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Title: On the Margin - Notes and Essays
Author: Huxley, Aldous
Language: English
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ON THE MARGIN
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ALDOUS HUXLEY
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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MORTAL COILS
CROME YELLOW
LIMBO
LEDA: AND OTHER POEMS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ON THE
MARGIN
--------------
NOTES AND ESSAYS
By ALDOUS HUXLEY
[Illustration: G.H.D. logo]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Illustration: G.H.D. logo]
ON THE MARGIN. II
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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CONTENTS
PAGE
I: CENTENARIES 9
II: ON RE-READING _CANDIDE_ 19
III: ACCIDIE 25
IV: SUBJECT-MATTER OF POETRY 32
V: WATER MUSIC 43
VI: PLEASURES 48
VII: MODERN FOLK POETRY 55
VIII: BIBLIOPHILY 62
IX: DEMOCRATIC ART 67
X: ACCUMULATIONS 74
XI: ON DEVIATING INTO SENSE 80
XII: POLITE CONVERSATION 86
XIII: NATIONALITY IN LOVE 94
XIV: HOW THE DAYS DRAW IN! 100
XV: TIBET 106
XVI: BEAUTY IN 1920 112
XVII: GREAT THOUGHTS 118
XVIII: ADVERTISEMENT 123
XIX: EUPHUES REDIVIVUS 129
XX: THE AUTHOR OF _EMINENT VICTORIANS_ 136
XXI: EDWARD THOMAS 143
XXII: A WORDSWORTH ANTHOLOGY 150
XXIII: VERHAEREN 155
XXIV: EDWARD LEAR 161
XXV: SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN 167
XXVI: BEN JONSON 177
XXVII: CHAUCER 194
NOTE: Most of these Essays appeared in _The Athenæum_, under the title
“Marginalia” and over the signature AUTOLYCUS. The others were first
printed in _The Weekly Westminster Gazette_, _The London Mercury_ and
_Vanity Fair_ (New York).
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ON THE MARGIN
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ON THE MARGIN
I: CENTENARIES
From Bocca di Magra to Bocca d’Arno, mile after mile, the sandy beaches
smoothly, unbrokenly extend. Inland from the beach, behind a sheltering
belt of pines, lies a strip of coastal plain—flat as a slice of Holland
and dyked with slow streams. Corn grows here and the vine, with
plantations of slim poplars interspersed, and fat water-meadows. Here
and there the streams brim over into shallow lakes, whose shores are
fringed with sodden fields of rice. And behind this strip of plain, four
or five miles from the sea, the mountains rise, suddenly and steeply:
the Apuan Alps. Their highest crests are of bare limestone, streaked
here and there with the white marble which brings prosperity to the
little towns that stand at their feet: Massa and Carrara, Serravezza,
Pietrasanta. Half the world’s tombstones are scooped out of these noble
crags. Their lower slopes are grey with olive trees, green with woods of
chestnut. Over their summits repose the enormous sculptured masses of
the clouds.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,—
The mountains its columns be.
The landscape fairly quotes Shelley at you. This sea with its luminous
calms and sudden tempests, these dim blue islands hull down on the
horizon, these mountains and their marvellous clouds, these rivers and
woodlands are the very substance of his poetry. Live on this coast for a
little and you will find yourself constantly thinking of that lovely,
that strangely childish poetry, that beautiful and child-like man.
Perhaps his spirit haunts the coast. It was in this sea that he sailed
his flimsy boat, steering with one hand and holding in the other his
little volume of Æschylus. You picture him so on the days of calm. And
on the days of sudden violent storm you think of him, too. The
lightnings cut across the sky, the thunders are like terrible explosions
overhead, the squall comes down with a fury. What news of the flimsy
boat? None, save only that a few days after the storm a young body is
washed ashore, battered, unrecognizable; the little Æschylus in the coat
pocket is all that tells us that this was Shelley.
I have been spending the summer on this haunted coast. That must be my
excuse for mentioning in so self-absorbed a world as is ours the name of
a poet who has been dead these hundred years. But be reassured. I have
no intention of writing an article about the ineffectual angel beating
in the void his something-or-other wings in vain. I do not mean to add
my croak to the mellifluous chorus of centenary-celebrators. No; the
ghost of Shelley, who walks in Versilia and the Lunigia, by the shores
of the Gulf of Spezia and below Pisa where Arno disembogues, this ghost
with whom I have shaken hands and talked, incites me, not to add a
supererogatory and impertinent encomium, but rather to protest against
the outpourings of the other encomiasts, of the honey-voiced
centenary-chanters.
The cooing of these persons, ordinarily a specific against insomnia, is
in this case an irritant; it rouses, it exacerbates. For annoying and
disgusting it certainly is, this spectacle of a rebellious youth praised
to fulsomeness, a hundred years after his death, by people who would
hate him and be horrified by him, if he were alive, as much as the
Scotch reviewers hated and were horrified by Shelley. How would these
persons treat a young contemporary who, not content with being a
literary innovator, should use his talent to assault religion and the
established order, should blaspheme against plutocracy and patriotism,
should proclaim himself a Bolshevik, an internationalist, a pacifist, a
conscientious objector? They would say of him that he was a dangerous
young man who ought to be put in his place; and they would either
disparage and denigrate his talent, or else—if they were a little more
subtly respectable—they would never allow his name to get into print in
any of the periodicals which they controlled. But seeing that Shelley
was safely burnt on the sands of Viareggio a hundred years ago, seeing
that he is no longer a live dangerous man but only a dead classic, these
respectable supporters of established literature and established society
join in chorus to praise him, and explain his meaning, and preach
sermons over him. The mellifluous cooing is accompanied by a snuffle,
and there hangs over these centenary celebrations a genial miasma of
hypocrisy and insincerity. The effect of these festal anniversaries in
England is not to rekindle life in the great dead; a centenary is rather
a second burial, a reaffirmation of deadness. A spirit that was once
alive is fossilized and, in the midst of solemn and funereal ceremonies,
the petrified classic is duly niched in the temple of respectability.
How much better they order these things in Italy! In that country—which
one must ever admire more the more one sees of it—they duly celebrate
their great men; but celebrate them not with a snuffle, not in black
clothes, not with prayer-books in their hands, crape round their hats
and a hatred, in their hearts, of all that has to do with life and
vigour. No, no; they make their dead an excuse for quickening life among
the living; they get fun out of their centenaries.
Last year the Italians were celebrating the six hundredth anniversary of
Dante’s death. Now, imagine what this celebration would have been like
in England. All the oldest critics and all the young men who aspire to
be old would have written long articles in all the literary papers. That
would have set the tone. After that some noble lord, or even a Prince of
the Blood, would have unveiled a monument designed by Frampton or some
other monumental mason of the Academy. Imbecile speeches in words of not
more than two syllables would then have been pronounced over the ashes
of the world’s most intelligent poet. To his intelligence no reference
would, of course, be made; but his character, ah! his character would
get a glowing press. The most fiery and bitter of men would be held up
as an example to all Sunday-school children.
After this display of reverence, we should have had a lovely historical
pageant in the rain. A young female dressed in white bunting would have
represented Beatrice, and for the Poet himself some actor manager with a
profile and a voice would have been found. Guelfs and Ghibellines in
fancy dress of the period would go splashing about in the mud, and a
great many verses by Louis Napoleon Parker would be declaimed. And at
the end we should all go home with colds in our heads and suffering from
septic ennui, but with, at the same time, a pleasant feeling of
virtuousness, as though we had been at church.
See now what happens in Italy. The principal event in the Dante
celebration is an enormous military review. Hundreds of thousands of
wiry little brown men parade the streets of Florence. Young officers of
a fabulous elegance clank along in superbly tailored riding breeches and
glittering top-boots. The whole female population palpitates. It is an
excellent beginning. Speeches are then made, as only in Italy they can
be made—round, rumbling, sonorous speeches, all about Dante the
Italianissimous poet, Dante the irredentist, Dante the prophet of
Greater Italy, Dante the scourge of Jugo-Slavs and Serbs. Immense
enthusiasm. Never having read a line of his works, we feel that Dante is
our personal friend, a brother Fascist.
After that the real fun begins; we have the _manifestazioni sportive_ of
the centenary celebrations. Innumerable bicycle races are organized.
Fierce young Fascisti with the faces of Roman heroes pay their homage to
the Poet by doing a hundred and eighty kilometres to the hour round the
Circuit of Milan. High speed Fiats and Ansaldos and Lancias race one
another across the Apennines and round the bastions of the Alps. Pigeons
are shot, horses gallop, football is played under the broiling sun. Long
live Dante!
How infinitely preferable this is to the stuffiness and the snuffle of
an English centenary! Poetry, after all, is life, not death. Bicycle
races may not have very much to do with Dante—though I can fancy him,
his thin face set like metal, whizzing down the spirals of Hell on a
pair of twinkling wheels or climbing laboriously the one-in-three
gradients of Purgatory Mountain on the back of his trusty Sunbeam. No,
they may not have much to do with Dante; but pageants in Anglican
cathedral closes, boring articles by old men who would hate and fear him
if he were alive, speeches by noble lords over monuments made by Royal
Academicians—these, surely, have even less to do with the author of the
_Inferno_.
It is not merely their great dead whom the Italians celebrate in this
gloriously living fashion. Even their religious festivals have the same
jovial warm-blooded character. This summer, for example, a great feast
took place at Loreto to celebrate the arrival of a new image of the
Virgin to replace the old one which was burnt some little while ago. The
excitement started in Rome, where the image, after being blessed by the
Pope, was taken in a motor-car to the station amid cheering crowds who
shouted, “Evviva Maria” as the Fiat and its sacred burden rolled past.
The arrival of the Virgin in Loreto was the signal for a tremendous
outburst of jollification. The usual bicycle races took place; there
were football matches and pigeon-shooting competitions and Olympic
games. The fun lasted for days. At the end of the festivities two
cardinals went up in aeroplanes and blessed the assembled multitudes—an
incident of which the Pope is said to have remarked that the blessing,
in this case, did indeed come from heaven.
Rare people! If only we Anglo-Saxons could borrow from the Italians some
of their realism, their love of life for its own sake, of palpable,
solid, immediate things. In this dim land of ours we are accustomed to
pay too much respect to fictitious values; we worship invisibilities and
in our enjoyment of immediate life we are restrained by imaginary
inhibitions. We think too much of the past, of metaphysics, of
tradition, of the ideal future, of decorum and good form; too little of
life and the glittering noisy moment. The Italians are born Futurists.
It did not need Marinetti to persuade them to celebrate Dante with
bicycle races; they would have done it naturally, spontaneously, if no
Futurist propaganda had ever been issued. Marinetti is the product of
modern Italy, not modern Italy of Marinetti. They are all Futurists in
that burningly living Italy where we from the North seek only an escape
into the past. Or rather, they are not Futurists: Marinetti’s label was
badly chosen. They are Presentists. The early Christians preoccupied
with nothing but the welfare of their souls in the life to come were
Futurists, if you like.
We shall do well to learn something of their lively Presentism. Let us
hope that our great-grandchildren will celebrate the next centenary of
Shelley’s death by aerial regattas and hydroplane races. The living will
be amused and the dead worthily commemorated. The spirit of the man who
delighted, during life, in wind and clouds, in mountain-tops and waters,
in the flight of birds and the gliding of ships, will be rejoiced when
young men celebrate his memory by flying through the air or skimming,
like alighting swans, over the surface of the sea.
The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night
I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds
Which trample the dim winds; in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars;
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it.
The man who wrote this is surely more suitably celebrated by aeroplane
or even bicycle races than by seven-column articles from the pens of
Messrs.—well, perhaps we had better mention no names. Let us take a leaf
out of the Italian book.
II: ON RE-READING _CANDIDE_
The furniture vans had unloaded their freight in the new house. We were
installed, or, at least, we were left to make the best of an unbearable
life in the dirt and the confusion. One of the Pre-Raphaelites, I forget
at the moment which, once painted a picture called “The Last Day in the
Old Home.” A touching subject. But it would need a grimmer, harder brush
to depict the horrors of “The First Day in the New Home.” I had sat down
in despair among the tumbled movables when I noticed—with what a thrill
of pleased recognition—the top of a little leather-bound book protruding
from among a mass of bulkier volumes in an uncovered case. It was
_Candide_, my treasured little first edition of 1759, with its
discreetly ridiculous title-page, “_Candide ou L’Optimisme_, Traduit de
l’Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph.”
Optimism—I had need of a little at the moment, and as Mr. le Docteur
Ralph is notoriously one of the preachers most capable of inspiring it,
I took up the volume and began to read: “Il y avait en Westphalie, dans
le Château de Mr. le Baron de Thunder-ten-tronckh....” I did not put
down the volume till I had reached the final: “Il faut cultiver notre
jardin.” I felt the wiser and the more cheerful for Doctor Ralph’s
ministrations.
But the remarkable thing about re-reading _Candide_ is not that the book
amuses one, not that it delights and astonishes with its brilliance;
that is only to be expected. No, it evokes a new and, for me at least,
an unanticipated emotion. In the good old days, before the Flood, the
history of Candide’s adventures seemed to us quiet, sheltered,
middle-class people only a delightful phantasy, or at best a
high-spirited exaggeration of conditions which we knew, vaguely and
theoretically, to exist, to have existed, a long way off in space and
time. But read the book to-day; you feel yourself entirely at home in
its pages. It is like reading a record of the facts and opinions of
1922; nothing was ever more applicable, more completely to the point.
The world in which we live is recognizably the world of Candide and
Cunégonde, of Martin and the Old Woman who was a Pope’s daughter and the
betrothed of the sovereign Prince of Massa-Carrara. The only difference
is that the horrors crowd rather more thickly on the world of 1922 than
they did on Candide’s world. The manœuvrings of Bulgare and Abare, the
intestine strife in Morocco, the earthquake and _auto-da-fé_ are but
pale poor things compared with the Great War, the Russian Famine, the
Black and Tans, the Fascisti, and all the other horrors of which we can
proudly boast. “Quand Sa Hautesse envoye un vaisseau en Egypte,”
remarked the Dervish, “s’embarrasse-t-elle si les souris qui sont dans
le vaisseau sont à leur aise ou non?” No; but there are moments when Sa
Hautesse, absent-mindedly no doubt, lets fall into the hold of the
vessel a few dozen of hungry cats; the present seems to be one of them.
Cats in the hold? There is nothing in that to be surprised at. The
wisdom of Martin and the Old Woman who was once betrothed to the Prince
of Massa-Carrara has become the everyday wisdom of all the world since
1914. In the happy Victorian and Edwardian past, Western Europe, like
Candide, was surprised at everything. It was amazed by the frightful
conduct of King Bomba, amazed by the Turks, amazed by the political
chicanery and loose morals of the Second Empire—(what is all Zola but a
prolonged exclamation of astonishment at the goings-on of his
contemporaries?). After that we were amazed at the disgusting behaviour
of the Boers, while the rest of Europe was amazed at ours. There
followed the widespread astonishment that in this, the so-called
twentieth century, black men should be treated as they were being
treated on the Congo and the Amazon. Then came the war: a great outburst
of indignant astonishment, and afterwards an acquiescence as complete,
as calmly cynical as Martin’s. For we have discovered, in the course of
the somewhat excessively prolonged _histoire à la Candide_ of the last
seven years, that astonishment is a supererogatory emotion. All things
are possible, not merely for Providence, whose ways we had always known,
albeit for some time rather theoretically, to be strange, but also for
men.
Men, we thought, had grown up from the brutal and rampageous
hobbledehoyism of earlier ages and were now as polite and genteel as
Gibbon himself. We now know better. Create a hobbledehoy environment and
you will have hobbledehoy behaviour; create a Gibbonish environment and
every one will be, more or less, genteel. It seems obvious, now. And now
that we are living in a hobbledehoy world, we have learnt Martin’s
lesson so well that we can look on almost unmoved at the most appalling
natural catastrophes and at exhibitions of human stupidity and
wickedness which would have aroused us in the past to surprise and
indignation. Indeed, we have left Martin behind and are become, with
regard to many things, Pococurante.
And what is the remedy? Mr. le Docteur Ralph would have us believe that
it consists in the patient cultivation of our gardens. He is probably
right. The only trouble is that the gardens of some of us seem hardly
worth cultivating. The garden of the bank clerk and the factory hand,
the shop-girl’s garden, the garden of the civil servant and the
politician—can one cultivate them with much enthusiasm? Or, again, there
is my garden, the garden of literary journalism. In this little plot I
dig and delve, plant, prune, and finally reap—sparsely enough, goodness
knows!—from one year’s end to another. And to what purpose, to whom for
a good, as the Latin Grammar would say? Ah, there you have me.
There is a passage in one of Tchekov’s letters which all literary
journalists should inscribe in letters of gold upon their writing desks.
“I send you,” says Tchekov to his correspondent, “Mihailovsky’s article
on Tolstoy.... It’s a good article, but it’s strange: one might write a
thousand such articles and things would not be one step forwarder, and
it would still remain unintelligible why such articles are written.”
_Il faut cultiver notre jardin._ Yes, but suppose one begins to wonder
why?
III: ACCIDIE
The cœnobites of the Thebaid were subjected to the assaults of many
demons. Most of these evil spirits came furtively with the coming of
night. But there was one, a fiend of deadly subtlety, who was not afraid
to walk by day. The holy men of the desert called him the _dæmon
meridianus_; for his favourite hour of visitation was in the heat of the
day. He would lie in wait for monks grown weary with working in the
oppressive heat, seizing a moment of weakness to force an entrance into
their hearts. And once installed there, what havoc he wrought! For
suddenly it would seem to the poor victim that the day was intolerably
long and life desolatingly empty. He would go to the door of his cell
and look up at the sun and ask himself if a new Joshua had arrested it
midway up the heavens. Then he would go back into the shade and wonder
what good he was doing in that cell or if there was any object in
existence. Then he would look at the sun again and find it indubitably
stationary, and the hour of the communal repast of the evening as remote
as ever. And he would go back to his meditations, to sink, sink through
disgust and lassitude into the black depths of despair and hopeless
unbelief. When that happened the demon smiled and took his departure,
conscious that he had done a good morning’s work.
Throughout the Middle Ages this demon was known as Acedia, or, in
English, Accidie. Monks were still his favourite victims, but he made
many conquests among the laity also. Along with _gastrimargia_,
_fornicatio_, _philargyria_, _tristitia_, _cenodoxia_, _ira_ and
_superbia_, _acedia_ or _tædium cordis_ is reckoned as one of the eight
principal vices to which man is subject. Inaccurate psychologists of
evil are wont to speak of accidie as though it were plain sloth. But
sloth is only one of the numerous manifestations of the subtle and
complicated vice of accidie. Chaucer’s discourse on it in the “Parson’s
Tale” contains a very precise description of this disastrous vice of the
spirit. “Accidie,” he tells us, “makith a man hevy, thoghtful and
wrawe.” It paralyzes human will, “it forsloweth and forsluggeth” a man
whenever he attempts to act. From accidie comes dread to begin to work
any good deeds, and finally wanhope, or despair. On its way to ultimate
wanhope, accidie produces a whole crop of minor sins, such as idleness,
tardiness, _lâchesse_, coldness, undevotion and “the synne of worldly
sorrow, such as is cleped _tristitia_, that sleth man, as seith seint
Poule.” Those who have sinned by accidie find their everlasting home in
the fifth circle of the Inferno. They are plunged in the same black bog
with the Wrathful, and their sobs and words come bubbling up to the
surface:
Fitti nel limo dicon: “Tristi fummo
nell’ aer dolce che dal sol s’ allegra,
portando dentro accidioso fummo;
Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra.”
Quest’ inno si gorgoglian nella strozza,
chè dir nol posson con parola integra.
Accidie did not disappear with the monasteries and the Middle Ages. The
Renaissance was also subject to it. We find a copious description of the
symptoms of acedia in Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_. The results of
the midday demon’s machinations are now known as the vapours or the
spleen. To the spleen amiable Mr. Matthew Green, of the Custom House,
devoted those eight hundred octosyllables which are his claim to
immortality. For him it is a mere disease to be healed by temperate
diet:
Hail! water gruel, healing power,
Of easy access to the poor;
by laughter, reading and the company of unaffected young ladies:
Mothers, and guardian aunts, forbear
Your impious pains to form the fair,
Nor lay out so much cost and art
But to deflower the virgin heart;
by the avoidance of party passion, drink, Dissenters and missionaries,
especially missionaries: to whose undertakings Mr. Green always declined
to subscribe:
I laugh off spleen and keep my pence
From spoiling Indian innocence;
by refraining from going to law, writing poetry and thinking about one’s
future state.
_The Spleen_ was published in the thirties of the eighteenth century.
Accidie was still, if not a sin, at least a disease. But a change was at
hand. “The sin of worldly sorrow, such as is cleped _tristitia_,” became
a literary virtue, a spiritual mode. The apostles of melancholy wound
their faint horns, and the Men of Feeling wept. Then came the nineteenth
century and romanticism; and with them the triumph of the meridian
demon. Accidie in its most complicated and most deadly form, a mixture
of boredom, sorrow and despair, was now an inspiration to the greatest
poets and novelists, and it has remained so to this day. The Romantics
called this horrible phenomenon the _mal du siècle_. But the name made
no difference; the thing was still the same. The meridian demon had good
cause to be satisfied during the nineteenth century, for it was then, as
Baudelaire puts it, that
L’Ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité,
Prit les proportions de l’immortalité.
It is a very curious phenomenon, this progress of accidie from the
position of being a deadly sin, deserving of damnation, to the position
first of a disease and finally of an essentially lyrical emotion,
fruitful in the inspiration of much of the most characteristic modern
literature. The sense of universal futility, the feelings of boredom and
despair, with the complementary desire to be “anywhere, anywhere out of
the world,” or at least out of the place in which one happens at the
moment to be, have been the inspiration of poetry and the novel for a
century and more. It would have been inconceivable in Matthew Green’s
day to have written a serious poem about ennui. By Baudelaire’s time
ennui was as suitable a subject for lyric poetry as love; and accidie is
still with us as an inspiration, one of the most serious and poignant of
literary themes. What is the significance of this fact? For clearly the
progress of accidie is a spiritual event of considerable importance. How
is it to be explained?
It is not as though the nineteenth century invented accidie. Boredom,
hopelessness and despair have always existed, and have been felt as
poignantly in the past as we feel them now. Something has happened to
make these emotions respectable and avowable; they are no longer sinful,
no longer regarded as the mere symptoms of disease. That something that
has happened is surely simply history since 1789. The failure of the
French Revolution and the more spectacular downfall of Napoleon planted
accidie in the heart of every youth of the Romantic generation—and not
in France alone, but all over Europe—who believed in liberty or whose
adolescence had been intoxicated by the ideas of glory and genius. Then
came industrial progress with its prodigious multiplication of filth,
misery, and ill-gotten wealth; the defilement of nature by modern
industry was in itself enough to sadden many sensitive minds. The
discovery that political enfranchisement, so long and stubbornly fought
for, was the merest futility and vanity so long as industrial servitude
remained in force was another of the century’s horrible
disillusionments.
A more subtle cause of the prevalence of boredom was the
disproportionate growth of the great towns. Habituated to the feverish
existence of these few centres of activity, men found that life outside
them was intolerably insipid. And at the same time they became so much
exhausted by the restlessness of city life that they pined for the
monotonous boredom of the provinces, for exotic islands, even for other
worlds—any haven of rest. And finally, to crown this vast structure of
failures and disillusionments, there came the appalling catastrophe of
the War of 1914. Other epochs have witnessed disasters, have had to
suffer disillusionment; but in no century have the disillusionments
followed on one another’s heels with such unintermitted rapidity as in
the twentieth, for the good reason that in no century has change been so
rapid and so profound. The _mal du siècle_ was an inevitable evil;
indeed, we can claim with a certain pride that we have a right to our
accidie. With us it is not a sin or a disease of the hypochondries; it
is a state of mind which fate has forced upon us.
IV: SUBJECT-MATTER OF POETRY
It should theoretically be possible to make poetry out of anything
whatsoever of which the spirit of man can take cognizance. We find,
however, as a matter of historical fact, that most of the world’s best
poetry has been content with a curiously narrow range of subject-matter.
The poets have claimed as their domain only a small province of our
universe. One of them now and then, more daring or better equipped than
the rest, sets out to extend the boundaries of the kingdom. But for the
most part the poets do not concern themselves with fresh conquests; they
prefer to consolidate their power at home, enjoying quietly their
hereditary possessions. All the world is potentially theirs, but they do
not take it. What is the reason for this, and why is it that poetical
practice does not conform to critical theory? The problem has a peculiar
relevance and importance in these days, when young poetry claims
absolute liberty to speak how it likes of whatsoever it pleases.
Wordsworth, whose literary criticism, dry and forbidding though its
aspect may be, is always illumined by a penetrating intelligence,
Wordsworth touched upon this problem in his preface to _Lyrical
Ballads_—touched on it and, as usual, had something of value to say
about it. He is speaking here of the most important and the most
interesting of the subjects which may, theoretically, be made into
poetry, but which have, as a matter of fact, rarely or never undergone
the transmutation: he is speaking of the relations between poetry and
that vast world of abstractions and ideas—science and philosophy—into
which so few poets have ever penetrated. “The remotest discoveries of
the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of
the poet’s art as any upon which he is now employed, if the time should
ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations
under which they are contemplated shall be manifestly and palpably
material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” It is a formidable
sentence; but read it well, read the rest of the passage from which it
is taken, and you will find it to be full of critical truth.
The gist of Wordsworth’s argument is this. All subjects—“the remotest
discoveries of the chemist” are but one example of an unlikely poetic
theme—can serve the poet with material for his art, on one condition:
that he, and to a lesser degree his audience, shall be able to apprehend
the subject with a certain emotion. The subject must somehow be involved
in the poet’s intimate being before he can turn it into poetry. It is
not enough, for example, that he should apprehend it merely through his
senses. (The poetry of pure sensation, of sounds and bright colours, is
common enough nowadays; but amusing as we may find it for the moment, it
cannot hold the interest for long.) It is not enough, at the other end
of the scale, if he apprehends his subject in a purely intellectual
manner. An abstract idea must be felt with a kind of passion, it must
mean something emotionally significant, it must be as immediate and
important to the poet as a personal relationship before he can make
poetry of it. Poetry, in a word, must be written by “enjoying and
suffering beings,” not by beings exclusively dowered with sensations or,
as exclusively, with intellect.
Wordsworth’s criticism helps us to understand why so few subjects have
ever been made into poetry when everything under the sun, and beyond it,
is theoretically suitable for transmutation into a work of art. Death,
love, religion, nature; the primary emotions and the ultimate personal
mysteries—these form the subject-matter of most of the greatest poetry.
And for obvious reasons. These things are “manifestly and palpably
material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” But to most men,
including the generality of poets, abstractions and ideas are not
immediately and passionately moving. They are not enjoying or suffering
when they apprehend these things—only thinking.
The men who do feel passionately about abstractions, the men to whom
ideas are as persons—moving and disquietingly alive—are very seldom
poets. They are men of science and philosophers, preoccupied with the
search for truth and not, like the poet, with the expression and
creation of beauty. It is very rarely that we find a poet who combines
the power and the desire to express himself with that passionate
apprehension of ideas and that passionate curiosity about strange remote
facts which characterize the man of science and the philosopher. If he
possessed the requisite sense of language and the impelling desire to
express himself in terms of beauty, Einstein could write the most
intoxicating lyrics about relativity and the pleasures of pure
mathematics. And if, say, Mr. Yeats understood the Einstein
theory—which, in company with most other living poets, he presumably
does not, any more than the rest of us—if he apprehended it exultingly
as something bold and profound, something vitally important and
marvellously true, he too could give us, out of the Celtic twilight, his
lyrics of relativity. It is those distressing little “ifs” that stand in
the way of this happy consummation. The conditions upon which any but
the most immediately and obviously moving subjects can be made into
poetry are so rarely fulfilled, the combination of poet and man of
science, poet and philosopher, is so uncommon, that the theoretical
universality of the art has only very occasionally been realized in
practice.
Contemporary poetry in the whole of the western world is insisting,
loudly and emphatically through the mouths of its propagandists, on an
absolute liberty to speak of what it likes how it likes. Nothing could
be better; all that we can now ask is that the poets should put the
theory into practice, and that they should make use of the liberty which
they claim by enlarging the bounds of poetry.
The propagandists would have us believe that the subject-matter of
contemporary poetry is new and startling, that modern poets are doing
something which has not been done before. “Most of the poets represented
in these pages,” writes Mr. Louis Untermeyer in his _Anthology of Modern
American Poetry_, “have found a fresh and vigorous material in a world
of honest and often harsh reality. They respond to the spirit of their
times; not only have their views changed, their vision has been widened
to include things unknown to the poets of yesterday. They have learned
to distinguish real beauty from mere prettiness, to wring loveliness out
of squalor, to find wonder in neglected places, to search for hidden
truths even in the dark caves of the unconscious.” Translated into
practice this means that contemporary poets can now write, in the words
of Mr. Sandburg, of the “harr and boom of the blast fires,” of “wops and
bohunks.” It means, in fact, that they are at liberty to do what Homer
did—to write freely about the immediately moving facts of everyday life.
Where Homer wrote of horses and the tamers of horses, our contemporaries
write of trains, automobiles, and the various species of wops and
bohunks who control the horsepower. That is all. Much too much stress
has been laid on the newness of the new poetry; its newness is simply a
return from the jewelled exquisiteness of the eighteen-nineties to the
facts and feelings of ordinary life. There is nothing intrinsically
novel or surprising in the introduction into poetry of machinery and
industrialism, of labour unrest and modern psychology: these things
belong to us, they affect us daily as enjoying and suffering beings;
they are a part of our lives, just as the kings, the warriors, the
horses and chariots, the picturesque mythology were part of Homer’s
life. The subject-matter of the new poetry remains the same as that of
the old. The old boundaries have not been extended. There would be real
novelty in the new poetry if it had, for example, taken to itself any of
the new ideas and astonishing facts with which the new science has
endowed the modern world. There would be real novelty in it if it had
worked out a satisfactory artistic method for dealing with abstractions.
It has not. Which simply means that that rare phenomenon, the poet in
whose mind ideas are a passion and a personal moving force, does not
happen to have appeared.
And how rarely in all the long past he has appeared! There was
Lucretius, the greatest of all the philosophic and scientific poets. In
him the passionate apprehension of ideas, and the desire and ability to
give them expression, combined to produce that strange and beautiful
epic of thought which is without parallel in the whole history of
literature. There was Dante, in whose soul the mediæval Christian
philosophy was a force that shaped and directed every feeling, thought
and action. There was Goethe, who focussed into beautiful expression an
enormous diffusion of knowledge and ideas. And there the list of the
great poets of thought comes to an end. In their task of extending the
boundaries of poetry into the remote and abstract world of ideas, they
have had a few lesser assistants—Donne, for example, a poet only just
less than the greatest; Fulke Greville, that strange, dark-spirited
Elizabethan; John Davidson, who made a kind of poetry out of Darwinism;
and, most interesting poetical interpreter of nineteenth-century
science, Jules Laforgue.
Which of our contemporaries can claim to have extended the bounds of
poetry to any material extent? It is not enough to have written about
locomotives and telephones, “wops and bohunks,” and all the rest of it.
That is not extending the range of poetry; it is merely asserting its
right to deal with the immediate facts of contemporary life, as Homer
and as Chaucer did. The critics who would have us believe that there is
something essentially unpoetical about a bohunk (whatever a Bohunk may
be), and something essentially poetical about Sir Lancelot of the Lake,
are, of course, simply negligible; they may be dismissed as
contemptuously as we have dismissed the pseudo-classical critics who
opposed the freedoms of the Romantic Revival. And the critics who think
it very new and splendid to bring bohunks into poetry are equally
old-fashioned in their ideas.
It will not be unprofitable to compare the literary situation in this
early twentieth century of ours with the literary situation of the early
seventeenth century. In both epochs we see a reaction against a rich and
somewhat formalized poetical tradition expressing itself in a
determination to extend the range of subject-matter, to get back to real
life, and to use more natural forms of expression. The difference
between the two epochs lies in the fact that the twentieth-century
revolution has been the product of a number of minor poets, none of them
quite powerful enough to achieve what he theoretically meant to do,
while the seventeenth-century revolution was the work of a single poet
of genius, John Donne. Donne substituted for the rich formalism of
non-dramatic Elizabethan poetry a completely realized new style, the
style of the so-called metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century.
He was a poet-philosopher-man-of-action whose passionate curiosity about
facts enabled him to make poetry out of the most unlikely aspects of
material life, and whose passionate apprehension of ideas enabled him to
extend the bounds of poetry beyond the frontiers of common life and its
emotions into the void of intellectual abstraction. He put the whole
life and the whole mind of his age into poetry.
We to-day are metaphysicals without our Donne. Theoretically we are free
to make poetry of everything in the universe; in practice we are kept
within the old limits, for the simple reason that no great man has
appeared to show us how we can use our freedom. A certain amount of the
life of the twentieth century is to be found in our poetry, but precious
little of its mind. We have no poet to-day like that strange old Dean of
St. Paul’s three hundred years ago—no poet who can skip from the heights
of scholastic philosophy to the heights of carnal passion, from the
contemplation of divinity to the contemplation of a flea, from the rapt
examination of self to an enumeration of the most remote external facts
of science, and make all, by his strangely passionate apprehension, into
an intensely lyrical poetry.
The few poets who do try to make of contemporary ideas the substance of
their poetry, do it in a manner which brings little conviction or
satisfaction to the reader. There is Mr. Noyes, who is writing four
volumes of verse about the human side of science—in his case, alas, all
too human. Then there is Mr. Conrad Aiken. He perhaps is the most
successful exponent in poetry of contemporary ideas. In his case, it is
clear, “the remotest discoveries of the chemist” are apprehended with a
certain passion; all his emotions are tinged by his ideas. The trouble
with Mr. Aiken is that his emotions are apt to degenerate into a kind of
intellectual sentimentality, which expresses itself only too easily in
his prodigiously fluent, highly coloured verse.
One could lengthen the list of more or less interesting poets who have
tried in recent times to extend the boundaries of their art. But one
would not find among them a single poet of real importance, not one
great or outstanding personality. The twentieth century still awaits its
Lucretius, awaits its own philosophical Dante, its new Goethe, its
Donne, even its up-to-date Laforgue. Will they appear? Or are we to go
on producing a poetry in which there is no more than the dimmest
reflection of that busy and incessant intellectual life which is the
characteristic and distinguishing mark of this age?
V: WATER MUSIC
The house in which I live is haunted by the noise of dripping water.
Always, day and night, summer and winter, something is dripping
somewhere. For many months an unquiet cistern kept up within its iron
bosom a long, hollow-toned soliloquy. Now it is mute; but a new and more
formidable drip has come into existence. From the very summit of the
house a little spout—the overflow, no doubt, of some unknown receptacle
under the roof—lets fall a succession of drops that is almost a
continuous stream. Down it falls, this all but stream, a sheer forty or
fifty feet on to the stones of the basement steps, thence to dribble
ignominiously away into some appointed drain. The cataracts blow their
trumpets from the steep; but my lesser waterfalls play a subtler, I had
almost said a more “modern” music. Lying awake at nights, I listen with
a mixture of pleasure and irritation to its curious cadences.
The musical range of a dripping tap is about half an octave. But within
the bounds of this major fourth, drops can play the most surprising and
varied melodies. You will hear them climbing laboriously up small
degrees of sound, only to descend at a single leap to the bottom. More
often they wander unaccountably about in varying intervals, familiar or
disconcertingly odd. And with the varying pitch the time also varies,
but within narrower limits. For the laws of hydrostatics, or whatever
other science claims authority over drops, do not allow the dribblings
much licence either to pause or to quicken the pace of their falling. It
is an odd sort of music. One listens to it as one lies in bed, slipping
gradually into sleep, with a curious, uneasy emotion.
Drip drop, drip drap drep drop. So it goes on, this watery melody, for
ever without an end. Inconclusive, inconsequent, formless, it is always
on the point of deviating into sense and form. Every now and then you
will hear a complete phrase of rounded melody. And then—drip drop,
di-drep, di-drap—the old inconsequence sets in once more. But suppose
there were some significance in it! It is that which troubles my drowsy
mind as I listen at night. Perhaps for those who have ears to hear, this
endless dribbling is as pregnant with thought and emotion, as
significant as a piece of Bach. Drip drop, di-drap, di-drep. So little
would suffice to turn the incoherence into meaning. The music of the
drops is the symbol and type of the whole universe; it is for ever, as
it were, asymptotic to sense, infinitely close to significance, but
never touching it. Never, unless the human mind comes and pulls it
forcibly over the dividing space. If I could understand this wandering
music, if I could detect in it a sequence, if I could force it to some
conclusion—the diapason closing full in God, in mind, I hardly care
what, so long as it closes in something definite—then, I feel, I should
understand the whole incomprehensible machine, from the gaps between the
stars to the policy of the Allies. And growing drowsier and drowsier, I
listen to the ceaseless tune, the hollow soliloquy in the cistern, the
sharp metallic rapping of the drops that fall from the roof upon the
stones below; and surely I begin to discover a meaning, surely I detect
a trace of thought, surely the phrases follow one another with art,
leading on inevitably to some prodigious conclusion. Almost I have it,
almost, almost.... Then, I suppose, I fall definitely to sleep. For the
next thing I am aware of is that the sunlight is streaming in. It is
morning, and the water is still dripping as irritatingly and
persistently as ever.
Sometimes the incoherence of the drop music is too much to be borne. The
listener insists that the asymptote shall somehow touch the line of
sense. He forces the drops to say something. He demands of them that
they shall play, shall we say, “God Save the King,” or the Hymn to Joy
from the Ninth Symphony, or _Voi che Sapete_. The drops obey
reluctantly; they play what you desire, but with more than the
ineptitude of the child at the piano. Still they play it somehow. But
this is an extremely dangerous method of laying the haunting ghost whose
voice is the drip of water. For once you have given the drops something
to sing or say, they will go on singing and saying it for ever. Sleep
becomes impossible, and at the two or three hundredth repetition of
_Madelon_ or even of an air from _Figaro_ the mind begins to totter
towards insanity.
Drops, ticking clocks, machinery, everything that throbs or clicks or
hums or hammers, can be made, with a little perseverance, to say
something. In my childhood, I remember, I was told that trains said, “To
Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch a pocket handkercher”—and _da capo_
ad infinitum. They can also repeat, if desired, that useful piece of
information: “To stop the train, pull down the chain.” But it is very
hard to persuade them to add the menacing corollary: “Penalty for
improper use Five Pounds.” Still, with careful tutoring I have succeeded
in teaching a train to repeat even that unrhythmical phrase.
Dadaist literature always reminds me a little of my falling drops.
Confronted by it, I feel the same uncomfortable emotion as is begotten
in me by the inconsequent music of water. Suppose, after all, that this
apparently accidental sequence of words should contain the secret of art
and life and the universe! It may; who knows? And here am I, left out in
the cold of total incomprehension; and I pore over this literature and
regard it upside down in the hope of discovering that secret. But
somehow I cannot induce the words to take on any meaning whatever. Drip
drop, di-drap, di-drep—Tzara and Picabia let fall their words and I am
baffled. But I can see that there are great possibilities in this type
of literature. For the tired journalist it is ideal, since it is not he,
but the reader who has to do all the work. All he need do is to lean
back in his chair and allow the words to dribble out through the nozzle
of his fountain pen. Drip, drop....
VI: PLEASURES
We have heard a great deal, since 1914, about the things which are a
menace to civilization. First it was Prussian militarism; then the
Germans at large; then the prolongation of the war; then the shortening
of the same; then, after a time, the Treaty of Versailles; then French
militarism—with, all the while, a running accompaniment of such minor
menaces as Prohibition, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Bryan, Comstockery....
Civilization, however, has resisted the combined attacks of these
enemies wonderfully well. For still, in 1923, it stands not so very far
from where it stood in that “giant age before the flood” of nine years
since. Where, in relation to Neanderthal on the one hand and Athens on
the other, where precisely it stood _then_ is a question which each may
answer according to his taste. The important fact is that these menaces
to our civilization, such as it is—menaces including the largest war and
the stupidest peace known to history—have confined themselves in most
places and up till now to mere threats, barking more furiously than they
bite.
No, the dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the
external dangers—wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after
them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within,
that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary
man.
Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of
auto-intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems
to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that
curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure.”
“Pleasure” (I place the word between inverted commas to show that I
mean, not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known
by the same name) “pleasure”—what nightmare visions the word evokes!
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would
rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned
to lead a life of “pleasure”; I would even, I believe, prefer to write a
million words of journalism a year.
The horrors of modern “pleasure” arise from the fact that every kind of
organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more
imbecile. There was a time when people indulged themselves with
distractions requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort. In
the seventeenth century, for example, royal personages and their
courtiers took a real delight in listening to erudite sermons (Dr.
Donne’s, for example) and academical disputes on points of theology or
metaphysics. Part of the entertainment offered to the Prince Palatine,
on the occasion of his marriage with James 1.’s daughter, was a
syllogistic argumentation, on I forget what philosophical theme, between
the amiable Lord Keeper Williams and a troop of minor Cambridge
logicians. Imagine the feelings of a contemporary prince, if a loyal
University were to offer him a similar entertainment!
Royal personages were not the only people who enjoyed intelligent
pleasures. In Elizabethan times every lady and gentleman of ordinary
culture could be relied upon, at demand, to take his or her part in a
madrigal or a motet. Those who know the enormous complexity and subtlety
of sixteenth-century music will realize what this means. To indulge in
their favourite pastime our ancestors had to exert their minds to an
uncommon degree. Even the uneducated vulgar delighted in pleasures
requiring the exercise of a certain intelligence, individuality and
personal initiative. They listened, for example, to _Othello_, _King
Lear_, and _Hamlet_—apparently with enjoyment and comprehension. They
sang and made much music. And far away, in the remote country, the
peasants, year by year, went through the traditional rites—the dances of
spring and summer, the winter mummings, the ceremonies of harvest
home—appropriate to each successive season. Their pleasures were
intelligent and alive, and it was they who, by their own efforts,
entertained themselves.
We have changed all that. In place of the old pleasures demanding
intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that
provide us with ready-made distractions—distractions which demand from
pleasure-seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of
any sort. To the interminable democracies of the world a million cinemas
bring the same stale balderdash. There have always been fourth-rate
writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died
without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in
which they appeared. To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go
out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak
passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of
them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.
Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have made it
themselves. Now, they merely turn on the gramophone. Or if they are a
little more up-to-date they adjust their wireless telephone to the right
wave-length and listen-in to the fruity contralto at Marconi House,
singing “The Gleaner’s Slumber Song.”
And if they want literature, there is the Press. Nominally, it is true,
the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to
provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind
without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single
thought. This function, it must be admitted, it fulfils with an
extraordinary success. It is possible to go on for years and years,
reading two papers every working day and one on Sundays without ever
once being called upon to think or to make any other effort than to move
the eyes, not very attentively, down the printed column.
Certain sections of the community still practise athletic sports in
which individual participation is demanded. Great numbers of the middle
and upper classes play golf and tennis in person and, if they are
sufficiently rich, shoot birds and pursue the fox and go ski-ing in the
Alps. But the vast mass of the community has now come even to sport
vicariously, preferring the watching of football to the fatigues and
dangers of the actual game. All classes, it is true, still dance; but
dance, all the world over, the same steps to the same tunes. The dance
has been scrupulously sterilized of any local or personal individuality.
These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the
same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely
a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were. The
working hours of the day are already, for the great majority of human
beings, occupied in the performance of purely mechanical tasks in which
no mental effort, no individuality, no initiative are required. And now,
in the hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically
stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does
our work. Add such leisure to such work and the sum is a perfect day
which it is a blessed relief to come to the end of.
Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might
easily decline into a kind of premature senility. With a mind almost
atrophied by lack of use, unable to entertain itself and grown so
wearily uninterested in the ready-made distractions offered from without
that nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever-increasing violence
and crudity can move it, the democracy of the future will sicken of a
chronic and mortal boredom. It will go, perhaps, the way the Romans
went: the Romans who came at last to lose, precisely as we are doing
now, the capacity to distract themselves; the Romans who, like us, lived
on ready-made entertainments in which they had no participation. Their
deadly ennui demanded ever more gladiators, more tightrope-walking
elephants, more rare and far-fetched animals to be slaughtered. Ours
would demand no less; but owing to the existence of a few idealists,
doesn’t get all it asks for. The most violent forms of entertainment can
only be obtained illicitly; to satisfy a taste for slaughter and cruelty
you must become a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Let us not despair,
however; we may still live to see blood flowing across the stage of the
Hippodrome. The force of a boredom clamouring to be alleviated may yet
prove too much for the idealists.
VII: MODERN FOLK POETRY
To all those who are interested in the “folk” and their poetry—the
contemporary folk of the great cities and their urban muse—I would
recommend a little-known journal called _McGlennon’s Pantomime Annual_.
This periodical makes its appearance at some time in the New Year, when
the pantos are slowly withering away under the influence of approaching
spring. I take this opportunity of warning my readers to keep a sharp
look out for the coming of the next issue; it is sure to be worth the
modest twopence which one is asked to pay for it.
_McGlennon’s Pantomime Annual_ is an anthology of the lyrics of the
panto season’s most popular songs. It is a document of first-class
importance. To the future student of our popular literature _McGlennon_
will be as precious as the Christie-Miller collection of Elizabethan
broadsheets. In the year 2220 a copy of the _Pantomime Annual_ may very
likely sell for hundreds of pounds at the Sotheby’s of the time. With
laudable forethought I am preserving my copy of last year’s _McGlennon_
for the enrichment of my distant posterity.
The Folk Poetry of 1920 may best be classified according to
subject-matter. First, by reason of its tender associations as well as
its mere amount, is the poetry of Passion. Then there is the Poetry of
Filial Devotion. Next, the Poetry of the Home—the dear old earthly Home
in Oregon or Kentucky—and, complementary to it, the Poetry of the
Spiritual Home in other and happier worlds. Here, as well as in the next
section, the popular lyric borrows some of its best effects from
hymnology. There follows the Poetry of Recollection and Regret, and the
Poetry of Nationality, a type devoted almost exclusively to the praises
of Ireland. These types and their variations cover the Folk’s serious
poetry. Their comic vein is less susceptible to analysis. Drink, Wives,
Young Nuts, Honeymoon Couples—these are a few of the stock subjects.
The Amorous Poetry of the Folk, like the love lyrics of more cultured
poets, is divided into two species: the Poetry of Spiritual Amour and
the more direct and concrete expression of Immediate Desire. _McGlennon_
provides plenty of examples of both types:
When love peeps in the window of your heart
[it might be the first line of a Shakespeare sonnet]
You seem to walk on air,
Birds sing their sweet songs to you,
No cloud in your skies of blue,
Sunshine all the happy day, etc.
These rhapsodies tend to become a little tedious. But one feels the warm
touch of reality in
I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle,
I know a cosy place for two.
I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle,
I want to feel that love is true.
Take me in your arms as lovers do.
Hold me very tight and kiss me too.
I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle,
I want to snuggle close to you.
This is sound; but it does not come up to the best of the popular
lyrics. The agonized passion expressed in the words and music of “You
Made Me Love You” is something one does not easily forget, though that
great song is as old as the now distant origins of ragtime.
The Poetry of Filial Devotion is almost as extensive as the Poetry of
Amour. _McGlennon_ teems with such outbursts as this:
You are a wonderful mother, dear old mother of mine.
You’ll hold a spot down deep in my heart
Till the stars no longer shine.
Your soul shall live on for ever,
On through the fields of time,
For there’ll never be another to me
Like that wonderful mother of mine.
Even Grandmamma gets a share of this devotion:
Granny, my own, I seem to hear you calling me;
Granny, my own, you are my sweetest memory ...
If up in heaven angels reign supreme,
Among the angels you must be the Queen.
Granny, my own, I miss you more and more.
The last lines are particularly rich. What a fascinating heresy, to hold
that the angels reign over their Creator!
The Poetry of Recollection and Regret owes most, both in words and
music, to the hymn. _McGlennon_ provides a choice example in “Back from
the Land of Yesterday”:
Back from the land of yesterday,
Back to the friends of yore;
Back through the dark and dreary way
Into the light once more.
Back to the heart that waits for me,
Warmed by the sunshine above;
Back from the old land of yesterday’s dreams
To a new land of life and love.
What it means, goodness only knows. But one can imagine that, sunk to a
slow music in three-four time—some rich religious waltz-tune—it would be
extremely uplifting and edifying. The decay of regular churchgoing has
inevitably led to this invasion of the music-hall by the hymn. People
still want to feel the good uplifting emotion, and they feel it with a
vengeance when they listen to songs about
the land of beginning again,
Where skies are always blue ...
Where broken dreams come true.
The great advantage of the music-hall over the church is that the
uplifting moments do not last too long.
Finally, there is the great Home motif. “I want to be,” these lyrics
always begin, “I want to be almost anywhere that is not the place where
I happen at the moment to be.” M. Louis Estève has called this longing
“Le Mal de la Province,” which in its turn is closely related to “Le Mal
de l’au-delà.” It is one of the worst symptoms of romanticism.
Steamer, balançant ta mâture,
Lève l’ancre vers une exotique nature,
exclaims Mallarmé, and the Folk, whom that most exquisite of poets
loathed and despised, echo his words in a hundred different keys. There
is not a State in America where they don’t want to go. In _McGlennon_ we
find yearnings expressed for California, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and
Georgia. Some sigh for Ireland, Devon, and the East. “Egypt! I am
calling you; oh, life is sweet and joys complete when at your feet I lay
[_sic_].” But the Southern States, the East, Devon, and Killarney are
not enough. The Mal de l’au-delà succeeds the Mal de la Province. The
Folk yearn for extra-mundane worlds. Here, for example, is an expression
of nostalgia for a mystical “Kingdom within your Eyes”:
Somewhere in somebody’s eyes
Is a place just divine,
Bounded by roses that kiss the dew
In those dear eyes that shine.
Somewhere beyond earthly dreams,
Where love’s flower never dies,
God made the world, and He gave it to me
In that kingdom within your eyes.
If there is any characteristic which distinguishes contemporary folk
poetry from the folk poetry of other times it is surely its
meaninglessness. Old folk poetry is singularly direct and to the point,
full of pregnant meaning, never vague. Modern folk poetry, as
exemplified in _McGlennon_, is almost perfectly senseless. The
Elizabethan peasant or mechanic would never have consented to sing or
listen to anything so flatulently meaningless as “Back from the Land of
Yesterday” or “The Kingdom within your Eyes.” His taste was for
something clear, definite and pregnant, like “Greensleeves”:
And every morning when you rose,
I brought you dainties orderly,
To clear your stomach from all woes—
And yet you would not love me.
Could anything be more logical and to the point? But we, instead of
logic, instead of clarity, are provided by our professional entertainers
with the drivelling imbecility of “Granny, my own.” Can it be that the
standard of intelligence is lower now than it was three hundred years
ago? Have newspapers and cinemas and now the wireless telephone
conspired to rob mankind of whatever sense of reality, whatever power of
individual questioning and criticism he once possessed? I do not venture
to answer. But the fact of _McGlennon_ has somehow got to be explained.
How? I prefer to leave the problem on a note of interrogation.
VIII: BIBLIOPHILY
Bibliophily is on the increase. It is a constatation which I make with
regret; for the bibliophile’s point of view is, to me at least,
unsympathetic and his standard of values unsound. Among the French,
bibliophily would seem to have become a kind of mania, and, what is
more, a highly organized and thoroughly exploited mania. Whenever I get
a new French book I turn at once—for in what disgusts and irritates one
there is always a certain odious fascination—to the fly-leaf. One had
always been accustomed to finding there a brief description of the
“vingt exemplaires sur papier hollande Van Gelder”; nobody objected to
the modest old Dutchman whose paper gave to the author’s presentation
copies so handsome an appearance. But Van Gelder is now a back number.
In this third decade of the twentieth century he has become altogether
too simple and unsophisticated. On the fly-leaf of a _dernière
nouveauté_ I find the following incantation, printed in block capitals
and occupying at least twenty lines:
Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage, après impositions spéciales, 133
exemplaires in-4. Tellière sur papier-vergé pur-fil Lafuma-Navarre, au
filigrane de la _Nouvelle Revue Française_, dont 18 exemplaires hors
commerce, marqués de A à R, 100 exemplaires réservés aux Bibliophiles
de la _Nouvelle Revue Française_, numérotés de I à C, 15 exemplaires
numérotés de CI à CXV; 1040 exemplaires sur papier vélin pur-fil
Lafuma-Navarre, dont dix exemplaires hors commerce marqués de a à j,
800 exemplaires réservés aux amis de l’Edition originale, numérotés de
1 à 800, 30 exemplaires d’auteur, hors commerce, numérotés de 801 à
830 et 200 exemplaires numérotés de 831 à 1030, ce tirage constituant
proprement et authentiquement l’Edition originale.
If I were one of the hundred Bibliophiles of the _Nouvelle Revue
Française_ or even one of the eight hundred Friends of the Original
Edition, I should suggest, with the utmost politeness, that the
publishers might deserve better of their fellow-beings if they spent
less pains on numbering the first edition and more on seeing that it was
properly produced. Personally, I am the friend of any edition which is
reasonably well printed and bound, reasonably correct in the text and
reasonably clean. The consciousness that I possess a numbered copy of an
edition printed on Lafuma-Navarre paper, duly watermarked with the
publisher’s initials, does not make up for the fact that the book is
full of gross printer’s errors and that a whole sheet of sixteen pages
has wandered, during the process of binding, from one end of the volume
to the other—occurrences which are quite unnecessarily frequent in the
history of French book production.
With the increased attention paid to bibliophilous niceties, has come a
great increase in price. Limited _éditions de luxe_ have become absurdly
common in France, and there are dozens of small publishing concerns
which produce almost nothing else. Authors like Monsieur André Salmon
and Monsieur Max Jacob scarcely ever appear at less than twenty francs a
volume. Even with the exchange this is a formidable price; and yet the
French bibliophiles, for whom twenty francs are really twenty francs,
appear to have an insatiable appetite for these small and beautiful
editions. The War has established a new economic law: the poorer one
becomes the more one can afford to spend on luxuries.
The ordinary English publisher has never gone in for Van Gelder,
Lafuma-Navarre and numbered editions. Reticent about figures, he leaves
the book collector to estimate the first edition’s future rarity by
guesswork. He creates no artificial scarcity values. The collector of
contemporary English first editions is wholly a speculator; he never
knows what time may have in store.
In the picture trade for years past nobody has pretended that there was
any particular relation between the price of a picture and its value as
a work of art. A magnificent El Greco is bought for about a tenth of the
sum paid for a Romney that would be condemned by any self-respecting
hanging-committee. We are so well used to this sort of thing in picture
dealing that we have almost ceased to comment on it. But in the book
trade the tendency to create huge artificial values is of a later
growth. The spectacle of a single book being bought for fifteen thousand
pounds is still sufficiently novel to arouse indignation. Moreover, the
book collector who pays vast sums for his treasures has even less excuse
than has the collector of pictures. The value of an old book is wholly a
scarcity value. From a picture one may get a genuine æsthetic pleasure;
in buying a picture one buys the unique right to feel that pleasure. But
nobody can pretend that _Venus and Adonis_ is more delightful when it is
read in a fifteen thousand pound unique copy than when it is read in a
volume that has cost a shilling. On the whole, the printing and general
appearance of the shilling book is likely to be the better of the two.
The purchaser of the fabulously expensive old book is satisfying only
his possessive instinct. The buyer of a picture may also have a genuine
feeling for beauty.
The triumph and the _reductio ad absurdum_ of bibliophily were witnessed
not long ago at Sotheby’s, when the late Mr. Smith of New York bought
eighty thousand pounds’ worth of books in something under two hours at
the Britwell Court sale. The War, it is said, created forty thousand new
millionaires in America; the New York bookseller can have had no lack of
potential clients. He bought a thousand guinea volume as an ordinary
human being might buy something off the sixpenny shelf in a second-hand
shop. I have seldom witnessed a spectacle which inspired in me an
intenser blast of moral indignation. Moral indignation, of course, is
always to be mistrusted as, wholly or in part, the disguised
manifestation of some ignoble passion. In this case the basic cause of
my indignation was clearly envy. But there was, I flatter myself, a
superstructure of disinterested moral feeling. To debase a book into an
expensive object of luxury is as surely, in Miltonic language, “to kill
the image of God, as it were in the eye” as to burn it. And when one
thinks how those eighty thousand pounds might have been spent.... Ah,
well!
IX: DEMOCRATIC ART
There is intoxication to be found in a crowd. For it is good to be one
of many all doing the same thing—good whatever the thing may be, whether
singing hymns, watching a football match, or applauding the eternal
truths of politicians. Anything will serve as an excuse. It matters not
in whose name your two or three thousand are gathered together; what is
important is the process of gathering. In these last days we have
witnessed a most illuminating example of this tendency in the wild
outburst of mob excitement over the arrival in this country of Mary
Pickford. It is not as though people were really very much interested in
the Little Sweetheart of the World. She is no more than an excuse for
assembling in a crowd and working up a powerful communal emotion. The
newspapers set the excitement going; they built the fire, applied the
match, and cherished the infant flame. The crowds, only too happy to be
kindled, did the rest; they burned.
I belong to that class of unhappy people who are not easily infected by
crowd excitement. Too often I find myself sadly and coldly unmoved in
the midst of multitudinous emotion. Few sensations are more
disagreeable. The defect is in part temperamental, and in part is due to
that intellectual snobbishness, that fastidious rejection of what is
easy and obvious, which is one of the melancholy consequences of the
acquisition of culture. How often one regrets this asceticism of the
mind! How wistfully sometimes one longs to be able to rid oneself of the
habit of rejection and selection, and to enjoy all the dear, obviously
luscious, idiotic emotions without an afterthought! And indeed, however
much we may admire the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach, we all of us have a
soft spot somewhere in our minds that is sensitive to “Roses in
Picardy.” But the soft spot is surrounded by hard spots; the enjoyment
is never unmixed with critical disapprobation. The excuses for working
up a communal emotion, even communal emotion itself, are rejected as too
gross. We turn from them as a cœnobite of the Thebaid would have turned
from dancing girls or a steaming dish of tripe and onions.
I have before me now a little book, recently arrived from America, which
points out the way in which the random mob emotion may be systematically
organized into a kind of religion. This volume, _The Will of Song_ (Boni
& Liveright, 70 c.), is the joint production of Messrs. Harry Barnhart
and Percy MacKaye. “How are art and social service to be reconciled?...
How shall the Hermit Soul of the Individual Poet give valid, spontaneous
expression to the Communal Soul of assembled multitudes? How may the
surging Tides of Man be sluiced in Conduits of Art, without losing their
primal glory and momentum?” These questions and many others, involving a
great expense of capital letters, are asked by Mr. MacKaye and answered
in _The Will of Song_, which bears the qualifying sub-title, “A Dramatic
Service of Community Singing.”
The service is democratically undogmatic. Abstractions, such as Will,
Imagination, Joy, Love and Liberty, some of whom are represented in the
dramatic performance, not by individuals, but by Group Personages
(_i.e._, choruses), chant about Brotherhood in a semi-Biblical
phraseology that is almost wholly empty of content. It is all
delightfully vague and non-committal, like a Cabinet Minister’s speech
about the League of Nations, and, like such a speech, leaves behind it a
comfortable glow, a noble feeling of uplift. But, like Cabinet
Ministers, preachers and all whose profession it is to move the people
by the emission of words, the authors of _The Will of Song_ are well
aware that what matters in a popular work of art is not the intellectual
content so much as the picturesqueness of its form and the emotion with
which it is presented. In the staging—if such a term is not
irreverent—of their service, Messrs. Barnhart and MacKaye have borrowed
from Roman Catholic ritual all its most effective emotion-creators. The
darknesses, the illuminations, the chiming bells, the solemn mysterious
voices, the choral responses—all these traditional devices have been
most scientifically exploited in the Communal Service.
These are the stage directions which herald the opening of the service:
As the final song of the Prelude ceases, the assembly hall grows
suddenly dark, and the DARKNESS is filled with fanfare of blowing
TRUMPETS. And now, taking up the trumpets’ refrain, the Orchestra
plays an elemental music, suggestive of rain, wind, thunder and the
rushing of waters; from behind the raised Central Seat great Flashes
of Fire spout upward, and while they are flaring there rises a FLAME
GOLD FIGURE, in a cone of light, who calls with deep, vibrant voice:
“Who has risen up from the heart of the people?” Instantaneous, from
three portions of the assembly, the VOICES OF THREE GROUPS, Men, Women
and Children, answer from the dark in triple unison: “I!”
Even from the cold print one can see that this opening would be
extremely effective. But doubts assail me. I have a horrid suspicion
that that elemental music would not sweep me off my feet as it ought to.
My fears are justified when, looking up the musical programme, I
discover that the elemental music is by Langey, and that the orchestral
accompaniments that follow are the work of Massenet, Tschaikovsky,
Langey once more, Julia Ward Howe and Sinding. Alas! once more one finds
oneself the slave of one’s habit of selection and rejection. One would
find oneself left out in the cold just because one couldn’t stand
Massenet. Those who have seen Sir James Barrie’s latest play, _Mary
Rose_, will perhaps recall the blasts of music which prelude the piece
and recur at every mystical moment throughout the play. In theory one
ought to have mounted on the wings of that music into a serene
acceptance of Sir James Barrie’s supernatural machinery; one ought to
have been filled by it with deeply religious emotions. In practice,
however, one found oneself shrinking with quivering nerves from the
poignant vulgarity of that _Leitmotif_, isolated by what should have
united one with the author and the rest of the audience. The cœnobite
would like to eat the tripe and onions, but finds by experiment that the
smell of the dish makes him feel rather sick.
One must not, however, reject such things as _The Will of Song_ as
absolutely and entirely bad. They are useful, they are even good, on
their own plane and for people who belong to a certain order of the
spiritual hierarchy. _The Will of Song_, set to elemental music by
Massenet and Julia Ward Howe, may be a moving spiritual force for people
to whom, shall we say, Wagner means nothing; just as Wagner himself may
be of spiritual importance to people belonging to a slightly higher
caste, but still incapable of understanding or getting any good out of
the highest, the transcendent works of art—out of the Mass in D, for
example, or Sonata Op. 111.
The democratically minded will ask what right we have to say that the
Mass in D is better than the works of Julia Ward Howe, what right we
have to assign a lower place in the spiritual hierarchy to the admirers
of _The Will of Song_ than to the admirers of Beethoven. They will
insist that there is no hierarchy at all; that every creature possessing
humanity, possessing even life, is as good and as important, by the mere
fact of that possession, as any other creature. It is not altogether
easy to answer these objections. The arguments on both sides are
ultimately based on conviction and faith. The best one can do to
convince the paradoxical democrat of the real superiority of the Mass in
D over _The Will of Song_ is to point out that, in a sense, one contains
the other; that _The Will of Song_ is a part, and a very small part at
that, of a great Whole of human experience, to which the Mass in D much
more nearly approximates. In _The Will of Song_, and its “elemental”
accompaniment one knows exactly how every effect is obtained; its range
of emotional and intellectual experience is extremely limited and
perfectly familiar. But the range of the Mass in D is enormously much
larger; it includes within itself the range of _The Will of Song_, takes
it for granted, so to speak, and reaches out into remoter spheres of
experience. It is in a real sense quantitatively larger than _The Will
of Song_. To the democrat who believes in majorities this is an argument
which must surely prove convincing.
X: ACCUMULATIONS
In the brevity of life and the perishableness of material things the
moral philosophers have always found one of their happiest themes.
“Time, which antiquates Antiquities, hath an Art to make dust of all
things.” There is nothing more moving than those swelling elegiac organ
notes in which they have celebrated the mortality of man and all his
works. Those of us for whom the proper study of mankind is books dwell
with the most poignant melancholy over the destruction of literary
treasures. We think of all the pre-Platonic philosophers of whose
writings only a few sentences remain. We think of Sappho’s poems, all
but completely blotted from our knowledge. We think of the missing
fragments of the “Satyricon,” and of many other precious pages which
once were and are now no more. We complain of the holes that time has
picked in the records of history, bewailing the loss of innumerable
vanished documents. As for buildings, pictures, statues and the
accumulated evidence of whole civilizations, all destroyed as though
they had never been, they do not belong to our literary province, and,
if they did, would be too numerous to catalogue even summarily.
But because men have once thought and felt in a certain way it does not
follow that they will for ever continue to do so. There seems every
probability that our descendants, some two or three centuries hence,
will wax pathetic in their complaints, not of the fragility, but the
horrible persistence and indestructibility of things. They will feel
themselves smothered by the intolerable accumulation of the years. The
men of to-day are so deeply penetrated with the sense of the
perishableness of matter that they have begun to take immense
precautions to preserve everything they can. Desolated by the
carelessness of our ancestors, we are making very sure that our
descendants shall lack no documents when they come to write our history.
All is systematically kept and catalogued. Old things are carefully
patched and propped into continued existence; things now new are hoarded
up and protected from decay.
To walk through the book-stores of one of the world’s great libraries is
an experience that cannot fail to set one thinking on the appalling
indestructibility of matter. A few years ago I explored the recently dug
cellars into which the overflow of the Bodleian pours in an unceasing
stream. The cellars extend under the northern half of the great
quadrangle in whose centre stands the Radcliffe Camera. These catacombs
are two storeys deep and lined with impermeable concrete. “The muddy
damps and ropy slime” of the traditional vault are absent in this great
necropolis of letters; huge ventilating pipes breathe blasts of a dry
and heated wind, that makes the place as snug and as unsympathetic to
decay as the deserts of Central Asia. The books stand in metal cases
constructed so as to slide in and out of position on rails. So ingenious
is the arrangement of the cases that it is possible to fill two-thirds
of the available space, solidly, with books. Twenty years or so hence,
when the existing vaults will take no more books, a new cellar can be
dug on the opposite side of the Camera. And when that is full—it is only
a matter of half a century from now—what then? We shrug our shoulders.
After us the deluge. But let us hope that Bodley’s Librarian of 1970
will have the courage to emend the last word to “bonfire.” To the
bonfire! That is the only satisfactory solution of an intolerable
problem.
The deliberate preservation of things must be compensated for by their
deliberate and judicious destruction. Otherwise the world will be
overwhelmed by the accumulation of antique objects. Pigs and rabbits and
watercress, when they were first introduced into New Zealand, threatened
to lay waste the country, because there were no compensating forces of
destruction to put a stop to their indefinite multiplication. In the
same way, mere things, once they are set above the natural laws of
decay, will end by burying us, unless we set about methodically to get
rid of the nuisance. The plea that they should all be preserved—every
novel by Nat Gould, every issue of the _Funny Wonder_—as historical
documents is not a sound one. Where too many documents exist it is
impossible to write history at all. “For ignorance,” in the felicitous
words of Mr. Lytton Strachey, “is the first requisite of the
historian—ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and
omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.” Nobody
wants to know everything—the irrelevancies as well as the important
facts—about the past; or in any case nobody ought to desire to know.
Those who do, those who are eaten up by an itch for mere facts and
useless information, are the wretched victims of a vice no less
reprehensible than greed or drunkenness.
Hand in hand with this judicious process of destruction must go an
elaborate classification of what remains. As Mr. Wells says in his
large, opulent way, “the future world-state’s organization of scientific
research and record compared with that of to-day will be like an ocean
liner beside the dug-out canoe of some early heliolithic wanderer.” With
the vast and indiscriminate multiplication of books and periodicals our
organization of records tends to become ever more heliolithic. Useful
information on any given subject is so widely scattered or may be hidden
in such obscure places that the student is often at a loss to know what
he ought to study or where. An immense international labour of
bibliography and classification must be undertaken at no very distant
date, if future generations of researchers are to make the fullest use
of the knowledge that has already been gained.
But this constructive labour will be tedious and insipid compared with
the glorious business of destruction. Huge bonfires of paper will blaze
for days and weeks together, whenever the libraries undertake their
periodical purgation. The only danger, and, alas! it is a very real
danger, is that the libraries will infallibly purge themselves of the
wrong books. We all know what librarians are; and not only librarians,
but critics, literary men, general public—everybody, in fact, with the
exception of ourselves—we know what they are like, we know them: there
never was a set of people with such bad taste! Committees will doubtless
be set up to pass judgment on books, awarding acquittals and
condemnations in magisterial fashion. It will be a sort of gigantic
Hawthornden competition. At that thought I find that the flames of my
great bonfires lose much of their imagined lustre.
XI: ON DEVIATING INTO SENSE
There is a story, very dear for some reason to our ancestors, that
Apelles, or I forget what other Greek painter, grown desperate at the
failure of his efforts to portray realistically the foam on a dog’s
mouth, threw his sponge at the picture in a pet, and was rewarded for
his ill-temper by discovering that the resultant smudge was the living
image of the froth whose aspect he had been unable, with all his art, to
recapture. No one will ever know the history of all the happy mistakes,
the accidents and unconscious deviations into genius, that have helped
to enrich the world’s art. They are probably countless. I myself have
deviated more than once into accidental felicities. Recently, for
example, the hazards of careless typewriting caused me to invent a new
portmanteau word of the most brilliantly Laforguian quality. I had meant
to write the phrase “the Human Comedy,” but, by a happy slip, I put my
finger on the letter that stands next to “C” on the universal keyboard.
When I came to read over the completed page I found that I had written
“the Human Vomedy.” Was there ever a criticism of life more succinct and
expressive? To the more sensitive and queasy among the gods the last few
years must indeed have seemed a vomedy of the first order.
The grossest forms of mistake have played quite a distinguished part in
the history of letters. One thinks, for example, of the name Criseida or
Cressida manufactured out of a Greek accusative, of that Spenserian
misunderstanding of Chaucer which gave currency to the rather ridiculous
substantive “derring-do.” Less familiar, but more deliciously absurd, is
Chaucer’s slip in reading “naves ballatrices” for “naves
bellatrices”—ballet-ships instead of battle-ships—and his translation
“shippes hoppesteres.” But these broad, straightforward howlers are
uninteresting compared with the more subtle deviations into originality
occasionally achieved by authors who were trying their best not to be
original. Nowhere do we find more remarkable examples of accidental
brilliance than among the post-Chaucerian poets, whose very indistinct
knowledge of what precisely _was_ the metre in which they were trying to
write often caused them to produce very striking variations on the
staple English measure.
Chaucer’s variations from the decasyllable norm were deliberate. So, for
the most part, were those of his disciple Lydgate, whose favourite
“broken-backed” line, lacking the first syllable of the iambus that
follows the cæsura, is metrically of the greatest interest to
contemporary poets. Lydgate’s characteristic line follows this model:
For speechéless nothing maist thou speed.
Judiciously employed, the broken-backed line might yield very beautiful
effects. Lydgate, as has been said, was probably pretty conscious of
what he was doing. But his procrustean methods were apt to be a little
indiscriminate, and one wonders sometimes whether he was playing
variations on a known theme or whether he was rather tentatively groping
after the beautiful regularity of his master Chaucer. The later
fifteenth and sixteenth century poets seem to have worked very much in
the dark. The poems of such writers as Hawes and Skelton abound in the
vaguest parodies of the decasyllable line. Anything from seven to
fifteen syllables will serve their turn. With them the variations are
seldom interesting. Chance had not much opportunity of producing subtle
metrical effects with a man like Skelton, whose mind was naturally so
full of jigging doggerel that his variations on the decasyllable are
mostly in the nature of rough skeltonics. I have found interesting
accidental variations on the decasyllable in Heywood, the writer of
moralities. This, from the _Play of Love_, has a real metrical beauty:
Felt ye but one pang such as I feel many,
One pang of despair or one pang of desire,
One pang of one displeasant look of her eye,
One pang of one word of her mouth as in ire,
Or in restraint of her love which I desire—
One pang of all these, felt once in all your life,
Should quail your opinion and quench all our strife.
These dactylic resolutions of the third and fourth lines are extremely
interesting.
But the most remarkable example of accidental metrical invention that I
have yet come across is to be found in the Earl of Surrey’s translation
of Horace’s ode on the golden mean. Surrey was one of the pioneers of
the reaction against the vagueness and uncertain carelessness of the
post-Chaucerians. From the example of Italian poetry he had learned that
a line must have a fixed number of syllables. In all his poems his aim
is always to achieve regularity at whatever cost. To make sure of having
ten syllables in every line it is evident that Surrey made use of his
fingers as well as his ears. We see him at his worst and most laborious
in the first stanza of his translation:
Of thy life, Thomas, this compass well mark:
Ne by coward dread in shunning storms dark
Not aye with full sails the high seas to beat;
On shallow shores thy keel in peril freat.
The ten syllables are there all right, but except in the last line there
is no recognizable rhythm of any kind, whether regular or irregular. But
when Surrey comes to the second stanza—
Auream quisquis mediocritatem
Diligit, tutus caret obsoleti
Sordibus tecti, caret invidenda
Sobrius aula—
some lucky accident inspires him with the genius to translate in these
words:
Whoso gladly halseth the golden mean,
Void of dangers advisedly hath his home;
Not with loathsome muck as a den unclean,
Nor palace like, whereat disdain may gloam.
Not only is this a very good translation, but it is also a very
interesting and subtle metrical experiment. What could be more
felicitous than this stanza made up of three trochaic lines, quickened
by beautiful dactylic resolutions, and a final iambic line of regular
measure—the recognized tonic chord that brings the music to its close?
And yet the tunelessness of the first stanza is enough to prove that
Surrey’s achievement is as much a product of accident as the foam on the
jaws of Apelles’ dog. He was doing his best all the time to write
decasyllabics with the normal iambic beat of the last line. His failures
to do so were sometimes unconscious strokes of genius.
XII: POLITE CONVERSATION
There are some people to whom the most difficult to obey of all the
commandments is that which enjoins us to suffer fools gladly. The
prevalence of folly, its monumental, unchanging permanence and its
almost invariable triumph over intelligence are phenomena which they
cannot contemplate without experiencing a passion of righteous
indignation or, at the least, of ill-temper. Sages like Anatole France,
who can probe and anatomize human stupidity and still remain serenely
detached, are rare. These reflections were suggested by a book recently
published in New York and entitled _The American Credo_. The authors of
this work are those _enfants terribles_ of American criticism, Messrs.
H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. They have compiled a list of four
hundred and eighty-eight articles of faith which form the fundamental
Credo of the American people, prefacing them with a very entertaining
essay on the national mind:
Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is
never precisely the same at two successive moments. But error flows
down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or
infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in
a world of chaos.
To look through the articles of the Credo is to realize that there is a
good deal of truth in this statement. Such beliefs as the following—not
by any means confined to America alone—are probably at least as old as
the Great Pyramid:
That if a woman, about to become a mother, plays the piano every day,
her baby will be born a Victor Herbert.
That the accumulation of great wealth always brings with it great
unhappiness.
That it is bad luck to kill a spider.
That water rots the hair and thus causes baldness.
That if a bride wears an old garter with her new finery, she will have a
happy married life.
That children were much better behaved twenty years ago than they are
to-day.
And most of the others in the collection, albeit clothed in forms
distinctively contemporary and American, are simply variations on
notions as immemorial.
Inevitably, as one reads _The American Credo_, one is reminded of an
abler, a more pitiless and ferocious onslaught on stupidity, I mean
Swift’s “_Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation,
according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court and in
the Best Companies of England_. In three Dialogues. By Simon Wagstaff,
Esq.” I was inspired after reading Messrs. Mencken and Nathan’s work to
refresh my memories of this diabolic picture of the social amenities.
And what a book it is! There is something almost appalling in the way it
goes on and on, a continuous, never-ceasing stream of imbecility. Simon
Wagstaff, it will be remembered, spent the best part of forty years in
collecting and digesting these gems of polite conversation:
I can faithfully assure the reader that there is not one single witty
phrase in the whole Collection which has not received the Stamp and
Approbation of at least One Hundred Years, and how much longer it is
hard to determine; he may therefore be secure to find them all
genuine, sterling and authentic.
How genuine, sterling and authentic Mr. Wagstaff’s treasures of polite
conversation are is proved by the great number of them which have
withstood all the ravages of time, and still do as good service to-day
as they did in the early seventeen-hundreds or in the days of Henry
VIII.: “Go, you Girl, and warm some fresh Cream.” “Indeed, Madam,
there’s none left; for the Cat has eaten it all.” “I doubt it was a Cat
with Two Legs.”
“And, pray, What News, Mr. Neverout?” “Why, Madam, Queen Elizabeth’s
dead.” (It would be interesting to discover at exactly what date Queen
Anne took the place of Queen Elizabeth in this grand old repartee, or
who was the monarch referred to when the Virgin Queen was still alive.
Aspirants to the degree of B. or D.Litt. might do worse than to take
this problem as a subject for their thesis.)
Some of the choicest phrases have come down in the world since Mr.
Wagstaff’s day. Thus, Miss Notable’s retort to Mr. Neverout, “Go, teach
your Grannam to suck Eggs,” could only be heard now in the dormitory of
a preparatory school. Others have become slightly modified. Mr. Neverout
says, “Well, all Things have an End, and a pudden has two.” I think we
may flatter ourselves that the modern emendation, “except a roly-poly
pudding, which has two,” is an improvement.
Mr. Wagstaff’s second dialogue, wherein he treats of Polite Conversation
at meals, contains more phrases that testify to the unbroken continuity
of tradition than either of the others. The conversation that centres on
the sirloin of beef is worthy to be recorded in its entirety:
LADY SMART. Come, Colonel, handle your Arms. Shall I help you to some
Beef?
COLONEL. If your Ladyship please; and, pray, don’t cut like a
Mother-in-law, but send me a large Slice; for I love to lay a good
Foundation. I vow, ’tis a noble Sir-loyn.
NEVEROUT. Ay; here’s cut and come again.
MISS. But, pray; why is it call’d a Sir-loyn?
LORD SMART. Why, you must know that our King James the First, who
lov’d good Eating, being invited to Dinner by one of his Nobles, and
seeing a large Loyn of Beef at his Table, he drew out his Sword, and,
in a Frolic, knighted it. Few people know the Secret of this.
How delightful it is to find that we have Mr. Wagstaff’s warrant for
such gems of wisdom as, “Cheese digests everything except itself,” and
“If you eat till you’re cold, you’ll live to grow old”! If they were a
hundred years old in his day they are fully three hundred now. Long may
they survive! I was sorry, however, to notice that one of the best of
Mr. Wagstaff’s phrases has been, in the revolution of time, completely
lost. Indeed, before I had read Aubrey’s “Lives,” Lord Sparkish’s
remark, “Come, box it about; ’twill come to my Father at last,” was
quite incomprehensible to me. The phrase is taken from a story of Sir
Walter Raleigh and his son.
Sir Walter Raleigh [says Aubrey] being invited to dinner to some great
person where his son was to goe with him, he sayd to his son, “Thou
art expected to-day at dinner to goe along with me, but thou art so
quarrelsome and affronting that I am ashamed to have such a beare in
my company.” Mr. Walter humbled himselfe to his father and promised he
would behave himselfe mighty mannerly. So away they went. He sate next
to his father and was very demure at least halfe dinner time. Then
sayd he, “I this morning, not having the feare of God before my eies,
but by the instigation of the devill, went....”
At this point Mr. Clark, in his edition, suppresses four lines of
Aubrey’s text; but one can imagine the sort of thing Master Walter said.
Sir Walter, being strangely surprized and putt out of countenance at
so great a table, gives his son a damned blow over the face. His son,
as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes over the
face the gentleman that sate next to him and sayd, “Box about: ’twill
come to my father anon.” ’Tis now a common-used proverb.
And so it still deserves to be; how, when and why it became extinct, I
have no idea. Here is another good subject for a thesis.
There are but few things in Mr. Wagstaff’s dialogue which appear
definitely out of date and strange to us, and these super-annuations can
easily be accounted for. Thus the repeal of the Criminal Laws has made
almost incomprehensible the constant references to hanging made by Mr.
Wagstaff’s personages. The oaths and the occasional mild grossnesses
have gone out of fashion in mixed polite society. Otherwise their
conversation is in all essentials exactly the same as the conversation
of the present day. And this is not to be wondered at; for, as a wise
man has said:
Speech at the present time retains strong evidence of the survival in
it of the function of herd recognition.... The function of
conversation is ordinarily regarded as being the exchange of ideas and
information. Doubtless it has come to have such a function, but an
objective examination of ordinary conversation shows that the actual
conveyance of ideas takes a very small part in it. As a rule the
exchange seems to consist of ideas which are necessarily common to the
two speakers and are known to be so by each.... Conversation between
persons unknown to one another is apt to be rich in the ritual of
recognition. When one hears or takes part in these elaborate
evolutions, gingerly proffering one after another of one’s marks of
identity, one’s views on the weather, on fresh air and draughts, on
the Government and on uric acid, watching intently for the first low
hint of a growl, which will show one belongs to the wrong pack and
must withdraw, it is impossible not to be reminded of the similar
manœuvres of the dog and to be thankful that Nature has provided us
with a less direct, though perhaps a more tedious, code.
XIII: NATIONALITY IN LOVE
The hazards of indiscriminate rummaging in bookshops have introduced me
to two volumes of verse which seem to me (though I am ordinarily very
sceptical of those grandiose generalizations about racial and national
characteristics, so beloved of a certain class of literary people) to
illustrate very clearly some of the differences between the French and
English mind. The first is a little book published some few months back
and entitled _Les Baisers_.... The publisher says of it in one of those
exquisitely literary puffs which are the glory of the Paris book trade:
“Un volume de vers? Non pas! Simplement des baisers mis en vers, des
baisers variés comme l’heure qui passe, inconstants comme l’Amour
lui-même.... Baisers, baisers, c’est toute leur troublante musique qui
chante dans ces rimes.” The other volume hails from the antipodes and is
called _Songs of Love and Life_. No publisher’s puff accompanies it; but
a coloured picture on the dust-wrapper represents a nymph frantically
clutching at a coy shepherd. A portrait of the authoress serves as a
frontispiece. Both books are erotic in character, and both are very
indifferent in poetical quality. They are only interesting as
illustrations, the more vivid because of their very second-rateness, of
the two characteristic methods of approach, French and English, to the
theme of physical passion.
The author of _Les Baisers_ approaches his amorous experiences with the
detached manner of a psychologist interested in the mental reactions of
certain corporeal pleasures whose mechanism he has previously studied in
his capacity of physiological observer. His attitude is the same as that
of the writers of those comedies of manners which hold the stage in the
theatres of the boulevards. It is dry, precise, matter-of-fact and
almost scientific. The comedian of the boulevards does not concern
himself with trying to find some sort of metaphysical justification for
the raptures of physical passion, nor is he in any way a propagandist of
sensuality. He is simply an analyst of facts, whose business it is to
get all the wit that is possible out of an equivocal situation.
Similarly, the author of these poems is far too highly sophisticated to
imagine that
every spirit as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For of the soul the body form doth take;
For soul is form and doth the body make.
He does not try to make us believe that physical pleasures have a divine
justification. Neither has he any wish to “make us grovel, hand and foot
in Belial’s gripe.” He is merely engaged in remembering “des heures et
des entretiens” which were extremely pleasant—hours which strike for
every one, conversations and meetings which are taking place in all
parts of the world and at every moment.
This attitude towards _volupté_ is sufficiently old in France to have
made possible the evolution of a very precise and definite vocabulary in
which to describe its phenomena. This language is as exact as the
technical jargon of a trade, and as elegant as the Latin of Petronius.
It is a language of which we have no equivalent in our English
literature. It is impossible in English to describe _volupté_ elegantly;
it is hardly possible to write of it without being gross. To begin with,
we do not even possess a word equivalent to _volupté_. “Voluptuousness”
is feeble and almost meaningless; “pleasure” is hopelessly inadequate.
From the first the English writer is at a loss; he cannot even name
precisely the thing he proposes to describe and analyze. But for the
most part he has not much use for such a language. His approach to the
subject is not dispassionate and scientific, and he has no need for
technicalities. The English amorist is inclined to approach the subject
rapturously, passionately, philosophically—almost in any way that is not
the wittily matter-of-fact French way.
In our rich Australian _Songs of Love and Life_ we see the
rapturous-philosophic approach reduced to something that is very nearly
the absurd. Overcome with the intensities of connubial bliss, the
authoress feels it necessary to find a sort of justification for them by
relating them in some way with the cosmos. God, we are told,
looking through His hills on you and me,
Feeds Heaven upon the flame of our desire.
Or again:
Our passions breathe their own wild harmony,
And pour out music at a clinging kiss.
Sing on, O Soul, our lyric of desire,
For God Himself is in the melody.
Meanwhile the author of _Les Baisers_, always elegantly _terre-à-terre_,
formulates his more concrete desires in an Alexandrine worthy of Racine:
Viens. Je veux dégrafer moi-même ton corsage.
The desire to involve the cosmos in our emotions is by no means confined
to the poetess of _Songs of Love and Life_. In certain cases we are all
apt to invoke the universe in an attempt to explain and account for
emotions whose intensity seems almost inexplicable. This is particularly
true of the emotions aroused in us by the contemplation of beauty. Why
we should feel so strongly when confronted with certain forms and
colours, certain sounds, certain verbal suggestions of form and
harmony—why the thing which we call beauty should move us at
all—goodness only knows. In order to explain the phenomenon, poets have
involved the universe in the matter, asserting that they are moved by
the contemplation of physical beauty because it is the symbol of the
divine. The intensities of physical passion have presented the same
problem. Ashamed of admitting that such feelings can have a purely
sublunary cause, we affirm, like the Australian poetess, that “God
Himself is in the melody.” That, we argue, can be the only explanation
for the violence of the emotion. This view of the matter is particularly
common in a country with fundamental puritanic traditions like England,
where the dry, matter-of-fact attitude of the French seems almost
shocking. The puritan feels bound to justify the facts of beauty and
_volupté_. They must be in some way made moral before he can accept
them. The French unpuritanic mind accepts the facts as they are tendered
to it by experience, at their face value.
XIV: HOW THE DAYS DRAW IN!
The autumn equinox is close upon us with all its presages of mortality,
a shortening day, a colder and longer night. How the days draw in! Fear
of ridicule hardly allows one to make the melancholy constatation. It is
a conversational gambit that, like fool’s mate, can only be used against
the simplest and least experienced of players. And yet how much of the
world’s most moving poetry is nothing but a variation on the theme of
this in-drawing day! The certainty of death has inspired more poetry
than the hope of immortality. The visible transience of frail and lovely
matter has impressed itself more profoundly on the mind of man than the
notion of spiritual permanence.
Et l’on verra bientôt surgir du sein de l’onde
La première clarté de mon dernier soleil.
That is an article of faith from which nobody can withhold assent.
Of late I have found myself almost incapable of enjoying any poetry
whose inspiration is not despair or melancholy. Why, I hardly know.
Perhaps it is due to the chronic horror of the political situation. For
heaven knows, that is quite sufficient to account for a taste for
melancholy verse. The subject of any European government to-day feels
all the sensations of Gulliver in the paws of the Queen of Brobdingnag’s
monkey—the sensations of some small and helpless being at the mercy of
something monstrous and irresponsible and idiotic. There sits the monkey
“on the ridge of a building five hundred yards above the ground, holding
us like a baby in one of his fore paws.” Will he let go? Will he squeeze
us to death? The best we can hope for is to be “let drop on a ridge
tile,” with only enough bruises to keep one in bed for a fortnight. But
it seems very unlikely that some “honest lad will climb up and, putting
us in his breeches pocket, bring us down safe.” However, I divagate a
little from my subject, which is the poetry of melancholy.
Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall
contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and
despair. All the obvious people will be in it and as many of the obscure
apostles of gloom as vague and miscellaneous reading shall have made
known to me. A duly adequate amount of space, for example, will be
allotted to that all but great poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. For
dark magnificence there are not many things that can rival that summing
up against life and human destiny at the end of his “Mustapha.”
Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth nature by these diverse laws,
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?
Is it the mark or majesty of power
To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give....
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
Milton aimed at justifying the ways of God to man; Fulke Greville
gloomily denounces them.
Nor shall I omit from my anthology the extraordinary description in the
Prologue to “Alaham” of the Hell of Hells and of Privation, the peculiar
torment of the place:
Thou monster horrible, under whose ugly doom
Down in eternity’s perpetual night
Man’s temporal sins bear torments infinite,
For change of desolation must I come
To tempt the earth and to profane the light.
A place there is, upon no centre placed,
Deep under depths as far as is the sky
Above the earth, dark, infinitely spaced,
Pluto the king, the kingdom misery.
Privation would reign there, by God not made,
But creature of uncreated sin,
Whose being is all beings to invade,
To have no ending though it did begin;
And so of past, things present and to come,
To give depriving, not tormenting doom.
But horror in the understanding mixed....
Like most of his contemporaries in those happy days before the notion of
progress had been invented, Lord Brooke was what Peacock would have
called a “Pejorationist.” His political views (and they were also
Sidney’s) are reflected in his _Life of Sir Philip Sidney_. The best
that a statesman can do, according to these Elizabethan pessimists, is
to patch and prop the decaying fabric of society in the hope of staving
off for a little longer the final inevitable crash. It seems curious to
us, who have learnt to look at the Elizabethan age as the most splendid
in English history, that the men who were the witnesses of these
splendours should have regarded their time as an age of decadence.
The notion of the Fall was fruitful in despairing poetry. One of the
most remarkable products of this doctrine is a certain “Sonnet Chrétien”
by the seventeenth-century writer, Jean Ogier de Gombauld, surnamed “le
Beau Ténébreux.”
Cette source de mort, cette homicide peste,
Ce péché dont l’enfer a le monde infecté,
M’a laissé pour tout être un bruit d’avoir été,
Et je suis de moi-même une image funeste.
L’Auteur de l’univers, le Monarque céleste
S’était rendu visible en ma seule beauté.
Ce vieux titre d’honneur qu’autrefois j’ai porté
Et que je porte encore, est tout ce qui me reste.
Mais c’est fait de ma gloire, et je ne suis plus rien
Qu’un fantôme qui court après l’ombre d’un bien,
Ou qu’un corps animé du seul ver qui le ronge.
Non, je ne suis plus rien quand je veux m’éprouver,
Qu’un esprit ténébreux qui voit tout comme en songe
Et cherche incessament ce qu’il ne peut trouver.
There are astonishing lines in this, lines that might have been written
by a Baudelaire, if he had been born a Huguenot and two hundred years
before his time. That “carcase animated by the sole gnawing worm” is
something that one would expect to find rotting away among the sombre
and beautiful Flowers of Evil.
An amusing speculation. If Steinach’s rejuvenating operations on the old
become the normal and accepted thing, what will be the effect on poetry
of this abolition of the depressing process of decay? It may be that the
poetry of melancholy and despair is destined to lose its place in
literature, and that a spirit of what William James called
“healthy-mindedness” will inherit its kingdom. Many “eternal truths”
have already found their way on to the dust-heap of antiquated ideas. It
may be that this last and seemingly most inexorable of them—that life is
short and subject to a dreadful decay—will join the other great
commonplaces which have already perished out of literature.
The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee:
Timor mortis conturbat me:—
Some day, it may be, these sentiments will seem as hopelessly
superannuated as Milton’s cosmology.
XV: TIBET
In moments of complete despair, when it seems that all is for the worst
in the worst of all possible worlds, it is cheering to discover that
there are places where stupidity reigns even more despotically than in
Western Europe, where civilization is based on principles even more
fantastically unreasonable. Recent experience has shown me that the
depression into which the Peace, Mr. Churchill, the state of
contemporary literature, have conspired to plunge the mind, can be
sensibly relieved by a study, even superficial, of the manners and
customs of Tibet. The spectacle of an ancient and elaborate civilization
of which almost no detail is not entirely idiotic is in the highest
degree comforting and refreshing. It fills us with hopes of the ultimate
success of our own civilization; it restores our wavering
self-satisfaction in being citizens of industrialized Europe. Compared
with Tibet, we are prodigious. Let us cherish the comparison.
My informant about Tibetan civilization is a certain Japanese monk of
the name of Kawaguchi, who spent three years in Tibet at the beginning
of the present century. His account of the experience has been
translated into English, and published, with the title _Three Years in
Tibet_, by the Theosophical Society. It is one of the great travel books
of the world, and, so far as I am aware, the most interesting book on
Tibet that exists. Kawaguchi enjoyed opportunities in Tibet which no
European traveller could possibly have had. He attended the University
of Lhasa, he enjoyed the acquaintance of the Dalai Lama himself, he was
intimate with one of the four Ministers of Finance, he was the friend of
lama and layman, of all sorts and conditions of Tibetans, from the
highest class to the lowest—the despicable caste of smiths and butchers.
He knew his Tibet intimately; for those three years, indeed, he was for
all practical purposes a Tibetan. This is something which no European
explorer can claim, and it is this which gives Kawaguchi’s book its
unique interest.
The Japanese, like people of every other nationality except the Chinese,
are not permitted to enter Tibet. Mr. Kawaguchi did not allow this to
stand in the way of his pious mission—for his purpose in visiting Tibet
was to investigate the Buddhist writings and traditions of the place. He
made his way to India, and in a long stay at Darjeeling familiarized
himself with the Tibetan language. He then set out to walk across the
Himalayas. Not daring to affront the strictly guarded gates which bar
the direct route to Lhasa, he penetrated Tibet at its southwestern
corner, underwent prodigious hardships in an uninhabited desert eighteen
thousand feet above sea-level, visited the holy lake of Manosarovara,
and finally, after astonishing adventures, arrived in Lhasa. Here he
lived for nearly three years, passing himself off as a Chinaman. At the
end of that time his secret leaked out, and he was obliged to accelerate
his departure for India. So much for Kawaguchi himself, though I should
have liked to say more of him; for a more charming and sympathetic
character never revealed himself in a book.
Tibet is so full of fantastic low comedy that one hardly knows where to
begin a catalogue of its absurdities. Shall we start with the Tibetans’
highly organized service of trained nurses, whose sole duty it is to
prevent their patients from going to sleep? or with the Dalai Lama’s
chief source of income—the sale of pills made of dung, at, literally, a
guinea a box? or with the Tibetan custom of never washing from the
moment of birth, when, however, they are plentifully anointed with
melted butter, to the moment of death? And then there is the University
of Lhasa, which an eminent Cambridge philosopher has compared with the
University of Oxford—somewhat unjustly, perhaps; but let that pass. At
the University of Lhasa the student is instructed in logic and
philosophy; every year of his stay he has to learn by heart from one to
five or six hundred pages of holy texts. He is also taught mathematics,
but in Tibet this art is not carried farther than subtraction. It takes
twenty years to get a degree at the University of Lhasa—twenty years,
and then most of the candidates are ploughed. To obtain a superior Ph.D.
degree, entitling one to become a really holy and eminent lama, forty
years of application to study and to virtue are required. But it is
useless to try to make a catalogue of the delights of Tibet. There are
too many of them for mention in this small space. One can do no more
than glance at a few of the brighter spots in the system.
There is much to be said for the Tibetan system of taxation. The
Government requires a considerable revenue; for enormous sums have to be
spent in keeping perpetually burning in the principal Buddhist cathedral
of Lhasa an innumerable army of lamps, which may not be fed with
anything cheaper than clarified yak butter. This is the heaviest item of
expenditure. But a great deal of money also goes to supporting the
Tibetan clergy, who must number at least a sixth of the total
population. The money is raised by a poll tax, paid in kind, the amount
of which, fixed by ancient tradition, may, theoretically, never be
altered. Theoretically only; for the Tibetan Government employs in the
collection of taxes no fewer than twenty different standards of weight
and thirty-six different standards of measure. The pound may weigh
anything from half to a pound and a half; and the same with the units of
measure. It is thus possible to calculate with extraordinary nicety,
according to the standard of weight and measure in which your tax is
assessed, where precisely you stand in the Government’s favour. If you
are a notoriously bad character, or even if you are innocent, but live
in a bad district, your tax will have to be paid in measures of the
largest size. If you are virtuous, or, better, if you are rich, of good
family and _bien pensant_, then you will pay by weights which are only
half the nominal weight. For those whom the Government neither hates nor
loves, but regards with more or less contempt or tolerance, there are
the thirty-four intervening degrees.
Kawaguchi’s final judgment of the Tibetans, after three years’ intimate
acquaintance with them, is not a flattering one:
The Tibetans are characterized by four serious defects, these being:
filthiness, superstition, unnatural customs (such as polyandry), and
unnatural art. I should be sorely perplexed if I were asked to name
their redeeming points; but if I had to do so, I should mention first
of all the fine climate in the vicinity of Lhasa and Shigatze, their
sonorous and refreshing voices in reading the Text, the animated style
of their catechisms, and their ancient art.
Certainly a bad lot of vices; but then the Tibetan virtues are not
lightly to be set aside. We English possess none of them: our climate is
abominable, our method of reading the holy texts is painful in the
extreme, our catechisms, at least in my young days, were far from
animated, and our ancient art is very indifferent stuff. But still, in
spite of these defects, in spite of Mr. Churchill and the state of
contemporary literature, we can still look at the Tibetans and feel
reassured.
XVI: BEAUTY IN 1920
To those who know how to read the signs of the times it will have become
apparent, in the course of these last days and weeks, that the Silly
Season is close upon us. Already—and this in July with the menace of
three or four new wars grumbling on the thunderous horizon—already a
monster of the deep has appeared at a popular seaside resort. Already
Mr. Louis McQuilland has launched in the _Daily Express_ a fierce
onslaught on the younger poets of the Asylum. Already the picture-papers
are more than half filled with photographs of bathing nymphs—photographs
that make one understand the ease with which St. Anthony rebuffed his
temptations. The newspapermen, ramping up and down like wolves, seek
their prey wherever they may find it; and it was with a unanimous howl
of delight that the whole Press went pelting after the hare started by
Mrs. Asquith in a recent instalment of her autobiography. Feebly and
belatedly, let me follow the pack.
Mrs. Asquith’s denial of beauty to the daughters of the twentieth
century has proved a god-sent giant gooseberry. It has necessitated the
calling in of a whole host of skin-food specialists, portrait-painters
and photographers to deny this far from soft impeachment. A great deal
of space has been agreeably and inexpensively filled. Every one is
satisfied, public, editors, skin-food specialists and all. But by far
the most interesting contribution to the debate was a pictorial one,
which appeared, if I remember rightly, in the _Daily News_. Side by
side, on the same page, we were shown the photographs of three beauties
of the eighteen-eighties and three of the nineteen-twenties. The
comparison was most instructive. For a great gulf separates the two
types of beauty represented by these two sets of photographs.
I remember in _If_, one of those charming conspiracies of E. V. Lucas
and George Morrow, a series of parodied fashion-plates entitled “If
Faces get any Flatter. Last year’s standard, this year’s Evening
Standard.” The faces of our living specimens of beauty have grown
flatter with those of their fashion-plate sisters. Compare the types of
1880 and 1920. The first is steep-faced, almost Roman in profile; in the
contemporary beauties the face has broadened and shortened, the profile
is less noble, less imposing, more appealingly, more alluringly pretty.
Forty years ago it was the aristocratic type that was appreciated;
to-day the popular taste has shifted from the countess to the soubrette.
Photography confirms the fact that the ladies of the ’eighties looked
like Du Maurier drawings. But among the present young generation one
looks in vain for the type; the Du Maurier damsel is as extinct as the
mesozoic reptile; the Fish girl and other kindred flat-faced species
have taken her place.
Between the ’thirties and ’fifties another type, the egg-faced girl,
reigned supreme in the affections of the world. From the early portraits
of Queen Victoria to the fashion-plates in the _Ladies’ Keepsake_ this
invariable type prevails—the egg-shaped face, the sleek hair, the
swan-like neck, the round, champagne-bottle shoulders. Compared with the
decorous impassivity of the oviform girl our flat-faced fashion-plates
are terribly abandoned and provocative. And because one expects so much
in the way of respectability from these egg-faces of an earlier age, one
is apt to be shocked when one sees them conducting themselves in ways
that seem unbefitting. One thinks of that enchanting picture of Etty’s,
“Youth on the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm.” The naiads are of the
purest egg-faced type. Their hair is sleek, their shoulders slope and
their faces are as impassive as blanks. And yet they have no clothes on.
It is almost indecent; one imagined that the egg-faced type came into
the world complete with flowing draperies.
It is not only the face of beauty that alters with the changes of
popular taste. The champagne-bottle shoulders of the oviform girl have
vanished from the modern fashion-plate and from modern life. The
contemporary hand, with its two middle fingers held together and the
forefinger and little finger splayed apart, is another recent product.
Above all, the feet have changed. In the days of the egg-faces no
fashion-plate had more than one foot. This rule will, I think, be found
invariable. That solitary foot projects, generally in a strangely
haphazard way as though it had nothing to do with a leg, from under the
edge of the skirt. And what a foot! It has no relation to those
provocative feet in Suckling’s ballad:
Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out.
It is an austere foot. It is a small, black, oblong object like a
tea-leaf. No living human being has ever seen a foot like it, for it is
utterly unlike the feet of nineteen-twenty. To-day the fashion-plate is
always a biped. The tea-leaf has been replaced by two feet of rich
baroque design, curved and florid, with insteps like the necks of Arab
horses. Faces may have changed shape, but feet have altered far more
radically. On the text, “the feet of the young women,” it would be
possible to write a profound philosophical sermon.
And while I am on the subject of feet I would like to mention another
curious phenomenon of the same kind, but affecting, this time, the
standards of male beauty. Examine the pictorial art of the eighteenth
century, and you will find that the shape of the male leg is not what it
was. In those days the calf of the leg was not a muscle that bulged to
its greatest dimensions a little below the back of the knee, to subside,
_decrescendo_, towards the ankle. No, in the eighteenth century the calf
was an even crescent, with its greatest projection opposite the middle
of the shin; the ankle, as we know it, hardly existed. This curious calf
is forced upon one’s attention by almost every minor picture-maker of
the eighteenth century, and even by some of the great masters, as, for
instance, Blake. How it came into existence I do not know. Presumably
the crescent calf was considered, in the art schools, to approach more
nearly to the Platonic Idea of the human leg than did the poor distorted
Appearance of real life. Personally, I prefer my calves with the bulge
at the top and a proper ankle at the bottom. But then I don’t hold much
with the _beau idéal_.
The process by which one type of beauty becomes popular, imposes its
tyranny for a period and then is displaced by a dissimilar type is a
mysterious one. It may be that patient historical scholars will end by
discovering some law to explain the transformation of the Du Maurier
type into the flat-face type, the tea-leaf foot into the baroque foot,
the crescent calf into the normal calf. As far as one can see at
present, these changes seem to be the result of mere hazard and
arbitrary choice. But a time will doubtless come when it will be found
that these changes of taste are as ineluctably predetermined as any
chemical change. Given the South African War, the accession of Edward
VII. and the Liberal triumph of 1906, it was, no doubt, as inevitable
that Du Maurier should have given place to Fish as that zinc subjected
to sulphuric acid should break up into ZnSO₄ + H₂. But we leave it to
others to formulate the precise workings of the law.
XVII: GREAT THOUGHTS
To all lovers of unfamiliar quotations, aphorisms, great thoughts and
intellectual gems, I would heartily recommend a heavy volume recently
published in Brussels and entitled _Pensées sur la Science, la Guerre et
sur des sujets très variés_. The book contains some twelve or thirteen
thousand quotations, selected from a treasure of one hundred and
twenty-three thousand great thoughts gleaned and garnered by the
industry of Dr. Maurice Legat—an industry which will be appreciated at
its value by any one who has ever made an attempt to compile a
commonplace book or private anthology of his own. The almost intolerable
labour of copying out extracts can only be avoided by the drastic use of
the scissors; and there are few who can afford the luxury of mutilating
their copies of the best authors.
For some days I made Dr. Legat’s book my _livre de chevet_. But I had
very soon to give up reading it at night, for I found that the Great
often said things so peculiar that I was kept awake in the effort to
discover their meaning. Why, for example, should it be categorically
stated by Lamennais that “si les animaux connaissaient Dieu, ils
parleraient”? What could Cardinal Maury have meant when he said,
“L’éloquence, compagne ordinaire de la liberté [astonishing
generalization!], est inconnue en Angleterre”? These were mysteries
insoluble enough to counteract the soporific effects of such profound
truths as this, discovered, apparently, in 1846 by Monsieur C. H. D.
Duponchel, “Le plus sage mortel est sujet à l’erreur.”
Dr. Legat has found some pleasing quotations on the subject of England
and the English. His selection proves with what fatal ease even the most
intelligent minds are lured into making generalizations about national
character, and how grotesque those generalizations always are.
Montesquieu informs us that “dès que sa fortune se délabre, un anglais
tue ou se fait voleur.” Of the better half of this potential murderer
and robber Balzac says, “La femme anglaise est une pauvre créature
verteuse par force, prête à se dépraver.” “La vanité est l’âme de toute
société anglaise,” says Lamartine. Ledru-Rollin is of opinion that all
the riches of England are “des dépouilles volées aux tombeaux.”
The Goncourts risk a characteristically dashing generalization on the
national characters of England and France: “L’Anglais, filou comme
peuple, est honnête comme individu. Il est le contraire du Français,
honnête comme peuple, et filou comme individu.” If one is going to make
a comparison Voltaire’s is more satisfactory because less pretentious.
Strange are the ways of you Englishmen,
qui, des mêmes couteaux,
Coupez la tête au roi et la queue aux chevaux.
Nous Français, plus humains, laissons aux rois leurs têtes,
Et la queue à nos bêtes.
It is unfortunate that history should have vitiated the truth of this
pithy and pregnant statement.
But the bright spots in this enormous tome are rare. After turning over
a few hundred pages one is compelled, albeit reluctantly, to admit that
the Great Thought or Maxim is nearly the most boring form of literature
that exists. Others, it seems, have anticipated me in this grand
discovery. “Las de m’ennuyer des pensées des autres,” says d’Alembert,
“j’ai voulu leur donner les miennes; mais je puis me flatter de leur
avoir rendu tout l’ennui que j’avais reçu d’eux.” Almost next to
d’Alembert’s statement I find this confession from the pen of J. Roux
(1834-1906): “Emettre des pensées, voilà ma consolation, mon délice, ma
vie!” Happy Monsieur Roux!
Turning dissatisfied from Dr. Legat’s anthology of thought, I happened
upon the second number of _Proverbe_, a monthly review, four pages in
length, directed by M. Paul Eluard and counting among its contributors
Tristan Tzara of _Dada_ fame, Messrs. Soupault, Breton and Aragon, the
directors of _Littérature_, M. Picabia, M. Ribemont-Dessaignes and
others of the same kidney. Here, on the front page of the March number
of _Proverbe_, I found the very comment on Great Thoughts for which I
had, in my dissatisfaction, been looking. The following six maxims are
printed one below the other: the first of them is a quotation from the
_Intransigeant_; the other five appear to be the work of M. Tzara, who
appends a footnote to this effect: “Je m’appelle dorénavant
exclusivement Monsieur Paul Bourget.” Here they are:
Il faut violer les règles, oui, mais pour les violer il faut les
connaître.
Il faut régler la connaissance, oui, mais pour la régler il faut la
violer.
Il faut connaître les viols, oui, mais pour les connaître il faut les
régler.
Il faut connaître les règles, oui, mais pour les connaître il faut les
violer.
Il faut régler les viols, oui, mais pour les régler il faut les
connaître.
Il faut violer la connaissance, oui, mais pour la violer il faut la
régler.
It is to be hoped that Dr. Legat will find room for at least a selection
of these profound thoughts in the next edition of his book. “LE passé et
LA pensée n’existent pas,” affirms M. Raymond Duncan on another page of
_Proverbe_. It is precisely after taking too large a dose of “Pensées
sur la Science, la Guerre et sur des sujets très variés” that one half
wishes the statement were in fact true.
XVIII: ADVERTISEMENT
I have always been interested in the subtleties of literary form. This
preoccupation with the outward husk, with the letter of literature, is,
I dare say, the sign of a fundamental spiritual impotence. Gigadibs, the
literary man, can understand the tricks of the trade; but when it is a
question, not of conjuring, but of miracles, he is no more effective
than Mr. Sludge. Still, conjuring is amusing to watch and to practise;
an interest in the machinery of the art requires no further
justification. I have dallied with many literary forms, taking pleasure
in their different intricacies, studying the means by which great
authors of the past have resolved the technical problems presented by
each. Sometimes I have even tried my hand at solving the problems
myself—delightful and salubrious exercise for the mind. And now I have
discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the
most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I
mean the advertisement.
Nobody who has not tried to write an advertisement has any idea of the
delights and difficulties presented by this form of literature—or shall
I say of “applied literature,” for the sake of those who still believe
in the romantic superiority of the pure, the disinterested, over the
immediately useful? The problem that confronts the writer of
advertisements is an immensely complicated one, and by reason of its
very arduousness immensely interesting. It is far easier to write ten
passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring
critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few
thousand of the uncritical buying public. The problem presented by the
Sonnet is child’s play compared with the problem of the advertisement.
In writing a Sonnet one need think only of oneself. If one’s readers
find one boring or obscure, so much the worse for them. But in writing
an advertisement one must think of other people. Advertisement writers
may not be lyrical, or obscure, or in any way esoteric. They must be
universally intelligible. A good advertisement has this in common with
drama and oratory, that it must be immediately comprehensible and
directly moving. But at the same time it must possess all the
succinctness of epigram.
The orator and the dramatist have “world enough and time” to produce
their effects by cumulative appeals; they can turn all round their
subject, they can repeat; between the heights of their eloquence they
can gracefully practise the art of sinking, knowing that a period of
flatness will only set off the splendour of their impassioned moments.
But the advertiser has no space to spare; he pays too dearly for every
inch. He must play upon the minds of his audience with a small and
limited instrument. He must persuade them to part with their money in a
speech that is no longer than many a lyric by Herrick. Could any problem
be more fascinatingly difficult? No one should be allowed to talk about
the _mot juste_ or the polishing of style who has not tried his hand at
writing an advertisement of something which the public does not want,
but which it must be persuaded into buying. Your _boniment_ must not
exceed a poor hundred and fifty or two hundred words. With what care you
must weigh every syllable! What infinite pains must be taken to fashion
every phrase into a barbed hook that shall stick in the reader’s mind
and draw from its hiding-place within his pocket the reluctant coin!
One’s style and ideas must be lucid and simple enough to be understood
by all; but at the same time, they must not be vulgar. Elegance and an
economical distinction are required; but any trace of literariness in an
advertisement is fatal to its success.
I do not know whether any one has yet written a history of advertising.
If the book does not already exist it will certainly have to be written.
The story of the development of advertising from its infancy in the
early nineteenth century to its luxuriant maturity in the twentieth is
an essential chapter in the history of democracy. Advertisement begins
abjectly, crawling on its belly like the serpent after the primal curse.
Its abjection is the oily humbleness of the shopkeeper in an
oligarchical society. Those nauseating references to the nobility and
clergy, which are the very staple of early advertisements, are only
possible in an age when the aristocracy and its established Church
effectively ruled the land. The custom of invoking these powers lingered
on long after they had ceased to hold sway. It is now, I fancy, almost
wholly extinct. It may be that certain old-fashioned girls’ schools
still provide education for the daughters of the nobility and clergy;
but I am inclined to doubt it. Advertisers still find it worth while to
parade the names and escutcheons of kings. But anything less than
royalty is, frankly, a “wash-out.”
The crawling style of advertisement with its mixture of humble appeals
to patrons and its hyperbolical laudation of the goods advertised, was
early varied by the pseudo-scientific style, a simple development of the
quack’s patter at the fair. Balzacians will remember the advertisement
composed by Finot and the Illustrious Gaudissard for César Birotteau’s
“Huile Céphalique.” The type is not yet dead; we still see
advertisements of substances “based on the principles established by the
Academy of Sciences,” substances known “to the ancients, the Romans, the
Greeks and the nations of the North,” but lost and only rediscovered by
the advertiser. The style and manner of these advertisements belonging
to the early and middle periods of the Age of Advertisement continue to
bear the imprint of the once despicable position of commerce. They are
written with the impossible and insincere unctuousness of tradesmen’s
letters. They are horribly uncultured; and when their writers aspire to
something more ambitious than the counting-house style, they fall at
once into the stilted verbiage of self-taught learning. Some of the
earlier efforts to raise the tone Of advertisements are very curious.
One remembers those remarkable full-page advertisements of Eno’s Fruit
Salt, loaded with weighty apophthegms from Emerson, Epictetus, Zeno the
Eleatic, Pomponazzi, Slawkenbergius and other founts of human wisdom.
There was noble reading on these strange pages. But they shared with
sermons the defect of being a little dull.
The art of advertisement writing has flowered with democracy. The lords
of industry and commerce came gradually to understand that the right way
to appeal to the Free Peoples of the World was familiarly, in an honest
man-to-man style. They perceived that exaggeration and hyperbole do not
really pay, that charlatanry must at least have an air of sincerity.
They confided in the public, they appealed to its intelligence in every
kind of flattering way. The technique of the art became at once
immensely more difficult than it had ever been before, until now the
advertisement is, as I have already hinted, one of the most interesting
and difficult of modern literary forms. Its potentialities are not yet
half explored. Already the most interesting and, in some cases, the only
readable part of most American periodicals is the advertisement section.
What does the future hold in store?
XIX: EUPHUES REDIVIVUS
I have recently been fortunate in securing a copy of that very rare and
precious novel _Delina Delaney_, by Amanda M. Ros, authoress of _Irene
Iddesleigh_ and _Poems of Puncture_. Mrs. Ros’s name is only known to a
small and select band of readers. But by these few she is highly prized;
one of her readers, it is said, actually was at the pains to make a
complete manuscript copy of _Delina Delaney_, so great was his
admiration and so hopelessly out of print the book. Let me recommend the
volume, Mrs. Ros’s masterpiece, to the attention of enterprising
publishers.
_Delina Delaney_ opens with a tremendous, an almost, in its richness of
vituperative eloquence, Rabelaisian denunciation of Mr. Barry Pain, who
had, it seems, treated _Irene Iddesleigh_ with scant respect in his
review of the novel in _Black and White_. “This so-called Barry Pain, by
name, has taken upon himself to criticize a work, the depth of which
fails to reach the solving power of his borrowed, and, he’d have you
believe, varied talent.” But “I care not for the opinion of half-starved
upstarts, who don the garb of a shabby-genteel, and fain would feed the
mind of the people with the worthless scraps of stolen fancies.” So
perish all reviewers! And now for Delina herself.
The story is a simple one. Delina Delaney, daughter of a fisherman,
loves and is loved by Lord Gifford. The baleful influence of a
dark-haired Frenchwoman, Madame de Maine, daughter of the Count-av-Nevo,
comes between the lovers and their happiness, and Delina undergoes
fearful torments, including three years’ penal servitude, before their
union can take place. It is the manner, rather than the matter, of the
book which is remarkable. Here, for instance, is a fine conversation
between Lord Gifford and his mother, an aristocratic dame who
strenuously objects to his connection with Delina. Returning one day to
Columba Castle she hears an unpleasant piece of news: her son has been
seen kissing Delina in the conservatory.
“Home again, mother?” he boldly uttered, as he gazed reverently in her
face.
“Home to Hades!” returned the raging high-bred daughter of
distinguished effeminacy.
“Ah me! what is the matter?” meekly inquired his lordship.
“Everything is the matter with a broken-hearted mother of low-minded
offspring,” she answered hotly.... “Henry Edward Ludlow Gifford, son
of my strength, idolized remnant of my inert husband, who at this
moment invisibly offers the scourging whip of fatherly authority to
your backbone of resentment (though for years you think him dead to
your movements) and pillar of maternal trust.”
Poor Lady Gifford! her son’s behaviour was her undoing. The shock caused
her to lose first her reason and then her life. Her son was heart-broken
at the thought that he was responsible for her downfall:
“Is it true, O Death,” I cried in my agony, “that you have wrested
from me my mother, Lady Gifford of Columba Castle, and left me here, a
unit figuring on the great blackboard of the past, the shaky surface
of the present and fickle field of the future to track my life-steps,
with gross indifference to her wished-for wish?”... Blind she lay to
the presence of her son, who charged her death-gun with the powder of
accelerated wrath.
It is impossible to suppose that Mrs. Ros can ever have read _Euphues_
or the earlier romances of Robert Greene. How then shall we account for
the extraordinary resemblance to Euphuism of her style? how explain
those rich alliterations, those elaborate “kennings” and circumlocutions
of which the fabric of her book is woven? Take away from Lyly his
erudition and his passion for antithesis, and you have Mrs. Ros. Delina
is own sister to Euphues and Pandosto. The fact is that Mrs. Ros
happens, though separated from Euphuism by three hundred years and more,
to have arrived independently at precisely the same stage of development
as Lyly and his disciples. It is possible to see in a growing child a
picture in miniature of all the phases through which humanity has passed
in its development. And, in the same way, the mind of an individual
(especially when that individual has been isolated from the main current
of contemporary thought) may climb, alone, to a point at which, in the
past, a whole generation has rested. In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in
the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an
unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the
artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature
simplicity is invented. The first attempts of any people to be
consciously literary are always productive of the most elaborate
artificiality. Poetry is always written before prose and always in a
language as remote as possible from the language of ordinary life. The
language and versification of “Beowulf” are far more artificial and
remote from life than those of, say, _The Rape of the Lock_. The
Euphuists were not barbarians making their first discovery of
literature; they were, on the contrary, highly educated. But in one
thing they were unsophisticated: they were discovering prose. They were
realizing that prose could be written with art, and they wrote it as
artificially as they possibly could, just as their Saxon ancestors wrote
poetry. They became intoxicated with their discovery of artifice. It was
some time before the intoxication wore off and men saw that art was
possible without artifice. Mrs. Ros, an Elizabethan born out of her
time, is still under the spell of that magical and delicious
intoxication.
Mrs. Ros’s artifices are often more remarkable and elaborate even than
Lyly’s. This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing
needlework:
She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father’s
slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose
blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its
sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.
And Lord Gifford parts from Delina in these words:
I am just in time to hear the toll of a parting bell strike its heavy
weight of appalling softness against the weakest fibres of a heart of
love, arousing and tickling its dormant action, thrusting the dart of
evident separation deeper into its tubes of tenderness, and fanning
the flame, already unextinguishable, into volumes of burning blaze.
But more often Mrs. Ros does not exceed the bounds which Lyly set for
himself. Here, for instance, is a sentence that might have come direct
out of _Euphues_:
Two days after, she quit Columba Castle and resolved to enter the holy
cloisters of a convent, where, she believed she’d be dead to the built
hopes of wealthy worth, the crooked steps to worldly distinction, and
the designing creaks [_sic_] in the muddy stream of love.
Or again, this description of the artful charmers who flaunt along the
streets of London is written in the very spirit and language of
_Euphues_:
Their hair was a light-golden colour, thickly fringed in front, hiding
in many cases the furrows of a life of vice; behind, reared coils,
some of which differed in hue, exhibiting the fact that they were on
patrol for the price of another supply of dye.... The elegance of
their attire had the glow of robbery—the rustle of many a lady’s
silent curse. These tools of brazen effrontery were strangers to the
blush of innocence that tinged many a cheek, as they would gather
round some of God’s ordained, praying in flowery words of decoying
Cockney, that they should break their holy vows by accompanying them
to the halls of adultery. Nothing daunted at the staunch refusal of
different divines, whose modest walk was interrupted by their bold
assertion of loathsome rights, they moved on, while laughs of hidden
rage and defeat flitted across their doll-decked faces, to die as they
next accosted some rustic-looking critics, who, tempted with their
polished twang, their earnest advances, their pitiful entreaties,
yielded, in their ignorance of the ways of a large city, to their
glossy offers, and accompanied, with slight hesitation, these
artificial shells of immorality to their homes of ruin, degradation
and shame.
XX: THE AUTHOR OF _EMINENT VICTORIANS_
A superlatively civilized Red Indian living apart from the vulgar world
in an elegant and park-like reservation, Mr. Strachey rarely looks over
his walls at the surrounding country. It seethes, he knows, with crowds
of horribly colonial persons. Like the hosts of Midian, the innumerable
“poor whites” prowl and prowl around, but the noble savage pays no
attention to them.
In his spiritual home—a neat and commodious Georgian mansion in the
style of Leoni or Ware—he sits and reads, he turns over portfolios of
queer old prints, he savours meditatively the literary vintages of
centuries. And occasionally, once in two or three years, he tosses over
his park palings a record of these leisured degustations, a judgment
passed upon his library, a ripe rare book. One time it is Eminent
Victorians; the next it is Queen Victoria herself. To-day he has given
us a miscellaneous collection of _Books and Characters_.
If Voltaire had lived to the age of two hundred and thirty instead of
shuffling off at a paltry eighty-four, he would have written about the
Victorian epoch, about life and letters at large, very much as Mr.
Strachey has written. That lucid common sense, that sharp illuminating
wit which delight us in the writings of the middle eighteenth
century—these are Mr. Strachey’s characteristics. We know exactly what
he would have been if he had come into the world at the beginning of the
seventeen hundreds; if he is different from the men of that date it is
because he happens to have been born towards the end of the eighteens.
The sum of knowledge at the disposal of the old Encyclopædists was
singularly small, compared, that is to say, with the knowledge which we
of the twentieth century have inherited. They made mistakes and in their
ignorance they passed what we can see to have been hasty and very
imperfect judgments on men and things. Mr. Strachey is the eighteenth
century grown-up; he is Voltaire at two hundred and thirty.
Voltaire at sixty would have treated the Victorian era, if it could have
appeared in a prophetical vision before his eyes, in terms of “La
Pucelle”—with ribaldry. He would have had to be much older in knowledge
and inherited experience before he could have approached it in that
spirit of sympathetic irony and ironical sympathy which Mr. Strachey
brings to bear upon it. Mr. Strachey makes us like the old Queen, while
we smile at her; he makes us admire the Prince Consort in spite of the
portentous priggishness—duly insisted on in the biography—which
accompanied his intelligence. With all the untutored barbarity of their
notions, Gordon and Florence Nightingale are presented to us as
sympathetic figures. Their peculiar brand of religion and ethics might
be absurd, but their characters are shown to be interesting and fine.
It is only in the case of Dr. Arnold that Mr. Strachey permits himself
to be unrestrainedly Voltairean; he becomes a hundred and seventy years
younger as he describes the founder of the modern Public School system.
The irony of that description is tempered by no sympathy. To make the
man appear even more ridiculous, Mr. Strachey adds a stroke or two to
the portrait of his own contriving—little inventions which deepen the
absurdity of the caricature. Thus we read that Arnold’s “outward
appearance was the index of his inward character. The legs, perhaps,
were shorter than they should have been; but the sturdy athletic frame,
especially when it was swathed (as it usually was) in the flowing robes
of a Doctor of Divinity, was full of an imposing vigour.” How
exquisitely right those short legs are! how artistically inevitable! Our
admiration for Mr. Strachey’s art is only increased when we discover
that in attributing to the Doctor this brevity of shank he is justified
by no contemporary document. The short legs are his own contribution.
Voltaire, then, at two hundred and thirty has learned sympathy. He has
learned that there are other ways of envisaging life than the
common-sense, reasonable way and that people with a crack-brained view
of the universe have a right to be judged as human beings and must not
be condemned out of hand as lunatics or obscurantists. Blake and St.
Francis have as much right to their place in the sun as Gibbon and Hume.
But still, in spite of this lesson, learned and inherited from the
nineteenth century, our Voltaire of eleven score years and ten still
shows a marked preference for the Gibbons and the Humes; he still
understands their attitude towards life a great deal better than he
understands the other fellow’s attitude.
In his new volume of _Books and Characters_ Mr. Strachey prints an essay
on Blake (written, it may be added parenthetically, some sixteen years
ago), in which he sets out very conscientiously to give that disquieting
poet his due. The essay is interesting, not because it contains anything
particularly novel in the way of criticism, but because it reveals, in
spite of all Mr. Strachey’s efforts to overcome it, in spite of his
admiration for the great artist in Blake, his profound antagonism
towards Blake’s view of life.
He cannot swallow mysticism; he finds it clearly very difficult to
understand what all this fuss about the soul really signifies. The man
who believes in the absoluteness of good and evil, who sees the universe
as a spiritual entity concerned, in some transcendental fashion, with
morality, the man who regards the human spirit as possessing a somehow
cosmic importance and significance—ah no, decidedly no, even at two
hundred and thirty Voltaire cannot whole-heartedly sympathize with such
a man.
And that, no doubt, is the reason why Mr. Strachey has generally shrunk
from dealing, in his biographies and his criticisms, with any of these
strange incomprehensible characters. Blake is the only one he had tried
his hand on, and the result is not entirely satisfactory. He is more at
home with the Gibbons and Humes of this world, and when he is not
discussing the reasonable beings he likes to amuse himself with the
eccentrics, like Mr. Creevey or Lady Hester Stanhope. The portentous,
formidable mystics he leaves severely alone.
One cannot imagine Mr. Strachey coping with Dostoevsky or with any of
the other great explorers of the soul. One cannot imagine him writing a
life of Beethoven. These huge beings are disquieting for a Voltaire who
has learned enough sympathy to be able to recognize their greatness, but
whose temperament still remains unalterably alien. Mr. Strachey is wise
to have nothing to do with them.
The second-rate mystics (I use the term in its widest and vaguest
sense), the men who believe in the spirituality of the universe and in
the queerer dogmas which have become tangled in that belief, without
possessing the genius which alone can justify such notions in the eyes
of the Voltaireans—these are the objects on which Mr. Strachey likes to
turn his calm and penetrating gaze. Gordon and Florence Nightingale, the
Prince Consort, Clough—they and their beliefs are made to look rather
absurd by the time he has done with them. He reduces their spiritual
struggles to a series of the most comically futile series of gymnastics
in the void. The men of genius who have gone through the same spiritual
struggles, who have believed the same sort of creeds, have had the
unanswerable justification of their genius. These poor absurd creatures
have not. Voltaire in his third century gives them a certain amount of
his newly learned sympathy; but he also gives them a pretty strong dose
of his old irony.
XXI: EDWARD THOMAS[1]
The poetry of Edward Thomas affects one morally as well as æsthetically
and intellectually. We have grown rather shy, in these days of pure
æstheticism, of speaking of those consoling or strengthening qualities
of poetry on which critics of another generation took pleasure in
dwelling. Thomas’s poetry is strengthening and consoling, not because it
justifies God’s ways to man or whispers of reunions beyond the grave,
not because it presents great moral truths in memorable numbers, but in
a more subtle and very much more effective way. Walking through the
streets on these September nights, one notices, wherever there are trees
along the street and lamps close beside the trees, a curious and
beautiful phenomenon. The light of the street lamps striking up into the
trees has power to make the grimed, shabby, and tattered foliage of the
all-but autumn seem brilliantly and transparently green. Within the
magic circle of the light the tree seems to be at that crowning moment
of the spring when the leaves are fully grown, but still luminous with
youth and seemingly almost immaterial in their lightness. Thomas’s
poetry is to the mind what that transfiguring lamplight is to the tired
trees. On minds grown weary in the midst of the intolerable turmoil and
aridity of daily wage-earning existence, it falls with a touch of
momentary rejuvenation.
The secret of Thomas’s influence lies in the fact that he is genuinely
what so many others of our time quite unjustifiably claim to be, a
nature poet. To be a nature poet it is not enough to affirm vaguely that
God made the country and man made the town, it is not enough to talk
sympathetically about familiar rural objects, it is not enough to be
sonorously poetical about mountains and trees; it is not even enough to
speak of these things with the precision of real knowledge and love. To
be a nature poet a man must have felt profoundly and intimately those
peculiar emotions which nature can inspire, and must be able to express
them in such a way that his reader feels them. The real difficulty that
confronts the would-be poet of nature is that these emotions are of all
emotions the most difficult to pin down and analyze, and the hardest of
all to convey. In “October” Thomas describes what is surely the
characteristic emotion induced by a contact with nature—a kind of
exultant melancholy which is the nearest approach to quiet unpassionate
happiness that the soul can know. Happiness of whatever sort is
extraordinarily hard to analyze and describe. One can think of a hundred
poems, plays, and novels that deal exhaustively with pain and misery to
one that is an analysis and an infectious description of happiness.
Passionate joy is more easily recapturable in art; it is dramatic,
vehemently defined. But quiet happiness, which is at the same time a
kind of melancholy—there you have an emotion which is inexpressible
except by a mind gifted with a diversity of rarely combined qualities.
The poet who would sing of this happiness must combine a rare
penetration with a rare candour and honesty of mind. A man who feels an
emotion that is very difficult to express is often tempted to describe
it in terms of something entirely different. Platonist poets feel a
powerful emotion when confronted by beauty, and, finding it a matter of
the greatest difficulty to say precisely what that emotion is in itself,
proceed to describe it in terms of theology which has nothing whatever
to do with the matter in point. Groping after an expression of the
emotions aroused in him by the contemplation of nature, Wordsworth
sometimes stumbles doubtfully along philosophical byways that are at the
best parallel to the direct road for which he is seeking. Everywhere in
literature this difficulty in finding an expression for any undramatic,
ill-defined emotion is constantly made apparent.
Thomas’s limpid honesty of mind saves him from the temptation to which
so many others succumb, the temptation to express one thing, because it
is with difficulty describable, in terms of something else. He never
philosophizes the emotions which he feels in the presence of nature and
beauty, but presents them as they stand, transmitting them directly to
his readers without the interposition of any obscuring medium. Rather
than attempt to explain the emotion, to rationalize it into something
that it is not, he will present it for what it is, a problem of which he
does not know the solution. In “Tears” we have an example of this candid
confession of ignorance:
It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen—
Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall—that day
When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out
But still all equals in their age of gladness
Upon the scent, made one, like a great dragon
In Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun
And once bore hops: and on that other day
When I stepped out from the double-shadowed Tower
Into an April morning, stirring and sweet
And warm. Strange solitude was there and silence.
A mightier charm than any in the Tower
Possessed the courtyard. They were changing guard,
Soldiers in line, young English countrymen,
Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums
And fifes were playing “The British Grenadiers.”
The men, the music piercing that solitude
And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed,
And have forgotten since their beauty passed.
The emotion is nameless and indescribable, but the poet has intensely
felt it and transmitted it to us who read his poem, so that we, too,
feel it with the same intensity. Different aspects of this same nameless
emotion of quiet happiness shot with melancholy are the theme of almost
all Thomas’s poems. They bring to us precisely that consolation and
strength which the country and solitude and leisure bring to the spirits
of those long pent in populous cities, but essentialized and distilled
in the form of art. They are the light that makes young again the
tattered leaves.
Of the purely æsthetic qualities of Thomas’s poetry it is unnecessary to
say much. He devised a curiously bare and candid verse to express with
all possible simplicity and clarity his clear sensations and
emotions.... “This is not,” as Mr. de la Mare says in his foreword to
Thomas’s _Collected Poems_, “this is not a poetry that will drug or
intoxicate.... It must be read slowly, as naturally as if it were prose,
without emphasis.” With this bare verse, devoid of any affectation,
whether of cleverness or a too great simplicity, Thomas could do all
that he wanted. See, for example, with what extraordinary brightness and
precision he could paint a picture:
Lichen, ivy and moss
Keep evergreen the trees
That stand half flayed and dying,
And the dead trees on their knees
In dog’s mercury and moss:
And the bright twit of the goldfinch drops
Down there as he flits on thistle-tops.
The same bare precision served him well for describing the interplay of
emotions, as in “After you Speak” or “Like the Touch of Rain.” And with
this verse of his he could also chant the praises of his English
countryside and the character of its people, as typified in
Lob-lie-by-the-fire:
He has been in England as long as dove and daw,
Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree,
The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery;
And in a tender mood he, as I guess,
Christened one flower Love-in-idleness....
XXII: A WORDSWORTH ANTHOLOGY[2]
To regard Wordsworth critically, impersonally, is for some of us a
rather difficult matter. With the disintegration of the solid
orthodoxies Wordsworth became for many intelligent, liberal-minded
families the Bible of that sort of pantheism, that dim faith in the
existence of a spiritual world, which filled, somewhat inadequately, the
place of the older dogmas. Brought up as children in the Wordsworthian
tradition, we were taught to believe that a Sunday walk among the hills
was somehow equivalent to church-going: the First Lesson was to be read
among the clouds, the Second in the primroses; the birds and the running
waters sang hymns, and the whole blue landscape preached a sermon “of
moral evil and of good.” From this dim religious education we brought
away a not very well-informed veneration for the name of Wordsworth, a
dutiful conviction about the spirituality of Nature in general, and an
extraordinary superstition about mountains in particular—a superstition
that it took at least three seasons of Alpine Sports to dissipate
entirely. Consequently, on reaching man’s estate, when we actually came
to read our Wordsworth, we found it extremely difficult to appraise his
greatness, so many veils of preconceived ideas had to be pushed aside,
so many inveterate deflections of vision allowed for. However, it became
possible at last to look at Wordsworth as a detached phenomenon in the
world of ideas and not as part of the family tradition of childhood.
Like many philosophers, and especially philosophers of a mystical tinge
of thought, Wordsworth based his philosophy on his emotions. The
conversion of emotions into intellectual terms is a process that has
been repeated a thousand times in the history of the human mind. We feel
a powerful emotion before a work of art, therefore it partakes of the
divine, is a reconstruction of the Idea of which the natural object is a
poor reflection. Love moves us deeply, therefore human love is a type of
divine love. Nature in her various aspects inspires us with fear, joy,
contentment, despair, therefore nature is a soul that expresses anger,
sympathy, love, and hatred. One could go on indefinitely multiplying
examples of the way in which man objectifies the kingdoms of heaven and
hell that are within him. The process is often a dangerous one. The
mystic who feels within himself the stirrings of inenarrable emotions is
not content with these emotions as they are in themselves. He feels it
necessary to invent a whole cosmogony that will account for them. To him
this philosophy will be true, in so far as it is an expression in
intellectual terms of these emotions. But to those who do not know these
emotions at first hand, it will be simply misleading. The mystical
emotions have what may be termed a conduct value; they enable the man
who feels them to live his life with a serenity and confidence unknown
to other men. But the philosophical terms in which these emotions are
expressed have not necessarily any truth value. This mystical philosophy
will be valuable only in so far as it revives, in the minds of its
students, those conduct-affecting emotions which originally gave it
birth. Accepted at its intellectual face value, such a philosophy may
not only have no worth; it may be actually harmful.
Into this beautifully printed volume Mr. Cobden-Sanderson has gathered
together most of the passages in Wordsworth’s poetry which possess the
power of reviving the emotions that inspired them. It is astonishing to
find that they fill the best part of two hundred and fifty pages, and
that there are still plenty of poems—“Peter Bell,” for example—that one
would like to see included. “The Prelude” and “Excursion” yield a rich
tribute of what our ancestors would have called “beauties.” There is
that astonishing passage in which the poet describes how, as a boy, he
rowed by moonlight across the lake:
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me.
There is the history of that other fearful moment when
I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.
And there are other passages telling of nature in less awful and
menacing aspects, nature the giver of comfort and strong serenity.
Reading these we are able in some measure to live for ourselves the
emotions that were Wordsworth’s. If we can feel his “shadowy
exaltations,” we have got all that Wordsworth can give us. There is no
need to read the theology of his mysticism, the pantheistic explanation
of his emotions. To Peter Bell a primrose by a river’s brim was only a
yellow primrose. Its beauty stirred in him no feeling. But one can be
moved by the sight of the primrose without necessarily thinking, in the
words of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson’s preface, of “the infinite tenderness of
the infinitely great, of the infinitely great which, from out the
infinite and amid its own stupendous tasks, stoops to strew the path of
man, the infinitely little, with sunshine and with flowers.” This is the
theology of our primrose emotion. But it is the emotion itself which is
important, not the theology. The emotion has its own powerful conduct
value, whereas the philosophy derived from it, suspiciously
anthropocentric, possesses, we should imagine, only the smallest value
as truth.
XXIII: VERHAEREN
Verhaeren was one of those men who feel all their life long “l’envie”
(to use his own admirably expressive phrase), “l’envie de tailler en
drapeaux l’étoffe de la vie.” The stuff of life can be put to worse
uses. To cut it into flags is, on the whole, more admirable than to cut
it, shall we say, into cerecloths, or money-bags, or Parisian
underclothing. A flag is a brave, a cheerful and a noble object. These
are qualities for which we are prepared to forgive the flag its
over-emphasis, its lack of subtlety, its touch of childishness. One can
think of a number of writers who have marched through literary history
like an army with banners. There was Victor Hugo, for example—one of
Verhaeren’s admired masters. There was Balzac, to whose views of life
Verhaeren’s was, in some points, curiously akin. Among the minor makers
of oriflammes there is our own Mr. Chesterton, with his heroic air of
being for ever on the point of setting out on a crusade, glorious with
bunting and mounted on a rocking-horse.
The flag-maker is a man of energy and strong vitality. He likes to
imagine that all that surrounds him is as large, as full of sap and as
vigorous as he feels himself to be. He pictures the world as a place
where the colours are strong and brightly contrasted, where a vigorous
chiaroscuro leaves no doubt as to the true nature of light and darkness,
and where all life pulsates, quivering and taut, like a banner in the
wind. From the first we find in Verhaeren all the characteristics of the
tailor of banners. In his earliest book of verse, _Les Flamands_, we see
him already delighting in such lines as
Leurs deux poings monstrueux pataugeaient dans la pâte.
Already too we find him making copious use—or was it abuse?—as Victor
Hugo had done before him, of words like “vaste,” “énorme,” “infini,”
“infiniment,” “infinité,” “univers.” Thus, in “L’Ame de la Ville,” he
talks of an “énorme” viaduct, an “immense” train, a “monstrueux” sun,
even of the “énorme” atmosphere. For Verhaeren all roads lead to the
infinite, wherever and whatever that may be.
Les grand’routes tracent des croix
A l’infini, à travers bois;
Les grand’routes tracent des croix lointaines
A l’infini, à travers plaines.
Infinity is one of those notions which are not to be lightly played
with. The makers of flags like it because it can be contrasted so
effectively with the microscopic finitude of man. Writers like Hugo and
Verhaeren talk so often and so easily about infinity that the idea
ceases in their poetry to have any meaning at all.
I have said that, in certain respects, Verhaeren, in his view of life,
is not unlike Balzac. This resemblance is most marked in some of the
poems of his middle period, especially those in which he deals with
aspects of contemporary life. _Les Villes tentaculaires_ contains poems
which are wholly Balzacian in conception. Take, for example, Verhaeren’s
rhapsody on the Stock Exchange:
Une fureur réenflammée
Au mirage du moindre espoir
Monte soudain de l’entonnoir
De bruit et de fumée,
Où l’on se bat, à coups de vols, en bas.
Langues sèches, regards aigus, gestes inverses,
Et cervelles, qu’en tourbillons les millions traversent,
Echangent là leur peur et leur terreur ...
Aux fins de mois, quand les débâcles se décident
La mort les paraphe de suicides,
Mais au jour même aux heures blêmes,
Les volontés dans la fièvre revivent,
L’acharnement sournois
Reprend comme autrefois.
One cannot read these lines without thinking of Balzac’s feverish
money-makers, of the Baron de Nucingen, Du Tillet, the Kellers and all
the lesser misers and usurers, and all their victims. With their
worked-up and rather melodramatic excitement, they breathe the very
spirit of Balzac’s prodigious film-scenario version of life.
Verhaeren’s flag-making instinct led him to take special delight in all
that is more than ordinarily large and strenuous. He extols and
magnifies the gross violence of the Flemish peasantry, their almost
infinite capacity for taking food and drink, their industry, their
animalism. In true Rooseveltian style, he admired energy for its own
sake. All his romping rhythms were dictated to him by the need to
express this passion for the strenuous. His curious assonances and
alliterations—
Luttent et s’entrebuttent en disputes—
arise from this same desire to recapture the sense of violence and
immediate life.
It is interesting to compare the violence and energy of Verhaeren with
the violence of an earlier poet—Rimbaud, the marvellous boy, if ever
there was one. Rimbaud cut the stuff of life into flags, but into flags
that never fluttered on this earth. His violence penetrated, in some
sort, beyond the bounds of ordinary life. In some of his poems Rimbaud
seems actually to have reached the nameless goal towards which he was
striving, to have arrived at that world of unheard-of spiritual vigour
and beauty whose nature he can only describe in an exclamatory metaphor:
Millions d’oiseaux d’or, ô future vigueur!
But the vigour of Verhaeren is never anything so fine and spiritual as
this “million of golden birds.” It is merely the vigour and violence of
ordinary life speeded up to cinema intensity.
It is a noticeable fact that Verhaeren was generally at his best when he
took a holiday from the making and waving of flags. His Flemish bucolics
and the love poems of _Les Heures_, written for the most part in
traditional form, and for the most part shorter and more concentrated
than his poems of violence and energy, remain the most moving portion of
his work. Very interesting, too, are the poems belonging to that early
phase of doubt and depression which saw the publication of _Les
Débâcles_ and _Les Flambeaux Noirs_. The energy and life of the later
books is there, but in some sort concentrated, preserved and
intensified, because turned inwards upon itself. Of many of the later
poems one feels that they were written much too easily. These must have
been brought very painfully and laboriously to the birth.
XXIV: EDWARD LEAR
There are few writers whose works I care to read more than once, and one
of them is certainly Edward Lear. Nonsense, like poetry, to which it is
closely allied, like philosophic speculation, like every product of the
imagination, is an assertion of man’s spiritual freedom in spite of all
the oppression of circumstance. As long as it remains possible for the
human mind to invent the Quangle Wangle and the Fimble Fowl, to wander
at will over the Great Gromboolian Plain and the hills of the Cnankly
Bore, the victory is ours. The existence of nonsense is the nearest
approach to a proof of that improvable article of faith, whose truth we
must all assume or perish miserably: that life is worth living. It is
when circumstances combine to prove, with syllogistic cogency, that life
is not worth living that I turn to Lear and find comfort and
refreshment. I read him and I perceive that it is a good thing to be
alive; for I am free, with Lear, to be as inconsequent as I like.
Lear is a genuine poet. For what is his nonsense except the poetical
imagination a little twisted out of its course? Lear had the true poet’s
feeling for words—words in themselves, precious and melodious, like
phrases of music; personal as human beings. Marlowe talks of
entertaining divine Zenocrate; Milton of the leaves that fall in
Vallombrosa; Lear of the Fimble Fowl with a corkscrew leg, of runcible
spoons, of things meloobious and genteel. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense
by exaggerating sense—a too logical logic. His coinages of words are
intellectual. Lear, more characteristically a poet, wrote nonsense that
is an excess of imagination, coined words for the sake of their colour
and sound alone. His is the purer nonsense, because more poetical.
Change the key ever so little and the “Dong with a Luminous Nose” would
be one of the most memorable romantic poems of the nineteenth century.
Think, too, of that exquisite “Yonghy Bonghy Bo”! In one of Tennyson’s
later volumes there is a charming little lyric about Catullus, which
begins:
Row us out from Desenzano,
To your Sirmione row!
So they row’d, and there we landed—
_O venusta Sirmio!_
Can one doubt for a moment that he was thinking, when he wrote these
words, of that superb stanza with which the “Yonghy Bonghy” opens:
On the coast of Coromandel,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods,
Dwelt the Yonghy Bonghy Bo.
Personally, I prefer Lear’s poem; it is the richer and the fuller of the
two.
Lear’s genius is at its best in the Nonsense Rhymes, or Limericks, as a
later generation has learned to call them. In these I like to think of
him not merely as a poet and a draughtsman—and how unique an artist the
recent efforts of Mr. Nash to rival him have only affirmed—but also as a
profound social philosopher. No study of Lear would be complete without
at least a few remarks on “They” of the Nonsense Rhymes. “They” are the
world, the man in the street; “They” are what the leader-writers in the
twopenny press would call all Right-Thinking Men and Women; “They” are
Public Opinion. The Nonsense Rhymes are, for the most part, nothing more
nor less than episodes selected from the history of that eternal
struggle between the genius or the eccentric and his fellow-beings.
Public Opinion universally abhors eccentricity. There was, for example,
that charming Old Man of Melrose who walked on the tips of his toes. But
“They” said (with their usual inability to appreciate the artist), “It
ain’t pleasant to see you at present, you stupid old man of Melrose.”
Occasionally, when the eccentric happens to be a criminal genius, “They”
are doubtless right. The Old Man with a Gong who bumped on it all the
day long deserved to be smashed. (But “They” also smashed a quite
innocuous Old Man of Whitehaven merely for dancing a quadrille with a
raven.) And there was that Old Person of Buda, whose conduct grew ruder
and ruder; “They” were justified, I dare say, in using a hammer to
silence his clamour. But it raises the whole question of punishment and
of the relation between society and the individual.
When “They” are not offensive, they content themselves with being
foolishly inquisitive. Thus, “They” ask the Old Man of the Wrekin
whether his boots are made of leather. “They” pester the Old Man in a
Tree with imbecile questions about the Bee which so horribly bored him.
In these encounters the geniuses and the eccentrics often get the better
of the gross and heavy-witted public. The Old Person of Ware who rode on
the back of a bear certainly scored off “Them.” For when “They” asked:
“Does it trot?” He replied, “It does not.” (The picture shows it
galloping _ventre à terre_.) “It’s a Moppsikon Floppsikon bear.”
Sometimes, too, the eccentric actually leads “Them” on to their
discomfiture. One thinks of that Old Man in a Garden, who always begged
every one’s pardon. When “They” asked him, “What for?” he replied,
“You’re a bore, and I trust you’ll go out of my garden.” But “They”
probably ended up by smashing him.
Occasionally the men of genius adopt a Mallarméen policy. They flee from
the gross besetting crowd.
La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres.
Fuir, là-bas, fuir....
It was surely with these words on his lips that the Old Person of Bazing
(whose presence of mind, for all that he was a Symbolist, was amazing)
went out to purchase the steed which he rode at full speed and escaped
from the people of Bazing. He chose the better part; for it is almost
impossible to please the mob. The Old Person of Ealing was thought by
his suburban neighbours to be almost devoid of good feeling, because, if
you please, he drove a small gig with three owls and a pig. And there
was that pathetic Old Man of Thermopylæ (for whom I have a peculiar
sympathy, since he reminds me so poignantly of myself), who never did
anything properly. “They,” said, “If you choose to boil eggs in your
shoes, you shall never remain in Thermopylæ.” The sort of people “They”
like do the stupidest things, have the vulgarest accomplishments. Of the
Old Person of Filey his acquaintance was wont to speak highly because he
danced perfectly well to the sound of a bell. And the people of Shoreham
adored that fellow-citizen of theirs whose habits were marked by decorum
and who bought an umbrella and sate in the cellar. Naturally; it was
only to be expected.
XXV: SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN
That an Englishman should be a very great plastic artist is always
rather surprising. Perhaps it is a matter of mere chance; perhaps it has
something to do with our national character—if such a thing really
exists. But, whatever may be the cause, the fact remains that England
has produced very few artists of first-class importance. The
Renaissance, as it spread, like some marvellous infectious disease of
the spirit, across the face of Europe, manifested itself in different
countries by different symptoms. In Italy, the country of its origin,
the Renaissance was, more than anything, an outburst of painting,
architecture and sculpture. Scholarship and religious reformation were,
in Germany, the typical manifestations of the disease. But when this
gorgeous spiritual measles crossed the English Channel, its symptoms
were almost exclusively literary. The first premonitory touch of the
infection from Italy “brought out” Chaucer. With the next bout of the
disease England produced the Elizabethans. But among all these poets
there was not a single plastic artist whose name we so much as remember.
And then, suddenly, the seventeenth century gave birth to two English
artists of genius. It produced Inigo Jones and, a little later, Wren.
Wren died, at the age of more than ninety, in the spring of 1723. We are
celebrating to-day his bi-centenary—celebrating it not merely by
antiquarian talk and scholarly appreciations of his style but also (the
signs are not wanting) in a more concrete and living way: by taking a
renewed interest in the art of which he was so great a master and by
reverting in our practice to that fine tradition which he, with his
predecessor, Inigo, inaugurated.
An anniversary celebration is an act of what Wordsworth would have
called “natural piety”; an act by which past is linked with present and
of the vague, interminable series of the days a single comprehensible
and logical unity is created in our minds. At the coming of the
centenaries we like to remember the great men of the past, not so much
by way of historical exercise, but that we may see precisely where, in
relation to their achievement, we stand at the present time, that we may
appraise the life still left in their spirit and apply to ourselves the
moral of their example. I have no intention in this article of giving a
biography of Wren, a list of his works, or a technical account of his
style and methods. I propose to do no more than describe, in the most
general terms, the nature of his achievement and its significance to
ourselves.
Wren was a good architect. But since it is important to know precisely
what we are talking about, let us begin by asking ourselves what good
architecture is. Descending with majesty from his private Sinai, Mr.
Ruskin dictated to a whole generation of Englishmen the æsthetic Law. On
monolithic tables that were the Stones of Venice he wrote the great
truths that had been revealed to him. Here is one of them:
It is to be generally observed that the proportions of buildings have
nothing to do with the style or general merit of their architecture.
An architect trained in the worst schools and utterly devoid of all
meaning or purpose in his work, may yet have such a natural gift of
massing and grouping as will render his structure effective when seen
at a distance.
Now it is to be generally observed, as he himself would say, that in all
matters connected with art, Ruskin is to be interpreted as we interpret
dreams—that is to say, as signifying precisely the opposite of what he
says. Thus, when we find him saying that good architecture has nothing
to do with proportion or the judicious disposition of masses and that
the general effect counts for nothing at all, we may take it as more or
less definitely proven that good architecture is, in fact, almost
entirely a matter of proportion and massing, and that the general effect
of the whole work counts for nearly everything. Interpreted according to
this simple oneirocritical method, Ruskin’s pontifical pronouncement may
be taken as explaining briefly and clearly the secrets of good
architecture. That is why I have chosen this quotation to be the text of
my discourse on Wren.
For the qualities which most obviously distinguish Wren’s work are
precisely those which Ruskin so contemptuously disparages and which we,
by our process of interpretation, have singled out as the essentially
architectural qualities. In all that Wren designed—I am speaking of the
works of his maturity; for at the beginning of his career he was still
an unpractised amateur, and at the end, though still on occasion
wonderfully successful, a very old man—we see a faultless proportion, a
felicitous massing and contrasting of forms. He conceived his buildings
as three-dimensional designs which should be seen, from every point of
view, as harmoniously proportioned wholes. (With regard to the exteriors
this, of course, is true only of those buildings which _can_ be seen
from all sides. Like all true architects, Wren preferred to build in
positions where his work could be appreciated three-dimensionally. But
he was also a wonderful maker of façades; witness his Middle Temple
gateway and his houses in King’s Bench Walk.) He possessed in the
highest degree that instinctive sense of proportion and scale which
enabled him to embody his conception in brick and stone. In his great
masterpiece of St. Paul’s every part of the building, seen from within
or without, seems to stand in a certain satisfying and harmonious
relation to every other part. The same is true even of the smallest
works belonging to the period of Wren’s maturity. On its smaller scale
and different plane, such a building as Rochester Guildhall is as
beautiful, because as harmonious in the relation of all its parts, as
St. Paul’s.
Of Wren’s other purely architectural qualities I shall speak but
briefly. He was, to begin with, an engineer of inexhaustible resource;
one who could always be relied upon to find the best possible solution
to any problem, from blowing up the ruins of old St. Paul’s to providing
the new with a dome that should be at once beautiful and thoroughly
safe. As a designer he exhibited the same practical ingenuity. No
architect has known how to make so much of a difficult site and cheap
materials. The man who built the City churches was a practical genius of
no common order. He was also an artist of profoundly original mind. This
originality reveals itself in the way in which he combines the accepted
features of classical Renaissance architecture into new designs that
were entirely English and his own. The steeples of his City churches
provide us with an obvious example of this originality. His domestic
architecture—that wonderful application of classical principles to the
best in the native tradition—is another.
But Wren’s most characteristic quality—the quality which gives to his
work, over and above its pure beauty, its own peculiar character and
charm—is a quality rather moral than æsthetic. Of Chelsea Hospital,
Carlyle once remarked that it was “obviously the work of a gentleman.”
The words are illuminating. Everything that Wren did was the work of a
gentleman; that is the secret of its peculiar character. For Wren was a
great gentleman: one who valued dignity and restraint and who,
respecting himself, respected also humanity; one who desired that men
and women should live with the dignity, even the grandeur, befitting
their proud human title; one who despised meanness and oddity as much as
vulgar ostentation; one who admired reason and order, who distrusted all
extravagance and excess. A gentleman, the finished product of an old and
ordered civilization.
Wren, the restrained and dignified gentleman, stands out most clearly
when we compare him with his Italian contemporaries. The baroque artists
of the seventeenth century were interested above everything in the new,
the startling, the astonishing; they strained after impossible
grandeurs, unheard-of violences. The architectural ideals of which they
dreamed were more suitable for embodiment in theatrical cardboard than
in stone. And indeed, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century
was the golden age of scene-painting in Italy. The artists who painted
the settings for the elder Scarlatti’s operas, the later Bibienas and
Piranesis, came nearer to reaching the wild Italian ideal than ever mere
architects like Borromini or Bernini, their imaginations cramped by the
stubbornness of stone and the unsleeping activities of gravitations,
could hope to do.
How vastly different is the baroque theatricality from Wren’s sober
restraint! Wren was a master of the grand style; but he never dreamed of
building for effect alone. He was never theatrical or showy, never
pretentious or vulgar. St. Paul’s is a monument of temperance and
chastity. His great palace at Hampton Court is no gaudy stage-setting
for the farce of absolute monarchy. It is a country gentleman’s
house—more spacious, of course, and with statelier rooms and more
impressive vistas—but still a house meant to be lived in by some one who
was a man as well as a king. But if his palaces might have housed,
without the least incongruity, a well-bred gentleman, conversely his
common houses were always dignified enough, however small, to be palaces
in miniature and the homes of kings.
In the course of the two hundred years which have elapsed since his
death, Wren’s successors have often departed, with melancholy results,
from the tradition of which he was the founder. They have forgotten, in
their architecture, the art of being gentlemen. Infected by a touch of
the baroque _folie de grandeur_, the architects of the eighteenth
century built houses in imitation of Versailles and Caserta—huge stage
houses, all for show and magnificence and all but impossible to live in.
The architects of the nineteenth century sinned in a diametrically
opposite way—towards meanness and a negation of art. Senselessly
preoccupied with details, they created the nightmare architecture of
“features.” The sham Gothic of early Victorian times yielded at the end
of the century to the nauseous affectation of “sham-peasantry.” Big
houses were built with all the irregularity and more than the
“quaintness” of cottages; suburban villas took the form of machine-made
imitations of the Tudor peasant’s hut. To all intents and purposes
architecture ceased to exist; Ruskin had triumphed.
To-day, however, there are signs that architecture is coming back to
that sane and dignified tradition of which Wren was the great exponent.
Architects are building houses for gentlemen to live in. Let us hope
that they will continue to do so. There may be sublimer types of men
than the gentleman: there are saints, for example, and the great
enthusiasts whose thoughts and actions move the world. But for practical
purposes and in a civilized, orderly society, the gentleman remains,
after all, the ideal man. The most profound religious emotions have been
expressed in Gothic architecture. Human ambitions and aspirations have
been most colossally reflected by the Romans and the Italians of the
baroque. But it is in England that the golden mean of reasonableness and
decency—the practical philosophy of the civilized man—has received its
most elegant and dignified expression. The old gentleman who died two
hundred years ago preached on the subject of civilization a number of
sermons in stone. St. Paul’s and Greenwich, Trinity Library and Hampton
Court, Chelsea, Kilmainham, Blackheath and Rochester, St. Stephen’s,
Wallbrook and St. Mary Ab-church, Kensington orangery and Middle Temple
gateway—these are the titles of a few of them. They have much, if we
will but study them, to teach us.
XXVI: BEN JONSON[3]
It comes as something of a surprise to find that the niche reserved for
Ben Jonson in the “English Men of Letters” series has only now been
filled. One expected somehow that he would have been among the first of
the great ones to be enshrined; but no, he has had a long time to wait;
and Adam Smith, and Sydney Smith, and Hazlitt, and Fanny Burney have
gone before him into the temple of fame. Now, however, his monument has
at last been made, with Professor Gregory Smith’s qualified version of
“O rare Ben Jonson!” duly and definitively carved upon it.
What is it that makes us, almost as a matter of course, number Ben
Jonson among the great? Why should we expect him to be an early
candidate for immortality, or why, indeed, should he be admitted to the
“English Men of Letters” series at all? These are difficult questions to
answer; for when we come to consider the matter we find ourselves unable
to give any very glowing account of Ben or his greatness. It is hard to
say that one likes his work; one cannot honestly call him a good poet or
a supreme dramatist. And yet, unsympathetic as he is, uninteresting as
he often can be, we still go on respecting and admiring him, because, in
spite of everything, we are conscious, obscurely but certainly, that he
was a great man.
He had little influence on his successors; the comedy of humours died
without any but an abortive issue. Shadwell, the mountain-bellied “Og,
from a treason tavern rolling home,” is not a disciple that any man
would have much pride in claiming. No raking up of literary history will
make Ben Jonson great as a founder of a school or an inspirer of others.
His greatness is a greatness of character. There is something almost
alarming in the spectacle of this formidable figure advancing with
tank-like irresistibility towards the goal he had set himself to attain.
No sirens of romance can seduce him, no shock of opposition unseat him
in his career. He proceeds along the course theoretically mapped out at
the inception of his literary life, never deviating from this narrow way
till the very end—till the time when, in his old age, he wrote that
exquisite pastoral, _The Sad Shepherd_, which is so complete and
absolute a denial of all his lifelong principles. But _The Sad Shepherd_
is a weakness, albeit a triumphant weakness. Ben, as he liked to look
upon himself, as he has again and again revealed himself to us, is the
artist with principles, protesting against the anarchic absence of
principle among the geniuses and charlatans, the poets and ranters of
his age.
The true artificer will not run away from nature as he were afraid of
her; or depart from life and the likeness of truth; but speak to the
capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from the
vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, with the
Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age, which had nothing in them
but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to
the ignorant gapers. He knows it is his only art, so to carry it as
none but artificers perceive it. In the meantime, perhaps, he is
called barren, dull, lean, a poor writer, or by what contumelious word
can come in their cheeks, by these men who without labour, judgment,
knowledge, or almost sense, are received or preferred before him.
In these sentences from _Discoveries_ Ben Jonson paints his own
picture—portrait of the artist as a true artificer—setting forth, in its
most general form, and with no distracting details of the humours or the
moral purpose of art, his own theory of the artist’s true function and
nature. Jonson’s theory was no idle speculation, no mere thing of words
and air, but a creed, a principle, a categorical imperative,
conditioning and informing his whole work. Any study of the poet must,
therefore, begin with the formulation of his theory, and must go on, as
Professor Gregory Smith’s excellent essay does indeed proceed, to show
in detail how the theory was applied and worked out in each individual
composition.
A good deal of nonsense has been talked at one time or another about
artistic theories. The artist is told that he should have no theories,
that he should warble native wood-notes wild, that he should “sing,” be
wholly spontaneous, should starve his brain and cultivate his heart and
spleen; that an artistic theory cramps the style, stops up the Helicons
of inspiration, and so on, and so on. The foolish and sentimental
conception of the artist, to which these anti-intellectual doctrines are
a corollary, dates from the time of romanticism and survives among the
foolish and sentimental of to-day. A consciously practised theory of art
has never spoiled a good artist, has never dammed up inspiration, but
rather, and in most cases profitably, canalized it. Even the Romantics
had theories and were wild and emotional on principle.
Theories are above all necessary at moments when old traditions are
breaking up, when all is chaos and in flux. At such moments an artist
formulates his theory and clings to it through thick and thin; clings to
it as the one firm raft of security in the midst of the surrounding
unrest. Thus, when the neo-Classicism, of which Ben was one of the
remote ancestors, was crumbling into the nothingness of _The Loves of
the Plants_ and _The Triumphs of Temper_, Wordsworth found salvation by
the promulgation of a new theory of poetry, which he put into practice
systematically and to the verge of absurdity in _Lyrical Ballads_.
Similarly in the shipwreck of the old tradition of painting we find the
artists of the present day clinging desperately to intellectual formulas
as their only hope in the chaos. The only occasions, in fact, when the
artist can afford entirely to dispense with theory occur in periods when
a well-established tradition reigns supreme and unquestioned. And then
the absence of theory is more apparent than real; for the tradition in
which he is working is a theory, originally formulated by someone else,
which he accepts unconsciously and as though it were the law of Nature
itself.
The beginning of the seventeenth century was not one of these periods of
placidity and calm acceptance. It was a moment of growth and decay
together, of fermentation. The fabulous efflorescence of the Renaissance
had already grown rank. With that extravagance of energy which
characterized them in all things, the Elizabethans had exaggerated the
traditions of their literature into insincerity. All artistic traditions
end, in due course, by being reduced to the absurd; but the Elizabethans
crammed the growth and decline of a century into a few years. One after
another they transfigured and then destroyed every species of art they
touched. Euphuism, Petrarchism, Spenserism, the sonnet, the drama—some
lasted a little longer than others, but they all exploded in the end,
these beautiful iridescent bubbles blown too big by the enthusiasm of
their makers.
But in the midst of this unstable luxuriance voices of protest were to
be heard, reactions against the main romantic current were discernible.
Each in his own way and in his own sphere, Donne and Ben Jonson
protested aganst the exaggerations of the age. At a time when sonneteers
in legions were quibbling about the blackness of their ladies’ eyes or
the golden wires of their hair, when Platonists protested in melodious
chorus that they were not in love with “red and white” but with the
ideal and divine beauty of which peach-blossom complexions were but
inadequate shadows, at a time when love-poetry had become, with rare
exceptions, fantastically unreal, Donne called it back, a little grossly
perhaps, to facts with the dry remark:
Love’s not so pure and abstract as they use
To say, who have no mistress but their muse.
There have been poets who have written more lyrically than Donne, more
fervently about certain amorous emotions, but not one who has formulated
so rational a philosophy of love as a whole, who has seen all the facts
so clearly and judged them so soundly. Donne laid down no literary
theory. His followers took from him all that was relatively
unimportant—the harshness, itself a protest against Spenserian facility,
the conceits, the sensuality tempered by mysticism—but the important and
original quality of Donne’s work, the psychological realism, they could
not, through sheer incapacity, transfer into their own poetry. Donne’s
immediate influence was on the whole bad. Any influence for good he may
have had has been on poets of a much later date.
The other great literary Protestant of the time was the curious subject
of our examination, Ben Jonson. Like Donne he was a realist. He had no
use for claptrap, or rant, or romanticism. His aim was to give his
audiences real facts flavoured with sound morality. He failed to be a
great realist, partly because he lacked the imaginative insight to
perceive more than the most obvious and superficial reality, and partly
because he was so much preoccupied with the sound morality that he was
prepared to sacrifice truth to satire; so that in place of characters he
gives us humours, not minds, but personified moral qualities.
Ben hated romanticism; for, whatever may have been his bodily habits,
however infinite his capacity for drinking sack, he belonged
intellectually to the party of sobriety. In all ages the drunks and the
sobers have confronted one another, each party loud in derision and
condemnation of the defects which it observes in the other. “The
Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age” accuse the sober Ben of
being “barren, dull, lean, a poor writer.” Ben retorts that they “have
nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to
warrant them to the ignorant gapers.” At another period it is the
Hernanis and the Rollas who reproach that paragon of dryness, the almost
fiendishly sober Stendhal, with his grocer’s style. Stendhal in his turn
remarks: “En paraissant, vers 1803, le _Génie_ de Chateaubriand m’a
semblé ridicule.” And to-day? We have our sobers and our drunks, our
Hardy and our Belloc, our Santayana and our Chesterton. The distinction
is eternally valid. Our personal sympathies may lie with one or the
other; but it is obvious that we could dispense with neither. Ben, then,
was one of the sobers, protesting with might and main against the
extravagant behaviour of the drunks, an intellectual insisting that
there was no way of arriving at truth except by intellectual processes,
an apotheosis of the Plain Man determined to stand no nonsense about
anything. Ben’s poetical achievement, such as it is, is the achievement
of one who relied on no mysterious inspiration, but on those solid
qualities of sense, perseverance, and sound judgment which any decent
citizen of a decent country may be expected to possess. That he himself
possessed, hidden somewhere in the obscure crypts and recesses of his
mind, other rarer spiritual qualities is proved by the existence of his
additions to _The Spanish Tragedy_—if, indeed, they are his, which there
is no cogent reason to doubt—and his last fragment of a masterpiece,
_The Sad Shepherd_. But these qualities, as Professor Gregory Smith
points out, he seems deliberately to have suppressed; locked them away,
at the bidding of his imperious theory, in the strange dark places from
which, at the beginning and the very end of his career, they emerged. He
might have been a great romantic, one of the sublime inebriates; he
chose rather to be classical and sober. Working solely with the logical
intellect and rejecting as dangerous the aid of those uncontrolled
illogical elements of imagination, he produced work that is in its own
way excellent. It is well-wrought, strong, heavy with learning and what
the Chaucerians would call “high sentence.” The emotional intensity and
brevity excepted, it possesses all the qualities of the French classical
drama. But the quality which characterizes the best Elizabethan and
indeed the best English poetry of all periods, the power of moving in
two worlds at once, it lacks. Jonson, like the French dramatists of the
seventeenth century, moves on a level, directly towards some logical
goal. The road over which his great contemporaries take us is not level;
it is, as it were, tilted and uneven, so that as we proceed along it we
are momently shot off at a tangent from the solid earth of logical
meaning into superior regions where the intellectual laws of gravity
have no control. The mistake of Jonson and the classicists in general
consists in supposing that nothing is of value that is not susceptible
of logical analysis; whereas the truth is that the greatest triumphs of
art take place in a world that is not wholly of the intellect, but lies
somewhere between it and the inenarrable, but, to those who have
penetrated it, supremely real, world of the mystic. In his fear and
dislike of nonsense, Jonson put away from himself not only the
Tamer-Chams and the fustian of the late age, but also most of the beauty
it had created.
With the romantic emotions of his predecessors and contemporaries Jonson
abandoned much of the characteristically Elizabethan form of their
poetry. That extraordinary melodiousness which distinguishes the
Elizabethan lyric is not to be found in any of Ben’s writing. The poems
by which we remember him—“Cynthia,” “Drink to Me Only,” “It is Not
Growing Like a Tree”—are classically well made (though the cavalier
lyrists were to do better in the same style); but it is not for any
musical qualities that we remember them. One can understand Ben’s
critical contempt for those purely formal devices for producing musical
richness in which the Elizabethans delighted.
Eyes, why did you bring unto me these graces,
Grac’d to yield wonder out of her true measure,
Measure of all joyes’ stay to phansie traces
Module of pleasure.
The device is childish in its formality, the words, in their obscurity,
almost devoid of significance. But what matter, since the stanza is a
triumph of sonorous beauty? The Elizabethans devised many ingenuities of
this sort; the minor poets exploited them until they became ridiculous;
the major poets employed them with greater discretion, playing subtle
variations (as in Shakespeare’s sonnets) on the crude theme. When
writers had something to say, their thoughts, poured into these
copiously elaborate forms, were moulded to the grandest, poetical
eloquence. A minor poet, like Lord Brooke, from whose works we have just
quoted a specimen of pure formalism, could produce, in his moments of
inspiration, such magnificent lines as:
The mind of Man is this world’s true dimension,
And knowledge is the measure of the mind;
or these, of the nethermost hell:
A place there is upon no centre placed,
Deepe under depthes, as farre as is the skie
Above the earth; darke, infinitely spaced:
Pluto the king, the kingdome, miserie.
Even into comic poetry the Elizabethans imported the grand manner. The
anonymous author of
Tee-hee, tee-hee! Oh sweet delight
He tickles this age, who can
Call Tullia’s ape a marmosite
And Leda’s goose a swan,
knew the secret of that rich, facile music which all those who wrote in
the grand Elizabethan tradition could produce. Jonson, like Donne,
reacted against the facility and floridity of this technique, but in a
different way. Donne’s protest took the form of a conceited subtlety of
thought combined with a harshness of metre. Jonson’s classical training
inclined him towards clarity, solidity of sense, and economy of form. He
stands, as a lyrist, half-way between the Elizabethans and the cavalier
song-writers; he has broken away from the old tradition, but has not yet
made himself entirely at home in the new. At the best he achieves a
minor perfection of point and neatness. At the worst he falls into that
dryness and dulness with which he knew he could be reproached.
We have seen from the passage concerning the true artificer that Jonson
fully realized the risk he was running. He recurs more than once in
_Discoveries_ to the same theme, “Some men to avoid redundancy run into
that [a “thin, flagging, poor, starved” style]; and while they strive to
have no ill-blood or juice, they lose their good.” The good that Jonson
lost was a great one. And in the same way we see to-day how a fear of
becoming sentimental, or “chocolate-boxy,” drives many of the younger
poets and artists to shrink from treating of the great emotions or the
obvious lavish beauty of the earth. But to eschew a good because the
corruption of it is very bad is surely a sign of weakness and a folly.
Having lost the realm of romantic beauty—lost it deliberately and of set
purpose—Ben Jonson devoted the whole of his immense energy to portraying
and reforming the ugly world of fact. But his reforming satiric
intentions interfered, as we have already shown, with his realistic
intentions, and instead of recreating in his art the actual world of
men, he invented the wholly intellectual and therefore wholly unreal
universe of Humours. It is an odd new world, amusing to look at from the
safe distance that separates stage from stalls; but not a place one
could ever wish to live in—one’s neighbours, fools, knaves, hypocrites,
and bears would make the most pleasing prospect intolerable. And over it
all is diffused the atmosphere of Jonson’s humour. It is a curious kind
of humour, very different from anything that passes under that name
to-day, from the humour of _Punch_, or _A Kiss for Cinderella_. One has
only to read _Volpone_—or, better still, go to see it when it is acted
this year by the Phœnix Society for the revival of old plays—to realize
that Ben’s conception of a joke differed materially from ours. Humour
has never been the same since Rousseau invented humanitarianism.
Syphilis and broken legs were still a great deal more comic in
Smollett’s day than in our own. There is a cruelty, a heartlessness
about much of the older humour which is sometimes shocking, sometimes,
in its less extreme forms, pleasantly astringent and stimulating after
the orgies of quaint pathos and sentimental comedy in which we are
nowadays forced to indulge. There is not a pathetic line in _Volpone_;
all the characters are profoundly unpleasant, and the fun is almost as
grim as fun can be. Its heartlessness is not the brilliant, cynical
heartlessness of the later Restoration comedy, but something ponderous
and vast. It reminds us of one of those enormous, painful jokes which
fate sometimes plays on humanity. There is no alleviation, no purging by
pity and terror. It requires a very hearty sense of humour to digest it.
We have reason to admire our ancestors for their ability to enjoy this
kind of comedy as it should be enjoyed. It would get very little
appreciation from a London audience of to-day.
In the other comedies the fun is not so grim; but there is a certain
hardness and brutality about them all—due, of course, ultimately to the
fact that the characters are not human, but rather marionettes of wood
and metal that collide and belabour one another, like the ferocious
puppets of the Punch and Judy show, without feeling the painfulness of
the proceeding. Shakespeare’s comedy is not heartless, because the
characters are human and sensitive. Our modern sentimentality is a
corruption, a softening of genuine humanity. We need a few more Jonsons
and Congreves, some more plays like _Volpone_, or that inimitable
_Marriage à la Mode_ of Dryden, in which the curtain goes up on a lady
singing the outrageously cynical song that begins:
Why should a foolish marriage vow,
That long ago was made,
Constrain us to each other now
When pleasure is decayed?
Too much heartlessness is intolerable (how soon one turns, revolted,
from the literature of the Restoration!), but a little of it now and
then is bracing, a tonic for relaxed sensibilities. A little ruthless
laughter clears the air as nothing else can do; it is good for us, every
now and then, to see our ideals laughed at, our conception of nobility
caricatured; it is good for solemnity’s nose to be tweaked, it is good
for human pomposity to be made to look mean and ridiculous. It should be
the great social function—as Marinetti has pointed out—of the music
halls, to provide this cruel and unsparing laughter, to make a
buffoonery of all the solemnly accepted grandeurs and nobilities. A good
dose of this mockery, administered twice a year at the equinoxes, should
purge our minds of much waste matter, make nimble our spirits and
brighten the eye to look more clearly and truthfully on the world about
us.
Ben’s reduction of human beings to a series of rather unpleasant Humours
is sound and medicinal. Humours do not, of course, exist in actuality;
they are true only as caricatures are true. There are times when we
wonder whether a caricature is not, after all, truer than a photograph;
there are others when it seems a stupid lie. But at all times a
caricature is disquieting; and it is very good for most of us to be made
uncomfortable.
XXVII: CHAUCER
There are few things more melancholy than the spectacle of literary
fossilization. A great writer comes into being, lives, labours and dies.
Time passes; year by year the sediment of muddy comment and criticism
thickens round the great man’s bones. The sediment sets firm; what was
once a living organism becomes a thing of marble. On the attainment of
total fossilization the great man has become a classic. It becomes
increasingly difficult for the members of each succeeding generation to
remember that the stony objects which fill the museum cases were once
alive. It is often a work of considerable labour to reconstruct the
living animal from the fossil shape. But the trouble is generally worth
taking. And in no case is it more worth while than in Chaucer’s.
With Chaucer the ordinary fossilizing process, to which every classical
author is subject, has been complicated by the petrifaction of his
language. Five hundred years have almost sufficed to turn the most
living of poets into a substitute on the modern sides of schools for the
mental gymnastic of Latin and Greek. Prophetically, Chaucer saw the fate
that awaited him and appealed against his doom:
Ye know eke that, in form of speech is change
Within a thousand year, and wordes tho
That hadden price, now wonder nice and strange
Us thinketh them; and yet they spake them so,
And sped as well in love as men now do.
The body of his poetry may have grown old, but its spirit is still young
and immortal. To know that spirit—and not to know it is to ignore
something that is of unique importance in the history of our
literature—it is necessary to make the effort of becoming familiar with
the body it informs and gives life to. The antique language and
versification, so “wonder nice and strange” to our ears, are obstacles
in the path of most of those who read for pleasure’s sake (not that any
reader worthy of the name ever reads for anything else but pleasure); to
the pedants they are an end in themselves. Theirs is the carcass, but
not the soul. Between those who are daunted by his superficial
difficulties and those who take too much delight in them Chaucer finds
but few sympathetic readers. I hope in these pages to be able to give a
few of the reasons that make Chaucer so well worth reading.
Chaucer’s art is, by its very largeness and objectiveness, extremely
difficult to subject to critical analysis. Confronted by it, Dryden
could only exclaim, “Here is God’s plenty!”—and the exclamation proves,
when all is said, to be the most adequate and satisfying of all
criticisms. All that the critic can hope to do is to expand and to
illustrate Dryden’s exemplary brevity.
“God’s plenty!”—the phrase is a peculiarly happy one. It calls up a
vision of the prodigal earth, of harvest fields, of innumerable beasts
and birds, of teeming life. And it is in the heart of this living and
material world of Nature that Chaucer lives. He is the poet of earth,
supremely content to walk, desiring no wings. Many English poets have
loved the earth for the sake of something—a dream, a reality, call it
which you will—that lies behind it. But there have been few, and, except
for Chaucer, no poets of greatness, who have been in love with earth for
its own sake, with Nature in the sense of something inevitably material,
something that is the opposite of the supernatural. Supreme over
everything in this world he sees the natural order, the “law of kind,”
as he calls it. The teachings of most of the great prophets and poets
are simply protests against the law of kind. Chaucer does not protest,
he accepts. It is precisely this acceptance that makes him unique among
English poets. He does not go to Nature as the symbol of some further
spiritual reality; hills, flowers, sea, and clouds are not, for him,
transparencies through which the workings of a great soul are visible.
No, they are opaque; he likes them for what they are, things pleasant
and beautiful, and not the less delicious because they are definitely of
the earth earthy. Human beings, in the same way, he takes as he finds,
noble and beastish, but, on the whole, wonderfully decent. He has none
of that strong ethical bias which is usually to be found in the English
mind. He is not horrified by the behaviour of his fellow-beings, and he
has no desire to reform them. Their characters, their motives interest
him, and he stands looking on at them, a happy spectator. This serenity
of detachment, this placid acceptance of things and people as they are,
is emphasized if we compare the poetry of Chaucer with that of his
contemporary, Langland, or whoever it was that wrote _Piers Plowman_.
The historians tell us that the later years of the fourteenth century
were among the most disagreeable periods of our national history.
English prosperity was at a very low ebb. The Black Death had
exterminated nearly a third of the working population of the islands, a
fact which, aggravated by the frenzied legislation of the Government,
had led to the unprecedented labour troubles that culminated in the
peasants’ revolt. Clerical corruption and lawlessness were rife. All
things considered, even our own age is preferable to that in which
Chaucer lived. Langland does not spare denunciation; he is appalled by
the wickedness about him, scandalized at the openly confessed vices that
have almost ceased to pay to virtue the tribute of hypocrisy.
Indignation is the inspiration of _Piers Plowman_, the righteous
indignation of the prophet. But to read Chaucer one would imagine that
there was nothing in fourteenth-century England to be indignant about.
It is true that the Pardoner, the Friar, the Shipman, the Miller, and,
in fact, most of the Canterbury pilgrims are rogues and scoundrels; but,
then, they are such “merry harlots” too. It is true that the Monk
prefers hunting to praying, that, in these latter days when fairies are
no more, “there is none other incubus” but the friar, that “purse is the
Archdeacon’s hell,” and the Summoner a villain of the first magnitude;
but Chaucer can only regard these things as primarily humorous. The fact
of people not practising what they preach is an unfailing source of
amusement to him. Where Langland cries aloud in anger, threatening the
world with hell-fire, Chaucer looks on and smiles. To the great
political crisis of his time he makes but one reference, and that a
comic one:
So hideous was the noyse, ah _benedicite_!
Certes he Jakke Straw, and his meyné,
Ne maden schoutes never half so schrille,
Whan that they wolden eny Flemyng kille,
As thilke day was mad upon the fox.
Peasants may revolt, priests break their vows, lawyers lie and cheat,
and the world in general indulge its sensual appetites; why try and
prevent them, why protest? After all, they are all simply being natural,
they are all following the law of kind. A reasonable man, like himself,
“flees fro the pres and dwelles with soothfastnesse.” But reasonable men
are few, and it is the nature of human beings to be the unreasonable
sport of instinct and passion, just as it is the nature of the daisy to
open its eye to the sun and of the goldfinch to be a spritely and
“gaylard” creature. The law of kind has always and in everything
dominated; there is no rubbing nature against the hair. For
God it wot, there may no man embrace
As to destreyne a thing, the which nature
Hath naturelly set in a creature.
Take any brid, and put him in a cage,
And do all thine entent and thy corrage
To foster it tendrely with meat and drynke,
And with alle the deyntees thou canst bethinke,
And keep it all so kyndly as thou may;
Although his cage of gold be never so gay,
Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand fold,
Lever in a forest, that is wyld and cold,
Gon ete wormes, and such wrecchidnes;
For ever this brid will doon his busynes
To scape out of his cage when that he may;
His liberté the brid desireth aye ...
Lo, heer hath kynd his dominacioun,
And appetyt flemeth (banishes) discrescioun.
Also a she wolf hath a vilayne kynde,
The lewideste wolf that she may fynde,
Or least of reputacioun, him will sche take,
In tyme whan hir lust to have a make.
Alle this ensaumples tell I by these men
That ben untrewe, and nothing by wommen.
(As the story from which these lines are quoted happens to be about an
unfaithful wife, it seems that, in making the female sex immune from the
action of the law of kind, Chaucer is indulging a little in irony.)
For men han ever a licorous appetit
On lower thing to parforme her delit
Than on her wyves, ben they never so faire,
Ne never so trewe, ne so debonaire.
Nature, deplorable as some of its manifestations may be, must always and
inevitably assert itself. The law of kind has power even over immortal
souls. This fact is the source of the poet’s constantly expressed
dislike of celibacy and asceticism. The doctrine that upholds the
superiority of the state of virginity over that of wedlock is, to begin
with (he holds), a danger to the race. It encourages a process which we
may be permitted to call dysgenics—the carrying on of the species by the
worst members. The Host’s words to the Monk are memorable:
Allas! why wearest thou so wide a cope?
God give me sorwe! and I were a pope
Nought only thou, but every mighty man,
Though he were shore brode upon his pan (head)
Should han a wife; for all this world is lorn;
Religioun hath take up all the corn
Of tredyng, and we burel (humble) men ben shrimpes;
Of feble trees there cometh wrecchid impes.
This maketh that our heires ben so sclendere
And feble, that they may not wel engendre.
But it is not merely dangerous; it is anti-natural. That is the theme of
the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Counsels of perfection are all very well
when they are given to those
That wolde lyve parfytly;
But, lordyngs, by your leve, that am not I.
The bulk of us must live as the law of kind enjoins.
It is characteristic of Chaucer’s conception of the world, that the
highest praise he can bestow on anything is to assert of it, that it
possesses in the highest degree the qualities of its own particular
kind. Thus of Cressida he says:
She was not with the least of her stature,
But all her limbes so well answering
Weren to womanhood, that creature
Nas never lesse mannish in seeming.
The horse of brass in the _Squire’s Tale_ is
So well proportioned to be strong,
Right as it were a steed of Lombardye,
Thereto so _horsely_ and so quick of eye.
Everything that is perfect of its kind is admirable, even though the
kind may not be an exalted one. It is, for instance, a joy to see the
way in which the Canon sweats:
A cloote-leaf (dock leaf) he had under his hood
For sweat, and for to keep his head from heat.
But it was joye for to see him sweat;
His forehead dropped as a stillatorie
Were full of plantain or of peritorie.
The Canon is supreme in the category of sweaters, the very type and idea
of perspiring humanity; therefore he is admirable and joyous to behold,
even as a horse that is supremely horsely or a woman less mannish than
anything one could imagine. In the same way it is a delight to behold
the Pardoner preaching to the people. In its own kind his charlatanism
is perfect and deserves admiration:
Mine handes and my tonge gon so yerne,
That it is joye to see my busynesse.
This manner of saying of things that they are joyous, or, very often,
heavenly, is typical of Chaucer. He looks out on the world with a
delight that never grows old or weary. The sights and sounds of daily
life, all the lavish beauty of the earth fill him with a pleasure which
he can only express by calling it a “joy” or a “heaven.” It “joye was to
see” Cressida and her maidens playing together; and
So aungellyke was her native beauté
That like a thing immortal seemede she,
As doth an heavenish parfit creature.
The peacock has angel’s feathers; a girl’s voice is heavenly to hear:
Antigone the shene
Gan on a Trojan song to singen clear,
That it an heaven was her voice to hear.
One could go on indefinitely multiplying quotations that testify to
Chaucer’s exquisite sensibility to sensuous beauty and his immediate,
almost exclamatory response to it. Above all, he is moved by the beauty
of “young, fresh folkes, he and she”; by the grace and swiftness of
living things, birds and animals; by flowers and placid, luminous,
park-like landscapes.
It is interesting to note how frequently Chaucer speaks of animals. Like
many other sages, he perceives that an animal is, in a certain sense,
more human in character than a man. For an animal bears the same
relation to a man as a caricature to a portrait. In a way a caricature
is truer than a portrait. It reveals all the weaknesses and absurdities
that flesh is heir to. The portrait brings out the greatness and dignity
of the spirit that inhabits the often ridiculous flesh. It is not merely
that Chaucer has written regular fables, though the _Nun’s Priest’s
Tale_ puts him among the great fabulists of the world, and there is also
much definitely fabular matter in the _Parliament of Fowls_. No, his
references to the beasts are not confined to his animal stories alone;
they are scattered broadcast throughout his works. He relies for much of
his psychology and for much of his most vivid description on the
comparison of man, in his character and appearance (which with Chaucer
are always indissolubly blended), with the beasts. Take, for example,
that enchanting simile in which Troilus, stubbornly anti-natural in
refusing to love as the law of kind enjoins him, is compared to the
corn-fed horse, who has to be taught good behaviour and sound philosophy
under the whip:
As proude Bayard ginneth for to skip
Out of the way, so pricketh him his corn,
Till he a lash have of the longe whip,
Then thinketh he, “Though I prance all biforn,
First in the trace, full fat and newe shorn,
Yet am I but an horse, and horses’ law
I must endure and with my feeres draw.”
Or, again, women with too pronounced a taste for fine apparel are
likened to the cat:
And if the cattes skin be sleek and gay,
She will not dwell in housé half a day,
But forth she will, ere any day be dawet
To show her skin and gon a caterwrawet.
In his descriptions of the personal appearance of his characters Chaucer
makes constant use of animal characteristics. Human beings, both
beautiful and hideous, are largely described in terms of animals. It is
interesting to see how often in that exquisite description of Alisoun,
the carpenter’s wife, Chaucer produces his clearest and sharpest effects
by a reference to some beast or bird:
Fair was this younge wife, and therewithal
As any weasel her body gent and small ...
But of her song it was as loud and yern
As is the swallow chittering on a barn.
Thereto she coulde skip and make a game
As any kid or calf following his dame.
Her mouth was sweet as bragot is or meath,
Or hoard of apples, laid in hay or heath.
Wincing she was, as is a jolly colt,
Long as a mast and upright as a bolt.
Again and again in Chaucer’s poems do we find such similitudes, and the
result is always a picture of extraordinary precision and liveliness.
Here, for example, are a few:
Gaylard he was as goldfinch in the shaw,
or,
Such glaring eyen had he as an hare;
or,
As piled (bald) as an ape was his skull.
The self-indulgent friars are
Like Jovinian,
Fat as a whale, and walken as a swan.
The Pardoner describes his own preaching in these words:
Then pain I me to stretche forth my neck
And east and west upon the people I beck,
As doth a dove, sitting on a barn.
Very often, too, Chaucer derives his happiest metaphors from birds and
beasts. Of Troy in its misfortune and decline he says: Fortune
Gan pull away the feathers bright of Troy
From day to day.
Love-sick Troilus soliloquizes thus:
He said: “O fool, now art thou in the snare
That whilom japedest at lovés pain,
Now art thou hent, now gnaw thin owné chain.”
The metaphor of Troy’s bright feathers reminds me of a very beautiful
simile borrowed from the life of the plants:
And as in winter leavés been bereft,
Each after other, till the tree be bare,
So that there nis but bark and branches left,
Lieth Troilus, bereft of each welfare,
Ybounden in the blacke bark of care.
And this, in turn, reminds me of that couplet in which Chaucer compares
a girl to a flowering pear-tree:
She was well more blissful on to see
Than is the newe parjonette tree.
Chaucer is as much at home among the stars as he is among the birds and
beasts and flowers of earth. There are some literary men of to-day who
are not merely not ashamed to confess their total ignorance of all facts
of a “scientific” order, but even make a boast of it. Chaucer would have
regarded such persons with pity and contempt. His own knowledge of
astronomy was wide and exact. Those whose education has been as horribly
imperfect as my own will always find some difficulty in following him as
he moves with easy assurance through the heavens. Still, it is possible
without knowing any mathematics to appreciate Chaucer’s descriptions of
the great pageant of the sun and stars as they march in triumph from
mansion to mansion through the year. He does not always trouble to take
out his astrolabe and measure the progress of “Phebus, with his rosy
cart”; he can record the god’s movements in more general terms than may
be understood even by the literary man of nineteen hundred and
twenty-three. Here, for example, is a description of “the colde frosty
seisoun of Decembre,” in which matters celestial and earthly are mingled
to make a picture of extraordinary richness:
Phebus wox old and hewed like latoun,
That in his hoté declinacioun
Shone as the burned gold, with streames bright;
But now in Capricorn adown he light,
Where as he shone full pale; I dare well sayn
The bitter frostes with the sleet and rain
Destroyed hath the green in every yerd.
Janus sit by the fire with double beard,
And drinketh of his bugle horn the wine;
Beforn him stont the brawn of tusked swine,
And “_noel_” cryeth every lusty man.
In astrology he does not seem to have believed. The magnificent passage
in the _Man of Law’s Tale_, where it is said that
In the starres, clearer than is glass,
Is written, God wot, whoso can it read,
The death of every man withouten drede,
is balanced by the categorical statement found in the scientific and
educational treatise on the astrolabe, that judicial astrology is mere
deceit.
His scepticism with regard to astrology is not surprising. Highly as he
prizes authority, he prefers the evidence of experience, and where that
evidence is lacking he is content to profess a quiet agnosticism. His
respect for the law of kind is accompanied by a complementary mistrust
of all that does not appear to belong to the natural order of things.
There are moments when he doubts even the fundamental beliefs of the
Church:
A thousand sythes have I herd men telle
That there is joye in heaven and peyne in helle;
And I accorde well that it be so.
But natheless, this wot I well also
That there is none that dwelleth in this countree
That either hath in helle or heaven y-be.
Of the fate of the spirit after death he speaks in much the same style:
His spiryt changed was, and wente there
As I came never, I cannot tellen where;
Therefore I stint, I nam no divinistre;
Of soules fynde I not in this registre,
Ne me list not th’ opiniouns to telle
Of hem, though that they witten where they dwelle.
He has no patience with superstitions. Belief in dreams, in auguries,
fear of the “ravenes qualm or schrychynge of thise owles” are all
unbefitting to a self-respecting man:
To trowen on it bothe false and foul is;
Alas, alas, so noble a creature
As is a man shall dreaden such ordure!
By an absurd pun he turns all Calchas’s magic arts of prophecy to
ridicule:
So when this Calkas knew by calkulynge,
And eke by answer of this Apollo
That Grekes sholden such a people bringe,
Through which that Troye muste ben fordo,
He cast anon out of the town to go.
It would not be making a fanciful comparison to say that Chaucer in many
respects resembles Anatole France. Both men possess a profound love of
this world for its own sake, coupled with a profound and gentle
scepticism about all that lies beyond this world. To both of them the
lavish beauty of Nature is a never-failing and all-sufficient source of
happiness. Neither of them are ascetics; in pain and privation they see
nothing but evil. To both of them the notion that self-denial and
self-mortification are necessarily righteous and productive of good is
wholly alien. Both of them are apostles of sweetness and light, of
humanity and reasonableness. Unbounded tolerance of human weakness and a
pity, not the less sincere for being a little ironical, characterize
them both. Deep knowledge of the evils and horrors of this
unintelligible world makes them all the more attached to its kindly
beauty. But in at least one important respect Chaucer shows himself to
be the greater, the completer spirit. He possesses, what Anatole France
does not, an imaginative as well as an intellectual comprehension of
things. Faced by the multitudinous variety of human character, Anatole
France exhibits a curious impotence of imagination. He does not
understand characters in the sense that, say, Tolstoy understands them;
he cannot, by the power of imagination, get inside them, become what he
contemplates. None of the persons of his creation are complete
characters; they cannot be looked at from every side; they are
portrayed, as it were, in the flat and not in three dimensions. But
Chaucer has the power of getting into someone else’s character. His
understanding of the men and women of whom he writes is complete; his
slightest character sketches are always solid and three-dimensional. The
Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_, in which the effects are almost
entirely produced by the description of external physical features,
furnishes us with the most obvious example of his three-dimensional
drawing. Or, again, take that description in the Merchant’s tale of old
January and his young wife May after their wedding night. It is wholly a
description of external details, yet the result is not a superficial
picture. We are given a glimpse of the characters in their entirety:
Thus laboureth he till that the day gan dawe.
And then he taketh a sop in fine clarré,
And upright in his bed then sitteth he.
And after that he sang full loud and clear,
And kissed his wife and made wanton cheer.
He was all coltish, full of ragerye,
And full of jargon as a flecked pye.
The slacké skin about his necké shaketh,
While that he sang, so chanteth he and craketh.
But God wot what that May thought in her heart,
When she him saw up sitting in his shirt,
In his night cap and with his necké lean;
She praiseth not his playing worth a bean.
But these are all slight sketches. For full-length portraits of
character we must turn to _Troilus and Cressida_, a work which, though
it was written before the fullest maturity of Chaucer’s powers, is in
many ways his most remarkable achievement, and one, moreover, which has
never been rivalled for beauty and insight in the whole held of English
narrative poetry. When one sees with what certainty and precision
Chaucer describes every movement of Cressida’s spirit from the first
movement she hears of Troilus’ love for her to the moment when she is
unfaithful to him, one can only wonder why the novel of character should
have been so slow to make its appearance. It was not until the
eighteenth century that narrative artists, using prose as their medium
instead of verse, began to rediscover the secrets that were familiar to
Chaucer in the fourteenth.
_Troilus and Cressida_ was written, as we have said, before Chaucer had
learnt to make the fullest use of his powers. In colouring it is
fainter, less sharp and brilliant than the best of the _Canterbury
Tales_. The character studies are there, carefully and accurately worked
out; but we miss the bright vividness of presentation with which Chaucer
was to endow his later art. The characters are all alive and completely
seen and understood. But they move, as it were, behind a veil—the veil
of that poetic convention which had, in the earliest poems, almost
completely shrouded Chaucer’s genius, and which, as he grew up, as he
adventured and discovered, grew thinner and thinner, and finally
vanished like gauzy mist in the sunlight. When _Troilus and Cressida_
was written the mist had not completely dissipated, and the figures of
his creation, complete in conception and execution as they are, are seen
a little dimly because of the interposed veil.
The only moment in the poem when Chaucer’s insight seems to fail him is
at the very end; he has to account for Cressida’s unfaithfulness, and he
is at a loss to know how he shall do it. Shakespeare, when he re-handled
the theme, had no such difficulty. His version of the story, planned on
much coarser lines than Chaucer’s, leads obviously and inevitably to the
fore-ordained conclusion; his Cressida is a minx who simply lives up to
her character. What could be more simple? But to Chaucer the problem is
not so simple. His Cressida is not a minx. From the moment he first sets
eyes on her Chaucer, like his own unhappy Troilus, falls head over ears
in love. Beautiful, gentle, gay; possessing, it is true, somewhat
“tendre wittes,” but making up for her lack of skill in ratiocination by
the “sudden avysements” of intuition; vain, but not disagreeably so, of
her good looks and of her power over so great and noble a knight as
Troilus; slow to feel love, but once she has yielded, rendering back to
Troilus passion for passion; in a word, the “least mannish” of all
possible creatures—she is to Chaucer the ideal of gracious and courtly
womanhood. But, alas, the old story tells us that Cressida jilted her
Troilus for that gross prize-fighter of a man, Diomed. The woman whom
Chaucer has made his ideal proves to be no better than she should be;
there is a flaw in the crystal. Chaucer is infinitely reluctant to admit
the fact. But the old story is specific in its statement; indeed, its
whole point consists in Cressida’s infidelity. Called upon to explain
his heroine’s fall, Chaucer is completely at a loss. He makes a few
half-hearted attempts to solve the problem, and then gives it up,
falling back on authority. The old clerks say it was so, therefore it
must be so, and that’s that. The fact is that Chaucer pitched his
version of the story in a different key from that which is found in the
“olde bokes,” with the result that the note on which he is compelled by
his respect for authority to close is completely out of harmony with the
rest of the music. It is this that accounts for the chief, and indeed
the only, defect of the poem—its hurried and boggled conclusion.
I cannot leave Cressida without some mention of the doom which was
prepared for her by one of Chaucer’s worthiest disciples, Robert
Henryson, in some ways the best of the Scottish poets of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. Shocked by the fact that, in Chaucer’s poem,
Cressida receives no punishment for her infidelity, Henryson composed a
short sequel, _The Testament of Cresseid_, to show that poetic justice
was duly performed. Diomed, we are told, grew weary as soon as he had
“all his appetyte and mair, fulfillit on this fair ladie” and cast her
off, to become a common drab.
O fair Cresseid! the flour and _A per se_
Of Troy and Greece, how wast thow fortunait!
To change in filth all thy feminitie
And be with fleshly lust sa maculait,
And go amang the Grekis, air and late
So giglot-like.
In her misery she curses Venus and Cupid for having caused her to love
only to lead her to this degradation:
The seed of love was sowen in my face
And ay grew green through your supply and grace.
But now, alas! that seed with frost is slain,
And I fra lovers left, and all forlane.
In revenge Cupid and his mother summon a council of gods and condemn the
_A per se_ of Greece and Troy to be a hideous leper. And so she goes
forth with the other lepers, armed with bowl and clapper, to beg her
bread. One day Troilus rides past the place where she is sitting by the
roadside near the gates of Troy:
Then upon him she cast up both her een,
And with ane blenk it cam into his thocht,
That he some time before her face had seen,
But she was in such plight he knew her nocht,
Yet then her look into his mind it brocht
The sweet visage and amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid, one sometime his own darling.
He throws her an alms and the poor creature dies. And so the moral sense
is satisfied. There is a good deal of superfluous mythology and
unnecessary verbiage in _The Testament of Cresseid_, but the main lines
of the poem are firmly and powerfully drawn. Of all the disciples of
Chaucer, from Hoccleve and the Monk of Bury down to Mr. Masefield,
Henryson may deservedly claim to stand the highest.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES
Footnote 1:
_Collected Poems_, by Edward Thomas: with a Foreword by W. de la Mare.
Selwyn & Blount.
Footnote 2:
_Wordsworth: an Anthology_, edited, with a Preface, by T. J.
Cobden-Sanderson. R. Cobden-Sanderson.
Footnote 3:
_Ben Jonson_, by G. Gregory Smith. (English Men of Letters Series.)
Macmillan, 1919.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Notes
The following minor changes have been made:
The word “poety” was changed to “poetry” on page 42.
A comma was added after “C” on page 63.
Accents were added to “numérotés” on page 63 and “Où” on page 157.
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