THE ART OF LETTERS

by

ROBERT LYND

New York

1921

TO J. C. SQUIRE

My Dear Jack, You were godfather to a good many of the chapters in this book when theyfirst appeared in the _London Mercury_, the _New Statesman_, and the_British Review_. Others of the chapters appeared in the _Daily News_, the_Nation_, the _Athenæum_, the _Observer_, and _Everyman_. Will itembarrass you if I now present you with the entire brood in the name of afriendship that has lasted many midnights?

Yours, Robert Lynd. 

Steyning, 30th August 1920

CONTENTS

 I. MR. PEPYS

 II. JOHN BUNYAN

 III. THOMAS CAMPION

 IV. JOHN DONNE

 V. HORACE WALPOLE

 VI. WILLIAM COWPER

 VII. A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS

 VIII. THE OFFICE OF THE POETS

 IX. EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC

 X. GRAY AND COLLINS

 XI. ASPECTS OF SHELLEY (1) THE CHARACTER HALF-COMIC (2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST (3) THE POET OF HOPE

 XII. THE WISDOM OF COLERIDGE (1) COLERIDGE AS CRITIC (2) COLERIDGE AS A TALKER

 XIII. TENNYSON: A TEMPORARY CRITICISM

 XIV. THE POLITICS OF SWIFT AND SHAKESPEARE (1) SWIFT (2) SHAKESPEARE

 XV. THE PERSONALITY OF MORRIS

 XVI. GEORGE MEREDITH (1) THE EGOIST (2) THE OLYMPIAN UNBENDS (3) THE ANGLO-IRISH ASPECT

 XVII. OSCAR WILDE

XVIII. TWO ENGLISH CRITICS (1) MR. SAINTSBURY (2) MR. GOSSE

 XIX. AN AMERICAN CRITIC: PROFESSOR IRVING BABBIT

 XX. GEORGIANS (1) MR. DE LA MARE (2) THE GROUP (3) THE YOUNG SATIRISTS

 XXI. LABOUR OF AUTHORSHIP

 XXII. THE THEORY OF POETRY

XXIII. THE CRITIC AS DESTROYER

 XXIV. BOOK REVIEWING

THE ART OF LETTERS

I. --MR. PEPYS

Mr. Pepys was a Puritan. Froude once painted a portrait of Bunyan as anold Cavalier. He almost persuaded one that it was true till the laterdiscovery of Bunyan's name on the muster-roll of one of Cromwell'sregiments showed that he had been a Puritan from the beginning. If onecalls Mr. Pepys a Puritan, however, one does not do so for the love ofparadox or at a guess. He tells us himself that he "was a great Roundheadwhen I was a boy, " and that, on the day on which King Charles wasbeheaded, he said: "Were I to preach on him, my text should be--'thememory of the wicked shall rot. '" After the Restoration he was uneasy lesthis old schoolfellow, Mr. Christmas, should remember these strong words. True, when it came to the turn of the Puritans to suffer, he went, with afine impartiality, to see General Harrison disembowelled at Charing Cross. "Thus it was my chance, " he comments, "to see the King beheaded at WhiteHall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the Kingat Charing Cross. From thence to my Lord's, and took Captain Cuttance andMr. Shepley to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters. " Pepys wasa spectator and a gourmet even more than he was a Puritan. He was aPuritan, indeed, only north-north-west. Even when at Cambridge he gaveevidence of certain susceptibilities to the sins of the flesh. He was"admonished" on one occasion for "having been scandalously overserved withdrink ye night before. " He even began to write a romance entitled _Love aCheate_, which he tore up ten years later, though he "liked it very well. "At the same time his writing never lost the tang of Puritan speech. "Blessed be God" are the first words of his shocking Diary. When he had togive up keeping the Diary nine and a half years later, owing to failingsight, he wound up, after expressing his intention of dictating in thefuture a more seemly journal to an amanuensis, with the characteristicsentences:

 Or, if there be anything, which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb. Are past, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand. 

 And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me. 

With these words the great book ends--the diary of one of the godliest andmost lecherous of men. 

In some respects Mr. Pepys reminds one of a type that is now commoner inScotland, I fancy, than elsewhere. He himself seems at one time to havetaken the view that he was of Scottish descent. None of the authorities, however, will admit this, and there is apparently no doubt that hebelonged to an old Cambridgeshire family that had come down in the world, his father having dwindled into a London tailor. In temperament, however, he seems to me to have been more Scottish than the very Scottish Boswell. He led a double life with the same simplicity of heart. He was Scottish inthe way in which he lived with one eye on the "lassies" and the other on"the meenister. " He was notoriously respectable, notoriously hard-working, a judge of sermons, fond of the bottle, cautious, thrifty. He had all thevirtues of a K. C. B. He was no scapegrace or scallywag such as you mightfind nowadays crowing over his sins in Chelsea. He lived, so far as theworld was concerned, in the complete starch of rectitude. He was a pillarof Society, and whatever age he had been born in, he would have acceptedits orthodoxy. He was as grave a man as Holy Willie. Stevenson hascommented on the gradual decline of his primness in the later years of theDiary. "His favourite ejaculation, 'Lord!' occurs, " he declares, "but oncethat I have observed in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at leastfive times in '63; after which the 'Lords' may be said to pullulate likeherrings, with here and there a solitary 'damned, ' as it were a whaleamong the shoal. " As a matter of fact, Mr. Pepys's use of the expression"Lord!" has been greatly exaggerated, especially by the parodists. Hisprimness, if that is the right word, never altogether deserted him. Wediscover this even in the story of his relations with women. In 1665, forinstance, he writes with surprised censoriousness of Mrs. Penington:

 There we drank and laughed [he relates], and she willingly suffered me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there long. Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought she could have suffered it by her former discourse with me; so modest she seemed and I know not what. 

It is a sad world for idealists. 

Mr. Pepys's Puritanism, however, was something less than Mr. Pepys. It wasbut a pair of creaking Sunday boots on the feet of a pagan. Mr. Pepys wasan appreciator of life to a degree that not many Englishmen have beensince Chaucer. He was a walking appetite. And not an entirely ignobleappetite either. He reminds one in some respects of the poet in Browning's"How it strikes a Contemporary, " save that he had more worldly success. One fancies him with the same inquisitive ferrule on the end of his stick, the same "scrutinizing hat, " the same eye for the bookstall and "the manwho slices lemon into drink. " "If any cursed a woman, he took note. "Browning's poet, however, apparently "took note" on behalf of a higherpower. It is difficult to imagine Mr. Pepys sending his Diary to theaddress of the Recording Angel. Rather, the Diary is the soliloquy of anegoist, disinterested and daring as a bad boy's reverie over the fire. 

Nearly all those who have written about Pepys are perplexed by thequestion whether Pepys wrote his Diary with a view to its ultimatepublication. This seems to me to betray some ignorance of the working ofthe human mind. 

Those who find one of the world's puzzles in the fact that Mr. Pepyswrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant noother eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains unnecessarily. Pepys was not the first human being to make his confession in an emptyconfessional. Criminals, lovers and other egoists, for lack of a priest, will make their confessions to a stone wall or a tree. There is no moremystery in it than in the singing of birds. The motive may be either toobtain discharge from the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store upthe very echoes and last drops of pleasure. Human beings keep diaries foras many different reasons as they write lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy, the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure. The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the worldmade it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in theearly days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write incipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the commonprudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret andsolitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. He had discovered aroom to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see therespectable man liberated. He no longer needs to be on his officialbehaviour, but may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind thesafety of shorthand. And how he takes advantage of his opportunities! Heremains to the end something of a Puritan in his standards and his publiccarriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from the sty ofEpicurus, naked and only half-ashamed. He never, it must be admitted, entirely shakes off his timidity. At a crisis he dare not confess inEnglish even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad French with a blush. In some instances the French may be for facetiousness rather thanconcealment, as in the reference to the ladies of Rochester Castle in1665:

 Thence to Rochester, walked to the Crowne, and while dinner was getting ready, I did then walk to visit the old Castle ruines, which hath been a noble place, and there going up I did upon the stairs overtake three pretty mayds or women and took them up with me, and I did _baiser sur mouches et toucher leur mains_ and necks to my great pleasure; but lord! to see what a dreadfull thing it is to look down the precipices, for it did fright me mightily, and hinder me of much pleasure which I would have made to myself in the company of these three, if it had not been for that. 

Even here, however, Mr. Pepys's French has a suggestion of evasion. Healways had a faint hope that his conscience would not understand French. 

Some people have written as though Mr. Pepys, in confessing himself in hisDiary, had confessed us all. They profess to see in the Diary simply theimage of Everyman in his bare skin. They think of Pepys as an ordinary manwho wrote an extraordinary book. To me it seems that Pepys's Diary is notmore extraordinary as a book than Pepys himself is as a man. Takenseparately, nine out of ten of his characteristics may seem ordinaryenough--his fears, his greeds, his vices, his utilitarian repentances. They were compounded in him, however, in such proportion as to produce anentirely new mixture--a character hardly less original than Dr. Johnson orCharles Lamb. He had not any great originality of virtue, as these othershad, but he was immensely original in his responsiveness--his capacity forbeing interested, tempted and pleased. The voluptuous nature of the manmay be seen in such a passage as that in which, speaking of "thewind-musique when the angel comes down" in _The Virgin Martyr_, hedeclares:

 It ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife. 

Writing of Mrs. Knipp on another occasion, he says:

 She and I singing, and God forgive me! I do still see that my nature is not to be quite conquered, but will esteem pleasure above all things, though yet in the middle of it, it has reluctances after my business, which is neglected by my following my pleasure. However, musique and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is. 

Within a few weeks of this we find him writing again:

 So abroad to my ruler's of my books, having, God forgive me! a mind to see Nan there, which I did, and so back again, and then out again to see Mrs. Bettons, who were looking out of the window as I came through Fenchurch Streete. So that, indeed, I am not, as I ought to be, able to command myself in the pleasures of my eye. 

Though page after page of the Diary reveals Mr. Pepys as an extravagantpleasure-lover, however, he differed from the majority of pleasure-loversin literature in not being a man of taste. He had a rolling rather than afastidious eye. He kissed promiscuously, and was not aspiring in hislusts. He once held Lady Castlemaine in his arms, indeed, but it was in adream. He reflected, he tells us, that since it was a dream, and that I took so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be if when we are in our graves (as Shakespeare resembles it) we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this, that then we should not need to be so fearful of death, as we are this plague time. 

He praises this dream at the same time as "the best that ever was dreamt. "Mr. Pepys's idea of Paradise, it would be seen, was that commonlyattributed to the Mohammedans. Meanwhile he did his best to turn Londoninto an anticipatory harem. We get a pleasant picture of a littleRoundhead Sultan in such a sentence as "At night had Mercer comb my headand so to supper, sing a psalm and to bed. "

 * * * * *

It may seem unfair to over-emphasize the voluptuary in Mr. Pepys, but itis Mr. Pepys, the promiscuous amourist; stringing his lute (God forgivehim!) on a Sunday, that is the outstanding figure in the Diary. Mr. Pepysattracts us, however, in a host of other aspects--Mr. Pepys whose nose hisjealous wife attacked with the red-hot tongs as he lay in bed; Mr. Pepyswho always held an anniversary feast on the date on which he had been cutfor the stone; Mr. Pepys who was not "troubled at it at all" as soon as hesaw that the lady who had spat on him in the theatre was a pretty one; Mr. Pepys drinking; Mr. Pepys among his dishes; Mr. Pepys among princes; Mr. Pepys who was "mightily pleased" as he listened to "my aunt Jenny, a poor, religious, well-meaning good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty";Mr. Pepys, as he counts up his blessings in wealth, women, honour andlife, and decides that "all these things are ordered by God Almighty tomake me contented"; Mr. Pepys as, having just refused to see LadyPickering, he comments, "But how natural it is for us to slight people outof power!"; Mr. Pepys who groans as he sees his office clerks sitting inmore expensive seats than himself at the theatre. Mr. Pepys is a man somany-sided, indeed, that in order to illustrate his character one wouldhave to quote the greater part of his Diary. He is a mass of contrasts andcontradictions. He lives without sequence except in the business ofgetting-on (in which he might well have been taken as a model by SamuelSmiles). One thinks of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimesas the most innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal andsnobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and agrateful heart. He felt that God had created the world for the pleasure ofSamuel Pepys, and had no doubt that it was good. 

II. --JOHN BUNYAN

Once, when John Bunyan had been preaching in London, a friendcongratulated him on the excellence of his sermon. "You need not remind meof that, " replied Bunyan. "The Devil told me of it before I was out of thepulpit. " On another occasion, when he was going about in disguise, aconstable who had a warrant for his arrest spoke to him and inquired if heknew that devil Bunyan. "Know him?" said Bunyan. "You might call him adevil if you knew him as well as I once did. " We have in these anecdotes akey to the nature of Bunyan's genius. He was a realist, a romanticist, anda humourist. He was as exact a realist (though in a different way) as Mr. Pepys, whose contemporary he was. He was a realist both in hisself-knowledge and in his sense of the outer world. He had the acute eyeof the artist which was aware of the stones of the street and the crows inthe ploughed field. As a preacher, he did not guide the thoughts of hishearers, as so many preachers do, into the wind. He recalled them fromorthodox abstractions to the solid earth. "Have you forgot, " he asked hisfollowers, "the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where God did visit your souls?" He himself could never be indifferent tothe place or setting of the great tragi-comedy of salvation. When herelates how he gave up swearing as a result of a reproof from a "loose andungodly" woman, he begins the story: "One day, as I was standing at aneighbour's shop-window, and there cursing and swearing after my wontedmanner, there sat within the woman of the house, who heard me. " Thispassion for locality was always at his elbow. A few pages further on in_Grace Abounding_, when he tells us how he abandoned not only swearing butthe deeper-rooted sins of bell-ringing and dancing, and neverthelessremained self-righteous and "ignorant of Jesus Christ, " he introduces thenext episode in the story of his conversion with the sentence: "But upon aday the good providence of God called me to Bedford to work at my calling, and in one of the streets of that town I came where there were three orfour poor women sitting at a door in the sun, talking about the things ofGod. " That seems to me to be one of the most beautiful sentences inEnglish literature. Its beauty is largely due to the hungry eyes withwhich Bunyan looked at the present world during his progress to the next. If he wrote the greatest allegory in English literature, it is because hewas able to give his narrative the reality of a travel-book instead of theinsubstantial quality of a dream. He leaves the reader with the feelingthat he is moving among real places and real people. As for the people, Bunyan can give even an abstract virtue--still more, an abstract vice--theskin and bones of a man. A recent critic has said disparagingly thatBunyan would have called Hamlet Mr. Facing-both-ways. As a matter of fact, Bunyan's secret is the direct opposite of this. His great and singulargift was the power to create an atmosphere in which a character with aname like Mr. Facing-both-ways is accepted on the same plane of reality asHamlet. 

If Bunyan was a realist, however, as regards place and character, hisconception of life was none the less romantic. Life to him was a story ofhairbreadth escapes--of a quest beset with a thousand perils. Not only wasthere that great dragon the Devil lying in wait for the traveller, butthere was Doubting Castle to pass, and Giant Despair, and the lions. Wehave in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ almost every property of romanticadventure and terror. We want only a map in order to bring home to us thefact that it belongs to the same school of fiction as _Treasure Island_. There may be theological contentions here and there that interrupt theaction of the story as they interrupt the interest of _Grace Abounding_. But the tedious passages are extraordinarily few, considering that theauthor had the passions of a preacher. No doubt the fact that, when hewrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_, he was not definitely thinking of theedification of his neighbours, goes far towards explaining the absence ofcommonplace arguments and exhortations. "I did it mine own self togratify, " he declared in his rhymed "apology for his book. " Later on, inreply to some brethren of the stricter sort who condemned such dabbling infiction, he defended his book as a tract, remarking that, if you want tocatch fish, They must be groped for, and be tickled too, Or they will not be catch't, whate'er you do. 

But in its origin _The Pilgrim's Progress_ was not a tract, but theinevitable image of the experiences of the writer's soul. And what wildadventures those were every reader of _Grace Abounding_ knows. There wereterrific contests with the Devil, who could never charm John Bunyan as hecharmed Eve. To Bunyan these contests were not metaphorical battles, butwere as struggles with flesh and blood. "He pulled, and I pulled, " hewrote in one place; "but, God be praised, I overcame him--I got sweetnessfrom it. " And the Devil not only fought him openly, but made more subtleattempts to entice him to sin. "Sometimes, again, when I have beenpreaching, I have been violently assaulted with thoughts of blasphemy, andstrongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth before thecongregation. " Bunyan, as he looked back over the long record of hisspiritual torments, thought of it chiefly as a running fight with theDevil. Outside the covers of the Bible, little existed save temptationsfor the soul. No sentence in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is more suggestiveof Bunyan's view of life than that in which the merchandise of Vanity Fairis described as including "delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not. " It is no wonderthat one to whom so much of the common life of man was simply Devil'straffic took a tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, andapplied to himself, on account of his love of strong language, Sundaysports and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strongif he had committed all the crimes of the latest Bluebeard. He himself, indeed, seems to have become alarmed when--probably as a result of his ownconfessions--it began to be rumoured that he was a man with an unspeakablepast. He now demanded that "any woman in heaven, earth or hell" should beproduced with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage. "Myfoes, " he declared, "have missed their mark in this shooting at me. I amnot the man. I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all thefornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till theybe dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would still be alive andwell. " Bunyan, one observes, was always as ready to defend as to attackhimself. The verses he prefixed to _The Holy War_ are an indignant replyto those who accused him of not being the real author of _The Pilgrim'sProgress_. He wound up a fervent defence of his claims to originality bypointing out the fact that his name, if "anagrammed, " made the words: "NUHONY IN A B. " Many worse arguments have been used in the quarrels oftheologians. 

Bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of countenance, quick of eye, and mild of speech. His mildness of speech, I fancy, musthave been an acquired mildness. He loved swearing as a boy, and, as _ThePilgrim's Progress_ shows, even in his later life he had not lost thehumour of calling names. No other English author has ever invented a nameof the labelling kind equal to that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman--a character, by the way, who does not appear in the first edition of _The Pilgrim'sProgress_, but came in later as an afterthought. Congreve's "TribulationSpintext" and Dickens's "Lord Frederick Verisopht" are mere mechanicalcontrivances compared to this triumph of imagination and phrase. Bunyan'sgift for names was in its kind supreme. His humorous fancy chiefly tookthat form. Even atheists can read him with pleasure for the sake of hisnames. The modern reader, no doubt, often smiles at these names whereBunyan did not mean him to smile, as when Mrs. Lightmind says: "I wasyesterday at Madam Wantons, when we were as merry as the maids. For who doyou think should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-flesh, and three or fourmore, with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth, and some others?" Bunyan'sfancifulness, however, gives us pleasure quite apart from such quainteffects as this. How delightful is Mr. By-ends's explanation of the twopoints in regard to which he and his family differ in religion from thoseof the stricter sort: "First, we never strive against wind and tide. Secondly, we are always most zealous when Religion goes in his silverslippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines, and the people applaud him. " What a fine grotesque, again, Bunyan gives usin toothless Giant Pope sitting in the mouth of the cave, and, though toofeeble to follow Christian, calling out after him: "You will never mendtill more of you be burnt. " We do not read _The Pilgrim's Progress_, however, as a humorous book. Bunyan's pains mean more to us than the playof his fancy. His books are not seventeenth-century grotesques, but thestory of his heart. He has written that story twice over--with the gloomof the realist in _Grace Abounding_, and with the joy of the artist in_The Pilgrim's Progress_. Even in _Grace Abounding_, however, much as itis taken up with a tale of almost lunatic terror, the tenderness ofBunyan's nature breaks out as he tells us how, when he was taken off toprison, "the parting with my wife and four children hath often been to mein the place as the pulling the flesh from the bones . .. Especially mypoor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, thethoughts of the hardship I thought my poor blind one might go under wouldbreak my heart to pieces!" At the same time, fear and not love is thedominating passion in _Grace Abounding_. We are never far from the noiseof Hell in its pages. In _Grace Abounding_ man is a trembling criminal. In_The Pilgrim's Progress_ he has become, despite his immense capacity forfear, a hero. The description of the fight with Apollyon is a piece ofheroic literature equal to anything in those romances of adventure thatwent to the head of Don Quixote. "But, as God would have it, whileApollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby to make a full end of thisgood man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and caughtit, saying: 'Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy! when I fall I shallarise'; and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back, as one that had received a mortal wound. " Heroic literature cannot surpassthis. Its appeal is universal. When one reads it, one ceases to wonderthat there exists even a Catholic version of _The Pilgrim's Progress_, inwhich Giant Pope is discreetly omitted, but the heroism of Christianremains. Bunyan disliked being called by the name of any sect. Hisimagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of aseventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily not aBaptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance toEveryman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him fromsinking into a pulpit generalization. 

III. --THOMAS CAMPION

Thomas Campion is among English poets the perfect minstrel. He takes loveas a theme rather than is burned by it. His most charming, if not his mostbeautiful poem begins: "Hark, all you ladies. " He sings of love-makingrather than of love. His poetry, like Moore's--though it is infinitelybetter poetry than Moore's--is the poetry of flirtation. Little is knownabout his life, but one may infer from his work that his range of amorousexperience was rather wide than deep. There is no lady "with two pitchballs stuck in her face for eyes" troubling his pages with a constantpresence. The Mellea and Caspia--the one too easy of capture, the othertoo difficult--to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are addressed, aresaid to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love. But he has buriedmost of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead language. HisEnglish poems do not portray him as a man likely to die of love, or evento forget a meal on account of it. His world is a happy land of song, inwhich ladies all golden in the sunlight succeed one another as in apageant of beauties. Lesbia, Laura, and Corinna with her lute equallyinhabit it. They are all characters in a masque of love, forms and figuresin a revel. Their maker is an Epicurean and an enemy to "the sager sort":

 My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love, And, though the sager sort our deeps reprove, Let us not weigh them. Heav'n's great lamps do dive Into their west, and straight again revive. But, soon as once is set our little light, Then must we sleep our ever-during night. 

Ladies in so bright and insecure a day must not be permitted to "let theirlovers moan. " If they do, they will incur the just vengeance of the FairyQueen Proserpina, who will send her attendant fairies to pinch their whitehands and pitiless arms. Campion is the Fairy Queen's court poet. Heclaims all men--perhaps, one ought rather to say all women--as hersubjects:

 In myrtle arbours on the downs The Fairy Queen Proserpina, This night by moonshine leading merry rounds, Holds a watch with sweet love, Down the dale, up the hill; No plaints or groans may move Their holy vigil. 

 All you that will hold watch with love, The Fairy Queen Proserpina Will make you fairer than Dione's dove; Roses red, lilies white And the clear damask hue, Shall on your cheeks alight: Love will adorn you. 

 All you that love, or lov'd before, The Fairy Queen Proserpina Bids you increase that loving humour more: They that have not fed On delight amorous, She vows that they shall lead Apes in Avernus. 

It would be folly to call the poem that contains these three verses one ofthe great English love-songs. It gets no nearer love than a ballet does. There are few lyrics of "delight amorous" in English, however, that cancompare with it in exquisite fancy and still more exquisite music. 

Campion, at the same time, if he was the poet of the higher flirtation, was no mere amorous jester, as Moore was. His affairs of the heart werealso affairs of the imagination. Love may not have transformed the earthfor him, as it did Shakespeare and Donne and Browning, but at least ittransformed his accents. He sang neither the "De Profundis" of love northe triumphal ode of love that increases from anniversary to anniversary;but he knew the flying sun and shadow of romantic love, and staged them inmusic of a delicious sadness, of a fantastic and playful gravity. Hispoems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little insincere. They arethe compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. He exaggerates theburden of his sigh, the incurableness of his wounded heart. But beneaththese conventional excesses there is a flow of sincere and beautifulfeeling. He may not have been a worshipper, but his admirations weregolden. In one or two of his poems, such as:

 Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet, admiration treads on the heels of worship. 

 All that I sung still to her praise did tend; Still she was first, still she my song did end--

in these lines we find a note of triumphant fidelity rare in Campion'swork. Compared with this, that other song beginning:

 Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow, Though thou be black as night, And she made all of light, Yet follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow--

seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines. Others of the songshesitate between compliment and the finer ecstasy. The compliment iscertainly of the noblest in the lyric which sets out--

 When thou must home to shades of underground, And, there arriv'd, a new admired guest, The beauteous spirits do ingirt thee round, White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest, To hear the stories of thy finisht love From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;

but it fades by way of beauty into the triviality of convention in thesecond verse:

 Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, Of masks and revels which sweet youth did make, Of tourneys and great challenges of knights, And all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake: When thou hast told these honours done to thee, Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murther me. 

There is more of jest than of sorrow in the last line. It is an act ofcourtesy. Through all these songs, however, there is a continuous expenseof beauty, of a very fortune of admiration, that entitles Campion to aplace above any of the other contemporaries of Shakespeare as a writer ofsongs. His dates (1567-1620) almost coincide with those of Shakespeare. Living in an age of music, he wrote music that Shakespeare alone couldequal and even Shakespeare could hardly surpass. Campion's words arethemselves airs. They give us at once singer and song and stringedinstrument. 

It is only in music, however, that Campion is in any way comparable toShakespeare. Shakespeare is the nonpareil among song-writers, not merelybecause of his music, but because of the imaginative riches that he poursout in his songs. In contrast with his abundance, Campion's fortune seemslean, like his person. Campion could not see the world for lovely ladies. Shakespeare in his lightest songs was always aware of the abundantbackground of the visible world. Campion seems scarcely to know of theexistence of the world apart from the needs of a masque-writer. Among hissongs there is nothing comparable to "When daisies pied and violets blue, "or "Where the bee sucks, " or "You spotted snakes with double tongue, " or"When daffodils begin to peer, " or "Full fathom five, " or "Fear no morethe heat o' the sun. " He had neither Shakespeare's eye nor Shakespeare'sexperiencing soul. He puts no girdle round the world in his verse. Heknows but one mood and its sub-moods. Though he can write

 There is a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies grow, he brings into his songs none of the dye and fragrance of flowers. 

Perhaps it was because he suspected a certain levity and thinness in hisgenius that Campion was so contemptuous of his English verse. His songs hedismissed as "superfluous blossoms of his deeper studies. " It is as thoughhe thought, like Bacon, that anything written for immortality should bewritten in Latin. Bacon, it may be remembered, translated his essays intoLatin for fear they might perish in so modern and barbarous a tongue asEnglish. Campion was equally inclined to despise his own language incomparison with that of the Greeks and Romans. His main quarrel with itarose, however, from the obstinacy with which English poets clung to "thechildish titillation of rhyming. " "Bring before me now, " he wrote, "anythe most self-loved rhymer, and let me see if without blushing he be ableto read his lame, halting rhymes. " There are few more startling paradoxesin literature than that it should have been this hater of rhymes who didmore than any other writer to bring the art of rhyme to perfection in theEnglish language. The bent of his intellect was classical, as we see inhis astonishing _Observations on the Art of English Poesy_, in which hesets out to demonstrate "the unaptness of rhyme in poesy. " The bent of hisgenius, on the other hand, was romantic, as was shown when, desiring toprovide certain airs with words, he turned out--that seems, in thecircumstances, to be the proper word--"after the fashion of the time, ear-pleasing rhymes without art. " His songs can hardly be called"pot-boilers, " but they were equally the children of chance. They wereaccidents, not fulfilments of desire. Luckily, Campion, writing them withmusic in his head, made his words themselves creatures of music. "In theseEnglish airs, " he wrote in one of his prefaces, "I have chiefly aimed tocouple my words and notes lovingly together. " It would be impossible toimprove on this as a description of his achievement in rhyme. Only one ofhis good poems, "Rosecheek'd Laura, " is to be found among those which hewrote according to his pseudo-classical theory. All the rest are amongthose in which he coupled his words and notes lovingly together, not as aduty, but as a diversion. 

Irish critics have sometimes hoped that certain qualities in Campion'smusic might be traced to the fact that his grandfather was "John Campionof Dublin, Ireland. " The art--and in Campion it was art, notartlessness--with which he made use of such rhymes as "hill" and "vigil, ""sing" and "darling, " besides his occasional use of internal rhyme andassonance (he rhymed "licens'd" and "silence, " "strangeness" and"plainness, " for example), has seemed to be more akin to the practices ofIrish than of English poets. No evidence exists, however, as to whetherCampion's grandfather was Irish in anything except his adventures. OfCampion himself we know that his training was English. He went toPeterhouse, and, though he left it without taking a degree, he wasapparently regarded as one of the promising figures in the Cambridge ofhis day. "I know, Cambridge, " apostrophized a writer of the time, "howsoever now old, thou hast some young. Bid them be chaste, yet sufferthem to be witty. Let them be soundly learned, yet suffer them to begentlemanlike qualified"; and the admonitory reference, though he had leftCambridge some time before, is said to have been to "sweet masterCampion. "

The rest of his career may be summarized in a few sentences. He wasadmitted to Gray's Inn, but was never called to the Bar. That he served asa soldier in France under Essex is inferred by his biographers. Heafterwards practised as a doctor, but whether he studied medicine duringhis travels abroad or in England is not known. The most startling factrecorded of his maturity is that he acted as a go-between in bribing theLieutenant of the Tower to resign his post and make way for a more pliablesuccessor on the eve of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. This he did onbehalf of Sir Thomas Monson, one of whose dependants, as Mr. PercivalVivian says, "actually carried the poisoned tarts and jellies. " Campionafterwards wrote a masque in celebration of the nuptials of the murderers. Both Monson and he, however, are universally believed to have beeninnocent agents in the crime. Campion boldly dedicated his _Third Book ofAirs_ to Monson after the first shadow of suspicion had passed. 

As a poet, though he was no Puritan, he gives the impression of havingbeen a man of general virtue. It is not only that he added piety toamorousness. This might be regarded as flirting with religion. Did not hehimself write, in explaining why he mixed pious and light songs; "He thatin publishing any work hath a desire to content all palates must cater forthem accordingly"? Even if the spiritual depth of his graver songs hasbeen exaggerated, however, they are clearly the expression of a charmingand tender spirit. 

 Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore, Never tired pilgrim's limbs affected slumber more, Than my wearied sprite now longs to fly out of my troubled breast. O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest. 

What has the "sweet master Campion" who wrote these lines to do withpoisoned tarts and jellies? They are not ecstatic enough to have beenwritten by a murderer. 

IV. --JOHN DONNE

Izaak Walton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of almostseraphic beauty. When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said thatthe age had brought forth another Pico della Mirandola. As a young man inhis twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his secret marriagewith his patron's niece--"for love, " says Walton, "is a flatteringmischief"--purchased at first only the ruin of his hopes and a term inprison. Finally, we have the later Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul'srepresented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of his own images, as"always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none;carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticingothers by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives. " The picture isall of noble charm. Walton speaks in one place of "his winningbehaviour--which, when it would entice, had a strange kind of elegantirresistible art. " There are no harsh phrases even in the references tothose irregularities of Donne's youth, by which he had wasted the fortuneof £3, 000--equal, I believe, to more than £30, 000 of our money--bequeathedto him by his father, the ironmonger. "Mr. Donne's estate, " writes Waltongently, referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, "was thegreatest part spent in many and chargeable travels, books, and dear-boughtexperience. " It is true that he quotes Donne's own confession of theirregularities of his early life. But he counts them of no significance. He also utters a sober reproof of Donne's secret marriage as "theremarkable error of his life. " But how little he condemned it in his heartis clear when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne and his wife"with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of theirsufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than thebanquets of dull and low-spirited people. " It was not for Walton to go insearch of small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of theworld--him whose grave, mournful friends "strewed . .. With an abundance ofcurious and costly flowers, " as Alexander the Great strewed the grave of"the famous Achilles. " In that grave there was buried for Walton a wholeage magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety and beauty. More thanthat, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an inimitableChristian. He mourns over "that body, which once was a Temple of the HolyGhost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust, " and, as hemourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "But I shall see itreanimated. " That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed three hundredyears after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan, this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in hisbiography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his _Songs andSonnets_ and _Elegies_ rather than in his _Divine Poems_. We find, in someof these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds withthe good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all thetemptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but forexperience--experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. Hehas left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at oneperiod of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic, immoderate desire ofhuman learning and languages. " Faust in his cell can hardly have been amore insatiate student than Donne. "In the most unsettled days of hisyouth, " Walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond thehour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew himout of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study;though he took great liberty after it. " His thoroughness of study may bejudged from the fact that "he left the resultance of 1, 400 authors, mostof them abridged and analyzed with his own hand. " But we need not gobeyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning that he had madehis own. He was versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. Hesubdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. NineMuses were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He calledin to their aid Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and thesprings for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in thelibrary the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the worksof men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom Londonmay almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime. I do notthink his verse or correspondence contains a single reference toShakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later. The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded withinterest and even friendship was Ben Jonson. Jonson's Catholicism may havebeen a link between them. But, more important than that, Jonson was, likeDonne himself, an inflamed pedant. For each of them learning was thenecessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of theclassics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate toa surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was, I think, becauseDonne was to so great a degree a pagan of the Renaissance, loving theproud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, thathe found it easy to abandon the Catholicism of his family forProtestantism. He undoubtedly became in later life a convinced andpassionate Christian of the Protestant faith, but at the time when hefirst changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the piousconvert. He wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect hadliberated from dogma-worship. Nor did he ever lose this rationalisttolerance. "You know, " he once wrote to a friend, "I have never imprisonedthe word religion. .. . They" (the churches) "are all virtual beams of onesun. " Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with suchwise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines:

 To adore or scorn an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go; And what the hill's suddenness resists win so. 

This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of atheologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not fromardent faith. 

It is all in keeping with one's impression of the young Donne as a mansetting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge andexperience. He travels, though he knows not why he travels. He loves, though he knows not why he loves. He must escape from that "hydroptic, immoderate" thirst of experience by yielding to it. One fancies that itwas in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit, for hehimself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something todo with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions ofstorm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes:

 Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain, Or to disuse me from the queasy pain Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first. 

In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted mostinterest in recent years--the Donne who experienced more variously thanany other poet of his time "the queasy pain of being beloved and loving. "Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing more than inlove. As a youth he leaves the impression of having been an Odysseus oflove, a man of many wiles and many travels. He was a virile neurotic, comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mindeven more than of the body. His sensibilities were different as well asless of a piece, but he had something of Baudelaire's taste for hideousand shocking aspects of lust. One is not surprised to find among his poemsthat "heroical epistle of Sappho to Philaenis, " in which he makes himselfthe casuist of forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, arefor the most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him moreof the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in hisgenius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donneand Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed morefrequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must beadmitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. _Goand Catch a Falling Star_ is but one of a series of delightful lyrics indisparagement of women. In several of the _Elegies_, however, he throwsaway his lute and comes to the satirist's more prosaic business. He writesfrankly as a man in search of bodily experiences:

 Whoever loves, if he do not propose The right true end of love, he's one that goes To sea for nothing but to make him sick. 

In _Love Progress_ he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography of awoman's body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the beautifulseems almost beastly. In _The Anagram_ and _The Comparison_ he plays theYahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses in insulting twoof them. In _The Perfume_ he relates the story of an intrigue with a girlwhose father discovered his presence in the house as a result of his usingscent. Donne's jest about it is suggestive of his uncontrollable passionfor ugliness:

 Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought That his own feet, or breath, that smell had brought. 

It may be contended that in _The Perfume_ he was describing an imaginaryexperience, and indeed we have his own words on record: "I did best when Ihad least truth for my subjects. " But even if we did not accept Mr. Gosse's common-sense explanation of these words, we should feel that thedetails of the story have a vividness that springs straight from reality. It is difficult to believe that Donne had not actually lived in terror ofthe gigantic manservant who was set to spy on the lovers:

 The grim eight-foot-high iron-bound serving-man That oft names God in oaths, and only then; He that to bar the first gate doth as wide As the great Rhodian Colossus stride, Which, if in hell no other pains there were, Makes me fear hell, because he must be there. 

But the most interesting of all the sensual intrigues of Donne, from thepoint of view of biography, especially since Mr. Gosse gave it suchcommanding significance in that _Life of John Donne_ in which he made aliving man out of a mummy, is that of which we have the story in_Jealousy_ and _His Parting from Her_. It is another story of furtive andforbidden love. Its theme is an intrigue carried on under a

 Husband's towering eyes, That flamed with oily sweat of jealousy. 

A characteristic touch of grimness is added to the story by making thehusband a deformed man. Donne, however, merely laughs at his deformity, ashe bids the lady laugh at the jealousy that reduces her to tears:

 O give him many thanks, he is courteous, That in suspecting kindly warneth us. We must not, as we used, flout openly, In scoffing riddles, his deformity; Nor at his board together being set, With words nor touch scarce looks adulterate. 

And he proposes that, now that the husband seems to have discovered them, they shall henceforth carry on their intrigue at some distance from where

 He, swol'n and pampered with great fare, Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair. 

It is an extraordinary story, if it is true. It throws a scarcely lessextraordinary light on the nature of Donne's mind, if he invented it. Atthe same time, I do not think the events it relates played the importantpart which Mr. Gosse assigns to them in Donne's spiritual biography. It isimpossible to read Mr. Gosse's two volumes without getting the impressionthat "the deplorable but eventful liaison, " as he calls it, was the mostfruitful occurrence in Donne's life as a poet. He discovers traces of itin one great poem after another--even in the _Nocturnal upon St. Lucy'sDay_, which is commonly supposed to relate to the Countess of Bedford, andin _The Funeral_, the theme of which Professor Grierson takes to be themother of George Herbert. I confess that the oftener I read the poetry ofDonne the more firmly I become convinced that, far from being primarilythe poet of desire gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet offrustrated love. He is often described by the historians of literature asthe poet who finally broke down the tradition of Platonic love. I believethat, so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of aPlatonic lover among the English poets. He was usually Platonic underprotest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether he finally overcame themore consistent Platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic of _TheEcstasy_ we have no means of knowing. If he did, it would be difficult toresist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue to be hispassionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love was Anne More, whom he afterwards married. If not, we may look for her where we will, whether in Magdalen Herbert (already a young widow who had borne tenchildren when he first met her) or in the Countess of Bedford or inanother. The name is not important, and one is not concerned to know it, especially when one remembers Donne's alarming curse on:

 Whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows Who is my mistress. 

One sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover real peoplein the shadows, as they speculate about Swift's Stella and Vanessa, andhis relations to them. It is enough for us to feel, however, that thesepoems railing at or glorying in Platonic love are no mere goldsmith'scompliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford. Miracles of this sort are not wrought save by the heart. We do not find inthem the underground and sardonic element that appears in so much ofDonne's merely amorous work. We no longer picture him as a sort of Vulcanhammering out the poetry of base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. Hebecomes in them a child Apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him. He makes music of so grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonderat all the critics who have found fault with his rhythms--from Ben Jonson, who said that "for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging, " down toColeridge, who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots, " and describedhim as "rhyme's sturdy cripple. " Coleridge's quatrain on Donne is, withoutdoubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne rodeno dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a master, evenif he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an encyclopædiain his saddle-bags. 

Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he alsoremains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue eachother through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those twobeautiful poems, _The Relic_ and _The Funeral_, addressed to the lady whohad given him a bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells what willhappen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton discovered with

 A bracelet of bright hair about the bone. 

People will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of lovers

 To make their souls at the last busy day Meet at the grave and make a little stay. 

Bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics--the relics of a Magdalenand her lover. He conjectures with a quiet smile:

 All women shall adore us, and some men. 

He warns his worshippers, however, that the facts are far different fromwhat they imagine, and tells the miracle seekers what in reality were "themiracles we harmless lovers wrought":

 First we loved well and faithfully, Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why; Difference of sex no more we knew Than our guardian angels do; Coming and going, we Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals; Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals, Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free: These miracles we did; but now, alas! All measure, and all language I should pass, Should I tell what a miracle she was. 

In _The Funeral_ he returns to the same theme:

 Whoever comes to shroud me do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair that crowns my arm; The mystery, the sign you must not touch, For 'tis my outward soul. 

In this poem, however, he finds less consolation than before in the toomiraculous nobleness of their love:

 Whate'er she meant by it, bury it with me, For since I am Love's martyr, it might breed idolatry, If into other hands these relics came; As 'twas humility To afford to it all that a soul can do, So, 'tis some bravery, That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you. 

In _The Blossom_ he is in a still more earthly mood, and declares that, ifhis mistress remains obdurate, he will return to London, where he willfind a mistress:

 As glad to have my body as my mind. 

_The Primrose_ is another appeal for a less intellectual love:

 Should she Be more than woman, she would get above All thought of sex, and think to move My heart to study her, and not to love. 

If we turn back to _The Undertaking_, however, we find Donne boasting oncemore of the miraculous purity of a love which it would be useless tocommunicate to other men, since, there being no other mistress to love inthe same kind, they "would love but as before. " Hence he will keep thetale a secret:

 If, as I have, you also do, Virtue attir'd in woman see, And dare love that, and say so too, And forget the He and She. 

 And if this love, though placed so, From profane men you hide, Which will no faith on this bestow, Or, if they do, deride:

 Then you have done a braver thing Than all the Worthies did; And a braver thence will spring, Which is, to keep that hid. 

It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it isuseless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love. Hispoems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no otherEnglish poet--not even, perhaps, Browning's--does. He was by destiny thecomplete experimentalist in love in English literature. He passed throughphase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase of thelove of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect marriage. Inhis youth he was a gay--but was he ever really gay?--free-lover, who sangjestingly:

 How happy were our sires in ancient time, Who held plurality of loves no crime!

But even then he looks forward, not with cynicism, to a time when he

 Shall not so easily be to change dispos'd, Nor to the arts of several eyes obeying; But beauty with true worth securely weighing, Which, being found assembled in some one, We'll love her ever, and love her alone. 

By the time he writes _The Ecstasy_ the victim of the body has become theprotesting victim of the soul. He cries out against a love that is merelyan ecstatic friendship:

 But O alas, so long, so far, Our bodies why do we forbear?

He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not theenemy but the companion of the soul:

 Soul into the soul may flow Though it to body first repair. 

The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greaterintellectual vehemence:

 So must pure lovers' souls descend T' affections and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great Prince in prison lies. To our bodies turn we then, that so Weak men on love reveal'd may look; Love's mysteries in souls do grow But yet the body is the book. 

I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionateverse--verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne's genius--was amere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has beenpointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. Hisgreatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths ofthe soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in thehistory of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to hismeeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevereddialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been less of a frustratedlover, less of a martyr, in whom love's

 Art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations and lean emptiness, much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have beenwritten. 

One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne'sgenius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with someunimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange themin chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea that hasbitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant_Anniversary_, and but a page or two before the _Nocturnal upon St. Lucy'sDay_. Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to thePlatonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for theenrichment of his genius. Such a poem as _The Canonisation_ can beinterpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne More, who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love. It is, ineither case, written in defence of his love against some who censured himfor it:

 For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love. 

In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot bemeasured by the standards of the vulgar:

 We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs or hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And, if no piece of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs, And by these hymns all shall approve Us canoniz'd by love:

 And thus invoke us: "You whom reverend love Made one another's hermitage; You to whom love was peace, that now is rage; Who did the whole world's soul contract and drove Into the glasses of your eyes (So made such mirrors, and such spies, That they did all to you epitomize), Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above A pattern of your love!"

According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the beautifulverses beginning:

 Sweetest love, I do not go For weariness of thee;

as well as the series of _Valedictions_. Of many of the other love-poems, however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the occasion. All thatwe can say with confidence when we have read them is that, after we havefollowed one tributary on another leading down to the ultimate Thames ofhis genius, we know that his progress as a lover was a progress frominfidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness to deep and enduringpassion. The image that is finally stamped on his greatest work is notthat of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist of love. It is true thatthere is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to have led even Sir ThomasBrowne to think of Donne's verse rather as a confession of his sins thanas a golden book of love. Browne's quaint poem, _To the deceased Author, before the Promiscuous printing of his Poems, the Looser Sort, with theReligious_, is so little known that it may be quoted in full as theexpression of one point of view in regard to Donne's work:

 When thy loose raptures, Donne, shall meet with those That do confine Tuning unto the duller line, And sing not but in sanctified prose, How will they, with sharper eyes, The foreskin of thy fancy circumcise, And fear thy wantonness should now begin Example, that hath ceased to be sin! And that fear fans their heat; whilst knowing eyes Will not admire At this strange fire That here is mingled with thy sacrifice, But dare read even thy wanton story As thy confession, not thy glory; And will so envy both to future times, That they would buy thy goodness with thy crimes. 

To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is as muchdivinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of the religiousones. Donne's last word as a secular poet may well be regarded as havingbeen uttered in that great poem in celebration of lasting love, _TheAnniversary_, which closes with so majestic a sweep:

 Here upon earth we are kings, and none but we Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be. Who is so safe as we, where none can do Treason to us, except one of us two? True and false fears let us refrain; Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write three-score: this is the second of our reign. 

Donne's conversion as a lover was obviously as complete and revolutionaryas his conversion in religion. 

It is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate religion. When his marriage with Sir George More's sixteen-year-old daughter broughthim at first only imprisonment and poverty, he summed up the sorrows ofthe situation in the famous line--a line which has some additionalinterest as suggesting the correct pronunciation of his name:

 John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone. 

His married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries due toill-health, debt and thwarted ambition, seems to have been happy beyondprophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his wife died in childbed, after having borne him twelve children, a religious crisis resulted thatturned his conventional churchmanship into sanctity. His original changefrom Catholicism to Protestantism has been already mentioned. Most of theauthorities are agreed, however, that this was a conversion in a formalrather than in a spiritual sense. Even when he took Holy Orders in 1615, at the age of forty-two, he appears to have done so less in answer to anyimpulse to a religious life from within than because, with the downfall ofSomerset, all hope of advancement through his legal attainments wasbrought to an end. Undoubtedly, as far back as 1612, he had thought ofentering the Church. But we find him at the end of 1613 writing anepithalamium for the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is a curiousfact that three great poets--Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion--appear, though innocently enough, in the story of the Countess of Essex's sordidcrime. Donne's temper at the time is still clearly that of a man of theworld. His jest at the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower, is the jest of an ungenerous worldling. Even after his admission into theChurch he reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess ofBedford, in trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no morethan £30 to pay his debts. The truth is, to be forty and a failure is anaffliction that might sour even a healthy nature. The effect on a man ofDonne's ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory ofhis dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of along family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous. Tosuch a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were toSwift. One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing lessand less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in them somevolatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through the bars andsung above the ground. Donne and Swift were morbid men suffering fromclaustrophobia. They were pent and imprisoned spirits, hating the wallsthat seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush them. In his poemsand letters Donne is haunted especially by three images--the hospital, theprison, and the grave. Disease, I think, preyed on his mind even moreterrifyingly than warped ambition. "Put all the miseries that man issubject to together, " he exclaims in one of the passages in that luxuriantanthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has made from the _Sermons_;"sickness is more than all . .. . In poverty I lack but other things; inbanishment I lack but other men; but in sickness I lack myself. " Waltondeclares that it was from consumption that Donne suffered; but he hadprobably the seeds of many diseases. In some of his letters he dwellsmiserably on the symptoms of his illnesses. At one time, his sickness"hath so much of a cramp that it wrests the sinews, so much of tetane thatit withdraws and pulls the mouth, and so much of the gout . .. That it isnot like to be cured. .. . I shall, " he adds, "be in this world, like aporter in a great house, but seldomest abroad; I shall have many things tomake me weary, and yet not get leave to be gone. " Even after hisconversion he felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details of hisill-health. Those amazing records which he wrote while lying ill in bed inOctober, 1623, give us a realistic study of a sick-bed and itscircumstances, the gloom of which is hardly even lightened by his oddaccount of the disappearance of his sense of taste: "My taste is not goneaway, but gone up to sit at David's table; my stomach is not gone, butgone upwards toward the Supper of the Lamb. " "I am mine own ghost, " hecries, "and rather affright my beholders than interest them. .. . Miserableand inhuman fortune, when I must practise my lying in the grave by lyingstill. "

It does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by wretchednessand given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily corruptions was oftentempted, by "a sickly inclination, " to commit suicide, and that he evenwrote, though he did not dare to publish, an apology for suicide onreligious grounds, his famous and little-read _Biathanatos_. The familycrest of the Donnes was a sheaf of snakes, and these symbolize well enoughthe brood of temptations that twisted about in this unfortunateChristian's bosom. Donne, in the days of his salvation, abandoned thefamily crest for a new one--Christ crucified on an anchor. But he mightwell have left the snakes writhing about the anchor. He remained a temptedman to the end. One wishes that the _Sermons_ threw more light on hislater personal life than they do. But perhaps that is too much to expectof sermons. There is no form of literature less personal except a leadingarticle. The preacher usually regards himself as a mouthpiece rather thana man giving expression to himself. In the circumstances what surprises usis that the _Sermons_ reveal, not so little, but so much of Donne. Indeed, they make us feel far more intimate with Donne than do his privateletters, many of which are little more than exercises in composition. As apreacher, no less than as a poet, he is inflamed by the creative heat. Heshows the same vehemence of fancy in the presence of the divine andinfernal universe--a vehemence that prevents even his most far-soughtextravagances from disgusting us as do the lukewarm follies of theEuphuists. Undoubtedly the modern reader smiles when Donne, explainingthat man can be an enemy of God as the mouse can be an enemy to theelephant, goes on to speak of "God who is not only a multiplied elephant, millions of elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied world, amultiplied all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite many times over;nay (if we may dare to say so) a multiplied God, a God that hath themillions of the heathens' gods in Himself alone. " But at the same time onefinds oneself taking a serious pleasure in the huge sorites of quips andfancies in which he loves to present the divine argument. Nine out of tenreaders of the _Sermons_, I imagine, will be first attracted to themthrough love of the poems. They need not be surprised if they do notimmediately enjoy them. The dust of the pulpit lies on them thicklyenough. As one goes on reading them, however, one becomes suddenly awareof their florid and exiled beauty. One sees beyond their local theology tothe passion of a great suffering artist. Here are sentences that expressthe Paradise, the Purgatory, and the Hell of John Donne's soul. A nobleimagination is at work--a grave-digging imagination, but also animagination that is at home among the stars. One can open Mr. PearsallSmith's anthology almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passagewhich gives us a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror andhope that was Donne's contribution to the art of prose. Listen to this, for example, from a sermon preached in St. Paul's in January, 1626:

 Let me wither and wear out mine age in a discomfortable, in an unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth with the beggary of mine age; let me wither in a spittle under sharp, and foul, and infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if God withdraw not his spiritual blessings, his grace, his patience, if I can call my suffering his doing, my passion his action, all this that is temporal, is but a caterpillar got into one corner of my garden, but a mildew fallen upon one acre of my corn: the body of all, the substance of all is safe, so long as the soul is safe. 

The self-contempt with which his imagination loved to intoxicate itselffinds more lavish expression in a passage in a sermon delivered on EasterSunday two years later:

 When I consider what I was in my parents' loins (a substance unworthy of a word, unworthy of a thought), when I consider what I am now (a volume of diseases bound up together; a dry cinder, if I look for natural, for radical moisture; and yet a sponge, a bottle of overflowing Rheums, if I consider accidental; an aged child, a grey-headed infant, and but the ghost of mine own youth), when I consider what I shall be at last, by the hand of death, in my grave (first, but putrefaction, and, not so much as putrefaction; I shall not be able to send forth so much as ill air, not any air at all, but shall be all insipid, tasteless, savourless, dust; for a while, all worms, and after a while, not so much as worms, sordid, senseless, nameless dust), when I consider the past, and present, and future state of this body, in this world, I am able to conceive, able to express the worst that can befall it in nature, and the worst that can be inflicted on it by man, or fortune. But the least degree of glory that God hath prepared for that body in heaven, I am not able to express, not able to conceive. 

Excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final beauty whichwe expect in a work of art; and the reader of Donne's _Sermons_ in theirlatest form will be wise if he comes to them expecting to find beautypiecemeal and tarnished though in profusion. He will be wise, too, not toexpect too many passages of the same intimate kind as that famousconfession in regard to prayer which Mr. Pearsall Smith quotes, and whichno writer on Donne can afford not to quote:

 I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door. I talk on, in the same posture of praying; eyes lifted up; knees bowed down; as though I prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should ask me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain troubles me in my prayer. 

If Donne had written much prose in this kind, his _Sermons_ would be asfamous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of theApostles. 

Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whosepersonality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousandbays and creeks and river-mouths, to the same degree as the personalitythat expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of John Donne. It isa mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies only intermittently inthe sun. A fog hangs around its coast, and at the base of its most radiantmountain-tops there is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp. There arejewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its surface, and byminers in the dark. It is richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metalsand curious ornaments than in flowers. The shepherd on the hillside seldomtells his tale uninterrupted. Strange rites in honour of ancient infernaldeities that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echoof these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder evenas he looks at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. Thechief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is, nodoubt, Walton's story of the last days of Donne's life that makes us, aswe read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this ghostlyapparition. Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of his death, dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his head andfeet, " and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with so much ofthe sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face, "while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral monument. He then hadthe picture placed at his bedside, to which he summoned his friends andservants in order to bid them farewell. As he lay awaiting death, he saidcharacteristically, "I were miserable if I might not die, " and thenrepeatedly, in a faint voice, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done. " At thevery end he lost his speech, and "as his soul ascended and his last breathdeparted from him he closed his eyes, and then disposed his hands and bodyinto such a posture as required not the least alteration by those thatcame to shroud him. " It was a strange chance that preserved his spectralmonument almost uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the GreatFire, and no other monument in the cathedral escaped. Among all hisfantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this lastfanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects afantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eightdays before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so ancientlyegoistic amid its worship, as in the verse:

 Whilst my physicians by their love are grown Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown That this is my south-west discovery, _Per fretum febris_, by these straits to die. 

Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God. Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, butnone travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places, now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of thefirst man in a new found land. 

V. --HORACE WALPOLE[1]

 [1] _Letters of Horace Walpole_; Oxford University Press, 16 vols. , 96s. _Supplementary Letters_, 1919; Oxford University Press, 2 vols. , 17s. 

Horace Walpole was "a dainty rogue in porcelain" who walked badly. In hisbest days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he"tripped like a pewit. " "If I do not flatter myself, " he wrote when he wasjust under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dab-chick's. " A ladyhas left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet ontiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor. " When his feet were not swollen withthe gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet ona silver penny. " He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked withhis unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and notparticularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silkstockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters animpression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of abeau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was achina figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regardedeverything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could notbe helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defenceof the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it wasmore likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an empire. Hismost common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, primeministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When GeorgeII. Died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand--You lovelaughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" Thatrepresents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh allthe more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written aletter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, beggingLord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's hand. His attitudeto the Court he described to George Montagu as "mixing extreme politenesswith extreme indifference. " His politeness, like his indifference, was butplay at the expense of a solemn world. "I wrote to Lord Bute, " he informedMontagu; "thrust all the _unexpecteds, want of ambition, disinterestedness, etc. _, that I could amass, gilded with as much duty, affection, zeal, etc. , as possible. " He frankly professed relief that hehad not after all to go to Court and act out the extravagant complimentshe had written. "Was ever so agreeable a man as King George the Second, "he wrote, "to die the very day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?""For my part, " he adds later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will alwaysbe a favourite; he tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of thelate Prince of Wales's death, and to-day of the King's. " It is not thatWalpole was a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toyrepublican who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behindtheir backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion ofBeau Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a publicdisplay; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatestprivate entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the great, as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the thoughts ofthe moment, " he told the dearest of his friends, Conway, "and even laughto divert the person I am writing to, without any ill will on the subjectsI mention. " His letters are for the most part those of a good-natured man. 

It is not that he was above the foible--it was barely more than that--ofhatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own, but he nevercould forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His ridicule of the Dukeof Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the baiting of a mean andtreacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling out, " and whose mouth was"tumbling in. " He rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity ofthe Duke, as when he describes him going to Court on becoming PrimeMinister in 1754:

 On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the King's feet, sobbed, and cried, "God bless your Majesty! God preserve your Majesty!" and lay there howling, embracing the King's knees, with one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was _luckily_ in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with, "For God's sake, gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!" endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made him roar with pain. 

The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description ofGeorge II. 's funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" isintroduced as comic relief into the solemn picture:

 He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping his eyes with the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble. 

Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in hispersecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball atBedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful oldcreature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and spied"his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense carried onin stage whispers. There was never a more loyal son than Horace Walpole. He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at Sir Robert's tomb. 

At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of afamily inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of men and womenoutside the circle of his affections. It was his first instinct todisparage. He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at thefirst time of meeting her, as "an old blind débauchée of wit. " Hiscomments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a veinof satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, ofFielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he found"silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts. " Boswell's_Tour of the Hebrides_ was "the story of a mountebank and his zany. "Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing to the criticismof Gray in the _Lives of the Poets_. He would not even, when Johnsondied, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter asking for a subscriptionwas sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell, and Reynolds. "I would notdeign to write an answer, " Walpole told the Miss Berrys, "but sent downword by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief, that I would not subscribe. " Walpole does not appear in this incident the"sweet-tempered creature" he had earlier claimed to be. His pose is thatof a schoolgirl in a cutting mood. At the same time his judgment ofJohnson has an element of truth in it. "Though he was good-natured atbottom, " he said of him, "he was very ill-natured at top. " It has oftenbeen said of Walpole that, in his attitude to contemporary men of genius, he was influenced mainly by their position in Society--that he regarded anauthor who was not a gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author. This is hardly fair. The contemporary of whom he thought most highly wasGray, the son of a money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary WortleyMontagu any more than Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it wasmore likely to be owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to anaristocratic distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowestof low life. It was certainly Fielding's Bohemianism that disgusted him. He relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and foundhim "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on somecold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth. "Horace Walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an author who didnot know how to sup decently. If he found Boswell's _Johnson_ tedious, itwas no doubt partly due to his inability to reconcile himself to Johnson'stable manners. It can hardly be denied that he was unnaturally sensitiveto surface impressions. He was a great observer of manners, but not agreat portrayer of character. He knew men in their absurd actions ratherthan in their motives--even their absurd motives. He never admits us intothe springs of action in his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was toostudied a believer in the puppetry of men and women to make them more thanridiculous. And unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itselfadmirably to his love of caricature. His account of the vanity of Gibbon, whose history he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted inplaying with an egoistic author as with a trout:

 You will be diverted to hear that Mr. Gibbon has quarrelled with me. He lent me his second volume in the middle of November. I returned it with a most civil panegyric. He came for more incense. I gave it, but, alas, with too much sincerity! I added, "Mr. Gibbon, I am sorry _you_ should have pitched on so disgusting a subject as the Constantinopolitan History. There is so much of the Arians and Eumonians, and semi-Pelagians; and there is such a strange contrast between Roman and Gothic manners, and so little harmony between a Consul Sabinus and a Ricimer, Duke of the palace, that though you have written the story as well as it could be written, I fear few will have patience to read it. " He coloured; all his round features squeezed themselves into sharp angles; he screwed up his button mouth, and rapping his snuff-box, said, "It had never been put together before"--_so well_ he meant to add--but gulped it. He meant _so well_ certainly, for Tillemont, whom he quotes in every page, has done the very thing. Well, from that hour to this I have never seen him, though he used to call once or twice a week; nor has he sent me the third volume, as he promised. I well knew his vanity, even about his ridiculous face and person, but thought he had too much sense to avow it so palpably. 

"So much, " he concludes, "for literature and its fops. " The comic spiritleans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of human nature, and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only a breach of hiscode, but an invitation to his contempt. "You know, " he once wrote, "Ishun authors, and would never have been one myself if it obliged me tokeep such bad company. They are always in earnest and think theirprofession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and reverence learning. Ilaugh at all these things, and write only to laugh at them and divertmyself. None of us are authors of any consequence, and it is the mostridiculous of all vanities to be vain of being _mediocre. "_ He followedthe Chinese school of manners and made light of his own writings. "Whathave I written, " he asks, "that was worth remembering, even by myself?""It would be affected, " he tells Gray, "to say I am indifferent to fame. Icertainly am not, but I am indifferent to almost anything I have done toacquire it. The greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder theyare, as you say, incorrect when they were commonly written with people inthe room. "

It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole wasmerely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He had asense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence ofShakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his ownwritings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the poets. Hefelt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was diffidentboth for his times and for himself. So difficult do some writers find itto believe that there was any deep genuineness in him that they ask us toregard even his enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence. They do notrealize that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was anenthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion. His airs andgraces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure in wearing amask. He was quick, responsive, excitable, and only withdrew into, thesimilitude of a china figure, as Diogenes into his tub, throughphilosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who are tolerable are thosewhose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our interest in character is largelyan interest in contradictions of this kind. The beau capable of breakinginto excitement awakens our curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to ahumane action, the Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or thepacifist in a rage of violence. The average man, whom one knowssuperficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. Thatis why we find him dull. The characters who interest us in history andliterature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to theformulae we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They give uspleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to meabsurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only realthing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels amongthe Alps with Gray down to his senile letters to Hannah More about theFrench Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensityof his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for hissensations like an æsthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constantat a fire as George Selwyn at an execution. " If he cared for the crowningsof kings and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight inthe fireworks and illuminations. 

He had the keen spirit of a masquerader. Masquerades, he declared, were"one of my ancient passions, " and we find him as an elderly man dressingout "a thousand young Conways and Cholmondeleys" for an entertainment ofthe kind, and going "with more pleasure to see them pleased than when Iformerly delighted in that diversion myself. " He was equally an enthusiastin his hobbies and his tastes. He rejoiced to get back in May toStrawberry Hill, "where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are inbloom. " He could not have made his collections or built his battlements ina mood of indifference. In his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself aGoth-intoxicated man. As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result may havebeen a ridiculous mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produceit. Walpole's own description of his house and its surroundings has anexquisite charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "It is alittle plaything house, " he told Conway, "that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set inenamelled meadows, with filigree hedges:

 "A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd, And little finches wave their wings in gold. "

He goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful properties:

 Two delightful roads that you would call dusty supply me continually with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as barons of the exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham-walks bound my prospect; but, thank God, the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind. 

It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into playingwith a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is in this spiritthat he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses andsheep. " The very phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared atthe age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom has consisted in forming ababy-house full of playthings for my second childhood. " That explains whyone almost loves the creature. Macaulay has severely censured him fordevoting himself to the collection of knick-knacks, such as King WilliamIII. 's spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend Walpole as acollector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in amood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himselfquite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang upMagna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the warrant for theexecution of King Charles I. , on which he had written "Major Charta. " Whocan question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway:"Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen mynew divine closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess ofPembroke and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip, " andended: "I never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old ward-robethere still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches andEve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good-night. " Helaughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends. "As to snuff-boxes and toothpick cases, " he wrote to the Countess ofOssory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year. "Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded inthe same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like aspectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself as amaster of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and thegoldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley fishingin the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin and atea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese method. " Thiswas in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who "carried a dozento town t'other day in a decanter. " Walpole is similarly amused by thespectacle of himself as a planter and gardener. "I have made greatprogress, " he boasts, "and talk very learnedly with the nursery-men, except that now and then a lettuce runs to seed, overturns all my botany, and I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian floweringshrub. Then the deliberation with which trees grow is extremelyinconvenient to my natural impatience. " He goes on enviously to imaginethe discovery by posterity of a means of transplanting oaks of a hundredand fifty years as easily as tulip-bulbs. This leads him to enlarge uponthe wonders that the Horace Walpole of posterity will be able to possesswhen the miraculous discoveries have been made. 

 Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds, tatne tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to see all that is doing in China, and a thousand other toys, which we now look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in our face for staring at. 

Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself, it isimpossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that the wolfcarried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels, or the moreimperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to prevent frombiting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with Madame du Deffandherself "grows the greater favourite the more people he devours. " "T'othernight, " writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand afterwards bequeathedthe dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's face, and I thoughtwould have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting her finger. She wasterrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand, who has too much partsnot to see everything in its true light, perceiving that she had notbeaten Tonton half enough, immediately told us a story of a lady whose doghaving bitten a piece out of a gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in agreat fright, cried out, 'Won't it make him sick?'" In the most attractiveaccounts we possess of Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at thebreakfast-table, drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancientporcelain of Japan, " and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (nowgrown almost too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), andafterwards going to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw tothe squirrels in the garden. 

Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was anexcitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet or theprospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de l'Enclos atStrawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of Anne Boleyn, orRanelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes. " What is notgenerally realized is that he was also a high-strung and eager spectatorof the greater things. I have already spoken of his enthusiasm for wildnature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is true he grew weary ofthem. "Such uncouth rocks, " he wrote, "and such uncomely inhabitants. " "Iam as surfeited with mountains and inns as if I had eat them, " he groanedin a later letter. But the enthusiasm was at least as genuine as thefatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves only that there were twoWalpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic enthusiasms was insincere. He was a devotee of romance, but it was romance under the control of thecomic spirit. He was always amused to have romance brought down toreality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of Scots, he said: "I believe Ihave told you that, in a very old trial of her, which I bought for LordOxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Takesentiments out of their _pantaufles_, and reduce them to the infirmitiesof mortality, what a falling off there is!" But see him in thepicture-gallery in his father's old house at Houghton, after an absence ofsixteen years, and the romantic mood is upper-most. "In one respect, " hewrites, speaking of the pictures, "I am very young; I cannot satiatemyself with looking, " and he adds, "Not a picture here but calls ahistory; not one but I remember in Downing Street or Chelsea, where queensand crowds admired them. " And, if he could not "satiate himself withlooking" at the Italian and Flemish masters, he similarly preserved theheat of youth in his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. "When, " he wrote, duringhis dispute with Voltaire on the point, "I think over all the greatauthors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and English (and I know noother languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew. "One is astonished to find that he was contemptuous of Montaigne. "Whatsignifies what a man thought, " he wrote, "who never thought of anythingbut himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?"This sentence might have served as a condemnation of Walpole himself, andindeed he meant it so. Walpole, however, was an egoist of an opposite kindto Montaigne. Walpole lived for his eyes, and saw the world as a masque ofbright and amusing creatures. Montaigne studied the map of himself ratherthan the map of his neighbours' vanities. Walpole was a social being, andnot finally self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to knowhimself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored byMontaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. LikeMontaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in hisliterary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple as regardsShakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the other hand, howfoolish it is to regard him as being critically a fashionable trifler. 

Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything Dionysiacin his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to say that he was aman of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves. Capricious inlittle things, he was faithful in great. His warmth of nature as a son, asa friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in tolerance and liberty, is sounfailing that it is curious it should ever have been brought in questionby any reader of the letters. His quarrels are negligible when put besidehis ceaseless extravagance of good humour to his friends. His lettersalone were golden gifts, but we also find him offering his fortune toConway when the latter was in difficulties. "I have sense enough, " hewrote, "to have real pleasure in denying myself baubles, and in saving avery good income to make a man happy for whom I have a just esteem andmost sincere friendship. " "Blameable in ten thousand other respects, " hewrote to Conway seventeen years later, "may not I almost say I am perfectwith regard to you? Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?""I am, " he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincereto friends of above forty years. " In his friendships he was more eager togive than to receive. Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making himher heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit her again. Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving pleasure andfor his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. The earliest of hispublished letters was until recently one written at the age of fourteen. But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of Walpole letters, recently published, has been able to print one to Lady Walpole written atthe age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a delightful sort ofchild, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend, or a pet:

 Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop papa is wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens like there pla things vary wall

 and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray give my Duty to papa. HORACE WALPOLE. 

 and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all wall. And Mrs. Selwyn has sprand her Fot and givs her Sarves to you and I dind ther yester Day. 

At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship--the"Triumvirate, " as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and the"Quadruple Alliance, " in which one of his fellows was Gray. The truth is, Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being loved. "Oneloves to find people care for one, " he wrote to Conway, "when they canhave no view in it. " His friendship in his old age for the MissBerrys--his "twin wifes, " his "dear Both"--to each of whom he left anannuity of £4, 000, was but a continuation of that kindliness which ranlike a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt) through hislong life. And his kindness was not limited to his friends, but was at thecall of children and, as we have seen, of animals. "You know, " he explainsto Conway, apologizing for not being able to visit him on account of thepresence of a "poor little sick girl" at Strawberry Hill, "how courteous aknight I am to distrest virgins of five years old, and that my castlegates are always open to them. " One does not think of Walpole primarily asa squire of children, and certainly, though he loved on occasion to rompwith the young, there was little in him of a Dickens character. But he waswhat is called "sympathetic. " He was sufficient of a man of imagination towish to see an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims, chimney-sweepers. " So far from being a heartless person, as he has been attimes portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist. This was shown in his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a greatterror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all dogs foundin the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of Strafford:

 In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the Russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the innocents--one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear, good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! how can anybody hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees the English, who desire no better than to be halloo'd to blood--one day Samuel Byng, the next Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs!

As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after writerthat he never took them seriously, but was interested in them mainly forgossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great fight for goodcauses while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he the temper of aruler of men. But as a commentator on politics and a spreader of opinionin private, he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious, humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events. His detestation of thearbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion. He detested italike in a government and in a mob. He loathed the violence that compassedthe death of Admiral Byng and the violence that made war on America. Heraged against a public world that he believed was going to the devil. "Iam not surprised, " he wrote in 1776, "at the idea of the devil beingalways at our elbows. They who invented him no doubt could not conceivehow men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention ofa fiend. Don't you think, if he had never been heard of before, that hewould have been invented on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy hasa poor chance with me, " he wrote a little later in regard to America, "when my warmth is stirred--and yet I know that an angry old man out ofParliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal. "The war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubedover with airs of bullying. " War at any time was, in his eyes, all but theunforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened intocontempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about, " he wrote, "but it is apickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to pettylarceny. " As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his commenton the Wilkes riots, when he declares:

 I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power--which cowards call out for as protection, and knaves are so ready to grant. 

Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them with anaristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance was thatwhich celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It was of themob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory: "They were, asGeorge Montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you might have strokedthem_. " When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out inParis, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the French with thehysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce theBolshevists. He called them "_inferno-human_ beings, " "that atrocious anddetestable nation, " and declared that "France must be abhorred to latestposterity. " His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah, " whatever else maybe said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. Theyare the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlierage, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience inDrury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had criedangrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics nevergot beyond an angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic ofhim:

 The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat, and pulling off his hat, said, "Mr. Walpole, what would you please to have us do next?" It is impossible to describe to you the confusion into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down into the box, and have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse. 

There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank downinto his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might savethe situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and hisfriends. 

This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist. He wasa connoisseur of great actions, not a practicer of them. At StrawberryHill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health with the aid oficed water and by not wearing a hat when out of doors to compose thegreatest works of art of their kind that have appeared in English. Had hewritten his letters for money we should have praised him as one of thebusiest and most devoted of authors, and never have thought of blaming himfor abstaining from statesmanship as he did from wine. Possibly he had theconstitution for neither. His genius was a genius, not of Westminster, butof Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry Hill that one finally prefers tosee him framed, an extraordinarily likeable, charming, and whimsicalfigure. He himself has suggested his kingdom entrancingly for us in aletter describing his return to Strawberry after a visit to Paris in 1769:

 I feel myself here like a swan, that after living six weeks in a nasty pool upon a common, is got back into its own Thames. I do nothing but plume and clean myself, and enjoy the verdure and silent waves. Neatness and greenth are so essential in my opinion to the country, that in France, where I see nothing but chalk and dirty peasants, I seem in a terrestrial purgatory that is neither town or country. The face of England is so beautiful, that I do not believe Tempe or Arcadia were half so rural; for both lying in hot climates, must have wanted the turf of our lawns. It is unfortunate to have so pastoral a taste, when I want a cane more than a crook. We are absurd creatures; at twenty I loved nothing but London. 

Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among correspondents. One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men of a deeper and moreimaginative tenderness. But how incomparable he is as an acquaintance! Howexquisite a specimen--hand-painted--for the collector of the choicecreatures of the human race!

VI. --WILLIAM COWPER

Cowper has the charm of littleness. His life and genius were on theminiature scale, though his tragedy was a burden for Atlas. He leftseveral pictures of himself in his letters, all of which make one see himas a veritable Tom Thumb among Christians. He wrote, he tells us, atOlney, in "a summerhouse not much bigger than a sedan-chair. " At anearlier date, when he was living at Huntingdon, he compared himself to "aThames wherry in a world full of tempest and commotion, " and congratulatedhimself on "the creek I have put into and the snugness it affords me. " Hisvery clothes suggested that he was the inhabitant of a plaything world. "Green and buff, " he declared, "are colours in which I am oftener seenthan in any others, and are become almost as natural to me as a parrot. ""My thoughts, " he informed the Rev. John Newton, "are clad in a soberlivery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants"; buthis body was dressed in parrot's colours, and his bald head was bagged orin a white cap. If he requested one of his friends to send him anythingfrom town, it was usually some little thing, such as a "genteelishtoothpick case, " a handsome stock-buckle, a new hat--"not a round slouch, which I abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair"--or acuckoo-clock. He seems to have shared Wordsworth's taste for the last ofthese. Are we not told that Wordsworth died as his favourite cuckoo-clockwas striking noon? Cowper may almost be said, so far as his tastes andtravels are concerned, to have lived in a cage. He never ventured outsideEngland, and even of England he knew only a few of the southern counties. "I have lived much at Southampton, " boasted at the age of sixty, "haveslept and caught a sore throat at Lyndhurst, and have swum in the Bay ofWeymouth. " That was his grand tour. He made a journey to Eastham, nearChichester, about the time of this boast, and confessed that, as he drovewith Mrs. Unwin over the downs by moonlight, "I indeed myself was a littledaunted by the tremendous height of the Sussex hills in comparison ofwhich all I had seen elsewhere are dwarfs. " He went on a visit to somerelations on the coast of Norfolk a few years later, and, writing to LadyHesketh, lamented: "I shall never see Weston more. I have been tossed likea ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me. " Who butthe little recluse of a little world could think of Norfolk as a farcountry and shake with alarm before the "tremendous height" of the Sussexdowns?

"We are strange creatures, my little friend, " Cowper once wrote toChristopher Rowley; "everything that we do is in reality important, thoughhalf that we do seems to be push-pin. " Here we see one of the main reasonsof Cowper's eternal attractiveness. He played at push-pin during most ofhis life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom. He trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad withthinking about Heaven and Hell. He sought in the infinitesimal a cure forthe disease of brooding on the infinite. His distractions were those notof too light, but of too grave, a mind. If he picnicked with the ladies, it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come. He was gay, but on the edge of the precipice. 

I do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to trifling. Even in the days when he was studying law in the Temple he dined everyThursday with six of his old school-fellows at the Nonsense Club. Hisessays in Bonnell Thornton and Coleman's paper, _The Connoisseur_, writtensome time before he went mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, leadone to believe that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might haveequalled or surpassed Addison as a master of light prose. He was somethingof the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during his first years in asolicitor's office, as we gather from the letter in which he reminds LadyHesketh how he and Thurlow used to pass the time with her and her sister, Theodora, the object of his fruitless love. "There was I, and the futureLord Chancellor, " he wrote, "constantly employed from morning to night ingiggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law. " Such was hislife till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two. Hehad already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as aschoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at St. Margaret's rolled towards him and struck him on the leg. Again, in hischambers in the Middle Temple, he suffered for a time from religiousmelancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems ofGeorge Herbert. Even at the age of twenty-three he told Robert Lloyd in arhymed epistle that he "addressed the muse, " not in order to show hisgenius or his wit, But to divert a fierce banditti (Sworn foe to everything that's witty) That, in a black infernal train, Make cruel inroads in my brain, And daily threaten to drive thence My little garrison of sense. 

It was not till after his release from the St. Alban's madhouse in histhirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasureson the ruins of the old. He now set himself of necessity to the task ofcreating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in hisbrighter moments, a sort of Epicurean of evangelical piety. He was adamned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself stilldeeper in the process. His round of recreation, it must be admitted, wasfor the most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seekerquail worse than any inferno of miseries. Only a nature of peculiarsweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and hymnsin which Cowper learned to be happy in the Unwins' Huntingdon home. Breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and nine. Then, "till eleven, weread either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher ofthose holy mysteries. " Church was at eleven. After that he was atliberty to read, walk, ride, or work in the garden till the three o'clockdinner. Then to the garden, "where with Mrs. Unwin and her son I havegenerally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea-time. " After teacame a four-mile walk, and "at night we read and converse, as before, tillsupper, and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon; andlast of all the family are called to prayers. " In those days, it may be, evangelical religion had some of the attractions of a new discovery. Theories of religion were probably as exciting a theme of discussion inthe age of Wesley as theories of art and literature in the age of cubismand _vers libre_. One has to remember this in order to be able to realizethat, as Cowper said, "such a life as this is consistent with the utmostcheerfulness. " He unquestionably found it so, and, when the Rev. MorleyUnwin was killed as the result of a fall from his horse, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin moved to Olney in order to enjoy further evangelical companionshipin the neighbourhood of the Rev. John Newton, the converted slave-trader, who was curate in that town. At Olney Cowper added at once to histerrors of Hell and to his amusements. For the terrors, Newton, who seemsto have wielded the Gospel as fiercely as a slaver's whip, was largelyresponsible. He had earned a reputation for "preaching people mad, " andCowper, tortured with shyness, was even subjected to the ordeal of leadingin prayer at gatherings of the faithful. Newton, however, was a man oftenderness, humour, and literary tastes, as well as of a somewhat savagepiety. He was not only Cowper's tyrant, but Cowper's nurse, and, insetting Cowper to write the Olney Hymns, he gave a powerful impulse to atalent hitherto all but hidden. At the same time, when, as a result of thetoo merciless flagellation of his parishioners on the occasion of someFifth of November revels, Newton was attacked by a mob and driven out ofOlney, Cowper undoubtedly began to breathe more freely. Even under the eyeof Newton, however, Cowper could enjoy his small pleasures, and we have anattractive picture of him feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons everymorning on the gravel walk in the garden. He shared with Newton hisamusements as well as his miseries. We find him in 1780 writing to thedeparted Newton to tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener. "I draw, " he said, "mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, anddab-chicks. " He represents himself in this lively letter as a Christianlover of baubles, rather to the disadvantage of lovers of baubles who arenot Christians:

 I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth--what are the planets--what is the sun itself but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, "The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!" Their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more. I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute's gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself: "This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon. "

In this and the following year we find him turning his thoughts more andmore frequently to writing as a means of forgetting himself. "Thenecessity of amusement, " he wrote to Mrs. Unwin's clergyman son, "makes mesometimes write verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, agardener; and has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with . .. Surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance of ittwo months ago. " His impulse towards writing verses, however, was animpulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning imagination. "I haveno more right to the name of poet, " he once said, "than a maker ofmouse-traps has to that of an engineer. .. . Such a talent in verse as mineis like a child's rattle--very entertaining to the trifler that uses it, and very disagreeable to all beside. " "Alas, " he wrote in another letter, "what can I do with my wit? I have not enough to do great things with, andthese little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at thesubject, he is only filling his hand with smoke. I must do with it as I dowith my linnet; I keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and thenset open the door, that he may whisk about the room a little, and thenshut him up again. " It may be doubted whether, if subjects had not beenimposed on him from without, he would have written much save in the veinof "dear Mat Prior's easy jingle" or the Latin trifles of Vincent Bourne, of whom Cowper said: "He can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms soexquisitely appropriated to the character he draws that one would supposehim animated by the spirit of the creature he describes. "

Cowper was not to be allowed to write, except occasionally, on magpies andcats. Mrs. Unwin, who took a serious view of the poet's art, gave him as asubject _The Progress of Error_, and is thus mainly responsible for thenow little-read volume of moral satires, with which he began his career asa poet at the age of fifty in 1782. It is not a book that can be read withunmixed, or even with much, delight. It seldom rises above a good man'srhetoric. Cowper, instead of writing about himself and his pets, and hiscucumber-frames, wrote of the wicked world from which he had retired, andthe vices of which he could not attack with that particularity that makessatire interesting. The satires are not exactly dull, but they are lackingin force, either of wit or of passion. They are hardly more than anexpression of sentiment and opinion. The sentiments are usually sound--forCowper was an honest lover of liberty and goodness--but even the cause ofliberty is not likely to gain much from such a couplet as:

 Man made for kings! those optics are but dim That tell you so--say, rather, they for him. 

Nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of such anattack on the "pleasant-Sunday-afternoon" kind of pastor as is containedin the lines:

 If apostolic gravity be free To play the fool on Sundays, why not we? If he the tinkling harpsichord regards As inoffensive, what offence in cards?

These, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best in themoral satires; but the latter is worth quoting as evidence of the way inwhich Cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a rather narrow creed. The satires are hardly more than denominational in their interest. Theybelong to the religious fashion of their time, and are interesting to usnow only as the old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. Thesubject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere almostalways remains evangelical. The Rev. John Newton wrote a preface for thevolume, suggesting this and claiming that the author "aims to communicatehis own perceptions of the truth, beauty and influence of the religion ofthe Bible. " The publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of thepiety of the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the firstedition. Cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal hispious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this reasonopened the book, not with _The Progress of Error_, but with the moreattractively-named _Table Talk_. "My sole drift is to be useful, " he tolda relation, however. ". .. My readers will hardly have begun to laughbefore they will be called upon to correct that levity, and peruse me witha more serious air. " He informed Newton at the same time: "Thinking myselfin a measure obliged to tickle, if I meant to please, I therefore affecteda jocularity I did not feel. " He also told Newton: "I am merry that I maydecoy people into my company. " On the other hand, Cowper did not write_John Gilpin_ which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a manusing wit as a decoy. He wrote it because it irresistibly demanded to bewritten. "I wonder, " he once wrote to Newton, "that a sportive thoughtshould ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that itshould gain admittance. It is as if harlequin should intrude himself intothe gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state. " Harlequin, luckily for us, took hold of his pen in _John Gilpin_ and in many of theletters. In the moral satires, harlequin is dressed in a sober suit andsent to a theological seminary. One cannot but feel that there issomething incongruous in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had "foundoccasion towards the close of my last poem, called _Retirement_, to takesome notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments, and todirect the means by which they might be made useful as well as agreeable. "This might serve well enough as a theme for a "letter to the editor" of_The Baptist Eye-opener_. One cannot imagine, however, its causing aflutter in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses. 

Cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a letter-writer. The interest of his verse is chiefly historical. He was a poet of thetransition to Wordsworth and the revolutionists, and was a mouthpiece ofhis time. But he has left only a tiny quantity of memorable verse. Lambhas often been quoted in his favour. "I have, " he wrote to Coleridge in1796, "been reading _The Task_ with fresh delight. I am glad you loveCowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would notcall that man my friend who should be offended with the 'divine chit-chatof Cowper. '" Lamb, it should be remembered, was a youth of twenty-one whenhe wrote this, and Cowper's verse had still the attractions of earlyblossoms that herald the coming of spring. There is little in _The Task_to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of literaryhistory. Like the Olney Hymns and the moral satires it was a poem writtento order. Lady Austen, the vivacious widow who had meanwhile joined theOlney group, was anxious that Cowper should show what he could do in blankverse. He undertook to humour her if she would give him a subject. "Oh, "she said, "you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any;write upon this sofa!" Cowper, in his more ambitious verse, seems seldomto have written under the compulsion of the subject as the great poets do. Even the noble lines _On the Loss of the Royal George_ were written, as heconfessed, "by desire of Lady Austen, who wanted words to the March in_Scipio_. " For this Lady Austen deserves the world's thanks, as she doesfor cheering him up in his low spirits with the story of John Gilpin. Hedid not write _John Gilpin_ by request, however. He was so delighted onhearing the story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and thenext day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad. "Strange as it may seem, " he afterwards said of it, "the most ludicrouslines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for thatsaddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all. " "The grinners at_John Gilpin_, " he said in another letter, "little dream what the authorsometimes suffers. How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!"It was the publication of _The Task_ and _John Gilpin_ that made Cowperfamous. It is not _The Task_ that keeps him famous to-day. There is, itseems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good lettersthan there is in the entire six books of _The Task_. One has only to readthe argument at the top of the third book, called _The Garden_, in orderto see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written. Here is theargument in full:

 Self-recollection and reproof--Address to domestic happiness--Some account of myself--The vanity of many of the pursuits which are accounted wise--Justification of my censures--Divine illumination necessary to the most expert philosopher--The question, what is truth? answered by other questions--Domestic happiness addressed again--Few lovers of the country--My tame hare--Occupations of a retired gentleman in the garden--Pruning--Framing--Greenhouse--Sowing of flower-seeds--The country preferable to the town even in the winter--Reasons why it is deserted at that season--Ruinous effects of gaming and of expensive improvement--Book concludes with an apostrophe to the metropolis. 

It is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic happiness andapostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of room here for Virgilianverse if Cowper had had the genius for it. Unfortunately, when he writesabout his garden, he too often writes about it as prosaically as acontributor to a gardening paper. His description of the making of a hotframe is merely a blank-verse paraphrase of the commonest prose. First, hetells us:

 The stable yields a stercoraceous heap, Impregnated with quick fermenting salts, And potent to resist the freezing blast; For, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf, Deciduous, when now November dark Checks vegetation in the torpid plant, Expos'd to his cold breath, the task begins. Warily therefore, and with prudent heed He seeks a favour'd spot; that where he builds Th' agglomerated pile his frame may front The sun's meridian disk, and at the back Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge Impervious to the wind. 

Having further prepared the ground:

 Th' uplifted frame, compact at every joint, And overlaid with clear translucent glass, He settles next upon the sloping mount, Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure From the dash'd pane the deluge as it falls. 

The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowperdoes not survive the test. Had _The Task_ been written in couplets hemight have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As itis, he is merely ponderous--a snail of imagination labouring under a heavyshell of eloquence. In the fragment called _Yardley Oak_ he undoubtedlyachieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do notthink he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet. He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to writeit. "I reckon it, " he wrote in 1781, "among my principal advantages, as acomposer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteenyears, and but one these thirteen years. " So mild was his interest in hiscontemporaries that he had never heard Collins's name till he read abouthim in Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Though descended from Donne--hismother was Anne Donne--he was apparently more interested in Churchill andBeattie than in him. His one great poetical master in English was Milton, Johnson's disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence. He wasprobably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education. Hedescribed himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his lateryears, as "a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two ofthem are your brother Chester's. " The passages I have quoted give, nodoubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper's indifference to literature. His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters. But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literatureas Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer. ThoughCowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homerinto English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelicalreservations. "I should not have chosen to have been the original authorof such a business, " he declared, while he was translating the nineteenthbook of the _Iliad_, "even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow. Timehas wonderful effects. We admire that in an ancient for which we shouldsend a modern bard to Bedlam. " It is hardly to be wondered at that histranslation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation ofVincent Bourne's _Jackdaw_ has. 

Cowper's poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, becauseit played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius. It brought him one of the best of his correspondents, his cousin, LadyHesketh, and it gave various other people a reason for keeping hisletters. Had it not been for his fame as a poet his letters might neverhave been published, and we should have missed one of the most exquisitehistories of small beer to be had outside the pages of Jane Austen. As aletter-writer he does not, I think, stand in the same rank as HoraceWalpole and Charles Lamb. He has less wit and humour, and he mirrors lessof the world. His letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothingcharm. Cowper's occupations amuse one, while his nature delights one. Hisletters, like Lamb's, have a soul of goodness--not of mere virtue, but ofgoodness--and we know from his biography that in life he endured theseverest test to which a good nature can be subjected. His treatment ofMrs. Unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its wayas Lamb's treatment of his sister. Mrs. Unwin, who had supported Cowperthrough so many dark and suicidal hours, afterwards became palsied andlost her mental faculties. "Her character, " as Sir James Frazer writes inthe introduction to his charming selection from the letters, [2] "underwenta great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness inministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought but forhis welfare, now became querulous and exacting, forgetful of him andmindful, apparently, only of herself. Unable to move out of her chairwithout help, or to walk across the room unless supported by two people, her speech at times almost unintelligible, she deprived him of all hiswonted exercises, both bodily and mental, as she did not choose that heshould leave her for a moment, or even use a pen or a book, except when heread to her. To these demands he responded with all the devotion ofgratitude and affection; he was assiduous in his attentions to her, butthe strain told heavily on his strength. " To know all this does not modifyour opinion of Cowper's letters, except is so far as it strengthens it. Ithelps us, however, to explain to ourselves why we love them. We love thembecause, as surely as the writings of Shakespeare and Lamb, they are anexpression of that sort of heroic gentleness which can endure the fires ofthe most devastating tragedy. Shakespeare finally revealed the strongsweetness of his nature in _The Tempest_. Many people are inclined toover-estimate _The Tempest_ as poetry simply because it gives them soprecious a clue to the character of his genius, and makes clear once morethat the grand source and material of poetry is the infinite tenderness ofthe human heart. Cowper's letters are a tiny thing beside Shakespeare'splays. But the same light falls on them. They have an eighteenth-centuryrestraint, and freedom from emotionalism and gush. But behind theirchronicle of trifles, their small fancies, their little vanities, one isaware of an intensely loving and lovable personality. Cowper's poem, _ToMary_, written to Mrs. Unwin in the days of her feebleness, is, to mymind, made commonplace by the odious reiteration of "my Mary!" at the endof every verse. Leave the "my Marys" out, however, and see how beautiful, as well as moving, a poem it becomes. Cowper was at one time on the pointof marrying Mrs. Unwin, when an attack of madness prevented him. Later onLady Austen apparently wished to marry him. He had an extraordinary giftfor commanding the affections of those of both sexes who knew him. Hisfriendship with the poet Hayley, then a rocket fallen to earth, towardsthe close of his life, reveals the lovableness of both men. 

 [2] _Letters of William Cowper_. Chosen and edited by J. G. Frazer. Two vols. Eversley Series. Macmillan. 12s. Net. 

If we love Cowper, then, it is not only because of his little world, butbecause of his greatness of soul that stands in contrast to it. He is likeone of those tiny pools among the rocks, left behind by the deep waters ofocean and reflecting the blue height of the sky. His most trivial actionsacquire a pathos from what we know of the _De Profundis_ that is behindthem. When we read of the Olney household--"our snug parlour, one ladyknitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted"--we feelthat this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance. Onanother day, "one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock. " It is agame of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result ofbelonging to the pious English upper-middle classes. The poet, inclined tobe fat, whose chief occupation in winter is "to walk ten times in a dayfrom the fireside to his cucumber frame and back again, " is busy enough ona heavenly errand. With his pet hares, his goldfinches, his dog, hiscarpentry, his greenhouse--"Is not our greenhouse a cabinet ofperfumes?"--his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not onlyconstantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all theterrors of Hell. He is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one sloughof despond only to fall waist-deep into another. This strange creature whopassed so much of his time writing such things as _Verses written at Bathon Finding the Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-glass almost driedin the Sun, Lines sent with Two Cockscombs to Miss Green_, and _On theDeath of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bullfinch_, stumbled along under a load ofwoe and repentance as terrible as any of the sorrows that we read of inthe great tragedies. The last of his original poems, _The Castaway_, is animage of his utter hopelessness. As he lay dying in 1880 he was asked howhe felt. He replied, "I feel unutterable despair. " To face damnation withthe sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare and saintlyaccomplishment. It gives him a place in the company of the beloved authorswith men of far greater genius than himself--with Shakespeare and Lamb andDickens. 

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinionthat of all the English poets "the one who, but for a stroke of madness, would have become our English Horace was William Cowper. He had the wit, "he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness. " As for the wit, I doubtit. Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five wordslong. " Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he wasnever a master of the Horatian phrase. Such phrases of his--and there arenot many of them--as have passed into the common speech flash neither withwit nor with wisdom. Take the best-known of them:

 "The cups That cheer but not inebriate;"

 "God made the country and man made the town;"

 "I am monarch of all I survey;"

 "Regions Cæsar never knew;" and

 "England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!"

This is lead for gold. Horace, it is true, must be judged as somethingmore than an inventor of golden tags. But no man can hope to succeedHorace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally passinto golden tags. This, I know, is a matter not only of style but oftemper. But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs fromHorace. Horace mixed on easy terms with the world. He enjoyed the samepleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties. He was a man of theworld above all other poets. Cowper was in comparison a man of theparlour. His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat, even if he had been neither mad nor pious. He was the very opposite of aworldling. He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, "of a verysingular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversedwith. " While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: "If Iwas as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and God forbid Ishould speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions with any saint inChristendom. " Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almostcertainly have been a Deist. Cowper was very nearly a Methodist. Thedifference, indeed, between them is fundamental. Horace was a pig, thougha charming one; Cowper was a pigeon. 

This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a Horace_manqué_, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as aletter-writer. It may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroyinghis real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew. Heunquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose. Hewrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using thefile on his poems. "To touch and retouch, " he once wrote to the Rev. William Unwin, "is, though some writers boast of negligence, and otherswould be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all goodwriting, especially in verse. I am never weary of it myself. " Even if wecount him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all hisfastidiousness of composition was wasted. He acquired in the workshop ofverse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiarprose. It is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers ofEnglish will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which herecounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyedwonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention ofhis stomach by Lady Hesketh's gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth atthe dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash Dr. Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinatedtastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as:

 I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and fowls please me without one exception. I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer. 

Here he is no missfire rival of Horace or Milton or Prior, or any of theother poets. Here he has arrived at the perfection for which he was born. How much better he was fitted to be a letter-writer than a poet may beseen by anyone who compares his treatment of the same incidents in verseand in prose. There is, for instance, that charming letter about theescaped goldfinch, which is not spoiled for us even though we may takeBlake's view of caged birds:

 I have two goldfinches, which in the summer occupy the greenhouse. A few days since, being employed in cleaning out their cages, I placed that which I had in hand upon the table, while the other hung against the wall; the windows and the doors stood wide open. I went to fill the fountain at the pump, and on my return was not a little surprised to find a goldfinch sitting on the top of the cage I had been cleaning, and singing to and kissing the goldfinch within. I approached him, and he discovered no fear; still nearer, and he discovered none. I advanced my hand towards him, and he took no notice of it. I seized him, and supposed I had caught a new bird, but casting my eye upon the other cage perceived my mistake. Its inhabitant, during my absence, had contrived to find an opening, where the wire had been a little bent, and made no other use of the escape it afforded him, than to salute his friend, and to converse with him more intimately than he had done before. I returned him to his proper mansion, but in vain. In less than a minute he had thrust his little person through the aperture again, and again perched upon his neighbour's cage, kissing him, as at the first, and singing, as if transported with the fortunate adventure. I could not but respect such friendship, as for the sake of its gratification had twice declined an opportunity to be free, and consenting to their union, resolved that for the future one cage should hold them both. I am glad of such incidents; for at a pinch, and when I need entertainment, the versification of them serves to divert me. .. . 

Cowper's "versification" of the incident is vapid compared to this. Theincident of the viper and the kittens again, which he "versified" in _TheColubriad_, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. His quietprose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy whichwas the deepest need of his nature. He made a full confession of himselfonly to his friends. In one of his letters he compares himself, as herises in the morning to "an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with theooze and mud of melancholy. " In his most ambitious verse he is a frogtrying to blow himself out into a bull. It is the frog in him, not theintended bull, that makes friends with us to-day. 

VII. --A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS

Voltaire's criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only onefault. It does not fit Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is the singledramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable. "He was asavage, " said Voltaire, "who had imagination. He has written many happylines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada. " Had thisbeen said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning), orCyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps therewas something in it. Again, Voltaire's boast that he had been the first toshow the French "some pearls which I had found" in the "enormous dunghill"of Shakespeare's plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably havebeen said by an anthologist who had made selections from Dekker orBeaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under Elizabeth and Jamesexcept William Shakespeare. One reads the average Elizabethan play in thecertainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practicallyfive acts high. There are, perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart fromShakespeare's that are as great as his third-best work. But there are no_Hamlets_ or _Lears_ among them. There are no _Midsummer Night's Dreams_. There is not even a _Winter's Tale_. 

If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans ingeneral in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespearehis claim would have been just. Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire'svanity. He did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans asa patron: he regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated bythe suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb probablylooked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in this as wide ofthe mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise has made famous amongvirgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago havebeen thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. Everyone goes to theElizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a longsuccession of sleeping beauties. The average man retires disappointed fromthe quest. He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to bedisappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man canread the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb's enthusiasm, however, who nevercould have read them with his own. 

One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse's books, he took downLamb's _Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets_, and, turning to Mr. Gosse, said, "That book taught me more than any other book in theworld--that and the Bible. " Swinburne was a notorious borrower of othermen's enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, theDevil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb. He had not, as Lambhad, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had the Elizabethan love ofphrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave. Swinburnehad none of this rich taste in speech. He used words riotously, but he didnot use great words riotously. He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb wascarefully extravagant. He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making abeautiful noise. Nor was this the only point on which he was opposed toLamb and the Elizabethans. He differed fundamentally from them in hisattitude to the spectacle of life. His mood was the mood not of aspectator but of a revivalist. He lectured his generation on the deadlyvirtues. He was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than toentertain the bar-parlour. Lamb himself was little enough of a formalPuritan. He felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had beenclipped by the descendants of the Puritans. He did not scold, however, butretired into the spectacle of another century. He wandered among old playslike an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle. Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much forsaying things. As a result, a great deal of his verse--and still more ofhis prose--has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life. 

His posthumous book on the Elizabethans is liveliest when it is mostargumentative. Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting theElizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion. Hisstyle is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable forintimate conversation. He writes in superlatives that give one theimpression that he is furious about something or other even when he isbeing fairly sensible. His criticism has thus an air of being much moreinsane than it is. His estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both farmore moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading. He out-LambsLamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudiciousexcess when he says of Brome:

 Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able competitor in their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris. 

Brome, I think, is better than this implies. Swinburne is not going manymiles too far when he calls _The Antipodes_ "one of the most fanciful anddelightful farces in the world. " It is a piece of poetic low comedy thatwill almost certainly entertain and delight any reader who goes to itexpecting to be bored. 

It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the averagereader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointedin them. He must not expect to find them giants on the Shakespeare scale. Better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetryrather than for the genius of separate plays. Of most of them it may besaid that their age is greater than they--that they are glorified by theirperiod rather than glorify it. They are figures in a golden and teeminglandscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their noblecircumstances. 

They are less great individually than in the mass. If they are giants, fewof them are giants who can stand on their own legs. They prop one anotherup. There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that areindividually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet byWordsworth is. The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more preciouspossession than the plays. The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poetsby destiny and dramatists by accident. It is conceivable that the greatestof them apart from Shakespeare--Marlowe and Jonson and Webster andDekker--might have been greater writers if the English theatre had neverexisted. Shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as in poetry. Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. _The Alchemist_ is a brilliantheavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another ofJonson's songs. As for Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires theexcellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedywhich survive in his dialogue, his _Sweet Content_ is worth all the purelydramatic work he ever wrote. 

One thing that differentiates the other Elizabethan and Jacobeandramatists from Shakespeare is their comparative indifference to humannature. There is too much mechanical malice in their tragedies and toolittle of the passion that every man recognizes in his own breast. Even sogood a play as _The Duchess of Malfi_ is marred by inadequacy of motive onthe part of the duchess's persecutors. Similarly, in Chapman's _Bussyd'Ambois_, the villains are simply a dramatist's infernal machines. Shakespeare's own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy ofmotive--the casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and inpart the revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act of _King Lear_as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in theother four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. _Othello_ breaksfree from mechanism of Plot in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer ofthe fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as wasGulliver among the Lilliputians. 

Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan dramatistsagain. Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying flat, and it wasnatural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately onpedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world. The modern reader, accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wishthat they were lying flat again. Most of the Elizabethans deserve neitherfate. They should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals, but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees--resting against thebase of Shakespeare's colossal statue. 

Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written ofChapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would haveadded to one's enjoyment of them. His _Chapman_ gives us a portrait of acharacter. Several of the chapters in _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_, however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring thanthe summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature. EvenMr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in his _Life of Swinburne_, described one of the chapters as "unreadable. " The book as a whole is notthat. But it unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fograther than by the full light of day. 

VIII. --THE OFFICE OF THE POETS

There is--at least, there seems to be--more cant talked about poetry justnow than at any previous time. Tartuffe is to-day not a priest but apoet--or a critic. Or, perhaps, Tartuffe is too lively a prototype for thecurates of poetry who swarm in the world's capitals at the present hour. There is a tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it onthe world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing. In medicine, as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into which the memberscan retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate. In the same way, thetheologians took possession of the temple of religion and refusedadmittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. Thislargely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority overother men. Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit--joyless anddomineering. Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is adenial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons. All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part ofthe immortal souls against the superior persons. Religion, the reformershave proclaimed, is the common possession of mankind. Christ came into theworld not to afford a career to theological pedants, but that the mass ofmankind might have life and might have it more abundantly. 

Poetry is in constant danger of suffering the same fate as religion. Inthe great ages of poetry, poetry was what is called a popular subject. Thegreatest poets, both of Greece and of England, took their genius to thatextremely popular institution, the theatre. They wrote not for pedants orany exclusive circle, but for mankind. They were, we have reason tobelieve, under no illusions as to the imperfections of mankind. But it wasthe best audience they could get, and represented more or less the samekind of world that they found in their own bosoms. It is a difficult thingto prove that the ordinary man can appreciate poetry, just as it is adifficult thing to prove that the ordinary man has an immortal soul. Butthe great poets, like the great saints, gave him the benefit of the doubt. If they had not, we should not have had the Greek drama or Shakespeare. 

That they were right seems probable in view of the excellence of the poemsand songs that survive among a peasantry that has not been de-educated inthe schools. If the arts were not a natural inheritance of simple people, neither the Irish love-songs collected by Dr. Douglas Hyde nor the Irishmusic edited by Moore could have survived. I do not mean to suggest thatany art can be kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet, the singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily alivewithout the popular audience. Tolstoy's use of the unspoiled peasant asthe test of art may lead to absurdities, if carried too far. But at leastit is an error in the right direction. It is an affirmation of the factthat every man is potentially an artist just as Christianity is anaffirmation of the fact that every man is potentially a saint. It is alsoan affirmation of the fact that art, like religion, makes its appeal tofeelings which are shared by the mass of men rather than the feelingswhich are the exclusive possession of the few. Where Tolstoy made hischief mistake was in failing to see that the artistic sense, like thereligious sense, is something that, so far from being born perfect, evenin the unspoiled peasant, passes though stage after stage of labour andexperience on the way to perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed:he is not an artist in the flower. He may pass all his life without evercoming to flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universalpotentiality of beauty. Tolstoy's most astounding paradox came _to_nothing more than this--that art exists, not for the hundreds of peoplewho are artists in name, but for the millions of people who are artists inembryo. 

At the same time, there is no use in being too confident that the averageman will ever be a poet, even in the sense of being a reader of poetry. All that one can ask is that the doors of literature shall be thrown opento him, as the doors of religion are in spite of the fact that he is not aperfect saint. The histories of literature and religion, it seems likely, both go back to a time in which men expressed their most rapturousemotions in dances. In time the inarticulate shouts of thedancers--Scottish dancers still utter those shouts, do they not?--gaveplace to rhythmic words. It may have been the genius of a single dancerthat first broke into speech, but his genius consisted not so much in hisseparateness from the others as in his power to express what all theothers felt. He was the prophet of a rapture that was theirs as much ashis own. 

Men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order toliberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember things. Poetryhas a double origin in joy and utility. The "Thirty days hath September"rhyme of the English child suggests the way in which men must have turnedto verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbialwisdom, of legend and narrative. Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from his _NewStudy of English Poetry_, would deny the name of poetry to all verse thatis not descended from the choric dance. In my opinion it is better torecognize the two lines, as of the father and the mother, in the pedigreeof poetry. We find abundant traces of them not only in Hesiod and Virgil, but in Homer and Chaucer. The utility of form and the joy of form have inall these poets become inextricably united. The objection to most of the"free verse" that is being written to-day is that in form it is neitherdelightful nor memorable. The truth is, the memorableness of the writingsof a man of genius becomes a part of their delight. If Pope is adelightful writer it is not merely because he expressed interestingopinions; it is because he threw most of the energies of his being intothe task of making them memorable and gave them a heightened vitality bygiving them rhymes. His satires and _The Rape of the Lock_ are, no doubt, better poetry than the _Essay on Man_, because he poured into them a stillmore vivid energy. But I doubt if there is any reasonable definition ofpoetry which would exclude even Pope the "essayist" from the circle of thepoets. He was a puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they areto-day, of all shapes and sizes. 

Unfortunately, "poetry, " like "religion, " is a word that we are almostbound to use in several senses. Sometimes we speak of "poetry" incontradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry. Similarly, "religion" would in one sense include the Abode of Love asopposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the Abode ofLove as opposed to the religion of St. James. In a common-senseclassification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind of literaturewritten in verse or in rhythms akin to verse. Sir Thomas Browne may havebeen more poetic than Erasmus Darwin, but in his best work he did notwrite poetry. Erasmus Darwin may have been more prosaic than Sir ThomasBrowne, but in his most famous work he did not write prose. Sir HenryNewbolt will not permit a classification of this kind. For him poetry isan expression of intuitions--an emotional transfiguration of life--whileprose is the expression of a scientific fact or a judgment. I doubt ifthis division is defensible. Everything that is literature is, in a sense, poetry as opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a greatdeal of work that is preponderantly the result of observation andjudgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly imaginative. Poetry is a house of many mansions. It includes fine poetry and foolishpoetry, noble poetry and base poetry. The chief duty of criticism is thepraise--the infectious praise--of the greatest poetry. The critic has theright to demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a nobletransfiguration of life. Swinburne transfigures life in _Anactoria_ noless than Shakespeare transfigures it in _King Lear_. But Swinburne's isan ignoble, Shakespeare's a noble transfiguration. Poetry may be divine ordevilish, just as religion may be. Literary criticism is so timid of beingaccused of Puritanism that it is chary of admitting that there may be aHeaven and a Hell of poetic genius as well as of religious genius. Themoralists go too far on the other side and are tempted to judge literatureby its morality rather than by its genius. It seems more reasonable toconclude that it is possible to have a poet of genius who is neverthelessa false poet, just as it is possible to have a prophet of genius who isnevertheless a false prophet. The lover of literature will be interestedin them all, but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to thefact that the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well asaesthetically, great. If Shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of theElizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the greatest;it is also because he had a soul incomparably noble and generous. SirHenry Newbolt deals in an interesting way with this ennoblement of lifethat is the mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodoxcode of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along thepath that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerateegotism. 

The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treatspoetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must beable to meet the challenge to its right to exist. The extreme moralistwould deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to makemen more moral. The hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure. Thegreatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of theextreme moralist or of the hedonist. Poetry exists for the purpose ofdelivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure. It exists for thepurpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above thisscene of wonder, beauty and terror. It is consonant both with the world ofgood conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and anenrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth andheaven. Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost alwaysfail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away soresolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula. Poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by thehome-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world. But it must always usethe life we live as the material of its joyous vision. It is born of ourdouble attachment to Earth and to Paradise. There is no formula forabsolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it inthe songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. It is open toquestion whether

 There is a fountain filled with blood

expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as

 And now my heart with pleasure fills And dances with the daffodils. 

There are many details on which one would like to join issue with SirHenry Newbolt, but his main contentions are so suggestive, his sympathiesso catholic and generous, that it seems hardly worth while arguing withhim about questions of scansion or of the relation of Blake tocontemporary politics, or of the evil of anthologies. His book is thereply of a capable and honest man of letters to the challenge uttered topoets by Keats in _The Fall of Hyperion_, where Moneta demands:

 What benfits canst thou, or all thy tribe To the great world?

and declares:

 None can usurp this height . .. But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest. 

Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold that hereKeats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. But how noble isKeats's dissatisfaction with himself! It is such noble dissatisfaction asthis that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs. Poetry andreligion--the impulse is very much the same. The rest is but aparlour-game. 

IX. --EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC

So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost forgottenhow wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. It was not merelythat he was popular in England, where his satires, _The Love of Fame, theUniversal Passion_, are said to have made him £3, 000. He was also a poweron the Continent. His _Night Thoughts_ was translated not only into allthe major languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. It wasadopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France. Even his_Conjectures on Original Composition_, written in 1759 in the form of aletter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that haslasted till our own day. A new edition of the German translation waspublished at Bonn so recently as 1910. In England there is no famousauthor more assiduously neglected. Not so much as a line is quoted fromhim in _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. I recently turned up a fairlyfull anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it hasroom for Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not beenallowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. I look round myown shelves, and they tell the same story. Small enough poets stand therein shivering neglect. Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have all beenthought worth keeping. But not on the coldest, topmost shelf has spacebeen found for Young. He scarcely survives even in popular quotations. Thecopy-books have perpetuated one line:

 Procrastination is the thief of time. 

Apart from that, _Night Thoughts_ have been swallowed up in an eternalnight. 

And certainly a study of the titles of his works will not encourage theaverage reader to go to him in search of treasures of the imagination. Atthe age of thirty, in 1713, he wrote a _Poem on the Last Day_, which hededicated to Queen Anne. In the following year he wrote _The Force ofReligion, or Vanquish'd Love_, a poem about Lady Jane Grey, which hededicated to the Countess of Salisbury. And no sooner was Queen Anne deadthan he made haste to salute the rising sun in an epistle _On the LateQueen's Death and His Majesty's Accession to the Throne_. Passing over anumber of years, we find him, in 1730, publishing a so-called Pindaricode, _Imperium Pelagi; a Naval Lyric_, in the preface to which he declareswith characteristic italics: "_Trade_ is a very _noble_ subject in itself;more _proper_ than any for an Englishman; and particularly _seasonable_ atthis juncture. " Add to this that he was the son of a dean, that he marriedthe daughter of an earl, and that, other means of advancement havingfailed, he became a clergyman at the age of between forty and fifty, andthe suggested portrait is that of a prudent hanger-on rather than a fieryman of genius. His prudence was rewarded with a pension of £200 a year, aRoyal Chaplaincy, and the position (after George III. 's accession) ofClerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager. In the opinion of Younghimself, who lived till the age of 82, the reward was inadequate. At theage of 79, however, he had conquered his disappointment to a sufficientdegree to write a poem on _Resignation_. 

Readers who, after a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined to looksatirically on Young as a time-server, oily with the mediocrity ofself-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read his _Conjectures onOriginal Composition_ for the first time. It is a bold and masculine essayon literary criticism, written in a style of quite brilliant, ifold-fashioned, rhetoric. Mrs. Thrale said of it: "In the _Conjectures uponOriginal Composition_ . .. We shall perhaps read the wittiest piece ofprose our whole language has to boast; yet from its over-twinkling, itseems too little gazed at and too little admired perhaps. " This is anexaggerated estimate. Dr. Johnson, who heard Young read the _Conjectures_at Richardson's house, said that "he was surprised to find Young receiveas novelties what he thought very common maxims. " If one tempers Mrs. Thrale's enthusiasms and Dr. Johnson's scorn, one will have a fairly justidea of the quality of Young's book. 

It is simply a shot fired with a good aim in the eternal war betweenauthority and liberty in literature. This is a controversy for which, weremen wise, there would be no need. We require in literature both theauthority of tradition and the liberty of genius to such new conquests. Unfortunately, we cannot agree as to the proportions in which each of themis required. The French exaggerated the importance of tradition, and sogave us the classical drama of Racine and Corneille. Walt Whitmanexaggerated the importance of liberty, and so gave us _Leaves of Grass_. In nearly all periods of literary energy, we find writers rushing to oneor other of these extremes. Either they declare that the classics areperfect and cannot be surpassed but only imitated; or, like the Futurists, they want to burn the classics and release the spirit of man for newadventures. It is all a prolonged duel between reaction and revolution, and the wise man of genius doing his best, like a Liberal, to bring thetwo opponents to terms. 

Much of the interest of Young's book is due to the fact that in an age ofreaction he came out on the revolutionary side. There was seldom a time atwhich the classics were more slavishly idolized and imitated. Miss Morleyquotes from Pope the saying that "all that is left us is to recommend ourproductions by the imitation of the ancients. " Young threw all hiseloquence on the opposite side. He uttered the bold paradox: "The less wecopy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more. " "Become anoble collateral, " he advised, "not a humble descendant from them. Let usbuild our compositions in the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients, but not with their materials. Thus will they resemble the structures ofPericles at Athens, which Plutarch commends for having had an air ofantiquity as soon as they were built. " He refuses to believe that themoderns are necessarily inferior to the ancients. If they are inferior, itis because they plagiarize from the ancients instead of emulating them. "If ancients and moderns, " he declares, "were no longer considered asmasters, and pupils, but as hard-matched rivals for renown, then moderns, by the longevity of their labours, might one day become ancientsthemselves. "

He deplores the fact that Pope should have been so content to indenturehis genius to the work of translation and imitation:

 Though we stand much obliged to him for giving us an Homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us--a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks before his decease. 

For ourselves, we hold that Pope showed himself to be as original as needsbe in his epistles to Martha Blount and Dr. Arbuthnot. None the less, thegeneral philosophy of Young's remarks is sound enough. We should reverencetradition in literature, but not superstitiously. Too much awe of the oldmasters may easily scare a modern into hiding his talent in a napkin. True, we are not in much danger of servitude to tradition in literatureto-day. We no longer imitate the ancients; we only imitate each other. Onthe whole, we wish there was rather more sense of the tradition incontemporary writing. The danger of arbitrary egoism is quite as great asthe danger of classicism. Luckily, Young, in stating the case against theclassicists, has at the same time stated perfectly the case forfamiliarity with the classics. "It is, " he declares, "but a sort of noblecontagion, from a general familiarity with their writings, and not by anyparticular sordid theft, that we can be the better for those who wentbefore us, " However we may deride a servile classicism, we should alwaysset out assuming the necessity of the "noble contagion for every man ofletters. "

The truth is, the man of letters must in some way reconcile himself to theparadox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival of the ancients. Young is optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to surpass them. In the mechanic arts, he complains, men are always attempting to go beyondtheir predecessors; in the liberal arts, they merely try to follow them. The analogy between the continuous advance of science and a possiblecontinuous advance in literature is perhaps, a misleading one. ProfessorGilbert Murray, in _Religio Grammatici_, bases much of his argument on adenial that such an analogy should be drawn. Literary genius cannot bebequeathed and added to as a scientific discovery can. The modern poetdoes not stand on Shakespeare's shoulders as the modern astronomer standson Galileo's shoulders. Scientific discovery is progressive. Literarygenius, like religious genius, is a miracle less dependent on time. Nonethe less, we may reasonably believe that literature, like science, hasever new worlds to conquer--that, even if Æschylus and Shakespeare cannotbe surpassed, names as great as theirs may one day be added to the roll ofliterary fame. And this will be possible only if men in each generationare determined, in the words of Goldsmith, "bravely to shake offadmiration, and, undazzled by the splendour of another's reputation, tochalk out a path to fame for themselves, and boldly cultivate untriedexperiment. " Goldsmith wrote these words in _The Bee_ in the same year inwhich Young's _Conjectures_ was published. I feel tolerably certain thathe wrote them as a result of reading Young's work. The reaction againsttraditionalism, however, was gathering general force by this time, and thedesire to be original was beginning to oust the desire to copy. BothYoung's and Goldsmith's essays are exceedingly interesting asanticipations of the romantic movement. Young was a true romantic when hewrote that Nature "brings us into the world all Originals--no two faces, no two minds, are just alike; but all bear evident marks of separation onthem. Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we are Copies?" Genius, hethinks, is commoner than is sometimes supposed, if we would make use ofit. His book is a plea for giving genius its head. He wants to see themodern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil, staking out a claimin the perfectly virgin field of his own experience. He cannot teach youto be a man of genius; he could not even teach himself to be one. But atleast he lays down many of the right rules for the use of genius. His bookmarks a most interesting stage in the development of English literarycriticism. 

X. --GRAY AND COLLINS

There seems to be a definite connection between good writing andindolence. The men whom we call stylists have, most of them, been idlers. From Horace to Robert Louis Stevenson, nearly all have been pigs from thesty of Epicurus. They have not, to use an excellent Anglo-Irish word, "industered" like insects or millionaires. The greatest men, one mustadmit, have mostly been as punctual at their labours as the sun--as fieryand inexhaustible. But, then, one does not think of the greatest writersas stylists. They are so much more than that. The style of Shakespeare isinfinitely more marvellous than the style of Gray. But one hardly thinksof style in presence of the sea or a range of mountains or in readingShakespeare. His munificent and gorgeous genius was as far above style asthe statesmanship of Pericles or the sanctity of Joan of Arc was abovegood manners. The world has not endorsed Ben Jonson's retort to those whocommended Shakespeare for never having "blotted out" a line: "Would he hadblotted out a thousand!" We feel that so vast a genius is beyond theperfection of control we look for in a stylist. There may be badly-writtenscenes in Shakespeare, and pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but withall this there are enchanted continents left in him which we may continueto explore though we live to be a hundred. 

The fact that the noble impatience of a Shakespeare is above ourfault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy patience ofgood writing. An Æschylus or a Shakespeare, a Browning or a Dickens, conquers us with an abundance like nature's. He feeds us out of a horn, ofplenty. This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the firstorder. The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather thanabundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. Who does notagree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been abetter poet if he had learned:

 The last and greatest art--the art to blot?

Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of Gray's thanall the poetical works of Southey? If voluminousness alone made a man agreat writer, we should have to canonize Lord Lytton. The truth is, literary genius has no rule either of voluminousness or of the opposite. The genius of one writer is a world ever moving. The genius of another isa garden often still. The greatest genius is undoubtedly of the formerkind. But as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall, much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to cultivatetheir gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult of creation, todelight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and quiet thought. 

Gray and Collins were both writers who labored in little gardens. Collins, indeed, had a small flower-bed--perhaps only a pot, indeed--rather than agarden. He produced in it one perfect bloom--the _Ode to Evening_. Therest of his work is carefully written, inoffensive, historicallyinteresting. But his continual personification of abstract ideas makes thegreater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in agraveyard. He was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his own day. Heseems academic to ours. His work is that of a man striking an attituderather than of one expressing the deeps of a passionate nature. He isalways careful not to confess. His _Ode to Fear_ does not admit us to anyof the secrets of his maniacal and melancholy breast. It is ananticipation of the factitious gloom of Byron, not of the nerve-shatteredgloom of Dostoevsky. Collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what hedoes not really think. He glorifies fear as though it were the better partof imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the lines:

 O thou whose spirit most possessed, The sacred seat of Shakespeare's breast! By all that from thy prophet broke In thy divine emotions spoke: Hither again thy fury deal, Teach me but once, like him, to feel; His cypress wreath my meed decree, And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!

We have only to compare these lines with Claudio's terrible speech aboutdeath in _Measure for Measure_ to see the difference between pretence andpassion in literature. Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knewabout fear. Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to foboff a disease on us as an accomplishment. What perpetually delights us inthe _Ode to Evening_ is that here at least Collins can tell the truthwithout falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of theworld as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use ofpersonifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion intoimagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed uphis view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent uponexpressing any other man's experiences but his own when he described howthe

 Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn. 

He speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the liberty of anew mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed before. As far as allthe rest of his work is concerned, his passion for style is more or lesswasted. But the _Ode to Evening_ justifies both his pains and hisindolence. As for the pains he took with his work, we have it on theauthority of Thomas Warton that "all his odes . .. Had the marks ofrepeated correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets. " As for hisindolence, his uncle, Colonel Martin, thought him "too indolent even forthe Army, " and advised him to enter the Church--a step from which he wasdissuaded, we are told, by "a tobacconist in Fleet Street. " For the rest, he was the son of a hatter, and went mad. He is said to have haunted thecloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and tohave uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls during theplaying of the organ. The Castle of Indolence was for Collins no keep ofthe pleasures. One may doubt if it is ever this for any artist. Did noteven Horace attempt to escape into Stoicism? Did not Stevenson write_Pulvis et Umbra_?

Assuredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as Collinswas wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the Castle ofIndolence a happy place. "Low spirits, " he wrote, when he was still anundergraduate, "are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits, and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me. " Theend of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses onthe drowning of Horace Walpole's cat) that his indolent melancholy was notwithout its compensations. He was a wit, an observer of himself and theworld about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of theessay. Further, he was Horace Walpole's friend, and (while his father hada devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tendernessinto which he could always retire. "I do not remember, " Mr. Gosse has saidof Gray, "that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs ofany other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed. "This delicious sentence contains an important criticism of Gray. Gray wasa poet of the sheltered life. His genius was shy and retiring. He had noambition to thrust himself upon the world. He kept himself to himself, asthe saying is. He published the _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_ in 1751only because the editors of the _Magazine of Magazines_ had got hold of acopy and Gray was afraid that they would publish it first. How lethargic apoet Gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began the _Elegy_ asfar back as 1746--Mason says it was begun in August, 1742--and did notfinish it until June 12, 1750. Probably there is no other short poem inEnglish literature which was brooded over for so many seasons. Nor wasthere ever a greater justification for patient brooding. Gray in this poemliberated the English imagination after half a century of prose andrhetoric. He restored poetry to its true function as the confession of anindividual soul. Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at least, assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into Englishliterature. But poetic diction was in use long before Gray. He isremarkable among English poets, not for having succumbed to poeticdiction, but for having triumphed over it. It is poetic feeling, notpoetic diction, that distinguishes him from the mass of eighteenth-centurywriters. It is an interesting coincidence that Gray and Collins shouldhave brought about a poetic revival by the rediscovery of the beauty ofevening, just as Mr. Yeats and "A. E. " brought about a poetic revival inour own day by the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight. Both schools ofpoetry (if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillnessof the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from thetyrannical prose of common day. There have been critics, including MatthewArnold, who have denied that the _Elegy_ is the greatest of Gray's poems. This, I think, can only be because they have been unable to see the poetryfor the quotations. No other poem that Gray ever wrote was a miracle. _TheBard_ is a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric. But the _Elegy_ is morethan this. It is an autobiography and the creation of a world for thehearts of men. Here Gray delivers the secret doctrine of the poets. Herehe escapes out of the eighteenth century into immortality. One realizeswhat an effort it must have been to rise above his century when one readsan earlier version of some of his most famous lines:

 Some village Cato (----) with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest; Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood. 

Could there be a more effective example of the return to reality than wefind in the final shape of this verse?

 Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood. 

It is as though suddenly it had been revealed to Gray that poetry is not amere literary exercise but the image of reality; that it does not consistin vain admiration of models far off in time and place, but that it is asnear to one as one's breath and one's country. Not that the _Elegy_ wouldhave been one of the great poems of the world if it had never plungeddeeper into the heart than in this verse. It is a poem of beauty andsorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as Cromwell andMilton. Here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means to theimagination, its quiet movement and its music, its pensiveness and itsregrets, have been given a form more lasting than bronze. Perhaps the poemowes a part of its popularity to the fact that it is a great homily, though a homily transfigured. But then does not _Hamlet_ owe a great partof its popularity to the fact that it is (among other things) a greatblood-and-thunder play with duels and a ghost?

One of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that Gray, havingwritten so greatly, should have written so little. He spoke of himself asa "shrimp of an author, " and expressed the fear that his works might bemistaken for those of "a pismire or a flea. " But to make a mystery of theindolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who wasblessed with more fastidiousness than passion, is absurd. To say perfectlyonce and for all what one has to say is surely as fine an achievement asto keep restlessly trying to say it a thousand times over. Gray was noblabber. It is said that he did not even let his mother and his aunts knowthat he wrote poetry. He lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy. Hestood aside from life. He would not even take money from his publishersfor his poetry. No wonder that he earned the scorn of Dr. Johnson, whosaid of him to Boswell, "Sir, he was dull in his company, dull in hiscloset, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made manythink him great. " Luckily, Gray's reserve tempted him into his own heartand into external nature for safety and consolation. Johnson could see inhim only a "mechanical poet. " To most of us he seems the first naturalpoet in modern literature. 

XI. --ASPECTS OF SHELLEY

(1) THE CHARACTER HALF-COMIC

Shelley is one of the most difficult of men of genius to portray. It iseasy enough to attack him or defend him--to damn him as an infidel or topraise him because he made Harriet Westbrook so miserable that she threwherself into the Serpentine. But this is an entirely different thing fromrecapturing the likeness of the man from the nine hundred and ninety-nineanecdotes that are told of him. These for the most part leave him with anair of absurdity. In his habit of ignoring facts he appeals again andagain to one's sense of the comic, like a drunken man who fails to see thekerb or who walks into a wall. He was indeed drunken with doctrine. Helived almost as much from doctrine as from passion. He pursued theories asa child chases butterflies. There is a story told of his Oxford days whichshows how eccentrically his theories converted themselves into conduct. Having been reading Plato with Hogg, and having soaked himself in thetheory of pre-existence and reminiscence, he was walking on MagdalenBridge when he met a woman with a child in her arms. He seized the child, while its mother, thinking he was about to throw it into the river, clungon to it by the clothes. "Will your baby tell us anything aboutpre-existence, madam?" he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistfullook. She made no answer, but on Shelley repeating the question she said, "He cannot speak. " "But surely, " exclaimed Shelley, "he can if he will, for he is only a few weeks old! He may fancy perhaps that he cannot, butit is only a silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use ofspeech in so short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible. " The woman, obviously taking him for a lunatic, replied mildly: "It is not for me todispute with you gentlemen, but I can safely declare that I never heardhim speak, nor any child, indeed, of his age. " Shelley walked away withhis friend, observing, with a deep sigh: "How provokingly close are thesenew-born babes!" One can, possibly, discover similar anecdotes in thelives of other men of genius and of men who thought they had genius. Butin such cases it is usually quite clear that the action was a jest or apiece of attitudinizing, or that the person who performed it was, as thevulgar say, "a little above himself. " In any event it almost invariablyappears as an abnormal incident in the life of a normal man. Shelley'slife, on the other hand, is largely a concentration of abnormal incidents. He was habitually "a bit above himself. " In the above incident he may havebeen consciously behaving comically. But many of his serious actions werequite as comically extraordinary. 

Godwin is related to have said that "Shelley was so beautiful, it was apity he was so wicked. " I doubt if there is a single literate person inthe world to-day who would apply the word "wicked" to Shelley. It is saidthat Browning, who had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt thesame regard for Shelley after reading the full story of his desertion ofHarriet Westbrook and her suicide. But Browning did not know the fullstory. No one of us knows the full story. On the face of it, it looks apeculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when she is about tobecome a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of£1, 000 a year to make an annual allowance of only £200 to a deserted wifeand her two children. Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love. A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl inorder to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. At the end ofthree years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides this, she had anintolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated. Harriet's sister, it issuggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shopsinstead of supporting Shelley's exhortations to her that she shouldcultivate her mind. "Harriet, " says Mr. Ingpen in _Shelley in England_, "foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whoseadvice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed uponShelley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensiveclothes. " We cannot help sympathizing a little with Harriet. At the sametime, she was making a breach with Shelley inevitable. She wished him toremain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish evento pretend to "live up to him" any longer. As Mr. Ingpen says, "it waslove, not matrimony, " for which Shelley yearned. "Marriage, " Shelley hadonce written, echoing Godwin, "is hateful, detestable. A kind ofineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this mostdespotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine itsenergies. " Having lived for years in a theory of "anti-matrimonialism, " henow saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which hadalways seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love. This, too, at atime when he had found in Mary Godwin a woman belonging to the sameintellectual and spiritual race as himself--a woman whom he loved as thegreat lovers in all the centuries have loved. Shelley himself expressedthe situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peacock:"Everyone who knows me, " he said, "must know that the partner of my lifeshould be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is anoble animal, but she can do neither. " "It always appeared to me, " saidPeacock, "that you were very fond of Harriet. " Shelley replied: "But youdid not know how I hated her sister. " And so Harriet's marriage-lineswere, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a scrap of paper. That Shelleydid not feel he had done anything inconsiderate is shown by the fact that, within three weeks of his elopement with Mary Godwin, he was writing toHarriet, describing the scenery through which Mary and he had travelled, and urging her to come and live near them in Switzerland. "I write, " hisletter runs--

 to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be always dear--by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured. From none can you expect this but me--all else are unfeeling, or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own, as Mrs. B[oinville], to whom their attention and affection is confined. 

He signed this letter (the Ianthe of whom he speaks was his daughter):

 With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most affectionately yours, S. 

This letter, if it had been written by an amorist, would seem eitherbase or priggish. Coming from Shelley, it is a miracle of what can only becalled innocence. 

The most interesting of the "new facts and letters" in Mr. Ingpen's bookrelate to Shelley's expulsion from Oxford and his runaway match withHarriet, and to his father's attitude on both these occasions. Shelley'sfather, backed by the family solicitor, cuts a commonplace figure in thestory. He is simply the conventional grieved parent. He made no effort tounderstand his son. The most he did was to try to save his respectability. He objected to Shelley's studying for the Bar, but was anxious to make hima member of Parliament; and Shelley and he dined with the Duke of Norfolkto discuss the matter, the result being that the younger man was highlyindignant "at what he considered an effort to shackle his mind, andintroduce him into life as a mere follower of the Duke. " How unpromisingas a party politician Shelley was may be gathered from the fact that in1811, the same year in which he dined with the Duke, he not only wrote asatire on the Regent _à propos_ of a Carlton House fête, but "amusedhimself with throwing copies into the carriages of persons going toCarlton House after the fête. " Shelley's methods of propaganda were onother occasions also more eccentric than is usual with followers of dukes. His journey to Dublin to preach Catholic Emancipation and repeal of theUnion was, the beginning of a brief but extraordinary period of propagandaby pamphlet. Having written a fivepenny pamphlet, _An Address to the IrishPeople_, he stood in the balcony of his lodgings in Lower SackvilleStreet, and threw copies to the passers-by. "I stand, " he wrote at thetime, "at the balcony of our window, and watch till I see a man _who lookslikely_; I throw a book to him. " Harriet, it is to be feared, saw only thecomic side of the adventure. Writing to Elizabeth Hitchener--"the BrownDemon, " as Shelley called her when he came to hate her--she said:

 I'm sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. We throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pass in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman's hood and cloak. She knew nothing of it, and we passed her. I could hardly get on: my muscles were so irritated. 

Shelley, none the less, was in regard to Ireland a wiser politician thanthe politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid or fanciful prose inhis _Address_ when he described the Act of Union as "the most successfulengine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland. "Godwin, with whom Shelley had been corresponding for some time, now becamealarmed at his disciple's reckless daring. "Shelley, you are preparing ascene of blood!" he wrote to him in his anxiety. It is evidence of theextent of Godwin's influence over Shelley that the latter withdrew hisIrish publications and returned to England, having spent about six weekson his mission to the Irish people. 

Mr. Ingpen has really written a new biography of Shelley rather than acompilation of new material. The new documents incorporated in the bookwere discovered by the successors to Mr. William Whitton, the Shelleys'family solicitor, but they can hardly be said to add much to our knowledgeof the facts about Shelley. They prove, however, that his marriage toHarriet Westbrook took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, andthat, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holdsthat they also prove that Shelley "appeared on the boards of the WindsorTheatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama. " But we have only WilliamWhitton, the solicitor's words for this, and it is clear that he had beenat no pains to investigate the matter. "It was mentioned to me yesterday, "he wrote to Shelley's father in November, 1815, "that Mr. P. B. Shelley wasexhibiting himself on the Windsor stage in the character of Shakespeare'splays, under the figured name of Cooks. " "The character of Shakespeare'splays" sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he was talkingabout, unless he was referring to allegorical "tableaux vivants" of somesort. Certainly, so vague a rumour as this--the sort of rumour that wouldnaturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone tothe bad--is no trustworthy evidence that Shelley was ever "an actor inShakespearean drama. " At the same time, Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiasticpraise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add anindispensable book to the Shelley library. I wish that, as he has to someextent followed the events of Shelley's life until the end, he had filledin the details of the life abroad as well as the life in England. His bookis an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography withgaps. He writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of factsrather than of a psychologist. One has to create one's own portrait ofShelley out of the facts he has brought together. 

One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Shelley--astudent to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition ofShelley's letters as well as for the biography--referring to Shelley againand again as "Bysshe. " Shelley's family, it may be admitted, called him"Bysshe. " But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet whobrought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biographyover again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehowexpress two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a greatextent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley wrote _The Skylark_and _Pan_ and _The West Wind_. It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat oldwoman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpenquotes Peacock's account of this characteristic illusion:

 He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant's, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands arms, and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning. 

Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous. After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, one has to read _Prometheus_ again in order to recall that divine song ofa freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Shelley. 

(2) THE EXPERIMENTALIST

Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice. In an introduction to Medwin's _Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_ he begins byfrankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point ofcontroversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is. "Lastcentury, " he declares, "produced a plethora of bad books that werevaluable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value. Medwin'sdistinction is that he left two bad books which were and still arevaluable, but whether the _Byron Conversations_ and the _Life of Shelley_should be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the twoworst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry. " Medwin, we may admit, even if he was not the "perfect idiot" he has been called, would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met Shelley or Byron. But he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, ornear it, a little gilded by their rays. He was not, Mr. Forman contends, the original of the man who "saw Shelley plain" in Browning's lyric. Nonethe less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us. Arelative of Shelley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years inItaly, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannothelp lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as atreasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives inthe history of English literature. 

Shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland, continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth. Here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of theage of science: he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not onlyin chemistry, but in life and in politics. At school, he and his solarmicroscope were inseparable. Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, weare told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin's father, but his ownfather sent it back with a note saying: "I have returned the book onchemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton. " During his life atUniversity College, Oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued. 

 His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to premise nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He had inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids--more than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents, for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot. 

The same eagerness of discovery is shown in his passion for kite-flying asa boy:

 He was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place made an electrical one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw lightning from The clouds--fire from Heaven, like a new Prometheus. 

And his generous dream of bringing science to the service of humanity isrevealed in his reflection:

 What a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will furnish them with a constant supply!

Shelley's many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth naturally led him earlyto invade theology. From his Eton days, he used to enter intocontroversies by letter with learned divines. Medwin declares that he sawone such correspondence in which Shelley engaged in argument with a bishop"under the assumed name of a woman. " It must have been in a somewhatsimilar mood that "one Sunday after we had been to Rowland Hill's chapel, and were dining together in the city, he wrote to him under an assumedname, proposing to preach to his congregation. "

Certainly, Shelley loved mystification scarcely less than he loved truthitself. He was a romanticist as well as a philosopher, and the reading inhis childhood of novels like _Zofloya the Moor_--a work as wild, apparently, as anything Cyril Tourneur ever wrote--excited his imaginationto impossible flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to studythe effects of this ghostly reading in Shelley's own work--his forgottennovels, _Zastrossi_, and _St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian_--but we can seehow his life itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. Many ofhis recorded adventures are supposed to have been hallucinations, like thestory of the "stranger in a military cloak, " who, seeing him in apost-office at Pisa, said, "What! Are you that d--d atheist, Shelley?" andfelled him to the ground. On the other hand, Shelley's story of his beingattacked by a midnight assassin in Wales, after being disbelieved forthree-quarters of a century, has in recent years been corroborated in themost unexpected way. Wild a fiction as his life was in many respects, itwas a fiction he himself sincerely and innocently believed. Hisimaginative appetite, having devoured science by day and sixpenny romancesby night, still remained unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mixup reality and make-believe past all recognition for its next dish. Francis Thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when henoted what a complete playfellow Shelley was in his life. When he was inLondon after his expulsion from the University, he could throw himselfwith all his being into childish games like skimming stones on theSerpentine, "counting with the utmost glee the number of bounds, as theflat stones flew skimming over the surface of the water. " He found aperfect pleasure in paper boats, and we hear of his making a sail on oneoccasion out of a ten-pound note--one of those myths, perhaps, whichgather round poets. It must have been the innocence of pleasure shown ingames like these that made him an irresistible companion to so manycomparatively prosaic people. For the idea that Shelley in private lifewas aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely false one. AsMedwin points out, in referring to his school-days, he "must have had arather large circle of friends, since his parting breakfast at Eton cost£50. "

Even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the fascinationof that boyish figure with the "stag eyes, " so enthusiastically in pursuitof truth and of dreams, of trifles light as air and of the redemption ofthe human race. "His figure, " Hogg tells us, "was slight and fragile, andyet his bones were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so muchthat he seemed of low stature. " And, in Medwin's book, we even becomereconciled to that shrill voice of his, which Lamb and most other peoplefound so unpleasant. Medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portraitof Shelley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluablematerials for such a portrait--in descriptions, for instance, of how heused to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and wouldget so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, "Mary, have Idined?" More important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, isthe account of how Medwin saw him, "after threading the carnival crowd inthe Lung' Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair, overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in thatsensual and unintellectual crowd. " Some people, on reading a passage likethis, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig isa man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries andimperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of hisown rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in Englishhistory. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On theother hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not evensuch an innocent egoism as Thoreau's. He was always longing to givehimself to the world. In the Italian days we find him planning anexpedition with Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger ofbeing burnt alive for sacrilege. He has often been denounced for hisheartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not judgehim, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently. Butit was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through themarriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that heso long endured Harriet's sister as the tyrant of his house, and that heneglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they wereconsistent with his deserting her for another woman. This may seem a_bizarre_ defence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Shelleybehaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done, given the same principles and the same circumstances. He was a man whonever followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as mostmen do in their love affairs. He fought a difficult fight all his life ina world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluterof Society. Whatever mistakes we may consider him to have made, we canhardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans. 

(3) THE POET OF HOPE

Shelley is the poet for a revolutionary age. He is the poet of hope, asWordsworth is the poet of wisdom. He has been charged with beingintangible and unearthly, but he is so only in the sense in which thefuture is intangible and unearthly. He is no more unearthly than theskylark or the rainbow or the dawn. His world, indeed, is a universe ofskylarks and rainbows and dawns--a universe in which

 Like a thousand dawns on a single night The splendours rise and spread. 

He at once dazzles and overwhelms us with light and music. He is unearthlyin the sense that as we read him we seem to move in a new element. We loseto some extent the gravity of flesh and find ourselves wandering amongstars and sunbeams, or diving under sea or stream to visit the buried dayof some wonder-strewn cave. There are other great poets besides Shelleywho have had a vision of the heights and depths. Compared with him, however, they have all about them something of Goliath's disadvantageousbulk. Shelley alone retains a boyish grace like David's, and does not seemto groan under the burden of his task. He does not round his shoulders ingloom in the presence of Heaven and Hell. His cosmos is a constellation. His thousand dawns are shaken out over the earth with a promise that turnseven the long agony of Prometheus into joy. There is no other joy inliterature like Shelley's. It is the joy not of one who is blind oruntroubled, but of one who, in a midnight of tyranny and suffering of theunselfish, has learned

 . .. To hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates. 

To write like this is to triumph over death. It is to cease to be a victimand to become a creator. Shelley recognized that the world had been boundinto slavery by the Devil, but he more than anyone else believed that itwas possible for the human race in a single dayspring to recover the firstintention of God. 

 In the great morning of the world, The Spirit of God with might unfurled The flag of Freedom over Chaos. 

Shelley desired to restore to earth not the past of man but the past ofGod. He lacked the bad sort of historical sense that will sacrifice theperfect to-morrow to pride in the imperfect yesterday. He was the devotedenemy of that dark spirit of Power which holds fast to the old greed as toa treasure. In _Hellas_ he puts into the mouth of Christ a reproof ofMahomet which is a reproof to all the Carsons and those who are haters ofa finer future to-day. 

 Obdurate spirit! Thou seest but the Past in the To-come. Pride is thy error and thy punishment. Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops Before the Power that wields and kindles them. True greatness asks not space. 

There are some critics who would like to separate Shelley's politics fromhis poetry. But Shelley's politics are part of his poetry. They are thepolitics of hope as his poetry is the poetry of hope. Europe did not adopthis politics in the generation that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and theresult is we have had an infinitely more terrible war a hundred yearslater. Every generation rejects Shelley; it prefers incredulity to hope, fear to joy, obedience to common sense, and is surprised when the logic ofits common sense turns out to be a tragedy such as even the wildest orgyof idealism could not have produced. Shelley must, no doubt, still seem ashocking poet to an age in which the limitation of the veto of the Houseof Lords was described as a revolutionary step. To Shelley even the newearth for which the Bolsheviks are calling would not have seemed anextravagant demand. He was almost the only English poet up to his own timewho believed that the world had a future. One can think of no other poetto whom to turn for the prophetic music of a real League of Nations. Tennyson may have spoken of the federation of the world, but his passionwas not for that but for the British Empire. He had the craven fear ofbeing great on any but the old Imperialist lines. His work did nothing tomake his country more generous than it was before. Shelley, on the otherhand, creates for us a new atmosphere of generosity. His patriotism waslove of the people of England, not love of the Government of England. Hence, when the Government of England allied itself with the oppressors ofmankind, he saw nothing unpatriotic in arraigning it as he would havearraigned a German or a Russian Government in the same circumstances. 

He arraigned it, indeed, in the preface to _Hellas_ in a paragraph whichthe publisher nervously suppressed, and which was only restored in 1892 byMr. Buxton Forman. The seditious paragraph ran:

 Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon the part which those who presume to represent them will have played in the great drama of the revival of liberty, with feelings which it would become them to anticipate. This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread. 

It is nearly a hundred years since Shelley proclaimed this birth of a newrace throughout Europe. Would he have turned pessimist if he had lived tosee the world infected with Prussianism as it has been in our time? I donot think he would. He would have been the singer of the new race to-dayas he was then. To him the resurrection of the old despotism, foreign anddomestic, would have seemed but a fresh assault by the Furies on the bodyof Prometheus. He would have scattered the Furies with a song. 

For Shelley has not failed. He is one of those who have brought down toearth the creative spirit of freedom. And that spirit has never ceased tobrood, with however disappointing results, over the chaos of Europe untilour own time. His greatest service to freedom is, perhaps, that he made itseem, not a policy, but a part of Nature. He made it desirable as thespring, lovely as a cloud in a blue sky, gay as a lark, glad as a wave, golden as a star, mighty as a wind. Other poets speak of freedom, andinvite the birds on to the platform. Shelley spoke of freedom and himselfbecame a bird in the air, a wave of the sea. He did not humiliate beautyinto a lesson. He scattered beauty among men not as a homily but as aspirit--

 Singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. 

His politics are implicit in _The Cloud_ and _The Skylark_ and _The WestWind_, no less than in _The Mask of Anarchy_. His idea of the State aswell as his idea of sky and stream and forest was rooted in the exuberantimagination of a lover. The whole body of his work, whether lyrical in thestrictest sense or propagandist, is in the nature of a Book of Revelation. 

It is impossible to say whether he might not have been a greater poet ifhe had not been in such haste to rebuild the world. He would, one fancies, have been a better artist if he had had a finer patience of phrase. On theother hand, his achievement even in the sphere of phrase and music issurpassed by no poet since Shakespeare. He may hurry along at intervals ina cloud of second-best words, but out of the cloud suddenly comes a songlike Ariel's and a radiance like the radiance of a new day. With him apoem is a melody rather than a manuscript. Not since Prospero commandedsongs from his attendant spirits has there been singing heard like the_Hymn of Pan_ and _The Indian Serenade_. _The Cloud_ is the most magicaltransmutation of things seen into things heard in the English language. Not that Shelley misses the wonder of things seen. But he sees things, as it were, musically. 

 My soul is an enchanted boat Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing. 

There is more of music than painting in this kind of writing. 

There is no other music but Shelley's which seems to me likely to bringhealing to the madness of the modern Saul. For this reason I hope thatProfessor Herford's fine edition of the shorter poems (arranged for thefirst time in chronological order) will encourage men and women to turn toShelley again. Professor Herford promises us a companion volume on thesame lines, containing the dramas and longer poems, if sufficient interestis shown in his book. The average reader will probably be content with Mr. Hutchinson's cheap and perfect "Oxford Edition" of Shelley. But thescholar, as well as the lover of a beautiful page, will find in ProfessorHerford's edition a new pleasure in old verse. 

XII. --THE WISDOM OF COLERIDGE

(1) COLERIDGE AS CRITIC

Coleridge was the thirteenth child of a rather queer clergyman. The Rev. John Coleridge was queer enough in having thirteen children: he wasqueerer still in being the author of a Latin grammar in which he renamedthe "ablative" the "quale-quare-quidditive case. " Coleridge was thus bornnot only with an unlucky number, but trailing clouds of definitions. Hewas in some respects the unluckiest of all Englishmen of literary genius. He leaves on us an impression of failure as no other writer of the samestature does. The impression may not be justified. There are few writerswho would not prefer the magnificent failure of a Coleridge to their ownlittle mole-hill of success. Coleridge was a failure in comparison notwith ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius. Hisimperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god. Charles Lamb summed up thetruth about his genius as well as about his character in that finalphrase, "an archangel a little damaged. " This was said at a time when thearchangel was much more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum;but even then Lamb wrote: "His face, when he repeats his verses, hath itsancient glory. " Most of Coleridge's great contemporaries were aware ofthat glory. Even those who were afterwards to be counted among hisrevilers, such as Hazlitt and De Quincey, had known what it was to bedisciples at the feet of this inspired ruin. They spoke not only of hismind, but even of his physical characteristics--his voice and his hair--asthough these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia. Even as a boy at Christ's Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the"casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced withadmiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the _speech_ andthe _garb_ of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep andsweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus . .. Orreciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar--while the walls of the old GreyFriars re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity-boy!_"

It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we shouldconstantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of hiscontemporaries. _Christabel_ and _Kubla Kahn_ we could read, no doubt, inperfect enjoyment even if we did not know the author's name. For the rest, there is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that, if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we mightpersuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dullflappings and slitherings of a penguin. His genius is intermittent andcomes arbitrarily to an end. He is inspired only in fragments andaphorisms. He was all but incapable of writing a complete book or acomplete poem at a high level. His irresponsibility as an author isdescribed in that sentence in which he says: "I have laid too many eggs inthe hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness andostrich oblivion. " His literary plans had a ludicrous way of breakingdown. It was characteristic of him that, in 1817, when he projected acomplete edition of his poems, under the title _Sibylline Leaves_, heomitted to publish Volume I. And published only Volume II. He wouldannounce a lecture on Milton, and then give his audience "a very eloquentand popular discourse on the general character of Shakespeare. " His twofinest poems he never finished. He wrote not by an act of the will butaccording to the wind, and when the wind dropped he came to earth. It wasas though he could soar but was unable to fly. It is this thatdifferentiates him from other great poets or critics. None of them hasleft such a record of unfulfilled purposes. It is not that he did not getthrough an enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in Mr. Chesterton's poem, he "went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head, " and inthe end he did not get to Birmingham. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives anamusing account of the way in which _Biographia Literaria_ came to bewritten. Originally, in 1815, it was conceived as a preface--to be "donein two, or at farthest three days"--to a collection of some "scattered andmanuscript poems. " Two months later the plan had changed. Coleridge wasnow busy on a preface to an _Autobiographia Literaria, sketches of myliterary Life and Opinions_. This in turn developed into "a full account(_raisonné_) of the controversy concerning Wordsworth's poems and theory, "with a "disquisition on the powers of Association . .. And on the genericdifference between the Fancy and the Imagination. " This ran to such alength that he decided not to use it as a preface, but to amplify it intoa work in three volumes. He succeeded in writing the first volume, but hefound himself unable to fill the second. "Then, as the volume obstinatelyremained too small, he tossed in _Satyrane_, an epistolary account of hiswanderings in Germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gavethe whole painfully to the world in July, 1817. " It is one of the ironiesof literary history that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous inliterature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to thehaphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the"shaping imagination, " should himself have given us in his greatest bookof criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. It is butanother proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what iscalled technique, genius almost can. Coleridge, in spite of hisformlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in English aboutliterature. His place is that of an oracle among controversialists. 

Even so, _Biographia Literaria_ is a disappointing book. It is the porch, but it is not the temple. It may be that, in literary criticism, there canbe no temple. Literary criticism is in its nature largely an incitement toenter, a hint of the treasures that are to be found within. Persons whoseek rest in literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written uponthe walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing. It isextremely easy to invent ten such commandments--it was done in the age ofRacine and in the age of Pope--but the wise critic knows that inliterature the rules are less important than the "inner light. " Hence, criticism at its highest is not a theorist's attempt to impose iron lawson writers: it is an attempt to capture the secret of that "inner light"and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. It is also anattempt to define the conditions in which the "inner light" has mosthappily manifested itself, and to judge new writers of promise accordingto the measure in which they have been true to the spirit, though notnecessarily to the technicalities, of the great tradition. Criticism, then, is not the Roman father of good writing: it is the disciple andmissionary of good writing. The end of criticism is less law-giving thanconversion. It teaches not the legalities, but the love, of literature. _Biographia Literaria_ does this in its most admirable parts byinteresting us in Coleridge's own literary beginnings, by emphasizing thestrong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty animosities oflittle ones, by pointing out the signs of the miracle of genius in theyoung Shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of Wordsworth from ahundred extravagances of theory and practice. Coleridge's remarks on theirritability of minor poets--"men of undoubted talents, but not ofgenius, " whose tempers are "rendered yet more irritable by their desire to_appear_ men of genius"--should be written up on the study walls ofeveryone commencing author. His description, too, of his period as "thisage of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when themeanest insects are worshipped with sort of Egyptian superstition if onlythe brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in thetail, " conveys a warning to writers that is not of an age but for alltime. Coleridge may have exaggerated the "manly hilarity" and "evennessand sweetness of temper" of men of genius. But there is no denying that, the smaller the genius, the greater is the spite of wounded self-love. "Experience informs us, " as Coleridge says, "that the first defence ofweak minds is to recriminate. " As for Coleridge's great service toWordsworth's fame, it was that of a gold-washer. He cleansed it from allthat was false in Wordsworth's reaction both in theory and in practiceagainst "poetic diction. " Coleridge pointed out that Wordsworth hadmisunderstood the ultimate objections to eighteenth-century verse. Thevalid objection to a great deal of eighteenth-century verse was not, heshowed, that it was written in language different from that of prose, butthat it consisted of "translations of prose thoughts into poeticlanguage. " Coleridge put it still more strongly, indeed, when he said that"the language from Pope's translation of Homer to Darwin's _Temple ofNature_ may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be toofaithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no better reasonthan that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose. "Wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against the meretricious garb ofmean thoughts, wished to deny verse its more splendid clothing altogether. If we accepted his theories we should have to condemn his _Ode_, thegreatest of his sonnets, and, as Coleridge put it, "two-thirds at least ofthe marked beauties of his poetry. " The truth is, Wordsworth created anengine that was in danger of destroying not only Pope but himself. Coleridge destroyed the engine and so helped to save Wordsworth. Coleridgemay, in his turn, have gone too far in dividing language into threegroups--language peculiar to poetry, language peculiar to prose, andlanguage common to both, though there is much to be said for the division;but his jealousy for the great tradition in language was the jealousy of asound critic. "Language, " he declared, "is the armoury of the human mind;and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of itsfuture conquests. "

He, himself, wrote idly enough at times: he did not shrink from thephrase, "literary man, " abominated by Mr. Birrell. But he rises insentence after sentence into the great manner, as when he declares:

 No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. 

How excellently, again, he describes Wordsworth's early aim as being--

 to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. 

He explains Wordsworth's gift more fully in another passage:

It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought, the finebalance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifyingthe objects observed, and, above all, the original gift of spreading thetone, the _atmosphere_, and with it the depth and height of the idealworld, around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for thecommon view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up thesparkle and the dew-drops. 

Coleridge's censures on Wordsworth, on the other hand, such as that on_The Daffodil_, may not all be endorsed by us to-day. But in the mass theyhave the insight of genius, as when he condemns "the approximation to whatmight be called _mental_ bombast, as distinguished from verbal. " Hisquotations of great passages, again, are the very flower of goodcriticism. 

Mr. George Sampson's editorial selection from _Biographia Literaria_and his pleasant as well as instructive notes give one a newpleasure in re-reading this classic of critical literature. The"quale-quare-quidditive" chapters have been removed, and Wordsworth'srevolutionary prefaces and essays given in their place. In its new form, _Biographia Literaria_ may not be the best book that could be written, butthere is good reason for believing that it is the best book that has beenwritten on poetry in the English tongue. 

(2) COLERIDGE AS A TALKER

Coleridge's talk resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. Itmoves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. When Dr. Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. Hissentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bullyeven more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comiccharacters in literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the samecompany as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention ofa Scottish humourist named Boswell. "Burke, " we read in Coleridge's _TableTalk_, "said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater intalking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life. "Coleridge's conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expressionof personality. He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather thanstruts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. At his best, he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says: "To mostmen experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate onlythe track it has passed. " He can give us in a sentence the central truthof politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is goodin Socialism in a score or so of words:

 That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man. 

And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in thesentence:

 Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of error, lest you get your brains knocked out. 

"I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner, " said Coleridge, and heexplained that he did not mean by this "an arguer. " He was a discoverer oforder, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist. He sought afterprinciples, whether in politics or literature. He quarrelled with Gibbonbecause his _Decline and Fall_ was "little else but a disguised collectionof . .. Splendid anecdotes" instead of a philosophic search for theultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire. Coleridge himselfformulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a timewhen we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vastboxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations. He said:

 The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire--which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the _national_ character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation. 

One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however. He was a seer with hishead among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait, stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses. He himselfboasted in a delightful sentence:

 For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance--that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine. 

It is to be feared that Coleridge's "gastric and bowel distempers" hadmore effect on his head than he was aware of. Like other men, he oftenspoke out of a heart full of grievances. He uttered the bitterness of anunhappily married dyspeptic when he said: "The most happy marriage I canpicture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blindwoman. " It is amusing to reflect that one of the many books which hewished to write was "a book on the duties of women, more especially totheir husbands. " One feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism ofthe great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather thanmaking an impersonal statement of truth. "How can a tall man help thinkingof his size, " he asked, "when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoebeside him?" The personal note that occasionally breaks in upon theoracular rhythm of the _Table Talk_, however, is a virtue in literature, even if a lapse in philosophy. The crumbs of a great man's autobiographyare no less precious than the crumbs of his wisdom. There are moods inwhich one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts. It is pleasant tohear Coleridge boasting; "The _Ancient Mariner_ cannot be imitated, northe poem _Love_. _They may be excelled; they are not imitable. _" One isamused to know that he succeeded in offending Lamb on one occasion byillustrating "the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and thepredominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of Lamband himself. " It is amusing, too, to find that, while Wordsworth regarded_The Ancient Mariner_ as a dangerous drag on the popularity of _LyricalBallads_, Coleridge looked on his poem as the feature that had sold thegreatest number of the copies of the book. It is only fair to add that intaking this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously:

 I was told by Longmans that the greater part of the _Lyrical Ballads_ had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of the _Ancient Mariner_, concluded that it was a naval song-book, or, at all events, that it had some relation to nautical matters. 

Of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in _Table Talk_ asone would like. At the same time, there are one or two which throw lighton the nature of Coleridge's imagination. We get an idea of one of thechief differences between the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry ofWordsworth when we read the confession:

 I had the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them I mostly forget. 

The nephew who collected Coleridge's talk declared that there was no manwhom he would more readily have chosen as a guide in morals, but "I wouldnot take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads. " Theauthor of _Kubla Khan_ asserted still more strongly on another occasionhis indifference to locality:

 Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact but harmonious opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations, just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in Herodotus, as anyone can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay on a man who lived in past time: I thought of adding another to it on one who lived not _in time_ at all, past, present, or future--but beside or collaterally. 

Some of Coleridge's other memories are of a more trifling and amusingsort. He recalls, for instance, the occasion of his only flogging atschool. He had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be taken on as anapprentice. The shoemaker, "being an honest man, " had at once told theboy's master:

 Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a clergyman. "Why so?" said he. "Because, to tell you the truth, sir, " said I, "I am an infidel!" For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me--wisely, as I think--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly. 

Among the reminiscences of Coleridge no passage is more famous than thatin which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane near Highgate oneday, a "loose, slack, not well-dressed youth" was introduced to him:

 It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said: "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "There is death in that hand, " I said to ----, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly. 

Another famous anecdote relates to the time at which Coleridge, likeWordsworth, carried the fires of the French Revolution about him into thepeace of the West Country. Speaking of a fellow-disciple of the liberty ofthose days, Coleridge afterwards said:

 John Thelwall had something very good about him. We were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him: "Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!" "Nay! Citizen Samuel, " replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!"

Is there any prettier anecdote in literary history?

Besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the _TableTalk_, however, there are a great number of opinions which show usColeridge not as a seer, but as a "character"--a crusty gentleman, everywhit as ready to express an antipathy as a principle. He shared Dr. Johnson's quarrel with the Scots, and said of them:

 I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English. 

He had no love for Jews, or Dissenters, or Catholics, and anticipatedCarlyle's hostility to the emancipation of the negroes. He raged againstthe Reform Bill, Catholic Emancipation, and the education of the poor inschools. He was indignant with Belgium for claiming national independence. One cannot read much of his talk about politics without amazement that sowise a man should have been so frequently a fool. At the same time, hegenerally remained an original fool. He never degenerated into a merepartisan. He might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was not takenin by reactionary leaders. He was no more capable than Shelley ofmistaking Castlereagh for a great man, and he did not join in theglorification of Pitt. Like Dr. Johnson, he could be a Tory withoutfeeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully Ireland. Coleridge, indeed, went so far as to wish to cut the last link with Ireland as theonly means of saving England. Discussing the Irish question, he said:

 I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from our association with Ireland. .. . Mr. Pitt has received great credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill! And what next?

When one thinks of the injury that the subjection of Ireland has done theEnglish name in America, in Russia, in Australia, and elsewhere in quiterecent times, one can hardly deny that on this matter Coleridge was asound prophet. 

It is the literary rather than the political opinions, however, that willbring every generation of readers afresh to Coleridge's _Table Talk_. Noman ever talked better in a few sentences on Shakespeare, Sterne, and thetribe of authors. One may not agree with Coleridge in regarding JeremyTaylor as one of the four chief glories of English literature, or inthinking Southey's style "next door to faultless. " But one listens to his_obiter dicta_ eagerly as the sayings of one of the greatest minds thathave interested themselves in the criticism of literature. There aretedious pages in _Table Talk_, but these are, for the most part, concernedwith theology. On the whole, the speech of Coleridge was golden. Even theleaden parts are interesting because they are Coleridge's lead. One wishesthe theology was balanced, however, by a few more glimpses of his lighterinterests, such as we find in the passage: "Never take an iambus for aChristian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rothaare my favourite names for women. " What we want most of all in table talkis to get an author into the confession album. Coleridge's _Table Talk_would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it not for the factthat he occasionally came down out of the pulpit and babbled. 

XIII. --TENNYSON: A TEMPORARY CRITICISM

If Tennyson's reputation has diminished, it is not that it has fallenbefore hostile criticism: it has merely faded through time. Perhaps therewas never an English poet who loomed so large to his own age asTennyson--who represented his contemporaries with the same passion andpower. Pope was sufficiently representative of his age, but his age meant, by comparison, a limited and aristocratic circle. Byron represented andshocked his age by turns. Tennyson, on the other hand, was as close to theeducated middle-class men and women of his time as the family clergyman. That is why, inevitably, he means less to us than he did to them. That hewas ahead of his age on many points on which this could not be said of thefamily clergyman one need not dispute. He was a kind of "new theologian. "He stood, like Dean Farrar, for the larger hope and various otherheresies. Every representative man is ahead of his age--a little, but notenough to be beyond the reach of the sympathies of ordinary people. It maybe objected that Tennyson is primarily an artist, not a thinker, and thathe should be judged not by his message but by his song. But his messageand his song sprang from the same vision--a vision of the world seen, not_sub specie æternitatis_, but _sub specie_ the reign of Queen Victoria. Before we appreciate Tennyson's real place in literature, we must franklyrecognize the fact that his muse wore a crinoline. The great mass of hiswork bears its date stamped upon it as obviously almost as a copy of _TheTimes_. How topical, both in mood and phrasing, are such lines as those in_Locksley Hall:_

 Then her cheek was pale, and thinner than should be for one so young. And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung. And I said "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee. "

One would not, of course, quote these lines as typical of Tennyson'sgenius. I think, however, they may be fairly quoted as lines suggestingthe mid-Victorian atmosphere that clings round all but his greatest work. They bring before our minds the genteel magazine illustrations of otherdays. They conjure up a world of charming, vapid faces, where there islittle life apart from sentiment and rhetoric. Contrast such a poem as_Locksley Hall_ with _The Flight of the Duchess_. Each contains at once adramatization of human relations, and the statement of a creed. The humanbeings in Browning's poem, however, are not mere shadows out of oldmagazines; they are as real as the men and women in the portraits of themasters, as real as ourselves. Similarly, in expressing his thought, Browning gives it imaginative dignity as philosophy, while Tennyson writeswhat is after all merely an exalted leading article. There is more incommon between Tennyson and Lytton than is generally realized. Both werefond of windy words. They were slaves of language to almost as great anextent as Swinburne. One feels that too often phrases like "moor and fell"and "bower and hall" were mere sounding substitutes for a creativeimagination. I have heard it argued that the lines in _Maud_:

 All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon;

introduce a curiously inappropriate instrument into a ball-room orchestramerely for the sake of euphony. The mistake about the bassoon is a smallone, and is, I suppose, borrowed from Coleridge, but it is characteristic. 

Tennyson was by no means the complete artist that for years he wasgenerally accepted as being. He was an artist of lines rather than ofpoems. He seldom wrote a poem which seemed to spring full-armed from theimagination as the great poems of the world do. He built them uphaphazard, as Thackeray wrote his novels. They are full of sententiouspadding and prettiness, and the wordiness is not merely a philosopher'svacuous babbling in his sleep, as so much of Wordsworth is; it is theword-spinning of a man who loves words more than people, or philosophy, orthings. Let us admit at once that when Tennyson is word perfect he takeshis place among the immortals. One may be convinced that the bulk of hiswork is already as dead as the bulk of Longfellow's work. But in his greatpoems he awoke to the vision of romance in its perfect form, and expressedit perfectly. He did this in _Ulysses_, which comes nearer a nobleperfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. One can imagine theenthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennysonis as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lineshackneyed for us by much quotation:

 The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

There, even if you have not the stalwart imagination which makesBrowning's people alive, you have a most beautiful fancy illustrating anold story. One of the most beautiful lines Tennyson ever wrote:

 The horns of Elfland faintly blowing, has the same suggestion of having been forged from the gold of the world'sromance. 

Tennyson's art at its best, however, and in these two instances is artfounded upon art, not art founded upon life. We used to be asked to admirethe vivid observation shown in such lines as:

 More black than ashbuds in the front of March;

and it is undoubtedly interesting to learn that Tennyson had a quick eyefor the facts of nature. But such lines, however accurate, do not make aman a poet. It is in his fine ornamental moods that Tennyson means most toour imaginations nowadays--in the moods of such lines as:

 Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost. 

The truth is, Tennyson, with all his rhetoric and with all his prosaicVictorian opinions, was an æsthete in the immortal part of him no lessthan were Rossetti and Swinburne. He seemed immense to his contemporaries, because he put their doubts and fears into music, and was master of thefervid rhetoric of the new gospel of Imperialism. They did not realizethat great poetry cannot be founded on a basis of perishable doubts andperishable gospels. It was enough for them to feel that _In Memoriam_ gavethem soothing anchorage and shelter from the destructive hurricanes ofscience. It was enough for them to thrill to the public-speech poetry of_Of old sat Freedom on the Heights_, the patriotic triumph of _The Reliefof Lucknow_, the glorious contempt for foreigners exhibited in hisreferences to "the red fool-fury of the Seine. " Is it any wonder thatduring a great part of his life Tennyson was widely regarded as not only apoet, but a teacher and a statesman? His sneering caricature of Bright asthe "broad-brimmed hawker of holy things" should have made it clear thatin politics he was but a party man, and that his political intelligencewas commonplace. 

He was too deficient in the highest kind of imagination and intellect toachieve the greatest things. He seldom or never stood aloof from his owntime, as Wordsworth did through his philosophic imagination, as Keats didthrough his æsthetic imagination, as Browning did through his dramaticimagination. He wore a poetical cloak, and avoided the vulgar crowdphysically; he had none of Browning's taste for tea-parties. But Browninghad not the tea-party imagination; Tennyson, in a great degree, had. Hepreached excellent virtues to his time; but they were respectable ratherthan spiritual virtues. Thus, _The Idylls of the King_ have become to usmere ancient fashion-plates of the virtues, while the moral power of _TheRing and the Book_ is as commanding to-day as in the year in which thepoem was first published. 

It is all the more surprising that no good selection from Tennyson has yetappeared. His "complete works" contain so much that is ephemeral anduninspired as to be a mere book of reference on our shelves. When willsome critic do for him what Matthew Arnold did for Wordsworth, andseparate the gold from the dross--do it as well as Matthew Arnold did itfor Wordsworth? Such a volume would be far thinner than the Wordsworthselection. But it would entitle Tennyson to a much higher place among thepoets than in these years of the reaction he is generally given. 

XIV. --THE POLITICS OF SWIFT AND SHAKESPEARE

(1) SWIFT

There are few greater ironies in history than that the modernConservatives should be eager to claim Swift as one of themselves. Onefinds even the _Morning Post_--which someone has aptly enough named the_Morning Prussian_--cheerfully counting the author of _A Voyage toHouyhnhnms_ in the list of sound Tories. It is undeniable that Swift wrotepamphlets for the Tory Party of his day. A Whig, he turned from the Whigsof Queen Anne in disgust, and carried the Tory label for the rest of hislife. If we consider realities rather than labels, however, what do wefind were the chief political ideals for which Swift stood? His politics, as every reader of his pamphlets knows, were, above all, the politics of apacifist and a Home Ruler--the two things most abhorrent to the orthodoxTories of our own time. Swift belonged to the Tory Party at one of thoserare periods at which it was a peace party. _The Conduct of the Allies_was simply a demand for a premature peace. Worse than this, it was apamphlet against England's taking part in a land-war on the Continentinstead of confining herself to naval operations. "It was the kingdom'smisfortune, " wrote Swift, "that the sea was not the Duke of Marlborough'selement, otherwise the whole force of the war would infallibly have beenbestowed there, infinitely to the advantage of his country. " Whether Swiftand the Tories were right in their attack on Marlborough and the war is aquestion into which I do not propose to enter. I merely wish to emphasizethe fact that _The Conduct of the Allies_ was, from the modern Tory pointof view, not merely a pacifist, but a treasonable, document. Were anythinglike it to appear nowadays, it would be suppressed under the Defence ofthe Realm Act. And that Swift was a hater of war, not merely as a partypolitician, but as a philosopher, is shown by the discourse on the causesof war which he puts into the mouth of Gulliver when the latter is tryingto convey a picture of human society to his Houyhnhnm master:

 Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretends to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war with our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. 

There you have "Kultur" wars, and "white man's burden" wars, and wars for"places of strategic importance, " satirized as though by atwentieth-century humanitarian. When the _Morning Post_ begins to writeleaders in the same strain, we shall begin to believe that Swift was aTory in the ordinary meaning of the word. 

As for Swift's Irish politics, Mr. Charles Whibley, like otherConservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential Nationalismby suggesting that Swift was merely a just man righteously indignant atthe destruction of Irish manufactures. At least, one would never gatherfrom the present book that Swift was practically the father of the modernIrish demand for self-government. Swift was an Irish patriot in the sensein which Washington was an American patriot. Like Washington, he had noquarrel with English civilization. He was not an eighteenth-century SinnFeiner. He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism wasColonial Nationalism. As such he was the forerunner of Grattan and Flood, and also, in a measure, of Parnell and Redmond. While not a Separatist, hehad the strongest possible objection to being either ruled or ruined fromLondon. In his _Short View of the State of Ireland_, published in 1728, hepreached the whole gospel of Colonial Nationalism as it is accepted byIrishmen like Sir Horace Plunkett to-day. He declared that one of thecauses of a nation's thriving--

 . .. Is by being governed only by laws made with their own consent, for otherwise they are not a free people. And, therefore, all appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment, to another country are so many grievous impoverishments. 

He said of the Irish:

 We are in the condition of patients who have physic sent to them by doctors at a distance, strangers to their constitution and the nature of their disease. 

In the _Drapier's Letters_ he denied the right of the English Parliamentto legislate for Ireland. He declared that all reason was on the side ofIreland's being free, though power and the love of power made forIreland's servitude. "The arguments on both sides, " he said in a passagewhich sums up with perfect irony the centuries-old controversy betweenEngland and Ireland, were "invincible":

 For in reason all government without the consent of the governed is slavery. But, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt. 

It would be interesting to know how the modern Tory, whose gospel is thegospel of the eleven men well armed, squares this with Swift's passionatechampionship of the "one single man in his shirt. " One wishes veryearnestly that the Toryism of Swift were in fact the Toryism of the modernConservative party. Had it been so, there would have been no such thing asCarsonism in pre-war England; and, had there been no Carsonism, one mayinfer from Mr. Gerard's recent revelations, there might have been noEuropean war. 

Mr. Whibley, it is only fair to say, is concerned with Swift as a man ofletters and a friend, rather than with Swift as a party politician. Thepresent book is a reprint of the Leslie Stephen lecture which he deliveredat Cambridge a few months ago. It was bound, therefore, to bepredominantly literary in interest. At the same time, Mr. Whibley'spolitical bias appears both in what he says and in what he keeps silentabout. His defence of Swift against the charge of misanthropy is a defencewith which we find ourselves largely in agreement. But Mr. Whibley is toosingle-minded a party politician to be able to defend the Dean withoutclubbing a number of his own pet antipathies in the process. He seems tothink that the only alternative to the attitude of Dean Swift towardshumanity is the attitude of persons who, "feigning a bland and generallove of abtract humanity . .. Wreak a wild revenge upon individuals. " Heapparently believes that it is impossible for one human being to wish wellto the human race in general, and to be affectionate to John, Peter andThomas in particular. Here are some of Mr. Whibley's rather wild commentson this topic. He writes:

 We know well enough whither universal philanthropy leads us. The Friend of Man is seldom the friend of men. At his best he is content with a moral maxim, and buttons up his pocket in the presence of poverty. "I _give_ thee sixpence! I will see thee damned first!" It is not for nothing that Canning's immortal words were put in the mouth of the Friend of Humanity, who, finding that he cannot turn the Needy Knife Grinder to political account, give him kicks for ha'pence, and goes off in "a transport of Republican enthusiasm. " Such is the Friend of Man at his best. 

"At his best" is good. It makes one realize that Mr. Whibley is merelyplaying a game of make-believe, and playing it very hard. His indictmentof humanitarians has about as much, or as little, basis in fact as wouldan indictment of wives or seagulls or fields of corn. One has only tomention Shelley with his innumerable personal benevolences to set Mr. Whibley's card-castle of abuse tumbling. 

With Mr. Whibley's general view of Swift as opposed to his general view ofpolitics, I find myself for the most part in harmony. I doubt, however, whether Swift has been pursued in his grave with such torrential malignityas Mr. Whibley imagines. Thackeray's denigration, I admit, takes thebreath away. One can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift'swritings or his life. Of course he had done so, but his passion for thesentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a genius ofsaturnine realism such as Swift's. The truth is, though Swift was amongthe staunchest of friends, he is not among the most sociable of authors. His writings are seldom in the vein either of tenderness or of merriment. We know of the tenderness of Swift only from a rare anecdote or from theprattle of the _Journal to Stella_. As for his laughter, as Mr. Whibleyrightly points out, Pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of Swift aslaughing and shaking in Rabelais's easy chair. Swift's humour isessentially of the intellect. He laughs out of his own bitterness ratherthan to amuse his fellow-men. As Mr. Whibley says, he is not a cynic. Heis not sufficiently indifferent for that. He is a satirist, a sort ofperverted and suffering idealist: an idealist with the cynic's vision. Itis the essential nobleness of Swift's nature which makes the voyage to theHouyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature. There arepeople who pretend that this section of _Gulliver's Travels_ is almost tooterrible for sensitive persons to read. This is sheer affectation. It canonly be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terriblefor sensitive persons to live!

(2) SHAKESPEARE

Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-poster. Heplasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on Fox's House ofCommons but on Shakespeare's Theatre. He is apparently interested in menof genius chiefly as regards their attitude to his electioneeringactivities. Shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person whowould have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in NewPlace than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as "Vote forPodgkins and Down with the Common People" or "Vote for Podgkins and NoLeague of Nations. " Mr. Whibley thinks Shakespeare was like that, and sohe exalts Shakespeare. He has, I do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but thathas made no difference, He would clearly have taken much the same view ofShakespeare if he had never read him. To be great, said Emerson, is to bemisunderstood. To be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by Mr. Whibley. 

I do not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single out thechapter on "Shakespeare: Patriot and Tory" as the most representative inhis volume of _Political Portraits_. It would be unjust if one were tosuggest that Mr. Whibley could write nothing better than this. Hishistorical portraits are often delightful as the work of a cleverillustrator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits. Those essays inwhich he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas mostsuccessfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer. Hisstudies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and Melbourne are all of themgood entertainment. If I comment on the Shakespeare essay rather than onthese, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author'sskill as a portrait-painter is put to the test. Here he has to dependalmost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge ofhuman nature. Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes toquote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or apedestrian intelligence with the trick of words. Mr. Whibley, I fear, comes badly off from the test. One does not blame him for having writtenon the theme that "Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also. " Itwould be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study of Shakespeare onthese lines. Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare tooffend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Toryshould not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him. There isevery reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if itis to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness oftouch. Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, especially the second. The proof of Shakespeare's Toryism, for instance, which he draws from _Troilus and Cressida_, is based on a totalmisunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about thenecessity of observing "degree, priority and place. " Mr. Whibley, plungingblindly about in Tory blinkers, imagines that in this speech Ulysses, orrather Shakespeare, is referring to the necessity of keeping the democracyin its place. "Might he not, " he asks, "have written these prophetic lineswith his mind's eye upon France of the Terror or upon modern Russia?" HadMr. Whibley read the play with that small amount of self-forgetfulnesswithout which no man has ever yet been able to appreciate literature, hewould have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy butof the aristocracy against which Ulysses--or, if you prefer it, Shakespeare--inveighs in this speech. The speech is aimed at the self-willand factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to Agamemnon. If there areany moderns who come under the noble lash of Ulysses, they must be soughtfor not among either French or Russian revolutionists, but in the personsof such sound Tories as Sir Edward Carson and such sound patriots as Mr. Lloyd George. It is tolerably certain that neither Ulysses nor Shakespeareforesaw Sir Edward Carson's escapades or Mr. Lloyd George's insurbordinatecareer as a member of Mr. Asquith's Cabinet. But how admirably they sum upall the wild statesmanship of these later days in lines which Mr. Whibley, accountably enough, fails to quote:

 They tax our policy, and call it cowardice; Count wisdom as no member of the war; Forestall prescience, and esteem no act But that of hand; the still and mental parts-- That do contrive how many hands shall strike, When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight-- Why, this hath not a finger's dignity. They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war: So that the ram, that batters down the wall, For the great swing and rudeness of his poise, They place before his hand that made the engine, Or those that with the fineness of their souls By reason guide his execution. 

There is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to the soul ofthe author of the _Letters of an Englishman_. 

Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp thepoint of _Troilus and Cressida_. He blunders with equal assiduity inregard to _Coriolanus_. He treats this play, not as a play aboutCoriolanus, but as a pamphlet in favour of Coriolanus. He has not beeninitiated, it seems, into the first secret of imaginative literature, which is that one may portray a hero sympathetically without makingbelieve that his vices are virtues. Shakespeare no more endorsesCoriolanus's patrician pride than he endorses Othello's jealousy orMacbeth's murderous ambition. Shakespeare was concerned with paintingnoble natures, not with pandering to their vices. He makes us sympathizewith Coriolanus in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to hisbetter nature, in his death; but from Shakespeare's point of view, as frommost men's the Nietzschean arrogance which led Coriolanus to become atraitor to his city is a theme for sadness, not (as apparently with Mr. Whibley) for enthusiasm. "Shakespeare, " cries Mr. Whibley, as he quotessome of Coriolanus's anti-popular speeches, "will not let the people off. He pursues it with an irony of scorn. " "There in a few lines, " he writesof some other speeches, "are expressed the external folly and shame ofdemocracy. Ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not even thecourage of its own opinions. " It would be interesting to know whether inMr. Whibley's eyes Coriolanus's hatred of the people is a sufficientlysplendid virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor. That good Torieshave the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often enough inregard to the Ulster trouble before the war. It may be doubted, however, whether Shakespeare was sufficiently a Tory to foresee the necessity ofsuch a gospel in _Coriolanus_. Certainly, the mother of Coriolanus, whowas far from being a Radical, or even a mild Whig, preached the veryopposite of the gospel of treason. She warned Coriolanus that his triumphover Rome would be a traitor's triumph, that his name would be "dogg'dwith curses, " and that his character would be summed up in history in onefatal sentence:

 The man was noble, But with his last attempt he wiped it out, Destroyed his country, and his name remains To the ensuing age abhorr'd. 

Mr. Whibley appears to loathe the mass of human beings so excessively thathe does not quite realize the enormity (from the modern point of view) ofCoriolanus's crime. It would, I agree, be foolish to judge Coriolanus tooscrupulously from a modern point of view. But Mr. Whibley has asked us toaccept the play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as suchin order to discover what Mr. Whibley means. 

But, after all, Mr. Whibley's failure as a portrait-painter is a failureof the spirit even more than of the intellect. A narrow spirit cannotcomprehend a magnanimous spirit, and Mr. Whibley's imagination does notmove in that large Shakespearean world in which illustrious men salutetheir mortal enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of

 He was the noblest Roman of them all. 

The author who is capable of writing Mr. Whibley's character-study of Foxdoes not understand enough about the splendour and the miseries of humannature to write well on Shakespeare. Of Fox Mr. Whibley says:

 He put no bounds upon his hatred of England, and he thought it not shameful to intrigue with foreigners against the safety and credit of the land to which he belonged. Wherever there was a foe to England, there was a friend of Fox. America, Ireland, France, each in turn inspired his enthusiasm. When Howe was victorious at Brooklyn, he publicly deplored "the terrible news. " After Valmy he did not hesitate to express his joy. "No public event, " he wrote, "not excepting Yorktown and Saratoga, ever happened that gave me so much delight. I could not allow myself to believe it for some days for fear of disappointment. "

It does not seem to occur to Mr. Whibley that in regard to America, Ireland, and France, Fox was, according to the standard of every ideal forwhich the Allies professed to fight, tremendously right, and that, were itnot for Yorktown and Valmy, America and France would not in our own timehave been great free nations fighting against the embattled Whibleys ofGermany. So far as Mr. Whibley's political philosophy goes, I see noreason why he should not have declared himself on the side of Germany. Hebelieves in patriotism, it is true, but he is apparently a patriot of thesort that loves his country and hates his fellow-countrymen (if that iswhat he means by "the people, " and presumably it must be). Mr. Whibley hascertainly the mind of a German professor. His vehemence against theGermans for appreciating Shakespeare is strangely like a Germanprofessor's vehemence against the English for not appreciating him. "Whythen, " he asks, should the Germans have attempted to lay violent hands upon our Shakespeare? It is but part of their general policy of pillage. Stealing comes as easy to them as it came to Bardolph and Nym, who in Calais stole a fire-shovel. Wherever they have gone they have cast a thievish eye upon what does not belong to them. They hit upon the happy plan of levying tolls upon starved Belgium. It was not enough for their greed to empty a country of food; they must extract something from its pocket, even though it be dying of hunger. .. . No doubt, if they came to these shores, they would feed their fury by scattering Shakespeare's dust to the winds of heaven. As they are unable to sack Stratford, they do what seems to them the next best thing: they hoist the Jolly Roger over Shakespeare's works. 

 Their arrogance is busy in vain. Shakespeare shall never be theirs. He was an English patriot, who would always have refused to bow the knee to an insolent alien. 

This is mere foaming at the mouth--the tawdry violence of a ToryThersites. This passage is a measure of the good sense and imagination Mr. Whibley brings to the study of Shakespeare. It is simply theatricalJolly-Rogerism. 

XV. --THE PERSONALITY OF MORRIS

One thinks of William Morris as a man who wished to make the world asbeautiful as an illuminated manuscript. He loved the bright colours, thegold, the little strange insets of landscape, the exquisite craftsmanshipof decoration, in which the genius of the medieval illuminators expresseditself. His Utopia meant the restoration, not so much of the soul of man, as of the selected delights of the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages. Hispassion for trappings--and what fine trappings!--is admirably suggested byMr. Cunninghame Graham in his preface to Mr. Compton-Rickett's _WilliamMorris: a Study in Personality_. Morris he declares, was in his opinion"no mystic, but a sort of symbolist set in a medieval frame, and itappeared to me that all his love of the old times of which he wrote waschiefly of the setting; of tapestries well wrought; of needlework, richcolours of stained glass falling upon old monuments, and of fine work notscamped. " To emphasize the preoccupation of Morris with the veryhandiwork, rather than with the mystic secrets, of beauty is notnecessarily to diminish his name. He was essentially a man for whom thevisible world existed, and in the manner in which he wore himself out inhis efforts to reshape the visible world he proved himself one of thegreat men of his century. His life was, in its own way, devotional eversince those years in which Burne-Jones, his fellow-undergraduate atOxford, wrote to him: "We must enlist you in this Crusade and Holy Warfareagainst the age. " Like all revolutions, of course, the Morris revolutionwas a prophecy rather than an achievement. But, perhaps, a prophecy ofUtopia is itself one of the greatest achievements of which humanity iscapable. 

It is odd that one who spilled out his genius for the world of men shouldhave been so self-sufficing, so little dependent on friendships andordinary human relationships as Morris is depicted both in Mr. Mackail'sbiography and Mr. Compton-Rickett's study. Obviously, he was a man withwhom generosity was a second nature. When he became a Socialist, he soldthe greater part of his precious library in order to help the cause. Onthe other hand, to balance this, we have Rossetti's famous assertion:"Top"--the general nickname for Morris--"never gives money to a beggar. "Mr. Mackail, if I remember right, accepted Rossetti's statement asexpressive of Morris's indifference to men as compared with causes. Mr. Compton-Rickett, however, challenges the truth of the observation. "Thenumber of 'beggars, '" he affirms, "who called at his house and went awayrewarded were legion. "

 Mr. Belfort Bax declares that he kept a drawerful of half-crowns for foreign anarchists, because, as he explained apologetically: "They always wanted half-a-crown, and it saved time to have a stock ready. "

But this is no real contradiction of Rossetti. Morris's anarchistsrepresented his life's work to him. He did not help them from thatpersonal and irrational charity which made Rossetti want to give a pennyto a beggar in the street. This may be regarded as a supersubtledistinction; but it is necessary if we are to understand the importantfact about Morris that--to quote Mr. Compton-Rickett--"human nature in theconcrete never profoundly interested him. " Enthusiastic as were thefriendships of his youth--when he gushed into "dearests" in hisletters--we could imagine him as living without friends and yet beingtolerably happy. He was, as Mr. Compton-Rickett suggests, like a childwith a new toy in his discovery of ever-fresh pursuits in the three worldsof Politics, Literature and Art. He was a person to whom even duties werePleasures. Mr. Mackail has spoken of him as "the rare distance of a manwho, without ever once swerving from truth or duty, knew what he liked anddid what he liked, all his life long. " One thinks of him in his work as achild with a box of paints--an inspired child with wonderful paints andthe skill to use them. He was such a child as accepts companions withpleasure, but also accepts the absence of companions with pleasure. Hecould absorb himself in his games of genius anywhere and everywhere. "Muchof his literary work was done on buses and in trains. " His poetry isoften, as it were, the delightful nursery-work of a grown man. "His bestwork, " as Mr. Compton-Rickett says, "reads like happy improvisations. " Hehad a child's sudden and impulsive temper, too. Once, having come into hisstudio in a rage, he "took a flying kick at the door, and smashed in apanel. " "It's all right, " he assured the scared model, who was preparingto fly; "it's all right--_something_ had to give way. " The same violenceof impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion, when he wasstaying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to his hostess'scurtains, and tore them down during the night. His judgments were oftenmuch the same kind of untempered emotions as he showed in the matter ofthe curtains--his complaint, for example, that a Greek temple was "like atable on four legs: a damned dull thing!" He was a creature of whims: somuch so that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel, " flung at him. He enjoyed the expression ofknock-out opinions such as: "I always bless God for making anything sostrong as an onion!" He laughed easily, not from humour so much as from aromping playfulness. He took a young boy's pleasure in showing off thestrength of his mane of dark brown hair. He would get a child to get holdof it, and lift him off the ground by it "with no apparent inconvenience. "He was at the same time nervous and restless. He was given to talking tohimself; his hands were never at peace; "if he read aloud, he punched hisown head in the exuberance of his emotions. " Possibly there was somethinghigh-strung even about his play, as when, Mr. Mackail tells us, "he wouldimitate an eagle with considerable skill and humour, climbing on to achair and, after a sullen pause, coming down with a soft, heavy flop. " Itseems odd that Mr. John Burns could say of this sensitive and capriciousman of genius, as we find him saying in Mr. Compton-Rickett's book, that"William Morris was a chunk of humanity in the rough; he was a piece ofgood, strong, unvarnished oak--nothing of the elm about him. " But we canforgive Mr. Burns's imperfect judgment in gratitude for the sentences thatfollow:

 There is no side of modern life which he has not touched for good. I am sure he would have endorsed heartily the House and Town Planning Act for which I am responsible. 

Morris, by the way, would have appreciated Mr. Burns's reference to him asa fellow-craftsman: did he not once himself boast of being "a masterartisan, if I may claim that dignity"?

The buoyant life of this craftsman-preacher--whose craftsmanship, indeed, was the chief part of his preaching--who taught the labourers of his age, both by precept and example, that the difference between success andfailure in life was the difference between being artisans of lovelinessand poor hackworkers of profitable but hideous things--has a uniqueattractiveness in the history of the latter half of the nineteenthcentury. He is a figure of whom we cannot be too constantly and vividlyreminded. When I took up Mr. Compton-Rickett's book I was full of hopethat it would reinterpret for a new generation Morris's evangelisticpersonality and ideals. Unfortunately, it contains very little ofimportance that has not already appeared in Mr. Mackail's distinguishedbiography; and the only interpretation of first-rate interest in the bookoccurs in the bold imaginative prose of Mr. Cunninghame Graham'sintroduction. More than once the author tells us the same things as Mr. Mackail, only in a less life-like way. For example, where Mr. Mackail saysof Morris that "by the time he was seven years old he had read all theWaverley novels, and many of Marryat's, " Mr. Compton-Rickett vaguelywrites: "He was suckled on Romance, and knew his Scott and Marryat almostbefore he could lisp their names. " That is typical of Mr. Compton-Rickett's method. Instead of contenting himself with simple andrealistic sentences like Mr. Mackail's, he aims at--and certainlyachieves--a kind of imitative picturesqueness. We again see his taste forthe high-flown in such a paragraph as that which tells us that "a commonbond unites all these men--Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris. Theydiffered in much; but, like great mountains lying apart in the base, theyconverge high up in the air. " The landscape suggested in these sentencesis more topsy-turvy than the imagination likes to dwell upon. And thecriticisms in the book are seldom lightning-flashes of revelation. Forinstance:

 A more polished artistry we find in Tennyson; a greater intellectual grip in Browning; a more haunting magic in Rossetti; but for easy mastery over his material and general diffusion of beauty Morris has no superior. 

That, apart from the excellent "general diffusion of beauty, " is the kindof conventional criticism that might pass in a paper read to a literarysociety. But somehow, in a critic who deliberately writes a book, we lookfor a greater and more personal mastery of his authors than Mr. Compton-Rickett gives evidence of in the too facile eloquence of thesepages. 

The most interesting part of the book is that which is devoted topersonalia. But even in the matter of personalia Mr. Cunninghame Grahamtells us more vital things in a page of his introduction than Mr. Compton-Rickett scatters through a chapter. His description of Morris'sappearance, if not a piece of heroic painting, gives us a fine grotesquedesign of the man:

 His face was ruddy, and his hair inclined to red, and grew in waves like water just before it breaks over a fall. His beard was of the same colour as his hair. His eyes were blue and fiery. His teeth, small and irregular, but white except upon the side on which he hew his pipe, where they were stained with brown. When he walked he swayed a little, not like (_sic_) a sailor sways, but as a man who lives a sedentary life toddles a little in his gait. His ears were small, his nose high and well-made, his hands and feet small for a man of his considerable bulk. His speech and address were fitting the man; bold, bluff, and hearty. .. . He was quick-tempered and irritable, swift to anger and swift to reconciliation, and I should think never bore malice in his life. 

 When he talked he seldom looked at you, and his hands were always twisting, as if they wished to be at work. 

Such was the front the man bore. The ideal for which he lived may besummed up, in Mr. Compton-Rickett's expressive phrase, as "thedemocratization of beauty. " Or it may be stated more humanly in the wordswhich Morris himself spoke at the grave of a young man who died ofinjuries received at the hands of the police in Trafalgar Square on"Bloody Sunday. " "Our friend, " he then said:

 Our friend who lies here has had a hard life, and met with a hard death; and, if society had been differently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, a beautiful, and a happy one. It is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a beautiful and happy place. 

There you have the sum of all Morris's teaching. Like so many fine artistssince Plato, he dreamed of a society which would be as beautiful as a workof art. He saw the future of society as a radiant picture, full of thebright light of hope, as he saw the past of society as a picture steepedin the charming lights of fancy. He once explained Rossetti's indifferenceto politics by saying that he supposed "it needs a person of hopeful mindto take disinterested notice of politics, and Rossetti was certainly nothopeful. " Morris was the very illuminator of hope. He was as hopeful a manas ever set out with words and colours to bring back the innocentsplendours of the Golden Age. 

XVI. --GEORGE MEREDITH

(1) THE EGOIST

George Meredith, as his friends used to tell one with amusement, was avain man. Someone has related how, in his later years, he regarded it as amatter of extreme importance that his visitors should sit in a positionfrom which they would see his face in profile. This is symbolic of hisattitude to the world. All his life he kept one side of his face hidden. Mr. Ellis, who is the son of one of Meredith's cousins, now takes us for awalk round Meredith's chair. No longer are we permitted to remain inrestful veneration of "a god and a Greek. " Mr. Ellis invites us--and wecannot refuse the invitation--to look at the other side of the face, toconsider the full face and the back of the head. He encourages us to feelMeredith's bumps, and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel cancontinue for five minutes the pretence of being an Olympian. He becomes ahuman being under a criticizing thumb. We discover that he had a geniusfor imposture, an egoist's temper, and a stomach that fluttered greedilyat the thought of dainty dishes. We find all those characteristics thatprevented him from remaining on good terms first with his father, nextwith his wife, and then with his son. At first, when one reads the fullstory of Meredith's estrangements through three generations, one has thefeeling that one is in the presence of an idol in ruins. Certainly, onecan never mistake Box Hill for Olympus again. On the other hand, let usbut have time to accustom ourselves to see Meredith in other aspects thanthat which he himself chose to present to his contemporaries--let us beginto see in him not so much one of the world's great comic censors, as oneof the world's great comic subjects, and we shall soon find ourselves backamong his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a newpassion of interest in the figure-in-the-background of the complex humanbeing who wrote them. 

For Meredith was his own great subject. Had he been an Olympian he couldnot have written _The Egoist_ or _Harry Richmond_. He was an egoist andpretender, coming of a line of egoists and pretenders, and his novels aresimply the confession and apology of such a person. Meredith concealed thetruth about himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in hisnovels. He made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought hewas a cousin of Queen Victoria's or at least a son of Bulwer Lytton's. Itwas only in _Evan Harrington_ that he told the essentials of the truthabout the tailor's shop in Portsmouth above which he was born. Outside hisart, nothing would persuade him to own up to the tailor's shop. Once, whenMr. Clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, Meredith told him to put"near Petersfield" as his place of birth. The fact that he was born atPortsmouth was not publicly known, indeed, until some time after hisdeath. And not only was there the tailor's shop to live down, but on hismother's side he was the grandson of a publican, Michael Macnamara. Meredith liked to boast that his mother was "pure Irish"--an exaggeration, according to Mr. Ellis--but he said nothing about Michael Macnamara of"The Vine. " At the same time it was the presence not of a bar sinister butof a yardstick sinister in his coat of arms that chiefly filled him withshame. When he was marrying his first wife he wrote "Esquire" in theregister as a description of his father's profession. There is noevidence, apparently, as to whether Meredith himself ever served in thetailor's shop after his father moved from Portsmouth to St. James'sStreet, London. Nothing is known of his life during the two years afterhis return from the Moravian school at Neuwied. As for his hapless father(who had been trained as a medical student but went into the familybusiness in order to save it from ruin), he did not succeed in London anybetter than in Portsmouth, and in 1849 he emigrated to South Africa andopened a shop in Cape Town. It was while in Cape Town that he readMeredith's ironical comedy on the family tailordom, _Evan Harrington; orHe Would be a Gentleman_. Naturally, he regarded the book (in which hisfather and himself were two of the chief figures) with horror. It was asthough George had washed the family tape-measure in public. AugustusMeredith, no less than George, blushed for the tape-measure daily. Probably, Melchizedek Meredith, who begat Augustus, who begat George, hadalso blushed for it in his day. As the "great Mel" in _Evan Harrington_ heis an immortal figure of genteel imposture. His lordly practice of neversending in a bill was hardly that of a man who accepted the conditions ofhis trade. In _Evan Harrington_ three generations of a family's shame wereheld up to ridicule. No wonder that Augustus Meredith, when he wascongratulated by a customer on his son's fame, turned away silently with alook of pain. 

The comedy of the Meredith family springs, of course, not from the factthat they were tailors, but that they pretended not to be tailors. WhetherMeredith himself was more ashamed of their tailoring or theirpretentiousness it is not easy to decide. Both _Evan Harrington_ and_Harry Richmond_ are in a measure, comedies of imposture, in which thevice of imposture is lashed as fiercely as Molière lashes the vice ofhypocrisy in _Tartuffe_. But it may well be that in life Meredith was asnob, while in art he was a critic of snobs. Mr. Yeats, in his last bookof prose, put forward the suggestion that the artist reveals in his artnot his "self" (which is expressed in his life), but his "anti-self, " acomplementary and even contrary self. He might find in the life and worksof Meredith some support for his not quite convincing theory. Meredith wasan egoist in his life, an anti-egoist in his books. He was pretentious inhis life, anti-pretentious in his books. He took up the attitude of thewronged man in his life; he took up the case of the wronged woman in hisbooks. In short, his life was vehemently pro-George-Meredith, while hisbooks were vehemently anti-George-Meredith. He knew himself morethoroughly, so far as we can discover from his books, than any otherEnglish novelist has ever done. 

He knew himself comically, no doubt, rather than tragically. In _ModernLove_ and _Richard Feverel_ he reveals himself as by no means a laughingphilosopher; but he strove to make fiction a vehicle of philosophiclaughter rather than of passionate sympathy. Were it not that a greatpoetic imagination is always at work--in his prose, perhaps, even morethan in his verse--his genius might seem a little cold andhead-in-the-air. But his poet's joy in his characters saves his books frominhumanity. As Diana Warwick steps out in the dawn she is not a merefemale human being undergoing critical dissection; she is bird-song andthe light of morning and the coming of the flowers. Meredith had as greata capacity for rapture as for criticism and portraiture. He has expressedin literature as no other novelist has done the rapturous vision of a boyin love. He knew that a boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet. _Lovein a Valley_ is the incomparable music of a boy's ecstasy. Much of_Richard Feverel_ is its incomparable prose. Rapture and criticism, however, make a more practical combination in literature than in life. Inliterature, criticism may add flavour to rapture; in life it is more thanlikely to destroy the flavour. One is not surprised, then, to learn thefull story of Meredith's first unhappy marriage. A boy of twenty-one, hemarried a widow of thirty, high-strung, hot and satirical like himself;and after a depressing sequence of dead babies, followed by the birth of ason who survived, she found life with a man of genius intolerable, and ranaway with a painter. Meredith apparently refused her request to go and seeher when she was dying. His imaginative sympathy enabled him to see thewoman's point of view in poetry and fiction; it does not seem to haveextended to his life. Thus, his biography is to a great extent a"showing-up" of George Meredith. He proved as incapable of keeping theaffection of his son Arthur, as of keeping that of his wife. Much as heloved the boy he had not been married again long before he allowed him tobecome an alien presence. The boy felt he had a grievance. Hesaid--probably without justice--that his father kept him short of money. Possibly he was jealous for his dead mother's sake. Further, though putinto business, he had literary ambitions--a prolific source of bitterness. When Arthur died, Meredith did not even attend his funeral. 

Mr. Ellis has shown Meredith up not only as a husband and a father, but asa hireling journalist and a lark-devouring gourmet. On the whole, the poetwho could eat larks in a pie seems to me to be a more shocking "great man"than the Radical who could write Tory articles in a newspaper for pay. Atthe same time, it is only fair to say that Meredith remains a sufficientlysplendid figure in. Mr. Ellis's book even when we know the worst abouthim. Was his a generous genius? It was at least a prodigal one. As poet, novelist, correspondent, and conversationalist, he leaves an impression ofbeauty, wit, and power in a combination without a precedent. 

(2) THE OLYMPIAN UNBENDS

Lady Butcher's charming _Memoirs of George Meredith_ is admittedly writtenin reply to Mr. Ellis's startling volume. It seems to me, however, that itis a supplement rather than a reply. Mr. Ellis was not quite fair toMeredith as a man, but he enabled us to understand the limitations whichwere the conditions of Meredith's peculiar genius. Many readers wereshocked by the suggestion that characters, like countries, must haveboundaries. Where Mr. Ellis failed, in my opinion, was not in drawingthese as carefully as possible, but in the rather unfriendly glee withwhich, one could not help feeling, he did so. It is also true that hemissed some of the grander mountain-peaks in Meredith's character. LadyButcher, on the other hand, is far less successful than Mr. Ellis indrawing a portrait which makes us feel that now we understand something ofthe events that gave birth to _The Egoist_ and _Richard Feverel_ and_Modern Love_. Her book tells us nothing of the seed-time of genius, butis a delightful account of its autumn. 

At the same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular fallacyabout Meredith. Meredith, like most all the wits, has been accused ofstraining after image and epigram. Wit acts as an irritant on many people. They forget the admirable saying of Coleridge: "Exclusive of the abstractsciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists ofaphorisms; and the greatest of men is but an aphorism. " They might as welldenounce a hedge for producing wild roses or a peacock for growing tailfeathers with pretty eyes as a witty writer for flowering into aphorism, epigram and image. Even so artificial a writer as Wilde had not to labourto be witty. It has often been laid to his charge that his work smells ofthe lamp, whereas what is really the matter with it is that it smells ofthe drawing-room gas. It was the result of too much "easy-goingness, " notof too much strain. As for Meredith, his wit was the wit of an aboundingimagination. Lady Butcher gives some delightful examples of it. He couldnot see a baby in long robes without a witty image leaping into his mind. He said he adored babies "in the comet stage. "

Of a lady of his acquaintance he said: "She is a woman who has never hadthe first tadpole wriggle of an idea, " adding, "She has a mind as cleanand white and flat as a plate: there are no eminences in it. " Lady Butchertells of a picnic-party on Box Hill at which Meredith was one of thecompany. "After our picnic . .. It came on to rain, and as we drearilytrudged down the hill with cloaks and umbrellas, and burdened with our teabaskets, Mr. Meredith, with a grimace, called out to a passing friend:'Behold! the funeral of picnic!'"

If Meredith is to some extent an obscure author, it is clear that this wasnot due to his over-reaching himself in laborious efforts after wit. Hisobscurity is not that of a man straining after expression, but theobscurity of a man deliberately hiding something. Meredith believed inbeing as mysterious as an oracle. He assumed the Olympian manner, andobjected to being mistaken for a frequenter of the market-place. He wasimpatient of ordinary human witlessness, and spoke to his fellows, not asman to man, but as Apollo from his seat. This was probably a result of thefact that his mind marched much too fast for the ordinary man to keep pacewith it. "How I leaped through leagues of thought when I could walk!" heonce said when he had lost the power of his legs. Such buoyancy of theimagination and intellect separated him more and more from a world inwhich most of the athletics are muscular, not mental; and he began to takea malicious pleasure in exaggerating the difference that already existedbetween himself and ordinary mortals. He dressed his genius in amannerism, and, as he leaped through his leagues of thought, the flyingskirts of his mannerism were all that the average reader pantingdesperately after him could see. Shakespeare and the greatest men ofgenius are human enough to wait for us, and give us time to recover ourbreath. Meredith, however, was a proud man, and a mocker. 

In the ordinary affairs of life, Lady Butcher tells us, he was so proudthat it was difficult to give him even trifling gifts. "I remember, " shesays, "bringing him two silver flat poached-egg spoons from Norway, and heimplored me to take them back with me to London, and looked much relievedwhen I consented to do so!" He would always "prefer to bestow rather thanto accept gifts. " Lady Butcher, replying to the charge that he wasungrateful, suggests that "no one should expect an eagle to be grateful. "But then, neither can one love an eagle, and one would like to be able tolove the author of _Love in a Valley_ and _Richard Feverel_. Meredith wastoo keenly aware what an eagle he was. Speaking of the reviewers who hadattacked him, he said: "They have always been abusing me. I have beenobserving them. It is the crueller process. " It is quite true, but it wasa superior person who said it. 

Meredith, however, among his friends and among the young, loses this airof superiority, and becomes something of a radiant romp as well as anOlympian. Lady Butcher's first meeting with him took place when she was agirl of thirteen. She was going up Box Hill to see the sun rise with asixteen-year-old cousin, when the latter said: "I know a madman who liveson Box Hill. He's quite mad, but very amusing; he likes walks andsunrises. Let's go and shout him up!" It does Meredith credit that he gotout of bed and joined them, "his nightshirt thrust into brown trousers. "Even when the small girl insisted on "reading aloud to him one of thehymns from Keble's _Christian Year_, " he did not, as the saying is, turn ahair. His attachment to his daughter Mariette--his "dearie girl, " as hespoke of her with unaffected softness of phrase--also helps one torealize that he was not all Olympian. Meredith, the condemner of the"guarded life, " was humanly nervous in guarding his own little daughter. "He would never allow Mariette to travel alone, even the very shortdistance by train from Box Hill to Ewell; a maid had always to be sentwith her or to fetch her. He never allowed her to walk by herself. " Onelikes Meredith the better for Lady Butcher's picture of him as a "harassedfather. "

One likes him, too, as he converses with his dogs, and for histhoughtfulness in giving some of his MSS. , including that of _RichardFeverel_, to Frank Cole, his gardener, in the hope that "some day thegardener would be able to sell them" and so get some reward for hisdevotion. As to the underground passages in Meredith's life and character, Lady Butcher is not concerned with them. She writes of him merely as sheknew him. Her book is a friend's tribute, though not a blind tribute. Itmay not be effective as an argument against those who are bent ondisparaging the greatest lyrical wit in modern English literature. But itwill be welcomed by those for whom Meredith's genius is still a bubblingspring of good sense and delight. 

(3) THE ANGLO-IRISH ASPECT

Meredith never wrote a novel which was less a novel than _Celt and Saxon_. It is only a fragment of a book. It is so much a series of essays andsharp character-sketches, however, that the untimely fall of the curtaindoes not greatly trouble us. There is no excitement of plot, no grippinganxiety as to whether this or that pair of lovers will ever reach thealtar. Philip O'Donnell and Patrick, his devoted brother, and theircaricature relative, the middle-aged Captain Con, all interest us as theyabet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as they discusstheir native country or the temperament of the country which oppresses it;but they are chiefly desirable as performers in an Anglo-Irish fantasia, aMeredithian piece of comic music, with various national anthems, English, Welsh, and Irish, running through and across it in all manner of guises, and producing all manner of agreeable disharmonies. 

In the beginning we have Patrick O'Donnell, an enthusiast, a Celt, aCatholic, setting out for the English mansion of the father of AdianteAdister to find if the girl cannot be pleaded over to reconsider herrefusal of his brother Philip. He arrives in the midst of turmoil in thehouse, the cause of it being a hasty marriage which Adiante hadambitiously contracted with a hook-nosed foreign prince. Patrick, abroken-hearted proxy, successfully begs her family for a miniature of thegirl to take back to his brother, but he falls so deeply in love with heron seeing the portrait that his loyalty to Philip almost wavers, when thelatter carelessly asks him to leave the miniature on a more or less publictable instead of taking it off to the solitude of his own room for a longvigil of adoration. 

In the rest of the story we have an account of the brothers in the Londonhouse of Captain Con, the happy husband married to a stark English wife ofmechanical propriety--a rebellious husband, too, when in the sociableatmosphere of his own upper room, amid the blackened clay pipes and thefriendly fumes of whiskey, he sings her praises, while at the same timefull of grotesque and whimsical criticisms of all those things, Saxon andmore widely human, for which she stands. There is a touch of farce in therelations of these two, aptly symbolized by the bell which rings forCaptain Con, and hastens him away from his midnight eloquence with Patrickand Philip. "He groaned, 'I must go. I haven't heard the tinkler formonths. It signifies she's cold in her bed. The thing called circulationis unknown to her save by the aid of outward application, and I'm thewarming-pan, as legitimately as I should be, I'm her husband and herHarvey in one. '"

It is in the house of Captain Con, it should be added, that Philip andPatrick meet Jane Mattock, the Saxon woman; and the story as we have itends with Philip invalided home from service in India, and Jane, a victimof love, catching "glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious, rose-enfolded, foreign. " There are nearly three hundred pages of italtogether, some of them as fantastic and lyrical as any that Meredithever wrote. 

As one reads _Celt and Saxon_, however, one seems to get an inkling of thereason why Meredith has so often been set down as an obscure author. It isnot entirely that he is given to using imagery as the language ofexplanation--a subtle and personal sort of hieroglyphics. It is chiefly, Ithink, because there is so little direct painting of men and women in hisbooks. Despite his lyricism, he had something of an X-ray's imagination. The details of the modelling of a face, the interpreting lines and looks, did not fix themselves with preciseness on his vision enabling him to passthem on to us with the surface reality we generally demand in prosefiction. 

It is as though he painted some of his men and women upon air: they areelusive for all we know of their mental and spiritual processes. Eventhough he is at pains to tell us that Diana's hair is dark, we do not atonce accept the fact but are at liberty to go on believing she is a fairwoman, for he himself was general rather than insistently particular inhis vision of such matters. In the present book, again, we have a glimpseof Adiante in her miniature--"this lighted face, with the dark raised eyesand abounding auburn tresses, where the contrast of colours was in itselfthrilling, " "the light above beauty distinguishing its noble classic linesand the energy of radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in theeyes"--and, despite the details mentioned, the result is to give us onlythe lyric aura of the woman where we wanted a design. 

Ultimately, these women of Meredith's become intensely real to us--themost real women, I think, in English fiction--but, before we come tohandshaking terms with them, we have sometimes to go to them over bogs androcky places with the sun in our eyes. Before this, physically, they areapt to be exquisite parts of a landscape, sharers of a lyric beauty withthe cherry-trees and the purple crocuses. 

Coming to the substance of the book--the glance from many sides at theIrish and English temperaments--we find Meredith extremely penetrating inhis criticism of John Bullishness, but something of a foreigner in hisstudy of the Irish character. The son of an Irishwoman, he chose anIrishwoman as his most conquering heroine, but he writes of the race asone who has known the men and women of it entirely, or almost entirely, inan English setting--a setting, in other words, which shows up theirstrangeness and any surface eccentricities they may have, but does notgive us an ordinary human sense of them. Captain Con is vital, becauseMeredith imagined him vitally, but when all is said and done, he islargely a stage-Irishman, winking over his whiskey that has paid noexcise--a better-born relative of Captain Costigan. 

Politically, _Celt and Saxon_ seems to be a plea for Home Rule--Home Rule, with a view towards a "consolidation of the union. " Its diagnosis of theIrish difficulty is one which has long been popular with many intellectualmen on this side of the Irish Sea. Meredith sees, as the roots of thetrouble, misunderstanding, want of imagination, want of sympathy. It hasalways seemed curious to me that intelligent men could persuade themselvesthat Ireland was chiefly suffering from want of understanding and want ofsympathy on the part of England, when all the time her only ailment hasbeen want of liberty. To adapt the organ-grinder's motto, Sympathy without relief Is like mustard without beef. 

As a matter of fact, Meredith realized this, and was a friend to manyIrish national movements from the Home Rule struggle down to the GaelicLeague, to the latter of which the Irish part of him sent a subscription ayear or two ago. He saw things from the point of view of an ImperialLiberal idealist, however, not of a Nationalist. In the result, he did notknow the every-day and traditional setting of Irish life sufficiently wellto give us an Irish Nationalist central figure as winning and heroic, evenin his extravagances, as, say, the patriotic Englishman, NevilleBeauchamp. 

At the same time, one must be thankful for a book so obviously the work ofa great abundant mind--a mind giving out its criticisms like flutters ofbirds--a heroic intellect always in the service of an ideal liberty, courage, and gracious manners--a characteristically island brain, that wasyet not insular. 

XVII--OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Wilde is a writer whom one must see through in order to appreciate. One must smash the idol in order to preserve the god. If Mr. Ransome'sestimate of Wilde in his clever and interesting and seriously-written bookis a little unsatisfactory, it is partly because he is not enough of aniconoclast. He has not realized with sufficient clearness that, whileWilde belonged to the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better thansecond-rate as anything else. Consequently, it is not Wilde the beau ofliterature who dominates his book. Rather, it is Wilde theegoistic, --æsthetic philosopher, and Wilde the imaginative artist. 

This is, of course, as Wilde would have liked it to be. For, as Mr. Ransome says, "though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, hepreferred to think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams. "Indeed, so much was this so, that it is even suggested that, if _Salomé_had not been censored, the social comedies might never have been written. "It is possible, " observes Mr. Ransome, "that we owe _The Importance ofBeing Earnest_ to the fact that the Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt fromplaying _Salomé_ at the Palace Theatre. " If this conjecture is right, onecan never think quite so unkindly of the Censor again, for in _TheImportance of Being Earnest_, and in it alone, Wilde achieved a work ofsupreme genius in its kind. 

It is as lightly-built as a house of cards, a frail edifice of laughterfor laughter's sake. Or you might say that, in the literature of farce, ithas a place as a "dainty rogue in porcelain. " It is even lighter and morefragile than that. It is a bubble, or a flight of bubbles. It is the veryecstasy of levity. As we listen to Lady Bracknell discussing thepossibility of parting with her daughter to a man who had been "born, orat least bred, in a handbag, " or as we watch Jack and Algernon wranglingover the propriety of eating muffins in an hour of gloom, we seem somehowto be caught up and to sail through an exhilarating mid-air of nonsense. Some people will contend that Wilde's laughter is always the laughter notof the open air but of the salon. But there is a spontaneity in thelaughter of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ that seems to me toassociate it with running water and the sap rising in the green field. 

It is when he begins to take Wilde seriously as a serious writer that onequarrels with Mr. Ransome. Wilde was much better at showing off than atrevealing himself, and, as the comedy of showing off is much moredelightful than the solemn vanity of it, he was naturally happiest as awit and persifleur. On his serious side he ranks, not as an originalartist, but as a popularizer--the most accomplished popularizer, perhaps, in English literature. He popularized William Morris, both his domesticinteriors and his Utopias, in the æsthetic lectures and in _The Soul ofMan under Socialism_--a wonderful pamphlet, the secret of the world-widefame of which Mr. Ransome curiously misses. He popularized the cloistralæstheticism of Pater and the cultural egoism of Goethe in _Intentions_ andelsewhere. In _Salomé_ he popularized the gorgeous processionals ofornamental sentences upon which Flaubert had expended not the leastmarvellous portion of his genius. 

Into an age that guarded respectability more closely than virtue andridiculed beauty because it paid no dividend came Wilde, the assailant ofeven the most respectable ugliness, parrying the mockery of the meat teawith a mockery that sparkled like wine. Lighting upon a world thatadvertised commercial wares, he set himself to advertise art with, asheroic an extravagance, and who knows how much his puce velvetknee-breeches may have done to make the British public aware of thegenius, say, of Walter Pater? Not that Wilde was not a finished egoist, using the arts and the authors to advertise himself rather than himself toadvertise them. But the time-spirit contrived that the arts and theauthors should benefit by his outrageous breeches. 

It is in the relation of a great popularizer, then--a popularizer who, fora new thing, was not also a vulgarizer--that Wilde seems to me to stand tohis age. What, then, of Mr. Ransome's estimate of _Salomé_? That it is afascinating play no lover of the pageantry of words can deny. But of whatquality is this fascination? It is, when all is said and done, thefascination of the lust of painted faces. Here we have no tragedy, but amixing of degenerate philtres. Mr. Ransome hears "the beating of the wingsof the angel of death" in the play; but that seems to me to be exactly theatmosphere that Wilde fails to create. As the curtain falls on the brokenbody of _Salomé_ one has a sick feeling, as though one had been presentwhere vermin were being crushed. There is not a hint of the elation, theliberation, of real tragedy. The whole thing is simply a wonderful pieceof coloured sensationalism. And even if we turn to the costly sentences ofthe play, do we not find that, while in his choice of colour and jewel anddesign Flaubert wrought in language like a skilled artificer, Wilde, inhis treatment of words, was more like a lavish amateur about towndisplaying his collection of splendid gems?

Wilde speaks of himself in _De Profundis_ as a lord of language. Ofcourse, he was just the opposite. Language was a vice with him. He took toit as a man might take to drink. He was addicted rather than devoted tolanguage. He had a passion for it, but too little sense of responsibilitytowards it, and, in his choice of beautiful words, we are always consciousof the indolence as well as the extravagance of the man of pleasure. Howbeautifully, with what facility of beauty, he could use words, everyoneknows who has read his brief _Endymion_ (to name one of the poems), andthe many hyacinthine passages in _Intentions_. But when one is anxious tosee the man himself as in _De Profundis_--that book of a soul imprisonedin embroidered sophistries--one feels that this cloak of strange words isno better than a curse. 

If Wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its bejewelledslave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because there is so muchlaughter as well as language in _Intentions_ that I am inclined to agreewith Mr. Ransome that _Intentions_ is "that one of Wilde's books that mostnearly represents him. " Even here, however, Mr. Ransome will insist ontaking Wilde far too seriously. For instance, he tells us that "hisparadoxes are only unfamiliar truths. " How horrified Wilde would have beento hear him say so! His paradoxes are a good deal more than truths--or agood deal less. They helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many ofthem were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion. Mr. Ransome'sattitude on the question of Wilde's sincerity seems to me as impossible ashis attitude in regard to the paradoxes. He draws up a code of artisticsincerity which might serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of whichevery great artist is a living denial. But there is no room to go intothat. Disagree as we may with many of Mr. Ransome's conclusions, we mustbe grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and ambitious study ofone of the most brilliant personalities and wits, though by no means oneof the most brilliant imaginative artists, of the nineteenth century. 

XVIII. --TWO ENGLISH CRITICS

(1) MR. SAINTSBURY

Mr. Saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift of sendingthe reader post-haste to the works he criticizes. His _Peace of theAugustans_ is an almost irresistible incitement to go and forget thepresent world among the poets and novelists and biographers andletter-writers of the eighteenth century. His enthusiasm weaves spellsabout even the least of them. He does not merely remind us of the geniusof Pope and Swift, of Fielding and Johnson and Walpole. He also summons usto Armory's _John Buncle_ and to the Reverend Richard Graves's _SpiritualQuixote_ as to a feast. Of the latter novel he declares that "for a bookthat is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without beingponderous, _The Spiritual Quixote_ may, perhaps, be commended above allits predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great Fourthemselves. " That is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scatteredthrough _The Peace of the Augustans_. After reading the book, one canscarcely resist the temptation to spend an evening over Young's _NightThoughts_ and one will be almost more likely to turn to Prior than toShakespeare himself--Prior who, "with the eternal and almost unnecessaryexception of Shakespeare . .. Is about the first to bring out the trueEnglish humour which involves sentiment and romance, which laughs gentlyat its own, tears, and has more than half a tear for its ownlaughter"--Prior, of whom it is further written that "no one, exceptThackeray, has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit of_Ecclesiastes_. " It does not matter that in a later chapter of the book itis _Rasselas_ which is put with _Ecclesiastes_, and, after _Rasselas_, _The Vanity of Human Wishes_. One does not go to Mr. Saintsbury as aninspector of literary weights and measures. His estimates of authors arethe impressions of a man talking in a hurry, and his method is the methodof exaggeration rather than of precise statement. How deficient he is inthe sense of proportion may be judged from the fact that he devotesslightly more space to Collins than to Pope, unless the pages in which heassails "Grub Street" as a malicious invention of Pope's are to be countedto the credit of the latter. But Mr. Saintsbury's book is not so much athorough and balanced survey of eighteenth-century literature as aconfession, an almost garrulous monologue on the delights of thatliterature. How pleasant and unexpected it is to see a critic in hisseventies as incautious, as pugnacious, as boisterous as an undergraduate!It is seldom that we find the apostolic spirit of youth living in the samebreast with the riches of experience and memory, as we do in the presentbook. 

One of the great attractions of the eighteenth century for the modernworld is that, while it is safely set at an historical distance from us, it is, at the same time, brought within range of our everyday interests. It is not merely that about the beginning of it men began to write andtalk according to the simple rules of modern times. It is rather thatabout this time the man of letters emerges from the mists of legend andbecomes as real as one's uncle in his daily passions and his train oflittle interests. One has not to reconstruct the lives of Swift and Popefrom a handful of myths and references in legal documents. There is noroom for anything akin to Baconianism in their regard. They live in athousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well be anagnostic about Mr. Asquith as about either of them. Pope was a championliar, and Swift spun mystifications about himself. But, in spite of liesand Mystifications and gossip, they are both as real to us as if we metthem walking down the Strand. One could not easily imagine Shakespearewalking down the Strand. The Strand would have to be rebuilt, and the restof us would have to put on fancy dress in order to receive him. But thoughSwift and Pope lived in a century of wig and powder and in a Londonstrangely unlike the London of to-day, we do not feel that similarpreparations would be needed in their case. If Swift came back, one canwithout difficulty imagine him pamphleteering about war as though he hadmerely been asleep for a couple of centuries; and Pope, we may be sure, would resume, without too great perplexity, his attack on the egoists anddunces of the world of letters. But Shakespeare's would be a return fromlegendary Elysian fields. 

Hence Mr. Saintsbury may justly hope that his summons to the modern randomreader, no less than to the scholar, to go and enjoy himself among thewriters of the eighteenth century will not fall on entirely deaf ears. Atthe same time, it is only fair to warn the general reader not to followMr. Saintsbury's recommendations and opinions too blindly. He will do wellto take the author's advice and read Pope, but he will do very ill to takethe author's advice as regards what in Pope is best worth reading. Mr. Saintsbury speaks with respect, for instance, of the _Elegy on anUnfortunate Lady_--an insincere piece of tombstone rhetoric. "There aresome, " he declared in a footnote, "to whom this singular piece is Pope'sstrongest atonement, both as poet and man, for his faults as both. " Itseems to me to be a poem which reveals Pope's faults as a poet, while ofPope the man it tells us simply nothing. It has none of Pope's wit, noneof his epigrammatic characterization, none of his bewigged and powderedfancies, none of his malicious self-revelation. Almost the onlyinteresting thing about it is the notes the critics have written on it, discussing whether the lady ever lived, and, if so, whether she was a MissWainsbury or a lady of title, whether she was beautiful or deformed, whether she was in love with Pope or the Duke of Buckingham or the Duc deBerry, whether Pope was in love with her, or even knew her, or whether shekilled herself with a sword or by hanging herself. One can find plenty of"rest and refreshment" among the conjectures of the commentators, but inthe verse itself one can find little but a good example of the techniqueof the rhymed couplet. But Mr. Saintsbury evidently loves the heroiccouplet for itself alone. The only long example of Pope's verse which hequotes is merely ding-dong, and might have been written by any capableimitator of the poet later in the century. Surely, if his contention istrue that Pope's reputation as a poet is now lower than it ought to be, heought to have quoted something from the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ or _TheRape of the Lock_, or even _The Essay on Man_. The two first are almostflawless masterpieces. Here Pope suddenly becomes a star. Here he gildshis age and his passions with wit and fancy; he ceases to be a mere rhymedmoralist, a mechanician of metre. Mr. Saintsbury, I regret to see, contends that the first version of _The Rape of the Lock_ is the best. Onecan hardly forgive this throwing overboard of the toilet and the fairieswhich Pope added in the later edition. We may admit that the gnomes are aless happy invention than the sylphs, and that their introduction lets thepoem down from its level of magic illusion. But in the second telling thepoem is an infinitely richer and more peopled thing. Had we only known thefirst version, we should, no doubt, have felt with Addison that it wasmadness to tamper with such exquisite perfection. But Pope, who foolishlyattributed Addison's advice to envy, proved that Addison was wrong. Hisrevision of _The Rape of the Lock_ is one of the few magnificentlysuccessful examples in literature of painting the lily. 

One differs from Mr. Saintsbury, however, less in liking a differentgarden from his than in liking a different seat in the same garden. Onewho is familiar as he is with all the literature he discusses in thepresent volume is bound to indulge all manner of preferences, whims andeven eccentricities. An instance of Mr. Saintsbury's whims is hiscomplaint that the eighteenth-century essays are almost always reprintedonly in selections and without the advertisements that appeared with themon their first publication. He is impatient of J. R. Green's dismissal ofthe periodical essayist as a "mass of rubbish, " and he demands hiseighteenth-century essayists in full, advertisements and all. "Here, " heinsists, "these things fringe and vignette the text in the mostappropriate manner, and so set off the quaint variety and theother-worldly character as nothing else could do. " Is not the author'scontention, however, as to the great loss the Addisonian essay sufferswhen isolated from its context a severe criticism on that essay asliterature? The man of letters likes to read from a complete _Spectator_as he does from a complete Wordsworth. At the same time, the best ofAddison, as of Wordsworth, can stand on its own feet in an anthology, andthis is the final proof of its literary excellence. The taste foreighteenth century advertisements is, after all, only literaryantiquarianism--a delightful indulgence, a by-path, but hardly necessaryto the enjoyment of Addison's genius. 

But it is neither Pope nor Addison who is ultimately Mr. Saintsbury's idolamong the poets and prose-writers of the eighteenth century. His idol ofidols is Swift, and next to him he seems most wholeheartedly to love andadmire Dr. Johnson and Fielding. He makes no bones about confessing hispreference of Swift to Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière. Swift doesnot at once fascinate and cold-shoulder him as he does to so many people. Mr. Saintsbury glorifies _Gulliver_, and wisely so, right down to the lastword about the Houyhnhnms, and he demands for the _Journal to Stella_recognition as "the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellousand absolutely genuine autobiography. " His ultimate burst of appreciationis a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been calledSaintsburyese--not because of any obscurity in it, but because of itsoddity of phrase and metaphor:

 Swift never wearies, for, as Bossuet said of human passion generally, there is in this greatest master of one of its most terrible forms, _quelque chose d'infini_, and the refreshment which he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest froth of pure nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger to the most drastic restoratives--the very strychnine and capsicum of irony. 

But what, above all, attracts Mr. Saintsbury in Swift, Fielding andJohnson is their eminent manliness. He is an enthusiast within limits forthe genius of Sterne and the genius of Horace Walpole. But he loves themin a grudging way. He is disgusted with their lack of muscle. He admits ofthe characters in _Tristrom Shandy_ that "they are . .. Much moreintrinsically true to life than many, if not almost all, the characters ofDickens, " but he is too greatly shocked by Sterne's humour to be just tohis work as a whole. It is the same with Walpole's letters. Mr. Saintsburywill heap sentence after sentence of praise upon them, till one wouldimagine they were his favourite eighteenth-century literature. He evendefends Walpole's character against Macaulay, but in the result he damnshim with faint praise quite as effectively as Macaulay did. That he has anenviable appetite for Walpole's letters is shown by the fact that, inspeaking of Mrs. Toynbee's huge sixteen-volume edition of them, heobserves that "even a single reading of it will supply the eveningrequirements of a man who does not go to bed very late, and has learnt thelast lesson of intellectual as of other enjoyment--to enjoy _slowly_--fornearer a month than a week, and perhaps for longer still. " The man who canget through Horace Walpole in a month of evenings without sitting up lateseems to me to be endowed not only with an avarice of reading, but with anavarice of Walpole. But, in spite of this, Mr. Saintsbury does not seem tolike his author. His ideal author is one of whom he can say, as he does ofJohnson, that he is "one of the greatest of Englishmen, one of thegreatest men of letters, and one of the greatest of _men_. " One of hiscomplaints against Gray is that, though he liked _Joseph Andrews_, he "hadapparently not enough manliness to see some of Fielding's real merits. " Asfor Fielding, Mr. Saintsbury's verdict is summed up in Dryden's praise ofChaucer. "Here is God's plenty. " In _Tom Jones_ he contends that Fielding"puts the whole plant of the pleasure-giver in motion, as nonovel-writer--not even Cervantes--had ever done before. " For myself, Idoubt whether the exaltation of Fielding has not become too much a matterof orthodoxy in recent years. Compare him with Swift, and he islong-winded in his sentences. Compare him with Sterne, and his charactersare mechanical. Compare him with Dickens, and he reaches none of thedepths, either of laughter or of sadness. This is not to question thegenius of Fielding's vivid and critical picture of eighteenth-centurymanners and morals. It is merely to put a drag on the wheel of MrSaintsbury's galloping enthusiasm. 

But, however one may quarrel with it, _The Peace of the Augustans_ is abook to read with delight--an eccentric book, an extravagant book, agrumpy book, but a book of rare and amazing enthusiasm for goodliterature. Mr. Saintsbury's constant jibes at the present age, as thoughno one had ever been unmanly enough to make a joke before Mr. Shaw, becomeamusing in the end like Dr. Johnson's rudenesses. And Mr. Saintsbury's oneattempt to criticize contemporary fiction--where he speaks of _SinisterStreet_ in the same breath with _Waverley_ and _Pride and Prejudice_--isboth amusing and rather appalling. But, in spite of his attitude to hisown times, one could not ask for more genial company on going on apilgrimage among the Augustans. Mr. Saintsbury has in this book writtenthe most irresistible advertisement of eighteenth-century literature thathas been published for many years. 

(2) MR. GOSSE

Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are the two kings of Sparta among Englishcritics of to-day. They stand preeminent among those of our contemporarieswho have served literature in the capacity of law-givers during the pastfifty years. I do not suggest that they are better critics than Mr. Birrell or Sir Sidney Colvin or the late Sir E. T. Cook. But none of thesethree was ever a professional and whole-time critic, as Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are. One thinks of the latter primarily as the authors of booksabout books, though Mr. Gosse is a poet and biographer as well, and Mr. Saintsbury, it is said, once dreamed of writing a history of wine. Onemight say of Mr. Gosse that even in his critical work he writes largely asa poet and biographer, while Mr. Saintsbury writes of literature as thoughhe were writing a history of wine. Mr. Saintsbury seeks in literature, above all things, exhilarating qualities. He can read almost anything andin any language, provided it is not non-intoxicating. He has a good head, and it cannot be said that he ever allows an author to go to it. But theauthors whom he has collected in his wonderful cellar unquestionably makehim merry. In his books he always seems to be pressing on us "anotherglass of Jane Austen, " or "just a thimbleful of Pope, " or "a drop of '42Tennyson. " No other critic of literature writes with the garrulous gustoof a boon-companion as Mr. Saintsbury does. In our youth, when we demandstyle as well as gusto, we condemn him on account of his atrociousEnglish. As we grow older, we think of his English merely as a rathereccentric sort of coat, and we begin to recognize that geniality such ashis is a part of critical genius. True, he is not over-genial to newauthors. He regards them as he might 1916 claret. Perhaps he is right. Authors undoubtedly get mellower with age. Even great poetry is, we aretold, a little crude to the taste till it has stood for a few seasons. 

Mr. Gosse is at once more grave and more deferential in his treatment ofgreat authors. One cannot imagine Mr. Saintsbury speaking in a hushedvoice before Shakespeare himself. One can almost hear him saying, "Hullo, Shakespeare!" To Mr. Gosse, however, literature is an almost sacredsubject. He glows in its presence. He is more lyrical than Mr. Saintsbury, more imaginative and more eloquent. His short history of Englishliterature is a book that fills a young head with enthusiasm. He writes asa servant of the great tradition. He is a Whig, where Mr. Saintsbury is anheretical old Jacobite. He is, however, saved from a professorialearnestness by his sharp talent for portraiture. Mr. Gosse's judgments mayor may not last: his portraits certainly will. It is to be hoped that hewill one day write his reminiscences. Such a book would, we feel sure, beamong the great books of portraiture in the history of English literature. He has already set Patmore and Swinburne before us in comic reality, andwho can forget the grotesque figure of Hans Andersen, sketched in a fewlines though it is, in _Two Visits to Denmark_? It may be replied that Mr. Gosse has already given us the best of his reminiscences in half a dozenbooks of essay and biography. Even so, there were probably many thingswhich it was not expedient to tell ten or twenty years ago, but whichmight well be related for the sake of truth and entertainment to-day. Mr. Gosse in the past has usually told the truth about authors with thegentleness of a modern dentist extracting a tooth. He keeps up a steadyconversation of praise while doing the damage. The truth is out before youknow. One becomes suddenly aware that the author has ceased to be ascoldly perfect as a tailor's model, and is a queer-looking creature with agap in his jaw. It is possible that the author, were he alive, would feelfurious, as a child sometimes feels with the dentist. None the less, Mr. Gosse has done him a service. The man who extracts a truth is as much tobe commended as the man who extracts a tooth. It is not the function ofthe biographer any more than it is that of a dentist to prettify hissubject. Each is an enemy of decay, a furtherer of life. There is such athing as painless biography, but it is the work of quacks. Mr. Gosse isone of those honest dentists who reassure you by allowing it to hurt you"just a little. "

This gift for telling the truth is no small achievement in a man ofletters. Literature is a broom that sweeps lies out of the mind, andfortunate is the man who wields it. Unhappily, while Mr. Gosse is daringin portraiture, he is the reverse in comment. In comment, as his writingson the war showed, he will fall in with the cant of the times. He can seethrough the cant of yesterday with a sparkle in his eyes, but he is lesscritical of the cant of to-day. He is at least fond of throwing out savingclauses, as when, writing of Mr. Sassoon's verse, he says: "His temper isnot altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments must tend to relax theeffort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when conductedwith so much honesty and courage. " Mr. Gosse again writes out of theofficial rather than the imaginative mind when, speaking of the war poets, he observes:

 It was only proper that the earliest of all should be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with the prophecy:

 Much suffering shall cleanse thee! But thou through the flood Shall win to salvation, To Beauty through blood. 

Had a writer of the age of Charles II. Written a verse like that, Mr. Gosse's chortles would have disturbed the somnolent peace of the House ofPeers. Even if it had been written in the time of Albert the Good, hewould have rent it with the destructive dagger of a phrase. As it is, oneis not sure that Mr. Gosse regards this appalling scrap from a bad hymnalas funny. One hopes that he quoted it with malicious intention. But didhe? Was it not Mr. Gosse who early in the war glorified the blood that wasbeing shed as a cleansing stream of Condy's Fluid? The truth is, apartfrom his thoughts about literature, Mr. Gosse thinks much as theleader-writers tell him. He is sensitive to beauty of style and toidiosyncrasy of character, but he lacks philosophy and that tragic sensethat gives the deepest sympathy. That, we fancy, is why we would ratherread him on Catherine Trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings, than onany subject connected with the war. 

Two of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Gosse's _Diversions of a Manof Letters_ are the essay on Catherine Trotter and that on "the message ofthe Wartons. " Here he is on ground on which there is no leader-writer totake him by the hand and guide him into saying "the right thing. " Hewrites as a disinterested scholar and an entertainer. He forgets the warand is amused. How many readers are there in England who know thatCatherine Trotter "published in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox, " and that"she was then fourteen years of age"? How many know even that she wrote ablank-verse tragedy in five acts, called _Agnes de Cestro_, and had itproduced at Drury Lane at the age of sixteen? At the age of nineteen shewas the friend of Congreve, and was addressed by Farquhar as "one of thefairest of her sex and the best judge. " By the age of twenty-five, however, she had apparently written herself out, so far as the stage wasconcerned, and after her tragedy, _The Revolution in Sweden_, the theatreknows her no more. Though described as "the Sappho of Scotland" by theQueen of Prussia, and by the Duke of Marlborough as "the wisest virgin Iever knew, " her fame did not last even as long as her life. She married aclergyman, wrote on philosophy and religion, and lived till seventy. Herlater writings, according to Mr. Gosse, "are so dull that merely to thinkof them brings tears into one's eyes. " Her husband, who was a bit of aJacobite, lost his money on account of his opinions, even though--"aperfect gentleman at heart--'he always prayed for the King and RoyalFamily by name. '" "Meanwhile, " writes Mr. Gosse, "to uplift his spirits inthis dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on theMosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print. He remindsus of Dr. Primrose in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and, like him, Mr. Cockburn probably had strong views on the Whistonian doctrine. " Altogetherthe essay on Catherine Trotter is an admirable example of Mr. Gosse in aplayful mood. 

The study of Joseph and Thomas Warton as "two pioneers of romanticism" ismore serious in purpose, and is a scholarly attempt to discover the firstsymptoms of romanticism in eighteenth-century literature. Mr. Gosse findsin _The Enthusiast_, written by Joseph Warton at the age of eighteen, "theearliest expression of full revolt against the classical attitude whichhad been sovereign in all European literature for nearly a century. " Hedoes not pretend that it is a good poem, but "here, for the first time, wefind unwaveringly emphasized and repeated what was entirely new inliterature, the essence of romantic hysteria. " It is in Joseph Warton, according to Mr. Gosse, that we first meet with "the individualistattitude to nature. " Readers of Horace Walpole's letters, however, willremember still earlier examples of the romantic attitude to nature. Butthese were not published for many years afterwards. 

The other essays in the book range from the charm of Sterne to thevivacity of Lady Dorothy Nevill, from a eulogy of Poe to a discussion ofDisraeli as a novelist. The variety, the scholarship, the portraiture ofthe book make it a pleasure to read; and, even when Mr. Gosse flatters inhis portraits, his sense of truth impels him to draw the featurescorrectly, so that the facts break through the praise. The truth is Mr. Gosse is always doing his best to balance the pleasure of saying the bestwith the pleasure of saying the worst. His books are all the more vitalbecause they bear the stamp of an appreciative and mildly cruelpersonality. 

XIX. --AN AMERICAN CRITIC: PROFESSOR IRVING BABBITT

It is rather odd that two of the ablest American critics should also betwo of the most unsparing enemies of romanticism in literature. ProfessorBabbitt and Mr. Paul Elmer More cannot get over the French Revolution. They seem to think that the rights of man have poisoned literature. Onesuspects that they have their doubts even about the American Revolution;for there, too, the rights of man were asserted against the lust of power. It is only fair to Professor Babbitt to say that he does not defend thelust of power. On the contrary, he damns it, and explains it as thelogical and almost inevitable outcome of the rights of man! The steps ofthe process by which the change is effected are these. First, we have theRousseaus asserting that the natural man is essentially good, but that hehas been depraved by an artificial social system imposed on him fromwithout. Instead of the quarrel between good and evil in his breast, theysee only the quarrel between the innate good in man and his evilenvironment. They hold that all will be well if only he is set free--ifhis genius or natural impulses are liberated. "Rousseauism is . .. Anemancipation of impulse--especially of the impulse of sex. " It is a gospelof egoism and leaves little room for conscience. Hence it makes menmengalomaniacs, and the lust for dominion is given its head no less thanthe lust of the flesh. "In the absence of ethical discipline, " writesProfessor Babbitt in _Rousseau and Romanticism_, "the lust for knowledgeand the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, comparedwith the third main lust of human nature--the lust for power. Hence theemergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac. "In the result it appears that not only Rousseau and Hugo, but Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, helped to bring about the European War! Had there beenno wars, no tyrants, and no lascivious men before Rousseau, one would havebeen ready to take Professor Babbitt's indictment more seriously. 

Professor Babbitt, however, has a serious philosophic idea at the back ofall he says. He believes that man at his noblest lives the life ofobligation rather than of impulse; and that romantic literaturediscourages him in this. He holds that man should rise from the plane ofnature to the plane of humanism or the plane of religion, and that to liveaccording to one's temperament, as the romanticists preach, is to sinkback from human nature, in the best sense, to animal nature. He takes theview that men of science since Bacon, by the great conquests they havemade in the material sphere, have prepared man to take the romantic andboastful view of himself. "If men had not been so heartened by scientificprogress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen toRousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good. " Not thatProfessor Babbitt looks on us as utterly evil and worthy of damnation. Heobjects to the gloomy Jonathan-Edwards view, because it helps toprecipitate by reaction the opposite extreme--"the boundless sycophancy ofhuman nature from which we are now suffering. " It was, perhaps, inreaction against the priests that Rousseau made the most boastfulannouncements of his righteousness. "Rousseau feels himself so good thathe is ready, as he declares, to appear before the Almighty at the sound ofthe trump of the Last Judgment, with the book of his _Confessions_ in hishand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race, 'Let asingle one assert to Thee if he dare: "I am better than that man. "'"Rousseau would have been saved from this fustian virtue, Professor Babbittthinks, if he had accepted either the classic or the religious view oflife: for the classic view imposes on human nature the discipline ofdecorum, while the religious view imposes the discipline of humility. Human nature, he holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting "No. "Virtue is a struggle within iron limitations, not an easy gush of feeling. At the same time, Professor Babbitt does not offer us as a cure for ourtroubles the decorum of the Pharisees and the pseudo-classicists, who bidus obey outward rules instead of imitating a spirit. He wishes our men ofletters to rediscover the ethical imagination of the Greeks. "Trueclassicism, " he observes, "does not rest on the observance of rules or theimitation of modes, but on an immediate insight into the universal. " Theromanticists, he thinks, cultivate not the awe we find in the greatwriters, but mere wonder. He takes Poe as a typical romanticist. "It isnot easy to discover in either the personality or writings of Poe an atomof awe or reverence. On the other hand, he both experiences wonder andseeks in his art to be a pure wonder-smith. "

One of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the romanticistsunduly praise the ignorant--the savage, the peasant, and the child. Wordsworth here comes in for denunciation for having hailed a child of sixas "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us, praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedomfrom sin. The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gushof wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. Hebegins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character. He tries all sorts of false gods--nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As regards the last ofthese, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitationof the ass, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. "Medical men havegiven a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members oftheir own family and gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis). But Rousseaualready exhibits this 'psychosis. ' He abandoned his five children oneafter the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for hisdog. " As for the worship of nature, it leads to a "wise passiveness"instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idlein pantheistic reveries. "In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts to a sortof ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination. " ProfessorBabbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts Arcadianism. He perceives themote of Arcadianism even in "the light that never was on sea or land. " Hehas no objection to a "return to nature, " if it is for purposes ofrecreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or "asubstitute for philosophy and religion. " He denounces, indeed, every kindof "painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort. " He admires thedifficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity orfraternity is in their absence hardly worth having. 

On points of this kind, I fancy, he would have had on his side Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, and many of the other "Rousseauists" whom he attacks. Professor Babbitt, however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of thenineteenth century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics, are to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientificcomplacency. "The nineteenth century, " he declares, "may very well proveto have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries. " Headmits the immense materialistic energy of the century, but this did notmake up for the lack of a genuine philosophic insight in life andliterature. Man is a morally indolent animal, and he was never more sothan when he was working "with something approaching frenzy according tothe natural law. " Faced with the spectacle of a romantic spiritual slothaccompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even intellectual energy, the author warns us that "the discipline that helps a man to self-masteryis found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than thediscipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature. " He sees aperil to our civilization in our absorption in the temporal and ourfailure to discover that "something abiding" on which civilization mustrest. He quotes Aristotle's anti-romantic saying that "most men wouldrather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner. " He feels that inconduct, politics, and the arts, we have, as the saying is, "plumped for"the disorderly manner to-day. 

His book is a very useful challenge to the times, though it is a dangerousbook to put in the hands of anyone inclined to Conservatism. After all, romanticism was a great liberating force. It liberated men, not fromdecorum, but from pseudo-decorum--not from humility, but fromsubserviency. It may be admitted that, without humility and decorum of thetrue kind, liberty is only pseudo-liberty, equality only pseudo-equality, and fraternity only pseudo-fraternity. I am afraid, however, that ingetting rid of the vices of romanticism Professor Babbitt would pour awaythe baby with the bath water. 

Where Professor Babbitt goes wrong is in not realizing that romanticismwith its emphasis on rights is a necessary counterpart to classicism withits emphasis on duties. Each of them tries to do without the other. Themost notorious romantic lovers were men who failed to realize thenecessity of fidelity, just as the minor romantic artists to-day fail torealize the necessity of tradition. On the other hand, theclassicist-in-excess prefers a world in which men preserve the decorum ofservants to a world in which they might attain to the decorum of equals. Professor Babbitt refers to the pseudo-classical drama ofseventeenth-century France, in which men confused nobility of languagewith the language of the nobility. He himself unfortunately is not freefrom similar prejudices. He is antipathetic, so far as one can see, to anymovement for a better social system than we already possess. He isdefinitely in reaction against the whole forward movement of the last twocenturies. He has pointed out certain flaws in the moderns, but he hasfailed to appreciate their virtues. Literature to-day is less noble thanthe literature of Shakespeare, partly, I think, because men have lost the"sense of sin. " Without the sense of sin we cannot have the greatesttragedy. The Greeks and Shakespeare perceived the contrast between thepure and the impure, the noble and the base, as no writer perceives itto-day. Romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values. On theother hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism. In the greatbooks of the world, in _Isaiah_ and the Gospels, the best elements of boththe classic and the romantic are found working together in harmony. IfChrist were living to-day, is Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himselfwould not have censured the anthophilpsychosis of "Consider the lilies ofthe field"?

XX. --GEORGIANS

(1) MR. DE LA MARE

Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song. His genius is scarcelymore than a rill. But how the rill shines! How sweet a music it makes!Into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populouswith birds! It seems at times as though it were a little fugitive streamattempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of realityand to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places. There never were shyer songsthan these. 

Mr. De la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease withexperience as Browning and Whitman. He has no cheers or welcome for thelabouring universe on its march. He is interested in the daily processiononly because he seeks in it one face, one figure. He is love-sick forlove, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of thecommon world. Like the lover in _The Tryst_, he dreams always of a secretplace of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time andspace we know:

 Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come, There, out of all remembrance, make our home: Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair, Hollowed by Noah's mouse beneath the chair Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound, Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound. Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea Would lease a lost mermaiden's grot to me, There of your beauty we would joyance make-- A music wistful for the sea-nymph's sake: Haply Elijah, o'er his spokes of fire, Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre, Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space, Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace, Where two might happy be--just you and I-- Lost in the uttermost of Eternity. 

This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the waltz-songs ofthe music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers foran impossible loneliness. Mr. De la Mare touches our hearts, however, notbecause he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfullyturns back from them to the bitterness of reality:

 No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep. Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can. 

These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness ofphrase, which is Mr. De la Mare's peculiar vice as a poet) suggestssomething of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in _Motley_. The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in theshadow of death. 

Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. De la Mare's book is, as we havesaid, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He triumphantly announcesthat, if he were to begin to write of earth's wonders:

 Flit would the ages On soundless wings Ere unto Z My pen drew nigh; Leviathan told, And the honey-fly. 

He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a "thing of light, " in a bushwithout realizing that--

 All the throbbing world Of dew and sun and air By this small parcel of life Is made more fair. 

He bids us in _Farewell_:

 Look thy last on all things lovely Every hour. Let no night Seal thy sense in deathly slumber Till to delight Thou have paid thy utmost blessing. 

Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. De la Mare's melancholy. Hissorrow is idealist's sorrow. He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover. 

We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the outbreak ofthe war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling ofelation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world. 

 Now each man's mind all Europe is, he cries, in the first line in _Happy England_, and, as he remembers thepeace of England, "her woods and wilds, her loveliness, " he exclaims:

 O what a deep contented night The sun from out her Eastern seas Would bring the dust which in her sight Had given its all for these!

So beautiful a spirit as Mr. De la Mare's, however, could not remaincontent with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and heroism of dying men. In the long poem called _Motley_ he turns from the heroism to the madnessof war, translating his vision into a fool's song:

 Nay, but a dream I had Of a world all mad, Not simply happy mad like me, Who am mad like an empty scene Of water and willow-tree, Where the wind hath been; But that foul Satan-mad, Who rots in his own head. .. . 

The fool's vision of men going into battle is not a vision of knights ofthe Holy Ghost nobly falling in the lists with their country looking on, but of men's bodies--

 Dragging cold cannon through a mire Of rain and blood and spouting fire, The new moon glinting hard on eyes Wide with insanities!

In _The Marionettes_ Mr. De la Mare turns to tragic satire for relief fromthe bitterness of a war-maddened world:

 Let the foul scene proceed: There's laughter in the wings; 'Tis sawdust that they bleed, But a box Death brings. 

 How rare a skill is theirs These extreme pangs to show, How real a frenzy wears Each feigner of woe!

And the poem goes on in perplexity of anger and anguish:

 Strange, such a Piece is free, While we spectators sit, Aghast at its agony, Yet absorbed in it!

 Dark is the outer air, Coldly the night draughts blow, Mutely we stare, and stare, At the frenzied Show. 

 Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroud Of deep, immutable blue-- We cry, "The end!" We are bowed By the dread, "'Tis true!"

 While the Shape who hoofs applause Behind our deafened ear, Hoots--angel-wise--"the Cause"! And affrights even fear. 

There is something in these lines that reminds one of Mr. Thomas Hardy'sblack-edged indictment of life. 

As we read Mr. De la Mare, indeed, we are reminded again and again of thework of many other poets--of the ballad-writers, the Elizabethansong-writers, Blake and Wordsworth, Mr. Hardy and Mr. W. B. Yeats. In someinstances it is as though Mr. De la Mare had deliberately set himself tocompose a musical variation on the same theme as one of the older masters. Thus, _April Moon_, which contains the charming verse--

 "The little moon that April brings, More lovely shade than light, That, setting, silvers lonely hills Upon the verge of night"--

is merely Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" turned intonew music. New music, we should say, is Mr. De la Mare's chief gift toliterature--a music not regular or precise or certain, but none the less amusic in which weak rhymes and even weak phrases are jangled into astrange beauty, as in _Alexander_, which begins:

 It was the Great Alexander, Capped with a golden helm, Sate in the ages, in his floating ship, In a dead calm. 

One finds Mr. De la Mare's characteristic, unemphatic music again in theopening lines of _Mrs. Grundy_:

 Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot, Stumble not, whisper not, smile not, where "foot" and "not" are rhymes. 

It is the stream of music flowing through his verses rather than anyriches of imagery or phrase that makes one rank the author so high amongliving poets. But music in verse can hardly be separated from intensityand sincerity of vision. This music of Mr. De la Mare's is not a merecraftsman's tune: it is an echo of the spirit. Had he not seen beautifulthings passionately, Mr. De la Mare could never have written:

 Thou with thy cheek on mine, And dark hair loosed, shalt see Take the far stars for fruit The cypress tree, And in the yew's black Shall the moon be. 

Beautiful as Mr. De la Mare's vision is, however, and beautiful as is hismusic, we miss in his work that frequent perfection of phrase which ispart of the genius of (to take another living writer) Mr. Yeats. One hasonly to compare Mr. Yeats's _I Heard the Old, Old Men Say_ with Mr. De laMare's _The Old Men_ to see how far the latter falls below verbal mastery. Mr. Yeats has found the perfect embodiment for his imagination. Mr. De laMare seems in comparison to be struggling with his medium, and contrivesin his first verse to be no more than just articulate:

 Old and alone, sit we, Caged, riddle-rid men, Lost to earth's "Listen!" and "See!" Thought's "Wherefore?" and "When?"

There is vision in some of the later verses in the poem, but, if we readit alongside of Mr. Yeats's, we get an impression of unsuccess ofexecution. Whether one can fairly use the word "unsuccess" in reference toverse which succeeds so exquisitely as Mr. De la Mare's in beingliterature is a nice question. But how else is one to define the peculiarquality of his style--its hesitations, its vaguenesses, its obscurities?On the other hand, even when his lines leave the intellect puzzled and thedesire for grammar unsatisfied, a breath of original romance blows throughthem and appeals to us like the illogical burden of a ballad. Here atleast are the rhythms and raptures of poetry, if not always the beatengold of speech. Sometimes Mr. De la Mare's verse reminds one ofpiano-music, sometimes of bird-music: it wavers so curiously between whatis composed and what is unsophisticated. Not that one ever doubts for amoment that Mr. De la Mare has spent on his work an artist's pains. He hasmade a craft out of his innocence. If he produces in his verse the effectof the wind among the reeds, it is the result not only of his artlessness, but of his art. He is one of the modern poets who have broken away fromthe metrical formalities of Swinburne and the older men, and who, of setpurpose, have imposed upon poetry the beauty of a slightly irregularpulse. 

He is typical of his generation, however, not only in his form, but in thepain of his unbelief (as shown in _Betrayal_), and in that sense ofhalf-revelation that fills him always with wonder and sometimes with hope. His poems tell of the visits of strange presences in dream and vacancy. In_A Vacant Day_, after describing the beauty of a summer moon, with clearwaters flowing under willows, he closes with the verses:

 I listened; and my heart was dumb With praise no language could express; Longing in vain for him to come Who had breathed such blessedness. 

 On this fair world, wherein we pass So chequered and so brief a stay, And yearned in spirit to learn, alas! What kept him still away. 

In these poems we have the genius of the beauty of gentleness expressingitself as it is doing nowhere else just now in verse. Mr. De la Mare'spoetry is not only lovely, but lovable. He has a personal possession--

 The skill of words to sweeten despair, such as will, we are confident, give him a permanent place in Englishliterature. 

(2) THE GROUP

The latest collection of Georgian verse has had a mixed reception. One ortwo distinguished critics have written of it in the mood of a challenge tomortal combat. Men have begun to quarrel over the question whether we areliving in an age of poetic dearth or of poetic plenty--whether the worldis a nest of singing-birds or a cage in which the last canary has beendead for several years. 

All this, I think, is a good sign. It means that poetry is interestingpeople sufficiently to make them wish to argue about it. Better abreeze--even a somewhat excessive breeze--than stagnant air. It is goodboth for poets and for the reading public. It prevents the poets fromresting on their wings, as they might be tempted to do by a consistentcalm of praise. It compels them to examine their work more critically. Anyhow, "fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, " and a reasonableamount of sharp censure will do a true poet more good than harm. It willnot necessarily injure even his sales. I understand the latest volume of_Georgian Poetry_ is already in greater demand than its predecessor. 

It is a good anthology of the poetry of the last two years without beingan ideal anthology. Some good poets and some good poems have been omitted. And they have been omitted, in some instances, in favour of inferior work. Many of us would prefer an anthology of the best poems rather than ananthology of authors. At the same time, with all its faults, _GeorgianPoetry_ still remains the best guide we possess to the poetic activitiesof the time. I am glad to see that the editor includes the work of a womanin his new volume. This helps to make it more representative than theprevious selections. But there are several other living women who arebetter poets, at the lowest estimate, than at least a quarter of the menwho have gained admission. 

Mr. W. H. Davies is by now a veteran among the Georgians, and one cannoteasily imagine a presence more welcome in a book of verse. Among poets heis a bird singing in a hedge. He communicates the same sense of freshnesswhile he sings. He has also the quick eye of a bird. He is, for all hisfairy music, on the look-out for things that will gratify his appetite. Helooks to the earth rather than the sky, though he is by no means deaf tothe lark that

 Raves in his windy heights above a cloud. 

At the same time, at his best, he says nothing about his appetite, andsings in the free spirit of a child at play. His best poems are songs ofinnocence. At least, that is the predominant element in them. He warnedthe public in a recent book that he is not so innocent as he sounds. Buthis genius certainly is. He has written greater poems than any that areincluded in the present selection. _Birds_, however, is a beautifulexample of his gift for joy. We need not fear for contemporary poetrywhile the hedges contain a poet such as Mr. Davies. 

Mr. De la Mare does not sing from a hedge. He is a child of the arts. Heplays an instrument. His music is the music of a lute of which some of thestrings have been broken. It is so extraordinarily sweet, indeed, that onehas to explain him to oneself as the perfect master of an imperfectinstrument. He is at times like Watts's figure of Hope listening to thefaint music of the single string that remains unbroken. There is alwayssome element of hope, or of some kindred excuse for joy, even in hisdeepest melancholy. But it is the joy of a spirit, not of a "super-tramp. "Prospero might have summoned just such a spirit through the air to makemusic for him. And Mr. De la Mare's is a spirit perceptible to the earrather than to the eye. One need not count him the equal of Campion inorder to feel that he has something of Campion's beautiful genius formaking airs out of words. He has little enough of the Keatsian genius forchoosing the word that has the most meaning for the seeing imagination. But there is a secret melody in his words that, when once one hasrecognized it, one can never forget. 

How different the Georgian poets are from each other may be seen if wecompare three of the best poems in this book, all of them on similarsubjects--Mr. Davies's _Birds_, Mr. De la Mare's _Linnet_, and Mr. Squire's _Birds_. Mr. Squire would feel as out of place in a hedge aswould Mr. De la Mare. He has an aquiline love of soaring and surveyingimmense tracts with keen eyes. He loves to explore both time and the map, but he does this without losing his eyehold on the details of the Noah'sArk of life on the earth beneath him. He does not lose himself in vaporousabstractions; his eye, as well as his mind, is extraordinarilyinteresting. This poem of his, _Birds_, is peopled with birds. We see themin flight and in their nests. At the same time, the philosophic wonder ofMr. Squire's poem separates him from Mr. Davies and Mr. De la Mare. Mr. Davies, I fancy, loves most to look at birds; Mr. De la Mare to listen tobirds; Mr. Squire to brood over them with the philosophic imagination. Itwould, of course, be absurd to offer this as a final statement of thepoetic attitude of the three writers. It is merely an attempt todifferentiate among them with the help of a prominent characteristic ofeach. 

The other poets in the collection include Mr. Robert Graves (with hispleasant bias towards nursery rhymes), Mr. Sassoon (with his sensitive, passionate satire), and Mr. Edward Shanks (with his tremblingresponsiveness to beauty). It is the first time that Mr. Shanks appearsamong the Georgians, and his _Night Piece_ and _Glow-worm_ both show howexquisite is his sensibility. He differs from the other poets by hisquasi-analytic method. He seems to be analyzing the beauty of the eveningin both these poems. Mrs. Shove's _A Man Dreams that He is the Creator_ isa charming example of fancy toying with a great theme. 

(3) THE YOUNG SATIRISTS

Satire, it has been said, is an ignoble art; and it is probable that thereare no satirists in Heaven. Probably there are no doctors either. Satireand medicine are our responses to a diseased world--to our diseasedselves. They are responses, however, that make for health. Satire holdsthe medicine-glass up to human nature. It also holds the mirror up in alimited way. It does not show a man what he looks like when he is bothwell and good. It does show a man what he looks like, however, when hebreaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result ofmaking a beast of himself. It reflects only sick men; but it reflects themwith a purpose. It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were ahospital for incurables. To write satire is an act of faith, not aluxurious exercise. The despairing Swift was a fighter, as the despairingAnatole France is a fighter. They may have uttered the very Z ofmelancholy about the animal called man; but at least they weresufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw themselves intodefeated causes. 

It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankindof the disease of war. It is a good sign, however, that satires on warhave begun to be written. War has affected with horror or disgust a numberof great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years. Thetragic indictment of war in _The Trojan Women_ and the satiric indictmentin _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ are evidence that some men at least sawthrough the romance of war before the twentieth century. In the war thathas just ended, however--or that would have ended if the Peace Conferencewould let it--we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on thepart of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers. Ballads havesurvived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldierleft to beg:

 You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg, You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg, You ought to be put in a bowl to beg-- Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!

But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itselfneither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on theright of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen whothemselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant. Soldiers--or some of them--see that wars go on only because the people whocause them do not realize what war is like. I do not mean to suggest thatthe kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would notthemselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be nofighting at all. The people who cause wars, however, are ultimately thepeople who endure kings, statesmen and journalists of the exploiting andbullying kind. The satire of the soldiers is an appeal not to thestatesmen and journalists, but to the general imagination of mankind. Itis an attempt to drag our imaginations away from the heroics of thesenate-house into the filth of the slaughter-house. It does not deny theheroism that exists in the slaughter-house any more than it denies theheroism that exists in the hospital ward. But it protests that, just asthe heroism of a man dying of cancer must not be taken to justify cancer, so the heroism of a million men dying of war must not be taken to justifywar. There are some who believe that neither war nor cancer is a curabledisease. One thing we can be sure of in this connection: we shall neverget rid either of war or of cancer if we do not learn to look at themrealistically and see how loathsome they are. So long as war was regardedas inevitable, the poet was justified in romanticizing it, as in thatepigram in the _Greek Anthology:_

 Demætia sent eight sons to encounter the phalanx of the foe, and she buried them all beneath one stone. No tear did she shed in her mourning, but said this only: "Ho, Sparta, I bore these children for thee. "

As soon as it is realized, however, that wars are not inevitable, mencease to idealize Demætia, unless they are sure she did her best to keepthe peace. To a realistic poet of war such as Mr. Sassoon, she is anobject of pity rather than praise. His sonnet, _Glory of Women_, suggeststhat there is another point of view besides Demætia's:

 You love us when we're heroes, home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place. You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace. You make us shells. You listen with delight, By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed. 

 You can't believe that British troops "retire" When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood. _O German mother dreaming by the fire, _ _While you, are knitting socks to send your son_ _His face is trodden deeper in the mud. _

To Mr. Sassoon and the other war satirists, indeed, those stay at home andincite others to go out and kill or get killed seem either pitifullystupid or pervertedly criminal. Mr. Sassoon has now collected all his warpoems into one volume, and one is struck by the energetic hatred of thosewho make war in safety that finds expression in them. Most readers willremember the bitter joy of the dream that one day he might hear "theyellow pressmen grunt and squeal, " and see the Junkers driven out ofParliament by the returned soldiers. Mr. Sassoon cannot endure theenthusiasm of the stay-at-home--especially the enthusiasm that pretendsthat soldiers not only behave like music-hall clowns, but are incapable ofthe more terrible emotional experiences. He would like, I fancy, to forbidcivilians to make jokes during war-time. His hatred of the jestingcivilian attains passionate expression in the poem called _Blighters_:

 The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din; "We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!"

 I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls, Lurching to rag-time tunes, or "Home, sweet Home, "-- And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume. 

Mr. Sassoon himself laughs on occasion, but it is the laughter of a manbeing driven insane by an insane world. The spectacle of lives beingthrown away by the hundred thousand by statesmen and generals without thecapacity to run a village flower-show, makes him find relief now and thenin a hysteria of mirth, as in _The General_:

 "Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said When we met him last week on our way to the Line, Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. "He's a cheery old card, " grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. * * * * * But he did for them both by his plan of attack. 

Mr. Sassoon's verse is also of importance because it paints life in thetrenches with a realism not to be found elsewhere in the English poetry ofthe war. He spares us nothing of:

 The strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead. 

He gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of thetrenches. His book is in its aim destructive. It is a great pamphletagainst war. If posterity wishes to know what war was like during thisperiod, it will discover the truth, not in _Barrack-room Ballads_, but inMr. Sassoon's verse. The best poems in the book are poems of hatred. Thismeans that Mr. Sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry. Hispoems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionarypoems of Shelley. They are utterances of pain rather than of vision. Manyof them, however, rise to a noble pity--_The Prelude_, for instance, and_Aftermath_, the latter of which ends:

 Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz, -- The night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench, -- And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"

 Do you remember that hour of din before the attack-- And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back With dying eyes and lolling heads, --those ashen-grey Masks of the lad who once were keen and kind and gay?

 _Have you forgotten yet?. .. _ _Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget. _

Mr. Sitwell's satires--which occupy the most interesting pages of_Argonaut and Juggernaut_--seldom take us into the trenches. Mr. Sitwellgets all the subjects he wants in London clubs and drawing-rooms. These"free-verse" satires do not lend themselves readily to quotation, but boththe manner and the mood of them can be guessed from the closing verses of_War-horses_, in which the "septuagenarian butterflies" of Society returnto their platitudes and parties after seeing the war through:

 But now They have come out. They have preened And dried themselves After their blood bath. Old men seem a little younger, And tortoise-shell combs Are longer than ever; Earrings weigh down aged ears; And Golconda has given them of its best. 

 They have seen it through! Theirs is the triumph, And, beneath The carved smile of the Mona Lisa, False teeth Rattle Like machine-guns, In anticipation Of food and platitudes. Les Vieilles Dames Sans Merci!

Mr. Sitwell's hatred of war is seldom touched with pity. It is arroganthatred. There is little emotion in it but that of a young man at war withage. He pictures the dotards of two thousand years ago complaining thatChrist did not die--

 Like a hero With an oath on his lips, Or the refrain from a comic song-- Or a cheerful comment of some kind. 

His own verse, however, seems to me to be hardly more in sympathy with thespirit of Christ than with the spirit of those who mocked him. He is movedto write by unbelief in the ideals of other people rather than by thepassionate force of ideals of his own. He is a sceptic, not a sufferer. His work proceeds less from his heart than from his brain. It is a cleverbrain, however, and his satirical poems are harshly entertaining and willinfuriate the right people. They may not kill Goliath, but at least theywill annoy Goliath's friends. David's weapon, it should be remembered, wasa sling, with some pebbles from the brook, not a pea-shooter. 

The truth is, so far as I can see, Mr. Sitwell has not begun to takepoetry quite seriously. His non-satirical verse is full of bright colour, but it has the brightness, not of the fields and the flowers, but ofcaptive birds in an aviary. It is as though Mr. Sitwell had taken poetryfor his hobby. I suspect his Argonauts of being ballet dancers. He enjoysamusing little decorations--phrases such as "concertina waves" and--

 The ocean at a toy shore Yaps like a Pekinese. 

His moonlight owl is surely a pretty creature from the unreality of aballet:

 An owl, horned wizard of the night, Flaps through the air so soft and still; Moaning, it wings its flight Far from the forest cool, To find the star-entangled surface of a pool, Where it may drink its fill Of stars. 

At the same time, here and there are evidences that Mr. Sitwell has feltas well as fancied. The opening verse of _Pierrot Old_ gives us a realimpression of shadows:

 The harvest moon is at its height, The evening primrose greets its light With grace and joy: then opens up The mimic moon within its cup. Tall trees, as high as Babel tower, Throw down their shadows to the flower-- Shadows that shiver--seem to see An ending to infinity. 

But there is too much of Pan, the fauns and all those other ballet-dancersin his verse. Mr. Sitwell's muse wears some pretty costumes. But onewonders when she will begin to live for something besides clothes. 

XXI. --LABOUR OF AUTHORSHIP

Literature maintains an endless quarrel with idle sentences. Twenty yearsago this would have seemed too obvious to bear saying. But in the meantimethere has been a good deal of dipping of pens in chaos, and authors havefound excuses for themselves in a theory of literature which is impatientof difficult writing. It would not matter if it were only the paunched andflat-footed authors who were proclaiming the importance of writing withoutstyle. Unhappily, many excellent writers as well have used their gift ofstyle to publish the praise of stylelessness. Within the last few weeks Ihave seen it suggested by two different critics that the hasty writingwhich has left its mark on so much of the work of Scott and Balzac was agood thing and almost a necessity of genius. It is no longer taken forgranted, as it was in the days of Stevenson, that the starry word is worththe pains of discovery. Stevenson, indeed, is commonly dismissed as apretty-pretty writer, a word-taster without intellect or passion, ajuggler rather than an artist. Pater's bust also is mutilated byirreverent schoolboys: it is hinted that he may have done well enough forthe days of Victoria, but that he will not do at all for the world ofGeorge. It is all part of the reaction against style which took place wheneverybody found out the æsthetes. It was, one may admit, an excellentthing to get rid of the æsthetes, but it was by no means an excellentthing to get rid of the virtue which they tried to bring into English artand literature. The æsthetes were wrong in almost everything they saidabout art and literature, but they were right in impressing upon thechildren of men the duty of good drawing and good words. With thecondemnation of Oscar Wilde, however, good words became suspected ofkinship with evil deeds. Style was looked on as the sign of minor poetsand major vices. Possibly, on the other hand, the reaction against stylehad nothing to do with the Wilde condemnation. The heresy of thestylelessness is considerably older than that. Perhaps it is not quitefair to call it the heresy of stylelessness: it would be more accurate todescribe it as the heresy of style without pains. It springs from the ideathat great literature is all a matter of first fine careless raptures, andit is supported by the fact that apparently much of the greatestliterature is so. If lines like

 Hark, hark! the lark at Heaven's gate sings, or

 When daffodils begin to peer, or

 His golden locks time hath to silver turned, shape themselves in the poet's first thoughts, he would be a manifest foolto trouble himself further. Genius is the recognition of the perfect line, the perfect phrase, the perfect word, when it appears, and this perfectline or phrase or word is quite as likely to appear in the twinkling of aneye as after a week of vigils. But the point is that it does notinvariably so appear. It sometimes cost Flaubert three days' labour towrite one perfect sentence. Greater writers have written more hurriedly. But this does not justify lesser writers in writing hurriedly too. 

Of all the authors who have exalted the part played in literature byinspiration as compared with labour, none has written more nobly or withbetter warrant than Shelley. "The mind, " he wrote in the _Defence ofPoetry_--

 The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. 

He then goes on to interpret literally Milton's reference to _ParadiseLost_ as an "unpremeditated song" "dictated" by the Muse, and to replyscornfully to those "who would allege the fifty-six various readings ofthe first line of the _Orlando Furioso_. " Who is there who would not agreewith Shelley quickly if it were a question of having to choose between hisinspirational theory of literature and the mechanical theory of the artsadvocated by writers like Sir Joshua Reynolds? Literature withoutinspiration is obviously even a meaner thing than literature withoutstyle. But the idea that any man can become an artist by taking pains ismerely an exaggerated protest against the idea that a man can become anartist without taking pains. Anthony Trollope, who settled downindustriously to his day's task of literature as to bookkeeping, did notgrow into an artist in any large sense; and Zola, with the motto "Nulledies sine linea" ever facing him on his desk, made himself a prodigiousauthor, indeed, but never more than a second-rate writer. On the otherhand, Trollope without industry would have been nobody at all, and Zolawithout pains might as well have been a waiter. Nor is it only the littleor the clumsy artists who have found inspiration in labour. It is a pitywe have not first drafts of all the great poems in the world: we mightthen see how much of the magic of literature is the result of toil and howmuch of the unprophesied wind of inspiration. Sir Sidney Colvin recentlypublished an early draft of Keats's sonnet, "Bright star, would I werestedfast as thou art, " which showed that in the case of Keats at least themind in creation was not "as a fading coal, " but as a coal blown toincreasing flame and splendour by sheer "labour and study. " And the poetryof Keats is full of examples of the inspiration not of first but of secondand later thoughts. Henry Stephens, a medical student who lived with himfor time, declared that an early draft of _Endymion_ opened with the line:

 A thing of beauty is a constant joy

--a line which, Stephens observed on hearing it, was "a fine line, butwanting something. " Keats thought over it for a little, then cried out, "Ihave it, " and wrote in its place:

 A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. 

Nor is this an exceptional example of the studied miracles of Keats. Themost famous and, worn and cheapened by quotation though it is, the mostbeautiful of all his phrases--

 magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn--

did not reach its perfect shape without hesitation and thinking. Heoriginally wrote "the wide casements" and "keelless seas":

 the wide casements, opening on the foam Of keelless seas, in fairy lands forlorn. 

That would probably have seemed beautiful if the perfect version had notspoiled it for us. But does not the final version go to prove thatShelley's assertion that "when composition begins, inspiration is alreadyon the decline" does not hold good for all poets? On the contrary, it isoften the heat of labour which produces the heat of inspiration. Or ratherit is often the heat of labour which enables the writer to recall the heatof inspiration. Ben Jonson, who held justly that "the poet must be able bynature and instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind, " took care toadd the warning that no one must think he "can leap forth suddenly a poetby dreaming he hath been in Parnassus. " Poe has uttered a comparablewarning against an excessive belief in the theory of the plenaryinspiration of poets in his _Marginalia_, where he declares that "thisuntenable and paradoxical idea of the incompatibility of genius and _art_"must be "kick[ed] out of the world's way. " Wordsworth's saying that poetryhas its origin in "emotion recollected in tranquillity" also suggests thatthe inspiration of poetry is an inspiration that may be recaptured bycontemplation and labour. How eagerly one would study a Shakespearemanuscript, were it unearthed, in which one could see the shapingimagination of the poet at work upon his lines! Many people have thetheory--it is supported by an assertion of Jonson's--that Shakespearewrote with a current pen, heedless of blots and little changes. He was, itis evident, not one of the correct authors. But it seems unlikely that nopains of rewriting went to the making of the speeches in _A MidsummerNight's Dream_ or Hamlet's address to the skull. Shakespeare, one feels, is richer than any other author in the beauty of first thoughts. But oneseems to perceive in much of his work the beauty of second thoughts too. There have been few great writers who have been so incapable of revisionas Robert Browning, but Browning with all his genius is not a greatstylist to be named with Shakespeare. He did indeed prove himself to be agreat stylist in more than one poem, such as _Childe Roland_--which hewrote almost at a sitting. His inspiration, however, seldom raised hiswork to the same beauty of perfection. He is, as regards mere style, themost imperfect of the great poets. If only Tennyson had had his genius! Ifonly Browning had had Tennyson's desire for golden words!

It would be absurd, however, to suggest that the main labour of an authorconsists in rewriting. The choice of words may have been made before asingle one of them has been written down, as tradition tells us was thecase with Menander, who described one of his plays as "finished" before hehad written a word of it. It would be foolish, too, to write as thoughperfection of form in literature were merely a matter of picking andchoosing among decorative words. Style is a method, not of decoration, butof expression. It is an attempt to make the beauty and energy of theimagination articulate. It is not any more than is construction theessence of the greatest art: it is, however, a prerequisite of thegreatest art. Even those writers whom we regard as the least decorativelabour and sorrow after it no less than the æsthetes. We who do not knowRussian do not usually think of Tolstoy as a stylist, but he took far moretrouble with his writing than did Oscar Wilde (whose chief fault is, indeed, that in spite of his theories his style is not laboured andartistic but inspirational and indolent). Count Ilya Tolstoy, the son ofthe novelist, published a volume of reminiscences of his father last year, in which he gave some interesting particulars of his father's energeticstruggle for perfection in writing:

 When _Anna Karénina_ began to come out in the _Russki Vyéstnik_ [he wrote], long galley-proofs were posted to my father, and he looked them through and corrected them. At first, the margins would be marked with the ordinary typographical signs, letters omitted, marks of punctuation, and so on; then individual words would be changed, and then whole sentences; erasures and additions would begin, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches, quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions, and erasures. 

 My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out afresh. 

 In the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and everything ready, so that when "Lyóvotchka" came down he could send the proof-sheets out by post. 

 My father would carry them off to his study to have "just one last look, " and by the evening it was worse than before; the whole thing had been rewritten and messed up once more. 

 "Sonya, my dear, I am very sorry, but I've spoilt all your work again; I promise I won't do it any more, " he would say, showing her the passages with a guilty air. "We'll send them off to-morrow without fail. " But his to-morrow was put off day by day for weeks or months together. 

 "There's just one bit I want to look through again, " my father would say; but he would get carried away and rewrite the whole thing afresh. There were even occasions when, after posting the Proofs, my father would remember some particular words next day and correct them by telegraph. 

There, better than in a thousand generalizations, you see what theartistic conscience is. In a world in which authors, like solicitors, mustlive, it is, of course, seldom possible to take pains in this measure. Dostoevsky used to groan that his poverty left him no time or chance towrite his best as Tolstoy and Turgenev could write theirs. But he at leastlaboured all that he could. Novel-writing has since his time become aspainless as dentistry, and the result may be seen in a host of books that, while affecting to be fine literature, have no price except asmerchandise. 

XXII. --THE THEORY OF POETRY

Matthew Arnold once advised people who wanted to know what was good poetrynot to trouble themselves with definitions of poetry, but to learn byheart passages, or even single lines, from the works of the great poets, and to apply these as touchstones. Certainly a book like Mr. Cowl's_Theory of Poetry in England_, which aims at giving us a representativeselection of the theoretical things which were said in England aboutpoetry between the time of Elizabeth and the time of Victoria, makes onewonder at the barrenness of men's thoughts about so fruitful a world asthat of the poets. Mr. Cowl's book is not intended to be read as ananthology of fine things. Its value is not that of a book of goldenthoughts. It is an ordered selection of documents chosen, not for theirbeauty, but simply for their use as milestones in the progress of Englishpoetic theory. It is a work, not of literature, but of literary history;and students of literary history are under a deep debt of gratitude to theauthor for bringing together and arranging the documents of the subject inso convenient and lucid a form. The arrangement is under subjects, andchronological. There are forty-one pages on the theory of poetic creation, beginning with George Gascoigne and ending with Matthew Arnold. These arefollowed by a few pages of representative passages about poetry as animitative art, the first of the authors quoted being Roger Ascham and thelast F. W. H. Myers. The hook is divided into twelve sections of this kind, some of which have a tendency to overlap. Thus, in addition to the sectionon poetry as an imitative art, we have a section on imitation of nature, another on external nature, and another on imitation. Imitation, in thelast of these, it is true, means for the most part imitation of theancients, as in the sentence in which Thomas Rymer urged theseventeenth-century dramatists to imitate Attic tragedy even to the pointof introducing the chorus. 

Mr. Cowl's book is interesting, however, less on account of the sectionsand subsections into which it is divided than because of the manner inwhich it enables us to follow the flight of English poetry from theromanticism of the Elizabethans to the neo-classicism of the eighteenthcentury, and from this on to the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and from this to a newer neo-classicism whose prophet was Matthew Arnold. There is not much of poetry captured in these cold-blooded criticisms, butstill the shadow of the poetry of his time occasionally falls on thecritic's formulae and aphorisms. How excellently Sir Philip Sidneyexpresses the truth that the poet does not imitate the world, but createsa world, in his observation that Nature's world "is brazen, the poets onlydeliver a golden!" This, however, is a fine saying rather than aninterpretation. It has no importance as a contribution to the theory ofpoetry to compare with a passage like that so often quoted fromWordsworth's preface to _Lyrical Ballads_:

 I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. 

As a theory of poetic creation this may not apply universally. But what aflood of light it throws on the creative genius of Wordsworth himself! Howrich in psychological insight it is, for instance, compared with Dryden'scomparable reference to the part played by the memory in poetry:

The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in thepoet . .. Is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the fieldof memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after. 

As a matter of fact, few of these generalizations carry one far. BenJonson revealed more of the secret of poetry when he said simply: "Itutters somewhat above a mortal mouth. " So did Edgar Allan Poe, when hesaid: "It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wildeffort to reach the beauty above. " Coleridge, again, initiates us into thesecrets of the poetic imagination when he speaks of it as somethingwhich--

 combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, which is alone truly one. 

On the other hand, the most dreadful thing that was ever written aboutpoetry was also written by Coleridge, and is repeated in Mr. Cowl's book:

 How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the faculty that forms the many into one--_Ineins-bildung_! Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, either catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will. 

The meaning is simple enough: it is much the same as that of the precedingparagraph. But was there ever a passage written suggesting more forciblyhow much easier it is to explain poetry by writing it than by writingabout it?

Mr. Cowl's book makes it clear that fiercely as the critics may disputeabout poetry, they are practically all agreed on at least one point--thatit is an imitation. The schools have differed less over the questionwhether it is an imitation than over the question how, in a discussion onthe nature of poetry, the word "imitation" must be qualified. Obviously, the poet must imitate something--either what he sees in nature, or what hesees in memory, or what he sees in other poets, or what he sees in hissoul, or it may me, all together. There arise schools every now andthen--classicists, Parnassians, realists, and so forth--who believe inimitation, but will not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen inthe imaginative world. In the result their work is no true imitation oflife. Pope's poetry is not as true an imitation of life as Shakespeare's. Nor is Zola's, for all its fidelity, as close an imitation of life asVictor Hugo's. Poetry, or prose either, without romance, withoutliberation, can never rise above the second order. The poet must befaithful not only to his subject, but to his soul. Poe defined art as the"reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil ofthe soul, " and this, though like most definitions of art, incomplete, istrue in so far as it reminds us that art at its greatest is the statementof a personal and ideal vision. That is why the reverence of rules in thearts is so dangerous. It puts the standards of poetry not in the hands ofthe poet, but in the hands of the grammarians. It is a Procrustes' bedwhich mutilates the poet's vision. Luckily, England has always been arather lawless country, and we find even Pope insisting that "to judge . .. Of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the laws ofone country who acted under those of another. " Dennis might cry: "Poetryis either an art or whimsy and fanaticism. .. . The great design of the artsis to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, byrestoring order. " But, on the whole, the English poets and critics haverealized the truth that it is not an order imposed from without, but anorder imposed from within at which the poet must aim. He aims at bringingorder into chaos, but that does not mean that he aims at bringingAristotle into chaos. He is, in a sense, "beyond good and evil, " so far asthe orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in anutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics whocondemned Shakespeare as "a sort of African nature, rich in beautifulmonsters, " lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organicform. " And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in anothersentence in the same lecture:

 As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes its genius--the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. 

Mr. Cowl enables us to follow, as in no other book we know, the endlessquarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit and the letter, among the English authorities on poetry. It is a quarrel which willobviously never be finally settled in any country. The mechanical theoryis a necessary reaction against romance that has decayed into windiness, extravagance, and incoherence. It brings the poets back to literatureagain. The romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminderthat the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision. Itbrings the poets back to nature again. No one but a Dennis will hesitatean instant in deciding which of the theories is the more importantly andeternally true one. 

XXIII. --THE CRITIC AS DESTROYER

It has been said often enough that all good criticism is praise. Paterboldly called one of his volumes of critical essays _Appreciations_. Thereare, of course, not a few brilliant instances of hostility in criticism. The best-known of these in English is Macaulay's essay on RobertMontgomery. In recent years we have witnessed the much more significantassault by Tolstoy upon almost the whole army of the authors of thecivilized world from Æschylus down to Mallarmé. _What is Art?_ wasunquestionably the most remarkable piece of sustained hostile criticismthat was ever written. At the same time, it was less a denunciation ofindividual authors than an attack on the general tendencies of theliterary art. Tolstoy quarrelled with Shakespeare not so much for beingShakespeare as for failing to write like the authors of the Gospels. Tolstoy would have made every book a Bible. He raged against men ofletters because with them literature was a means not to more abundant lifebut to more abundant luxury. Like so many inexorable moralists, he wasintolerant of all literature that did not serve as a sort of example ofhis own moral and social theories. That is why he was not a great critic, though he was immeasurably greater than a great critic. One would not turnto him for the perfect appreciation even of one of the authors he spared, like Hugo or Dickens. The good critic must in some way begin by acceptingliterature as it is, just as the good lyric poet must begin by acceptinglife as it is. He may be as full of revolutionary and reforming theoriesas he likes, but he must not allow any of these to come like a cloudbetween him and the sun, moon and stars of literature. The man whodisparages the beauty of flowers and birds and love and laughter andcourage will never be counted among the lyric poets; and the man whoquestions the beauty of the inhabited world the imaginative writers havemade--a world as unreasonable in its loveliness as the world of nature--isnot in the way of becoming a critic of literature. 

Another argument which tells in favour of the theory that the bestcriticism is praise is the fact that almost all the memorable examples ofcritical folly have been denunciations. One remembers that Carlyledismissed Herbert Spencer as a "never-ending ass. " One remembers thatByron thought nothing of Keats--"Jack Ketch, " as he called him. Oneremembers that the critics damned Wagner's operas as a new form of sin. One remembers that Ruskin denounced one of Whistler's nocturnes as a potof paint flung in the face of the British public. In the world of sciencewe have a thousand similar examples of new genius being hailed by thecritics as folly and charlatanry. Only the other day a biographer of LordLister was reminding us how, at the British Association in 1869, Lister'santiseptic treatment was attacked as a "return to the dark ages ofsurgery, " the "carbolic mania, " and "a professional criminality. " Thehistory of science, art, music and literature is strewn with the wrecks ofsuch hostile criticisms. It is an appalling spectacle for anyoneinterested in asserting the intelligence of the human race. So appallingis it, indeed, that most of us nowadays labour under such a terror ofaccidentally condemning something good that we have not the courage tocondemn anything at all. We think of the way in which Browning was oncetaunted for his obscurity, and we cannot find it in our hearts to censureMr. Doughty. We recall the ignorant attacks on Manet and Monet, and wewill not risk an onslaught on the follies of Picasso and theworse-than-Picassos of contemporary art. We grow a monstrous and unhealthyplant of tolerance in our souls, and its branches drop colourless goodwords on the just and on the unjust--on everybody, indeed, except MissMarie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, and a few others whom we know to besecond-rate because they have such big circulations. This is really adisastrous state of affairs for literature and the other arts. Ifcriticism is, generally speaking, praise, it is, more definitely, praiseof the right things. Praise for the sake of praise is as great an evil asblame for the sake of blame. Indiscriminate praise, in so far as it is theresult of distrust of one's own judgment or of laziness or of insincerity, is one of the deadly sins in criticism. It is also one of the deadly dullsins. Its effect is to make criticism ever more unreadable, and in the endeven the publishers, who love silly sentences to quote about their badbooks, will open their eyes to the futility of it. They will realize that, when once criticism has become unreal and unreadable, people will no morebe bothered with it than they will with drinking lukewarm water. I mentionthe publisher in especial, because there is no doubt that it is with theidea of putting the publishers in a good, open-handed humour that so manypapers and reviews have turned criticism into a kind of stagnant pond. Publishers, fortunately, are coming more and more to see that this kind ofcriticism is of no use to them. Reviews in such-and-such a paper, theywill tell you, do not sell books. And the papers to which they refer insuch cases are always papers in which praise is disgustingly served out toeverybody, like spoonfuls of treacle-and-brimstone to a mob ofschoolchildren. 

Criticism, then, is praise, but it is praise of literature. There is allthe difference in the world between that and the praise of what pretendsto be literature. True criticism is a search for beauty and truth and anannouncement of them. It does not care twopence whether the method oftheir revelation is new or old, academic or futuristic. It only asks thatthe revelation shall be genuine. It is concerned with form, because beautyand truth demand perfect expression. But it is a mere heresy in æstheticsto say that perfect expression is the whole of art that matters. It is thespirit that breaks through the form that is the main interest ofcriticism. Form, we know, has a permanence of its own: so much so that ithas again and again been worshipped by the idolators of art as being initself more enduring than the thing which it embodies. Robert Burns, byhis genius for perfect statement, can give immortality to the joys ofbeing drunk with whiskey as the average hymn-writer cannot giveimmortality to the joys of being drunk with the love of God. Style, then, does seem actually to be a form of life. The critic may not ignore it anymore than he may exaggerate its place in the arts. As a matter of fact, hecould not ignore it if he would, for style and spirit have a way ofcorresponding to one another like health and sunlight. 

It is to combat the stylelessness of many contemporary writers that thedestructive kind of criticism is just now most necessary. For, dangerousas the heresy of style was forty or fifty years ago, the newer heresy ofsylelessness is more dangerous still. It has become the custom even of menwho write well to be as ashamed of their style as a schoolboy is of beingcaught in an obvious piece of goodness. They keep silent about it asthough it were a kind of powdering or painting. They do not realize thatit is merely a form of ordinary truthfulness--the truthfulness of the wordabout the thought. They forget that one has no more right to misuse wordsthan to beat one's wife. Someone has said that in the last analysis styleis a moral quality. It is a sincerity, a refusal to bow the knee to thesuperficial, a passion for justice in language. Stylelessness, where it isnot, like colour-blindness, an accident of nature, is for the most partmerely an echo of the commercial man's world of hustle. It is like therushing to and fro of motor-buses which save minutes with great loss oflife. It is like the swift making of furniture with unseasoned wood. It isa kind of introduction of the quick-lunch system into literature. Onecannot altogether acquit Mr. Masefield of a hasty stylelessness in some ofthose long poems which the world has been raving about in the last year ortwo. His line in _The Everlasting Mercy:_

 And yet men ask, "Are barmaids chaste?"

is a masterpiece of inexpertness. And the couplet:

 The Bosun turned: "I'll give you a thick ear! Do it? I didn't. Get to hell from here!"

is like a Sunday-school teacher's lame attempt to repeat a blasphemousstory. Mr. Masefield, on the other hand, is, we always feel, wrestlingwith language. If he writes in a hurry, it is not because he isindifferent, but because his soul is full of something that he is eager toexpress. He does not gabble; he is, as it were, a man stammering out avision. So vastly greater are his virtues than his faults as a poet, indeed, that the latter would only be worth the briefest mention if itwere not for the danger of their infecting other writers who envy him hismethod but do not possess his conscience. One cannot contemplate withequanimity the prospect of a Masefield school of poetry with all Mr. Masefield's ineptitudes and none of his genius. 

Criticism, however, it is to be feared, is a fight for a lost cause if itessays to prevent the founding of schools upon the faults of good writers. Criticism will never kill the copyist. Nothing but the end of the worldcan do that. Still, whatever the practical results of his work may be, itis the function of the critic to keep the standard of writing high--toinsist that the authors shall write well, even if his own sentences arelike torn strips of newspaper for commonness. He is the enemy ofsloppiness in others--especially of that airy sloppiness which so oftennowadays runs to four or five hundred pages in a novel. It was amazing tofind with what airiness a promising writer like Mr. Compton Mackenzie gaveus some years ago _Sinister Street_, a novel containing thousands ofsentences that only seemed to be there because he had not thought it worthhis while to leave them out, and thousands of others that seemed to bemere hurried attempts to express realities upon which he was unable tospend more time. Here is a writer who began literature with a sense ofwords, and who is declining into a mere sense of wordiness. It is simplyanother instance of the ridiculous rush of writing that is going on allabout us--a rush to satisfy a public which demands quantity rather thanquality in its books. I do not say that Mr. Mackenzie consciously wrotedown to the public, but the atmosphere obviously affected him. Otherwisehe would hardly have let his book go out into the world till he hadrewritten it--till he had separated his necessary from his unnecessarysentences and given his conversations the tones of reality. 

There is no need, however, for criticism to lash out indiscriminately atall hurried writing. There are a multitude of books turned out every yearwhich make no claim to be literature--the "thrillers, " for example, of Mr. Phillips Oppenheim and of that capable firm of feuilletonists, CoralieStanton and Heath Hosken. I do not think literature stands to gainanything, even though all the critics in Europe were suddenly to assailthis kind of writing. It is a frankly commercial affair, and we have nomore right to demand style from those who live by it than from the authorsof the weather reports in the newspapers. Often, one notices, when thegolden youth, fresh from college and the reading of Shelley and AnatoleFrance, commences literary critic, he begins damning the sensationalnovelists as though it were their business to write like Jane Austen. Thisis a mere waste of literary standards, which need only be applied to whatpretends to be literature. That is why one is often impelled to attackreally excellent writers, like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch or Mr. Galsworthy, as one would never dream of attacking, say, Mr. William Le Queux. Toattack Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is, indeed, a form of appreciation, forthe only just criticism that can be levelled against him is that his laterwork does not seem to be written with that singleness of imagination andthat deliberate rightness of phrase which made _Noughts and Crosses_ and_The Ship of Stars_ books to be kept beyond the end of the year. If oneattacks Mr. Galsworthy, again, it is usually because one admires his bestwork so whole-heartedly that one is not willing to accept from himanything but the best. One cannot, however, be content to see the authorof _The Man of Property_ dropping the platitudes and the falsefancifulness of _The Inn of Tranquillity_. It is the false pretences inliterature which criticism must seek to destroy. Recognizing Mr. Galsworthy's genius for the realistic representation of men and women, itmust not be blinded by that genius to the essential second-rateness andsentimentality of much of his presentation of ideas. He is a man of geniusin the black humility with which he confesses strength and weaknessthrough the figures of men and women. He achieves too much of a pulpitcomplacency--therefore of condescendingness--therefore of falseness to thedeep intimacy of good literature--when he begins to moralize about timeand the universe. One finds the same complacency, the samecondescendingness, in a far higher degree in the essays of Mr. A. C. Benson. Mr. Benson, I imagine, began writing with a considerable literarygift, but his later work seems to me to have little in it but a good man'spretentiousness. It has the air of going profoundly into the secrecies oflove and joy and truth, but it contains hardly a sentence that would wakena ruffle on the surface of the shallowest spirit. It is not of theliterature that awakens, indeed, but of the literature that puts to sleep, and that is always a danger unless it is properly labelled andrecognizable. Sleeping-draughts may be useful to help a sick man through abad night, but one does not recommend them as a cure for ordinary healthythirst. Nor will Mr. Benson escape just criticism on the score of hismanner of writing. He is an absolute master of the otiose word, thesuperfluous sentence. He pours out pages as easily as a bird sings, but, alas! it is a clockwork bird in this instance. He lacks the true innocentabsorption in his task which makes happy writing and happy reading. 

It is not always the authors, on the other hand, whose pretences it is thework of criticism to destroy. It is frequently the wild claims of thepartisans of an author that must be put to the test. This sort ofpretentiousness often happens during "booms, " when some author is talkedof as though he were the only man who had ever written well. How many ofthese booms have we had in recent years--booms of Wilde, of Synge, ofDonne, of Dostoevsky! On the whole, no doubt, they do more good than harm. They create a vivid enthusiasm for literature that affects many people whomight not otherwise know that to read a fine book is as exciting anexperience as going to a horse-race. Hundreds of people would not have thecourage to sit down to read a book like _The Brothers Karamazov_ unlessthey were compelled to do so as a matter of fashionable duty. On the otherhand, booms more than anything else make for false estimates. It seemsimpossible with many people to praise Dostoevsky without saying that he isgreater than Tolstoy or Turgenev. Oscar Wilde enthusiasts, again, inviteus to rejoice, not only over that pearl of triviality, _The Importance ofBeing Earnest_, but over a blaze of paste jewelry like _Salomé_. Similarly, Donne worshippers are not content to ask us to praise Donne'sgifts of fancy, analysis and idiosyncratic music. They insist that weshall also admit that he knew the human heart better than Shakespeare. Itmay be all we like sheep have gone astray in this kind of literary riot. And so long as the exaggeration of a good writer's genius is an honestpersonal affair, one resents it no more than one resents the large nose orthe bandy legs of a friend. It is when men begin to exaggerate inherds--to repeat like a lesson learned the enthusiasm of others--that theboom becomes offensive. It is as if men who had not large noses were tobegin to pretend that they had, or as if men whose legs were not bandywere to pretend that they were, for fashion's sake. Insincerity is the oneentirely hideous artistic sin--whether in the creation or in theappreciation of art. The man who enjoys reading _The Family Herald_, andadmits it, is nearer a true artistic sense than the man who is bored byHenry James and denies it: though, perhaps, hypocrisy is a kind of homagepaid to art as well as to virtue. Still, the affectation of literaryrapture offends like every other affectation. It was the chorus ofimitative rapture over Synge a few years ago that helped most to bringabout a speedy reaction against him. Synge was undoubtedly a man of finegenius--the genius of gloomy comedy and ironic tragedy. His mind delvedfor strangenesses in speech and imagination among people whom the new agehad hardly touched, and his discoveries were sufficiently magnificent tomake the eyes of any lover of language brighten. His work showed less ofthe mastery of life, however, than of the mastery of a theme. It was acurious by-world of literature, a little literature of death's-heads, and, therefore, no more to be mentioned with the work of the greatest than thestories of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Unfortunately, some disturbances inDublin at the first production of _The Playboy_ turned the play into abattle-cry, and the artists, headed by Mr. Yeats, used Synge to belabourthe Philistinism of the mob. In the excitement of the fight they were soontalking about Synge as though Dublin had rejected a Shakespeare. Mr. Yeatseven used the word "Homeric" about him--surely the most inappropriate wordit would be possible to imagine. Before long Mr. Yeats's enthusiasm hadspread to England, where people who ignored the real magic of Synge'swork, as it is to be found in _Riders to the Sea_, _In the Shadow of theGlen_, and _The Well of the Saints_, went into ecstasies over the inferior_Playboy_. Such a boom meant not the appreciation of Synge but aglorification of his more negligible work. It was almost as if we were toboom Swinburne on the score of his later political poetry. Criticism makesfor the destruction of such booms. I do not mean that the critic has notthe right to fling about superlatives like any other man. Criticism, inone aspect, is the art of flinging about superlatives finely. But theymust be personal superlatives, not boom superlatives. Even when they areshowered on an author who is the just victim of a boom--and, on areasonable estimate, at least fifty per cent of the booms have somejustification--they are as unbeautiful as rotten apples unless they havethis personal kind of honesty. 

It may be thought that an attitude of criticism like this may easily sinkinto Pharisaism--a sort of "superior-person" aloofness from other people. And no doubt the critic, like other people, needs to beat his breast andpray, "God be merciful to me, a--critic. " On the whole, however, thecritic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimesimagined. He is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He isnot concerned with getting rid of the dross except in so far as it hidesthe gold. In other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely asubsidiary affair. None of the best critics have been men of destructiveminds. They are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowersthan with the weeds. If I may change the metaphor, the whole truth aboutcriticism is contained in the Eastern proverb which declares that "Love isthe net of Truth. " It is as a lover that the critic, like the lyric poetand the mystic, will be most excellently symbolized. 

XXIV. --BOOK REVIEWING

I notice that in Mr. Seekers' _Art and Craft of Letters_ series no volumeon book-reviewing has yet been announced. A volume on criticism has beenpublished, it is true, but book-reviewing is something different fromcriticism. It swings somewhere between criticism on the one hand andreporting on the other. When Mr. Arthur Bourchier a few years ago, in thecourse of a dispute about Mr. Walkley's criticisms, spoke of the dramaticcritic as a dramatic reporter, he did a very insolent thing. But there wasa certain reasonableness in his phrase. The critic on the Press is anews-gatherer as surely as the man who is sent to describe a publicmeeting or a strike. Whether he is asked to write a report on a play ofMr. Shaw's or an exhibition of etchings by Mr. Bone or a volume of shortstories by Mr. Conrad or a speech by Mr. Asquith or a strike on the Clyde, his function is the same. It is primarily to give an account, adescription, of what he has seen or heard or read. This may seem to manypeople--especially to critics--a degrading conception of a book-reviewer'swork. But it is quite the contrary. A great deal of book-reviewing at thepresent time is dead matter. Book-reviews ought at least to be alive asnews. 

At present everybody is ready to write book-reviews. This is becausenearly everybody believes that they are the easiest kind of thing towrite. People who would shrink from offering to write poems or leadingarticles or descriptive sketches of football matches, have an idea thatreviewing books is something with the capacity for which every man isborn, as he is born with the capacity for talking prose. They think it isas easy as having opinions. It is simply making a few remarks at the endof a couple of hours spent with a book in an armchair. Many men andwomen--novelists, barristers, professors and others--review books in theirspare time, as they look on this as work they can do when their brains aretoo tired to do anything which is of genuine importance. A great deal ofbook-reviewing is done contemptuously, as though to review books well werenot as difficult as to do anything else well. This is perhaps due in somemeasure to the fact that, for the amount of hard work it involves, book-reviewing is one of the worst-paid branches of journalism. The heroof Mr. Beresford's new novel, _The Invisible Event_, makes an income of£250 a year as an outside reviewer, and it is by no means every outsidereviewer who makes as much as that from reviewing alone. It is not thatthere is not an immense public which reads book-reviews. Mr. T. P. O'Connorshowed an admirable journalistic instinct when twenty years or so ago hefilled the front page of the _Weekly Sun_ with a long book-review. Thesale of the _Times Literary Supplement_, since it became a separatepublication, is evidence that, for good or bad, many thousands of readershave acquired the habit of reading criticism of current literature. 

But I do not think that the mediocre quality of most book-reviewing is dueto low payment. It is a result, I believe, of a wrong conception of what abook-review should be. My own opinion is that a review should be, from onepoint of view, a portrait of a book. It should present the book instead ofmerely presenting remarks about the book. In reviewing, portraiture ismore important than opinion. One has to get the reflexion of the book, andnot a mere comment on it, down on paper. Obviously, one must not pressthis theory of portraiture too far. It is useful chiefly as a protestagainst the curse of comment. Many clever writers, when they come to writebook-reviews, instead of portraying the book, waste their time in remarksto the effect that the book should never have been written, and so forth. That, in fact, is the usual attitude of clever reviewers when they begin. They are so horrified to find that Mr. William Le Queux does not writelike Dostoevsky and that Mrs. Florence Barclay lacks the grandeur ofÆschylus that they run amok among their contemporaries with something ofthe furious destructiveness of Don Quixote on his adventures. It is thenoble intolerance of youth; but how unreasonable it is! Suppose aportrait-painter were suddenly to take his sitter by the throat on theground that he had no right to exist. One would say to him that that wasnot his business: his business is to take the man's existence for granted, and to paint him until he becomes in a new sense alive. If he isworthless, paint his worthlessness, but do not merely comment on it. Thereis no reason why a portrait should be flattering, but it should be aportrait. It may be a portrait in the grand matter, or a portrait incaricature: if it expresses its subject honestly and delightfully, that isall we can ask of it. A critical portrait of a book by Mr. Le Queux may beamazingly alive: a censorious comment can only be dull. Mr. Hubert Blandwas at one time an almost ideal portrait-painter of commonplace novels. Heobviously liked them, as the caricaturist likes the people in the street. The novels themselves might not be readable, but Mr. Bland's reviews ofthem were. He could reveal their characteristics in a few strokes, whichwould tell you more of what you wanted to know about them than a wholedictionary of adjectives of praise and blame. One could tell at a glancewhether the book had any literary value, whether it was worth turning toas a stimulant, whether it was even intelligent of its kind. One would notlike to see Mr. Bland's method too slavishly adopted by reviewers: it wassuitable only for portraying certain kinds of books. But it is worthrecalling as the method of a man who, dealing with books that were for themost part insipid and worthless, made his reviews delightfully alive aswell as admirably interpretative. 

The comparison of a review to a portrait fixes attention on one essentialquality of a book-review. A reviewer should never forget hisresponsibility to his subject. He must allow nothing to distract him fromhis main task of setting down the features of his book vividly andrecognizably. One may say this even while admitting that the mostdelightful book-reviews of modern times--for the literary causeries ofAnatole France may fairly be classified as book-reviews--were the revoltof an escaped angel against the limitations of a journalistic form. ButAnatole France happens to be a man of genius, and genius is ajustification of any method. In the hands of a pinchbeck Anatole France, how unendurable the review conceived as a causerie would become! AnatoleFrance observes that "all books in general, and even the most admirable, seem to me infinitely less precious for what they contain than for what hewho reads puts into them. " That, in a sense, is true. But no reviewerought to believe it. His duty is to his author: whatever he "puts intohim" is a subsidiary matter. "The critic, " says Anatole France again, "must imbue himself thoroughly with the idea that every book has as manydifferent aspects as it has readers, and that a poem, like a landscape, istransformed in all the eyes that see it, in all the souls that conceiveit. " Here he gets nearer the idea of criticism as portraiture, andpractically every critic of importance has been a portrait-painter. Inthis respect Saint-Beuve is at one with Macaulay, Pater with MatthewArnold, Anatole France (occasionally) with Henry James. They may portrayauthors rather than books, artists rather than their work, but this onlymeans that criticism at its highest is a study of the mind of the artistas reflected in his art. 

Clearly, if the reviewer can paint the portrait of an author, he isachieving something better even than the portrait of a book. But what, atall costs, he must avoid doing is to substitute for a portrait of one kindor another the rag-bag of his own moral, political or religious opinions. It is one of the most difficult things in the world for anyone who happensto hold strong opinions not to make the mind of Shakespeare himself apulpit from which to roar them at the world. Reviewers with theories aboutmorality and religion can seldom be induced to come to the point ofportraiture until they have enjoyed a preliminary half-column ofself-explanation. In their eyes a review is a moral essay rather than animaginative interpretation. In dissenting from this view, one is notpleading for a race of reviewers without moral or religious ideas, or evenprepossessions. One is merely urging that in a review, as in a novel or aplay, the moral should be seated at the heart instead of sprawling allover the surface. In the well-worn phrase it should be implicit, notexplicit. Undoubtedly a rare critic of genius can make an interestingreview-article out of a statement of his own moral and political ideas. But that only justifies the article as an essay, not as a review. To manyreviewers--especially in the bright days of youth--it seems an immenselymore important thing to write a good essay than a good review. And so itis, but not when a review is wanted. It is a far, far better thing towrite a good essay about America than a good review of a book on America. But the one should not be substituted for the other. If one takes up areview of a book on America by Mr. Wells or Mr. Bennett, it is inninety-nine cases out of a hundred in order to find out what the authorthinks, not what the reviewer thinks. If the reviewer begins with aparagraph of general remarks about America--or, worse still, about someabstract thing like liberty--he is almost invariably wasting paper. Ibelieve it is a sound rule to destroy all preliminary paragraphs of thiskind. They are detestable in almost all writing, but most detestable ofall in book-reviews, where it is important to plunge all at once into themiddle of things. I say this, though there is an occasional book-reviewerwhose preliminary paragraphs I would not miss for worlds. But one has evenknown book-reviewers who wrote delightful articles, though they madescarcely any reference to the books under review at all. 

To my mind, nothing more clearly shows the general misconception of thepurpose of a book-review than the attitude of the majority of journaliststo the quotational review. It is the custom to despise the quotationalreview--to dismiss is as mere "gutting. " As a consequence, it is generallyvery badly done. It is done as if under the impression that it does notmatter what quotations one gives so long as one fills the space. One greatpaper lends support to this contemptuous attitude towards quotationalcriticism by refusing to pay its contributors for space taken up byquotations. A London evening newspaper was once guilty of the same folly. A reviewer on the staff of the latter confessed to me that to the presentday he finds it impossible, without an effort, to make quotations in areview, because of the memory of those days when to quote was to add toone's poverty. Despised work is seldom done well, and it is not surprisingthat it is almost more seldom that one finds a quotational review welldone than any other sort. Yet how critically illuminating a quotation maybe! There are many books in regard to which quotation is the onlycriticism necessary. Books of memoirs and books of verse--the leastartistic as well as the most artistic forms of literature--both lendthemselves to it. To criticize verse without giving quotations is to leaveone largely in ignorance of the quality of the verse. The selection ofpassages to quote is at least as fine a test of artistic judgment as anycomment the critic can make. In regard to books of memoirs, gossip, and soforth, one does not ask for a test of delicate artistic judgment. Books ofthis kind should simply be rummaged for entertaining "news. " To reviewthem well is to make an anthology of (in a wide sense) amusing passages. There is no other way to portray them. And yet I have known a verybrilliant reviewer take a book of gossip about the German Court and, instead of quoting any of the numerous things that would interest people, fill half a column with abuse of the way in which the book was written, ofthe inconsequence of the chapters, of the second-handedness of many of theanecdotes. Now, I do not object to any of these charges being brought. Itis well that "made" books should not be palmed off on the public asliterature. On the other hand, a mediocre book (from the point of view ofliterature or history) is no excuse for a mediocre review. No matter howmediocre a book is, if it is on a subject of great interest, it usuallycontains enough vital matter to make an exciting half-column. Manyreviewers despise a bad book so heartily that, instead of squeezing everydrop of interest out of it, as they ought to do, they refrain fromsqueezing a single drop of interest out of it. They are frequently peoplewho suffer from anecdotophobia. "Scorn not the anecdote" is a motto thatmight be modestly hung up in the heart of every reviewer. After all, Montaigne did not scorn it, and there is no reason why the modernjournalist should be ashamed of following so respectable an example. Onecan quite easily understand how the gluttony of many publishers foranecdotes has driven writers with a respect for their intellect intorevolt. But let us not be unjust to the anecdote because it has beencheapened through no fault of its own. We may be sure of one thing. Areview--a review, at any rate, of a book of memoirs or any similar kind ofnon-literary book--which contains an anecdote is better than a reviewwhich does not contain an anecdote. If an anecdotal review is bad, it isbecause it is badly done, not because it is anecdotal. This, one mightimagine, is too obvious to require saying; but many men of brains gothrough life without ever being able to see it. 

One of the chief virtues of the anecdote is that it brings the reviewerdown from his generalizations to the individual instances. Generalizationsmixed with instances make a fine sort of review, but to flow on for acolumn of generalizations without ever pausing to light them into lifewith instances, concrete examples, anecdotes, is to write not abook-review but a sermon. Of the two, the sermon is much the easier towrite: it does not involve the trouble of constant reference to one'sauthorities. Perhaps, however, someone with practice in writing sermonswill argue that the sermon without instances is as somniferous as thebook-review with the same want. Whether that it so or not, the book-reviewis not, as a rule, the place for abstract argument. Not that one wants toshut out controversy. There is no pleasanter review to read than acontroversial review. Even here, however, one demands portrait as well asargument. It is, in nine cases out of ten, waste of time to assail atheory when you can portray a man. It always seems to me to be hopelesslywrong for the reviewer of biographies, critical studies, or books of asimilar kind, to allow his mind to wander from the main figure in the bookto the discussion of some theory or other that has been incidentally putforward. Thus, in a review of a book on Stevenson, the important thing isto reconstruct the figure of Stevenson, the man and the artist. This ismuch more vitally interesting and relevant than theorizing on suchquestions as whether the writing of prose or of poetry is the moredifficult art, or what are the essential characteristics of romance. Theseand many other questions may arise, and it is the proper task of thereviewer to discuss them, so long as their discussion is kept subordinateto the portraiture of the central figure. But they must not be allowed topush the leading character in the whole business right out of the review. If they are brought in at all, they must be brought in, like moralsentiments, inoffensively by the way. 

In pleading that a review should be a portrait of a book to a vastlygreater degree than it is a direct comment on the book, I am not pleadingthat it should be a mere bald summary. The summary kind of review is nomore a portrait than is the Scotland Yard description of a man wanted bythe police. Portraiture implies selection and a new emphasis. The synopsisof the plot of a novel is as far from being a good review as is aparagraph of general comment on it. The review must justify itself, not asa reflection of dead bones, but by a new life of its own. 

Further, I am not pleading for the suppression of comment and, if need be, condemnation. But either to praise or condemn without instances is dull. Neither the one thing nor the other is the chief thing in the review. Theyare the crown of the review, but not its life. There are many critics towhom condemnation of books they do not like seems the chief end of man. They regard themselves as engaged upon a holy war against the Devil andhis works. Horace complained that it was only poets who were not allowedto be mediocre. The modern critic--I should say the modern critic of thecensorious kind, not the critic who looks on it as his duty to puff outmeaningless superlatives over every book that appears--will not allow anyauthor to be mediocre. The war against mediocrity is a necessary war, butI cannot help thinking that mediocrity is more likely to yield to humourthan to contemptuous abuse. Apart from this, it is the reviewer's part tomaintain high standards for work that aims at being literature, ratherthan to career about, like a destroying angel, among books that have nosuch aim. Criticism, Anatole France has said, is the record of the soul'sadventures among masterpieces. Reviewing, alas! is for the most part therecord of the soul's adventures among books that are the reverse ofmasterpieces. What, then, are his standards to be? Well, a man must judgelinen as linen, cotton as cotton, and shoddy as shoddy. It is ridiculousto denounce any of them for not being silk. To do so is not to apply highstandards so much as to apply wrong standards. One has no right as areviewer to judge a book by any standard save that which the author aimsat reaching. As a private reader, one has the right to say of a novel byMr. Joseph Hocking, for instance: "This is not literature. This is notrealism. This does not interest me. This is awful. " I do not say thatthese sentences can be fairly used of any of Mr. Hocking's novels. Imerely take him as an example of a popular novelist who would be bound tobe condemned if judged by comparison with Flaubert or Meredith or even Mr. Galsworthy. But the reviewer is not asked to state whether he finds Mr. Hocking readable so much as to state the kind of readableness at which Mr. Hocking aims and the measure of his success in achieving it. It is thereviewer's business to discover the quality of a book rather than to keepannouncing that the quality does not appeal to him. Not that he needconceal the fact that it has failed to appeal to him, but he shouldremember that this is a comparatively irrelevant matter. He may make it asclear as day--indeed, he ought to make it as clear as day, if it is hisopinion--that he regards the novels of Charles Garvice as shoddy, but heought also to make it clear whether they are the kind of shoddy thatserves its purpose. 

Is this to lower literary standards? I do not think so, for, in cases ofthis kind, one is not judging literature, but popular books. Those to whompopular books are anathema have a temperament which will always find itdifficult to fall in with the limitations of the work of a generalreviewer. The curious thing is that this intolerance of easy writing ismost generally found among those who are most opposed to intolerance inthe sphere of morals. It is as though they had escaped from one sort ofPuritanism into another. Personally, I do not see why, if we should betolerant of the breach of a moral commandment, we should not be equallytolerant of the breach of a literary commandment. We should gently scan, not only our brother man, but our brother author. The æsthete of to-day, however, will look kindly on adultery, but show all the harshness of aPilgrim Father in his condemnation of a split infinitive. I cannot see thelogic of this. If irregular and commonplace people have the right toexist, surely irregular and commonplace books have a right to exist bytheir side. 

The reviewer, however, is often led into a false attitude to a book, notby its bad quality, but by some irrelevant quality--some underlying moralor political idea. He denounces a novel the moral ideas of which offendhim, without giving sufficient consideration to the success or failure ofthe novelist in the effort to make his characters live. Similarly, hepraises a novel with the moral ideas of which he agrees, withoutreflecting that perhaps it is as a tract rather than as a work of art thatit has given him pleasure. Both the praise and blame which have beenheaped upon Mr. Kipling are largely due to appreciation or dislike of hispolitics. The Imperialist finds his heart beating faster as he reads _TheEnglish Flag_, and he praises Mr. Kipling as an artist when it is reallyMr. Kipling as a propagandist who has moved him. The anti-Imperialist, onthe other hand, is often led by detestation of Mr. Kipling's politics todeny even the palpable fact that Mr. Kipling is a very brilliantshort-story teller. It is for the reviewer to raise himself above suchprejudices and to discover what are Mr. Kipling's ideas apart from hisart, and what is his art apart from his ideas. 

The relation between one and the other is also clearly a relevant matterfor discussion. But the confusion of one with the other is fatal. In thefield of morals we are perhaps led astray in our judgments even morefrequently than in matters of politics. Mr. Shaw's plays are oftendenounced by critics whom they have made laugh till their sides ached, andthe reason is that, after leaving the theatre, the critics remember thatthey do not like Mr, Shaw's moral ideas. In the same way, it seems to me, a great deal of the praise that has been given to Mr. D. H. Lawrence as anartist ought really to be given to him as a distributor of certain moralideas. That he has studied wonderfully one aspect of human nature, that hecan describe wonderfully some aspects of external nature, I know; but Idoubt whether his art is fine enough or sympathetic enough to makeenthusiastic anyone who differs from the moral attitude, as it may becalled, of his stories. This is the real test of a work of art--has itsufficient imaginative vitality to capture the imagination of artisticreaders who are not in sympathy with its point of view? The _Book of Job_survives the test: it is a book to the spell of which no imaginative mancould be indifferent, whether Christian, Jew or atheist. Similarly, Shelley is read and written about with enthusiasm by many who hold moral, religious, and political ideas directly contrary to his own. Mr. Kipling's_Recessional_, with its sombre imaginative glow, its recapturing of OldTestament prides and fears, commands the praise of thousands to whom muchof the rest of his poetry is the abominable thing. It is the reviewer'stask to discover imagination even in those who are the enemies of theideas he cherishes. In so far as he cannot do this, he fails in hisbusiness as a critic of the arts. 

It may be said in answer to all this, however, that to appeal fortolerance in book-reviewers is not necessary. The Press is alreadyovercrowded with laudations of commonplace books. Not a day passes but atleast a dozen books are praised as having "not a dull moment, " being"readable from cover to cover, " and as reminding the reviewer ofStevenson, Meredith, Oscar Wilde, Paul de Kock, and Jane Austen. That isnot the kind of tolerance which one is eager to see. That kind of reviewis scarcely different from a publisher's advertisement. Besides, itusually sins in being mere summary and comment, or even comment withoutsummary. It is a thoughtless scattering of acceptable words and is asunlike the review conceived as a portrait as is the hostile kind ofcommentatory review which I have been discussing. It is generally thecomment of a lazy brain, instead of being, like the other, the comment ofa clever brain. Praise is the vice of the commonplace reviewer, just ascensoriousness is the vice of the more clever sort. Not that one wisheseither praise or censure to be stinted. One is merely anxious not to seethem misapplied. It is a vice, not a virtue, of reviewing to be lukewarmeither in the one or the other. What one desires most of all in areviewer, after a capacity to portray books, is the courage of hisopinions, so that, whether he is face to face with an old reputation likeMr. Conrad's or a new reputation like Mr. Mackenzie's, he will boldlyexpress his enthusiasms and his dissatisfactions without regard to theestimate of the author, which is, for the moment, "in the air. " What seemsto be wanted, then, in a book-reviewer is that, without being servile, heshould be swift to praise, and that, without being censorious, he shouldhave the courage to blame. While tolerant of kinds in literature, heshould be intolerant of pretentiousness. He should be less patient, forinstance, of a pseudo-Milton than of a writer who frankly aimed at nothinghigher than a book of music-hall songs. He should be more eager to definethe qualities of a book than to heap comment upon comment. If--I hope theimage is not too strained--he draws a book from the life, he will producea better review than if he spends his time calling it names, whether foulor fair. 

But what of the equipment of the reviewer? it may be asked. What of hisstandards? One of the faults of modern reviewing seems to me to be thatthe standards of many critics are derived almost entirely from theliterature of the last thirty years. This is especially so with someAmerican critics, who rush feverishly into print with volumes spotted withthe names of modern writers as Christmas pudding is spotted with currants. To read them is to get the impression that the world is only a hundredyears old. It seems to me that Matthew Arnold was right when he urged mento turn to the classics for their standards. His definition of theclassics may have been too narrow, and nothing could be more utterly deadthan a criticism which tries to measure imaginary literature by anacademic standard or the rules of Aristotle. But it is only those to whomthe classics are themselves dead who are likely to lay this academic deadhand on new literature. Besides, even the most academic standards arevaluable in a world in which chaos is hailed with enthusiasm both in artand in politics. But, when all is said, the taste which is the essentialquality of a critic is something with which he is born. It is somethingwhich is not born of reading Sophocles and Plato and does not perish ofreading Miss Marie Corelli. This taste must illuminate all the reviewer'sportraits. Without it, he had far better be a coach-builder than areviewer of books. It is this taste in the background that givesdistinction to a tolerant and humorous review of even the most unambitiousdetective story.