OLD AND NEW MASTERS

BY ROBERT LYND

1919

TO SYLVIA LYND

CONTENTS

 I. DOSTOEVSKY THE SENSATIONALIST II. JANE AUSTEN: NATURAL HISTORIAN III. MR. G. K. CHESTERTON AND MR. HILAIRE BELLOC (1) THE HEAVENLY TWINS (2) THE COPIOUSNESS OF MR. BELLOC (3) THE TWO MR. CHESTERTONS IV. WORDSWORTH (1) HIS PERSONALITY AND GENIUS (2) HIS POLITICS V. KEATS (1) THE BIOGRAPHY (2) THE MATTHEW ARNOLD VIEW VI. HENRY JAMES (1) THE NOVELIST OF GRAINS AND SCRUPLES (2) THE ARTIST AT WORK (3) HOW HE WAS BORN AGAIN VII. BROWNING: THE POET OF LOVEVIII. THE FAME OF J. M. SYNGE IX. VILLON: THE GENIUS OF THE TAVERN X. POPE XI. JAMES ELROY FLECKER XII. TURGENEVXIII. THE MADNESS OF STRINDBERGXIV. "THE PRINCE OF FRENCH POETS"XV. ROSSETTI AND RITUALXVI. MR. BERNARD SHAWXVII. MR. MASEFIELD'S SECRETXVIII. MR. W. B. YEATS (1) HIS OWN ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF (2) HIS POETRYXIX. TCHEHOV: THE PERFECT STORY-TELLERXX. LADY GREGORYXXI. MR. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAMXXII. SWINBURNE (1) THE EXOTIC BIRD (2) GENIUS WITHOUT EYESXXIII. THE WORK OF T. M. KETTLEXXIV. MR. J. C. SQUIREXXV. MR. JOSEPH CONRAD (1) THE MAKING OF AN AUTHOR (2) TALES OF MYSTERYXXVI. MR. RUDYARD KIPLING (1) THE GOOD STORY-TELLER (2) THE POET OF LIFE WITH A CAPITAL HELLXXVII. MR. THOMAS HARDY (1) HIS GENIUS AS A POET (2) A POET IN WINTER

OLD AND NEW MASTERS

I

DOSTOEVSKY THE SENSATIONALIST

Mr. George Moore once summed up _Crime and Punishment_ as "Gaboriau withpsychological sauce. " He afterwards apologized for the epigram, but heinsisted that all the same there is a certain amount of truth in it. Andso there is. 

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in thelast analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almostalways reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave likethe men and women one reads about in the police news. There are moremurders and attempted murders in his books than in those of any othergreat novelist. His people more nearly resemble madmen and wild beaststhan normal human beings. 

He releases them from most of the ordinary inhibitions. He is fascinatedby the loss of self-control--by the disturbance and excitement whichthis produces, often in the most respectable circles. He is beyond allhis rivals the novelist of "scenes. " His characters get drunk, or go madwith jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits, or rave hysterically. IfDostoevsky had had less vision he would have been Strindberg. If hisvision had been aesthetic and sensual, he might have been D'Annunzio. 

Like them, he is a novelist of torture. Turgenev found in his worksomething Sadistic, because of the intensity with which he dwells oncruelty and pain. Certainly the lust of cruelty--the lust of destructionfor destruction's sake--is the most conspicuous of the deadly sins inDostoevsky's men and women. He may not be a "cruel author. " Mr. J. Middleton Murry, in his very able "critical study, " _Dostoevsky_, deniesthe charge indignantly. But it is the sensational drama of a cruel worldthat most persistently haunts his imagination. 

Love itself is with him, as with Strindberg and D'Annunzio, for the mostpart only a sort of rearrangement of hatred. Or, rather, both hatred andlove are volcanic outbursts of the same passion. He does also portray analmost Christ-like love, a love that is outside the body and has thenature of a melting and exquisite charity. He sometimes even portraysthe two kinds of love in the same person. But they are never in balance;they are always in demoniacal conflict. Their ups and downs are like theups and downs in a fight between cat and dog. Even the lust is never, orhardly ever, the lust of a more or less sane man. It is always lust witha knife. 

Dostoevsky could not have described the sin of Nekhludov in_Resurrection_. His passions are such as come before the criminal ratherthan the civil courts. His people are possessed with devils as thepeople in all but religious fiction have long ceased to be. "This is amadhouse, " cries some one in _The Idiot_. The cry is, I fancy, repeatedin others of Dostoevsky's novels. His world is an inferno. 

One result of this is a multiplicity of action. There was never so muchtalk in any other novels, and there was never so much action. Even thetalk is of actions more than of ideas. Dostoevsky's characters describethe execution of a criminal, the whipping of an ass, the torture of achild. He sows violent deeds, not with the hand, but with the sack. EvenPrince Myshkin, the Christ-like sufferer in _The Idiot_, narratesatrocities, though he perpetrates none. Here, for example, is acharacteristic Dostoevsky story put in the Prince's mouth:

 In the evening I stopped for the night at a provincial hotel, and a murder had been committed there the night before. .. . Two peasants, middle-aged men, friends who had known each other for a long time and were not drunk, had had tea and were meaning to go to bed in the same room. But one had noticed during those last two days that the other was wearing a silver watch on a yellow bead chain, which he seems not to have seen on him before. The man was not a thief; he was an honest man, in fact, and by a peasant's standard by no means poor. But he was so taken with that watch and so fascinated by it that at last he could not restrain himself. He took a knife, and when his friend had turned away, he approached him cautiously from behind, took aim, turned his eyes heavenwards, crossed himself, and praying fervently "God forgive me, for Christ's sake!" he cut his friend's throat at one stroke like a sheep and took his watch. 

One would not accept that incident from any Western author. One wouldnot even accept it from Tolstoi or Turgenev. It is too abnormal, tooobviously tainted with madness. Yet to Dostoevsky such aberrations ofconduct make a continuous and overwhelming appeal. The crimes in hisbooks seem to spring, not from more or less rational causes, but fromsome seed of lunacy. 

He never paints Everyman; he always projects Dostoevsky, or a nightmareof Dostoevsky. That is why _Crime and Punishment_ belongs to a lowerrange of fiction than _Anna Karénina_ or _Fathers and Sons_. Raskolnikov's crime is the cold-blooded crime of a diseased mind. Itinterests us like a story from Suetonius or like _Bluebeard_. But thereis no communicable passion in it such as we find in _Agamemnon_ or_Othello_. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, thedespair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figureof the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive bysheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related tothe humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature asthe sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive me, for Christ's sake!"

One does not grudge an artist an abnormal character or two. Dostoevsky, however, has created a whole flock of these abnormal characters andwatches over them as a hen over her chickens. He invents viciousgrotesques as Dickens invents comic grotesques. In _The BrothersKaramazov_ he reveals the malignance of Smerdyakov by telling us that hewas one who, in his childhood, was very fond of hanging cats, and burying them with great ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet as though it were a surplice, and sang, and waved some object over the dead cat as though it were a censer. 

As for the Karamazovs themselves, he portrays the old father and theeldest of his sons hating each other and fighting like brutal maniacs:

 Dmitri threw up both hands and suddenly clutched the old man by the two tufts of hair that remained on his temples, tugged at them, and flung him with a crash on the floor. He kicked him two or three times with his heel in the face. The old man moaned shrilly. Ivan, though not so strong as Dmitri, threw his arms round him, and with all his might pulled him away. Alyosha helped him with his slender strength, holding Dmitri in front. 

 "Madman! You've killed him!" cried Ivan. 

 "Serve him right!" shouted Dmitri, breathlessly. "If I haven't killed him, I'll come again and kill him. "

It is easy to see why Dostoevsky has become a popular author. Incidentfollows breathlessly upon incident. No melodramatist ever poured outincident upon the stage from such a horn of plenty. His people areenergetic and untamed, like cowboys or runaway horses. They might bedescribed as runaway human beings. 

And Dostoevsky knows how to crowd his stage as only the inveteratemelodramatists know. Scenes that in an ordinary novel would take placewith two or three figures on the stage are represented in Dostoevsky astaking place before a howling, seething mob. "A dozen men have brokenin, " a maid announces in one place in _The Idiot_, "and they are alldrunk. " "Show them all in at once, " she is bidden. Dostoevsky is alwaysready to show them all in at once. 

It is one of the triumphs of his genius that, however many persons heintroduces, he never allows them to be confused into a hopeless chaos. His story finds its way unimpeded through the mob. On two opposite pagesof _The Idiot_ one finds the following characters brought in by name:General Epanchin, Prince S. , Adelaïda Ivanovna, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, Yevgeny Pavlovitch Radomsky, Princess Byelokonsky, Aglaia, PrinceMyshkin, Kolya Ivolgin, Ippolit, Varya, Ferdyshchenko, NastasyaFilippovna, Nina Alexandrovna, Ganya, Ptitsyn, and General Ivolgin. Andyet practically all of them remain separate and created beings. That ischaracteristic at once of Dostoevsky's mastery and his monstrousprofusion. 

But the secret of Dostoevsky's appeal is something more than themultitude and thrill of his incidents and characters. So incongruous, indeed, is the sensational framework of his stories with the immense andsombre genius that broods over them that Mr. Murry is inclined to regardthe incidents as a sort of wild spiritual algebra rather than as eventsoccurring on the plane of reality. "Dostoevsky, " he declares, "is not anovelist. What he is is more difficult to define. "

Mr. Murry boldly faces the difficulty and attempts the definition. Tohim Dostoevsky's work is "the record of a great mind seeking for a wayof life; it is more than a record of struggle, it is the struggleitself. " Dostoevsky himself is a man of genius "lifted out of the livingworld, " and unable to descend to it again. Mr. Murry confesses that attimes, as he reads him, he is "seized by a supersensual terror. "

 For an awful moment I seem to see things with the eye of eternity, and have a vision of suns grown cold, and hear the echo of voices calling without sound across the waste and frozen universe. And those voices take shape in certain unforgettable fragments of dialogue that have been spoken by one spirit to another in some ugly, mean tavern, set in surrounding darkness. 

Dostoevsky's people, it is suggested, "are not so much men and women asdisembodied spirits who have for the moment put on mortality. "

 They have no physical being. Ultimately they are the creations, not of a man who desired to be, but of a spirit which sought to know. They are the imaginations of a God-tormented mind. . .. Because they are possessed they are no longer men and women. 

This is all in a measure true. Dostoevsky was no realist. Nor, on theother hand, was he a novelist of horrors for horrors' sake. He couldnever have written _Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar_ like Poe for thesake of the aesthetic thrill. 

None the less he remains a novelist who dramatized his spiritualexperiences through the medium of actions performed by human beings. Clearly he believed that human beings--though not ordinary humanbeings--were capable of performing the actions he narrates with suchenergy. Mr. Murry will have it that the actions in the novels take placein a "timeless" world, largely because Dostoevsky has the habit ofcrowding an impossible rout of incidents into a single day. But surelythe Greeks took the same license with events. This habit of packing intoa few hours actions enough to fill a lifetime seems to me in Dostoevskyto be a novelist's device rather than the result of a spiritual escapeinto timelessness. 

To say this is not to deny the spiritual content of Dostoevsky'swork--the anguish of the imprisoned soul as it battles with doubt anddenial and despair. There is in Dostoevsky a suggestion of Calibantrying to discover some better god than Setebos. At the same time onewould be going a great deal too far in accepting the description ofhimself as "a child of unbelief. " The ultimate attitude of Dostoevsky isas Christian as the Apostle Peter's, "Lord, I believe; help Thou mineunbelief!" When Dostoevsky writes, "If any one could prove to me thatChrist is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I shall prefer to stay with Christ and not with the truth, " Mr. Murryinterprets this as a denial of Christ. It is surely a kind of faith, though a despairing kind. And beyond the dark night of suffering, anddissipating the night, Dostoevsky still sees the light of Christiancompassion. His work is all earthquake and eclipse and dead stars apartfrom this. 

He does not, Mr. Murry urges, believe, as has often been said, that menare purified by suffering. It seems to me that Dostoevsky believes thatmen are purified, if not by their own sufferings, at least by thesufferings of others. Or even by the compassion of others, like PrinceMyshkin in _The Idiot_. But the truth is, it is by no means easy tosystematize the creed of a creature at war with life, as Dostoevskywas--a man tortured by the eternal conflict of the devilish and thedivine in his own breast. 

His work, like his face, bears the mark of this terrible conflict. Thenovels are the perfect image of the man. As to the man himself, theVicomte de Vogüé described him as he saw him in the last years of hislife:--

 Short, lean, neurotic, worn and bowed down with sixty years of misfortune, faded rather than aged, with a look of an invalid of uncertain age, with a long beard and hair still fair, and for all that still breathing forth the "cat-life. " . .. The face was that of a Russian peasant; a real Moscow mujik, with a flat nose, small, sharp eyes deeply set, sometimes dark and gloomy, sometimes gentle and mild. The forehead was large and lumpy, the temples were hollow as if hammered in. His drawn, twitching features seemed to press down on his sad-looking mouth. .. . Eyelids, lips, and every muscle of his face twitched nervously the whole time. When he became excited on a certain point, one could have sworn that one had seen him before seated on a bench in a police-court awaiting trial, or among vagabonds who passed their time begging before the prison doors. At all other times he carried that look of sad and gentle meekness seen on the images of old Slavonic saints. 

That is the portrait of the man one sees behind Dostoevsky's novels--aportrait one might almost have inferred from the novels. It is a figurethat at once fascinates and repels. It is a figure that leads one to theedge of the abyss. One cannot live at all times with such an author. Buthis books will endure as the confession of the most terrible spiritualand imaginative experiences that modern literature has given us. 

II

JANE AUSTEN: NATURAL HISTORIAN

Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is anaturalist among tame animals. She does not study man (as Dostoevskydoes) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men andwomen are essentially men and women of the fireside. 

Nor is Jane Austen entirely a realist in her treatment even of these. She idealizes them to the point of making most of them good-looking, andshe hates poverty to such a degree that she seldom can endure to writeabout anybody who is poor. She is not happy in the company of acharacter who has not at least a thousand pounds. "People get sohorridly poor and economical in this part of the world, " she writes onone occasion, "that I have no patience with them. Kent is the only placefor happiness; everybody is rich there. " Her novels do not introduce usto the most exalted levels of the aristocracy. They provide us, however, with a natural history of county people and of people who are just belowthe level of county people and live in the eager hope of being takennotice of by them. There is more caste snobbishness, I think, in JaneAusten's novels than in any other fiction of equal genius. She, far morethan Thackeray, is the novelist of snobs. 

How far Jane Austen herself shared the social prejudices of hercharacters it is not easy to say. Unquestionably, she satirized them. Atthe same time, she imputes the sense of superior rank not only to herbutts, but to her heroes and heroines, as no other novelist has everdone. Emma Woodhouse lamented the deficiency of this sense in FrankChurchill. "His indifference to a confusion of rank, " she thought, "bordered too much on inelegance of mind. " Mr. Darcy, again, even whenhe melts so far as to become an avowed lover, neither forgets his socialposition, nor omits to talk about it. "His sense of her inferiority, ofits being a degradation . .. Was dwelt on with a warmth which seemed dueto the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommendhis suit. " On discovering, to his amazement, that Elizabeth is offendedrather than overwhelmed by his condescension, he defends himself warmly. "Disguise of every sort, " he declares, "is my abhorrence. Nor am Iashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could youexpect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? Tocongratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life isso decidedly beneath my own?"

It is perfectly true that Darcy and Emma Woodhouse are the butts of MissAusten as well as being among her heroes and heroines. She mocksthem--Darcy especially--no less than she admires. She loves to let herwit play about the egoism of social caste. She is quite merciless inderiding, it when it becomes overbearing, as in Lady Catherine deBourgh, or when it produces flunkeyish reactions, as in Mr. Collins. ButI fancy she liked a modest measure of it. Most people do. Jane Austen, in writing so much about the sense of family and position, chose as hertheme one of the most widespread passions of civilized human nature. 

She was herself a clergyman's daughter. She was the seventh of a familyof eight, born in the parsonage at Steventon, in Hampshire. Her lifeseems to have been far from exciting. Her father, like the clergy in hernovels, was a man of leisure--of so much leisure, as Mr. Cornish remindsus, that he was able to read out Cowper to his family in the mornings. Jane was brought up to be a young lady of leisure. She learned Frenchand Italian and sewing: she was "especially great in satin-stitch. " Sheexcelled at the game of spillikins. 

She must have begun to write at an early age. In later life, she urgesan ambitious niece, aged twelve, to give up writing till she is sixteen, adding that "she had herself often wished she had read more and writtenless in the corresponding years of her life. " She was only twenty whenshe began to write _First Impressions_, the perfect book which was notpublished till seventeen years later with the title altered to _Prideand Prejudice_. She wrote secretly for many years. Her family knew ofit, but the world did not--not even the servants or the visitors to thehouse. She used to hide the little sheets of paper on which she waswriting when any one approached. She had not, apparently, a room toherself, and must have written under constant threat of interruption. She objected to having a creaking door mended on one occasion, becauseshe knew by it when any one was coming. 

She got little encouragement to write. _Pride and Prejudice_ was offeredto a publisher in 1797: he would not even read it. _Northanger Abbey_was written in the next two years. It was not accepted by a publisher, however, till 1803; and he, having paid ten pounds for it, refused topublish it. One of Miss Austen's brothers bought back the manuscript atthe price at which it had been sold twelve or thirteen years later; buteven then it was not published till 1818, when the author was dead. 

The first of her books to appear was _Sense and Sensibility_. She hadbegun to write it immediately after finishing _Pride and Prejudice_. Itwas published in 1811, a good many years later, when Miss Austen wasthirty-six years old. The title-page merely said that it was written "Bya Lady. " The author never put her name to any of her books. For ananonymous first novel, it must be admitted, _Sense and Sensibility_ wasnot unsuccessful. It brought Miss Austen £150--"a prodigiousrecompense, " she thought, "for that which had cost her nothing. " Thefact, however, that she had not earned more than £700 from her novels bythe time of her death shows that she never became a really popularauthor in her lifetime. 

She was rewarded as poorly in credit as in cash, though the PrinceRegent became an enthusiastic admirer of her books, and kept a set ofthem in each of his residences. It was the Prince Regent's librarian, the Rev. J. S. Clarke, who, on becoming chaplain to Prince Leopold ofSaxe-Coburg, made the suggestion to her that "an historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august House of Coburg, would justnow be very interesting. " Mr. Collins, had he been able to wean himselffrom Fordyce's _Sermons_ so far as to allow himself to take an interestin fiction, could hardly have made a proposal more exquisitelygrotesque. One is glad the proposal was made, however, not only for itsown sake, but because it drew an admirable reply from Miss Austen on thenature of her genius. "I could not sit seriously down, " she declared, "to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life;and, if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and never relax intolaughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung beforeI had finished the first chapter. "

Jane Austen knew herself for what she was, an inveterate laugher. Shebelonged essentially to the eighteenth century--the century of the wits. She enjoyed the spectacle of men and women making fools of themselves, and she did not hide her enjoyment under a pretence of unobservantgood-nature. She observed with malice. It is tolerably certain that MissMitford was wrong in accepting the description of her in private life as"perpendicular, precise, taciturn, a poker of whom every one is afraid. "Miss Austen, one is sure, was a lady of good-humour, as well as anovelist of good-humour; but the good-humour had a flavour. It was thegood-humour of the satirist, not of the sentimentalizer. One can imagineJane Austen herself speaking as Elizabeth Bennet once spoke to hermonotonously soft-worded sister. "That is the most unforgiving speech, "she said, "that I ever heard you utter. Good girl!"

Miss Austen has even been accused of irreverence, and we occasionallyfind her in her letters as irreverent in the presence of death as Mr. Shaw. "Only think, " she writes in one letter--a remark she works into achapter of _Emma_, by the way--"of Mrs. Holder being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to makeone cease to abuse her. " And on another occasion she writes: "Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeksbefore she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawaresto look at her husband. " It is possible that Miss Austen's sense of thecomic ran away with her at times as Emma Woodhouse's did. I do not knowof any similar instance of cruelty in conversation on the part of alikeable person so unpardonable as Emma Woodhouse's witticism at theexpense of Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic. Miss Austen makes Emmaashamed of her witticism, however, after Mr. Knightley has lectured herfor it. She sets a limit to the rights of wit, again, in _Pride andPrejudice_, when Elizabeth defends her sharp tongue against Darcy. "Thewisest and best of men, " . .. He protests, "may be rendered ridiculous bya person whose first object in life is a joke. " "I hope I never ridiculewhat is wise or good, " says Elizabeth in the course of her answer. "Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, _do_ divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can. " The six novels that Jane Austen hasleft us might be described as the record of the diversions of aclergyman's daughter. 

The diversions of Jane Austen were, beyond those of most novelists, thediversions of a spectator. (That is what Scott and Macaulay meant bycomparing her to Shakespeare. ) Or, rather, they were the diversions of alistener. She observed with her ears rather than with her eyes. Withher, conversation was three-fourths of life. Her stories are stories ofpeople who reveal themselves almost exclusively in talk. She wastes notime in telling us what people and places looked like. She will dismissa man or a house or a view or a dinner with an adjective such as"handsome. " There is more description of persons and places in Mr. Shaw's stage-directions than in all Miss Austen's novels. She cuts the'osses and comes to the cackle as no other English novelist of the sameeminence has ever done. If we know anything of the setting or characteror even the appearance of her men and women, it is due far more to whatthey say than to anything that is said about them. And yet how perfectis her gallery of portraits! One can guess the very angle of Mr. Collins's toes. 

One seems, too, to be able to follow her characters through the trivialround of the day's idleness as closely as if one were pursuing themunder the guidance of a modern realist. They are the most unoccupiedpeople, I think, who ever lived in literature. They are people in whoselives a slight fall of snow is an event. Louisa Musgrave's jump on theCobb at Lyme Regis produces more commotion in the Jane Austen world thanmurder and arson do in an ordinary novel. Her people do not even seem, for the most part, to be interested in anything but their opinions ofeach other. They have few passions beyond match-making. They areunconcerned about any of the great events of their time. Almost the onlyreference in the novels to the Napoleonic Wars is a mention of theprize-money of naval officers. "Many a noble fortune, " says Mr. Shepherdin _Persuasion_, "has been made during the war. " Miss Austen's principaluse of the Navy outside _Mansfield Park_ is as a means of portraying theexquisite vanity of Sir Walter Elliott--his inimitable manner ofemphasizing the importance of both rank and good looks in the make-upof a gentleman. "The profession has its utility, " he says of the Navy, "but I should be sorry to see any friend of mine belonging to it. " Hegoes on to explain his reasons:

 It is in two points offensive to me; I have two strong grounds of objection to it. First as being the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of; and, secondly, as it cuts up a man's youth and vigour most terribly; a sailor grows older sooner than any other man. 

Sir Walter complains that he had once had to give place at dinner toLord St. Ives, the son of a curate, and "a certain Admiral Baldwin, themost deplorable-looking personage you can imagine: his face the colourof mahogany, rough and rugged to the last degree, all lines andwrinkles, nine grey hairs of a side, and nothing but a dab of powder attop":

 "In the name of heaven, who is that old fellow?" said I to a friend of mine who was standing near (Sir Basil Morley). "Old fellow!" cried Sir Basil, "it is Admiral Baldwin. What do you take his age to be?" "Sixty, " said I, "or perhaps sixty-two. " "Forty, " replied Sir Basil, "forty, and no more. " Picture to yourselves my amazement; I shall not easily forget Admiral Baldwin. I never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do; but to a degree, I know, it is the same with them all; they are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin's age. 

That, I think, is an excellent example of Miss Austen's genius formaking her characters talk. Luckily, conversation was still formal inher day, and it was as possible for her as for Congreve to make middlingmen and women talk first-rate prose. She did more than this, however. She was the first English novelist before Meredith to portray charmingwomen with free personalities. Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse havean independence (rare in English fiction) of the accident of beingfallen in love with. Elizabeth is a delightful prose counterpart ofBeatrice. 

Miss Austen has another point of resemblance to Meredith besides thatwhich I have mentioned. She loves to portray men puffed up withself-approval. She, too, is a satirist of the male egoist. Her books arethe most finished social satires in English fiction. They are so perfectin the delicacy of their raillery as to be charming. One is conscious inthem, indeed, of the presence of a sparkling spirit. Miss Austen comesas near being a star as it is possible to come in eighteenth-centuryconversational prose. She used to say that, if ever she should marry, she would fancy being Mrs. Crabbe. She had much of Crabbe's realism, indeed; but what a dance she led realism with the mocking light of herwit!

III

MR. G. K. CHESTERTON AND MR. HILAIRE BELLOC

1. THE HEAVENLY TWINS

It was Mr. Shaw who, in the course of a memorable controversy, inventeda fantastic pantomime animal, which he called the "Chester-Belloc. " Somesuch invention was necessary as a symbol of the literary comradeship ofMr. Hilaire Belloc and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. For Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, whatever may be the dissimilarities in the form and spiritof their work, cannot be thought of apart from each other. They are asinseparable as the red and green lights of a ship: the one illuminesthis side and the other that, but they are both equally concerned withannouncing the path of the good ship "Mediaevalism" through thedangerous currents of our times. Fifty years ago, when philology was oneof the imaginative arts, it would have been easy enough to gain creditfor the theory that they are veritable reincarnations of the HeavenlyTwins going about the earth with corrupted names. Chesterton is merelyEnglish for Castor, and Belloc is Pollux transmuted into French. Certainly, if the philologist had also been an evangelical Protestant, he would have felt a double confidence in identifying the two authorswith Castor and Pollux as the

 Great Twin Brethren, Who fought so well for Rome. 

A critic was struck some years ago by the propriety of the fact that Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc brought out books of the same kind and thesame size, through the same publisher, almost in the same week. Mr. Belloc, to be sure, called his volume of essays _This, That, and theOther_, and Mr. Chesterton called his _A Miscellany of Men. _ But if Mr. Chesterton had called his book _This, That, and the Other_ and Mr. Belloc had called his _A Miscellany of Men_, it would not have made apennyworth of difference. Each book is simply a ragbag of essays--theriotous and fantastically joyous essays of Mr. Chesterton, the sardonicand arrogantly gay essays of Mr. Belloc. Each, however, has a unity ofoutlook, not only an internal unity, but a unity with the other. Eachhas the outlook of the mediaevalist spirit--the spirit which findscrusades and miracles more natural than peace meetings and thediscoveries of science, which gives Heaven and Hell a place on the mapof the world, which casts a sinister eye on Turks and Jews, which bringsits gaiety to the altar as the tumbler in the story brought his cap andbells, which praises dogma and wine and the rule of the male, whichabominates the scientific spirit, and curses the day on which Bacon wasborn. Probably, neither of the authors would object to being labelled amediaevalist, except in so far as we all object to having labels affixedto us by other people. Mr. Chesterton's attitude on the matter, indeed, is clear from that sentence in _What's Wrong with the World_, in whichhe affirms: "Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rathermankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. " Andif, on learning some of the inferences he makes from this, you protestthat he is reactionary, and is trying to put back the hands of theclock, he is quite unashamed, and replies that the moderns "are alwayssaying 'you can't put the clock back. ' The simple and obvious answer is, 'You can. ' A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restoredby the human finger to any figure or hour. " The effrontery of an answerlike that is so magnificent that it takes one's breath away. The chiefdifficulty of Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, however, seems to be thatthey want their clock to point to two different hours at the same time, neither of which happens to be the hour which the sun has just marked atGreenwich. They want it to point at once to 878 and 1789--to Ethanduneand the French Revolution. 

Similar though they are in the revolutio-mediaevalist background oftheir philosophy, however, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc are as unlikeas possible in the spirit in which they proclaim it. If Mr. Chestertongets up on his box to prophesy against the times, he seems to do so outof a passionate and unreasoning affection for his fellows. If Mr. Bellocdenounces the age, he seems also to be denouncing the human race. Mr. Chesterton is jovial and democratic; Mr. Belloc is (to some extent)saturnine and autocratic. Mr. Chesterton belongs to the exuberantlylovable tradition of Dickens; indeed, he is, in the opinion of manypeople, the most exuberantly lovable personality which has expresseditself in English literature since Dickens. Mr. Belloc, on the otherhand, has something of the gleaming and solitary fierceness of Swift andHazlitt. Mr. Chesterton's vision, coloured though it is with the coloursof the past, projects itself generously into the future. He isforetelling the eve of the Utopia of the poor and the oppressed when hespeaks of

 the riot that all good men, even the most conservative, really dream of, when the sneer shall be struck from the face of the well-fed; when the wine of honour shall be poured down the throat of despair; when we shall, so far as to the sons of flesh is possible, take tyranny, and usury, and public treason, and bind them into bundles, and burn them. 

There is anger, as well as affection, in this eloquence--anger as of anew sort of knight thirsting to spill the blood of a new sort ofbarbarian in the name of Christ. Mr. Belloc's attack on the barbarianslacks the charity of these fiery sentences. He concludes his essay onthe scientific spirit, as embodied in Lombroso, for instance, with thewords, "The Ass!" And he seems to sneer the insult where Mr. Chestertonwould have roared it. Mr. Chesterton and he may be at one in the way inwhich they regard the scientific criminologists, eugenists, collectivists, pragmatists, post-impressionists, and most of the other"ists" of recent times, as an army of barbarians invading theterritories of mediaeval Christendom. But while Mr. Chesterton is in thegap of danger, waving against his enemies the sword of the spirit, Mr. Belloc stands on a little height apart, aiming at them the more cruelshafts of the intellect. It is not that he is less courageous than Mr. Chesterton, but that he is more contemptuous. Here, for example, is howhe meets the barbarian attack, especially as it is delivered by M. Bergson and his school:--

 In its most grotesque form, it challenges the accuracy of mathematics; in its most vicious, the processes of the human reason. The Barbarian is as proud as a savage in a top hat when he talks of the elliptical or the hyperbolic universe, and tries to picture parallel straight lines converging or diverging--but never doing anything so vulgarly old-fashioned as to remain parallel. 

 The Barbarian, when he has graduated to be a "pragmatist, " struts like a nigger in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to the gift of reason, etc. , etc. 

It would be unfair to offer this passage as an example of Mr. Belize'sdominating genius, but it is an excellent example of his domineeringtemper. His genius and his temper, one may add, seem, in these essays, to, be always trying to climb on one another's shoulders, and it is whenhis genius gets uppermost that he becomes one of the most biting andexhilarating writers of his time. On such occasions his malice ceases tobe a talent, and rises into an enthusiasm, as in _The Servants of theRich_, where, like a mediaeval bard, he shows no hesitation in housinghis enemies in the circles of Hell. His gloating proclamation of theeternal doom of the rich men's servants is an infectious piece ofhumour, at once grim and irresponsible:--

 Their doom is an eternal sleeplessness and a nakedness in the gloom. .. . These are those men who were wont to come into the room of the Poor Guest at early morning, with a steadfast and assured step, and a look of insult. These are those who would take the tattered garments and hold them at arm's length, as much as to say: "What rags these scribblers wear!" and then, casting them over the arm, with a gesture that meant: "Well, they must be brushed, but Heaven knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces!" would next discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class things, and notably loose tobacco. .. . 

 . .. Then one would see him turn one's socks inside out, which is a ritual with the horrid tribe. Then a great bath would be trundled in, and he would set beside it a great can, and silently pronounce the judgment that, whatever else was forgiven the middle-class, one thing would not be forgiven them--the neglect of the bath, of the splashing about of the water, and of the adequate wetting of the towel. 

 All these things we have suffered, you and I, at their hands. But be comforted. They writhe in Hell with their fellows. 

Mr. Belloc is not one of those authors who can be seen at their best inquotations, but even the mutilated fragment just given suggests to someextent the mixture of gaiety and malice that distinguishes his work fromthe work of any of his contemporaries. His gifts run to satire, as Mr. Chesterton's run to imaginative argument. It is this, perhaps, whichaccounts for the fact that, of these two authors, who write with theirheads in the Middle Ages, it is Mr. Chesterton who is the morecomprehensive critic of his own times. He never fights private, butalways public, battles in his essays. His mediaevalism seldomdegenerates into a prejudice, as it often does with Mr. Belloc. Itrepresents a genuine theory of the human soul, and of human freedom. Helaments as he sees men exchanging the authority of a spiritualinstitution, like the Church, for the authority a carnal institution, like a bureaucracy. He rages as he sees them abandoning charters thatgave men rights, and accepting charters that only give themprohibitions. It has been the custom for a long time to speak of Mr. Chesterton as an optimist; and there was, indeed, a time when he was sorejoiced by the discovery that the children of men were also thechildren of God, that he was as aggressively cheerful as Whitman andBrowning rolled into one. But he has left all that behind him. Theinsistent vision of a world in full retreat from the world of Alfred andCharlemagne and the saints and the fight for Jerusalem--from this andthe allied world of Danton and Robespierre, and the rush to theBastille--has driven him back upon a partly well-founded and partlyill-founded Christian pessimism. To him it now seems as if Jerusalem hadcaptured the Christians rather than the Christians Jerusalem. He seesmen rushing into Bastilles, not in order to tear them down, but in orderto inhabit the accursed cells. 

When I say that this pessimism is partly ill-founded, I mean that it isarrived at by comparing the liberties of the Middle Ages with thetyrannies of to-day, instead of by comparing the liberties of the MiddleAges with the liberties of to-day, or the tyrannies of the Middle Ageswith the tyrannies of to-day. It is the result, sometimes, of playingwith history and, sometimes, of playing with words. Is it not playingwith words, for instance, to glorify the charters by which medievalkings guaranteed the rights and privileges of their subjects, and todeny the name of charter to such a law as that by which a modern Stateguarantees some of the rights and privileges of children--to deny itsimply on the ground that the latter expresses itself largely inprohibitions? It may be necessary to forbid a child to go into agin-palace in order to secure it the privilege of not being driven intoa gin-palace. Prohibitions are as necessary to human liberty as permitsand licences. 

At the same time, quarrel as we may with Mr. Chesterton's mediaevalism, and his application of it to modern problems, we can seldom quarrel withthe motive with which he urges it upon us. His high purpose throughoutis to keep alive the human view of society, as opposed to the mechanicalview to which lazy politicians are naturally inclined. If he has notbeen able to give us any very, coherent vision of a Utopia of his own, he has, at least, done the world a service in dealing some smashingblows at the Utopia of machinery. None the less, he and Mr. Belloc wouldbe the most dangerous of writers to follow in a literal obedience. Inregard to political and social improvements, they are too often merelyDevil's Advocates of genius. But that is a necessary function, and theyare something more than that. As I have suggested, above all thearguments and the rhetoric and the humours of the little politicalbattles, they do bear aloft a banner with a strange device, reminding usthat organized society was made for man, and not man for organizedsociety. That, in the last analysis, is the useful thing for which Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc stand in modern politics. It almost seems attimes, however, as though they were ready to see us bound again with thefetters of ancient servitudes, in order to compel us to take part oncemore in the ancient struggle for freedom. 

2. THE COPIOUSNESS OF MR. BELLOC

Mr. Belloc has during the last four or five years become a public man. Before that he had been acknowledged a man of genius. But even the factthat he had sat in the House of Commons never led any great section ofEnglishmen to regard him as a figure or an institution. He was generallylooked on as one who made his bed aggressively among heretics, as a kindof Rabelaisian dissenter, as a settled interrupter, half-rude andhalf-jesting. And yet there was always in him something of thepedagogue who has been revealed so famously in these last months. Notonly had he a passion for facts and for stringing facts upon theories. He had also a high-headed and dogmatic and assured way of imparting hisfacts and theories to the human race as it sat--or in so far as it couldbe persuaded to sit--on its little forms. 

It is his schoolmasterishness which chiefly distinguishes the genius ofMr. Belloc from the genius of his great and uproarious comrade, Mr. Chesterton. Mr. Belloc is not a humorist to anything like the samedegree as Mr. Chesterton. If Mr. Chesterton were a schoolmaster he wouldgive all the triangles noses and eyes, and he would turn the Latin verbsinto nonsense rhymes. Humour is his breath and being. He cannot speak ofthe Kingdom of Heaven or of Robert Browning without it any more than ofasparagus. He is a laughing theologian, a laughing politician, alaughing critic, a laughing philosopher. He retains a fantasticcheerfulness even amid the blind furies--and how blindly furious he cansometimes be!--of controversy. With Mr. Belloc, on the other hand, laughter is a separate and relinquishable gift. He can at will lay asidethe mirth of one who has broken bounds for the solemnity of the man inauthority. He can be scapegrace prince and sober king by turns, and insuch a way that the two personalities seem scarcely to be related toeach other. Compared with Mr. Chesterton he is like a man in a mask, ora series of masks. He reveals more of his intellect to the world than ofhis heart. He is not one of those authors whom one reads with a sense ofpersonal intimacy. He is too arrogant even in his merriment for that. 

Perhaps the figure we see reflected most obtrusively in his works isthat of a man delighting in immense physical and intellectual energies. It is this that makes him one of the happiest of travellers. On histravels, one feels, every inch and nook of his being is intent upon thepassing earth. The world is to him at once a map and a history and apoem and a church and an ale-house. The birds in the greenwood, thebeer, the site of an old battle, the meaning of an old road, sacredemblems by the roadside, the comic events of way-faring--he has an equalappetite for them all. Has he not made a perfect book of these things, with a thousand fancies added, in _The Four Men_? In _The Four Men_ hehas written a travel-book which more than any other of his works hassomething of the passion of a personal confession. Here the pilgrimbecomes nearly genial as he indulges in his humours against the rich andagainst policemen and in behalf of Sussex against Kent and the rest ofthe inhabited world. 

Mr. Chesterton has spoken of Mr. Belloc as one who "did and does humanlyand heartily love England, not as a duty but as a pleasure, and almostan indulgence. " And _The Four Men_ expresses this love humorously, inconsequently, and with a grave stepping eloquence. There are fewspeeches in modern books better than the conversations in _The FourMen. _ Mr. Belloc is not one of those disciples of realism who believethat the art of conversation is dead, and that modern people are onlycapable of addressing each other in one-line sentences. He has thetraditional love of the fine speech such as we find it in the ancientpoets and historians and dramatists and satirists. He loves a monologuethat passes from mockery to regret, that gathers up by the way anecdoteand history and essay and foolery, that is half a narrative of thingsseen and half an irresponsible imagination. He can describe a runawayhorse with the farcical realism of the authors of _Some Experiences ofan Irish R. M. _, can parody a judge, can paint a portrait, and can steepa landscape in vision. Two recent critics have described him as "thebest English prose writer since Dryden, " but that only means that Mr. Belloc's rush of genius has quite naturally swept them off their feet. 

If Mr. Belloc's love of country is an indulgence, his moods ofsuspicion and contempt are something of the same kind. He is nothing ofa philanthropist in any sense of the word. He has no illusions about thevirtue of the human race. He takes pleasure in scorn, and there is aflavour of bitterness in his jests. His fiction largely belongs to thecomedy of corruption. He enjoys--and so do we--the thought of the poetin Sussex who had no money except three shillings, "and a French penny, which last some one had given him out of charity, taking him for abeggar a little way-out of Brightling that very day. " When he describesthe popular rejoicings at the result of Mr. Clutterbuck's election, hecomments: "The populace were wild with joy at their victory, and thatportion of them who as bitterly mourned defeat would have been roughlyhandled had they not numbered quite half this vast assembly of humanbeings. " He is satirist and ironist even more than historian. Hisironical essays are the best of their kind that have been written inrecent years. 

Mr. Mandell and Mr. Shanks in their little study, _Hilaire Belloc: theMan and his Work_, are more successful in their exposition of Mr. Belloc's theory of history and the theory of politics which has risenout of it--or out of which it has risen--than they are in theirdefinition of him as a man of letters. They have written a lively bookon him, but they do not sufficiently communicate an impression of thekind of his exuberance, of his thrusting intellectual ardour, of hispomp as a narrator, of his blind and doctrinaire injustices, of hisjesting like a Roman Emperor's, of the strength of his happiness upon ajourney, of his buckishness, of the queer lack of surprising phrases inhis work, of his measured omniscience, of the immense weight oftradition in the manner of his writing. There are many contemporarywriters whose work seems to be a development of journalism. Mr. Belloc's is the child of four literatures, or, maybe, half a dozen. Heoften writes carelessly, sometimes dully but there is the echo ofgreatness in his work. He is one of the few contemporary men of geniuswhose books are under-estimated rather than over-estimated. He is anauthor who has brought back to the world something of the copiousness, fancy, appetite, power, and unreason of the talk that, one imagines, wasonce to be heard in the Mermaid Tavern. 

3. THE TWO MR. CHESTERTONS

I cannot help wishing at times that Mr. Chesterton could be divided intwo. One half of him I should like to challenge to mortal combat as anenemy of the human race. The other half I would carry shoulder-highthrough the streets. For Mr. Chesterton is at once detestable andsplendid. He is detestable as a doctrinaire: he is splendid as a sageand a poet who juggles with stars and can keep seven of them in the airat a time. For, if he is a gamester, it is among the lamps of Heaven. Wecan see to read by his sport. He writes in flashes, and hidden andfantastic truths suddenly show their faces in the play of his sentences. 

Unfortunately, his two personalities have become so confused that hislater books sometimes strike one as being not so much a game played withlight as a game of hide-and-seek between light and darkness. In thedarkness he mutters incantations to the monstrous tyrannies of old time:in the light he is on his knees to liberty. He vacillates betweensuperstition and faith. His is a genius at once enslaved andtriumphantly rebel. This fatal duality is seen again and again in hisreferences to the tyrannies of the Middle Ages. Thus he writes: "It neednot be repeated that the case despotism is democratic. As a rule itscruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. " I confess I do not knowthe "rule" to which Mr. Chesterton refers. The picture of the despot asa good creature who shields the poor from the rich is not to be foundamong the facts of history. The ordinary despot, in his attitude to thecommon people suffering from the oppressions of their lords, is bestportrayed in the fable--if it be a fable--of Marie Antoinette and herflippancy about eating cake. 

I fancy, however, Mr. Chesterton's defence of despots is not the resultof any real taste for them or acquaintance with their history: it is duesimply to his passion for extremes. He likes a man, as the vulgar say, to be either one thing or the other. You must be either a Pope or arevolutionist to please him. He loves the visible rhetoric of things, and the sober suits of comfortable citizens seem dull and neutral incomparison with the red of cardinals on the one hand, and of caps ofliberty on the other. This, I think, explains Mr. Chesterton'sindifference to, if not dislike of, Parliaments. Parliaments aremonuments of compromise, and are guilty of the sin of unpicturesqueness. One would imagine that a historian of England who did not care forParliaments would be as hopelessly out of his element as a historian ofGreece who did not care for the arts. And it is because Mr. Chestertonis indifferent to so much in the English genius and character that hehas given us in his recent short _History of England_, instead of aHistory of England, a wild and wonderful pageant of argument. "Already, "he cries, as he relates how Parliament "certainly encouraged, and almostcertainly obliged" King Richard to break his pledge to the people afterthe Wat Tyler insurrection:--

 Already Parliament is not merely a governing body, but a governing class. 

The history of England is to Mr. Chesterton largely the history of therise of the governing class. He blames John Richard Green for leavingthe people out of his history; but Mr. Chesterton himself has left outthe people as effectually as any of the historians who went before him. The obsession of "the governing class" has thrust the people into thebackground. History resolves itself with him into a disgraceful epic ofa governing class which despoiled Pope and King with the right hand, andthe people with the left. It is a disgraceful epic patched with splendidepisodes, but it culminates in an appalling cry of doubt whether, afterall, it might not be better for England to perish utterly in the greatwar while fighting for liberty than to survive to behold the triumph ofthe "governing class" in a servile State of old-age pensions andInsurance Acts. 

This theory of history, as being largely the story of the evolution ofthe "governing class, " is an extremely interesting and even "fruitful"theory. But it is purely fantastic unless we bear in mind that thegoverning class has been continually compelled to enlarge itself, andthat its tendency is reluctantly to go on doing so until in the end itwill be coterminous with the "governed class. " History is a tale ofexploitation, but it is also a tale of liberation, and the over-emphasisthat Mr. Chesterton lays on exploitation by Parliaments as compared withexploitation by Popes and Kings, can only be due to infidelity in regardto some of the central principles of freedom. Surely it is possible tocondemn the Insurance Act, if it must be condemned, without apologizingeither for the Roman Empire or for the Roman ecclesiastical system. Mr. Chesterton, however, believes in giving way to one's prejudices. He saysthat history should be written backwards; and what does this mean butthat it should be dyed in prejudice? thus, he cannot refer to theHanoverian succession without indulging in a sudden outburst of heatedrhetoric such as one might expect rather in a leading article inwar-time. He writes:--

 With George there entered England something that had scarcely been seen there before; something hardly mentioned in mediaeval or Renascence writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot--the barbarian from beyond the Rhine. 

Similarly, his characterization of the Revolution of 1688 is largely aresult of his dislike of the governing classes at the present hour:--

 The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by gentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like their guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they are--factories of gentlemen when they are not merely factories of snobs. 

Both of these statements contain a grain of truth, but neither of themcontains enough truth to be true. One might describe them as sweetmeatsof history of small nutritious value. One might say the same of hiscomment on the alliance between Chatham and Frederick the Great:--

 The cannibal theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat other commonwealths, had entered Christendom. 

How finely said! But, alas! the cannibal theory of a commonwealthexisted long before Chatham and Frederick the Great. The instinct toexploit is one of the most venerable instincts of the human race, whether in individual men or in nations of men; and ancient Hebrew andancient Greek and ancient Roman had exhausted the passion of centuriesin obedience to it before the language spoken either by Chatham or byFrederick was born. Christian Spain, Christian France, and ChristianEngland had not in this matter disowned the example of their Jewish andPagan forerunners. 

What we are infinitely grateful to Mr. Chesterton for, however, is thathe has sufficient imagination to loathe cannibalism wherever he sees it. True, he seems to forgive certain forms of cannibalism on the groundthat it is an exaggeration to describe the flesh of a rich man as theflesh of a human being. But he does rage with genius at the continualeating of men that went on in England, especially after the spoliationof the monasteries in the reign of Henry the Eighth gave full scope tothe greed of the strong. He sees that the England which Whig and Torycombined to defend as the perfection of the civilized world in theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an England governed by men whosechief claim to govern was founded on the fact that they had seized theircountry and were holding it against their countrymen. Mr. Chestertonrudely shatters the mirror of perfection in which the possessing classhave long seen themselves. He writes in a brilliant passage:--

 It could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of another gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in dishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in the position of such an aristocrat of romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a secret and a sort of blackmail. .. . His glory did not come from the Crusades, but from the Great Pillage. .. . The oligarchs were descended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the paradox of England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart. 

 But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded on stealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim truth that, all through the eighteenth century, all through the great Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches about patriotism, through the period of Wandiwash and Plassey, through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in the central senate of the nation. Parliament was passing Bill after Bill for the enclosure by the great landlords of such of the common lands as had survived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than a pun, it is the prime political irony of our history that the Commons were destroying the commons. 

It would be folly to suggest, however, that, conscious though Mr. Chesterton is of the crimes of history, he has turned history into amere series of floggings of criminals. He is for ever laying down thewhip and inviting the criminals to take their seats while he paintsgorgeous portraits of them in all the colours of the rainbow. His praiseof the mighty rhetoricians of the eighteenth century could in somepassages scarcely be more unstinted if he were a Whig of the Whigs. Hecannot but admire the rotund speech and swelling adventures of thosedays. If we go farther back, we find him portraying even the Puritanswith a strange splendour of colour:--

 They were, above all things, anti-historic, like the Futurists in Italy; and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their very sacrilege was public and solemn, like a sacrament; and they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly considered, but a very secondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one of them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in the western shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown the whole story of Britain. 

This last passage is valuable, not only because it reveals Mr. Chesterton as a marvellous rhetorician doing the honours of prose to hisenemies, but because it helps to explain the essentially tragic view hetakes of English history. I exaggerated a moment ago when I said that toMr. Chesterton English history is the story of the rise of a governingclass. What it really is to him is the story of a thorn-bush cut down bya Puritan. He has hung all the candles of his faith on the sacred thorn, like the lights on a Christmas-tree, and lo! it has been cut down andcast out of England with as little respect as though it were a versefrom the Sermon on the Mount. It may be that Mr. Chesterton's sight iserratic, and that what he took to be the sacred thorn was really aUpas-tree. But in a sense that does not matter. He is entitled to hisown fable, if he tells it honestly and beautifully; and it is as atragic fable or romance of the downfall of liberty in England that onereads his _History_. He himself contends in the last chapter of the bookthat the crisis in English history came "with the fall of Richard II, following on his failures to use mediaeval despotism in the interestsof mediaeval democracy. " Mr. Chesterton's history would hardly be worthreading, if he had made nothing more of it than is suggested in thatsentence. His book (apart from occasional sloughs of sophistry andfallacious argument) remains in the mind as a song of praise and dolourchanted by the imagination about an England that obeyed not God anddespised the Tree of Life, but that may yet, he believes, hear once morethe ancestral voices, and with her sons arrayed in trade unions andguilds, march riotously back into the Garden of Eden. 

IV. 

WORDSWORTH

1. HIS PERSONALITY AND GENIUS

Dorothy Wordsworth--whom Professor Harper has praised not beyond reasonas "the most delightful, the most fascinating woman who has enrichedliterary history"--once confessed in a letter about her brother Williamthat "his person is not in his favour, " and that he was "certainlyrather plain. " He is the most difficult of all the great poets whom onereverences to portray as an attractive person. "'Horse-face, ' I haveheard satirists say, " Carlyle wrote of him, recalling a comparison ofHazlitt's; and the horse-face seems to be symbolic of something that wefind not only in his personal appearance, but in his personality and hiswork. 

His faults do not soften us, as the faults of so many favourite writersdo. They were the faults, not of passion, but of a superior person, whowas something of a Sir Willoughby Patterne in his pompousself-satisfaction. "He says, " records Lamb in one of his letters, "hedoes not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had amind to try it. " Lamb adds: "It is clear that nothing is wanting but themind. "

Leigh Hunt, after receiving a visit from Wordsworth in 1815, remarkedthat "he was as sceptical on the merit of all kinds of poetry but one asRichardson was on those of the novels of Fielding. " Keats, who hadearlier spoken of the reverence in which he held Wordsworth, wrote tohis brother in 1818: "I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a badimpression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity, andbigotry. " There was something frigidly unsympathetic in his judgment ofothers, which was as unattractive as his complacency in regard to hisown work. When Trelawny, seeing him at Lausanne and, learning who hewas, went up to him as he was about to step into his carriage and askedhim what he thought of Shelley as a poet, he replied: "Nothing. " Again, Wordsworth spoke with solemn reprobation of certain of Lamb'sfriendships, after Lamb was dead, as "the indulgences of social humoursand fancies which were often injurious to himself and causes of severeregrets to his friends, without really benefiting the object of hismisapplied kindness. "

Nor was this attitude of Johnny Head-in-Air the mark only of his lateryears. It appeared in the days when he and Coleridge collaborated inbringing out _Lyrical Ballads. _ There is something sublimely egotisticalin the way in which he shook his head over _The Ancient Mariner_ as adrag upon that miraculous volume. In the course of a letter to hispublisher, he wrote:--

 From what I can gather it seems that _The Ancyent Marinere_ has, on the whole, been an injury to the volume; I mean that the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on. If the volume should come to a second edition, I would put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste. 

It is when one reads sentences like these that one begins to take amischievous delight in the later onslaught of a Scottish reviewer who, indignant that Wordsworth should dare to pretend to be able toappreciate Burns, denounced him as "a retired, pensive, egotistical, _collector of stamps_, " and as--

 a melancholy, sighing, half-parson sort of gentleman, who lives in a small circle of old maids and sonneteers, and drinks tea now and then with the solemn Laureate. 

One feels at times that no ridicule or abuse of this stiff-necked oldfraud could be excessive; for, if he were not Wordsworth, as what but afraud could we picture him in his later years, as he protests againstCatholic Emancipation, the extension of the franchise, the freedom ofthe Press, and popular education? "Can it, in a _general_ view, " heasks, "be good that an infant should learn much which its _parents donot know?_ Will not a child arrogate a superiority unfavourable to loveand obedience?" He shuddered again at the likelihood that Mechanics'Institutes would "make discontented spirits and insubordinate andpresumptuous workmen. " He opposed the admission of Dissenters toCambridge University, and he "desired that a medical education should bekept beyond the reach of a poor student, " on the ground that "the betterable the parents are to incur expense, the stronger pledge have we oftheir children being above meanness and unfeeling and sordid habits. "One might go on quoting instance after instance of this piety ofsuccess, as it might be called. Time and again the words seem to comefrom the mouth, not of one of the inspired men of the modern world, butof some puffed-up elderly gentleman in a novel by Jane Austen. Hisletter to a young relation who wished to marry his daughter Dora is aletter that Jane Austen might have invented:--

 If you have thoughts of marrying, do look out for some lady with a sufficient fortune for both of you. What I say to you now I would recommend to every naval officer and clergyman who is without prospect of professional advancement. Ladies of some fortune are as easily won as those without, and for the most part as deserving. Check the first liking to those who have nothing. 

One is tempted to say that Wordsworth, like so many other poets, diedyoung, and that a pensioner who inherited his name survived him. 

When one has told the worst about Wordsworth, however, one is as far asever from having painted a portrait of him in which anybody couldbelieve while reading the _Ode on Intimations of Immortality--Ode_ asit was simply called when it was first published--or _I wandered lonelyas a cloud_, or the sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge. Nor does theportrait of a stern, unbending egotist satisfy us when we remember thelife-long devotion that existed between him and Dorothy, and the factthat Coleridge loved him, and that Lamb and Scott were his friends. Hemay have been a niggard of warm-heartedness to the outside world, but itis clear from his biography that he possessed the genius of a good heartas well as of a great mind. 

And he was as conspicuous for the public as for the private virtues. Hislatest biographer has done well to withdraw our eyes from the portraitof the old man with the stiffened joints and to paint in more glowingcolours than any of his predecessors the early Wordsworth who rejoicedin the French Revolution, and, apparently as a consequence, initiated arevolution in English poetry. The later period of the life is notglossed over; it is given, indeed, in cruel detail, and ProfessorHarper's account of it is the most lively and fascinating part of hisadmirable book. But it is to the heart of the young revolutionary, whodreamed of becoming a Girondist leader and of seeing England a republic, that he traces all the genius and understanding that we find in thepoems. 

"Wordsworth's connection, " he writes, "with the English 'Jacobins, ' withthe most extreme element opposed to the war or actively agitating infavour of making England a republic, was much closer than has beengenerally admitted. " He points out that Wordsworth's first books ofverse, _An Evening Walk_, and _Descriptive Sketches_, were published byJoseph Johnson, who also published Dr. Priestley, Horne Tooke, and MaryWollstonecraft, and whose shop was frequented by Godwin and Paine. Professor Harper attempts to strengthen his case by giving briefsketches of famous "Jacobins, " whom Wordsworth may or may not have met, but his case is strong enough without their help. Wordsworth'sreply--not published at the time, or, indeed, till after his death--tothe Bishop of Llandaff's anti-French-Revolution sermon on _The Wisdomand Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor_, was signedwithout qualification, "By a Republican. " He refused to join in "theidle Cry of modish lamentation" over the execution of the French King, and defended the other executions in France as necessary. He condemnedthe hereditary principle, whether in the Monarchy or the House of Lords. The existence of a nobility, he held, "has a necessary, tendency todishonour labour. " Had he published this pamphlet when it was written, in 1793, he might easily have found himself in prison, like many othersympathizers with the French. 

Wordsworth gives us an idea in _The Prelude_--how one wishes one had theoriginal and unamended version of the poem as it was finished in1805!--of the extreme lengths to which his Republican idealism carriedhim. When war was declared against France, he tells us, he prayed forFrench victories, and--

 Exulted in the triumph of my soul, When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown, Left without glory on the field, or driven, Brave hearts! to shameful flight. 

Two years later we, find him at Racedown planning satires against theKing, the Prince of Wales, and various public men, one of the coupletson the King and the Duke of Norfolk running:--

 Heavens! who sees majesty in George's face? Or looks at Norfolk, and can dream of grace?

But these lines, he declared, were given to him by Southey. 

By 1797 a Government spy seems to have been looking after him and hisfriends: he was living at the time at Alfoxden, near Coleridge, who, inthe previous year, had brought out _The Watchman_ to proclaim, as theprospectus said, "the state of the political atmosphere, and preserveFreedom and her Friends from the attacks of Robbers and Assassins. "Wordsworth at a later period did not like the story of the spy, but itis certain that about the time of the visit he got notice to quitAlfoxden, obviously for political reasons, from the lady who owned theestate. 

Professor Harper's originality as a biographer, however, does not lie inhis narration of facts like these, but in the patience with which hetraces the continuance of French sympathies in Wordsworth on into theopening years of the nineteenth century. He has altered the proportionsin the Wordsworth legend, and made the youth of the poet as long in thetelling as his age. This was all the more necessary because variousbiographers have followed too closely the example of the official_Life_, the materials for which Wordsworth entrusted to his nephew, theBishop, who naturally regarded Wordsworth, the pillar of Church andState, as a more eminent and laudable figure than Wordsworth, the youngRevolutionary. Whether the Bishop deliberately hushed up the fact that, during his early travels in France, Wordsworth fell in love with anaristocratic French lady who bore him an illegitimate child, I do notknow. Professor Harper, taking a more ruthless view of the duties of abiographer, now relates the story, though in a rather vague andmysterious way. One wishes that, having told us so much, he had told usa little more. Even with all we know about the early life of Wordsworth, we are still left guessing at his portrait rather than with a clear ideaof it. He was a figure in his youth, a character in his old age. Thecharacter we know down to the roots of his hair. But the figure remainssomething of a secret. 

As a poet, Wordsworth may almost be called the first of the democrats. He brought into literature a fresh vision--a vision bathing the worldand its inhabitants in a strange and revolutionary light. He was thefirst great poet of equality and fraternity in the sense that heportrayed the lives of common country, people in their dailysurroundings as faithfully as though they had been kings. It would beabsurd to suggest that there are no anticipations of this democraticspirit in English literature from Chaucer down to Burns, but Wordsworth, more than any other English writer, deserves the credit of havingemancipated the poor man into being a fit subject for noble poetry. Howrevolutionary a change this was it is difficult to realize at thepresent day, but Jeffrey's protest against it in the _Edinburgh Review_in 1802 enables one to realize to what a degree the poor man wasregarded as an outcast from literature when Wordsworth was young. In thecourse of an attack on _Lyrical Ballads_ Jeffrey wrote:--

 The love, or grief, or indignation, of an enlightened and refined character is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger, of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench. The things themselves are radically and obviously distinct. .. . The poor and vulgar may interest us, in poetry, by their _situation_; but never, we apprehend, by any sentiments that are peculiar to their condition, and still less by any language that is peculiar to it. 

When one takes sides with Wordsworth against Jeffrey on this matter itis not because one regards Wordsworth as a portrait-painter withoutfaults. His portraits are marred in several cases by the intrusion ofhis own personality with its "My good man" and "My little man" air. Hishuman beings have a way of becoming either lifeless or absurd when theytalk. _The Leech-Gatherer_ and _The Idiot Boy_ are not the only poems ofWordsworth that are injured by the insertion of banal dialogue. It is asthough there were, despite his passion for liberty, equality, andfraternity, a certain gaucherie in his relations with other humanbeings, and he were at his happiest as a solitary. His nature, we maygrant, was of mixed aspects, but, even as early as the 1807 _Poems inTwo Volumes_ had he not expressed his impatience of human society in asonnet?--

 I am not one who much or oft delight To season my fireside with personal talk-- Of friends, who live within an easy walk, Or neighbours, daily, weekly, in _my_ sight: And, for my chance-acquaintance, ladies bright, Sons, mothers, maidens withering on the stalk, These all wear out of me, like forms, with chalk Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast-night. 

 Better than such discourse doth silence long, Long, barren silence, square with my desire; To sit without emotion, hope, or aim, In the loved presence of my cottage fire, And listen to the flapping of the flame, Or kettle whispering its faint undersong. 

With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon humanbeings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth. He knew the birds ofthe countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better thanthe children. He noticed how light plays like a spirit upon all livingthings. He heard every field and valley echoing with new songs. He sawthe daffodils dancing by the lake, the green linnet dancing among thehazel leaves, and the young lambs bounding, as he says in an unexpectedline, "as to the tabor's sound, " and his heart danced to the same music, like the heart of a mystic caught up in holy rapture. Here rather thanin men did he discover the divine speech. His vision of men was alwaystroubled by his consciousness of duties. Nature came to him as aliberator into spiritual existence. Not that he ceased to be aphilosopher in his reveries. He was never the half-sensual kind ofmystic. He was never a sensualist in anything, indeed. It is significantthat he had little sense of smell--the most sensual of the senses. Itis, perhaps, because of this that he is comparatively so roseless apoet. 

But what an ear he had, what a harvesting eye! One cannot read _ThePrelude_ or _The Ode_ or _Tintern Abbey_ without feeling that seldom canthere have been a poet with a more exquisite capacity for the enjoymentof joyous things. In his profounder moments he reaches the very sourcesof joy as few poets have done. He attracts many readers like a prospectof cleansing and healing streams. 

And he succeeds in being a great poet in two manners. He is a great poetin the grand tradition of English literature, and he is a great poet inhis revolutionary simplicity. _The Idiot Boy_, for all its banalities, is as immortal as _The Ode_, and _The Solitary Reaper_ will live side byside with the great sonnets while the love of literature endures. Whilewe read these poems we tell ourselves that it is almost irrelevant tomourn the fact that the man who wrote them gave up his faith in humanityfor faith in Church and State. His genius survives in literature: it wasonly his courage as a politician that perished. At the same time, hewished to impress himself upon the world as a politician even moreperhaps than as a poet. And, indeed, if he had died at the age at whichByron died, his record in politics would have been as noble as hisrecord in poetry. Happily or unhappily, however, he lived on, a worsepolitician and a worse poet. His record as both has never before beenset forth with the same comprehensiveness as in Professor Harper'simportant and, after one has ploughed through some heavy pages, fascinating volumes. 

2. HIS POLITICS

"Just for a handful of silver he left us. " Browning was asked if hereally meant the figure in _The Lost Leader_ for Wordsworth, and headmitted that, though it was not a portrait, he had Wordsworth vaguelyin his mind. We do not nowadays believe that Wordsworth changed hispolitical opinions in order to be made distributor of stamps for thecounty of Westmoreland, or even (as he afterwards became in addition)for the county of Cumberland. Nor did Browning believe this. He didbelieve, however, that Wordsworth was a turncoat, a renegade--a poet whobegan as the champion of liberty and ended as its enemy. This is thegeneral view, and it seems to me to be unassailable. 

Mr. A. V. Dicey, in a recent book, _The Statesmanship of Wordsworth_, attempts to portray Wordsworth as a sort of early Mazzini--one who "bymany years anticipated, thought out, and announced the doctrine ofNationalism, which during at least fifty years of the nineteenth century(1820-70) governed or told upon the foreign policy of every Europeancountry. " I think he exaggerates, but it cannot be denied thatWordsworth said many wise things about nationality, and that he showed atrue liberal instinct in the French wars, siding with the French in theearly days while they were fighting for liberty, and afterwards sidingagainst them when they were fighting for Napoleonic Imperialism. Wordsworth had not yet abandoned his ardour for liberty when, in 1809, he published his _Tract on the Convention of Cintra. _ Those who accusehim of apostasy have in mind not his "Tract" and his sonnets ofwar-time, but the later lapse of faith which resulted in his opposingCatholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill, and in his sitting downseriously to write sonnets in favour in capital punishment. 

He began with an imagination which emphasized the natural goodness ofman: he ended with an imagination which emphasized the natural evil ofman. He began with faith in liberty; he ended with faith in restraint. Mr. Dicey admits much of the case against the later Wordsworth, but hisvery defence of the poet is in itself an accusation. He contends, forinstance, that "it was natural that a man, who had in his youth seenface to face the violence of the revolutionary struggle in France, should have felt the danger of the Reform Act becoming the commencementof anarchy and revolution in England. " Natural it may have been, butnone the less it was a right-about-turn of the spirit. Wordsworth hadceased to believe in liberty. 

There is very little evidence, indeed, that in his later yearsWordsworth remained interested in liberty at all. The most importantevidence of the kind is that of Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, author of_The Purgatory of Suicides_, who visited him in 1846 after serving aterm in prison on a charge of sedition. Wordsworth received him and saidto him: "You Chartists are right: you have a right to votes, only youtake the wrong way to obtain them. You must avoid physical violence. "Referring to the conversation, Mr. Dicey comments:--

 At the age of seventy-six the spirit of the old revolutionist and of the friend of the Girondins was still alive. He might not think much of the Whigs, but within four years of his death Wordsworth was certainly no Tory. 

There is no reason, however, why we should trouble our heads over thequestion whether at the age of seventy-six Wordsworth was a Tory or not. It is only by the grace of God that any man escapes being a Tory longbefore that. What is of interest to us is his attitude in the days ofhis vitality, not of his senility. In regard to this, I agree that itwould be grossly unfair to accuse him of apostasy, simply because he atfirst hailed the French Revolution as the return of the Golden Age--

 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

--and ten or fifteen years later was to be found gloomily prophesyingagainst a premature peace with Napoleon. One cannot be sure that, if onehad been living in those days oneself, one's faith in the Revolutionwould have survived the September massacres and Napoleon undiminished. Those who had at first believed that the reign of righteousness hadsuddenly come down from Heaven must have been shocked to find that humannature was still red in tooth and claw in the new era. Not that themassacres immediately alienated Wordsworth. In the year following themhe wrote in defence of the French Revolution, and incidentallyapologized for the execution of King Louis. "If you had attended, " hewrote in his unpublished _Apology for the French Revolution_ in 1793, "to the history of the French Revolution as minutely as its importancedemands, so far from stopping to bewail his death, you would rather haveregretted that the blind fondness of his people had placed a human beingin that monstrous situation which rendered him unaccountable before ahuman tribunal. " In _The Prelude_, too (which, it will be remembered, though it was written early, Wordsworth left to be published after hisdeath), we are given a perfect answer to those who would condemn theFrench Revolution, or any similar uprising, on account of its incidentalhorrors:--

 When a taunt Was taken up by scoffers in their pride, Saying, "Behold the harvest that we reap From popular government and equality, " I clearly saw that neither these nor aught Of wild belief engrafted on their views By false philosophy had caused the woe, But a terrific reservoir of guilt And ignorance filled up from age to age. That would no longer hold its loathsome charge, But burst and spread in deluge through the land. 

Mr. Dicey insists that Wordsworth's attitude in regard to the horrorsof September proves "the statesmanlike calmness and firmness of hisjudgment. " Wordsworth was hardly calm, but he remained on the side ofFrance with sufficiently firm enthusiasm to pray for the defeat of hisown countrymen in the war of 1793. He describes, in _The Prelude_, howhe felt at the time in an English country church:--

 When, in the congregation bending all To their great Father, prayers were offered up, Or praises for our country's victories; And, 'mid the simple worshippers, perchance I only, like an uninvited guest Whom no one owned, sate silent, shall I add, Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come. 

The faith that survived the massacres, however, could not surviveNapoleon. Henceforth Wordsworth began to write against France in thename of Nationalism and Liberty. 

He now becomes a political thinker--a great political thinker, in thejudgment of Mr. Dicey. He sets forth a political philosophy--thephilosophy of Nationalism. He grasped the first principle of Nationalismfirmly, which is, that nations should be self-governed, even if they aregoverned badly. He saw that the nation which is oppressed from within isin a far more hopeful condition than the nation which is oppressed fromwithout. In his _Tract_ he wrote:--

 The difference between inbred oppression and that which is from without [i. E. Imposed by foreigners] is _essential_; inasmuch as the former does not exclude, from the minds of the people, the feeling of being self-governed; does not imply (as the latter does, when patiently submitted to) an abandonment of the first duty imposed by the faculty of reason. 

And he went on:--

 If a country have put on chains of its own forging; in the name of virtue, let it be conscious that to itself it is accountable: let it not have cause to look beyond its own limits for reproof: and--in the name of humanity--if it be self-depressed, let it have its pride and some hope within itself. The poorest peasant, in an unsubdued land, feels this pride. I do not appeal to the example of Britain or of Switzerland, for the one is free, and the other lately was free (and, I trust, will ere long be so again): but talk with the Swede; and you will see the joy he finds in these sensations. With him animal courage (the substitute for many and the friend of all the manly virtues) has space to move in: and is at once elevated by his imagination, and softened by his affections: it is invigorated also; for the whole courage of his country is in his breast. 

That is an admirable statement of the Liberal faith. Sir HenryCampbell-Bannerman was putting the same truth in a sentence when he saidthat good government was no substitute for self-government. Wordsworth, however, was not an out-and-out Nationalist. He did not regard theprinciples of Nationalism as applicable to all nations alike, small andgreat. He believed in the "balance of power, " in which "the smallerstates must disappear, and merge in the large nations of widespreadlanguage. " He desired national unity for Germany and for Italy (whichwas in accordance with the principles of Nationalism), but he alsoblessed the union of Ireland with Great Britain (which was a violationof the principles of Nationalism). He introduced "certain limitations, "indeed, into the Nationalist creed, which enable even an Imperialistlike Mr. Dicey to look like a kind of Nationalist. 

At the same time, though he acquiesced in the dishonour of the IrishUnion, his patriotism never became perverted into Jingoism. He regardedthe war between England and France, not as a war between angel anddevil, but as a war between one sinner doing his best and another sinnerdoing his worst. He was gloomy as a Hebrew prophet in his summoning ofEngland to a change of heart in a sonnet written in 1803:--

 England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean Thy heart from its emasculating food; The truth should now be better understood; Old things have been unsettled; we have seen Fair seed-time, better harvest might have been But for thy trespasses; and, at this day, If for Greece, Egypt, India, Africa, Aught good were destined, thou wouldst step between. England! all nations in this charge agree: But worse, more ignorant in love and hate, Far, far more abject is thine Enemy: Therefore the wise pray for thee, though the freight Of thy offences be a heavy weight: Oh grief, that Earth's best hopes rest all with Thee!

All this means merely that the older Wordsworth grew, the more he becameconcerned with the duties rather than the rights of man. Therevolutionary creed seems at times to involve the belief that, if yougive men their rights, they will perform their duties as a necessaryconsequence. The Conservative creed, on the other hand, appears to bebased on the theory that men, as a whole, are scarcely fit for rightsbut must be kept to their duties with a strong hand. Neither belief isentirely true. As Mazzini saw, the French Revolution failed because itemphasized the rights so disproportionately in comparison with theduties of man. Conservatism fails, on the other hand, because itsconception of duty inevitably ceases before long to be an ethicalconception: duty in the mouth of reactionaries usually means simplyobedience to one's "betters. " The melancholy sort of moralist frequentlyhardens into a reactionary of this sort. Burke and Carlyle andRuskin--all of them blasphemed the spirit of liberty in the name ofduty. Mr. Dicey contends that Burke's and Wordsworth's politicalprinciples remained essentially consistent throughout. They assuredlydid nothing of the sort. Burke's principles during the American War andhis principles at the time of the French Revolution were divided fromeach other like crabbed age and youth. Burke lost his beliefs as he didhis youth. And so did Wordsworth. It seems to me rather a waste of timeto insist at all costs on the consistency of great men. The greatquestion is, not whether they were consistent, but when they were right. Wordsworth was in the main right in his enthusiasm for the FrenchRevolution, and he was in the main right in his hatred of Napoleonism. But, when once the Napoleonic Wars were over, he had no creed left formankind. He lived on till 1850, but he ceased to be able to say anythingthat had the ancient inspiration. He was at his greatest an inspiredchild of the Revolution. He learned from France that love of libertywhich afterwards led him to oppose France. Speaking of those who, likehimself, had changed in their feelings towards France, he wrote:--

 Though there was a shifting in temper of hostility in their minds as far as regarded persons, they only combated the same enemy opposed to them under a different shape; and that enemy was the spirit of selfish tyranny and lawless ambition. 

That is a just defence. But the undeniable fact is that, after thattime, Wordsworth ceased to combat the spirit of selfish tyranny andlawless ambition as he once had done. There is no need to blame him:also there is no need to defend him. He was human; he was tired; he wasgrowing old. The chief danger of a book like Mr. Dicey's is that, inaccepting its defence of Wordsworth's maturity, we may come to disparagehis splendid youth. Mr. Dicey's book, however, is exceedinglyinteresting in calling attention to the great part politics may play inthe life of a poet. Wordsworth said, in 1833, that "although he wasknown to the world only as a poet, he had given twelve hours' thought tothe condition and prospects of society, for one to poetry. " He did notretire into a "wise passiveness" as regards the world's affairs until hehad written some of the greatest political literature--and, in sayingthis, I am thinking of his sonnets rather than of his politicalprose--that has appeared in England since the death of Milton. 

V. 

KEATS

1. THE BIOGRAPHY

Sir Sidney Colvin deserves praise for the noble architecture of thetemple he has built in honour of Keats. His great book, _John Keats: HisLife and Poetry; His Friends, Critics, and After-fame_, is not only atemple, indeed, but a museum. Sir Sidney has brought together here thewhole of Keats's world, or at least all the relics of his world that thelast of a band of great collectors has been able to recover; and in theresult we can accompany Keats through the glad and sad and mad and badhours of his short and marvellous life as we have never been able to dobefore under the guidance of a single biographer. We are still left inthe dark, it is true, as to Keats's race and descent. Whether Keats'sfather came to London from Cornwall or not, Sir Sidney has not been ableto decide on the rather shaky evidence that has been put forward. If itshould hereafter turn out that Keats was a Cornishman at one remove, Matthew Arnold's conjecture as to the "Celtic element" in him, as inother English poets, may revive in the general esteem. 

In the present state of our knowledge, however, we must be content toaccept Keats as a Londoner without ancestors beyond the father who washead-ostler at the sign of the "Swan and Hoop, " Finsbury Pavement, andmarried his master's daughter. It was at the stable at the "Swan andHoop"--not a public-house, by the way, but a livery-stable--that Keatswas prematurely born at the end of October 1795. He was scarcely nineyears old when his father was killed by a fall from a horse. He was onlyfourteen when his mother (who had re-married unhappily and then beenseparated from her husband) died, a victim of chronic rheumatism andconsumption. It is from his mother that Keats seems to have inheritedhis impetuous and passionate nature. There is the evidence of a certainwholesale tea-dealer--the respectability of whose trade may haveinclined him to censoriousness--to the effect that, both as girl andwoman, she "was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her lateryears she fell into loose ways, and was no credit to the family. " Thatshe had other qualities besides those mentioned by the tea-dealer isshown by the passionate affection that existed between her and her sonJohn. "Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be kept quietduring an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at herdoor with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in. " As she lay dying, "he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobodyto give her medicine, or even cook her food, but himself, and readnovels to her in her intervals of ease. " The Keats children werefortunately not left penniless. Their grandfather, the proprietor of thelivery-stable, had bequeathed a fortune of £13, 000, a little of whichwas spent on sending Keats to a good school till the age of sixteen, andafterwards enabled him to attend Guy's Hospital as a medical student. 

It is almost impossible to credit the accepted story that he passed allhis boyhood without making any attempt at writing poetry. "He did notbegin to write, " says Sir Sidney Colvin, "till he was near eighteen. " Ifthis is so, one feels all the more grateful to his old schoolfellow, Cowden Clarke, who lent him _The Faëry Queene_, with a long list ofother books, and in doing so presented him with the key that unlockedthe unsuspected treasure of his genius. There is only one person, indeed, in all the Keats circle to whom one is more passionatelygrateful than to Cowden Clarke: that is Fanny Brawne. Keats no doubt hadlaboured to some purpose--occasionally, to fine purpose--with his geniusbefore the autumn of 1818, when he met Fanny Brawne for the first time. None the less, had he died before that date, he would have beenremembered in literature not as a marvellous original artist, but ratheras one of those "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" among whom Shelleysurprisingly placed him. Fanny Brawne may (or may not) have been the badfairy of Keats as a man. She was unquestionably his good fairy as apoet. 

This is the only matter upon which one is seriously disposed to quarrelwith Sir Sidney Colvin as a biographer. He does not emphasize as heought the debt we are under to Fanny Brawne as the intensifier ofKeats's genius--the "minx, " as Keats irritably called her, whotransformed him in a few months from a poet of still doubtful fame intoa master and an immortal. The attachment, Sir Sidney thinks, was amisfortune for him, though he qualifies this by adding that "so probablyunder the circumstances must any passion for a woman have been. " Well, let us test this "misfortune" by its consequences. The meeting withFanny took place, as I have said, in the autumn of 1818. During thewinter Keats continued to write _Hyperion_, which he seems already tohave begun. In January 1819 he wrote _The Eve of St. Agnes_. During thespring of that year, he wrote the _Ode to Psyche_, the _Ode on a GrecianUrn_, the _Ode to a Nightingale_, and _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. In theautumn he finished _Lamia_, and wrote the _Ode to Autumn_. To the sameyear belongs the second greatest of his sonnets, _Bright star, would Iwere steadfast as thou art_. In other words, practically all the finegold of Keats's work was produced in the months in which his passion forFanny Brawne was consuming him as with fire. His greatest poems weclearly owe to that heightened sense of beauty which resulted from histranslation into a lover. It seems to me a treachery to Keats's memoryto belittle a woman who was at least the occasion of such a passionateexpenditure of genius. Sir Sidney Colvin does his best to be fair toFanny, but his presentation of the story of Keats's love for her will, Iam afraid, be regarded by the long line of her disparagers as anendorsement of their blame. 

I can understand the dislike of Fanny Brawne on the part of those whodislike Keats and all his works. But if we accept Keats and _The Eve ofSt. Agnes_, we had better be honest and also accept Fanny, who inspiredthem. Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems belongto the literature of the higher sensualism. They reveal him as a man notaltogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one whowas able to transmute it into perfect literature. He seems to haveadmired women vulgarly as creatures whose hands were waiting to besqueezed, rather than as equal human beings; the eminent exception tothis being his sister-in-law, Georgiana. His famous declaration ofindependence of them--that he would rather give them a sugar-plum thanhis time--was essentially a cynicism in the exhausted-Don-Juan mood. Hence, Keats was almost doomed to fall in love with provocation ratherthan with what the Victorians called "soul. " His destiny was not to be ahappy lover, but the slave of a "minx. " It was not a slavery withoutdignity, however. It had the dignity of tragedy. Sir Sidney Colvinregrets that the love-letters of Keats to Fanny were ever published. Itwould be as reasonable, in my opinion, to regret the publication of _LaBelle Dame sans Merci_. _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ says in literaturemerely what the love-letters say in autobiography. The love-letters, indeed, like the poem, affect us as great literature does. Theyunquestionably take us down into the depths of suffering--those depthsin which tortured souls cry out almost inarticulately in their anguish. The torture of the dying lover, as he sails for Italy and leaves Fanny, never to see her again, has almost no counterpart in biographicalliterature. "The thought of leaving Miss Brawne, " he writes to Brownfrom Yarmouth, "is beyond everything horrible--the sense of darknesscoming over me--I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. " Andwhen he reaches Naples he writes to the same friend:--

 I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God! Everything that I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see her--I hear her. .. . O that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her--to receive a letter from her. To see her handwriting would break my heart--even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear. 

Sir Sidney Colvin does not attempt to hide Keats's love-story away in acorner. Where he goes wrong, it seems to me, is in his failure torealize that this love-story was the making of Keats as a man of genius. Had Sir Sidney fully grasped the part played by Fanny Brawne as, forgood or evil, the presiding genius of Keats as a poet, he would, Ifancy, have found a different explanation of the changes introduced intothe later version of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. Sir Sidney is all infavour--and there is something to be said for his preference--of theearlier version, which begins:--

 O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering!

But he does not perceive the reasons that led Keats to alter this in theversion he published in Leigh Hunt's _Indicator_ to:--

 Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, and so on. Sir Sidney thinks that this and other changes, "which areall in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made onHunt's suggestion, and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue orindifference. " To accuse Hunt of wishing to alter "knight-at-arms" to"wretched wight" seems to me unwarrantable guessing. Surely a much morelikely explanation is that Keats, who in this poem wrote his ownbiography as an unfortunate lover, came in a realistic mood to dislike"knight-at-arms" as a too romantic image of himself. He decided, Iconjecture, that "wretched wight" was a description nearer the bittertruth. Hence his emendation. The other alterations also seem to me tobelong to Keats rather than to Hunt. This does not mean that the"knight-at-arms" version is not also beautiful. But, in spite of this, Itrust the Delegates of the Oxford University Press will not listen toSir Sidney Colvin's appeal to banish the later version from theireditions of Keats. Every edition of Keats ought to contain both versionsjust as it ought to contain both versions of _Hyperion_. 

Nothing that I have written will be regarded, I trust, as depreciatingthe essential excellence, power, and (in its scholarly way) even thegreatness of Sir Sidney Colvin's book. But a certain false emphasis hereand there, an intelligible prejudice in favour of believing what is goodof his subject, has left his book almost too ready to the hand of thosewho cannot love a man of genius without desiring to "respectabilize"him. Sir Sidney sees clearly enough the double nature of Keats--hisfiery courage, shown in his love of fighting as a schoolboy, hisgenerosity, his virtue of the heart, on the one hand, and his luxuriouslove of beauty, his tremulous and swooning sensitiveness in the presenceof nature and women, his morbidness, his mawkishness, his fascination asby serpents, on the other. But in the resultant portrait, it is a toorespectable and virile Keats that emerges. Keats was more virile as aman than is generally understood. He does not owe his immortality to hisvirility, however. He owes it to his servitude to golden images, to hiscitizenship of the world of the senses, to his bondage to physical love. Had he lived longer he might have invaded other worlds. His recasting of_Hyperion_ opens with a cry of distrust in the artist who is content tolive in the little world of his art. His very revulsion against theEnglish of Milton was a revulsion against the dead language of formalbeauty. But it is in formal beauty--the formal beauty especially of the_Ode on a Grecian Urn_, which has never been surpassed inliterature--that his own achievement lies. He is great among the pagans, not among the prophets. Unless we keep this clearly in mind our praiseof him will not be appreciation. It will be but a sounding funeralspeech instead of communion with a lovely and broken spirit, thegreatest boast of whose life was: "I have loved the principle of beautyin all things. "

2. THE MATTHEW ARNOLD VIEW

Matthew Arnold has often been attacked for his essay on Shelley. Hisessay on Keats, as a matter of fact, is much less sympathetic andpenetrating. Here, more than anywhere else in his work, he seems to be aprofessor with whiskers drinking afternoon tea and discoursing onliterature to a circle of schoolgirls. It is not that Matthew Arnoldunder-estimated Keats. "He is with Shakespeare, " he declared; and inanother sentence: "In what we call natural magic, he ranks withShakespeare. " One may disagree with this--for in natural magic Keatsdoes not rank even with Shelley--and, at the same time, feel thatMatthew Arnold gives Keats too little rather than too much appreciation. He divorced Keats's poetry too gingerly from Keats's life. He did notsufficiently realize the need for understanding all that passion andcourage and railing and ecstasy of which the poems are the expression. He was a little shocked; he would have liked to draw a veil; he did notapprove of a young man who could make love in language so unlike themeasured ardour of one of Miss Austen's heroes. The impression left bythe letters to Fanny Brawne, he declared, was "unpleasing. " Afterquoting one of the letters, he goes on to comment:--

 One is tempted to say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice, which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. 

Applied to the letter which Arnold had just quoted there could not be amore foolish criticism. Keats was dogged by a curious vulgarity (whichproduced occasional comic effects in his work), but his self-abandonmentwas not vulgar. It may have been in a sense immoral: he was an artistwho practised the philosophy of exquisite moments long before Paterwrote about it. He abandoned himself to the sensations of love and thesensations of an artist like a voluptuary. The best of his work isday-dreams of love and art. The degree to which his genius fed itselfupon art and day-dreams of art is suggested by the fact that the mostperfect of his early poems, written at the age of twenty, was the sonneton Chapman's Homer, and that the most perfect of his later poems was the_Ode on a Grecian Urn_. His magic was largely artistic magic, notnatural magic. He writes about Pan and the nymphs, but we do not feelthat they were shapes of earth and air to him, as they were to Shelley;rather they seem like figures copied out of his friends' pictures. Consider, for example, the picture of a nymph who appeared toEndymion:--

 It was a nymph uprising to the breast In the fountain's pebbly margin, and she stood 'Mong lilies, like the youngest of her brood. To him her dripping hand she softly kist, And anxiously began to plait and twist

The gestures of the nymph are as ludicrous as could be found in anAcademy or Salon picture. Keats's human or quasi-human beings are seldommore than decorations, but this is a commonplace decoration. The figuresin _The Eve of St. Agnes_ and the later narratives are a part of thegeneral beauty of the poems; but even there they are made, as it were, to match the furniture. It is the same in all his best poems. Keats'simagination lived in castles, and he loved the properties, and the menand women were among the properties. We may forget the names of Porphyroand Madeline, but we do not forget the background of casement and arrasand golden dishes and beautiful sensual things against which we seethem, charming figures of love-sickness. Similarly, in _Lamia_, we mayremember the name of the serpent-woman's lover with difficulty; but whocan forget the colours of her serpent-skin or the furnishing of hercouch and of her palace in Corinth:--

 That purple-lined palace of sweet sin?

In Keats every palace has a purple lining. 

So much may be said in definition of Keats's genius. It was essentiallyan aesthetic genius. It anticipated both William Morris and Oscar Wilde. There is in Keats a passion for the luxury of the world such as we donot find in Wordsworth or Shelley. He had not that bird-like quality ofsong which they had--that happiness to be alive and singing between thesky and the green earth. He looked on beautiful things with the intensedevotion of the temple-worshipper rather than with the winged pleasureof the great poets. He was love-sick for beauty as Porphyro forMadeline. His attitude to beauty--the secret and immortal beauty--is oneof "love shackled with vain-loving. " It is desire of an almost bodilykind. Keats's work, indeed, is in large measure simply the beautifulexpression of bodily desire, or of something of the same nature asbodily desire. His conception of love was almost entirely physical. Hewas greedy for it to the point of green-sickness. His intuition told himthat passion so entirely physical had in it something fatal. Love in hispoems is poisonous and secret in its beauty. It is passion for a Lamia, for La Belle Dame sans Merci. Keats's ecstasies were swooning ecstasies. They lacked joy. It is not only in the _Ode to a Nightingale_ that heseems to praise death more than life. This was temperamental with him. He felt the "cursed spite" of things as melancholily as Hamlet did. Hewas able to dream a world nearer his happiness than this world ofdependence and church bells and "literary jabberers"; and he could cometo no terms except with his fancy. I do not mean to suggest that hedespised the beauty of the earth. Rather he filled his eyes with it:--

 Hill-flowers running wild In pink and purple chequer--

and:--

 Up-pil'd, The cloudy rack slow journeying in the West, Like herded elephants. 

But the simple pleasure in colours and shapes grows less in his laterpoems. It becomes overcast. His great poems have the intensity andsorrow of a farewell. 

It would be absurd, however, to paint Keats as a man without vitality, without pugnacity, without merriment. His brother declared that "Johnwas the very soul of manliness and courage, and as much like the HolyGhost as Johnny Keats"--the Johnny Keats who had allowed himself to be"snuffed out by an article. " As a schoolboy he had been fond offighting, and as a man he had his share of militancy. He had a quitehealthy sense of humour, too--not a subtle sense, but at leastsufficient to enable him to regard his work playfully at times, as whenhe commented on an early version of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_containing the lines:--

 And there I shut her wild, wild eyes With kisses four. 

"Why four kisses?" he writes to his brother:--

 Why four kisses--you will say--why four? Because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse--she would have fain said "score" without hurting the rhyme--but we must temper the imagination, as the critics say, with judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number, that both eyes might have fair play, and to speak truly I think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three and-a-half apiece--a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side. 

That was written nearly a year after the famous _Quarterly_ article on_Endymion_, in which the reviewer had so severely taken to task "Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in hissenses would put his real name to such a rhapsody). " It suggests thatKeats retained at least a certain share of good spirits, in spite of the_Quarterly_ and Fanny Brawne and the approach of death. His observation, too, was often that of a spirited common-sense realist rather than anaesthete, as in his first description of Fanny Brawne:--

 She is about my height--with a fine style and countenance of the lengthened sort--she wants sentiment in every feature--she manages to make her hair look well--her nostrils are fine--though a little painful--her mouth is bad and good--her profile is better than her full face, which, indeed, is not full but pale and thin, without showing any bone--her shape is very graceful, and so are her movements--her arms are good, her hands bad-ish--her feet tolerable--she is not seventeen [nineteen?]--but she is ignorant monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names--that I was forced lately to make use of the term _minx_; this is, I think, not from any innate vice but from a penchant she has of acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of such style, and shall decline any more of it. 

Yet before many months he was writing to the "minx, " "I will imagine youVenus to-night, and pray, pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen. "Certain it is, as I have already said, that it was after his meetingwith Fanny Brawne that he grew, as in a night, into a great poet. Let usnot then abuse Keats's passion for her as vulgar. And let us not attemptto make up for this by ranking him with Shakespeare. He is great amongthe second, not among the first poets. 

VI

HENRY JAMES

1. THE NOVELIST OF GRAINS AND SCRUPLES

Henry James is an example of a writer who enjoyed immense fame butlittle popularity. Some of his best books, I believe, never passed intosecond editions. He was, above all novelists, an esoteric author. Hisdisciples had the pleasure of feeling like persons initiated intomysteries. He was subject, like a religious teacher, to all kinds ofconflicting interpretations. He puzzled and exasperated even intelligentpeople. They often wondered what he meant and whether it was worthwriting about. Mr. Wells, or whoever wrote _Boon_, compared him to ahippopotamus picking up a pea. 

Certainly he laboured over trifles as though he were trying to pilePelion on Ossa. He was capable, had he been a poet, of writing an epicmade up of incidents chosen from the gossip of an old maid in the uppermiddle classes. He was the novelist of grains and scruples. I have heardit urged that he was the supreme incarnation of the Nonconformistconscience, perpetually concerned with infinitesimal details of conduct. As a matter of fact, there was much more of the aesthete in him than ofthe Nonconformist. He lived for his tastes. It is because he is anovelist of tastes rather than of passions that he is unlikely ever tobe popular even to the degree to, which Meredith is popular. 

One imagines him, from his childhood, as a perfect connoisseur, adilettante. He has told us how, as a child, in New York, Paris, London, and Geneva, he enjoyed more than anything else the "far from showypractice of wondering and dawdling and gaping. " And, while giving usthis picture of the small boy that was himself, he comments:

 There was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand: just to _be_ somewhere--almost anywhere would do--and somehow receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. 

That is the essential Henry James--the collector of impressions andvibrations. "Almost anywhere would do": that is what makes some of hisstories just miss being as insipid as the verse in a magazine. On theother hand, of few of his stories is this true. His personality was toodefinitely marked to leave any of his work flavourless. His workreflects him as the arrangement of a room may reflect a charming lady. He brings into every little world that he enters the light of a new andrefined inquisitiveness. He is as watchful as a cat. Half his pleasureseems to come from waiting for the extraordinary to peep and peer out ofthe ordinary. That is his adventure. He prefers it to seas of bloodshed. One may quarrel with it, if one demands that art shall be as violent aswar and shall not subdue itself to the level of a game. But those whoenjoy the spectacle of a game played with perfect skill will always findreading Henry James an exciting experience. 

It would be unfair, however, to suggest that the literature of HenryJames can be finally summed up as a game. He is unquestionably avirtuoso: he uses his genius as an instrument upon which he loves toreveal his dexterity, even when he is shy of revealing his immortalsoul. But he is not so inhuman in his art as some of his admirers haveheld him to be. Mr. Hueffer, I think, has described him as pitiless, andeven cruel. But can one call _Daisy Miller_ pitiless? Or _What MaisieKnew_? Certainly, those autobiographical volumes, _A Small Boy andOthers_ and _Notes of a Son and Brother_, which may be counted among themost wonderful of the author's novels, are pervaded by exquisiteaffections which to a pitiless nature would have been impossible. 

Henry James is even sufficiently human to take sides with hischaracters. He never does this to the point of lying about them. But heis in his own still way passionately on the side of the finer types. In_The Turn of the Screw_, which seems to me to be the greatestghost-story in the English language, he has dramatized the duel betweengood and evil; and the effect of it, at the end of all its horrors, isthat of a hymn in praise of courage. One feels--though a more perversetheory of the story has been put forward--that the governess, who fightsagainst the evil in the big house, has the author also fighting as herally and the children's. Similarly, Maisie has a friend in the author. 

He is never more human, perhaps, than when he is writing, not abouthuman beings, but about books. It is not inconceivable that he will liveas a critic long after he is forgotten as a novelist. No book ofcriticism to compare with his _Notes on Novelists_ has been published inthe present century. He brought his imagination to bear upon books as hebrought his critical and analytical faculty to bear upon human beings. Here there was room for real heroes. He idolized his authors as heidolized none of his characters. There is something of moral passion inthe reverence with which he writes of the labours of Flaubert and Balzacand Stevenson and even of Zola. 

He lied none of them into perfection, it is true. He accepted, and evenadvertised their limitations. But in each of them he found an example ofthe hero as artist. His characterization of Flaubert as the "operativeconscience or vicarious sacrifice" of a styleless literary age is thepure gold of criticism. "The piety most real to her, " Fleda says in _TheSpoils of Poynton_, "was to be on one's knees before one's highstandard. " Henry James himself had that kind of piety. Above all recentmen of letters, he was on his knees to his high standard. 

People may wonder whether his standard was not, to an excessive degree, a standard of subtlety rather than of creative imagination--at least, inhis later period. And undoubtedly his subtlety was to some extent amatter of make-believe. He loved to take a simple conversation, and, byintroducing a few subtle changes, to convert it into a sort ofhieroglyphics that need an interpreter. He grew more and more to believethat it was not possible to tell the simple truth except in an involvedway. He would define a gesture with as much labour as Shakespeare woulddevote to the entire portrait of a woman. He was a realist of civilizedsociety in which both speech and action have to be sifted withscientific care before they will yield their grain of motive. Thehumorous patience with which Henry James seeks for that grain is one ofthe distinctive features of his genius. 

But, it may be asked, are his people real? They certainly are real inthe relationships in which he exhibits them, but they are real likepeople to whom one has been introduced in a foreign city rather thanlike people who are one's friends. One does not remember them like thecharacters in Meredith or Mr. Hardy. Henry James, indeed, is himself theoutstanding character in his books. That fine and humorous collector ofEuropean ladies and gentlemen, that savourer of the little lives of theOld World and the little adventures of those who have escaped from theNew, that artist who brooded over his fellows in the spirit less of apoet than a man of science, that sober and fastidious trifler--this isthe image which presides over his books, and which gives them theirspecial character, and will attract tiny but enthusiastic companies ofreaders to them for many years to come. 

2. THE ARTIST AT WORK. 

Henry James's amanuensis, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, wrote an article ayear or two ago in the _Fortnightly Review_, describing how the greatman wrote his novels. Since 1895 or 1896 he dictated them, and they weretaken down, not in shorthand, but directly on the typewriter. He wasparticular even about the sort of typewriter. It must be a Remington. "Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossiblydisconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsivesound at all. " He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensiswithout having made a preliminary survey of the ground. "He liked to'break ground' by talking to himself day by day about the characters andthe construction until the whole thing was clearly before his mind'seye. This preliminary talking out the scheme was, of course, dulyrecorded by the typewriter. "It is not that he made rough drafts of hisnovels-sketches to be afterwards amplified. "His method might better becompared with Zola's habit of writing long letters to himself aboutcharacters in his next book until they became alive enough for him tobegin a novel about them. " Henry James has himself, as Miss Bosanquetpoints out, described his method of work in _The Death of a Lion_, inwhich it is attributed to his hero, Neil Paraday. "Loose, liberal, confident, " he declares of Faraday's "scenario, " as one might call it, "it might be passed for a great, gossiping, eloquent letter--theoverflow into talk of an artist's amorous plan. "

Almost the chief interest of Henry James's two posthumous novels is thefact that we are given not only the novels themselves--or, rather, thefragments of them that the author had written--but the "great, gossiping, eloquent letters" in which he soliloquized about them. As arule, these preliminary soliloquies ran to about thirty thousand words, and were destroyed as soon as the novel in hand was finished. Sodelightful are they--such thrilling revelations of the workings of anartist's mind--that one does not quite know whether or not tocongratulate oneself on the fact that the last books have been left meretorsos. Which would one rather have--a complete novel or the torso of anovel with the artist's dream of how to make it perfect? It is not easyto decide. What makes it all the more difficult to decide in the presentinstance is one's feeling that _The Sense of the Past_, had it beencompleted, would have been very nearly a masterpiece. In it Henry Jameshoped to get what he called a "kind of quasi-turn-of-screw effect. "Here, as in _The Turn of the Screw_, he was dealing with a sort ofghosts--whether subjective or objective in their reality does notmatter. His hero is a young American who had never been to Europe tillhe was about thirty, and yet was possessed by that almost sensual senseof the past which made Henry James, as a small boy, put his nose intoEnglish books and try to sniff in and smell from their pages the olderworld from which they came. The inheritance of an old house in a Londonsquare--a house in which the clocks had stopped, as it were, in1820--brings the young man over to England, though the lady with whom heis in love seeks to keep him in America and watch him developing as anew species--a rich, sensitive, and civilized American, untouched andunsubdued by Europe. This young man's emotions in London, amid oldthings in an atmosphere that also somehow seemed mellow and old, may, Ifancy, be taken as a record of the author's own spiritual experiences ashe drew in long breaths of appreciation during his almost lifelongwanderings in this hemisphere. For it is important to remember thatHenry James never ceased to be a foreigner. He was enchanted by Englandas by a strange land. He saw it always, like the hero of _The Sense ofthe Past_, under the charm . .. Of the queer, incomparable Londonlight--unless one frankly loved it rather as London shade--which he hadrepeatedly noted as so strange as to be at its finest sinister. "

 However else this air might have been described it was signally not the light of freshness, and suggested as little as possible the element in which the first children of nature might have begun to take notice. Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions, had produced it, and it seemed, wherever it rested, to be filtered through the bed of history. It made the objects about show for the time as in something "turned on"--something highly successful that he might have seen at the theatre. 

Henry James saw old-world objects in exactly that sort of light. He knewin his own nerves how Ralph Pendrel felt on going over his London house. "There wasn't, " he says, ". .. An old hinge or an old brass lock that hecouldn't work with love of the act. " He could observe the inanimatethings of the Old World almost as if they were living things. Nonaturalist spying for patient hours upon birds in the hope ofdiscovering their secrets could have had a more curious, more hopeful, and more loitering eye. He found even fairly common things in Europe, asPendrel found the things in the house he inherited, "all smoothed withservice and charged with accumulated messages. "

 He was like the worshipper in a Spanish church, who watches for the tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from the wound of some wonder-working effigy of Mother and Son. 

In _The Sense of the Past_, Henry James conceived a fantastic romance, in which his hero steps not only into the inheritance of an old house, but into 1820, exchanging personalities with a young man in one of thefamily portraits, and even wooing the young man's betrothed. It is astory of "queer" happenings, like the story of a dream or a delusion inwhich the ruling passion has reached the point of mania. It is the kindof story that has often been written in a gross, mechanical way. Here itis all delicate--a study of nuances and subtle relationships. For Ralph, though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changelingabout him--something that gradually makes people think him "queer, " andin the end arouses in him the dim beginnings of nostalgia for his owntime. It is a fascinating theme as Henry James works it out--doublyfascinating as he talks about it to himself in the "scenario" that ispublished along with the story. In the latter we see the author gropingfor his story, almost like a medium in a trance. Like a medium, he onemoment hesitates and is vague, and the next, as he himself would say, fairly pounces on a certainty. No artist ever cried with louder joy atthe sight of things coming absolutely right under his hand. Thus, at onemoment, the author announces:--

 The more I get into my drama the more magnificent upon my word I seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the muchness with which they threaten me. 

At a moment of less illumination he writes:--

 There glimmers and then floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense of something like _this_, a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and as I catch hold of the tip of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another admirable twist. 

He continually sees himself catching by the tip of the tail the thingsthat solve his difficulties. And what tiny little animals he sometimesmanages to catch by the tip of the tail in some of his trances ofinspiration! Thus, at one point, he breaks off excitedly about his herowith:--

 As to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch a bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?. .. No, no--no latch-key--but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass knocker. 

As the writer searches for the critical action or gesture which is tobetray the "abnormalism" of his hero to the 1820 world in which hemoves, he cries to himself:--

 Find it, find it; get it right, and it will be the making of the story. 

At another stage in the story, he comments:--

 All that is feasible and convincing; rather beautiful to do being what I mean. 

At yet another stage:--

 I pull up, too, here, in the midst of my elation--though after a little I shall straighten everything out. 

He discusses with himself the question whether Ralph Pendrel, in the1820 world, is to repeat exactly the experience of the young man in theportrait, and confides to himself:--

 Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let myself be scared, by a momentarily-confused appearance, an assumption, that he doesn't repeat it. I see, on recovery of my wits, not to say of my wit, that he very exactly does. 

Nowhere in the "scenario" is the artist's pleasure in his work expressedmore finely than in the passage in which Henry James describes his heroat the crisis of his experience, when the latter begins to feel that heis under the observation of his _alter ego_, and is being vaguelythreatened. "There must, " the author tells himself--

 There must be sequences here of the strongest, I make out--the successive driving in of the successive silver-headed nails at the very points and under the very tops that I reserve for them. That's it, the silver nail, the recurrence of it in the right place, the perfection of the salience of each, and the trick is played. 

"Trick, " he says, but Henry James resorted little to tricks, in theordinary meaning of the word. He scorns the easy and the obvious, as inpreparing for the return of the young hero to the modern world--areturn made possible by a noble act of self-sacrifice on the part of asecond 1820 girl who sends him from her, yet "without an excess of thekind of romanticism I don't want. " There is another woman--the modernwoman whom Ralph had loved in America--who might help the machinery ofthe story (as the author thinks) if he brought her on the scene at acertain stage. But he thinks of the device only to exclaim against it:--

 Can't possibly do anything so artistically base. 

The notes for _The Ivory Tower_ are equally alluring, though _The IvoryTower_ is not itself so good as _The Sense of the Past_. It is a storyof contemporary American life, and we are told that the author laid itaside at the beginning of the war, feeling that "he could no longer workupon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life. "Especially interesting is the "scenario, " because of the way in which wefind Henry James trying--poor man, he was always an amateur atnames!--to get the right names for his characters. He ponders, forinstance, on the name of his heroine:--

 I want her name . .. Her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have some bright combination with that; the essence of which is a surname of two syllables and ending in a consonant--also beginning with one. I am thinking of Moyra Grabham, the latter excellent thing was in _The Times_ of two or three days ago; the only fault is a little too much meaning. 

Consciousness in artistry can seldom have descended to minuter detailswith a larger gesture. One would not have missed these games of geniuswith syllables and consonants for worlds. Is it all an exquisite farceor is it splendidly heroic? Are we here spectators of the incongruousheroism of an artist who puts a hero's earnestness into getting the lastperfection of shine on to a boot or the last fine shade of meaning intothe manner in which he says, "No, thank you, no sugar"? No, it issomething more than that. It is the heroism of a man who lived at everyturn and trifle for his craft--who seems to have had almost no lifeoutside it. In the temple of his art, he found the very dust of thesanctuary holy. He had the perfect piety of the artist in the least aswell as in the greatest things. 

3. HOW HE WAS BORN AGAIN

As one reads the last fragment of the autobiography of Henry James, onecannot help thinking of him as a convert giving his testimony. HenryJames was converted into an Englishman with the same sense of being bornagain as is felt by many a convert to Christianity. He can speak of thejoy of it all only in superlatives. He had the convert's sense of--inhis own phrase--"agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce knowhow endearingly enough to name them I). " He speaks of "this reallyprodigious flush" of his first full experience of England. He passes onthe effect of his religious rapture when he tells us that "reallywherever I looked, and still more wherever I pressed, I sank in and inup to my nose. " How breathlessly he conjures up the scene of hisdedication, as he calls it, in the coffee-room of a Liverpool hotel onthat gusty, "overwhelmingly English" March morning in 1869, on which atthe age of almost twenty-six he fortunately and fatally landed on theseshores, with immediate intensities of appreciation, as I may call the muffled accompaniment, for fear of almost indecently overnaming it. 

He looks back, with how exquisite a humour and seriousness, on thatmorning as having finally settled his destiny as an artist. "This doom, "he writes:--

 This doom of inordinate exposure to appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great beheld sum of things, I regard . .. As having settled upon me once for all while I observed, for instance, that in England the plate of buttered muffins and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that circumstance in a perfect cloud of accompaniments. 

It is characteristic of Henry James that he should associate the hour inwhich he turned to grace with a plate of buttered muffins. His fictionremained to the end to some extent the tale of a buttered muffin. Hemade mountains out of muffins all his days. His ecstasy and hiscuriosity were nine times out of ten larger than their objects. Thus, though he was intensely interested in English life, he was interested init, not in its largeness as life so much as in its littleness as amuseum, almost a museum of _bric-à-brac_. He was enthusiastic about thewaiter in the coffee-room in the Liverpool hotel chiefly as anillustration of the works of the English novelists. 

Again and again in his reminiscences one comes upon evidence that HenryJames arrived in England in the spirit of a collector, a connoisseur, aswell as that of a convert. His ecstasy was that of a convert: hiscuriosity was that of a connoisseur. As he recalls his first experienceof a London eating-house of the old sort, with its "small compartments, narrow as horse-stalls, " he glories: in the sordidness of it all, because "every face was a documentary scrap. "

 I said to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittance of the "plain boiled" much better than one could dispense with that. 

Here, again, one has an instance of the way in which the show of Englishlife revealed itself to Henry James as an exhibition of eating. "As onesat there, " he says of his reeking restaurant, "one _understood. _" It isin the same mood of the connoisseur on the track of a preciousdiscovery that he recalls "the very first occasion of my sallying forthfrom Morley's Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house ofsustaining, of inspiring hospitality in the Kensington quarter. " What anepicure the man was! "The thrill of sundry invitations to breakfast"still survived on his palate more than forty years afterwards. Not thatthese meals were recalled as gorges of the stomach: they were merelygorges of sensation, gorges of the sense of the past. The breakfastsassociated him "at a jump" with the ghosts of Byron and Sheridan andRogers. They had also a documentary value as "the exciting note of asocial order in which every one wasn't hurled straight, with themomentum of rising, upon an office or a store. .. . " It was one morning, "beside Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-room, in Queen's Gate Terrace, " thathis "thrilling opportunity" came to sit opposite to Mr. FredericHarrison, eminent in the eyes of the young American, not for his ownsake so much as because recently he had been the subject of MatthewArnold's banter. Everybody in England, like Mr. Harrison, seemed toHenry James to _be_ somebody, or at least to have been talked about bysomebody. They were figures, not cyphers. They were characters in a playwith cross-references. 

 The beauty was . .. That people had references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures here and there, whether animate or no, quite groan under the accumulation and the weight of. 

It is surprising that, loving this new life so ecstatically, Jamesshould so seldom attempt to leave any detailed description of it in hisreminiscences. He is constantly describing his raptures: he onlyoccasionally describes the thing he was rapturous about. Almost all hetells us about "the extravagant youth of the aesthetic period" is thatto live through it "was to seem privileged to such immensities ashistory would find left her to record but with bated breath. " He recallsagain "the particular sweetness of wonder" with which he haunted certainpictures in the National Gallery, but it is himself, not the NationalGallery, that he writes about. Of Titian and Rembrandt and Rubens hecommunicates nothing but the fact that "the cup of sensation was therebyfilled to overflowing. " He does, indeed, give a slender description ofhis first sight of Swinburne in the National Gallery, but the chief facteven of this incident is that "I thrilled . .. With the prodigy of thiscircumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same breath withMr. Swinburne. "

Thus the reminiscences are, in a sense, extraordinarily egotistic. Thisis, however, not to condemn them. Henry James is, as I have alreadysaid, his own greatest character, and his portrait of his excitements isone of the most enrapturing things in the literature of autobiography. He makes us share these excitements simply by telling us how excited hewas. They are exactly the sort of excitements all of us have felt onbeing introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed aboutfrom our youth. Who has not felt the same kind of joy as Henry Jamesfelt when George Eliot allowed him to run for the doctor? "I shook offmy fellow-visitor, " he relates, "for swifter cleaving of the air, and Irecall still feeling that I cleft it even in the dull four-wheeler. "After he had delivered his message, he "cherished for the rest of theday the particular quality of my vibration. " The occasion of the messageto the doctor seems strangely comic in the telling. On arriving atGeorge Eliot's, Henry James found one of G. H. Lewes's sons lying inhorrible pain in the middle of the floor, the heritage of an oldaccident in the West Indies, or, as Henry James characteristicallydescribes it:--

 a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had tossed or otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him considerably compromised. 

There is something still more comic than this, however, to be got out ofhis visits to George Eliot. The visit he paid her at Witley under the"much-waved wing" of the irrepressible Mrs. Greville, who "knew no lawbut that of innocent and exquisite aberration, " had a superb conclusion, which "left our adventure an approved ruin. " As James was about toleave, and indeed was at the step of the brougham with Mrs. Greville, G. H. Lewes called on him to wait a moment. He returned to thedoorstep, and waited till Lewes hurried back across the hall, "shakinghigh the pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, theverily importunate loan of which by Mrs. Greville had lingered on theair after his dash in quest of them":--

 "Ah, those books--take them away, please, away, away!" I hear him unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again at me, and I scurry back into our conveyance. 

The blue-bound volumes happened to be a copy of Henry James's own newbook--a presentation copy he had given to Mrs. Greville, and she, inturn, with the best intentions, had tried to leave with George Eliot, tobe read and admired. George Eliot and Lewes had failed to connect theiryoung visitor with the volumes. Hence a situation so comic that even itsvictim could not but enjoy it:--

 Our hosts hadn't so much as connected book with author, or author with visitor, or visitor with anything but the convenience of his ridding them of an unconsidered trifle; grudging, as they so justifiedly did, the impingement of such matters on their consciousness. The vivid demonstration of one's failure to penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which could scarcely have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom. 

Henry James Was more fortunate in Tennyson as a host. Tennyson had readat least one of his stories and liked it. All the same, James wasdisappointed in Tennyson. He expected to find him a poet signed andstamped, and found him only a booming bard. Not only was Tennyson notTennysonian: he was not quite real. His conversation came as a shock tohis guest:--

 He struck me as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge. 

As Tennyson read _Locksley Hall_ to his guests, Henry James had to pinchhimself, "not at all to keep from swooning, but much rather to set upsome rush of sensibility. " What a lovely touch of malice there is in hisdescription of Tennyson on an occasion on which the ineffable Mrs. Greville quoted some of his own verse to him:--

 He took these things with a gruff philosophy, and could always repay them, on the spot, in heavily-shovelled coin of the same mint, since it _was_ a question of his genius. 

Henry James ever retained a beautiful detachment of intellect, evenafter his conversion. He was a wit as well as an enthusiast. _The MiddleYears_, indeed, is precious in every page for its wit as well as for itsconfessional raptures. It may be objected that Henry James's wit is onlya new form of the old-fashioned periphrasis. He might be described asthe last of the periphrastic humorists. At the same time, if ever in anybook there was to be found the free play of an original genius--a geniushowever limited and even little--it is surely in the autobiography ofHenry James. Those who can read it at all will read it with shiningeyes. 

VII

BROWNING: THE POET OF LOVE

Browning's reputation has not yet risen again beyond a half-tide. Thefact that two books about him were published during the war, however, suggests that there is a revival of interest in his work. It would havebeen surprising if this had not been so. He is one of the poets whoinspire confidence at a time when all the devils are loosed out of Hell. Browning was the great challenger of the multitude of devils. He did notachieve his optimism by ignoring Satan, but by defying him. His couragewas not merely of the stomach, but of the daring imagination. There isno more detestable sign of literary humbug than the pretence thatBrowning was an optimist simply because he did not experience sorrow andindigestion as other people do. I do not mean to deny that he, enjoyedgood health. As Professor Phelps, of Yale, says in a recent book, _Robert Browning: How to Know Him:--_

 He had a truly wonderful digestion: it was his firm belief that one should eat only what one really enjoyed, desire being the infallible sign that the food was healthful. "My father was a man of _bonne fourchette_, " said Barett Browning to me "he was not very fond of meat, but liked all kinds of Italian dishes, especially with rich sauces. He always ate freely of rich and delicate things. He would make a whole meal off mayonnaise. "

Upon which the American professor comments with ingenuous humour of akind rare in professors in this hemisphere:--

 It is pleasant to remember that Emerson, the other great optimist of the century, used to eat pie for breakfast. 

The man who does not suffer from pie will hardly suffer from pessimism;but, as Professor Phelps insists, Browning faced greater terrors thanpie for breakfast, and his philosophy did not flinch. There was no otherEnglish writer of the nineteenth century who to the same degree made allhuman experiences his own. His is poems are not poems about littlechildren who win good-conduct prizes. They are poems of the agonies oflife, poems about tragic severance, poems about failure. They rangethrough the virtues and the vices with the magnificent boldness ofDostoevsky's novels. The madman, the atheist, the adulterer, thetraitor, the murderer, the beast, are portrayed in them side by sidewith the hero, the saint, and the perfect woman. There is every sort ofrogue here half-way between good and evil, and every sort of half-herowho is either worse than his virtue or better than his sins. Nowhereelse in English poetry outside the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer isthere such a varied and humorous gallery of portraits. Landor's oftenquoted comparison of Browning with Chaucer is a piece of perfect andessential criticism:--

 Since Chaucer was alive and hale, No man hath walked along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse. 

For Browning was a portrait-painter by genius and a philosopher only byaccident. He was a historian even more than a moralist. He was born witha passion for living in other people's experiences. So impartially andeagerly did he make himself a voice of the evil as well as the good inhuman nature that occasionally one has heard people speculating as towhether he can have led so reputable a life as the biographers make onebelieve. To speculate in this manner, however, is to blunder intoforgetfulness of Browning's own answer, in _How it Strikes aContemporary_, to all such calumnies on poets. 

Of all the fields of human experience, it was love into which theimagination of Browning most fully entered. It may seem an obvious thingto say about almost any poet, but Browning differed from other poets inbeing able to express, not only the love of his own heart, but the loveof the hearts of all sorts of people. He dramatized every kind of lovefrom the spiritual to the sensual. One might say of him that there neverwas another poet in whom there was so much of the obsession of love andso little of the obsession of sex. Love was for him the crisis and testof a man's life. The disreputable lover has his say in Browning'smonologues no less than Count Gismond. Porphyria's lover, mad and amurderer, lives in our imaginations as brightly as the idealistic loverof Cristina. 

The dramatic lyric and monologue in which Browning set forth thevarieties of passionate experience was an art-form of immensepossibilities, which it was a work of genius to discover. To say thatBrowning, the inventor of this amazingly fine form, was indifferent toform has always seemed to me the extreme of stupidity. At the same time, its very newness puzzles many readers, even to-day. Some people cannotread Browning without note or comment, because they are unable to throwthemselves imaginatively into the "I" of each new poem. Our artisticsense is as yet so little developed that many persons are appalled bythe energy of imagination which is demanded of them before they arereborn, as it were, into the setting of his dramatic studies. ProfessorPhelps's book should be of especial service to such readers, because itwill train them in the right method of approach to Browning's best work. It is a very admirable essay in popular literary interpretation. One isastonished by its insight even more than by its recurrent banality. There are sentences that will make the fastidious shrink, such as:--

 The commercial worth of _Pauline_ was exactly zero. 

And:--

 Their (the Brownings') love-letters reveal a drama of noble passion that excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular examples of Heloise and Abelard, Aucassin and Nicolette, Paul and Virginia. 

And, again, in the story of the circumstances that led to Browning'sdeath:--

 In order to prove to his son that nothing was the matter with him, he ran rapidly up three flights of stairs, the son vainly trying to restrain him. Nothing is more characteristic of the youthful folly of aged folk than their impatient resentment of proffered hygienic advice. 

Even the interpretations of the poems sometimes take one's breath away, as when, discussing _The Lost Mistress_, Professor Phelps observes thatthe lover:--

 instead of thinking of his own misery . .. Endeavours to make the awkward situation easier for the girl by small talk about the sparrows and the leaf-buds. 

When one has marvelled one's fill at the professor's phrases andmisunderstandings, however, one is compelled to admit that he haswritten what is probably the best popular introduction to Browning inexistence. 

Professor Phelps's book is one of those rare essays in popular criticismwhich will introduce an average reader to a world of new excitements. One of its chief virtues is that it is an anthology as well as acommentary. It contains more than fifty complete poems of Browningquoted in the body of the book. And these include, not merely shortpoems like _Meeting at Night_, but long poems, such as _Andrea delSarto, Caliban on Setebos_, and _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. _This is the right kind of introduction to a great author. The poet isallowed as far as possible to be his own interpreter. 

At the outset Professor Phelps quotes in full _Transcendentalism_ and_How it Strikes a Contemporary_ as Browning's confession of his aims asan artist. The first of these is Browning's most energetic assertionthat the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than withthings--with abstractions rather than with actions. His disciples havewritten a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to aphilosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dullingof an imagination richer than a child's in adventures and in the passionfor the detailed and the concrete. In _Transcendentalism_ he bids ayounger poet answer whether there is more help to be got from JacobBoehme with his subtle meanings:--

 Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt, John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about. 

With how magnificent an image he then justifies the poet of "things" ascompared with the philosopher of "thoughts":--

 He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side, Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all-- Buries us with a glory, young once more, Pouring heaven into this poor house of life. 

One of the things one constantly marvels at as one reads Browning is thesplendid aestheticism with which he lights up prosaic words andpedestrian details with beauty. 

The truth is, if we do not realize that he is a great singer and a greatpainter as well as a, great humorist and realist, we shall have read himin vain. No doubt his phrases are often as grotesque as jagged teeth, aswhen the mourners are made to say in _A Grammarian's Funeral_:--

 Look out if yonder be not day again. Rimming the rock-row!

Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the mournershad stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path. Andyet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, heuttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion. There mayoften be no music in the individual words, but there is always in thepoems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river. His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only insmooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats ofPegasus. 

We find in his poems, indeed, no fastidious escape from life, but anexalted acceptance of it. Browning is one of the very few poets who, echoing the Creator, have declared that the world is good. His sense ofthe goodness of it even in foulness and in failure is written over halfof his poems. _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ is a fable of lifetriumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostilething--a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilishhands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning'sgenius, one has only to read _Childe Roland_ again to restore one'sfaith. There never was a landscape so alive with horror as that amidwhich the knight travelled in quest of the Dark Tower. As detail isadded to detail, it becomes horrible as suicide, a shrieking progress ofall the torments, till one is wrought up into a very nightmare ofapprehension and the Tower itself appears:--

 The round squat tower, blind as the fool's heart. 

Was there ever such a pause and gathering of courage as in the versesthat follow in which the last of the knights takes his resolve?:--

 Not see? because of night perhaps?--why, day Came back again for that! before it left, The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay-- "Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"

 Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears, Of all the lost adventurers my peers-- How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. 

 There they stood, ranged along the hillside, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! in a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set. And blew. "_Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_. "

There, if anywhere in literature, is the summit of tragic and triumphantmusic. There, it seems to me, is as profound and imaginative expressionof the heroic spirit as is to be found in the English language. 

To belittle Browning as an artist after such a poem is to blasphemeagainst art. To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool withwords. Browning was an optimist only in the sense that he believed inwhat Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things, " and that hebelieved in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devisedfor it by inquisitors or devils. He was not defiant in a fine attitudelike Byron. His defiance was rather a form of magnanimity. He is said, on Robert Buchanan's authority, to have thundered "No, " when in hislater years he was asked if he were a Christian. But his defiance wasthe defiance of a Christian, the dauntlessness of a knight of the HolyGhost. Perhaps it is that he was more Christian than the Christians. Like the Pope in _The Ring and the Book_, he loathed the association ofChristianity with respectability. Some readers are bewildered by hisrespectability in trivial things, such as dress, into failing to see hishatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritualthings. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides in_Apparent Failure_ than towards the vacillating and respectable loversin _The Statue and the Bust. _ There was at least a hint of heroism inthe last madness of the doomed men. Browning again and again protests, as Blake had done earlier, against the mean moral values of his age. Energy to him as to Blake meant endless delight, and especially thosetwo great energies of the spirit--love and heroism. For, though his workis not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginativeexpression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, thepoet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days;with Browning it was a soaring eagle. In some ways Mr. Conrad's is themost heroic imagination in contemporary literature. But he does not takethis round globe of light and darkness into his purview as Browning did. The whole earth is to him shadowed with futility. Browning was toolyrical to resign himself to the shadows. He saw the earth through theeyes of a lover till the end. He saw death itself as no more than aninterlude of pain, darkness, and cold before a lovers' meeting. It maybe that it is all a rapturous illusion, and that, after we have laid himaside and slept a night's broken sleep, we sink back again naturallyinto the little careful hopes and infidelities of everyday. But it seemsto me that here is a whole heroic literature to which the world willalways do well to turn in days of inexorable pain and horror such asthose through which it has but recently passed. 

VIII

THE FAME OF J. M. SYNGE

The most masterly piece of literary advertising in modern times wassurely Mr. Yeats's enforcement of Synge upon the coteries--or thechoruses--as a writer in the great tradition of Homer and Shakespeare. So successful has Mr. Yeats been, indeed, in the exaltation of hisfriend, that people are in danger of forgetting that it is Mr. Yeatshimself, and not Synge, who is the ruling figure in modern Irishliterature. One does not criticize Mr. Yeats for this. During the Syngecontroversy he was a man raising his voice in the heat of battle--a man, too, praising a generous comrade who was but lately dead. The criticsoutside Ireland, however, have had none of these causes of passion toprevent them from seeing Synge justly. They simply bowed down before theidol that Mr. Yeats had set up before them, and danced themselves intoecstasies round the image of the golden playboy. 

Mr. Howe, who wrote a sincere and able book on Synge, may be taken as arepresentative apostle of the Synge cult. He sets before us a god, not aman--a creator of absolute beauty--and he asks us to accept the commonview that _The Playboy of the Western World_ is his masterpiece. Therecan never be any true criticism of Synge till we have got rid of allthese obsessions and idolatries. Synge was an extraordinary man ofgenius, but he was not an extraordinarily great man of genius. He is notthe peer of Shakespeare: he is not the peer of Shelley: he is the peer, say, of Stevenson. His was a byway, not a high-road, of genius. That iswhy he has an immensely more enthusiastic following among clever peoplethan among simple people. 

Once and once only Synge achieved a piece of art that was universal inits appeal, satisfying equally the artistic formula of Pater and theartistic formula of Tolstoi. This was _Riders to the Sea. Riders to theSea_, a lyrical pageant of pity made out of the destinies offisher-folk, is a play that would have been understood in ancient Athensor in Elizabethan London, as well as by an audience of Irish peasantsto-day. 

Here, incidentally, we get a foretaste of that preoccupation with deathwhich heightens the tensity in so much of Synge's work. There is acorpse on the stage in _Riders to the Sea_, and a man laid out as acorpse in _In the Shadow of the Glen_, and there is a funeral party in_The Playboy of the Western World. _ Synge's imagination dwelt much amongthe tombs. Even in his comedies, his laughter does not spring from anexuberant joy in life so much as from excitement among the incongruitiesof a world that is due to death. Hence he cannot be summed up either asa tragic or a comic writer. He is rather a tragic satirist with the soulof a lyric poet. 

If he is at his greatest in _Riders to the Sea_, he is at his mostpersonal in _The Well of the Saints_, and this is essentially a tragicsatire. It is a symbolic play woven out of the illusions of two blindbeggars. Mr. Howe says that "there is nothing for the symbolists in _TheWell of the Saints_, " but that is because he is anxious to prove thatSynge was a great creator of men and women. Synge, in my opinion atleast, was nothing of the sort. His genius was a genius of decoration, not of psychology. One might compare it to firelight in a dark room, throwing fantastic shapes on the walls. He loved the fantastic, and hewas held by the darkness. Both in speech and in character, it was thebizarre and even the freakish that attracted him. In _Riders to the Sea_he wrote as one who had been touched by the simple tragedy of humanlife. But, as he went on writing and working, he came to look on lifemore and more as a pattern of extravagances, and he exchanged the noblestyle of _Riders to the Sea_ for the gauded and overwrought style of_The Playboy. _

"With _The Playboy of the Western World_, " says Mr. Howe, "Synge placedhimself among the masters. " But then Mr. Howe thinks that "Pegeen Mikeis one of the most beautiful and living figures in all drama, " and thatshe "is the normal, " and that

 Synge, with an originality more absolute than Wordsworth's, insisted that his readers should regain their poetic feeling for ordinary life; and presented them with Pegeen with the stink of poteen on her, and a playboy wet and crusted with his father's blood. 

The conception of ordinary life--or is it only ordinary Irish life?--inthe last half-sentence leaves one meditating. 

But, after all, it is not Synge's characters or his plots, but hislanguage, which is his great contribution to literature. I agree withMr. Howe that the question how far his language is the language of theIrish countryside is a minor one. On the other hand, it is worth notingthat he wrote most beautifully in the first enthusiasm of his discoveryof the wonders of Irish peasant speech. His first plays express, as itwere, the delight of first love. He was always a shaping artist, ofcourse, in search of figures and patterns; but he kept his passion forthese things subordinate to reality in the early plays. In _The Playboy_he seemed to be determined to write riotously, like a man strainingafter vitality. He exaggerated everything. He emptied bagfuls of wildphrases--the collections of years--into the conversations of a fewminutes. His style became, in a literary sense, vicious, a thing oftricks and conventions: blank-verse rhythms--I am sure there are ahundred blank-verse lines in the play--and otiose adjectives crept inand spoilt it as prose. It became like a parody of the beautiful EnglishSynge wrote in the noon of his genius. 

I cannot understand the special enthusiasm for _The Playboy_ exceptamong those who read it before they knew anything of Synge's earlier andbetter work. With all its faults, however, it is written by the hand ofgenius, and the first hearing or reading of it must come as a revelationto those who do not know _Riders to the Sea_ or _The Well of theSaints. _ Even when it is played, as it is now played, in an expurgatedform, and with sentimentality substituted for the tolerant butMephistophelean malice which Synge threaded into it, the genius andoriginality are obvious enough. _The Playboy_ is a marvellousconfection, but it is to _Riders to the Sea_ one turns in search ofSynge the immortal poet. 

IX

VILLON: THE GENIUS OF THE TAVERN

It is to Stevenson's credit that he was rather sorry that he had everwritten his essay on Villon. He explains that this was due to the factthat he "regarded Villon as a bad fellow, " but one likes to think thathis conscience was also a little troubled because through lack ofsympathy he had failed to paint a just portrait of a man of genius. Villon was a bad fellow enough in all conscience. He was not so bad, however, as Stevenson made him out. He was, no doubt, a thief; he hadkilled a man; and it may even be (if we are to read autobiography intoone of the most shocking portions of the _Grand Testament_) that helived for a time on the earnings of "la grosse Margot. " But, for allthis, he was not the utterly vile person that Stevenson believed. Hispoetry is not mere whining and whimpering of genius which occasionallychanges its mood and sticks its fingers to its nose. It is rather theconfession of a man who had wandered over the "crooked hills ofdelicious pleasure, " and had arrived in rags and filth in the famouscity of Hell. It is a map of disaster and a chronicle of lost souls. Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevensonwhen he addressed him in a paradoxical line as:

 Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn, and spoke of his "poor, perfect voice, "

 That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers, Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears. 

No man who has ever written has so cunningly mingled joy-bells anddeath-bells in his music. Here is a realism of damned souls--damned intheir merry sins--at which the writer of _Ecclesiastes_ merely seems tohint like a detached philosopher. Villon may never have achieved thelast faith of the penitent thief. But he was a penitent thief at leastin his disillusion. If he continues to sing _Carpe diem_ when at the ageof thirty he is already an old, diseased man, he sings it almost with asneer of hatred. It is from the lips of a grinning death's-head--not ofa jovial roysterer, as Henley makes it seem in his slangtranslation--that the _Ballade de bonne Doctrine à ceux de mauvaise Vie_falls, with its refrain of destiny:

 Tout aux tavernes et aux filles. 

And the _Ballade de la Belle Heaulmière aux Filles de Joie_, in whichAge counsels Youth to take its pleasure and its fee before the evil dayscome, expresses no more joy of living than the dismallest _mementomori. _

One must admit, of course, that the obsession of vice is strong inVillon's work. In this he is prophetic of much of the greatest Frenchliterature of the nineteenth century. He had consorted with criminalsbeyond most poets. It is not only that he indulged in the sins of theflesh. It is difficult to imagine that there exists any sin of which heand his companions were not capable. He was apparently a member of thefamous band of thieves called the Coquillards, the sign of which was acockle-shell in the cap, "which was the sign of the Pilgrim. " "It was alarge business, " Mr. Stacpoole says of this organization in his popularlife of Villon, "with as many departments as a New York store, and, toextend the simile, its chief aim and object was to make money. Coining, burglary, highway robbery, selling indulgences and false jewellery, card-sharping, and dice-playing with loaded dice, were chief among itsindustries. " Mr. Stacpoole goes on to tone down this catalogue ofiniquity with the explanation that the Coquillards were, after all, notnearly such villains as our contemporary milk-adulterators and sweatersof women. He is inclined to think they may have been good fellows, likeRobin Hood and his men or the gentlemen of the road in a later century. This may well be, but a gang of Robin Hoods, infesting a hundred tavernsin the town and quarrelling in the streets over loose women, isdangerous company for an impressionable young man who had never beentaught the Shorter Catechism. Paris, even in the twentieth century, isalleged to be a city of temptation. Paris, in the fifteenth century, must have been as tumultuous with the seven deadly sins as the worldbefore the Flood. Joan of Arc had been burned in the year in whichVillon was born, but her death had not made saints of the students ofParis. Living more or less beyond the reach of the civil law, they madea duty of riot, and counted insolence and wine to themselves forrighteousness. Villon, we are reminded, had good influences in his life, which might have been expected to moderate the appeal of wildness andfolly. He had his dear, illiterate mother, for whom, and at whoserequest, he wrote that unexpected ballade of prayer to the Mother ofGod. He had, too, that good man who adopted him, Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint Benoist--

 mon plus que père Maistre Guillaume de Villon, Qui m'a esté plus doux que mère;

and who gave him the name that he has made immortal. That he was notaltogether unresponsive to these good influences is shown by hisreferences to them in his _Grand Testament_, though Stevenson wasinclined to read into the lines on Guillaume the most infernal kind ofmockery and derision. One of Villon's bequests to the old man, it willbe remembered, was the _Rommant du Pet au Diable_, which Stevensonrefers to again and again as an "improper romance. " Mr. Stacpoole hasdone a service to English readers interested in Villon by showing thatthe _Rommant_ was nothing of the sort, but was a little epic--possiblywitty enough--on a notorious conflict between the students and civiliansof Paris. One may accept the vindication of Villon's goodness of heart, however, without falling in at all points with Mr. Stacpoole's tendencyto justify his hero. When, for instance, in the account of Villon's onlyknown act of homicide, the fact that after he had stabbed the priest, Sermoise, he crushed in his head with a stone, is used to prove that hemust have been acting on the defensive, because, "since the earliesttimes, the stone is the weapon used by man to repel attack--chiefly theattack of wolves and dogs"--one cannot quite repress a sceptical smile. I admit that, in the absence of evidence, we have no right to accuseVillon of deliberate murder. But it is the absence of evidence thatacquits him, not the fact that he killed his victim with a stone as wellas a dagger. Nor does it seem to, me quite fair to blame, as Mr. Stacpoole does by implication, the cold and beautiful Katherine deVaucelles for Villon's moral downfall. Katherine de Vaucelles--what apoem her very name is!-may, for all one knows, have had the best ofreasons for sending her bully to beat the poet "like dirty linen on thewashing-board. " We do not know, and it is better to leave the matter amystery than to sentimentalize like Mr. Stacpoole:--

 Had he come across just now one of those creative women, one of those women who by the alchemy that lives alone in love can bend a man's character, even though the bending had been ever so little, she might have saved him from the catastrophe towards which he was moving, and which took place in the following December. 

All we know is that the lady of miracles did not arrive, and that in herabsence Villon and a member of companion gallows-birds occupied the darkof one winter's night in robbing the chapel of the College de Navarre. This was in 1456, and not long afterwards Villon wrote his _PetitTestament_, and skipped from Paris. 

We know little of his wanderings in the next five years, nor do we knowwhether the greater part of them was spent in crimes or in reputableidleness. Mr. Stacpoole writes a chapter on his visit to Charles ofOrléans, but there are few facts for a biographer to go upon during thisperiod. Nothing with a date happened to Villon till the summer of 1461, when Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orléans, for some cause or other, real or imaginary, had him cast into a pit so deep that he "could noteven see the lightning of a thunderstorm, " and kept him there for threemonths with "neither stool to sit nor bed to lie on, and nothing to eatbut bits of bread flung down to him by his gaolers. " Here, during histhree months' imprisonment in the pit, he experienced all thatbitterness of life which makes his _Grand Testament_ a "De Profundis"without parallel in scapegrace literature. Here, we may imagine with Mr. Stacpoole, his soul grew in the grace of suffering, and the death-bellsbegan to bring a solemn music among the joy-bells of his earlierfollies. He is henceforth the companion of lost souls. He is the mostmelancholy of cynics in the kingdom of death. He has ever before him thevision of men hanging on gibbets. He has all the hatreds of a mantortured and haunted and old. 

Not that he ever entirely resigns his carnality. His only complaintagainst the flesh is that it perishes like the snows of last year. Butto recognize even this is to have begun to have a just view of life. Heknows that in the tavern is to be found no continuing city. He becomesthe servant of truth and beauty as he writes the most revealing andtragic satires on the population of the tavern in the world'sliterature. What more horrible portrait exists in poetry than that of"la belle Heaulmière" grown old, as she contemplates her beauty turnedto hideousness--her once fair limbs become "speckled like sausages"?"La Grosse Margot" alone is more horrible, and her bully utters his andher doom in the last three awful lines of the ballade which links hername with Villon's:--

 Ordure amons, ordure nous affuyt; Nous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuyt, En ce bordeau, où tenons nostre estat. 

But there is more than the truth of ugliness in these amazing ballads ofwhich the _Grand Testament_ is full. Villon was by nature a worshipperof beauty. The lament over the defeat of his dream of fair lords andladies by the reality of a withered and dissatisfying world runs like atorment through his verse. No one has ever celebrated the inevitablepassing of loveliness in lovelier verse than Villon has done in the_Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis. _ I have heard it maintained thatRossetti has translated the radiant beauty of this ballade into his_Ballad of Dead Ladies. _ I cannot agree. Even his beautiful translationof the refrain, But where are the snows of yesteryear, seems to me to injure simplicity with an ornament, and to turn naturalinto artificial music. Compare the opening lines in the original and inthe translation, and you will see the difference between the sincereexpression of a vision and the beautiful writing of an exercise. Here isVillon's beginning:--

 Dictes-moy où, n'en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine? Archipiade, ne Thaïs, Qui fut sa cousine germaine?

And here is Rossetti's jaunty English:--

 Tell me now in what hidden way is Lady Flora, the lovely Roman? Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thaïs, Neither of them the fairer woman?

One sees how Rossetti is inclined to romanticize that which is alreadyromantic beyond one's dreams in its naked and golden simplicity. I wouldnot quarrel with Rossetti's version, however, if it had not been oftenput forward as an example of a translation which was equal to theoriginal. It is certainly a wonderful version if we compare it with mostof those that have been made from Villon. Mr. Stacpoole's, I fear, haveno rivulets of music running through them to make up for their want ofprose exactitude. Admittedly, however, translation of Villon isdifficult. Some of his most beautiful poems are simple as catalogues ofnames, and the secret of their beauty is a secret elusive as a fragranceborne on the wind. Mr. Stacpoole may be congratulated on his courage inundertaking an impossible task--a task, moreover, in which he challengescomparison with Rossetti, Swinburne, and Andrew Lang. His book, however, is meant for the general public rather than for poets and scholars--atleast, for that intelligent portion of the general public which isinterested in literature without being over-critical. For its purpose itmay be recommended as an interesting, picturesque, and judicious book. The Villon of Stevenson is little better than a criminal monkey ofgenius. The Villon of Mr. Stacpoole is at least the makings of a man. 

X

POPE

Pope is a poet whose very admirers belittle him. Mr. Saintsbury, forinstance, even in the moment of inciting us to read him, observes that"it would be scarcely rash to say that there is not an original thought, sentiment, image, or example of any of the other categories of poeticsubstance to be found in the half a hundred thousand verses of Pope. "And he has still less to say in favour of Pope as a man. He denounceshim for "rascality" and goes on with characteristic irresponsibility tosuggest that "perhaps . .. There is a natural connection between the twokinds of this dexterity of fingering--that of the artist in words, andthat of the pickpocket or the forger. " If Pope had been a contemporary, Mr. Saintsbury, I imagine, would have stunned him with a huge mattock ofadjectives. As it is, he seems to be in two minds whether to bury or topraise him. Luckily, he has tempered his moral sense with his sense ofhumour, and so comes to the happy conclusion that as a matter of fact, when we read or read about Pope, "some of the proofs which are mostdamning morally, positively increase one's aesthetic delight. "

One is interested in Pope's virtues as a poet and his vices as a manalmost equally. It is his virtues as a man and his vices as a poet thatare depressing. He is usually at his worst artistically when he is athis best morally. He achieves wit through malice: he achieves onlyrhetoric through virtue. It is not that one wishes he had been a bad sonor a Uriah Heep in his friendships. It is pleasant to remember thepleasure he gave his mother by allowing her to copy out parts of histranslation of the _Iliad_, and one respects him for refusing a pensionof £300 a year out of the secret service money from his friend Craggs. But one wishes that he had put neither his filial piety nor hisfriendship into writing. Mr. Saintsbury, I see, admires "the masterlyand delightful craftsmanship in words" of the tribute to Craggs; butthen Mr. Saintsbury also admires the _Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady_--amere attitude in verse, as chill as a weeping angel in a graveyard. 

Pope's attractiveness is less that of a real man than of an inhabitantof Lilliput, where it is a matter of no importance whether or not onelives in obedience to the Ten Commandments. We can regard him withamusement as a liar, a forger, a glutton, and a slanderer of his kind. If his letters are the dullest letters ever written by a wit, it isbecause he reveals in them not his real vices but his imaginary virtues. They only become interesting when we know the secret history of his lifeand read them as the moralizings of a doll Pecksniff. Historians ofliterature often assert--mistakenly, I think--that Pliny's letters aredull, because they are merely the literary exercises of a manover-conscious of his virtues. But Pliny's virtues, however tip-tilted, were at least real. Pope's letters are the literary exercises of a manplatitudinizing about virtues he did not possess. They have animpersonality, like that of the leading articles in _The Times_. Theyhave all the qualities of the essay except intimate confession. They areirrelevant scrawls which might as readily have been addressed to onecorrespondent as another. So much so is this, that when Pope publishedthem, he altered the names of the recipients of some of them so as tomake it appear that they were written to famous persons when, as amatter of fact, they were written to private and little-known friends. 

The story of the way in which he tampered with his letters and arrangedfor their "unauthorized" publication by a pirate publisher is one of themost amazing in the history of forgery. It was in reference to this thatWhitwell Elwin declared that Pope "displayed a complication ofimposture, degradation, and effrontery which can only be paralleled inthe lives of professional forgers and swindlers. " When he published hiscorrespondence with Wycherley, his contemporaries were amazed that theboyish Pope should have written with such an air of patronage to theaged Wycherley and that Wycherley should have suffered it. We know, now, however, that the correspondence is only in part genuine, and that Popeused portions of his correspondence with Caryll and published them asthough they had been addressed to Wycherley. Wycherley had remonstratedwith Pope on the extravagant compliments he paid him: Pope hadremonstrated with Caryll on similar grounds. In the Wycherleycorrespondence, Pope omits Wycherley's remonstrance to him and publisheshis own remonstrance to Caryll as a letter from himself to Wycherley. 

From that time onwards Pope spared no effort in getting hiscorrespondence "surreptitiously" published. He engaged a go-between, adisreputable actor disguised as a clergyman, to approach Curll, thepublisher, with an offer of a stolen collection of letters, and, whenthe book was announced, he attacked Curll as a villain, and procured afriend in the House of Lords to move a resolution that Curll should bebrought before the House on a charge of breach of privilege, one of theletters (it was stated) having been written to Pope by a peer. Curlltook a number of copies of the book with him to the Lords, and it wasdiscovered that no such letter was included. But the advertisement was anoble one. Unfortunately, even a man of genius could not deviseelaborate schemes of this kind without ultimately falling undersuspicion, and Curll wrote a narrative of the events which resulted inseriously discrediting Pope. 

Pope was surely one of the least enviable authors who ever lived. He hadfame and fortune and friends. But he had not the constitution to enjoyhis fortune, and in friendship he had not the gift of fidelity. Hesecretly published his correspondence with Swift and then set up apretence that Swift had been the culprit. He earned from Bolingbroke inthe end a hatred that pursued him in the grave. He was always beggingSwift to go and live with him at Twickenham. But Swift found even ashort visit trying. "Two sick friends never did well together, " he wrotein 1727, and he has left us verses descriptive of the miseries of greatwits in each other's company:--

 Pope has the talent well to speak, But not to reach the ear; His loudest voice is low and weak, The Dean too deaf to hear. 

 Awhile they on each other look, Then different studies choose; The Dean sits plodding o'er a book, Pope walks and courts the muse. 

"Mr. Pope, " he grumbled some years later, "can neither eat nor drink, loves to be alone, and has always some poetical scheme in his head. "Swift, luckily, stayed in Dublin and remained Pope's friend. Lady Mary, Wortley Montagu went to Twickenham and became Pope's enemy. The reasonseems to have been that he was more eager for an exchange of complimentsthan for friendship. He affected the attitude of a man in love, whenLady Mary saw in him only a monkey in love. He is even said to havethrown his little makeshift of a body, in its canvas bodice and itsthree pairs of stockings, at her feet, with the result that she burstout laughing. Pope took his revenge in the _Epistle to Martha Blount_, where, describing Lady Mary as Sappho, he declared of another lady thather different aspects agreed as ill with each other--

 As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock; Or Sappho at her toilet's greasy task With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask; So morning insects, that in muck begun, Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the evening sun. 

His relations with his contemporaries were too often begun incompliments only to end in abuse of this kind. Even while he was on goodterms with them, he was frequently doing them ill turns. Thus, hepersuaded a publisher to get Dennis to write abusively of Addison's_Cato_ in order that he might have an excuse in his turn for writingabusively of Dennis, apparently vindicating Addison but secretly takinga revenge of his own. Addison was more embarrassed than pleased by sosavage a defence, and hastened to assure Dennis that he had had nothingto do with it. Addison also gave offence to Pope by his too judiciouspraise of _The Rape of the Lock_ and the translation of the _Iliad_. Thus began the maniacal suspicion of Addison, which was expressed withthe genius of venom in the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. _

There was never a poet whose finest work needs such a running commentaryof discredit as Pope's. He may be said, indeed, to be the only greatpoet in reading whom the commentary is as necessary as the text. One canenjoy Shakespeare or Shelley without a note: one is inclined even toresent the intrusion of the commentator into the upper regions ofpoetry. But Pope's verse is a guide to his age and the incidents of hiswaspish existence, lacking a key to which one misses three-fourths ofthe entertainment. The _Danciad_ without footnotes is one of theobscurest poems in existence: with footnotes it becomes a perfect epicof literary entomology. And it is the same with at least half of hiswork. Thus, in the _Imitations of Horace_, a reference to Russell tellsus little till we read in a delightful footnote:

 There was a Lord Russell who, by living too luxuriously, had quite spoiled his constitution. He did not love sport, but used to go out with his dogs every day only to hunt for an appetite. If he felt anything of that, he would cry out, "Oh, I have found it!" turn short round and ride home again, though they were in the midst of the finest chase. It was this lord who, when he met a beggar, and was entreated by him to give him something because he was almost famished with hunger, called him a "happy dog. "

There may have been a case for neglecting Pope before Mr. Elwin and Mr. Courthope edited and annotated him--though he had been edited wellbefore--but their monumental edition has made him of all English poetsone of the most incessantly entertaining. 

Pope, however, is a charmer in himself. His venom has graces. He is astinging insect, but of how brilliant a hue! There are few satires inliterature richer in the daintiness of malice than the _Epistle toMartha Blount_ and the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_. The "characters" ofwomen in the former are among the most precious of those railleries ofsex in which mankind has always loved to indulge. The summing-up of theperfect woman:

 And mistress of herself, though china fall, is itself perfect in its wit. And the fickle lady, Narcissa, is aportrait in porcelain:

 Narcissa's nature, tolerably mild, To make a wash, would hardly stew a child; Has even been proved to grant a lover's prayer. And paid a tradesman once, to make him stare;. .. Now deep in Taylor and the Book of Martyrs, Now drinking citron with his Grace and Chartres; Now conscience chills her and now passion burns; And atheism and religion take their turns; A very heathen in the carnal part, Yet still a sad, good Christian at the heart. 

The study of Chloe, who "wants a heart, " is equally delicate and witty:

 Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, Content to dwell in decencies for ever-- So very reasonable, so unmoved, As never yet to love, or to be loved. She, while her lover pants upon her breast, Can mark the figures on an Indian chest; And when she sees her friend in deep despair, Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair!. .. Would Chloe know if you're alive or dead? She bids her footman put it in her head. Chloe is prudent--would you too be wise? Then never break your heart when Chloe dies. 

The _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ is still more dazzling. The venom ispassionate without ever ceasing to be witty. Pope has composed amasterpiece of his vanities and hatreds. The characterizations ofAddison as Atticus, and of Lord Hervey as Sporus:

 Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk--

Sporus, "the bug with gilded wings"--are portraits one may almost callbeautiful in their bitter phrasing. There is nothing make-believe hereas there is in the virtue of the letters. This is Pope's confession, theimage of his soul. Elsewhere in Pope the accomplishment is too oftenrhetorical, though _The Rape of the Lock_ is as delicate in artifice asa French fairy-tale, the _Dunciad_ an amusing assault of a majorLilliputian on minor Lilliputians, and the _Essay on Criticism_--what aregiment of witty lines to be written by a youth of twenty ortwenty-one!--much nearer being a great essay in verse than is generallyadmitted nowadays. As for the _Essay on Man_, one can read! it more thanonce only out of a sense of duty. Pope has nothing to tell us that wewant to know about man except in so far as he dislikes him. We praisehim as the poet who makes remarks--as the poet, one might almost say, who makes faces. It is when he sits in the scorner's chair, whether ingood humour or in bad, that he is the little lord of versifiers. 

XI

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

James Elroy Flecker died in January 1915, having added at least one poemto the perfect anthology of English verse. Probably his work contains agood deal that is permanent besides this. But one is confident at leastof the permanence of _The Old Ships_. Readers coming a thousand yearshence upon the beauty, the romance and the colour of this poem will turneagerly, one imagines, in search of other work from the same pen. Thiswas the flower of the poet's genius. It was the exultant and originalspeech of one who was in a great measure the seer of other men'svisions. Flecker was much given to the translation of other poets, andhe did not stop at translating their words. He translated theirimagination also into careful verse. He was one of those poets whosegenius is founded in the love of literature more than in the love oflife. He seems less an interpreter of the earth than one who soughtafter a fantastic world which had been created by Swinburne and theParnassians and the old painters and the tellers of the _ArabianNights_. 

"He began, " Mr. J. C. Squire has said, "by being more interested in hisart than in himself. " And all but a score or so of his poems suggestthat this was his way to the last. He was one of those for whom thevisible world exists. But it existed for him less in nature than in art. He does not give one the impression of a poet who observed minutely anddelightedly as Mr. W. H. Davies observes. His was a painted worldinhabited by a number of chosen and exquisite images. He found the realworld by comparison disappointing. "He confessed, " we are told, "that hehad not greatly liked the East--always excepting, of course, Greece. "This was almost a necessity of his genius; and it is interesting to seehow in some of his later work his imagination is feeling its way backfrom the world of illusion to the world of real things--from Bagdad andBabylon to England. His poetry does not as a rule touch the heart; butin _Oak and Olive_ and _Brumana_ his spectatorial sensuousness at lastbreaks down and the cry of the exile moves us as in an intimate letterfrom a friend since dead. Those are not mere rhetorical reproaches tothe "traitor pines" which

 sang what life has found The falsest of fair tales;

which had murmured of--

 older seas That beat on vaster sands, and of--

 lands Where blaze the unimaginable flowers. 

It was as though disillusion had given an artist a soul. And when thewar came it found him, as he lay dying of consumption in Switzerland, apoet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. _The Burial inEngland_ is perhaps too much of an _ad hoc_ call to be great poetry. Butit has many noble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a differentworld from his mediocre version of _God Save the King_. 

At the same time, I do not wish to suggest that his poetry of illusionis the less important part of his work. The perfection of his genius isto be sought, as a matter of fact, in his romantic eastern work, such as_The Ballad of Iskander, A Miracle of Bethlehem, Gates of Damascus_, and _Bryan of Brittany_. The false, fair tale of the East had, as itwere, released; him from mere flirtation with the senses into the worldof the imagination. Of human passions he sang little. He wrote oftenerof amorousness than of love, as in _The Ballad of the Student of theSouth. _ His passion for fairy tales, his amorousness of the East, stirred his imagination from idleness among superficial fancies into abrilliant ardour. It was these things that roused him to a niceextravagance with those favourite words and colours and images uponwhich Mr. Squire comments:

 There are words, just as there are images, which he was especially fond of using. There are colours and metals, blue and red, silver and gold, which are present everywhere in his work; the progresses of the sun (he was always a poet of the sunlight rather than a poet of the moonlight) were a continual fascination to him; the images of Fire, of a ship, and of an old white-bearded man recur frequently in his poems. 

Mr. Squire contends justly enough that in spite of this Flecker isanything but a monotonous poet. But the image of a ship was almost anobsession with him. It was his favourite toy. Often it is a silver ship. In the blind man's vision in the time of Christ even the Empires of thefuture are seen sailing like ships. The keeper of the West Gate ofDamascus sings of the sea beyond the sea:

 when no wind breathes or ripple stirs, And there on Roman ships, they say, stand rows of metal mariners. 

Those lines are worth noting for the way in which they suggest' how muchin the nature of toys were the images with which Flecker's imaginationwas haunted. His world was a world of nursery ships and nurserycaravans. 

"Haunted" is, perhaps, an exaggeration. His attitude is too impassivefor that. He works with the deliberateness of a prose-writer. He isoccasionally even prosaic in the bad sense, as when he uses: the word"meticulously, " or makes his lost mariners say:

 How striking like that boat were we In the days, sweet days, when we put to sea. 

That he was a poet of the fancy rather than of the imagination alsotended to keep his poetry near the ground. His love of the ballad-designand "the good coloured things of Earth" was tempered by a kind ofinfidel humour in his use of them. His ballads are the ballads of abrilliant dilettante, not of a man who is expressing his whole heart andsoul and faith, as the old ballad-writers were. In the result he walkeda golden pavement rather than mounted into the golden air. He was anartist in ornament, in decoration. Like the Queen in the _Queen's Song_, he would immortalize the ornament at the cost of slaying the soul. 

Of all recent poets of his kind, Flecker is the most successful. Theclassical tradition of poetry has been mocked and mutilated by many ofthe noisy young in the last few years. Flecker was a poet who preservedthe ancient balance in days in which want of balance was looked on as asign of genius. That he was what is called a minor poet cannot bedenied, but he was the most beautiful of recent minor poets. His book, indeed, is a treasury of beauty rare in these days. Of that beauty, _TheOld Ships_ is, as I have said, the splendid example. And, as it isfoolish to offer anything except a poet's best as a specimen of hiswork, one has no alternative but to turn again to thosegorgeously-coloured verses which begin:

 I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep Beyond the village which men still call Tyre, With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep For Famagusta and the hidden sun That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire; And all those ships were certainly so old-- Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, The pirate Genoese Hell-raked them till they rolled Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold. But now through friendly seas they softly run, Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green, Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold. 

That is the summary and the summit of Flecker's genius. But the rest ofhis verse, too, is the work of a true and delightful poet, a faithfulpriest of literature, an honest craftsman with words. 

XII

TURGENEV

Mr. Edward Garnett has recently collected his prefaces to the novels andstories of Turgenev, and refashioned them into a book in praise of thegenius of the most charming of Russian authors. I am afraid the word"charming" has lost so much of its stamp and brightness with use as tohave become almost meaningless. But we apply it to Turgenev in itsfullest sense. We call him charming as Pater called Athens charming. Heis one of those authors whose books we love because they reveal apersonality sensitive, affectionate, pitiful. There are some personswho, when they come into a room, immediately make us feel happier. Turgenev seems to "come into the room" in his books with just such awelcome presence. That is why I wish Mr. Garnett had made his book abiographical, as well as a critical, study. 

He quotes Turgenev as saying: "All my life is in my books. " Still, thereare a great many facts recorded about him in the letters andreminiscences of those who knew him (and he was known in half thecountries of Europe), out of which we can construct a portrait. Onefinds in the _Life of Sir Charles Dilke_, for instance, that Dilkeconsidered Turgenev "in the front rank" as a conversationalist. Thisopinion interested one all the more because one had come to think ofTurgenev as something of a shy giant. I remember, too, reading in someFrench book a description of Turgenev as a strange figure in theliterary circles of Paris--a large figure with a curious chastity ofmind who seemed bewildered by some of the barbarous jests of civilizedmen of genius. 

There are, indeed, as I have said, plenty of suggestions for a portraitof Turgenev, quite apart from his novels. Mr. Garnett refers to some ofthem in two excellent biographical chapters. He reminds us, for example, of the immense generosity of Turgenev to his contemporaries and rivals, as when he introduced the work of Tolstoy to a French editor. "Listen, "said Turgenev. "Here is 'copy' for your paper of an absolutelyfirst-rate kind. This means that I am not its author. The master--for heis a _real_ master--is almost unknown in France; but I assure you, on mysoul and conscience, that I do not consider myself worthy to unloose thelatchet of his shoes. " The letter he addressed to Tolstoy from hisdeath-bed, urging him to return from propaganda to literature, isfamous, but it is a thing to which one always returns fondly as anexample of the noble disinterestedness of a great man of letters. "Icannot recover, " Turgenev wrote:--

 That is out of the question. I am writing to you specially to say how glad I am to be your contemporary, and to express my last and sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! That gift came to you whence comes all the rest. Ah, how happy I should be if I could think my request would have an effect on you!. .. I can neither walk, nor eat, nor sleep. It is wearisome even to repeat it all! My friend--great writer of our Russian land, listen to my request!. .. I can write no more; I am tired. 

One sometimes wonders how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky could ever havequarrelled with a friend of so beautiful a character as Turgenev. Perhaps it was that there was something barbarous and brutal in each ofthem that was intolerant of his almost feminine refinement. They wereboth men of action in literature, militant, and by nature propagandist. And probably Turgenev was as impatient with the faults of their strengthas they were with the faults of his weakness. He was a man whom it waspossible to disgust. Though he was Zola's friend, he complained that_L'Assommoir_ left a bad taste in the mouth. Similarly, he discoveredsomething almost Sadistic in the manner in which Dostoevsky let hisimagination dwell on scenes of cruelty and horror. And he was asstrongly repelled by Dostoevsky's shrieking Pan-Slavism as by hissensationalism among horrors. One can guess exactly the frame of mind hewas in when, in the course of an argument with Dostoevsky, he said: "Yousee, I consider myself a German. " This has been quoted against Turgenevas though he meant it literally, and as though it were a confession ofdenationalization. His words were more subtle than that in their irony. What they meant was simply: "If to be a Russian is to be a bigot, likemost of you Pan-Slav enthusiasts, then I am no Russian, but a European. "Has he not put the whole gospel of Nationalism in half a dozen sentencesin _Rudin?_ He refused, however, to adopt along with his Nationalism thenarrowness with which it has been too often associated. 

This refusal was what destroyed his popularity in Russia, in hislifetime. It is because of this refusal that he has been pursued withbelittlement by one Russian writer after another since his death. He hadthat sense of truth which always upsets the orthodox. This sense oftruth applied to the portraiture of his contemporaries was felt like aninsult in those circles of mixed idealism and make-believe, the circlesof the political partisans. A great artist may be a member--and anenthusiastic member--of a political party, but in his art he cannotbecome a political partisan without ceasing to be an artist. In hisnovels, Turgenev regarded it as his life-work to portray Russiatruthfully, not to paint and powder and "prettify" it for show purposes, and the result was an outburst of fury on the part of those who wereasked to look at themselves as real people instead of as themaster-pieces of a professional flatterer. When _Fathers and Children_was published in 1862, the only people who were pleased were the enemiesof everything in which Turgenev believed. "I received congratulations, "he wrote, almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies. This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me. I knew very well I had carried out honestly the type I had sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively with sympathy. 

This is bound to be the fate of every artist who takes his politicalparty or his church, or any other propagandist group to which hebelongs, as his subject. He is a painter, not a vindicator, and he iscompelled to exhibit numerous crooked features and faults in such a wayas to wound the vanity of his friends and delight the malice of hisenemies. Artistic truth is as different from propagandist truth asdaylight from limelight, and the artist will always be hated by thepropagandist as worse than an enemy--a treacherous friend. Turgenevdeliberately accepted as his life-work a course which could only lead tothe miseries of being misunderstood. When one thinks of the long yearsof denunciation and hatred he endured for the sake of his art, onecannot but regard him as one of the heroic figures of the nineteenthcentury. "He has, " Mr. Garnett tells us, "been accused of timidity andcowardice by uncompromising Radicals and Revolutionaries. .. . In anaccess of self-reproach he once declared that his character wascomprised in one word--'poltroon!'" He showed neither timidity norcowardice, however, in his devotion to truth. His first and last adviceto young writers, Mr. Garnett declares, was: "You need truth, remorseless truth, as regards your own sensations. " And if Turgenev wasremorseless in nothing else, he was remorseless in this--truth asregards both his own sensations and the sensations of hiscontemporaries. He seems, if we may judge from a sentence he wrote about_Fathers and Children_, to have regarded himself almost as the firstrealist. "It was a new method, " he said, "as well as a new type Iintroduced--that of Realizing instead of Idealizing. " His claim has, atleast, this truth in it: he was the first artist to apply the realisticmethod to a world seething with ideas and with political andphilosophical unrest. His adoption of the realistic method, however, wasthe result of necessity no less than of choice. He "simply did not knowhow to work otherwise, " as he said. He had not the sort of imaginationthat can invent men and women easily. He had always to draw from thelife. "I ought to confess, " he once wrote, "that I never attempted tocreate a type without having, not an idea, but a living person, in whomthe various elements were harmonized together, to work from. I havealways needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly. "

When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his characterand the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, washuman and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps, that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance. That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberancehigher than beauty or love or pity. The world before the war was afraidabove all things of losing vitality, and so it turned to contortionistsof genius such as Dostoevsky, or lesser contortionists, like some of theFuturists, for fear restfulness should lead to death. It would befoolish, I know, to pretend to sum up Dostoevsky as a contortionist; buthe has that element in him. Mr. Conrad suggests a certain vice ofmisshapenness in Dostoevsky when he praises the characters of Turgenevin comparison with his. "All his creations, fortunate or unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, " he says in his fine tribute to Turgenev inMr. Garnett's book, "are human beings, not strange beasts in amenagerie, or damned souls knocking themselves about in the stuffydarkness of mystical contradictions. " That is well said. On the otherhand, it is only right to remember that, if Turgenev's characters arehuman beings, they (at least the male characters) have a way of beingcuriously ineffectual human beings. He understood the Hamlet in manalmost too well. From Rudin to the young revolutionist in _Virgin Soil_, who makes such a mess of his propaganda among the peasantry, how many ofhis characters are as remarkable for their weakness as their unsuccess!Turgenev was probably conscious of this pessimism of imagination inregard to his fellow man--at least, his Russian fellow man. In _On theEve_, when he wished to create a central character that would act as anappeal to his countrymen to "conquer their sluggishness, their weaknessand apathy" (as Mr. Garnett puts it), he had to choose a Bulgarian, nota Russian, for his hero. Mr. Garnett holds that the characterization ofInsarov, the Bulgarian, in _On the Eve_, is a failure, and puts thisdown to the fact that Turgenev drew him, not from life, but fromhearsay. I think Mr. Garnett is wrong. I have known the counterpart ofInsarov among the members of at least one subject nation, and theportrait seems to me to be essentially true and alive. Luckily, ifTurgenev could not put his trust in Russian men, he believed with allhis heart in the courage and goodness of Russian women. He was one ofthe first great novelists to endow his women with independence of soul. With the majority of novelists, women are sexual or sentimentalaccidents. With Turgenev, women are equal human beings--saviours of menand saviours of the world. _Virgin Soil_ becomes a book of hope insteadof despair as the triumphant figure of Marianna, the young girl of theRevolution, conquers the imagination. Turgenev, as a creator of noblewomen, ranks with Browning and Meredith. His realism was not, in thelast analysis, a realism of disparagement, but a realism of affection. His farewell words, Mr. Garnett tells us, were: "Live and love others asI have always loved them. "

XIII

THE MADNESS OF STRINDBERG

The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It wascracked in a double sense--it was crazy. It gave back broken images of aworld which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream. MissLind-af-Hageby, in her popular biography of Strindberg, is too intentupon saying what can be said in his defence to make a serious attempt toanalyse the secret of genius which is implicit in those "115 plays, novels, collections of stories, essays, and poems" which will begathered into the complete edition of his works shortly to be publishedin Sweden. The biography will supply the need of that part of the publicwhich has no time to read Strindberg, but has plenty of time to readabout him. It will give them a capably potted Strindberg, and will tellthem quietly and briefly much that he himself has told violently and atlength in _The Son of a Servant, The Confession of a Fool_, and, indeed, in nearly everything he wrote. On the other hand, Miss Lind's book haslittle value as an interpretation. She does not do much to clear up thereasons which have made the writings of this mad Swede matter ofinterest in every civilized country in the world. She does, indeed, quote the remark of Gorki, who, at the time of Strindberg's death, compared him to the ancient Danubian hero, Danko, "who, in order to helphumanity out of the darkness of problems, tore his heart out of hisbreast, lit it, and holding it high, led the way. " "Strindberg, " MissLind declares, "patiently burnt his heart for the illumination of thepeople, and on the day when his body was laid low in the soil, theflame of his self-immolation was seen, pure and inextinguishable. " Thiswill not do. "Patiently" is impossible; so is "pure andinextinguishable. " Strindberg was at once a man of genius (and thereforenoble) and a creature of doom (and therefore to be pitied). But to sumhim up as a spontaneous martyr in the greatest of great causes is to doinjustice to language and to the lives of the saints and heroes. He wasa martyr, of course, in the sense in which we call a man a martyr totoothache. He suffered; but most of his sufferings were due, not totenderness of soul, but to tenderness of nerves. 

Other artists lay hold upon life through an exceptional sensibility. Strindberg laid hold on life through an exceptional excitability--evenan exceptional irritability. In his plays, novels, and essays alike, heis a specialist in the jars of existence. He magnified even the smallestworries until they assumed mountainous proportions. He was the kind ofman who, if something went wrong with the kitchen boiler, felt that theDevil and all his angels had been loosed upon him, as upon the righteousJob, with at least the connivance of Heaven. He seems to have regardedthe unsatisfactoriness of a servant as a scarcely less tremendous evilthan the infidelity of a wife. If you wish to see into twhat follies ofexaggeration Strindberg's want of the sense of proportion led him, youcannot do better than turn to those pages in _Zones of the Spirit_ (asthe English translation of his _Blue Book_ is called), in which he tellsus about his domestic troubles at the time of the rehearsals of _TheDream Play. _

 My servant left me; my domestic arrangements were upset; within forty days I had six changes of servants--one worse than the other. At last I had to serve myself, lay the table, and light the stove. I ate black broken victuals out of a basket. In short, I had to taste the whole bitterness of life without knowing why. 

Much as one may sympathize with a victim of the servant difficulty, onecannot but regard the last sentence as, in the vulgar phrase, rather atall order. But it becomes taller still before Strindberg has done withit. 

 Then came the dress-rehearsal of _The Dream Play. _ This drama I wrote seven years ago, after a period of forty days' suffering which were among the worst which I had ever undergone. And now again exactly forty days of fasting and pain had passed. There seemed, therefore, to be a secret legislature which promulgates clearly defined sentences. I thought of the forty days of the Flood, the forty years of wandering in the desert, the forty days' fast kept by Moses, Elijah, and Christ. 

There you have Strindberg's secret. His work is, for the most part, simply the dramatization of the conflict between man and the irritationsof life. The chief of these is, of course, woman. But the lesserirritations never disappear from sight for long. His obsession by themis very noticeable in _The Dream Play_ itself--in that scene, forinstance, in which the Lawyer and the daughter of Indra having married, the Lawyer begins to complain of the untidiness of their home, and theDaughter to complain of the dirt:

 THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I dreamed!

 THE LAWYER. We are not the worst off by far. There is still food in the pot. 

 THE DAUGHTER. But what sort of food?

 THE LAWYER. Cabbage is cheap, nourishing, and good to eat. 

 THE DAUGHTER. For those who like cabbage--to me it is repulsive. 

 THE LAWYER. Why didn't you say so?

 THE DAUGHTER. Because I loved you. I wanted to sacrifice my own taste. 

 THE LAWYER. Then I must sacrifice my taste for cabbage to you--for sacrifices must be mutual. 

 THE DAUGHTER. What are we to eat then? Fish? But you hate fish?

 THE LAWYER. And it is expensive. 

 THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I thought it!

 THE LAWYER _(kindly). _ Yes, you see how hard it is. 

And the symbolic representation of married life in terms of fish andcabbage is taken up again a little later:--

 THE DAUGHTER. I fear I shall begin to hate you after this!

 THE LAWYER. Woe to us, then! But let us forestall hatred. I promise never again to speak of any untidiness--although it is torture to me!

 THE DAUGHTER. And I shall eat cabbage, though it means agony to me. 

 THE LAWYER. A life of common suffering, then! One's pleasure the other one's pain. 

One feels that, however true to nature the drift of this may be, it islittle more than bacilli of truth seen as immense through a microscope. The agonies and tortures arising from eating cabbage and such thingsmay, no doubt, have tragic consequences enough, but somehow the men whomthese things put on the rack refuse to come to life in the imaginationon the same tragic plane where Prometheus lies on his crag and Oedipusstrikes out his eyes that they may no longer look upon his shame. Strindberg is too anxious to make tragedy out of discomforts instead ofout of sorrows. When he is denouncing woman as a creature who lovesabove all things to deceive her husband, his supreme way of expressinghis abhorrence is to declare: "If she can trick him into eatinghorse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy. " Here, and in a score ofsimilar passages, we can see how physical were the demons that endlesslyconsumed Strindberg's peace of mind. 

His attitude to women, as we find it expressed in _The Confession of aFool, The Dance of Death_, and all through his work, is that of a manoverwhelmed with the physical. He raves now with lust, now withdisgust--two aspects of the same mood. He turns from love to hatred witha change of front as swift as a drunkard's. He is the Mad Mullah of allthe sex-antagonism that has ever troubled men since they began to thinkof woman as a temptress. He was the most enthusiastic modern exponent ofthe point-of-view of that Adam who explained: "The woman tempted me. "Strindberg deliberately wrote those words on his banner and held themaloft to his generation as the summary of an eternal gospel. MissLind-af-Hageby tells us that, at one period of his life, he wassufficiently free from the physical obsessions of sex to preach theequality of men and women and even to herald the coming of womansuffrage. But his abiding view of woman was that of the plain man of thenineteenth century. He must either be praising her as a ministeringangel or denouncing her as a ministering devil--preferably the latter. It would be nonsense, however, to pretend that Strindberg did not see atleast one class of women clearly and truly. The accuracy with which heportrays woman the parasite, the man-eater, the siren, is quiteterrible. No writer of his day was so shudderingly conscious of everygesture, movement, and intonation with which the spider-woman sets outto lure the mate she is going to devour. It may be that he prophesiesagainst the sins of women rather than subtly analyses and describes themas a better artist would have done. _The Confessions of a Fool_ is lessa revelation of the soul of his first wife than an attack on her. But wemust, in fairness to Strindberg, remember that in his violences againstwomen he merely gives us a new rendering of an indictment that goes backto the beginning of history. The world to him was a long lane ofoglings, down which man must fly in terror with his eyes shut and hisears covered. His foolishness as a prophet consists, not in hissuspicions of woman regarded as an animal, but in his frothing at themouth at the idea that she should claim to be treated as somethinghigher than an animal. None the less, he denied to the end that he was awoman-hater. His denial, however, was grimly unflattering:--

 I have said that the child is a little criminal, incapable of self-guidance, but I love children all the same. I have said that woman is--what she is, but I have always loved some woman, and been a father. Whoever, therefore, calls me a woman-hater is a blockhead, a liar, or a noodle. Or all three together. 

Sex, of course, was the greatest cross Strindberg had to bear. But therewere hundreds of other little changing crosses, from persecution maniato poverty, which supplanted each other from day to day on his back. Hesuffered continually both from the way he was made and from the way theworld was made. His novels and plays are a literature of suffering. Hereveals himself there as a man pursued by furies, a man without rest. Heflies to a thousand distractions and hiding-places--drink and lust andpiano-playing, Chinese and chemistry, painting and acting, alchemy andpoison, and religion. Some of these, no doubt, he honestly turns to fora living. But in his rush from one thing to another he shows therestlessness of a man goaded to madness. Not that his life is to beregarded as entirely miserable. He obviously gets a good deal ofpleasure even out of his acutest pain. "I find the joy of life in itsviolent and cruel struggles, " he tells us in the preface to _MissJulia_, "and my pleasure lies in knowing something and learningsomething. " He is always consumed with the greed of knowledge--a phaseof his greed of domination. It is this that enables him to turn hisinferno into a purgatory. 

In his later period, indeed, he is optimist enough to believe that thesufferings of life cleanse and ennoble. By tortuous ways of sin he atlast achieves the simple faith of a Christian. He originally revoltedfrom this faith more through irritation than from principle. One feelsthat, with happier nerves and a happier environment, he might easilyhave passed his boyhood as the model pupil in the Sunday-school. It issignificant that we find him in _The Confession of a Fool_ recitingLongfellow's _Excelsior_ to the first and worst of his wives. Strindbergmay have been possessed of a devil; he undoubtedly liked to play thepart of a devil; but at heart he was constantly returning to theLongfellow sentiment, though, of course, his hungry intellectualcuriosity was something that Longfellow never knew. In his volume offables, _In Midsummer Days_, we see how essentially good and simple werehis ideas when he could rid himself of sex mania and persecution mania. Probably his love of children always kept him more or less in chains tovirtue. Ultimately he yielded himself a victim, not to the furies, butto the still more remorseless pursuit of the Hound of Heaven. On hisdeath-bed, Miss Lind tells us, he held up the Bible and said: "Thisalone is right. " Through his works, however, he serves virtue best, notby directly praising it, but by his eagerly earnest account of themadness of the seven deadly sins, as well as of the seventy-seven deadlyirritations. He has not the originality of fancy or imagination to paintvirtue well. His genius was the genius of frank and destructivecriticism. His work is a jumble of ideas and an autobiography of rawnerves rather than a revelation of the emotions of men and women. Hisgreat claim on our attention, however, is that his autobiography is trueas far as the power of truth was in him. His pilgrim's progress throughmadness to salvation is neither a pretty nor a sensational lie. It is agenuine document. That is why, badly constructed though his plays andnovels are, some of them have a fair chance of being read a hundredyears hence. As a writer of personal literature, he was one of the boldand original men of his time. 

XIV

"THE PRINCE OF FRENCH POETS"

It is difficult nowadays to conceive that, within half a century of hisdeath, Ronsard's fame suffered so dark an eclipse that no new edition ofhis works was called for between 1629 and 1857. When he died, he was, asM. Jusserand reminds us, the most illustrious man of letters in Europe. He seemed, too, to have all those gifts of charm--charm of mood andmusic--which make immortality certain. And yet, in the rule-of-thumbages that were to follow, he sank into such disesteem in his own countrythat Boileau had not a good word for him, and Voltaire roundly said ofhim that he "spoiled the language. " Later, we have Arnauld assertingthat France had only done herself dishonour by her enthusiasm for "thewretched poetry of Ronsard. " Fénelon, as M. Jusserand tells us, discusses Ronsard as a linguist, and ignores him as a poet. 

It was the romantic; revival of the nineteenth century that placedRonsard on a throne again. Even to-day, however, there are pessimisticFrenchmen who doubt whether their country has ever produced a greatpoet. Mr. Bennet has told us of one who, on being asked who was thegreatest of French poets, replied: "Victor Hugo, hélas!" And in the dayswhen Hugo was still but a youth the doubt must have been still morepainful. So keenly was the want of a national poet felt that, if onecould not have been discovered, the French would have had to invent him. It was necessary for the enthusiastic young romanticists to possess agreat indigenous figure to stand beside those imported idols--Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, and Dante. Sainte-Beuve, who brought out aRonsard anthology with a critical essay in 1828, showed them where tolook. After that, it was as though French literature had begun withRonsard. He was the "ideal ancestor. " He was, as it were, are-discovered fatherland. But his praise since then has been no meretask of patriotism. It has been a deep enthusiasm for literature. "Youcannot imagine, " wrote Flaubert, in 1852, "what a poet Ronsard is. Whata poet! What a poet! What wings!. .. This morning, at half-past twelve, Iread a poem aloud which almost upset my nerves, it gave me so muchpleasure. " That may be taken as the characteristic French view ofRonsard. It may be an exaggerated view. It may be fading to some extentbefore modern influences. But it is unlikely that Ronsard's reputationin his own country will ever again be other than that of a great poet. 

At the same time, it is not easy, on literary grounds, to acquiesce inall the praises that have been heaped upon him. One would imagine fromFlaubert's exclamations that Ronsard had a range like Shelley's, whereas, in fact, he was more comparable with the English cavalierpoets. He had the cavalier poet's gift of making love seem a professionrather than a passion. He was always very much a gentleman, both in hismoods and his philosophy. A great deal of his best poetry is merely avariation on _carpe diem. _ On the other hand, though he never went verydeep or very high, he did express real sentiments and emotions inpoetry. Few poets have sung the regret for youth more sincerely and morebeautifully, and, with Ronsard, regret for the lost wonder of his ownyouth was perhaps the acutest emotion he ever knew. He was himself, inhis early years, one of those glorious youths who have the genius ofcharm and comeliness, of grace and strength and the arts. He excelled atfootball as in lute-playing. He danced, fenced, and rode better than thebest; and, with his noble countenance, his strong limbs, his fairbeard, and his "eyes full of gentle gravity, " he must have been thepicture of the perfect courtier and soldier. Above all, we are told, hisconversation was delightful. He had "the gift of pleasing. " When he wentto Scotland in 1537 with Madeleine, the King's daughter, to attend aspage her tragic marriage with James V, James was so attracted by himthat he did not allow him to leave the country for two years. With everygift of popularity and success, with the world apparently already at hisfeet, Ronsard was suddenly struck down by an illness that crippled hiswhole life. He became deaf, or half-deaf. His body was tortured witharthritis and recurrent attacks of gout. His career as a courtier lay inruins before him. 

Possibly, had it not been so, his genius as a poet would have spentitself in mere politeness. The loss of his physical splendour and thedeath of more than one of his companions, however, filled him with anextreme sense of the transitoriness of the beauty of the world--of youthand fame and flowers--and turned him both to serious epicureanism and toserious writing. By the year 1550 he was leading the young men of Francein a great literary renaissance--a reaction against the lifeless jingleof ballades and punning rhymes. Like du Bellay, he asked himself and hiscontemporaries: "Are we, then, less than the Greeks and Romans?" And heset out to lay the foundations in France of a literature as individualin its genius as the ancient classics. M. Jusserand, in a mostinteresting chapter, relates the story of the battles over form andlanguage which were fought by French men of letters in the days of LaPléiade. In an age of awakenings, of conquests, of philosophies, ofdiscussions on everything under the sun, the literature of tricksterswas ultimately bound to give way before the bold originality and thesincerities of the new school. But Ronsard had to endure a wholeparliament of mockery before the day of victory. 

Of his life, apart from his work in literature, there is little totell. For a man who lived in France in days when Protestantism andCatholicism were murderously at one another's throats, he had apeculiarly uneventful career. This, too, though he threw himselfearnestly into the battle against the heretics. He had begun bysympathizing with Protestantism, because it promised much-needed reformsin the Church; but the sympathy was short-lived. In 1553, though alayman, he was himself filling various ecclesiastical offices. He drewthe salaries of several priories during his life, more lowly paidpriests apparently doing the work. Though an earnest Catholic, however, Ronsard was never faithless to friends who took the other side. Hepublished his kindly feelings towards Odet de Coligny, the Admiral'scardinal brother, for instance, who had adopted Protestantism andmarried, and, though he could write bloodily enough against hissectarian enemies, the cry for tolerance, for pity, for peace, seemscontinually to force itself to his lips amid the wars of the time. M. Jusserand lays great stress on the plain-spokenness of Ronsard. Hepraises especially the courage with which the poet often spoke out hismind to kings and churchmen, though no man could write odes fuller ofexaggerated adulation when they were wanted. He sometimes counselledkings, we are told, "in a tone that, after all our revolutions, nowriter would dare to employ to-day. " Perhaps M. Jusserand over-estimatesthe boldness with which his hero could remind kings that they, likecommon mortals, were made of mud. He has done so, I imagine, largely inorder to clear him from the charge of being a flatterer. It isinteresting to be reminded, by the way, that one of his essays inflattery was an edition of his works dedicated, by order of Catherine deMedicis, to Elizabeth of England, whom he compared to all theincomparables, adding a eulogy of "Mylord Robert Du-Dlé comte del'Encestre" as the ornament of the English, the wonder of the world. Elizabeth was delighted, and gave the poet a diamond for his prettybook. 

But Ronsard does not live in literature mainly as a flatterer. Nor ishe remembered as a keeper of the conscience of princes, or as areligious controversialist. If nothing but his love-poems had survived, we should have almost all his work that is of literary importance. Hefell in love in the grand manner three times, and from these threepassions most of his good poetry flowed. First there was Cassandre, thebeautiful girl of Florentine extraction, whom he saw singing to herlute, when he was only twenty-two, and loved to distraction. She marriedanother and became the star of Ronsard's song. She was the irruptiveheroine of that witty and delightful sonnet on the _Iliad:--_

 Je veux lire en trois jours l'Iliade d'Homère, Et pour ce, Corydon, ferme bien l'huis sur moi; Si rien me vient troubler, je t'assure ma foi, Tu sentiras combien pesante est ma colère. 

 Je ne veux seulement que notre chambrière Vienne faire mon lit, ton compagnon ni toi; Je veux trois jours entiers demeurer à recoi, Pour folâtrer après une semaine entière. 

 Mais, si quelqu'un venait de la part de Cassandre, Ouvre-lui tôt la porte, et ne le fais attendre, Soudain entre en ma chambre et me viens accoutrer. 

 Je veux tant seulement à lui seul me montrer; Au reste, si un dieu voulait pour moi descendre Du ciel, ferme la porte et ne le laisse entrer. 

Nine years after Cassandre came Marie, the fifteen-year-old daughter ofan Angevin villager, nut-brown, smiling, and with cheeks the colour of aMay rose. She died young, but not before she had made Ronsard suffer bycoquetting with another lover. What is more important still, not beforeshe had inspired him to write that sonnet which has about it so much ofthe charm of the morning:--

 Mignonne, levez-vous, vous êtes paresseuse, Ja la gaie alouette au ciel a fredonné, Et ja le rossignol doucement jargonné, Dessus l'épine assis, sa complainte amoureuse. 

 Sus! debout allons voir l'herbelette perleuse, Et votre beau rosier de boutons couronné, Et vos oeillets aimés auxquels aviez donné Hier au soir de l'eau d'une main si soigneuse. 

 Harsoir en vous couchant vous jurâtes vos yeux D'être plus tôt que moi ce matin éveillée: Mais le dormir de l'aube, aux filles gracieux, Vous tient d'un doux sommeil encor les yeux silléee. Ça, ça, que je les baise, et votre beau tetin, Cent fois, pour vous apprendre à vous lever matin. 

Ronsard was old and grey--at least, he was old before his time andgrey--when he met Hélène de Sorgères, maid of honour to the Queen, andbegan the third of his grand passions. He lived all the life of a younglover over again. They went to dances together, Hélène in a mask. Hélènegave her poet a crown of myrtle and laurel. They had childish quarrelsand swore eternal fidelity. It was for her that Ronsard made the mostexquisite of his sonnets: _Quand vous serez bien vieille_-a sonnet ofwhich Mr. Yeats has written a magical version in English. 

It is in referring to the sonnets for Hélène that M. Jusserand callsattention to the realism of Ronsard's poetry. He points out that oneseems to see the women Ronsard loves far more clearly than the heroinesof many other poets. He notes the same genius of realism again when heis relating how Ronsard, on the eve of his death, as he was transportedfrom priory to priory, in hope of relief in each new place, wrote a poemof farewell to his friends, in which he described the skeleton horrorsof his state with a minute carefulness, Ronsard, indeed, showed himselfa very personal chronicler throughout his work. "He cannot hide thefact that he likes to sleep on the left side, that he hates cats, dislikes servants 'with slow hands, ' believes in omens, adores physicalexercises and gardening, and prefers, especially in summer, vegetablesto meat. " M. Jusserand, I may add, has written the just and scholarlypraise of a most winning poet. His book, which appears in the _GrandsEcrivains Français_ series, is not only a good biographical study, butan admirable narrative of literary and national history. 

XV

ROSSETTI AND RITUAL

Rossetti's great gift to his time was the gift of beauty, of beauty tobe worshipped in the sacred hush of a temple. His work is not richer inthe essentials of beauty than Browning's--it is not, indeed, nearly sorich; but, while Browning served beauty joyously, a god in a firmamentof gods, Rossetti burned a lonely candle to it as to the only true god. To Browning, the temple of beauty was but a house in a living world; toRossetti, the world outside the temple was, for the most part, a deadworld. _Jenny_ may, seem to stand in vivid contradiction of this. But_Jenny_ was an exceptional excursion into life, and hardly expresses theRossetti that was a power in art and literature. Him we find best, perhaps, in _The Blessed Damozel_, written when he was little more thana boy. And this is not surprising, for the arrogant love of beauty, outof which the aesthetic sort of art and literature has been born, isessentially a boy's love. Poets who are sick with this passion musteither die young, like Keats, or survive merely to echo their youngerselves, like Swinburne. They are splendid in youth, like Aucassin, whoseswooning passion for Nicolette is symbolical of their almost painfuldesire of beauty. In _Hand and Soul_, Rossetti tells us of Chiaro dellErma that "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of statelypersons. " Keats's Odes express the same ecstasy of faintness, andRossetti himself was obviously a close nineteenth-century counterpart ofChiaro. Even when he troubles about the soul--and he constantly troublesabout it--he never seems to be able altogether to escape out of whatmay be called the higher sensationalism into genuine mysticism. His workis earth-born: it is rich in earthly desire. His symbols were not wingsto enable the soul to escape into a divine world of beauty. They werethe playthings of a grown man, loved for their owft beauty more than forany beauty they could help the spirit to reach. Rossetti belongs to theornamental school of poetry. He writes more like a man who has gone intoa library than like one who has gone out to Nature, and ornamentalism inpoetry is simply the result of seeing life, not directly, but throughthe coloured glass of literature and the other arts. Rossetti was theforerunner of all those artists and authors of recent times, who, ingreater or less degree, looked on art as a weaving of patterns, anarrangement of wonderful words and sounds and colours. Pater in hisearly writings, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and all those others whodreamed that it was the artist's province to enrich the world withbeautiful furniture--for conduct itself seemed, in the philosophy ofthese writers, to aspire after the quality of tapestry--are implicit in_The Blessed Damozel_ and _Troy Town. _ It is not that Rossetti couldcommand words like Pater or Wilde. His phrasing, if personal, iscuriously empty of the graces. He often does achieve graces of phrase;but some of his most haunting poems owe their power over us to theirgeneral pattern, and not to any persistent fine workmanship. Howbeautiful _Troy Town_ is, for instance, and yet how lacking in beautifulverses! The poet was easily content in his choice of words who couldleave a verse like:--

 Venus looked on Helen's gift; _(O Troy Town!)_ Looked and smiled with subtle drift, Saw the work of her heart's desire:-- "There thou kneel'st for Love to lift!" _(O Troy's down, Tall Troy's on fire!)_

Rossetti never wrote; a poem that was fine throughout. There is nothingto correspond to _The Skylark_ or the _Ode to a Grecian Urn_ or _ChildeRoland to the Dark Tower Came_ in his work. The truth is, he was not agreat poet, because he was not a singer. He was capable of decorationsin verse, but he was not capable of song. His sonnets, it may be argued, are more than decorations. But even they are laden with beauty; they arenever, as it were, light and alight with it, as are _Shall I comparethee to a summer's day?_ and _Where lies the land to which yon ship mustgo?_ They have flagging pulses like desire itself, and are often wearybefore the fourteenth line. Only rarely do we get a last six lineslike:--

 O love, my love! if I no more should see Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee, Nor image of thine eyes in any spring, -- How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, The wind of Death's imperishable wing?

And, beautiful as this is, is not the imagery of the closing lines alittle more deliberate than we are conscious of in the great work of thegreat singers? One never feels that the leaves and the winds inthemselves were sufficiently full of meaning and delight for Rossetti. He loved them as pictorial properties--as a designer rather than a poetloves them. 

In his use of the very mysteries of Christianity, he is intoxicatedchiefly by the beauty of the designs by which the painters haveexpressed their vision of religion. His _Ave_ is a praise of the beautyof art more than a praise of the beauty of divinity. In it we are toldhow, on the eve of the Annunciation, Far off the trees were as pale wands, Against the fervid sky: the sea Sighed further off eternally As human sorrow sighs in sleep. 

The poem is not a hymn but a decorated theme. And yet there is asincere vain-longing running through Rossetti's work that keeps it frombeing artificial or pretentious. This was no less real for being vague. His work is an attempt to satisfy his vain-longing with rites of wordsand colour. He always sought to bring peace to his soul by means ofritual. When he was dying, he was anxious to see a confessor. "I canmake nothing of Christianity, " he said, "but I only want a confessor togive me absolution for my sins. " That was typical of his attitude tolife. He loved its ceremonies more--at least, more vividly--than heloved its soul. One is never done hearing about his demand for"fundamental brainwork" in art. But his own poetry is poor enough inbrainwork. It is the poetry, of one who, like Keats, hungered for a"life of sensations rather than of thoughts. " It is the poetry of grief, of regret--the grief and regret of one who was a master of sensuousbeauty, and who reveals sensuous beauty rather than any deeper secreteven in touching spiritual themes. Poetry with him is a dyed andembroidered garment which weighs the spirit down rather than wingedsandals like Shelley's, which set the spirit free. 

Yet his influence on art and literature has been immense. He, far morethan Keats or Swinburne, was the prophet of that ritualism which hasbeen a; dominant characteristic in modern poetry, whether it is thePagan ritualism of Mr. Yeats or the Catholic ritualism of FrancisThompson. One need not believe that he was an important direct influenceon either of these poets. But his work as poet and painter prepared theworld for ritualism in literature. No doubt the medievalism of Scott andthe decorative imagination of Keats were also largely responsible forthe change in the literary atmosphere; but Rossetti was moredistinctively a symbolist and ritualist than any other English man ofletters who lived in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century. 

People used to debate whether he was greater as a painter or as a poet, and he was not always sure himself. When, however, he said toBurne-Jones, in 1857: "If any man has any poetry in him, he shouldpaint; for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcelybegun to paint it, " he gave convincing proof that painting, and notpoetry, was his essential gift. He may be denounced for his bad drawingand twenty other faults as an artist; but it is his paintings that showhim as a discoverer and a man of high genius. At the same time, how wellhe can also paint in verse, as in those ever-moving lines on Jenny'swanderings in the Haymarket:--

 Jenny, you know the city now. A child can tell the tale there, how Some things which are not yet enrol'd In market-lists are bought and sold, Even till the early Sunday light, When Saturday night is market-night Everywhere, be it dry or wet, And market-night in the Haymarket. Our learned London children know, Poor Jenny, all your pride and woe; Have seen your lifted silken skirt Advertise dainties through the dirt; Have seen your coach wheels splash rebuke On virtue; and have learned your look When wealth and health slipped past, you stare Along the streets alone, and there, Round the long park, across the bridge, The cold lamps at the pavement's edge Wind on together and apart, A fiery serpent for your heart. 

In most of his poems, unfortunately, the design, as a whole, rambles. His imagination worked best when limited by the four sides of a canvas. 

XVI

MR. BERNARD SHAW

Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an authorthan as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people, it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composedof Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw. Mr. Shaw's gift ofinfuriating people is unfailing. He is one of those rare public men whocan hardly express an opinion on potato-culture--and he does express anopinion on everything--without making a multitude of people shake theirfists in impotent anger. His life--at least, his public life--has been ajibe opposed to a rage. He has gone about, like a pickpocket ofillusions, from the world of literature to the world of morals, and fromthe world of morals to the world of politics, and, everywhere he hasgone, an innumerable growl has followed him. 

Not that he has not had his disciples--men and women who believe thatwhat Mr. Shaw says on any conceivable subject is far more important thanwhat _The Times_ or the _Manchester Guardian_ says. He has never foundeda church, however, because he has always been able to laugh at hisdisciples as unfeelingly as at anybody else. He has courted unpopularityas other men have courted popularity. He has refused to assume thevacuous countenance either of an idol or a worshipper, and in the resultthose of us to whom life without reverence seems like life in ruins arefilled at times with a wild lust to denounce and belittle him. He hasbeen called more names than any other man of letters alive. When all theother names have been exhausted and we are about to becomeinarticulate, we even denounce him as a bore. But this is only theBillingsgate of our exasperation. Mr. Shaw is not a bore, whatever elsehe may be. He has succeeded in the mere business of interesting usbeyond any other writer of his time. 

He has succeeded in interesting us largely by inventing himself as apublic figure, as Oscar Wilde and Stevenson did before him. Whether hecould have helped becoming a figure, even if he had never painted thatelongated comic portrait of himself, it is difficult to say. Probably hewas doomed to be a figure just as Dr. Johnson was. If he had not told uslegends about himself, other people would have told them, and they couldscarcely have told them so well: that would have been the chiefdifference. Even if Mr. Shaw's plays should ever become as dead as theessays in _The Rambler_, his lineaments and his laughter will survive ina hundred stories which will bring the feet of pilgrims to AdelphiTerrace in search of a ghost with its beard on fire. 

His critics often accuse him, in regard to the invention of the Shawmyth, of having designed a poster rather than painted a portrait. AndMr. Shaw always hastens to agree with those who declare he is anadvertiser in an age of advertisement. M. Hamon quotes him as saying:--

 Stop advertising myself! On the contrary, I must do it more than ever. Look at Pears's Soap. There is a solid house if you like, but every wall is still plastered with their advertisements. If I were to give up advertising, my business would immediately begin to fall off. You blame me for having declared myself to be the most remarkable man of my time. But the claim is an arguable one. Why should I not say it when I believe that it is true?

One suspects that there is as much fun as commerce in Mr. Shaw'sadvertisement. Mr. Shaw would advertise himself in this sense even if hewere the inmate of a workhouse. He is something of a natural peacock. He is in the line of all those tramps and stage Irishmen who have gonethrough! life with so fine a swagger of words. This only means that inhis life he is an artist. 

He is an artist in his life to an even greater extent than he is amoralist in his art. The mistake his depreciators make, however, is inthinking that his story ends here. The truth about Mr. Shaw is not quiteso simple as that. The truth about Mt. Shaw cannot be told until werealize that he is an artist, not only in the invention of his own life, but in the observation of the lives of other people. His Broadbent is aswonderful a figure as his George Bernard Shaw. Not that his portraitureis always faithful. He sees men and women too frequently in therefracting shallows of theories. He is a doctrinaire, and his charactersare often comic statements of his doctrines rather than the reflectionsof men and women. "When I present true human nature, " he observes in oneof the many passages in which he justifies himself, "the audience thinksit is being made fun of. In reality I am simply a very careful writer ofnatural history. " One is bound to contradict him. Mr. Shaw often thinkshe is presenting true human nature when he is merely presenting hisopinions about human nature--the human nature of soldiers, of artists, of women. Or, rather, when he is presenting a queer fizzing mixture ofhuman nature and his opinions about it. 

This may be sometimes actually a virtue in his comedy. Certainly, fromthe time of Aristophanes onwards, comedy has again and again been avehicle of opinions as well as a branch of natural history. But it isnot always a virtue. Thus in _The Doctors Dilemma_, when Dubedat isdying, his self-defence and his egoism are for the most part admirablytrue both to human nature and to Mr. Shaw's view of the human nature ofartists. But when he goes on with his last breath to utter his artisticcreed: "I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in themight of design, the mystery of colour, the redemption of all things byBeauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these handsblessed. Amen, Amen, " these sentences are no more natural ornaturalistic than the death-bed utterances in one of Mr. G. R. Sims'sballads. Dubedat would not have thought these things, he would not havesaid these things; in saying them he becomes a mere mechanical figure, without any admixture of humanity, repeating Mr. Shaw's opinion of thenature of the creed of artists. There is a similar falsification in thesame play in the characterization of the newspaper man who is present atDubedat's death and immediately afterwards is anxious to interview thewidow. "Do you think, " he asks, "she would give me a few words on 'Howit Feels to be a Widow?' Rather a good title for an article, isn't it?"These sentences are bad because into an atmosphere of more or lessnaturalistic comedy they simply introduce a farcical exaggeration of Mr. Shaw's opinion of the incompetence and impudence of journalists. Mr. Shaw's comedies are repeatedly injured by a hurried alteration ofatmosphere in this manner. Comedy, as well as tragedy, must create somekind of illusion, and the destruction of the illusion, even for the sakeof a joke, may mean the destruction of laughter. But, compared with thedegree of reality in his characterization, the proportion of unrealityis not overwhelming. It has been enormously exaggerated. 

After all, if the character of the newspaper man in _The Doctor'sDilemma_ is machine-made, the much more important character of B. B. , thesoothing and incompetent doctor, is a creation of the true comic genius. 

Nine people out of ten harp on Mr. Shaw's errors. It is much morenecessary that we should recognize that, amid all his falsifications, doctrinal and jocular, he has a genuine comic sense of character. "MostFrench critics, " M. Hamon tells us . .. "declare that Bernard Shaw doesdepict characters. M. Remy de Gourmont writes: 'Molière has never drawna doctor more comically "the doctor" than Paramore, nor morecharacteristic figures of women than those in the same play, _ThePhilanderer. _ The character-drawing is admirable. '" M. Hamon himselfgoes on, however, to suggest an important contrast between thecharacterization in Mr. Shaw and the characterization in Molière:--

 In Shaw's plays the characters are less representative of vices or passions than those of Molière, and more representative of class, profession, or sect. Molière depicts the miser, the jealous man, the misanthrope, the hypocrite; whereas Shaw depicts the bourgeois, the rebel, the capitalist, the workman, the Socialist, the doctor. A few only of these latter types are given us by Molière. 

M. Hamon's comparison, made in the course of a long book, between thegenius of Mr. Shaw and the genius of Molière is extraordinarilydetailed. Perhaps the detail is overdone in such a passage as that whichinforms us regarding the work of both authors that "suicide is never oneof the central features of the comedy; if mentioned, it is only to bemade fun of. " The comparison, however, between the sins that have beenalleged against both Molière and Mr. Shaw--sins of style, of form, ofmorals, of disrespect, of irreligion, of anti-romanticism, of farce, andso forth--is a suggestive contribution to criticism. I am not sure thatthe comparison would not have been more effectively put in a chapterthan a book, but it is only fair to remember that M. Hamon's book isintended as a biography and general criticism of Mr. Shaw as well as acomparison between his work and Molière's. It contains, it must beconfessed, a great deal that is not new to English readers, but then sodo all books about Mr. Shaw. And it has also this fault that, though itis about a master of laughter, it does not contain even the shadow of asmile. Mr. Shaw is made an idol in spite of himself: M. Hamon's volumeis an offering at a shrine. 

The true things it contains, however, make it worth reading. M. Hamonsees, for instance, what many critics have failed to see, that in hisdramatic work Mr. Shaw is less a wit than a humorist:--

 In Shaw's work we find few studied jests, few epigrams even, except those which are the necessary outcome of the characters and the situations. He does not labour to be witty, nor does he play upon words. .. . Shaw's brilliancy does not consist in wit, but in humour. 

Mr. Shaw was at one time commonly regarded as a wit of the school ofOscar Wilde. That view, I imagine, is seldom found nowadays, but evennow many people do not realize that humour, and not wit, is the rulingcharacteristic of Mr. Shaw's plays. He is not content with wittyconversation about life, as Wilde was: he has an actual comic vision ofhuman society. 

His humour, it is true, is not the sympathetic humour of Elia orDickens; but then neither was Molière's. As M. Hamon reminds us, Molièreanticipated Mr. Shaw in outraging the sentiment, for instance, which hasgathered round the family. "Molière and Shaw, " as he puts it with quaintseriousness, "appear to be unaware of what a father is, what a father isworth. "

The defence of Mr. Shaw, however, does not depend on any real orimaginary resemblance of his plays to Molière's. His joy and his miserybefore the ludicrous spectacle of human life are his own, and hisexpression of them is his own. He has studied with his own eyes theswollen-bellied pretences of preachers and poets and rich men and loversand politicians, and he has derided them as they have never been deridedon the English stage before. He has derided them with both an artisticand a moral energy. He has brought them all into a Palace of Truth, where they have revealed themselves with an unaccustomed and startlingfrankness. He has done this sometimes with all the exuberance of mirth, sometimes with all the bitterness of a satirist. Even his bitterness isnever venomous, however. He is genial beyond the majority of inveteratecontroversialists and propagandists. He does not hesitate to wound andhe does not hesitate to misunderstand, but he is free from malice. Thegeniality of his comedy, on the other hand, is often more offensive thanmalice, because it is from an orthodox point of view geniality in thewrong place. It is like a grin in church, a laugh at a marriage service. 

It is this that has caused all the trouble about Mr. Shaw's writings onthe war. He saw, not the war so much as the international diplomacy thatled up to the war, under the anti-romantic and satirical comic vision. Ido not mean that he was not intensely serious in all that he wrote aboutthe war. But his seriousness is essentially the seriousness of (in thehigher sense of the word) the comic artist, of the disillusionist. Hesees current history from the absolutely opposite point of view, say, tothe lyric poet. He was so occupied with his satiric vision of thepretences of the diplomatic world that, though his attitude to the warwas as anti-Prussian as M. Vandervelde's, a great number of peoplethought he must be a pro-German. 

The fact is, in war time more than at any other time, people dread thevision of the satirist and the sceptic. It is a vision of only one-halfof the truth, and of the half that the average man always feels to bemore or less irrelevant. And, even at this, it is not infallible. Thisis not to disparage Mr. Shaw's contributions to the discussion ofpolitics. That contribution has been brilliant, challenging, and humane, and not more wayward than the contribution of the partisan and thesentimentalist. It may be said of Mr. Shaw that in his politics, as inhis plays, he has sought Utopia along the path of disillusion as othermen have sought it along the path of idealism and romance. 

XVII

MR. MASEFIELD'S SECRET

Mr. Masefield, as a poet, has the secret of popularity. Has he also thesecret of poetry? I confess his poems often seem to me to invite theadmirably just verdict which Jeffrey delivered on Wordsworth's_Excursion_: "This will never do. " We miss in his lines the onward marchof poetry. His individual phrases carry no cargoes of wonder. His art isnot of the triumphant order that lifts us off our feet. As we read thefirst half of his narrative sea-poem, _Dauber_, we are again and againmoved to impatience by the sheer literary left-handedness of the author. There are so many unnecessary words, so many unnecessary sentences. Ofthe latter we have an example in the poet's reflection as he describesthe "fiery fishes" that raced Dauber's ship by night in the southernseas:--

 What unknown joy was in those fish unknown!

It is one of those superfluous thoughts which appear to be suggestedless by the thing described than by the need of filling up the last lineof the verse. Similarly, when Dauber, as the ship's lampman and painteris nicknamed, regards the miracle of a ship at sea in moonlight, andexclaims:--

 My Lord, my God, how beautiful it is!

we feel that he is only lengthening into a measured line the "My God, how beautiful it is!" of prose. A line like this, indeed, is merelyprose that has learned the goose-step of poetry. 

Perhaps one would not resent it--and many others like it--so much if itwere not that Mr. Masefield so manifestly aims at realism of effect. Hisnarrative is meant to be as faithful to commonplace facts as apoliceman's evidence in a court of law. We are not spared even the oldfamiliar expletives. When Dauber's paintings, for example--for he is anartist as well as an artisan--have been destroyed by the malice of thecrew, and he questions the Bosun about it, The Bosun turned: "I'll give you a thick ear! Do it? I didn't. Get to hell from here!"

Similarly, when the Mate, taking up the brush, makes a sketch of a shipfor Dauber's better instruction, "God, sir, " the Bosun said, "You do her fine!" "Aye!" said the Mate, "I do so, by the Lord!"

And when the whole crew gathers round to impress upon Dauber the fact ofhis incompetence, "You hear?" the Bosun cried, "You cannot do it!" "A gospel truth, " the Cook said, "true as hell!"

Here, obviously, the very letter of realism is intended. 

Here, too, it may be added, we have as well-meaning an array of oaths aswas ever set out in literature. When Mr. Kipling repeats a soldier'soath, he seems to do so with a chuckle of appreciation. When Mr. Masefield puts down the oaths of sailors, he does so rather as amelancholy duty. He swears, not like a trooper, but like a virtuous man. He does not, as so many realists do, love the innumerable coarsenessesof life which he chronicles; that is what makes his oaths often seem asinnocent as the conversation of elderly sinners echoed on the lips ofchildren. He has a splendid innocence of purpose, indeed. He wishes togive us the prosaic truth of actual things as a kind of correspondenceto the poetic truth of spiritual things of which they are the settingand the frame. Or it may be that he repeats these oaths and all therest of it simply as a part of the technicalities of life at sea. 

He certainly shows a passion for technicalities hardly less than Mr. Kipling's own. He tells us, for instance, how, in the height of the furyof frost and surge and gale round Cape Horn, at last, at last They frapped the cringled crojick's icy pelt; In frozen bulge and bunt they made it fast. 

And, again, when the storm was over and Dauber had won the respect ofhis mates by his manhood, we have an almost unintelligible versedescribing how the Bosun, in a mood of friendship, set out to teach himsome of the cunning of the sea:--

 Then, while the Dauber counted, Bosun took Some marline from his pocket. "Here, " he said, "You want to know square sennit? So fash. Look! Eight foxes take, and stop the ends with thread. I've known an engineer would give his head To know square sennit. " As the Bose began, The Dauber felt promoted to a man. 

Mr. Masefield has generously provided six pages of glossary at the endof his poem, where we are told the meaning of "futtock-shrouds, ""poop-break, " "scuttlebutt, " "mud-hooks, " and other items in the jargonof the sea. 

So much for Mr. Masefield's literary method. Let me be equally frankabout his genius, and confess at once that, in any serious estimate ofthis, all I have said will scarcely be more relevant than the chargeagainst Burke that he had a clumsy delivery. Mr. Masefield has given usin _Dauber_ a poem of genius, one of the great storm-pieces of modernliterature, a poem that for imaginative infectiousness challengescomparison with the prose of Mr. Conrad's _Typhoon_. To criticize itsstyle takes us no nearer its ultimate secret than piling up examples ofbathos takes us to the secret of Wordsworth, or talking about maniacalconstruction and characterization takes us to the secret of Dostoevsky. There is no use pretending that the methods of these writers are goodbecause their achievements are good. On the other hand, compared withthe marvel of achievement, the faultiness of method in each case sinksinto a matter almost of indifference. Mr. Masefield gives us in _Dauber_a book of revelation. If he does this in verse that is often merelyprose crooked into rhyme--if he does it with a hero who is at firstalmost as bowelless a human being and as much an appeal for pity asSmike in _Nicholas Nickleby_--that is his affair. In art, more thananywhere else, the end justifies the means, and the end of _Dauber_ isvision--intense, terrible, pitiful, heroic vision. Here we have inliterature what poor Dauber himself aimed at putting down on hisinexpert canvases:--

 A revealing Of passionate men in battle with the sea, High on an unseen stage, shaking and reeling; And men through him would understand their feeling, Their might, their misery, their tragic power, And all by suffering pain a little hour. 

That verse suggests both the kind and the degree of Mr. Masefield'ssensitiveness as a recorder of the life of the sea. His is the witnessless of a doer than of a sufferer. He is not a reveller in life: he isone, rather, who has found himself tossed about in the foaming tides ofanguish, and who clings with a desperate faith to some last spar ofbeauty or heroism. He is a martyr to the physical as well as to thespiritual pain of the world. He communicates to us, not only the horrorof humiliation, but the horror of a numbed boy, "cut to the ghost" bythe polar gale, as high in the yards Dauber fights against the ship'sdoom, having been

 ordered up when sails and spars Were flying and going mad among the stars, How well, too, he imparts the dread and the danger of the coming storm, as the ship gets nearer the Horn:

 All through the windless night the clipper rolled In a great swell with oily gradual heaves, Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled, Clang, and the weltering water moaned like beeves. 

And the next verse reiterates the prophecies of the moving waters:

 Like the march of doom Came those great powers of marching silences; Then fog came down, dead-cold, and hid the seas. 

The night was spent in dread of fog, in dread of ice, and the shipseemed to respond to the dread of the men as her horn called out intothe impenetrable wilderness of mists and waters:

 She bayed there like a solitary hound Lost in a covert. 

Morning came, bringing no release from fear:

 So the night passed, but then no morning broke-- Only a something showed that night was dead. A sea-bird, cackling like a devil, spoke, And the fog drew away and hung like lead. Like mighty cliffs it shaped, sullen and red; Like glowering gods at watch it did appear, And sometimes drew away, and then drew near. 

Then suddenly swooped down the immense black fiend of the storm, catching, as the Bosun put it, the ship "in her ball-dress. "

 The blackness crunched all memory of the sun. 

Henceforth we have a tale of white fear changing into heroism as Dauberclambers to his giddy place in the rigging, and goes out on the yard tohis task, Sick at the mighty space of air displayed Below his feet, where soaring birds were wheeling. 

It was all a "withering rush of death, " an orgy of snow, ice, andhowling seas. 

 The snow whirled, the ship bowed to it, the gear lashed, The sea-tops were cut off and flung down smashed; Tatters of shouts were flung, the rags of yells-- And clang, clang, clang, below beat the two bells. 

How magnificent a flash of the fury of the storm we get when the Dauberlooks down from his scramblings among rigging and snapped spars, andsees the deck

 Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow. 

In that line we seem to behold the beautiful face of danger--a beautythat is in some way complementary to the beauty of the endurance ofships and the endurance of men. For the ship is saved, and so is theDauber's soul, and the men who had been bullies in hours of peace revealthemselves as heroes in stress and peril. 

_Dauber_, it will be seen, is more than an exciting story of a storm. Itis a spiritual vision of life. It is a soul's confession. It is Mr. Masefield's _De Profundis_. It is a parable of trial--a chant of thesoul that has "emerged out of the iron time. " It is a praise of life, not for its own sake, but for the spiritual mastery which its storms anddangers bring. It is a paean of survival: the ship weathers the storm togo boldly forward again:--

 A great grey sea was running up the sky, Desolate birds flew past; their mewings came As that lone water's spiritual cry, Its forlorn voice, its essence, its soul's name. The ship limped in the water as if lame, Then, in the forenoon watch, to a great shout, More sail was made, the reefs were shaken out. 

Not even the death of the Dauber in a wretched accident defeats oursense of divine and ultimate victory. To some readers this fatality mayseem a mere luxury of pathos. But it is an essential part of the schemeof the poem. The poet must state his acceptance of life, not only in itssplendid and tragic dangers, but in its cruelty and patheticwastefulness. He must know the worst of it in order to put the best ofit to the proof. The worst passes, the best continues--that is thesecret enthusiasm of Mr. Masefield's song. Our final vision is of theship in safety, holding her course to harbour in a fair wind:--

 Shattering the sea-tops into golden rain. The waves bowed down before her like blown grain. 

And as she sits in Valparaiso harbour, a beautiful thing at peace underthe beautiful shadow of "the mountain tower, snow to the peak, " ourimagination is lifted to the hills-to where

 All night long The pointed mountain pointed at the stars, Frozen, alert, austere. 

It is a fine symbol of the aspiration of this book of men's "might, their misery, their tragic power. " There is something essentiallyChristian and simple in Mr. Masefield's presentation of life. Consciousthough he is of the pain of the world--and aloof from the world thoughthis consciousness sometimes makes him appear--he is full of anextraordinary pity and brotherliness for men. He wanders among them, notwith the condescension of so many earnest writers, but with the humilityalmost of one of the early Franciscans. One may amuse oneself byfancying that there is something in the manner of St. Francis even inMr. Masefield's attitude to his little brothers the swear-words. He maynot love them by nature, but he is kind to them by grace. They strikeone as being the most innocent swear-words in literature. 

XVIII

MR. W. B. YEATS

1. HIS OWN ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF

Mr. W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not areporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browningis. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. Heis like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal. Hehas a vision of real things, but in unreal circumstances. His poetryrepels many people at first because it is unlike any other poetry. Theyare suspicious of it as of a new sect in religion. They have beenaccustomed to bow in other temples. They resent the ritual, theincantations, the unearthly light and colour of the temple of thisinnovating high priest. 

They resent, most of all, the self-consciousness of the priest himself. For Mr. Yeats's is not a genius with natural readiness of speech. Hissentences do not pour from him in stormy floods. It is as though he hadto pursue and capture them one by one, like butterflies. Or, perhaps, itis that he has not been content with the simple utterance of his vision. He has reshaped and embroidered it, and has sung of passion in a mask. There are many who see in his poetry only the mask, and who areapparently blind to the passion of sorrowful ecstasy that sets _The WindAmong the Reeds_ apart from every other book that has ever been writtenin English. They imagine that the book amounts to little more than theattitude of a stylist, a trifler with Celtic nomenclature and fairylegend. 

One may agree that some of the less-inspired poems are works ofintellectual craftsmanship rather than of immediate genius, and thathere and there the originality of the poet's vision is clouded byreminiscences of the aesthetic painters. But the greatest poems in thebook are a new thing in literature, a "rapturous music" not heardbefore. One is not surprised to learn from Mr. Yeats's autobiographicalvolume, _Reveries over Childhood and Youth_, that, when he began towrite poetry as a boy, "my lines but seldom scanned, for I could notunderstand the prosody in the books, although there were many linesthat, taken by themselves, had music. " His genius, as a matter of fact, was unconsciously seeking after new forms. Those who have read the firstdraft of _Innisfree_ will remember how it gives one the impression of anew imagination stumbling into utterance. Mr. Yeats has laboured hisverse into perfect music with a deliberateness like that of Flaubert inwriting prose. 

_Reveries_ is the beautiful and fascinating story of his childhood andyouth, and the development of his genius. "I remember, " he tells us, "little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every yearof life, as though gradually conquering something in myself. " But thereis not much of the shadow of pain on these pages. They are full of theportraits of fantastically remembered relations and of stories of homeand school related with fantastic humour. It is difficult to believethat Mr. Yeats as a schoolboy "followed the career of a certainprofessional runner for months, buying papers that would tell me if hehad won or lost, " but here we see him even in the thick of a fight likea boy in a school story. His father, however, seems to have hadinfinitely more influence over him than his school environment. 

It was his father who grew so angry when the infant poet was taught atschool to sing "Little drops of water, " and who indignantly forbade himto write a school essay on the subject of the capacity of men to rise onstepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats'supbringing in the home of an artist anti-Victorian to the finger-tipswas obviously such as would lead a boy to live self-consciously, and Mr. Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel "asproud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise. " Heremembers how one day he looked at his schoolfellows on theplaying-field and said to himself, "If when I grow up I am as cleveramong grown-up men as I am among these boys, I shall be a famous man. "Another sentence about these days suggests what a difficult inarticulategenius was his. "My thoughts, " he says, "were a great excitement, butwhen I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack aballoon into a shed in a high wind. "

Though he was always near the bottom of his class, and was useless atgames--"I cannot, " he writes, "remember that I ever kicked a goal ormade a run"--he showed some promise as a naturalist, and used to lookfor butterflies, moths, and beetles in Richmond Park. Later, when livingon the Dublin coast, he "planned some day to write a book about thechanges through a twelvemonth among the creatures of some hole in therock. "

These passages in his autobiography are specially interesting asevidence to refute the absurd theory that Mr. Yeats is a mere vagueday-dreamer among poets. The truth is, Mr. Yeats's early poems show thathe was a boy of eager curiosity and observation--a boy with a remarkableintellectual machine, as well as a visionary who was one day to build anew altar to beauty. He has never been entirely aloof from the commonworld. Though at times he has conceived it to be the calling of a man ofletters to live apart like a monk, he has mingled with human intereststo a far greater extent than most people realize. He has nearly alwaysbeen a politician and always a fighter. 

At the same time, we need not read far in his autobiography to discoverwhy people who hate self-consciousness in artists are so hostile to him. 

_Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is the autobiography of one who wasalways more self-conscious than his fellows. Mr. Yeats describes himselfas a youth in Dublin:--

 sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet, and stopping at shop windows to look at my tie, gathered into a loose sailor-knot, and to regret that it could not be always blown out by the wind like Byron's tie in the picture. 

Even the fits of abstraction of the young poet must often have beenregarded as self-conscious attitudinizing by his neighbours--especiallyby the "stupid stout woman" who lived in the villa next to his father's, and who, as he amusingly relates, mocked him aloud:--

 I had a study with a window opposite some window of hers, and one night when I was writing, I heard voices full of derision, and saw the stout woman and her family standing at the window. I have a way of acting what I write, and speaking it aloud without knowing what I am doing. Perhaps I was on my hands and knees, or looking down over the back of a chair, talking into what I imagined an abyss. 

It will be seen that Mr. Yeats is as interesting a figure to himself ashe is to Mr. George Moore. If he were not he would not have troubled towrite his autobiography. And that would have been a loss to literature. _Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is a book of extraordinaryfreshness. It does not, like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, set forth the fullaccount of the great influences that shaped a poet's career. But it is adelightful study of early influences, and depicts a dedicated poet inhis boyhood as this has never been done before in English prose. 

Of all the influences that have shaped his career, none was moreimportant than the Irish atmosphere to which he early returned fromLondon. He is distinctively an Irish poet, though we find him in hisyouth writing plays and poems in imitation of Shelley and Spenser. Irish places have done more to influence his imagination even than themasterpieces of English literature. 

It was apparently while he was living in Sligo, not far from the lakes, that he conceived the longing which he afterwards expressed with suchoriginality of charm in _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_:--

 My father had read to me some passage out of _Walden_, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree. .. . 

 I thought that, having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom. 

It is the little world of Sligo, indeed, that provides all the spaciousand twilit landscape in Mr. Yeats's verse. Here were those fishermen andraths and mountains of the Sidhe and desolate lakes which repeatthemselves as images through his work. Here, too, he had relativeseccentric and adventurous to excite his imagination, such as the

 Merchant skipper that leaped overboard After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay. 

Mr. Yeats's relations seem in his autobiography as real as thecharacters in fiction. Each of them is magnificently stamped withromance or comedy--the hypochondriac uncle, for example, who--

 passed from winter to summer through a series of woollens that had always to be weighed; for in April or May, or whatever the date was, he had to be sure that he carried the exact number of ounces he had carried upon that date since boyhood. 

For a time Mr. Yeats thought of following his father's example andbecoming a painter. It was while attending an art school in Dublin thathe first met A. E. He gives us a curious description of A. E. As he wasthen:--

 He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some other image rose always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I remember), and already he spoke to us of his visions. His conversation, so lucid and vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, though now and again some phrase could be understood and repeated. One day he announced that he was leaving the Art Schools because his will was weak, and the arts or any other emotional pursuit would but weaken it further. 

Mr. Yeats's memoirs, however, are not confined to prose. His volume ofverse called _Responsibilities_ is almost equally autobiographical. Muchof it is a record of quarrels with contemporaries--quarrels about Synge, about Hugh Lane and his pictures, about all sorts of things. He aimsbarbed epigrams at his adversaries. Very Yeatsian is an epigram "to apoet, who would have me praise certain bad poets, imitators of his andmine":--

 You say, as I have often given tongue In praise of what another's said or sung, 'Twere politic to do the like by these; But have you known a dog to praise his fleas?

In an earlier version, the last line was still more arrogant:--

 But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

There is a noble arrogance again in the lines called _A Coat_:--

 I made my song a coat, Covered with embroideries, Out of old mythologies, From heel to throat. But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eye, As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked. 

Mr. Yeats still gives some of his songs the old embroidered vesture. Buthis work is now more frankly personal than it used to be--at onceharsher and simpler. One would not give _Responsibilities_ to a readerwho knew nothing of Mr. Yeats's previous work. There is too much ragingat the world in it, too little of the perfected beauty of _The WindAmong the Reeds_. One finds ugly words like "wive" and "thigh"inopportunely used, and the retort to Mr. George Moore's _Hail andFarewell_, though legitimately offensive, is obscure in statement. Still, there is enough beauty in the book to make it precious to thelover of literature. An Elizabethan might have made the music of thefirst verse of _A Woman Homer Sung_. 

And what splendour of praise and censure Mr. Yeats gives us in _TheSecond Troy_:--

 Why should I blame her, that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways. Or hurled the little streets against the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary, and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

It is curious to note in how much of his verse Mr. Yeats repeats hisprotest against the political passion of Ireland which once meant somuch to him. _All Things can Tempt Me_ expresses this artistic mood ofrevolt with its fierce beginning:--

 All things can tempt me from this craft of verse; One time it was a woman's face, or worse, The seeming needs of my fool-driven land. 

Some of the most excellent pages of _Reveries_, however, are those whichrecall certain famous figures in Irish Nationalism like John O'Leary andJ. F. Taylor, the orator whose temper so stood in his way. 

Mr. Yeats recalls a wonderful speech Taylor once made at a meeting inDublin at which a Lord Chancellor had apparently referred in abelittling way to Irish nationality and the Irish language:

 Taylor began hesitating and stopping for words, but after speaking very badly for a little, straightened his figure and spoke as out of a dream: "I am carried to another age, a nobler court, and another Lord Chancellor is speaking. I am at the court of the first Pharaoh. " Thereupon he put into the mouth of that Egyptian all his audience had listened to, but now it was spoken to the children of Israel. "If you have any spirituality as you boast, why not use our great empire to spread it through the world, why still cling to that beggarly nationality of yours? what are its history and its works weighed with those of Egypt?" Then his voice changed and sank: "I see a man at the edge of the crowd; he is standing listening there, but he will not obey"; and then, with his voice rising to a cry, "had he obeyed he would never have come down the mountain carrying in his arms the tables of the Law in the language of the outlaw. "

That Mr. Yeats, in spite of his secession from politics, loves the oldpassionate Ireland, is clear from the poem called _September, 1913_, with its refrain:--

 Romantic Ireland's dead and gone And with O'Leary in the grave. 

And to this Mr. Yeats has since added a significant note:--

 "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone" sounds old-fashioned now. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916. The late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one may say of its wisdom, will long be remembered for its heroism. "They weighed so lightly what they gave, " and gave, too, in some cases without hope of success. 

Mr. Yeats is by nature a poet of the heroic world--a hater of theburgess and of the till. He boasts in _Responsibilities_ of ancestorswho left him

 blood That has not passed through any huckster's loin. 

There may be a good deal of vanity and gesticulation in all this, butit is the vanity and gesticulation of a man of genius. As we cannot havethe genius of Mr. Yeats without the gestures, we may as well take thegestures in good part. 

2. HIS POETRY

It is distinctly surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton andJeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does notask us to apply it at all points. There is a remoteness about Milton'sgenius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reiddiscovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats iscertainly a little remote. He is so remote that some people regard hiswork with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing. The reason maypartly be that Mr. Yeats is not a singer in the ordinary tradition ofpoets. His poems are incantations rather than songs. They seem to callfor an order of priests and priestesses to chant them. There are one ortwo of his early poems, like _Down by the Sally Garden_, that mightconceivably be sung at a fair or even at a ballad-concert. But, as Mr. Yeats has grown older, he has become more and more determinedly themagician in his robes. Even in his prose he does not lay aside hisrobes; it is written in the tones of the sanctuary: it is prose forworshippers. To such an extent is this so that many who do not realizethat Mr. Yeats is a great artist cannot read much of his prose withoutconvincing themselves that he is a great humbug. It is easy tounderstand how readers accustomed to the rationalism of the end of thecentury refused to take seriously a poet who wrote "spooky" explanationsof his poems, such as Mr. Yeats wrote in his notes to _The Wind Amongthe Reeds_, the most entirely good of his books. Consider, for example, the note which he wrote on that charming if somewhat perplexing poem, _The Jester_. "I dreamed, " writes Mr. Yeats:--

 I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I was to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a vision than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me a sense of illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while the second dream was confused and meaningless. The poem has always meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said, "The authors are in eternity"; and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in dreams. 

Why, even those of us who count Mr. Yeats one of the immortals while heis still alive, are inclined to shy at a claim at once so solemn and soirrational as this. It reads almost like a confession of witchcraft. 

Luckily, Mr. Yeats's commerce with dreams and fairies and other spiritshas not all been of this evidential and disputable kind. His confessionsdo not convince us of his magical experiences, but his poems do. Here wehave the true narrative of fairyland, the initiation into other-worldlybeauty. Here we have the magician crying out against

 All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old, and attempting to invoke a new--or an old--and more beautiful world intobeing. 

 The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told, he cries, and over against the unshapely earth he sets up the "happytownland" of which he sings in one of his later and most lovely poems. It would not be easy to write a prose paraphrase of _The HappyTownland_, but who is there who can permanently resist the spell of thispoem, especially of the first verse and its refrain?--

 There's many a strong farmer Whose heart would break in two, If he could see the townland That we are riding to; Boughs have their fruit and blossom At all times of the year; Rivers are running over With red beer and brown beer. An old man plays the bagpipes In a golden and silver wood; Queens, their eyes blue like the ice, Are dancing in a crowd. 

 The little fox he murmured, "O what of the world's bane?" The sun was laughing sweetly, The moon plucked at my rein; But the little red fox murmured, "O, do not pluck at his rein, He is riding to the townland That is the world's bane. "

You may interpret the little red fox and the sun and the moon as youplease, but is it not all as beautiful as the ringing of bells?

But Mr. Yeats, in his desire for this other world of colour and music, is no scorner of the everyday earth. His early poems especially, as Mr. Reid points out, give evidence of a wondering observation of Naturealmost Wordsworthian. In _The Stolen Child_, which tells of a humanchild that is enticed away by the fairies, the magic of the earth thechild is leaving is the means by which Mr. Yeats suggests to us themagic of the world into which it is going, as in the last verse of thepoem:--

 Away with us he's going, The solemn eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside; Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal-chest. _For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, From a world more full of weeping than he can understand. _

There is no painting here, no adjective-work. But no painting oradjectives could better suggest all that the world and the loss of theworld mean to an imaginative child than this brief collection of simplethings. To read _The Stolen Child_ is to realize both that Mr. Yeatsbrought a new and delicate music into literature and that his genius hadits birth in a sense of the beauty of common things. Even when in hisearly poems the adjectives seem to be chosen with the too delicate careof an artist, as when he notes how--

 in autumnal solitudes Arise the leopard-coloured trees, his observation of the world about him is but proved the moreconclusively. The trees in autumn _are_ leopard-coloured, though a poetcannot say so without becoming dangerously ornamental. 

What I have written so far, however, might convey the impression that inMr. Yeats's poetry we have a child's rather than a man's vision at work. One might even gather that he was a passionless singer with his head inthe moon. This is exactly the misunderstanding which has led many peopleto think of him as a minor poet. 

The truth is Mr. Yeats is too original and, as it were, secret a poet tocapture all at once the imagination that has already fixed the outlinesof its kingdom amid the masterpieces of literature. His is a geniusoutside the landmarks. There is no prototype in Shelley or Keats, anymore than there is in Shakespeare, for such a poem as that which was atfirst called _Breasal the Fisherman_, but is now called simply _TheFisherman_:

 Although you hide in the ebb and flow Of the pale tide when the moon has set, The people of coming days will know About the casting out of my net, And how you have leaped times out of mind Over the little silver cords. And think that you were hard and unkind, And blame you with many bitter words. 

There, in music as simple as a fable of Aesop, Mr. Yeats has figured thepride of genius and the passion of defeated love in words that arebeautiful in themselves, but trebly beautiful in their significances. 

Beautifully new, again, is the poem beginning, "I wander by the edge, "which expresses the desolation of love as it is expressed in few modernpoems:

 I wander by the edge Of this desolate lake Where wind cries in the sedge: _Until the axle break That keeps the stars in their round And hands hurl in the deep The banners of East and West And the girdle of light is unbound, Your breast will not lie by the breast Of your beloved in sleep. _

Rhythms like these did not exist in the English language until Mr. Yeatsinvented them, and their very novelty concealed for a time the passionthat is immortal in them. It is by now a threadbare saying of Wordsworththat every great artist has himself to create the taste by which he isenjoyed, but it is worth quoting once more because it is especiallyrelevant to a discussion of the genius of Mr. Yeats. What previousartist, for example, had created the taste which would be prepared torespond imaginatively to such a revelation of a lover's triumph in thenonpareil beauty of his mistress as we have in the poem that ends:--

 I cried in my dream, "_O women bid the young men lay Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair, Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away_, "

One may doubt at times whether Mr. Yeats does not too consciously showhimself an artist of the aesthetic school in some of his epithets, suchas "cloud-pale" and "dream-dimmed. " His too frequent repetition ofsimilar epithets makes woman stand out of his poems at times like adecoration, as in the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, rather thanin the vehement beauty of life. It is as if the passion in his versewere again and again entangled in the devices of art. If we take hislove-poems as a whole, however, the passion in them is at once vehementand beautiful. 

The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the passion thathas given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse. _The Wind Among the Reeds_ is abook of love-poetry quite unlike all other books of love-poetry. Itutters the same moods of triumph in the beloved's beauty, of despair, ofdesire, of boastfulness of the poet's immortality, that we find in thelove-poetry of other ages. But here are new images, almost a newlanguage. Sometimes we have an image which fills the mind like the imagein some little Chinese lyric, as in the poem _He Reproves the Curlew_:--

 O, curlew, cry no more in the air, Or only to the waters of the West; Because your crying brings to my mind Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair That was shaken out over my breast: There is enough evil in the crying of the wind. 

This passion of loss, this sense of the beloved as of something secretand far and scarcely to be attained, like the Holy Grail, is thedominant theme of the poems, even in _The Song of Wandering Aengus_, that poem of almost playful beauty, which tells of the "little silvertrout" that became

 --a glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair, Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air. 

What a sense of long pursuit, of a life's quest, we get in theexquisite last verse--a verse which must be among the best-known of Mr. Yeats's writings after _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_ and _Had I theHeaven's Embroidered Cloths_:--

 Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun. 

This is the magic of fairyland again. It seems a little distant fromhuman passions. It is a wonderful example, however, of Mr. Yeats'sgenius for transforming passion into elfin dreams. The emotion is atonce deeper and nearer human experience in the later poem called _TheFolly of Being Comforted_. I have known readers who professed to findthis poem obscure. To me it seems a miracle of phrasing and portraiture. I know no better example of the nobleness of Mr. Yeats's verse and hisincomparable music. 

XIX

TCHEHOV: THE PERFECT STORY-TELLER

It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expenseof all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us weremonotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see anyrespect paid to the rivals of the god of the moment. And so one yearTolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and, another year, Turgenev. And, nodoubt, the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his hugeeminence. 

Perhaps the luckiest of all the Russian authors in this respect isTchehov. He is so obviously not a god. He does not deliver messages tous from the mountain-top like Tolstoy, or reveal himself beautifully insunset and star like Turgenev, or announce himself now in the hurricaneand now in the thunderstorm like Dostoevsky. He is a man and a medicaldoctor. He pays professional visits. We may define his genius moreexactly by saying that his is a general practice. There has, I think, never been so wonderful an examination of common people in literature asin the short stories of Tchehov. His world is thronged with the averageman and the average woman. Other writers have also put ordinary peopleinto books. They have written plays longer than _Hamlet_, and novelslonger than _Don Quixote_, about ordinary people. They have piled such aheap of details on the ordinary man's back as almost to squash him outof existence. In the result the reader as well as the ordinary man has asense of oppression. He begins to long for the restoration of the bigsubject to literature. 

Henry James complained of the littleness of the subject in _MadameBovary. _ He regarded it as one of the miracles of art that so great abook should have been written about so small a woman. _Tom Jones_, onthe other hand, is a portrait of a common man of the size of which fewpeople complain. But then _Tom Jones_ is a comedy, and we enjoy thecontinual relief of laughter. It is the tragic realists for whom thecommon man is a theme so perilous in its temptations to dullness. At thesame time he is a theme that they were bound to treat. He is himself, indeed, the sole source and subject of tragic realism in literature. Were it not for the oppression of his futile and philoprogenitivepresence, imaginative writers would be poets and romancers. 

The problem of the novelist of contemporary life for whom ordinarypeople are more intensely real than the few magnificent personalities ishow to portray ordinary people in such a way that they will becomebetter company than they are in life. Tchehov, I think, solves theproblem better than any of the other novelists. He sees, for one thing, that no man is uninteresting when he is seen as a person stumblingtowards some goal, just as no man is uninteresting when his hat is blownoff and he has to scuttle after it down the street. There is bound to bea break in the meanest life. 

Tchehov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or acharwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light ofhis sympathy. He does not run sympathy as a "stunt" like so many popularnovelists. He sympathizes merely in the sense that he understands in hisheart as well as in his brain. He has the most unbiassed attitude, Ithink, of any author in the world. Mr. Edward Garnett, in hisintroduction to Mrs. Garnett's translation of Tchehov's tales, speaksadmirably of his "profundity of acceptation. " There is no writer who isless inclined to use italics in his record of human life. Perhaps Mr. Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all hischaracters, watching them quietly and registering their circumstancesand feelings with such finality that to pass judgment on them appearssupererogatory. " Tchehov's judgment is at times clear enough--as clearas if it followed a summing-up from the bench. He portrays hischaracters instead of labelling them; but the portrait itself is thejudgment. His humour makes him tolerant, but, though he describes moraland material ugliness with tolerance, he never leaves us in any doubt asto their being ugly. His attitude to a large part of life might bedescribed as one of good-natured disgust. 

In one of the newly-translated stories, _Ariadne_, he shows us a womanfrom the point of view of a disgusted lover. It is a sensitive man'spicture of a woman who was even more greedy than beautiful. "This thirstfor personal success . .. Makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold--to me, to nature, and to music. " Tchehov extends towards her so little charitythat he makes her run away to Italy with a bourgeois who had "a necklike goose-skin and a big Adam's apple, " and who, as he talked, "breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and smelling of boiledbeef. " As the more sensitive lover who supplanted the bourgeois looksback, her incessant gluttony is more vivid in his thoughts than hercharm:

 She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up something, for instance, roast beef, and she would eat it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the night she would eat apples or oranges. 

The story, it is only fair to say, is given in the words of a loverdissatisfied with lust, and the judgment may therefore be regarded asthe lover's rather than as Tchehov's. Tchehov sets down the judgment, however, in a mood of acute perceptiveness of everything that is jarringand vulgar in sexual vanity. Ariadne's desire to please is neverpermitted to please us as, say, Beatrix Esmond's is. Her will tofascinate does not fascinate when it is refracted in Tchehov's criticalmind:

 She waked up every morning with the one thought of "pleasing. " It was the aim and object of her life. If I told her that in such a house, in such a street, there lived a man who was not attracted by her, it would have caused her real suffering. She wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I was in her power and reduced to a complete nonentity before her charms gave her the same sort of satisfaction that victors used to get in tournaments. .. . She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she imagined that if somewhere, in some great assembly, men could have seen how beautifully she was made and the colour of her skin, she would have vanquished all Italy, the whole world. Her talk of her figure, of her skin, offended me, and observing this, she would, when she was angry, say all sorts of vulgar things taunting me. 

A few strokes of cruelty are added to the portrait:

 Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant or kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted. 

As one reads _Ariadne_, one feels that those who say the artist is not ajudge are in error. What he must avoid becoming is aprosecuting--perhaps even a defending--counsel. 

Egoism seems to be the quality which offends Tchehov most. He is no morein love with it when it masquerades as virtue than when it parades asvice. _An Artist's Story_--a beautiful sad story, which might almosthave been written by Turgenev--contains a fine critical portrait of awoman absorbed in the egoism of good works. She is always looking afterthe poor, serving on committees, full of enthusiasm for nursing andeducation. She lacks only that charity of the heart which loves humanbeings, not because they are poor, but because they are human beings. She is by nature a "boss. " She "bosses" her mother and her youngersister, and when the artist falls in love with the latter, the strongerwill of the woman of high principles immediately separates lovers sofrivolous that they had never sat on a committee in their lives. When, the evening after the artist confesses his love, he waits for the girlto come to him in the garden of her house, he waits in vain. He goesinto the house to look for her, but does not find her. Then through oneof the doors he overhears the voice of the lady of the good works:

 "'God . .. Sent . .. A crow, '" she said in a loud, emphatic voice, probably dictating--"'God sent a crow a piece of cheese. .. . A crow . .. A piece of cheese . .. Who's there?" she called suddenly, hearing my steps. 

 "It's I. "

 "Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to open this minute; I'm giving Dasha her lesson. "

 "Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"

 "No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad, " she added after a pause. "'God sent . .. The crow . .. A piece . .. Of cheese. .. . ' Have you written it?"

 I went into the hall and stared vacantly at the pond and the village, and the sound reached me of "A piece of cheese . .. God sent the crow a piece of cheese. "

 And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time--first from the yard into the garden past the house, then into the avenue of lime-trees. .. . At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a note. 

 "I told my sister everything and she insisted on my parting from you, " I read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. God will give you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are crying!"

The people who cannot wound others--those are the people whose sharppangs we feel in our breasts as we read the stories of Tchehov. Thepeople who wound--it is they whom he paints (or, rather, as Mr. Garnettsuggests, etches) with such felicitous and untiring irony. But, thoughhe often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often thannot sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background. In_Anyuta_, the medical student and his mistress live in a roomdisgusting in its squalor:

 Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, boots, clothes, a big filthy slop--pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette-ends were swimming, and the litter on the floor--all seemed as though purposely jumbled together in one confusion. .. . 

And, if the surroundings are no more beautiful than those in which agreat part of the human race lives, neither are the people morebeautiful than ordinary people. In _The Trousseau_, the poor thin girlwho spends her life making a trousseau for a marriage that will nevertake place becomes ridiculous as she flushes at the entrance of astranger into her mother's house:

 Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with small-pox, turned red first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead. 

I do not know if a blush of this sort is possible, but the thought of itis distressing. 

The woman in _The Darling_, who marries more than once and simply cannotlive without some one to love and to be an echo to, is "not half bad" tolook at. But she is ludicrous even when most unselfish andadoring--especially when she rubs with eau-de-Cologne her little, thin, yellow-faced, coughing husband with "the curls combed forward on hisforehead, " and wraps him in her warm shawls to an accompaniment ofendearments. "'You're such a sweet pet!' she used to say with perfectsincerity, stroking his hair. 'You're such a pretty dear!'"

Thus sympathy and disgust live in a curious harmony in Tchehov'sstories. And, as he seldom allows disgust entirely to drive out sympathyin himself, he seldom allows it to do so in his readers either. Hisworld may be full of unswept rooms and unwashed men and women, but thepresiding genius in it is the genius of gentleness and love andlaughter. It is a dark world, but Tchehov brings light into it. There isno other author who gives so little offence as he shows us offensivethings and people. He is a writer who desires above all things to seewhat men and women are really like--to extenuate nothing and to set downnaught in malice. As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who isblack without being bitter. I know no writer who leaves one with thesame vision of men and women as lost sheep. 

We are now apparently to have a complete edition of the tales of Tchehovin English from Mrs. Garnett. It will deserve a place, both for theauthor's and the translator's sake, beside her Turgenev and Dostoevsky. In lifelikeness and graciousness her work as a translator always reachesa high level. Her latest volumes confirm one in the opinion that Tchehovis, for his variety, abundance, tenderness and knowledge of the heart ofthe "rapacious and unclean animal" called man, the greatest short-storywriter who has yet appeared on the planet. 

XX

LADY GREGORY

It was Mr. Bernard Shaw who, in commenting on the rowdy reception of theIrish players in some American theatres, spoke of Lady Gregory as "thegreatest living Irishwoman. " She is certainly a remarkable enough writerto put a generous critic a little off his balance. Equal mistress incomedy and tragedy, essayist, gatherer of the humours of folk-lore, imaginative translator of heroic literature, venturesome translator ofMolière, she has contributed a greater variety of grotesque andbeautiful things to Anglo-Irish literature than any of hercontemporaries. 

She owes her chief fame, perhaps, to the way in which, along with Mr. G. A. Birmingham and the authors of _Some Experiences of an Irish R. M. _, she has kept alive the tradition of Ireland as a country in whichLaughter has frequent occasion to hold both his sides. She surpasses theothers in the quality of her comedy, however. Not that she is morecomic, but that she is more comprehensively true to life. Mr. Birminghamhas given us farce with a salt of reality; Miss Somerville and MissRoss, practical jokers of literature, turned to reality as upper-classpatrons of the comic; but Lady Gregory has gone to reality as to a caveof treasure. She is one of the discoverers of Ireland. Her genius, likeSynge's, opened its eyes one day and saw spread below it the immense seaof Irish common speech, with its colour, its laughter, and its music. Itis a sort of second birth which many Irish men and women of the lastgeneration or so have experienced. The beggar on the road, the piper atthe door, the old people in the workhouse, are henceforth accepted as asort of aristocracy in exile. 

Lady Gregory obviously sought out their company as the heirs to a greatinheritance--an inheritance of imaginative and humorous speech. Not thatshe plundered them of their fantastic tropes so greedily as Synge did. She studied rather their common turn of phrase, its heights and itshollows, its exquisite illogic, its passionate underflow of poetry. Hasshe not herself told us how she could not get on with the character ofBartley Fallon in _Spreading the News_, till one day she met amelancholy man by the sea at Duras, who, after describing the crosses heendured at home, said: "But I'm thinking if I went to America, it's longago I'd be dead. And it's a great expense for a poor man to be buried inAmerica. " Out of sentences like these--sentences seized upon with thegenius of the note-book--she has made much of what is most delightful inher plays. Her sentences are steeped and dyed in life, even when hersituations are as mad as hatters. 

Some one has said that every great writer invents a new language. LadyGregory, whom it would be unfair to praise as a great writer, has atleast qualified as one by inventing a new language out of her knowledgeof Irish peasant speech. This, perhaps, is her chief literary peril. Having discovered the beautiful dialect of the Kiltartan peasantry, shewas not content to leave it a peasant dialect--as we find it in her bestdramatic work, _Seven Short Plays_; but she set about transforming itinto a tongue into which all literature and emotion might apparently betranslated. Thus, she gave us Molière in Kiltartan--a ridiculouslysuccessful piece of work--and she gave us Finn and Cuchullain inmodified Kiltartan, and this, too, was successful, sometimes verybeautifully so. Here, however, she had masterpieces to begin with. In_Irish Folk-History Plays_, on the other hand, we find her embarking, not upon translation, but upon original heroic drama, in the Kiltartanlanguage. The result is unreality as unreal as if Meredith had made afarm-labourer talk like Diana of the Crossways. Take, for instance, thefirst of the plays, _Grania_, which is founded on the story of thepursuit of Diarmuid and Grania by Finn MacCool, to whom Grania had beenbetrothed. When Finn, disguised as a blind beggar, visits the lovers intheir tent, Grania, who does not recognize him, bids him give Finn thismessage from her:--

 Give heed to what I say now. If you have one eye is blind, let it be turned to the place where we are, and that he might ask news of. And if you have one seeing eye, cast it upon me, and tell Finn you saw a woman no way sad or afraid, but as airy and high-minded as a mountain-filly would be challenging the winds of March!

I flatly refuse to take the high-minded mountain filly seriously as atragic heroine, and I confess I hold Finn equally suspect, disguised asa beggar though he is, when he speaks of himself to Grania as a hardman--"as hard as a barren step-mother's slap, or a highway gander'sgob. " After all, in heroic literature, we must have the illusion of theheroic. If we can get the peasant statement of the heroic, that isexcellent; its sincerity brings its illusion. But a mere imitation ofthe peasant statement of the heroic, such as Lady Gregory seems to aimat giving us in these sentences, is as pinchbeck and unreal asMacpherson's _Ossian_. It reaches a grotesque absurdity when at theclose of Act II Finn comes back to the door of the tent and, in order tostir up Diarmuid's jealousy, says:--

 It is what they were saying a while ago, the King of Foreign is grunting and sighing, grunting and sighing, around and about the big red sally tree beside the stream!

To write like that is to use not a style but a jargon. 

If you want a standard of reality with which to compare these passagesof Abbey-Theatre rhetoric, you have only to turn to Lady Gregory's ownnotes at the end of _Irish Folk-History Plays_, where she records anumber of peasant utterances on Irish history. Here, and not in theplays--in the tragic plays, at any rate--is the real "folk-history" ofher book to be found. One may take, as an example, the note on_Kincora_, where some one tells of the Battle of Clontarf, in whichBrian Boru defeated the Danes:--

 Clontarf was on the head of a game of chess. The generals of the Danes were beaten at it, and they were vexed. It was Broder, that the Brodericks are descended from, that put a dagger through Brian's heart, and he attending to his prayers. What the Danes left in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the morning the country people will always say: "It is for Denmark they are crowing; crowing they are to be back in Denmark. "

Lady Gregory reveals more of life--leaping, imaginative life--in thatlittle note than in all the three acts about Grania and the three aboutBrian. It is because the characters in the comic plays in the book arenearer the peasantry in stature and in outlook that she is so much moresuccessful with them than with the heroes and heroines of the tragedies. She describes the former plays as "tragic comedies"; but in the firstand best of them, _The Canavans_, it is difficult to see where thetragedy comes in. _The Canavans_ is really a farce of the days ofElizabeth. The principal character is a cowardly miller, who ensuesnothing but his own safety in the war of loyalties and disloyaltieswhich is destroying Ireland. He is equally afraid of the wrath of theneighbours on the one hand, and the wrath of the Government on theother. Consequently, he is at his wits' end when his brother Antonycomes seeking shelter in his house, after deserting from the EnglishArmy. When the soldiers come looking for Antony, so helpless with terroris the miller, that he flies into hiding among his sacks, and hisbrother has to impersonate him in the interview with the officer whocarries out the search. The situation obviously lends itself to comicelaborations, and Lady Gregory misses none of her opportunities. Sheflies off from every semblance of reality at a tangent, however, in alater scene, where Antony disguises himself as Queen Elizabeth, supposedto have come on a secret visit of inspection to Ireland, and takes inboth his brother and the officer (who is himself a Canavan, anglicizedunder the name of Headley). This is a sheer invention of the theatre; itturns the play from living speech into machinery. _The Canavans_, however, has enough of present-day reality to make us forgive itsoccasional stage-Elizabethanism. On the whole, its humours gain nothingfrom their historical setting. 

_The White Cockade_, the second of the tragic comedies, is a play aboutthe flight of King James II after the Battle of the Boyne, and it, too, is lifeless and mechanical in so far as it is historical. King Jameshimself is a good comic figure of a conventional sort, as he isdiscovered hiding in the barrel; but Sarsfield, who is meant to beheroic, is all joints and sawdust; and the mad Jacobite lady is a puppetwho might have been invented by any writer of plays. "When my _WhiteCockade_ was produced, " Lady Gregory tells us, "I was pleased to hearthat Mr. Synge had said my method had made the writing of historicaldrama again possible. " But surely, granted the possession of thedramatic gift, the historical imagination is the only thing that makesthe writing of historical drama possible. Lady Gregory does not seem tome to possess the historical imagination. Not that I believe inarchaeology in the theatre; but, apart from her peasant characters, shecannot give us the illusion of reality about the figures in thesehistorical plays. If we want the illusion of reality, we shall have toturn from _The White Cockade_ to the impossible scene outside thepost-office and the butcher's shop in _Hyacinth Halvey_. As for thethird of the tragic comedies, _The Deliverer_, it is a most interestingcuriosity. In it we have an allegory of the fate of Parnell in a settingof the Egypt of the time of Moses. Moses himself--or the King'snursling, as he is called--is Parnell; and he and the other characterstalk Kiltartan as to the manner born. _The Deliverer_ is grotesque and, in its way, impressive, though the conclusion, in which the King'snursling is thrown to the King's cats by his rebellious followers, invites parody. The second volume of the _Irish Folk-History Plays_, even if it reveals only Lady Gregory's talent rather than her genius, isfull of odd and entertaining things, and the notes at the end of bothof these volumes, short though they are, do give us the franchise of awonderful world of folk-history. 

XXI

MR. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

Mr. Cunninghame Graham is a grandee of contemporary literature. He isalso a grandee of revolutionary politics. Both in literature and inpolitics he is a figure of challenge for the love of challenge more thanany other man now writing. Other men challenge us with Utopias, withmoral laws and so forth. But Mr. Graham has little of the prophet or themoralist about him. He expresses himself better in terms of hishostilities than in terms of visionary cities and moralities such asPlato and Shelley and Mazzini have built for us out of light and fire. It is a temperament, indeed, not a vision or a logic, that Mr. Grahamhas brought to literature. He blows his fantastic trumpet outside thewalls of a score of Jerichos:--Jerichos of empire, of cruelty, ofself-righteousness, of standardized civilization--and he seems to do sofor the sheer soldierly joy of the thing. One feels that if all thewalls of all the Jerichos were suddenly to collapse before histrumpet-call he would be the loneliest man alive. For he is one of thosefor whom, above all, "the fight's the thing. "

It would be difficult to find any single purpose running through thesketches which fill most of his books. His characteristic book is amedley of cosmopolitan "things seen" and comments grouped together undera title in which irony lurks. Take the volume called _Charity_, forexample. Both the title of the book and the subject-matter of severalof the sketches may be regarded as a challenge to the unco' guid (ifthere are any left) and to respectability (from which even the humblestare no longer safe). On the other hand, his title may be the merestlucky-bag accident. It seems likely enough, however, that in choosing itthe author had in mind the fact that the supreme word of charitablenessin the history of man was spoken concerning a woman who was taken inadultery. It is scarcely an accident that in _Charity_ a number of thechapters relate to women who make a profession of sin. 

Mr. Graham is unique in his treatment of these members of the humanfamily. If he does not throw stones at them, as the Pharisees of virtuedid, neither does he glorify them as the Pharisees of vice have done ina later generation. He simply accepts them as he would accept abroken-down nation or a wounded animal, and presents them as charactersin the human drama. It would be more accurate to say "as figures in thehuman picture, " for he is far more of a painter than a dramatist. Butthe point to be emphasized is that these stories are records, tragic, grim or humorous, as the portraits in Chaucer are--acceptances of lifeas it is--at least, of life as it is outside the vision of policemen andother pillars of established interests. For Mr. Graham can forgave youfor anything but two things--being successful (in the vulgar sense ofthe term) or being a policeman. 

It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Mr. Graham achieves the veryfinest things in charity. It is the charity of tolerance, or the minorcharity, that is most frequent in his pages. The larger charity which wefind in Tolstoi and the great teachers is not here. We could not imagineMr. Graham forgetting himself so far in his human sympathies as Ruskindid when he stooped and kissed the filthy beggar outside the church doorin Rome. Nor do we find in any of these sketches of outcasts that senseof humanity bruised and exiled that we get in such a story asMaupassant's _Boule de Suif_. Mr. Graham gloriously insists upon ourrecognizing our human relations, but many of them he introduces to us asfirst cousins once removed rather than as brothers and sisters by thegrace of God. 

He does more than this in his preface, indeed, a marvellous piece ofreality and irony which tells how a courtesan in Gibraltar fell madly inlove with a gentleman-sponger who lived on her money while he could, andthen took the first boat home with discreet heartlessness on coming intoa bequest from a far-off cousin. "Good God, a pretty sight I should havelooked. .. . " he explained to a kindred spirit as they paced the deck ofthe boat to get an appetite. "I like her well enough, but what I say is, Charity begins at home, my boy. Ah, there's the dinner bell!" Mr. Grahamhas a noble courtesy, an unerring chivalry that makes him range himselfon the side of the bottom dog, a detestation of anything likebullying--every gift of charity, indeed, except the shy genius of pity. For lack of this last, some of his sketches, such as _Un AutreMonsieur_, are mere anecdotes and decorations. 

Possibly, it is as a romantic decorator that Mr. Graham, in his art asopposed to his politics, would prefer to be judged. He has dredged halfthe world for his themes and colours, and Spain and Paraguay and Moroccoand Scotland and London's tangled streets all provide settings for hisromantic rearrangements of life in this book. He has a taste for uncivilscenes, as Henley had a taste for uncivil words. Even a London streetbecomes a scene of this kind as he pictures it in his imagination withhuge motorbuses, like demons of violence, smashing their way through thetraffic. Or he takes us to some South American forest, where the vampirebats suck the blood of horses during the night. Or he introduces us to aSpanish hidalgo, "tall, wry-necked, and awkwardly built, with a noselike a lamprey and feet like coracles. " (For there is the same note ofviolence, of exaggeration, in his treatment of persons as of places. )Even in Scotland, he takes us by preference to some lost mansionstanding in grotesque contrast to the "great drabness of prosperitywhich overspreads the world. " He is a great scene-painter ofwildernesses and lawless places, indeed. He is a Bohemian, a lover ofadventures in wild and sunny lands, and even the men and women are aptto become features in the strange scenery of his pilgrimages rather thandominating portraits. In his descriptions he uses a splendid rhetoricsuch as no other living writer of English commands. He has revivedrhetoric as a literary instrument. Aubrey Beardsley called Turner arhetorician in paint. If we were to speak of Mr. Graham as a painter inrhetoric, we should be doing more than making a phrase. 

But Mr. Graham cannot be summed up in a phrase. To meet him in his booksis one of the desirable experiences of contemporary literature, as tohear him speak is one of the desirable experiences of modern politics. Protest, daring, chivalry, the passion for the colour of life and thecolour of words--he is the impersonation of these things in a worldthat is muddling its way half-heartedly towards the Promised Land. 

XXII

SWINBURNE

1. THE EXOTIC BIRD

Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut andplumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon ashe began to moult--and he had already moulted excessively by the timeWatts-Dunton took him under his roof--one saw how very little bodythere was underneath. Mr. Gosse in his biography compared Swinburne to acoloured and exotic bird--a "scarlet and azure macaw, " to, beprecise--and the comparison remains in one's imagination. Watts-Dunton, finding the poor creature moulted and "off its feed, " carried it down toPutney, resolved to domesticate it. He watched over it as a farmer'swife watches over a sick hen. He taught it to eat out of his hand. Hetaught it to speak--to repeat things after him, even "God Save theQueen. " Some people say that he ruined the bird by these methods. Othersmaintain that, on the contrary, but for him the bird would have died ofa disease akin to the staggers. They say, moreover, that the tamenessand docility of the bird, while he was looking after it, have beengreatly exaggerated, and they deny that it was entirely bald of its oldgay feathers. 

There you have a brief statement of the great Swinburne question, which, it seems likely, will last as long as the name of Swinburne isremembered. It is not a question of any importance; but that will notprevent us from arguing it hotly. The world takes a malicious joy injibing at men of genius and their associates, and a generous joy indefending them from jibes. Further, the discussion that interests thegreatest number of people is discussion that has come down to apersonal level. Ten people will be bored by an argument as to the natureof Swinburne's genius for one who will be bored by an argument as to thenature of Swinburne's submissiveness to Watts-Dunton. Was Watts-Dunton, in a phrase deprecated by the editors of a recent book of letters, a"kind of amiable Svengali"? Did he allow Swinburne to have a will of hisown? Did Swinburne, in going to Putney, go to the Devil? Or did notWatts-Dunton rather play the part of the good Samaritan? Unfortunately, all those who have hitherto attempted to describe the relations of thetwo men have succeeded only in making them both appear ridiculous. Mr. Gosse, a man of letters with a sting, has done it cleverly. The others, like the editors to whom I have referred, have done it inadvertently. They write too solemnly. If Swinburne had lost a trouser-button, theywould not have felt it inappropriate, one feels, for the Archbishop ofCanterbury to hurry to the scene and go down on his knees on the floorto look for it. .. . Well, no doubt, Swinburne was an absurd character. And so was Watts-Dunton. And so, perhaps, is the Archbishop ofCanterbury. 

Most of us have, at one time or another, fallen under the spell ofSwinburne owing to the genius with which he turned into music theenthusiasm of the heretic. He fluttered through the sooty and Sabbaticair of the Victorian era, uttering melodious cries of protest againsteverything in morals, politics, and religion for which Queen Victoriaseemed to stand. He was like a rebellious boy who takes more pleasure inbreaking the Sabbath than in the voice of nightingales. He was one ofthe few Englishmen of genius who have understood the French zest forshocking the bourgeois. He had little of his own to express, but hediscovered the heretic's gospel in Gautier, and Baudelaire and set itforth in English in music that he might have learned from the Sirenswho sang to Ulysses. He revelled in blasphemous and licentious fanciesthat would have made Byron's hair stand on end. Nowadays, much of theblasphemy and licentiousness seems flat and unprofitable as Governmentbeer. But in those days it seemed heady as wine and beautiful as amediaeval tale. There was always in Swinburne more of pose than ofpassion. That is why we have to some extent grown tired of him. But inthe atmosphere of Victorianism his pose was original and astonishing. Hewas anti-Christ in a world that had annexed Christ rather than servedhim. Nowadays, there is such an abundance of anti-Christs that the partseems hardly worth playing by a man of first-rate ability. Consequently, we have to remember the circumstances in which they were written inorder to appreciate to the full many of Swinburne's poems and even someof the amusing outbursts of heresy in his letters. Still, even to-day, one cannot but enjoy the gusto with which he praisedTrelawney--Shelley's and Byron's Trelawney--"the most splendid old man Ihave seen since Landor and my own grandfather":--

 Of the excellence of his principles I will say but this: that I did think, by the grace of Saban (unto whom, and not unto me, be the glory and thanksgiving. Amen: Selah), I was a good atheist and a good republican; but in the company of this magnificent old rebel, a lifelong incarnation of the divine right of insurrection, I felt myself, by comparison, a Theist and a Royalist. 

In another letter he writes in the same gay, under-graduatish strain ofmarriage:--

 When I hear that a personal friend has fallen into matrimonial courses, I feel the same sorrow as if I had heard of his lapsing into theism--a holy sorrow, unmixed with anger; for who am I to judge him? I think at such a sight, as the preacher--was it not Baxter?--at the sight of a thief or murderer led to the gallows: "There, but for the grace of----, goes A. C. S. , " and drop a tear over fallen man. 

There was, it is only fair to say, a great deal in Swinburne'sinsurrectionism that was noble, or, at least, in tune with nobleness. But it is impossible to persuade oneself that he was ever among thegenuine poets of liberty. He loved insurrectionism for its own sake. Herevelled in it in the spirit of a rhetorician rather than of a martyr. He was a glorious humbug, a sort of inverted Pecksniff. Even hisrepublicanism cannot have gone very deep if it is true, as certain ofhis editors declare, that having been born within the precincts ofBelgravia "was an event not entirely displeasing to a man of hisaristocratic leanings. " Swinburne, it seems, was easily pleased. One ofhis proudest boasts was that he and Victor Hugo bore a close resemblanceto each other in one respect: both of them were almost dead when theywere born, "certainly not expected to live an hour. " There was also onegreat difference between them. Swinburne never grew up. 

His letters, some of which Messrs. Hake and Compton Rickett have givenus, are interesting and amusing, but they do not increase one's opinionof Swinburne's mind. He reveals himself as a sensitive critic in hisremarks on the proofs of Rossetti's poems, in his comments on Morris, and in his references to Tennyson's dramas. But, as a rule, hisintemperance of praise and blame makes his judgments appear mereeccentricities of the blood. He could not praise Falstaff, for instance, without speaking of "the ever dear and honoured presence of Falstaff, "and applauding the "sweet, sound, ripe toothsome, wholesome kernel" ofFalstaff's character as well as humour. He even defied the opinion ofhis idol, Victor Hugo, and contended that Falstaff was not really acoward. All the world will agree that Swinburne was right in glorifyingFalstaff. He glorified him, however, on the wrong plane. He mixed hisplanes in the same way in his paean over Captain Webb's feat in swimmingthe English Channel. "I consider it, " he said, "as the greatest glorythat has befallen England since the publication of Shelley's greatestpoem, whatever that may have been. " This is shouting, not speech. Butthen, as I have said, Swinburne never grew up. He never learned tospeak. He was ever a shouter. The question that has so far not beensettled is: Did Watts-Dunton put his hand over Swinburne's mouth andforcibly stop him from shouting? As we know, he certainly stopped himfrom swearing before ladies, except in French. But, as for shouting, Swinburne had already exhausted himself when he went to the Pines. Meanwhile, questions of this sort have begun to absorb us to such adegree that we are apt to forget that Swinburne after all _was_ a man ofgenius--a man with an entrancing gift of melody--spiritually an echo, perhaps, but aesthetically a discoverer, a new creature, the mostamazing ecstatician of our time. 

2. GENIUS WITHOUT EYES

Swinburne, says Mr. Gosse, "was not quite like a human being. " That ischiefly what is the matter with his poetry. He did not write quite likea human being. He wrote like a musical instrument. There are few poetswhose work is less expressive of personal passions. He was much given toecstasies, but it is remarkable that most of these were echoes of otherpeople's ecstasies. He sought after rapture both in politics and poetry, and he took as his masters Mazzini in the one and Victor Hugo in theother. He has been described as one who, while conversing, even in hislater years, kept "bobbing all the while like a cork on the sea of hisenthusiasms. " And, in a great deal of his rapture, there is much of thelevity as well as the "bobbing" quality of the cork. He who sang thehymns of the Republic in his youth, ended his life asrhetorician-in-chief of the Jingoes against the Irish and the Boers. Nordoes one feel that there was any philosophic basis for the change in hisattitude as there was for a similar change in the attitude of Burke andWordsworth in their later years. He was influenced more by persons thanby principles. One does not find any real vision of a Republic in hiswork as one finds it in the work of Shelley. He had little of thesaintliness of spirit which marks the true Republican and which turnspolitics into music in _The Masque of Anarchy_. His was not one of thosetortured souls, like Francis Adams's, which desire the pulling-down ofthe pillars of the old, bad world more than love or fame. There is noutterance of the spirit in such lines as:--

 Let our flag run out straight in the wind! The old red shall be floated again When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned, When the names that are twenty are ten;

 When the devil's riddle is mastered And the galley-bench creaks with a Pope, We shall see Buonaparte the bastard Kick heels with his throat in a rope. 

It is possible for those who agree with the sentiments to derive acertain satisfaction from verse of this sort as from a vehement leadingarticle. But there is nothing here beyond the rhetoric of the hot fit. There is nothing to call back the hot fit in anybody older than a boy. 

Even when Swinburne was writing out of his personal experience, hecontrived somehow to empty his verse of personality and to putsentimentalism and rhetoric in its place. We have an instance of this inthe story of the love-affair recorded by Mr. Gosse. Swinburne, at theage of twenty-five, fell in love with a kinswoman of Sir John Simon, thepathologist. "She gave him roses, she played and sang to him, and heconceived from her gracious ways an encouragement which she was far fromseriously intending. " Swinburne proposed to her, and, possibly fromnervousness, she burst out laughing. He was only human in feelingbitterly offended, and "they parted on the worst of terms. " He went offto Northumberland to escape from his wretchedness, and there he wrote_The Triumph of Time_, which Mr. Gosse maintains is "the most profoundand the most touching of all his personal poems. " He assured Mr. Gosse, fourteen years afterwards, that "the stanzas of this wonderful lyricrepresented with the exactest fidelity the emotions which passed throughhis mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but theinfinite pity and the pain. " Beautiful though the poem intermittentlyis, however, it seems to me to lack that radiance of personal emotionwhich we find in the great love poems. There is much decoration of musicof a kind of which Swinburne and Poe alone possessed the secret, as inthe verse beginning:--

 There lived in France a singer of old By the tideless, dolorous, midland sea. In a land of sand and ruin and gold There shone one woman and none but she. 

But is there more than the decoration of music in the verses whichexpress the poet's last farewell to his passion?

 I shall go my ways, tread out my measure, Fill the days of my daily breath With fugitive things not good to treasure, Do as the world doth, say as it saith; But if we had loved each other--O sweet, Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet, The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure, To feel you tread it to dust and death--

 Ah, had I not taken my life up and given All that life gives and the years let go, The wine and honey, the balm and leaven, The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low? Come life, come death, not a word be said; Should I lose you living, and vex you dead? I shall never tell you on earth, and in heaven, If I cry to you then, will you care to know?

Browning, unquestionably, could have expressed Swinburne's passionbetter than Swinburne did it himself. He would not have been contentwith a sequence of vague phrases that made music. With him each phrasewould have been dramatic and charged with a personal image or a personalmemory. 

Swinburne, however, was a great musician in verse and beyondbelittlement in this regard. It would be incongruous to attempt a closecomparison between him and Longfellow, but he was like Longfellow inhaving a sense of music out of all proportion to the imaginative contentof his verse. There was never a distinguished poet whose work endureslogical analysis so badly. Mr. Arthur Symons, in a recent essay, refersscornfully to those who say that "the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne'sform is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. " Buthe produces no evidence on the other side. He merely calls on us toobserve the way in which Swinburne scatters phrases and epithets of"imaginative subtlety" by the way, while most poets "present us withtheir best effects deliberately. " It seems to me, on the contrary, thatSwinburne's phrasing is far from subtle. He induces moods of excitementand sadness by his musical scheme rather than by individual phrases. Whocan resist, for example, the spell of the opening verses of _Before theMirror_, the poem of enchantment addressed to Whistler's _Little WhiteGirl?_ One hesitates to quote again lines so well known. But it is asgood an example as one can find of the pleasure-giving qualities ofSwinburne's music, apart from his phrases and images:--

 White rose in red rose-garden Is not so white; Snowdrops that plead for pardon And pine from fright, Because the hard East blows Over their maiden rows, Grow not as thy face grows from pale to bright. Behind the veil, forbidden, Shut up from sight, Love, is there sorrow hidden, Is there delight? Is joy thy dower or grief, White rose of weary leaf, Late rose whose life is brief, whose loves are light?

The snowdrop image in the first verse is, charming as is the sound ofthe lines, nonsense. The picture of the snowdrops pleading for pardonand pining from fright would have been impossible to a poet with therealizing genius of the great writers. Swinburne's sense of rhythm, however, was divorced in large measure from his sense of reality. He wasa poet without the poet's gift of sight. William Morris complained thatSwinburne's poems did not make pictures. Swinburne had not the necessarysense of the lovely form of the things around him. His attitude toNature was lacking, as Mr. Gosse suggests, in that realism which givescoherence to poetry. To quote Mr. Gosse's own words:--

 Swinburne did not live, like Wordsworth, in a perpetual communion with Nature, but exceptional, and even rare, moments of concentrated observation wakened in him an ecstasy which he was careful to brood upon, to revive, and perhaps, at last, to exaggerate. As a rule, he saw little of the world around him, but what he did see was presented to him in a blaze of limelight. 

Nearly all his poems are a little too long, a little tedious, for thesimple reason that the muzziness of vision in them, limelight and all, is bewildering to the intelligence. There are few of his poems whichclose in splendour equal to the splendour of their opening verses. _TheGarden of Proserpine_ is one of the few that keep the good wine for thelast. Here, however, as in the rest of his poems, we find beautifulpassages rather than beauty informing the whole poem. Swinburne's poemshave no spinal cord. One feels this even in that most beautiful of hislyrics, the first chorus in _Atalanta in Calydon. _ But how many poetsare there who could have sustained for long the miracle of "When thehounds of spring are on winter traces, " and the verse that follows? Mrs. Disney Leith tells us in a charming book of recollections and lettersthat the first time Swinburne recited this poem to her was on horseback, and one wonders whether he had the ecstasy of the gallop and the musicof racing horses in his blood when he wrote the poem. His poems areessentially expressions of ecstasy. His capacity for ecstasy was themost genuine thing about him. A thunderstorm gave him "a more vividpleasure than music or wine. " His pleasure in thunder, in the gallop ofhorses, in the sea, was, however, one fancies, largely an intoxicationof music. It is like one's own enjoyment of his poems. This, too, issimply an intoxication of music. 

The first series of _Poems and Ballads_, it must be admitted, owed itssuccess for many years to other things besides the music. It broke inupon the bourgeois moralities of nineteenth-century England like adefiance. It expressed in gorgeous wordiness the mood of everygreen-sick youth of imagination who sees that beauty is being banishedfrom the world in the name of goodness. One has only to look at the greyand yellow and purple brick houses built during the reign of Victoria tosee that the green-sick youth had a good right to protest. A world thatmakes goodness the enemy of beauty and freedom is a blasphemous denialof both goodness and beauty, and young men will turn from it in disgustto the praise of Venus or any other god or goddess that welcomes beautyat the altar. The first volume of _Poems and Ballads_ was a challenge tothe lie of tall-hatted religion. There is much truth in Mr. Gosse'ssaying that "the poet is not a lotus-eater who has never known theGospel, but an evangelist turned inside out. " He had been brought upPuritanically by his mother, who kept all fiction from him in hischildhood, but grounded him with the happiest results in the Bible andShakespeare. "This acquaintance with the text of the Bible, " says Mr. Gosse, "he retained to the end of his life, and he was accustomed to beemphatic about the advantage he had received from the beauty of itslanguage. " His early poems, however, were not a protest against theatmosphere of his home, but against the atmosphere of what can only bedescribed by the worn-out word "respectability. " Mrs. Disney Leithdeclares that she never met a character more "reverent-minded. " And, certainly, the irreverence of his most pagan poems is largely anirreverence of gesture. He delighted in shocking his contemporaries, andplanned shocking them still further with a volume called _LesbiaBrandon_, which he never published; but at heart he never freed himselffrom the Hebrew awe in presence of good and evil. His _Aholibah_ is apoem that is as moral in one sense as it is lascivious in another. AsMr. Gosse says, "his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum, between the North and the South, between Paganism and Puritanism, between resignation to the insticts and an ascetic repudiation of theirauthority. " It is the conflict between the two moods that is the mostinteresting feature in Swinburne's verse, apart from its purely artisticqualities. Some writers find Swinburne as great a magician as ever inthose poems in which he is free from the obsession of the flesh. But Idoubt if Swinburne ever rose to the same great heights in his later workas in the two first series of _Poems and Ballads. _ Those who praise himas a thinker quote _Hertha_ as a masterpiece of philosophy in music, andit was Swinburne's own favourite among his poems. But I confess I findit a too long sermon. Swinburne's philosophy and religion were as vagueas his vision of the world about him. "I might call myself, if Iwished, " he wrote in 1875, "a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blakeand Shelley), but assuredly in no sense a Theist. "

Mr. Gosse has written Swinburne's life with distinction andunderstanding; but it was so eventless a life that the biographer's isnot an easy task. The book contains plenty of entertainment, however. Itis amusing to read of the author of _Anactoria_ as a child going aboutwith Bowdler's Shakespeare under his arm and, in later years, assistingJowett in the preparation of a _Child's Bible. _

XXIII

THE WORK OF T. M. KETTLE

To have written books and to have died in battle has been a commonenough fate in the last few years. But not many of the young men whohave fallen in the war have left us with such a sense of perished geniusas Lieutenant T. M. Kettle, who was killed at Ginchy. He was one of thosemen who have almost too many gifts to succeed. He had the gift ofletters and the gift of politics; he was a mathematician, an economist, a barrister, and a philosopher; he was a Bohemian as well as a scholar;as one listened to him, one suspected at times that he must be one ofthe most brilliant conversationalists of the age. He lived in a blaze ofadoration as a student, and, though this adoration was tempered by theabuse of opponents in his later years, he still had a way of going aboutas a conqueror with his charm. Had he only had a little ordinariness inhis composition to harden him, he would almost certainly have ended asthe leading Irish statesman of his day. He was undoubtedly ambitious ofsuccess in the grand style. But with his ambition went the mood ofEcclesiastes, which reminded him of the vanity of ambition. In his youthhe adhered to Herbert Spencer's much-quoted saying: "What I need torealize is how infinitesimal is the importance of anything I can do, andhow infinitely important it is that I should do it. " But, while withSpencer this was a call to action, with Kettle it was rather a call tomeditation, to discussion. He was the Hamlet of modern Ireland. And itis interesting to remember that in one of his early essays he defendedHamlet against the common charge of "inability to act, " and protestedthat he was the victim, not of a vacillating will, but of the fates. Hecontended that, so great were the issues and so dubious the evidence, Hamlet had every right to hesitate. "The commercial blandness, " hewrote, "with which people talk of Hamlet's 'plain duty' makes one wonderif they recognize such a thing as plain morality. The 'removal' of anuncle without due process of law and on the unsupported evidence of anunsubpoenable ghost; the widowing of a mother and her casting-off asunspeakably vile, are treated as enterprises about which a man has noright to hesitate or even to feel unhappy. " This is notmere speciousness. There is the commonsense of pessimism in it too. 

The normal Irish man of letters begins as something of a Utopian. Kettlewas always too much of a pessimist--he himself would have said arealist--to yield easily to romance. As a very young man he edited inDublin a paper called _The Nationist_, for which he claimed, above allthings, that it stood for "realism" in politics. Some men are driveninto revolution by despair: it was as though Kettle had been driven intoreform by despair. He admired the Utopians, but he could not share theirfaith. "If one never got tired, " he wrote in a sketch of theInternational Socialist Congress at Stuttgart in 1907, "one would alwaysbe with the revolutionaries, the re-makers, with Fourier and Kropotkin. But the soul's energy is strictly limited; and with weariness therecomes the need for compromise, for 'machines, ' for reputation, forroutine. Fatigue is the beginning of political wisdom. " One finds thesame strain of melancholy transmuting itself into gaiety with an epigramin much of his work. His appreciation of Anatole France is theappreciation of a kindred spirit. In an essay called _The Fatigue ofAnatole France_ in _The Day's Burden_ he defended his author'spessimistic attitude as he might have defended his own:

 A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams, as a thundercloud is stabbed by lightning, is a type of spiritual life far from contemptible. A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music of consummate prose, is an attitude and an achievement that will help many men to bear with more resignation the burden of our century. 

How wonderfully, again, he portrays the Hamlet doubts of Anatole France, when, speaking of his bust, he says: "It is the face of a soldier readyto die for a flag in which he does not entirely believe. " And he goeson:

 He looks out at you like a veteran of the lost cause of intellect, to whose soul the trumpet of defeat strikes with as mournful and vehement a music as to that of Pascal himself, but who thinks that a wise man may be permitted to hearten himself up in evil days with an anecdote after the manner of his master Rabelais. 

Kettle himself practised just such a gloom shot with gaiety. He did not, however, share Anatole France's gaiety of unbelief. In some ways he wasmore nearly akin to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, with his religion and hislove of the fine gesture. Had he been a Frenchman of an earliergeneration, he would have been famous for his talk, like Villiers, inthe cafés. Most people who knew him contend that he talked even betterthan he wrote; but one gets a good enough example of his ruling mood andattitude in the fine essay called _On Saying Good-bye. _ Meditating onlife as "a sustained good-bye, " he writes:

 Life is a cheap _table d'hôte_ in a rather dirty restaurant, with Time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything. 

 We were bewildered at school to be told that walking was a perpetual falling. But life is, in a far more significant way, a perpetual dying. Death is not an eccentricity, but a settled habit of the universe. The drums of to-day call to us, as they call to young Fortinbras in the fifth act of _Hamlet_, over corpses piled up in such abundance as to be almost ridiculous. We praise the pioneer, but we praise him on wrong grounds. His strength lies not in his leaning out to new things--that may be mere curiosity--but in his power to abandon old things. All his courage is a courage of adieus. 

This meditativeness on the passing nature of things is one of the oldmoods of mankind. Kettle, however, was one of the men of our time inwhom it has achieved imaginative expression. I remember his once saying, in regard to some hostile criticisms that had been passed on his own"power to abandon old things": "The whole world is nothing but the storyof a renegade. The bud is renegade to the tree, and the flower to thebud, and the fruit to the flower. " Though he rejoiced in change as apolitician, however, he bewaited the necessity of change as aphilosopher. His praise of death in the essay I have just quoted from isthe praise of something that will put an end to changes and goodbyes

 There is only one journey, as it seems to me . .. In which we attain our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death, normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any of its horrors. The old woman--

an old woman previously mentioned who complained that "the onlybothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrongend"--

 the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles beginning at the right end. We shall all bid our first real adieu to those brother-jesters of ours, Time; and Space; and though the handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat or defeat us. "However amusing the comedy may have been, " wrote Pascal, "there is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a little dust in your face; and then all is over for ever. " Blood there may be, but blood does not necessarily mean tragedy. The wisdom of humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we may have good lines and a timely exit; but, fine or feeble, there is comfort in breaking the parting word into its two significant halves, a Dieu. Since life has been a constant slipping from one good-bye to another, why should we fear that sole good-bye which promises to cancel all its forerunners?

There you have a passage which, in the light of events, seems strangelyprophetic. Kettle certainly got his "good lines" at Ginchy. He gave hislife greatly for his ideal of a free Ireland in a free Europe. 

This suggests that underlying his Hamlet there was a man of action assurely as there was a jester. He was a man with a genius for rising tothe occasion--for saying the fine word and doing the fine thing. Hecompromised often, in accordance with his "realistic" view of things;but he never compromised in his belief in the necessity of large andEuropean ideals in Ireland. He stood by all good causes, not as anextremist, but as a helper somewhat disillusioned. But hisdisillusionment never made him feeble in the middle of the fight. He wasthe sworn foe of the belittlers of Ireland. One will get an idea of thepassion with which he fought for the traditional Ireland, as well as forthe Ireland of coming days, if one turns to his rhymed reply to a livingEnglish poet who had urged the Irish to forget their history and gentlycease to be a nation. The last lines of this poem--_Reason in Rhyme_, ashe called it--are his testament to England no less than his call toEuropeanism is his testament to Ireland:

 Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease: Free, we are free to be your friend. And when you make your banquet, and we come. Soldier with equal soldier must we sit, Closing a battle, not forgetting it. With not a name to hide, This mate and mother of valiant "rebels" dead Must come with all her history on her head. We keep the past for pride: No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb: No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers, No rudest men who died To tear your flag down in the bitter years. But shall have praise, and three times thrice again, When at the table men shall drink with men. 

That was Kettle's mood to the last. This was the mood that made himregard with such horror the execution of Pearse and Connolly, and theother leaders of the Dublin insurrection. He regarded these men ashaving all but destroyed his dream of an Ireland enjoying the freedomof Europe. But he did not believe that any English Government possessedthe right to be merciless in Ireland. The murder of Sheehy-Skeffington, who was his brother-in-law, cast another shadow over his imaginationfrom which he never recovered. Only a week before he died he wrote to mefrom France: "The Skeffington case oppresses me with horror. " When I sawhim in the previous July, he talked like a man whose heart Easter Weekand its terrible retributions had broken. But there must have beenexaltation in those days just before his death, as one gathers from thelast, or all but the last, of his letters home:

 We are moving up to-night into the battle of the Somme. The bombardment, destruction, and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor did I ever think that the valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers. I have had two chances of leaving them--one on sick leave and one to take a staff job. I have chosen to stay with my comrades. 

There at the end you have the grand gesture. There you have the "goodlines" that Kettle had always desired. 

XXIV

MR. J. C. SQUIRE

It would not have been easy a few years ago to foresee the achievementof Mr. Squire as a poet. He laboured under the disadvantage of beingalso a wit. It used to be said of Ibsen that a Pegasus had once beenshot under him, and one was alarmed lest the reverse of this was aboutto happen to Mr. Squire, and lest a writer who began in the gaiety ofthe comic spirit should end soberly astride Pegasus. When, in _Tricks ofthe Trade_, he announced that he was going to write no more parodies, one had a depressed feeling that he was about to give up to poetry whatwas meant for mankind. Yet, on reading Mr. Squire's collected poems in_Poems: First Series_, it is difficult not to admit that it was to writeserious verse even more than parody and political epigram that he wasborn. 

He has arranged the poems in the book in the order of their composition, so that we can follow the development of his powers and see him, as itwere, learning to fly. To read him is again and again to be reminded ofDonne. Like Donne, he is largely self-occupied, examining the horrors ofhis own soul, overburdened at times with thought, an intellect at oddswith the spirit. Like Donne, he will have none of the merely poetic, either in music or in imagery. He beats out a music of his own and hebeats out an imagery of his own. In his early work, this sometimesresulted in his poems being unable to rise far from the ground. Theyseemed to be labouring on unaccustomed wings towards the ether. Whatother living poet has ever given a poem such a title as _Antinomies ona Railway Station?_ What other has examined himself with the same X-rayssort of realism as Mr. Squire has done in _The Mind of Man?_ Thelatter, like many of Mr. Squire's poems, is an expression of fastidiousdisgust with life. The early Mr. Squire was a master of disgust, and wesee the same mood dominant even in the _Ode: In a Restaurant_, where thepoet suddenly breaks out:--

 Soul! This life is very strange, And circumstances very foul Attend the belly's stormy howl. 

The ode, however, is not merely, or even primarily, an expression ofdisgust. Here, too, we see Mr. Squire's passion for romance and energy. Here, too, we see him as a fisherman of strange imagery, as when hedescribes the sounds of the restaurant band as they float in upon himfrom another room and die again:--

 Like keen-drawn threads of ink dropped into a glass Of water, which curl and relax and soften and pass. 

The _Ode: In a Restaurant_ is perhaps the summit of Mr. Squire's writingas a poet at odds with himself, a poet who floats above the obscene anddull realities of every day, "like a draggled seagull over dreary flatsof mud. " He has already escaped into bluer levels in the poem, _On afriend Recently Dead_, written in the same or the following year. Herehe ceases to be a poet floating and bumping against a ceiling. He is nowranging the heaven of the emancipated poets. Even when he writes of thecommon and prosaic things he now charges them with significance for theemotions. He is no longer a satirist and philosopher, but a lover. Howwell he conjures up the picture of the room in which his friend used tosit and talk:--

 Capricious friend! Here in this room, not long before the end, Here in this very room six months ago You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so. Beyond the window shook the ash-tree bough, You saw books, pictures, as I see them now. The sofa then was blue, the telephone Listened upon the desk and softly shone Even as now the fire-irons in the grate, And the little brass pendulum swung, a seal of fate Stamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and door Just moved in the air; and on the dark boards of the floor These same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying . .. And then you never had a thought of dying. 

How much richer, too, by this time Mr. Squire's imagery has become! Hisobservation is both exact and imaginative when he notes how--

 the frail ash-tree hisses With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain. 

Elsewhere in the same poem Mr. Squire has given us a fine new image ofthe brevity of man's life:--

 And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones, Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over. 

It was not, however, till _The Lily of Malud_ appeared that readers ofpoetry in general realized that Mr. Squire was a poet of the imaginationeven more than of the intellect. This is a flower that has blossomed outof the vast swamps of the anthropologists. It is the song of the ritualof initiation. Mr. Squire's power in the sphere both of the grotesqueand of lovely imagery is revealed in the triumphant close of thispoem:--

 And the surly thick-lipped men, as they sit about their huts Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then, Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin, Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony, Chip and grunt and do not see. 

 But each mother, silently, Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut, For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air, A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies. And stare softly at the ember, and try to remember Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seen Like an early evening star when the sky is pale green: A quiet silver tower that climbed in an hour, Or a ghost like a flower, or a flower like a queen: Something holy in the past that came and did not last, But she knows not what it was. 

It is easy to see in the last lines that Mr. Squire has escaped finallyfrom the idealist's disgust to the idealist's exaltation. He has learnedto express the beautiful mystery of life and he is no longer haunted inhis nerves by the ugliness of circumstances. Not that he has shuthimself up in an enchanted world: he still remains a poet of thisagonizing earth. In _The Stronghold_ he summons up a vision of "easefuldeath, " only to turn aside from it as Christian turned aside from thetemptations on his way:--

 But, O, if you find that castle, Draw back your foot from the gateway, Let not its peace invite you, Let not its offerings tempt you, For faded and decayed like a garment, Love to a dust will have fallen, And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow, And hope will have gone with pain; And of all the throbbing heart's high courage Nothing will remain. 

And these later poems are not only nobler in passion than the earlyintrospective work; they are also more moving. Few of the "in memoriam"poems of the war touch the heart as does that poem, _To a Bulldog_, withits moving close:--

 And though you run expectant as you always do To the uniforms we meet, You will never find Willy among all the soldiers Even in the longest street. 

 Nor in any crowd: yet, strange and bitter thought, Even now were the old words said, If I tried the old trick, and said "Where's Willy?" You would quiver and lift your head. 

 And your brown eyes would look to ask if I was serious, And wait for the word to spring. Sleep undisturbed: I shan't say that again, You innocent old thing. 

 I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa, While you lie there asleep on the floor; For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of, And he won't be coming here any more. 

Of the new poems in the book, one of the most beautiful is _AugustMoon_. The last verses provide an excellent example of Mr. Squire's giftboth as a painter of things and a creator of atmosphere:--

 A golden half-moon in the sky, and broken gold in the water. 

 In the water, tranquilly severing, joining, gold: Three or four little plates of gold on the river: A little motion of gold between the dark images Of two tall posts that stand in the grey water. A woman's laugh and children going home. A whispering couple, leaning over the railings, And somewhere, a little splash as a dog goes in. 

 I have always known all this, it has always been, There is no change anywhere, nothing will ever change. 

 I heard a story, a crazy and tiresome myth. 

 Listen! Behind the twilight a deep, low sound Like the constant shutting of very distant doors. 

 Doors that are letting people over there Out to some other place beyond the end of the sky. 

The contrast between the beauty of the stillness of the moonlit worldand the insane intrusion of the war into it has not, I think, beensuggested so expressively in any other poem. 

Now that these poems have been collected into a single volume it ispossible to measure the author's stature. His book will, I believe, comeas a revelation to the majority of readers. A poet of original music, of an original mind, of an original imagination, Mr. Squire has nowtaken a secure place among the men of genius of to-day. _Poems: FirstSeries_, is literary treasure so novel and so abundant that I can nolonger regret, as I once did, that Mr. Squire has said farewell to thebrilliant lighter-hearted moods of _Steps to Parnassus_ and _Tricks ofthe Trade. _ He has brought us gifts better even than those. 

XXV

R. JOSEPH CONRAD

1. THE MAKING OF AN AUTHOR

Mr. Joseph Conrad is one of the strangest figures in literature. He hascalled himself "the most unliterary of writers. " He did not even beginto write till he was half-way between thirty and forty. I do not like tobe more precise about the date, because there seems to be some doubt asto the year in which Mr. Conrad was born. Mr. Hugh Walpole, in his briefcritical study of Mr. Conrad, gives the date as the 6th of December, 1857; the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says 1856; Mr. Conrad himselfdeclares in his reminiscences that he was "nine years old orthereabouts" in 1868, which would bring the year of his birth nearer1859. Of one thing, however, there is no question. He grew up withoutany impulse to be a writer. He apparently never even wrote bad verse inhis teens. Before he began to write _Almayer's Folly_ he "had writtennothing but letters and not very many of these. " "I never, " he declares, "made a note of a fact, of an impression, or of an anecdote in my life. The ambition of being an author had never turned up among those preciousimaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself in the stillness andimmobility of a daydream. "

At the same time, Mr. Conrad's is not a genius without parentage orpedigree. His father was not only a revolutionary, but in some degree aman of letters. Mr. Conrad tells us that his own acquaintance withEnglish literature began at the age of eight with _The Two Gentlemen ofVerona_, which his father had translated into Polish. He has given us apicture of the child he then was (dressed in a black blouse with a whiteborder in mourning for his mother) as he knelt in his father's studychair, "with my elbows on the table and my head held in both hands overthe pile of loose pages. " While he was still a boy he read Hugo and _DonQuixote_ and Dickens, and a great deal of history, poetry, and travel. He had also been fascinated by the map. It may be said of him even inhis childhood, as Sir Thomas Browne has said in general of every humanbeing, that Africa and all her prodigies were within him. No passage inhis autobiography suggests the first prophecy of his career so markedlyas that in which he writes: "It was in 1868, when nine years old orthereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time andputting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolvedmystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance andan amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: 'When Igrow up I shall go _there_. '" Mr. Conrad's genius, his consciousness ofhis destiny, may be said to have come to birth in that hour. What butthe second sight of genius could have told this inland child that hewould one day escape from the torturing round of rebellion in which thesoul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secretrivers of Africa, where he would find an imperishable booty of wonderand monstrous fear? Many people regard _Heart of Darkness_ as hisgreatest story. _Heart of Darkness_ surely began to be written on theday on which the boy of nine "or thereabouts" put his finger on theblank space of the map of Africa and prophesied. 

He was in no hurry, however, to accomplish his destiny. Mr. Conrad hasnever been in a hurry, even in telling a story. He has waited on faterather than run to meet it. "I was never, " he declares, "one of thosewonderful fellows that would go afloat in a washtub for the sake of thefun. " On the other hand, he seems always to have followed in his owndetermined fashion certain sudden intuitions, much as great generals andsaints do. Alexander or Napoleon could not have seized the future with amore splendid defiance of reason than did Mr. Conrad, when, though hedid not yet know six words of English, he came to the resolve: "If aseaman, then an English seaman. " He has always been obedient to a star. He likes to picture himself as a lazy creature, but he is really one ofthe most dogged day-labourers who have ever served literature. In_Typhoon_ and _Youth_ he has written of the triumph of the spirit of manover tempest and fire. We may see in these stories not only the recordof Mr. Conrad's twenty years' toil as a seaman, but the image of hisdesperate doggedness as an author writing in a foreign tongue. "Line byline, " he writes, "rather than page by page, was the growth of_Almayer's Folly_. " He has earned his fame in the sweat of his brow. Hespeaks of the terrible bodily fatigue that is the lot of the imaginativewriter even more than of the manual labourer. "I have, " he adds, "carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost double under a ship'sdeck-beams, from six in the morning till six in the evening (with anhour and a half off for meals), so I ought to know. " He declares, indeed, that the strain of creative effort necessary in imaginativewriting is "something for which a material parallel can only be found inthe everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round CapeHorn. " This is to make the profession of literature a branch of theheroic life. And that, for all his smiling disparagement of himself as aSybarite, is what Mr. Conrad has done. 

It is all the more curious that he should ever have been regarded as onewho had added to the literature of despair. He is a tragic writer, it istrue; he is the only novelist now writing in English with the grandtragic sense. He is nearer Webster than Shakespeare, perhaps, in themood of his tragedy; he lifts the curtain upon a world in which thenoble and the beautiful go down before an almost meaningless malice. In_The End of the Tether_, in _Freya of the Seven Isles_, in _Victory_, itis as though a very Nero of malice who took a special delight in theruin of great spirits governed events. On the other hand, as in _SamsonAgonistes_, so in the stories of Mr. Conrad we are confronted with thecurious paradox that some deathless quality in the dying hero forbids usutterly to despair. Mr. Hardy has written the tragedy of man's weakness;Mr. Conrad has written the tragedy of man's strength "with courage neverto submit or yield. " Though Mr. Conrad possesses the tragic sense in adegree that puts him among the great poets, and above any of his livingrivals, however, the mass of his work cannot be called tragic. _Youth, Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow Line_--are not allthese fables of conquest and redemption? Man in Mr. Conrad's stories isalways a defier of the devils, and the devils are usually put to flight. 

Though he is eager to disclaim being a moralist or even having anyliking for moralists, it is clear that he is an exceedingly passionatemoralist and is in more ardent imaginative sympathy with the duties ofman and Burke than with the rights of man and Shelley. Had it not beenso, he might have been a political visionary and stayed at home. As itis, this son of a Polish rebel broke away from the wavering aspirationsand public dreams of his revolutionary countrymen, and found salvationas an artist in the companionship of simple men at sea. 

Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order thatMr. Conrad might be able to achieve his destiny as an artist. No one butan inland child could, perhaps, have come to the sea with such a passionof discovery. The sea to most of us is a glory, but it is a glory of oureveryday earth. Mr. Conrad, in his discovery of the sea, broke into anew and wonder-studded world, like some great adventurer of theRenaissance. He was like a man coming out of a pit into the light. That, I admit, is too simple an image to express all that going to sea meantto Mr. Conrad. But some such image seems to me to be necessary toexpress that element in his writing which reminds one of the vision of aman who has lived much underground. He is a dark man who carries theshadows and the mysteries of the pit about with him. He initiates us inhis stories into the romance of Erebus. He leads us through a hauntedworld in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of thedarkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer whoexalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, avery spendthrift of treasure--treasure of recollection, observation, imagery, tenderness, and humour. It is a strange thing that it was notuntil he published _Chance_ that the world in general began to recognizehow great a writer was enriching our time. Perhaps his own reserve waspartly to blame for this. He tells us that all the "characters" he evergot on his discharge from a ship contained the words "strictly sober, "and he claims that he has observed the same sobriety--"asceticism ofsentiment, " he calls it--in his literary work as at sea. He has beencompared to Dostoevsky, but in his quietism he is the very opposite ofDostoevsky--an author, indeed, of whom he has written impatiently. Atthe same time, Mr. Conrad keeps open house in his pages as Dostoevskydid for strange demons and goblins--that population of grotesquecharacters that links the modern realistic novel to the fairy tale. Histales are tales of wonder. He is not only a philosopher of the boldheart under a sky of despair, but one of the magicians of literature. That is why one reads the volume called _Youth_ for the third and fourthtime with even more enthusiasm than when one reads it for the first. 

2. TALES OF MYSTERY

Mr. Joseph Conrad is a writer with a lure. Every novelist of genius isthat, of course, to some extent. But Mr. Conrad is more than most. Hehas a lure like some lost shore in the tropics. He compels to adventure. There is no other living writer who is sensitive in anything like thesame degree to the sheer mysteriousness of the earth. Every man whobreathes, every woman who crosses the street, every wind that blows, every ship that sails, every tide that fills, every wave that breaks, isfor him alive with mystery as a lantern is alive with light--a littlelight in an immense darkness. Or perhaps it is more subtle than that. With Mr. Conrad it is as though mystery, instead of dwelling in peopleand things like a light, hung about them like an aura. Mr. Kiplingcommunicates to us aggressively what our eyes can see. Mr. Conradcommunicates to us tentatively what only his eyes can see, and in sodoing gives a new significance to things. Occasionally he leaves uspuzzled as to where in the world the significance can lie. But of thepresence of this significance, this mystery, we are as uncannily certainas of some noise that we have heard at night. It is like the "mana"which savages at once reverence and fear in a thousand objects. It isunlike "mana, " however, in that it is a quality not of sacredness, butof romance. It is as though for Mr. Conrad a ghost of romance inhabitedevery tree and every stream, every ship and every human being. Hisfunction in literature is the announcement of this ghost. In all hiswork there is some haunting and indefinable element that draws us into akind of ghost-story atmosphere as we read. His ships and men are, in anold sense of the word, possessed. 

One might compare Mr. Conrad in this respect with his master--hismaster, at least, in the art of the long novel--Henry James. I do notmean that in the matter of his genius Mr. Conrad is not entirelyoriginal. Henry James could no more have written Mr. Conrad's storiesthan Mr. Conrad could have written Henry James's. His manner ofdiscovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of theschool of Henry James. Like Henry James, he is a psychologist ineverything down to descriptions of the weather. It can hardly bequestioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology fromHenry James than from any other writer. As one reads a story like_Chance_, however, one feels that in psychology Mr. Conrad is somethingof an amateur of genius, while Henry James is a professor. Mr. Conradnever gives the impression of having used the dissecting-knife and themicroscope and the test-tubes as Henry James does. He seems rather to beone of the splendid guessers. Not that Henry James is timid inspeculations. He can sally out into the borderland and come back withhis bag of ghosts like a very hero of credulity. Even when he tells aghost story, however--and _The Turn of the Screw_ is one of the greatghost stories of literature--he remains supremely master of hismaterials. He has an efficiency that is scientific as compared with thevaguer broodings of Mr. Conrad. Where Mr. Conrad will drift intodiscovery, Henry James will sail more cunningly to his end with chartand compass. 

One is aware of a certain deliberate indolent hither-and-thitherness inthe psychological progress of Mr. Conrad's _Under Western Eyes_, forinstance, which is never to be found even in the most elusive of HenryJames's novels. Both of them are, of course, in love with the elusive. To each of them a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. But whileHenry James's birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens, Mr. Conrad's call from the heart of natural thickets--often from thedepths of the jungle. The progress of the steamer up the jungle river in_Heart of Darkness_ is symbolic of his method as a writer. He goes onand on, with the ogres of romance always lying in wait round the nextbend. He can describe things seen as well as any man, but it is hisespecial genius to use things seen in such a way as to suggest theunseen things that are waiting round the corner. Even when he isportraying human beings, like Flora de Barrel--the daughter of thedefalcating financier and wife of the ship's captain, who is the heroineof _Chance_--he often permits us just such glimpses of them as we get ofpersons hurrying round a corner. He gives us a picture of disappearingheels as the portrait of a personality. He suggests the soul of wonderin a man not by showing him realistically as he is so much as bysuggesting a mysterious something hidden, something on the horizon, ashadowy island seen at twilight. One result of this is that his humanbeings are seldom as rotund as life. They are emanations of personalityrather than collections of legs, arms, and bowels. They are, if youlike, ghostly. That is why they will never be quoted like Hamlet and myUncle Toby and Sam Weller. But how wonderful they are in theirenvironment of the unusual! How wonderful as seen in the light of thestrange eyes of their creator! "Having grown extremely sensitive (aneffect of irritation) to the tonalities, I may say, of the affair"--sothe narrator of _Chance_ begins one of his sentences; and it is not inthe invention of new persons or incidents, but in just such asensitiveness to the tonalities of this and that affair that Mr. Conradwins his laurels as a writer of novels. He would be sensitive, I do notdoubt, to the tonalities of the way in which a waitress in a Lyonstea-shop would serve a lumpy-shouldered City man with tea and toastedscone. His sensitiveness only becomes matter for enthusiasm, however, when it is concerned with little man in conflict with destiny--when, bare down to the immortal soul, he grapples with fate and throws it, oris beaten back by it into a savage of the first days. 

Some of his best work is contained in the two stories _Typhoon_ and_The Secret Sharer_, the latter of which appeared in the volume called_'Twixt Land and Sea_. And each of these is a fable of man's mysteriousquarrel with fate told with the Conrad sensitiveness, the dark Conradirony, and the Conrad zest for courage. These stories are so great thatwhile we read them we almost forget the word "psychology. " We are sweptoff our feet by a tide of heroic literature. Each of the stories, complex though Mr. Conrad's interest in the central situation may be, isradically as heroic and simple as the story of Jack's fight with thegiants or of the defence of the round-house in _Kidnapped_. In each ofthem the soul of man challenges fate with its terrors: it dares all, itrisks all, it invades and defeats the darkness. _Typhoon_ was, I fancy, not consciously intended as a dramatization of the struggle between thesoul and the Prince of the power of the air. But it is because it iseternally true as such a dramatization that it is--let us not shrinkfrom praise--one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories inliterature. It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than ofan unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angelsand demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her andtime and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters. They are anaffair of cosmic relevance as the captain and the mate cling on, watching the agonies of the steamer. 

 Opening their eyes, they saw the masses of piled-up foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like fragments of the ship. She had given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins. The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon. 

It is in the midst of these blinding, deafening, whirling, drowningterrors that we seem to see the captain and the mate as figures symbolicof Mr. Conrad's heroic philosophy of life. 

 He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander. His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in an agitated tone, "Our boats are going now, sir. "

 And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice--the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when the heavens fall and justice is done--again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far: "All right. "

Mr. Conrad's work, I have already suggested, belongs to the literatureof confidence. It is the literature of great hearts braving the perilsof the darkness. He is imaginatively never so much at home as in thenight, but he is aware not only of the night, but of the stars. Like acheer out of the dark comes that wonderful scene in _The Secret Sharer_in which, at infinite risk, the ship is sailed in close under thelooming land in order that the captain may give the hidden manslayer achance of escaping unnoticed to the land. This is a story in which the"tonalities of the affair" are much more subtle than in _Typhoon_. It isa study in eccentric human relations--the relations between the captainand the manslayer who comes naked out of the seas as if from nowhere onetropical night, and is huddled away with his secrets in the captain'scabin. It is for the most part a comedy of the abnormal--an ironic fableof splendid purposeless fears and risks. Towards the end, however, welose our concern with nerves and relationships and such things, and ourhearts pause as the moment approaches when the captain ventures his shipin order to save the interloper's life. That is a moment with allromance in it. As the ship swerves round into safety just in the nick oftime, we have a story transfigured into the music of the triumphantsoul. Mr. Conrad, as we see in _Freya of the Seven Isles_ and elsewhere, is not blind to the commonness of tragic ruin--tragic ruin against whichno high-heartedness seems to avail. He is, indeed, inclined rather thanotherwise to represent fate as a monstrous spider, unaccountable, oftenmaleficent, hard to run away from. But he loves the fantastic comedy ofthe high heart which persists in the heroic game against the spider tillthe bitter end. His _Youth_ is just such a comedy of the peacockry ofadventure amid the traps and disasters of fate. 

All this being so, it may be thought that I have underestimated theflesh-and-blood qualities in Mr. Conrad's work. I certainly do not wantto give the impression that his men are less than men. They are as manlymen as ever breathed. But Mr. Conrad seldom attempts to give us thecomplete synthesis of a man. He deals rather in aspects of personality. His longer books would hold us better if there were some overmasteringcharacters in them. In reading such a book as _Under Western Eyes_ wefeel as though we had here a precious alphabet of analysis, but that ithas not been used to spell a magnificent man. 

Worse than this, Mr. Conrad's long stories at times come out asawkwardly as an elephant being steered backwards through a gate. Hepauses frequently to impress upon us not only the romance of the fact heis stating but the romance of the circumstances in which somebodydiscovered it. In _Chance_ and _Lord Jim_ he is not content to tell us astraightforward story: he must show us at length the processes by whichit was pieced together. This method has its advantages. It gives us thefeeling, as I have said, that we are voyaging into strange seas andharbours in search of mysterious clues. But the fatigue ofreconstruction is apt to tell on us before the end. One gets tired ofthe thing just as one does of interviewing a host of strangers. That iswhy some people fail to get through Mr. Conrad's long novels. They arebooks of a thousand fascinations, but the best imagination in them is bythe way. Besides this, they have little of the economy of dramaticwriting, but are profusely descriptive, and most people are timid of anepic of description. 

Mr. Conrad's best work, then, is to be found, I agree with most peoplein believing, in three of his volumes of short stories--in _Typhoon, Youth_, and _'Twixt Land and Sea_. His fame will, I imagine, restchiefly on these, just as the fame of Wordsworth and Keats rests ontheir shorter poems. Here is the pure gold of his romance--written interms largely of the life of the old sailing-ship. Here he has writtenlittle epics of man's destiny, tragic, ironic, and heroic, which areunique in modern (and, it is safe to say, in all) literature. 

XXVI

MR. RUDYARD KIPLING

1. THE GOOD STORY-TELLER

Mr. Kipling is an author whom one has loved and hated a good deal. Onehas loved him as the eternal schoolboy revelling in smells and badlanguage and dangerous living. One has loved him less, but one has atleast listened to him, as the knowing youth who could tell one all aboutthe ladies of Simla. One has found him rather adorable as the favouriteuncle with the funny animal stories. One has been amazed by hismagnificent make-believe as he has told one about dim forgotten peoplesthat have disappeared under the ground. One has detested him, on theother hand, as the evangelist with the umbrella--the little Anglo-IndianPrussian who sing hymns of hate and Hempire. 

Luckily, this last Kipling is allowed an entirely free voice only inverse. If one avoids _Barrack Room Ballads_ and _The Seven Seas_, onemisses the worst of him. He visits the prose stories, too, it is true, but he does not dominate them in the same degree. Prose is his easychair, in which his genius as a humorist and anecdotalist can expand. Verse is a platform that tempts him at one moment into the performanceof music-hall turns and the next into stump orations the spiritual homeof which is Hyde Park Corner rather than Parnassus. _Recessional_surprises one like a noble recantation of nearly all the other verse Mr. Kipling has written. But, apart from _Recessional_, most of hispolitical verse is a mere quickstep of bragging and sneering. 

His prose, certainly, stands a third or a fourth reading, as his versedoes not. Even in a world which Henry James and Mr. Conrad have taughtto study motives and atmospheres with an almost scientific carefulness, Mr. Kipling's "well-hammered anecdotes, " as Mr. George Moore oncedescribed the stories, still refuse to bore us. 

At the same time, they make a different appeal to us from their appealof twenty or twenty-five years ago. In the early days, wehalf-worshipped Mr. Kipling because he told us true stories. Now weenjoy him because he tells us amusing stories. He conquered us at firstby making us think him a realist. He was the man who knew. We listenedto him like children drinking in travellers' tales. He bluffed us withhis cocksure way of talking about things, and by addressing us in amysterious jargon which we regarded as a proof of his intimacy with thebarrack-room, the engine-room, the racecourse, and the lives ofgenerals, Hindus, artists, and East-enders. That was Mr. Kipling'strick. He assumed the realistic manner as Jacob assumed the hairy handsof Esau. He compelled us to believe him by describing with elaboratedetail the setting of his story. And, having once got us in the mood ofbelief, he proceeded to spin a yarn that as often as not was as unlikelife as _A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_. His characters areinventions, not portraits. Even the dialects they speak--dialects whichused to be enthusiastically spoken of as masterly achievements ofrealism--are ludicrously false to life, as a page of Mulvaney's orOrtheris's talk will quickly make clear to any one who knows the realthing. But with what humour the stories are told! Mr. Kipling doesundoubtedly possess the genius of humour and energy. There are falsetouches in the boys' conversation in _The Drums of the Fore and Aft_, but the humour and energy with which the progress of the regiment to thefrontier, its disgrace and its rescue by the drunken children, aredescribed, make it one of the most admirable short stories of our time. 

His humour, it must be admitted, is akin to the picaresque. It isamusing to reflect as one looks round the disreputable company of Mr. Kipling's characters, that his work has now been given a place in thelibrary of law and order. When _Stalky and Co. _ was published, parentsand schoolmasters protested in alarm, and it seemed doubtful for a timewhether Mr. Kipling was to be reckoned among the enemies of society. IfI am not mistaken, _The Spectator_ came down on the side of Mr. Kipling, and his reputation as a respectable author was saved. 

But the parents and the schoolmasters were not nervous without cause. Mr. Kipling is an anarchist in his preferences to a degree that no benchof bishops could approve. He is, within limits, on the side of theIshmaelites--the bad boys of the school, the "rips" of the regiment. Hisbooks are the praise of the Ishmaelitish life in a world of law andorder. They are seldom the praise of a law and order life in a world oflaw and order. Mr. Kipling demands only one loyalty (beyond mutualloyalty) from his characters. His schoolboys may break every rule in theplace, provided that somewhere deep down in their hearts they are loyalto the "Head. " His pet soldiers may steal dogs or get drunk, or behavebrutally to their heart's content, on condition that they cherish asentimental affection for the Colonel. Critics used to explain thisaspect of Mr. Kipling's work by saying that he likes to show the heartof good in things evil. But that is not really a characteristic of hiswork. What he is most interested in is neither good nor evil but simplyroguery. As an artist, he is a barn rebel and lover of mischief. As apolitician he is on the side of the judges and the lawyers. It was hispolitics and not his art that ultimately made him the idol of thegenteel world. 

2. THE POET OF LIFE WITH A CAPITAL HELL

Everybody who is older than a schoolboy remembers how Mr. RudyardKipling was once a modern. He might, indeed, have been described at thetime as a Post-Imperialist. Raucous and young, he had left behind himthe ornate Imperialism of Disraeli, on the one hand, and the culturedImperialism of Tennyson, on the other. He sang of Imperialism as it was, or was about to be--vulgar and canting and bloody--and a world that waspreparing itself for an Imperialism that would be vulgar and canting andbloody bade him welcome. In one breath he would give you an invocationto Jehovah. In the next, with a dig in the ribs, he would be gettinground the roguish side of you with the assurance that:--

 If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg behind the keeper's back, If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line, If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack, You will understand this little song o' mine. 

This jumble--which seems so curious nowadays--of delight in piety anddelight in twopence-coloured mischiefs came as a glorious novelty andrespite to the oppressed race of Victorians. Hitherto they had beenbuilding up an Empire decently and in order; no doubt, manyreprehensible things were being done, but they were being done quietly:outwardly, so far as was possible, a respectable front was preserved. Itwas Mr. Kipling's distinction to tear off the mask of Imperialism as aneedless and irritating encumbrance; he had too much sense ofreality--too much humour, indeed--to want to portray Empire-builders asa company of plaster saints. Like an _enfant terrible_, he was ready toproclaim aloud a host of things which had, until then, been kept asdecorously in the dark as the skeleton in the family cupboard. Thethousand and one incidents of lust and loot, of dishonesty andbrutality and drunkenness--all of those things to which builders ofEmpire, like many other human beings, are at times prone--he neverdreamed of treating as matters to be hushed up, or, apparently, indeed, to be regretted. He accepted them quite frankly as all in the day'swork; there was even a suspicion of enthusiasm in the heartiness withwhich he referred to them. Simple old clergymen, with a sentimentalvision of an Imperialism that meant a chain of mission-stations (paintedred) encircling the earth, suddenly found themselves called upon to singa new psalm:--

 Ow, the loot! Bloomin' loot! That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot! It's the same with dogs an' men, If you'd make 'em come again. Clap 'em forward with a Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Whoopee! Tear 'im, puppy! Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Loot! Loot!

Frankly, I wish Mr. Kipling had always written in this strain. It mighthave frightened the clergymen away. Unfortunately, no sooner had theold-fashioned among his readers begun to show signs of nervousness thanhe would suddenly feel in the mood for a tune on his Old Testament harp, and, taking it down, would twang from its strings a lay of duty. "Takeup, " he would sing--

 Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best ye breed, Go, bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child. 

Little Willie, in the tracts, scarcely dreamed of a thornier path ofself-sacrifice. No wonder the sentimentalists were soon all dancing tothe new music--music which, perhaps, had more of the harmonium than theharp in it, but was none the less suited on that account to itsrevivalistic purpose. 

At the same time, much as we may have been attracted to Mr. Kipling inhis Sabbath moods, it was with what we may call his Saturday night moodsthat he first won the enthusiasm of the young men. They loved him forhis bad language long before he had ever preached a sermon or written aleading article in verse. His literary adaptation of the unmeasured talkof the barrack-room seemed to initiate them into a life at once morereal and more adventurous than the quiet three-meals-a-day ritual oftheir homes. He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still moreexciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God. Every oath heloosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; forhis characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new inliterature. One remembers the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which veryyoung men used to repeat to each other lines like the one in _The Balladof "The Bolivar_, " which runs--

 Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell--rig the winches aft!

Not that anybody knew, or cared, what "rigging the winches aft" meant. It was the familiar and fearless commerce with hell that seemed to giveliterature a new: horizon. Similarly, it was the eternal flames in thebackground that made the tattered figure of Gunga Din, thewater-carrier, so favourite a theme with virgins and boys. With whatdelight they would quote the verse:--

 So I'll meet 'im later on, At the place where 'e is gone-- Where it's always double drill and no canteen; 'E'll be squattin' on the coals, Givin' drink to poor damned souls. An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!

Ever since the days of Aucassin, indeed, who praised hell as the placewhither were bound the men of fashion and the good scholars and thecourteous fair ladies, youth has taken a strange, heretical delight inhell and damnation. Mr. Kipling offered new meats to the old taste. 

 Gentlemen-rankers, out on the spree, Damned from here to eternity, began to wear halos in the undergraduate imagination. Those "seven menfrom out of Hell" who went

 Rolling down the Ratcliff Road, Drunk, and raising Cain, were men with whom youth would have rejoiced to shake hands. One evenwrote bad verses oneself in those days, in which one loved to pictureoneself as

 Cursed with the curse of Reuben, Seared with the brand of Cain, though so far one's most desperate adventure into reality had been theconsumption of a small claret hot with a slice of lemon in it in aback-street public-house. Thus Mr. Kipling brought a new violence andwonder, a sort of debased Byronism, into the imagination of youth; atleast, he put a crown upon the violence and wonder which youth had longpreviously discovered for itself in penny dreadfuls and in its rebellionagainst conventions and orthodoxies. 

It may be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling's genius as a poet. He does something more in his verse, it maybe urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute thelanguage of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature. That is quitetrue. He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which hetalked adventure and talked "shop" to a generation that wasexceptionally greedy for both. He, more than any other writer of histime, set to banjo-music the restlessness of the young man who would notstay at home--the romance of the man who lived and laboured at least athousand miles away from the home of his fathers. He excited theimagination of youth with deft questions such as--

 Do you know the pile-built village, where the sago-dealers trade-- Do you know the reek of fish and wet bamboo?

If you did not know all about the sago-dealers and the fish and the wetbamboo, Mr. Kipling had a way of making you feel unpardonably ignorant;and the moral of your ignorance always was that you must "go--go--goaway from here. " Hence an immense increase in the number of passagesbooked to the colonies. Mr. Kipling, in his verse, simply acted as agorgeous poster-artist of Empire. And even those who resisted his callto adventure were hypnotized by his easy and lavish manner of talking"shop. " He could talk the "shop" of the army, the sea, the engine-room, the art-school, the charwoman; he was a perfect young Bacon ofomniscience. How we thrilled at the unintelligible jingle of the _AnchorSong_, with its cunning blend of "shop" and adventure:--

 Heh! Tally on. Aft and walk away with her! Handsome to the cathead, now! O tally on the fall! Stop, seize, and fish, and easy on the davit-guy. Up, well up, the fluke of her, and inboard haul!

 Well, ah, fare you well for the Channel wind's took hold of us, Choking down our voices as we snatch the gaskets free, And its blowing up for night. And she's dropping light on light, And she's snorting and she's snatching for a breath of open sea. 

The worst of Mr. Kipling is that, in verse like this, he is not onlyomniscient; he is knowing. He mistakes knowingness for knowledge. Heeven mistakes it for wisdom at times, as when he writes, not of ships, but of women. His knowing attitude to women makes some of hisverse--not very much, to be quite fair--absolutely detestable. _TheLadies_ seems to me the vulgarest poem written by a man of genius in ourtime. As one reads it, one feels how right Oscar Wilde was when he saidthat Mr. Kipling had seen many strange things through keyholes. Mr. Kipling's defenders may reply that, in poems like this, he is merelydramatizing the point of view of the barrack-room. But it is unfair tosaddle the barrack-room with responsibility for the view of women whichappears here and elsewhere in the author's verse. One is conscious of akind of malign cynicism in Mr. Kipling's own attitude, as one reads _TheYoung British Soldier_, with a verse like--

 If your wife should go wrong with a comrade, be loth To shoot when you catch 'em--you'll swing, on my oath!-- Make 'im take 'er and keep 'er; that's hell for them both, And you're shut o' the curse of a soldier. 

That seems to me fairly to represent the level of Mr. Kipling's poeticwisdom in regard to the relations between the sexes. It is the logicalresult of the keyhole view of life. And, similarly, his Imperialism is amean and miserable thing because it is the result of a keyhole view ofhumanity. Spiritually, Mr. Kipling may be said to have seen thousands ofmiles and thousands of places through keyholes. In him, wide wanderingshave produced the narrow mind, and an Empire has become as petty a thingas the hoard in a miser's garret. Many of his poems are simply miser'sshrieks when the hoard seems to be threatened. He cannot even praise theflag of his country without a shrill note of malice:--

 Winds of the world, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro-- And what should they know of England who only England know? The poor little street-bred people, that vapour, and fume, and brag, They are lifting their heads in the stillness, to yelp at the English flag!

Mr. Kipling is a good judge of yelping. 

The truth is, Mr. Kipling has put the worst of his genius into hispoetry. His verses have brazen "go" and lively colour and something ofthe music of travel; but they are too illiberal, too snappish, tooknowing, to afford deep or permanent pleasure to the human spirit. 

XXVII

MR. THOMAS HARDY

1. HIS GENIUS AS A POET

Mr. Thomas Hardy, in the opinion of some, is greater as a poet than as anovelist. That is one of the mild heresies in which the amateur ofletters loves to indulge. It has about as much truth in it as thestatement that Milton was greater as a controversialist than as a poet, or that Lamb's plays are better than his essays. Mr. Hardy hasundoubtedly made an original contribution to the poetry of his time. Buthe has given us no verse that more than hints at the height and depth ofthe tragic vision which is expressed in _Jude the Obscure_. He is not bytemperament a singer. His music is a still small voice unevenly matchedagainst his consciousness of midnight and storm. It is a flutter ofwings in the rain over a tomb. His sense of beauty is frail andmidge-like compared with his sense of everlasting frustration. Theconceptions in his novels are infinitely more poetic than theconceptions in his verse. In _Tess_ and _Jude_ destiny presides withsomething of the grandeur of the ancient gods. Except in _The Dynasts_and a few of the lyrics, there is none of this brooding majesty in hisverse. And even in _The Dynasts_, majestic as the scheme of it is, thereseems to me to be more creative imagination in the prose passages thanin the poetry. 

Truth to tell, Mr. Hardy is neither sufficiently articulate norsufficiently fastidious to be a great poet. He does not express lifeeasily in beautiful words or in images. There is scarcely a magicalimage in the hundred or so poems in the book of his selected verse. Thus he writes in _I Found Her Out There_ of one who:--

 would sigh at the tale Of sunk Lyonesse As a wind-tugged tress Flapped her cheek like a flail. 

There could not be an uglier and more prosaic exaggeration than iscontained in the image in the last line. And prose intrudes in thechoice of words as well as in images. Take, for example, the use of theword "domiciled" in the passage in the same poem about--

 that western sea, As it swells and sobs, Where she once domiciled. 

There are infelicities of the same kind in the first verse of the poemcalled _At an Inn_:--

 When we, as strangers, sought Their catering care, Veiled smiles bespoke their thought Of what we were. 

 They warmed as they opined Us more than friends-- That we had all resigned For love's dear ends. 

"Catering care" is an appalling phrase. 

I do not wish to over-emphasize the significance of flaws of this kind. But, at a time when all the world is eager to do honour to Mr. Hardy'spoems, it is surely well to refrain from doing equal honour to hisfaults. We shall not appreciate the splendid interpretation of earth in_The Return of the Native_ more highly for persuading ourselves that:--

 Intermissive aim at the thing sufficeth, is a line of good poetry. Similarly the critic, if he is to enjoy thebest of Mr. Hardy, must also be resolute not to shut his eyes to theworst in such a verse as that with which _A Broken Appointment_begins:--

 You did not come, And marching time drew on, and wore me numb, -- Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure loving kindness' sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, You did not come. 

There are hints of the grand style of lyric poetry in these lines, butphrases like "in your make" and "as the hope-hour stroked its sum" arediscords that bring it tumbling to the levels of Victorian commonplace. 

What one does bless Mr. Hardy for, however, both in his verse and in hisprose, is his bleak sincerity. He writes out of the reality of hisexperience. He has a temperament sensitive beyond that of all but a fewrecent writers to the pain and passion of human beings. Especially is hesensitive to the pain and passion of frustrated lovers. At least halfhis poems, I fancy, are poems of frustration. And they, hold us underthe spell of reality like a tragedy in a neighbour's house, even whenthey leave us most mournful over the emptiness of the world. One can seehow very mournful Mr. Hardy's genius is if one compares it with that ofBrowning, his master in the art of the dramatic lyric. Browning is alsoa poet of frustrated lovers. One can remember poem after poem of hiswith a theme that might easily have served for Mr. Hardy--_Too Late, Cristina, The Lost Mistress, The Last Ride Together, The Statue and theBust_, to name a few. But what a sense of triumph there is in Browning'stragedies! Even when he writes of the feeble-hearted, as in _The Statueand the Bust_, he leaves us with the feeling that we are in the presenceof weakness in a world in which courage prevails. His world is a placeof opulence, not of poverty. Compare _The Last Ride Together_ with Mr. Hardy's _The Phantom Horsewoman_, and you will see a vast energy andbeauty issuing from loss in the one, while in the other there is littlebut a sad shadow. To have loved even for an hour is with Browning tolive for ever after in the inheritance of a mighty achievement. To haveloved for an hour is, in Mr. Hardy's imagination, to have deepened thesadness even more than the beauty of one's memories. 

Not that Mr. Hardy's is quite so miserable a genius as is commonlysupposed. It is false to picture him as always on his knees before thegrave-worm. His faith in beauty and joy may be only a thin flame, but itis never extinguished. His beautiful lyric, _I Look into my Glass_, isthe cry of a soul dark but not utterly darkened:--

 I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say: "Would God, it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!"

 For then, I, undistrest, By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity. 

 But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide. 

That is certainly worlds apart from the unquenchable joy of Browning's"All the breath and the bloom of the world in the bag of one bee"; butit is also far removed from the "Lo! you may always end it where youwill" of _The City of Dreadful Night_. And despair is by no meanstriumphant in what is perhaps the most attractive of all Mr. Hardy'spoems, _The Oxen_:--

 Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock, "Now they are all on their knees, " An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease. 

 We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then. 

 So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If some one said on Christmas Eve, "Come; see the oxen kneel

 "In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know, " I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so. 

The mood of faith, however--or, rather, of delight in the memory offaith--is not Mr. Hardy's prevailing mood. At the same time, his unfaithrelates to the duration of love rather than to human destiny. Hebelieves in "the world's amendment. " He can enter upon a war withoutironical doubts, as we see in the song _Men who March Away_. More thanthis, he can look forward beyond war to the coming of a new patriotismof the world. "How long, " he cries, in a poem written some years ago:--

 How long, O ruling Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels, Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these, That are as puppets in a playing hand? When shall the saner softer polities Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land, And Patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?

But, perhaps, his characteristic attitude to war is to be found, not inlines like these, but in that melancholy poem, _The Souls of the Slain_, in which the souls of the dead soldiers return to their country andquestion a "senior soul-flame" as to how their friends and relativeshave kept their doughty deeds in remembrance:--

 "And, General, how hold out our sweethearts, Sworn loyal as doves?" "Many mourn; many think It is not unattractive to prink Them in sable for heroes. Some fickle and fleet hearts Have found them new loves. "

 "And our wives?" quoth another, resignedly, "Dwell they on our deeds?" "Deeds of home; that live yet Fresh as new--deeds of fondness or fret, Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly, These, these have their heeds. "

Mr. Hardy has too bitter a sense of reality to believe much in the gloryof war. His imagination has always been curiously interested insoldiers, but that is more because they have added a touch of colour tothe tragic game of life than because he is on the side of the militaryshow. One has only to read _The Dynasts_ along with _Barrack-roomBallads_ to see that the attitude of Mr. Hardy to war is the attitude ofthe brooding artist in contrast with that of the music-hall politician. Not that Mr. Kipling did not tell us some truths about the fate of ourfellows, but he related them to an atmosphere that savoured of beer andtobacco rather than of eternity. The real world to Mr. Hardy is theworld of ancient human things, in which war has come to be a hideousirrelevance. That is what he makes emphatically clear in _In the Time ofthe Breaking of Nations_:--

 Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. 

 Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. 

 Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War's annals will fade into night Ere their story die

It may be thought, on the other hand, that Mr. Hardy's poems about warare no more expressive of tragic futility than his poems about love. Futility and frustration are ever-recurring themes in both. His lovers, like his soldiers, rot in the grave defeated of their glory. Lovers arealways severed both in life and in death:--

 Rain on the windows, creaking doors, With blasts that besom the green, And I am here, and you are there, And a hundred miles between!

In _Beyond the Last Lamp_ we have the same mournful cry over severance. There are few sadder poems than this with its tristful refrain, even inthe works of Mr. Hardy. It is too long to quote in full, but one maygive the last verses of this lyric of lovers in a lane:--

 When I re-trod that watery way Some hours beyond the droop of day, Still I found pacing there the twain Just as slowly, just as sadly, Heedless of the night and rain. One could but wonder who they were And what wild woe detained them there. 

 Though thirty years of blur and blot Have slid since I beheld that spot, And saw in curious converse there Moving slowly, moving sadly, That mysterious tragic pair, Its olden look may linger on-- All but the couple; they have gone. 

 Whither? Who knows, indeed. .. . And yet To me, when nights are weird and wet, Without those comrades there at tryst Creeping slowly, creeping sadly, That love-lane does not exist. There they seem brooding on their pain, And will, while such a lane remain. 

And death is no kinder than life to lovers:--

 I shall rot here, with those whom in their day You never knew. And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay, Met not my view, Will in yon distant grave-place ever neighbour you. 

 No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower, While earth endures, Will fall on my mound and within the hour Steal on to yours; One robin never haunt our two green covertures. 

Mr. Hardy, fortunately, has the genius to express the burden and themystery even of a world grey with rain and commonplace in achievement. There is a beauty of sorrow in these poems in which "life with the sad, seared face" mirrors itself without disguise. They bring us face to facewith an experience intenser than our own. There is nothing common in thetragic image of dullness in _A Common-place Day_:--

 The day is turning ghost, And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively, To join the anonymous host Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe, To one of like degree. .. . 

 Nothing of tiniest worth Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or praise, Since the pale corpse-like birth Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays-- Dullest of dull-hued days!

 Wanly upon the panes The rain slides, as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet Here, while Day's presence wanes, And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set, He wakens my regret. 

In the poem which contains these verses the emotion of the poet giveswords often undistinguished an almost Elizabethan rhythm. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is a poet who often achieves music of verses, though he seldomachieves music of phrase. 

We must, then, be grateful without niggardliness for the gift of hisverse. On the larger canvas of his prose we find a vision more abundant, more varied, more touched with humour. But his poems are the genuineconfessions of a soul, the meditations of a man of genius, brooding notwithout bitterness but with pity on the paths that lead to the grave, and the figures that flit along them so solitarily and so ineffectually. 

2. A POET IN WINTER

In the last poem in his last book, _Moments of Vision_, Mr. Hardymeditates on his own immortality, as all men of genius probably do atone time or another. _Afterwards_, the poem in which he does so, isinteresting, not only for this reason, but because it containsimplicitly a definition and a defence of the author's achievement inliterature. The poem is too long to quote in full, but the first threeverses will be sufficient to illustrate what I have said:

 When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the people say: "He was a man who used to notice such things"?

 If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think: "To him this must have been a familiar sight"?

 If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, Will they say: "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone"?

Even without the two other verses, we have here a remarkable attempt onthe part of an artist to paint a portrait, as it were, of his owngenius. 

Mr. Hardy's genius is essentially that of a man who "used to notice suchthings" as the fluttering of the green leaves in May, and to whom theswift passage of a night-jar in the twilight has "been a familiarsight. " He is one of the most sensitive observers of nature who havewritten English prose. It may even be that he will be remembered longerfor his studies of nature than for his studies of human nature. His daysare among his greatest characters, as in the wonderful scene on theheath in the opening of _The Return of the Native_. He would havewritten well of the world, one can imagine, even if he had found ituninhabited. But his sensitiveness is not merely sensitiveness of theeye: it is also sensitiveness of the heart. He has, indeed, thathypersensitive sort of temperament, as the verse about the hedgehogsuggests, which is the victim at once of pity and of a feeling ofhopeless helplessness. Never anywhere else has there been such a worldof pity put into a quotation as Mr. Hardy has put into that line and ahalf from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, which he placed on thetitle-page of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_:--

 Poor wounded name, my bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee!

In the use to which he put these words Mr. Hardy may be said to haveadded to the poetry of Shakespeare. He gave them a new imaginativecontext, and poured his own heart into them. For the same helpless pitywhich he feels for dumb creatures he feels for men and women:

 . .. He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them. 

It is the spirit of pity brooding over the landscape in Mr. Hardy'sbooks that makes them an original and beautiful contribution toliterature, in spite of his endless errors as an artist. 

His last book is a reiteration both of his genius and of his errors. Aswe read the hundred and sixty or so poems it contains we get theimpression of genius presiding over a multitude of errors. There are nothalf a dozen poems in the book the discovery of which, should theauthor's name be forgotten, would send the critics in quest of otherwork from the same magician's hand. One feels safe in prophesyingimmortality for only two, _The Oxen_ and _In Time of "the Breaking ofNations"_; and these have already appeared in the selection of theauthor's poems published in the Golden Treasury Series. The fact thatthe entirely new poems contain nothing on the plane of immortality, however, does not mean that _Moments of Vision_ is a book of verse aboutwhich one has the right to be indifferent. No writer who is so concernedas Mr. Hardy with setting down what his eyes and heart have told him canbe regarded with indifference. Mr. Hardy's art is lame, but it carriesthe burden of genius. He may be a stammerer as a poet, but he stammersin words of his own concerning a vision of his own. When he notes thebird flying past in the dusk, "like an eyelid's soundless blink, " hedoes not achieve music, but he chronicles an experience, not merelyechoes one, with such exact truth as to make it immortally a part of allexperience. There is nothing borrowed or secondhand, again, in Mr. Hardy's grim vision of the yew-trees in the churchyard by moonlight in_Jubilate_:

 The yew-tree arms, glued hard to the stiff, stark air, Hung still in the village sky as theatre-scenes. 

Mr. Hardy may not enable us to hear the music which is more than themusic of the earth, but he enables us to see what he saw. Hecommunicates his spectacle of the world. He builds his house lopsided, harsh, and with the windows in unusual places; but it is his own house, the house of a seer, of a personality. That is what we are aware of insuch a poem as _On Sturminster Foot Bridge_, in which perfect andprecise observation of nature is allied to intolerably prosaicutterance. The first verse of this poem runs:

 Reticulations creep upon the slack stream's face When the wind skims irritably past. The current clucks smartly into each hollow place That years of flood have scrabbled in the pier's sodden base; The floating-lily leaves rot fast. 

One could make as good music as that out of a milk-cart. One wouldaccept such musicless verse only from a man of genius. But even here Mr. Hardy takes us home with him and makes us stand by his side and listento the clucking stream. He takes us home with him again in the poemcalled _Overlooking the River Stour_, which begins:

 The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam In the wet June's last beam: Like little crossbows animate, The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam. 

 Planing up shavings made of spray, A moor-hen darted out From the bank thereabout. And through the stream-shine ripped her way; Planing up shavings made of spray, A moor-hen darted out. 

In this poem we find observation leaping into song in one line andhobbling into a hard-wrought image in another. Both the line in whichthe first appears, however--

 Like little crossbows animate, and the line in which the second happens--

 Planing up shavings made of spray, equally make us feel how watchful and earnest an observer is Mr. Hardy. He is a man, we realize, to whom bird and river, heath and stone, roadand field and tree, mean immensely more than to his fellows. I do notsuggest that he observes nature without bias--that he mirrors theprocession of visible things with the delight of a child or a lyricpoet. He makes nature his mirror as well as himself a mirror of nature. He colours it with all his sadness, his helplessness, his (if one mayinvent the word and use it without offence) warpedness. If I am notmistaken, he once compared a bleak morning in _The Woodlanders_ to theface of a still-born baby. He loves to dwell on the uncomfortable moodsof nature--on such things as:--

 . .. The watery light Of the moon in its old age;

concerning which moon he goes on to describe how:

 Green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave. 

This, I fear, is a failure, but it is a failure in a common mood of theauthor's. It is a mood in which nature looks out at us, almost ludicrousin its melancholy. In such a poem as that from which I have quoted, itis as though we saw nature with a drip on the end of its nose. Mr. Hardy's is something different from a tragic vision. It is a desolate, disheartening, and, in a way, morbid vision. We wander with him toooften under--

 Gaunt trees that interlace, Through whose flayed fingers I see too clearly The nakedness of the place. 

And Mr. Hardy's vision of the life of men and women transgressessimilarly into a denial of gladness. His gloom, we feel, goes too far. It goes so far that we are tempted at times to think of it as afactitious gloom. He writes a poem called _Honeymoon Time at an Inn_, and this is the characteristic atmosphere in which he introduces us tothe bridegroom and bride:

 At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn, The moon was at the window-square, Deedily brooding in deformed decay-- The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze; At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn, So the moon looked in there. 

There are no happy lovers or happy marriages in Mr. Hardy's world. Suchpeople as are happy would not be happy if only they knew the truth. Manyof Mr. Hardy's poems are, as I have already said, dramatic lyrics on thepattern invented by Robert Browning--short stories in verse. But thereis a certain air of triumph even in Browning's tragic figures. Mr. Hardy's figures are the inmates of despair. Browning's love-poems belongto heroic literature. Mr. Hardy's love-poems belong to the literature ofdownheartedness. Browning's men and women are men and women who have hadthe courage of their love, or who are shown at least against abackground of Browning's own courage. Mr. Hardy's men and women do notknow the wild faith of love. They have not the courage even of theirsins. They are helpless as fishes in a net--a scarcely rebelliouspopulation of the ill-matched and the ill-starred. 

Many of the poems in his last book fail through a lack of imaginativeenergy. It is imaginative energy that makes the reading of a greattragedy like _King Lear_ not a depressing, but an exalting experience. But is there anything save depression to be got from reading such a poemas _A Caged Goldfinch_:--

 Within a churchyard, on a recent grave, I saw a little cage That jailed a goldfinch. All was silence, save Its hops from stage to stage. 

 There was inquiry in its wistful eye. And once it tried to sing; Of him or her who placed it there, and why, No one knew anything. 

 True, a woman was found drowned the day ensuing, And some at times averred The grave to be her false one's, who when wooing Gave her the bird. 

Apart even from the ludicrous associations which modern slang has giventhe last phrase, making it look like a queer pun, this poem seems to oneto drive sorrow over the edge of the ridiculous. That goldfinch hassurely escaped from a Max-Beerbohm parody. The ingenuity with which Mr. Hardy plots tragic situations for his characters in some of his otherpoems is, indeed, in repeated danger of misleading him into parody. Oneof his poems tells, for instance, how a stranger finds an old manscrubbing a Statue of Liberty in a city square, and, hearing he does itfor love, hails him as "Liberty's knight divine. " The old man confessesthat he does not care twopence for Liberty, and declares that he keepsthe statue clean in memory of his beautiful daughter, who had sat as amodel for it--a girl fair in fame as in form. In the interests of hisplot and his dismal philosophy, Mr. Hardy identifies the stranger withthe sculptor of the statue, and dismisses us with his blighting aside onthe old man's credulous love of his dead daughter:

 Answer I gave not. Of that form The carver was I at his side; His child my model, held so saintly, Grand in feature. Gross in nature, In the dens of vice had died. 

This is worse than optimism. 

It is only fair to say that, though poem after poem--including the oneabout the fat young man whom the doctors gave only six months to liveunless he walked a great deal, and who therefore was compelled to refusea drive in the poet's phaeton, though night was closing over theheath--dramatizes the meaningless miseries of life, there is also to befound in some of the poems a faint sunset-glow of hope, almost of faith. There have been compensations, we realize in _I Travel as a PhantomNow_, even in this world of skeletons. Mr. Hardy's fatalism concerningGod seems not very far from faith in God in that beautiful Christmaspoem, _The Oxen_. Still, the ultimate mood of the poems is not faith. Itis one of pity, so despairing as to be almost nihilism. There is mockeryin it without the merriment of mockery. The general atmosphere of thepoems, it seems to me, is to be found perfectly expressed in the lastthree lines of one of the poems, which is about a churchyard, a deadwoman, a living rival, and the ghost of a soldier:

 There was a cry by the white-flowered mound, There was a laugh from underground, There was a deeper gloom around. 

How much of the art of Thomas Hardy is suggested in those lines! Thelaugh from underground, the deeper gloom--are they not all butomnipresent throughout his later and greatest work? The war could notdeepen such pessimism. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hardy's war poetry ismore cheerful, because more heroic, than his poetry about the normalworld. Destiny was already crueller than any war-lord. The Prussian, tosuch an imagination, could be no more than a fly--a poisonous fly--onthe wheel of destiny's disastrous car.