies
selection and a new emphasis. The synopsis of the plot of a novel
is as far from being a good review as is a paragraph of general
comment on it. The review must justify itself, not as a reflection
of dead bones, but by a new life of its own.</p>
<p>Further, I am not pleading for the suppression of comment and,
if need be, condemnation. But either to praise or condemn without
instances is dull. Neither the one thing nor the other is the chief
thing in the review. They are the crown of the review, but not its
life. There are many critics to whom condemnation of books they do
not like seems the chief end of man. They regard themselves as
engaged upon a holy war against the Devil and his works. Horace
complained that it was only poets who were not allowed to be
mediocre. The modern critic—I should say the modern critic of
the censorious kind, not the critic who looks on it as his duty to
puff out meaningless superlatives over every book that
appears—will not allow any author to be mediocre. The war
against mediocrity is a necessary war, but I cannot help thinking
that mediocrity is more likely to yield to humour than to
contemptuous abuse. Apart from this, it is the reviewer’s
part to maintain high standards for work that aims at being
literature, rather than to career about, like a destroying angel,
among books that have no such aim. Criticism, Anatole France has
said, is the record of the soul’s adventures among
masterpieces. Reviewing, alas! is for the most part the record of
the soul’s adventures among books that are the reverse of
masterpieces. What, then, are his standards to be? Well, a man must
judge linen as linen, cotton as cotton, and shoddy as shoddy. It is
ridiculous to denounce any of them for not being silk. To do so is
not to apply high standards so much as to apply wrong standards.
One has no right as a reviewer to judge a book by any standard save
that which the author aims at reaching. As a private reader, one
has the right to say of a novel by Mr. Joseph Hocking, for
instance: “This is not literature. This is not realism. This
does not interest me. This is awful.” I do not say that these
sentences can be fairly used of any of Mr. Hocking’s novels.
I merely take him as an example of a popular novelist who would be
bound to be condemned if judged by comparison with Flaubert or
Meredith or even Mr. Galsworthy. But the reviewer is not asked to
state whether he finds Mr. Hocking readable so much as to state the
kind of readableness at which Mr. Hocking aims and the measure of
his success in achieving it. It is the reviewer’s business to
discover the quality of a book rather than to keep announcing that
the quality does not appeal to him. Not that he need conceal the
fact that it has failed to appeal to him, but he should remember
that this is a comparatively irrelevant matter. He may make it as
clear as day—indeed, he ought to make it as clear as day, if
it is his opinion—that he regards the novels of Charles
Garvice as shoddy, but he ought also to make it clear whether they
are the kind of shoddy that serves its purpose.</p>
<p>Is this to lower literary standards? I do not think so, for, in
cases of this kind, one is not judging literature, but popular
books. Those to whom popular books are anathema have a temperament
which will always find it difficult to fall in with the limitations
of the work of a general reviewer. The curious thing is that this
intolerance of easy writing is most generally found among those who
are most opposed to intolerance in the sphere of morals. It is as
though they had escaped from one sort of Puritanism into another.
Personally, I do not see why, if we should be tolerant of the
breach of a moral commandment, we should not be equally tolerant of
the breach of a literary commandment. We should gently scan, not
only our brother man, but our brother author. The æsthete of
to-day, however, will look kindly on adultery, but show all the
harshness of a Pilgrim Father in his condemnation of a split
infinitive. I cannot see the logic of this. If irregular and
commonplace people have the right to exist, surely irregular and
commonplace books have a right to exist by their side.</p>
<p>The reviewer, however, is often led into a false attitude to a
book, not by its bad quality, but by some irrelevant
quality—some underlying moral or political idea. He denounces
a novel the moral ideas of which offend him, without giving
sufficient consideration to the success or failure of the novelist
in the effort to make his characters live. Similarly, he praises a
novel with the moral ideas of which he agrees, without reflecting
that perhaps it is as a tract rather than as a work of art that it
has given him pleasure. Both the praise and blame which have been
heaped upon Mr. Kipling are largely due to appreciation or dislike
of his politics. The Imperialist finds his heart beating faster as
he reads <em>The English Flag</em>, and he praises Mr. Kipling as
an artist when it is really Mr. Kipling as a propagandist who has
moved him. The anti-Imperialist, on the other hand, is often led by
detestation of Mr. Kipling’s politics to deny even the
palpable fact that Mr. Kipling is a very brilliant short-story
teller. It is for the reviewer to raise himself above such
prejudices and to discover what are Mr. Kipling’s ideas apart
from his art, and what is his art apart from his ideas.</p>
<p>The relation between one and the other is also clearly a
relevant matter for discussion. But the confusion of one with the
other is fatal. In the field of morals we are perhaps led astray in
our judgments even more frequently than in matters of politics. Mr.
Shaw’s plays are often denounced by critics whom they have
made laugh till their sides ached, and the reason is that, after
leaving the theatre, the critics remember that they do not like Mr,
Shaw’s moral ideas. In the same way, it seems to me, a great
deal of the praise that has been given to Mr. D.H. Lawrence as an
artist ought really to be given to him as a distributor of certain
moral ideas. That he has studied wonderfully one aspect of human
nature, that he can describe wonderfully some aspects of external
nature, I know; but I doubt whether his art is fine enough or
sympathetic enough to make enthusiastic anyone who differs from the
moral attitude, as it may be called, of his stories. This is the
real test of a work of art—has it sufficient imaginative
vitality to capture the imagination of artistic readers who are not
in sympathy with its point of view? The <em>Book of Job</em>
survives the test: it is a book to the spell of which no
imaginative man could be indifferent, whether Christian, Jew or
atheist. Similarly, Shelley is read and written about with
enthusiasm by many who hold moral, religious, and political ideas
directly contrary to his own. Mr. Kipling’s
<em>Recessional</em>, with its sombre imaginative glow, its
recapturing of Old Testament prides and fears, commands the praise
of thousands to whom much of the rest of his poetry is the
abominable thing. It is the reviewer’s task to discover
imagination even in those who are the enemies of the ideas he
cherishes. In so far as he cannot do this, he fails in his business
as a critic of the arts.</p>
<p>It may be said in answer to all this, however, that to appeal
for tolerance in book-reviewers is not necessary. The Press is
already overcrowded with laudations of commonplace books. Not a day
passes but at least a dozen books are praised as having “not
a dull moment,” being “readable from cover to
cover,” and as reminding the reviewer of Stevenson, Meredith,
Oscar Wilde, Paul de Kock, and Jane Austen. That is not the kind of
tolerance which one is eager to see. That kind of review is
scarcely different from a publisher’s advertisement. Besides,
it usually sins in being mere summary and comment, or even comment
without summary. It is a thoughtless scattering of acceptable words
and is as unlike the review conceived as a portrait as is the
hostile kind of commentatory review which I have been discussing.
It is generally the comment of a lazy brain, instead of being, like
the other, the comment of a clever brain. Praise is the vice of the
commonplace reviewer, just as censoriousness is the vice of the
more clever sort. Not that one wishes either praise or censure to
be stinted. One is merely anxious not to see them misapplied. It is
a vice, not a virtue, of reviewing to be lukewarm either in the one
or the other. What one desires most of all in a reviewer, after a
capacity to portray books, is the courage of his opinions, so that,
whether he is face to face with an old reputation like Mr.
Conrad’s or a new reputation like Mr. Mackenzie’s, he
will boldly express his enthusiasms and his dissatisfactions
without regard to the estimate of the author, which is, for the
moment, “in the air.” What seems to be wanted, then, in
a book-reviewer is that, without being servile, he should be swift
to praise, and that, without being censorious, he should have the
courage to blame. While tolerant of kinds in literature, he should
be intolerant of pretentiousness. He should be less patient, for
instance, of a pseudo-Milton than of a writer who frankly aimed at
nothing higher than a book of music-hall songs. He should be more
eager to define the qualities of a book than to heap comment upon
comment. If—I hope the image is not too strained—he
draws a book from the life, he will produce a better review than if
he spends his time calling it names, whether foul or fair.</p>
<p>But what of the equipment of the reviewer? it may be asked. What
of his standards? One of the faults of modern reviewing seems to me
to be that the standards of many critics are derived almost
entirely from the literature of the last thirty years. This is
especially so with some American critics, who rush feverishly into
print with volumes spotted with the names of modern writers as
Christmas pudding is spotted with currants. To read them is to get
the impression that the world is only a hundred years old. It seems
to me that Matthew Arnold was right when he urged men to turn to
the classics for their standards. His definition of the classics
may have been too narrow, and nothing could be more utterly dead
than a criticism which tries to measure imaginary literature by an
academic standard or the rules of Aristotle. But it is only those
to whom the classics are themselves dead who are likely to lay this
academic dead hand on new literature. Besides, even the most
academic standards are valuable in a world in which chaos is hailed
with enthusiasm both in art and in politics. But, when all is said,
the taste which is the essential quality of a critic is something
with which he is born. It is something which is not born of reading
Sophocles and Plato and does not perish of reading Miss Marie
Corelli. This taste must illuminate all the reviewer’s
portraits. Without it, he had far better be a coach-builder than a
reviewer of books. It is this taste in the background that gives
distinction to a tolerant and humorous review of even the most
unambitious detective story.</p>
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