VariedTypes

by Chesterton · Cluster: Artist and Society · Truth · Regency Georgian England

Abstract

A collection of critical essays on figures such as Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, Byron, Pope, St Francis, Stevenson, Carlyle and Tolstoy; literary criticism that probes the inner truth and creed behind each writer’s art.

Capitoli / Chapters

Connections

Archetypes: King, Prophet

Settings: Italy, Medieval England (2), Germany, Europe

Motifs: Crown, Court (2)

Topoi: Poet as Prophet

Characters: King Alfred (2), Christ, Charlotte Brontë, William Morris, Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, St. Francis of Assisi, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edmond Rostand, Charles II, Thomas Carlyle, Leo Tolstoy, Girolamo Savonarola, Sir Walter Scott, Bret Harte, Maurice Maeterlinck, John Ruskin, Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm II (the German Emperor), Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Cyrano de Bergerac

Themes & Concepts: Artist and Society, Truth, Appearance vs Reality, Common Man, Beauty, Imagination, Democracy, Doubt, Self-Denial and Renunciation, Nature vs Civilization, Kingship and Legitimacy, Nationalism and Patriotism, Power of Language, Vanity, Individualism, Optimism and Pessimism, Hero Worship, The Spirit of Romance, History Forms & Genres: Literary Criticism, Essay, Biography, Satire, Verse Drama, Nonfiction Historical References: Regency Georgian England, Puritanism, Renaissance, Christianity, Napoleonic Wars the Navy, Medieval England, Danish Invasions, Battle of Ethandun, King Alfred

Testo integrale / Full text

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Varied Types

G.K. Chesterton

Author of “The Defendant,” etc.

New York: Dodd, Mead and Company

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1905

NOTE

These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted

with the kind permission of the Editors of The Daily News and _The

Speaker_.

G.K.C.

Kensington.

CONTENTS

                                   Page

Charlotte Brontë 3

William Morris And His School 15

The Optimism Of Byron 29

Pope And The Art Of Satire 43

Francis 59

Rostand 73

Charles II. 85

Stevenson 97

Thomas Carlyle 109

Tolstoy And The Cult Of Simplicity 125

Savonarola 147

The Position Of Sir Walter Scott 159

Bret Harte 179

Alfred The Great 199

Maeterlinck 209

Ruskin 217

Queen Victoria 225

The German Emperor 227

Tennyson 249

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 261

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals

so much that is important and even sacred about a man’s life. The real

objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a

man the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and

insists on exactly those things in a man’s life of which the man himself

is wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of

his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things which

do not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do

not occur to a man’s mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that

they do not occur in a man’s life. A man no more thinks about himself as

the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he

thinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man’s

name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, these

are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.

A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontës. The Brontë is in

the position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricities

form an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild

and bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips of

literature, like Mr. Augustine Birrell and Mr. Andrew Lang, never tire

of collecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lights

and sticks and straws which will go to make a Brontë museum. They are

the most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the

limelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the dark old

Yorkshire house. And yet the whole of this biographical investigation,

though natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontës.

For the Brontë genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme

unimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been

conceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte

Brontë electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and

more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person,

good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great

assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as

tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a bal masqué. She showed that

abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a

manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of

merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte

Brontë, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her

genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the

artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the natural

gold and diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she felt

that the whole of the exterior must be made ugly that the whole of the

interior might be made sublime. She chose the ugliest of women in the

ugliest of centuries, and revealed within them all the hells and heavens

of Dante.

It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals of

the Brontës’ life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter

less than the externals of almost any other writers. It is interesting

to know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the

officers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces.

It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or

been inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is

conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them.

But the whole aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Brontës is

that the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story

as “Jane Eyre” is in itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to be

excluded from a book of fairy tales. The characters do not do what they

ought to do, nor what they would do, nor it might be said, such is the

insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct

of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte

in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. “Then, resuming his

usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew,” does perhaps

reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester

dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to be

found in any other branch of art, except in the end of the pantomime,

where the Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet, despite this vast

nightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world, “Jane

Eyre” is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential

truth to life sometimes makes one catch one’s breath. For it is not true

to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost

always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true,

emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not

matter a single straw if a Brontë story were a hundred times more

moonstruck and improbable than “Jane Eyre,” or a hundred times more

moonstruck and improbable than “Wuthering Heights.” It would not matter

if George Read stood on his head, and Mrs. Read rode on a dragon, if

Fairfax Rochester had four eyes and St. John Rivers three legs, the

story would still remain the truest story in the world. The typical

Brontë character is, indeed, a kind of monster. Everything in him except

the essential is dislocated. His hands are on his legs and his feet on

his arms, his nose is above his eyes, but his heart is in the right

place.

The great and abiding truth for which the Brontë cycle of fiction stands

is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth,

the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy. The Brontë

heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating

inexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her

solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is

possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an

ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is of

humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on

evening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every first

night. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is not the man

of the world who appreciates the world. The man who has learnt to do all

conventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to do them

prosaically. It is the awkward man, whose evening dress does not fit

him, whose gloves will not go on, whose compliments will not come off,

who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He is frightened

enough of society actually to enjoy his triumphs. He has that element of

fear which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit is the

central spirit of the Brontë novel. It is the epic of the exhilaration

of the shy man. As such it is of incalculable value in our time, of

which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently because it does

not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess of

Charlotte Brontë, with the small outlook and the small creed, had more

commerce with the awful and elemental forces which drive the world than

a legion of lawless minor poets. She approached the universe with real

simplicity, and, consequently, with real fear and delight. She was, so

to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had

possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment being as

black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the first and

the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord is

the beginning of pleasure.

Upon the whole, therefore, I think it may justifiably be said that the

dark wild youth of the Brontës in their dark wild Yorkshire home has

been somewhat exaggerated as a necessary factor in their work and their

conception. The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions,

emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and the

springtide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some

midnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which

there was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress and

panic of “Wuthering Heights.” Every one of us has had a day-dream of

our own potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than “Jane Eyre.”

And the truth which the Brontës came to tell us is the truth that many

waters cannot quench love, and that suburban respectability cannot touch

or damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like every other earthly city, is

built upon a volcano. Thousands of people go to and fro in the

wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing a mean

religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have never found

any expression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to go on

working harder and yet harder at dull and automatic employments, at

scolding children or stitching shirts. But out of all these silent ones

one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testimony, and her

name was Charlotte Brontë. Spreading around us upon every side to-day

like a huge and radiating geometrical figure are the endless branches of

the great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, as

well we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the

frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought of

ours is in truth nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses;

there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses

is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these

men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of

these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house

of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the

heart of all things and the end of travel.

WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL

It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris

should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many

men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have

been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious

hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious

problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that

honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of

workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time

has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be

described as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter

instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully

conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we

should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with

the grandeur of mediæval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should

have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually

approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have

invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an

ironmonger, his nails would have had some noble pattern, fit to be the

nails of the Cross.

The limitations of William Morris, whatever they were, were not the

limitations of common decoration. It is true that all his work, even his

literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in some degree the

qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His characters, his stories, his

religious and political views, had, in the most emphatic sense, length

and breadth without thickness. He seemed really to believe that men

could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no account of the

unexplored and explosive possibilities of human nature, of the

unnameable terrors, and the yet more unnameable hopes. So long as a man

was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring

consciousness that the chestnut colour of his hair was relieved against

the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he would

be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if he

were a piece of exquisitely coloured card-board.

But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity of

human nature—took little account, so to speak, of human figures in the

round, it is altogether unfair to represent him as a mere æsthete. He

perceived a great public necessity and fulfilled it heroically. The

difficulty with which he grappled was one so immense that we shall have

to be separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge of

it. It was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the

most self-conscious of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of

the thing. He felt it was monstrous that the modern man, who was

pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory

beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic and

the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical

bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat.

He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in

raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It

is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness which

blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries. In

all created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly as

a pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height and

thickness just neutralising each other; its colour is the most repulsive

of colours—a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch of blood or

fire, like the scarlet of dead men’s sins. Yet there is no reason

whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full of civic

dignity, the treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of a

thousand souls. If the old Greeks had had such an institution, we may be

sure that it would have been surmounted by the severe, but graceful,

figure of the god of letter-writing. If the mediæval Christians has

possessed it, it would have had a niche filled with the golden aureole

of St. Rowland of the Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands at all

our street-corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under

one of the most preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that the

miracles of science have not been such an incentive to art and

imagination as were the miracles of religion. If men in the twelfth

century had been told that the lightning had been driven for leagues

underground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing

human beings, and if they had then been told that the people alluded to

this pulverising portent chirpily as “The Twopenny Tube,” they would

have called down the fire of Heaven on us as a race of half-witted

atheists. Probably they would have been quite right.

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anæsthetic

element in the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the work of a great

reformer: it requires a fine effort of the imagination to see an evil

that surrounds us on every side. The manner in which Morris carried out

his crusade may, considering the circumstances, be called triumphant.

Our carpets began to bloom under our feet like the meadows in spring,

and our hitherto prosaic stools and sofas seemed growing legs and arms

at their own wild will. An element of freedom and rugged dignity came in

with plain and strong ornaments of copper and iron. So delicate and

universal has been the revolution in domestic art that almost every

family in England has had its taste cunningly and treacherously

improved, and if we look back at the early Victorian drawing-rooms it is

only to realise the strange but essential truth that art, or human

decoration, has, nine times out of ten in history, made things uglier

than they were before, from the “coiffure” of a Papuan savage to the

wall-paper of a British merchant in 1830.

But great and beneficent as was the æsthetic revolution of Morris, there

was a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact that

his revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial

explanation of his partial failure. When he was denouncing the dresses

of modern ladies, “upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being draped

like women,” as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practical

imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further than

this retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go. Now,

the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was at

least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They would

have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of the

bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting themselves an æsthetic blue,

after the custom of the ancient Britons. They would not have called that

a movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in their dress or manners

sprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led and preferred to

lead. And it may surely be maintained that any real advance in the

beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally out of the

life we lead and prefer to lead. We are not altogether without hints and

hopes of such a change, in the growing orthodoxy of rough and athletic

costumes. But if this cannot be, it will be no substitute or

satisfaction to turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dress

ball.

But the limitation of Morris’s work lay deeper than this. We may best

suggest it by a method after his own heart. Of all the various works he

performed, none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly valuable as his

great protest for the fables and superstitions of mankind. He has the

supreme credit of showing that the fairy tales contain the deepest truth

of the earth, the real record of men’s feeling for things. Trifling

details may be inaccurate, Jack may not have climbed up so tall a

beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant; but it is not such things that

make a story false; it is a far different class of things that makes

every modern book of history as false as the father of lies; ingenuity,

self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. It appears to us that of

all the fairy-tales none contains so vital a moral truth as the old

story, existing in many forms, of Beauty and the Beast. There is

written, with all the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and

essential truth that until we love a thing in all its ugliness we

cannot make it beautiful. This was the weak point in William Morris as a

reformer: that he sought to reform modern life, and that he hated modern

life instead of loving it. Modern London is indeed a beast, big enough

and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with a million

eyes, and roaring with a million voices. But unless the poet can love

this fabulous monster as he is, can feel with some generous excitement

his massive and mysterious joie-de-vivre, the vast scale of his iron

anatomy and the beating of his thunderous heart, he cannot and will not

change the beast into the fairy prince. Morris’s disadvantage was that

he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century: he could not

understand its fascination, and consequently he could not really develop

it. An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal influence in the

æsthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the Arts and Crafts

Exhibitions, which are steeped in his personality like a chapel in that

of a saint. If we look round at the exhibits in one of these æsthetic

shows, we shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that the

decorative school leaves untouched. There is a noble instinct for giving

the right touch of beauty to common and necessary things, but the things

that are so touched are the ancient things, the things that always to

some extent commended themselves to the lover of beauty. There are

beautiful gates, beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs,

beautiful reading-desks. But there are no modern things made beautiful.

There are no beautiful lamp-posts, beautiful letter-boxes, beautiful

engines, beautiful bicycles. The spirit of William Morris has not seized

hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. And

this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not the

supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from the

Beast and the fairy-tale had a different ending.

But herein, indeed, lay Morris’s deepest claim to the name of a great

reformer: that he left his work incomplete. There is, perhaps, no better

proof that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, than

that his work is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention to

needs he cannot supply. In after-years we may have perhaps a newer and

more daring Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not decorate the

armour of the twelfth century, but the machinery of the twentieth. A

lamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the

sanctity of fire. A pillar-box shall be carved with figures emblematical

of the secrets of comradeship and the silence and honour of the State.

Railway signals, of all earthly things the most poetical, the coloured

stars of life and death, shall be lamps of green and crimson worthy of

their terrible and faithful service. But if ever this gradual and

genuine movement of our time towards beauty—not backwards, but

forwards—does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it.

Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art,

prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be

remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and

proved that this painful greenish grey of the æsthetic twilight in

which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the

greyness of death, but the greyness of dawn.

OPTIMISM OF BYRON

Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of

Byron. The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when

we wake in the morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the

world of Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world,

where men were romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in

bowers, and the very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery.

Roses and nightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous

elegance of a wall-paper pattern. The whole is like a revel of dead men,

a revel with splendid vesture and half-witted faces.

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the

less ready shall we be to make use of the word “artificial.” Nothing in

the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many

works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity

and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental

thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in

darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around

him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity

is a voice out of the abyss.

The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present

position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is

remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not

savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of

this: a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see

some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial

woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent

explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe

that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some

of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks,

we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation.

We almost believe that they are toys out of a child’s play-box,

artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the great

convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism. The volcano is not an

extinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains

not of a natural but of an artificial fire.

But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than anything

that is represented by such a view as this: their real value and meaning

are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron lies

in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himself

as such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byron

without knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge of himself

that ever fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The real character of

what is known as Byron’s pessimism is better worth study than any real

pessimism could ever be.

It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost

everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably

extolled to the disadvantage of everything else.

One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has

been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books,

love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion,

money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life

close to Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately maintained

by somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwise

indefensible world. Thus, while the world is almost always condemned in

summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail after

detail.

Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The

work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously

among them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House

of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind.

Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a

life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the

cellar, and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the

blackest of pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment

that he has written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation,

his one pang of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of

gratitude, with the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird.

Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far

as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adored

by an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which despised

the majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a little

more deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this

popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated

pessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would

no more receive the news of the failure of existence or of the

harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than

they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance a

breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist is

popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but

because he shows some things to be good.

Men can only join in a chorus of praise, even if it is the praise of

denunciation. The man who is popular must be optimistic about something,

even if he is only optimistic about pessimism. And this was emphatically

the case with Byron and the Byronists. Their real popularity was founded

not upon the fact that they blamed everything, but upon the fact that

they praised something. They heaped curses upon man, but they used man

merely as a foil. The things they wished to praise by comparison were

the energies of Nature. Man was to them what talk and fashion were to

Carlyle, what philosophical and religious quarrels were to Omar, what

the whole race after practical happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing

which must be censured in order that somebody else may be exalted. It

was merely a recognition of the fact that one cannot write in white

chalk except on a black-board.

Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron’s love of the

desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and

depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in

winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in

storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older

earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young

and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when

seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a

gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time

powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at

the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was

the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was

only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the

earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were

flaming like their own firesides.

Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and

lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr.

Aubrey Beardsley’s allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with a

pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the

cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial

life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the

restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new

pessimism is a revolt in its favour.

The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity; the decadent,

going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an

affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and their

frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere; in

their lights and garlands and ribbons we read their indwelling despair.

It was so, indeed, with Byron himself; his really bitter moments were

his frivolous moments. He went on year after year calling down fire

upon mankind, summoning the deluge and the destructive sea and all the

ultimate energies of nature to sweep away the cities of the spawn of

man. But through all this his subconscious mind was not that of a

despairer; on the contrary, there is something of a kind of lawless

faith in thus parleying with such immense and immemorial brutalities. It

was not until the time in which he wrote “Don Juan” that he really lost

this inward warmth and geniality, and a sudden shout of hilarious

laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron had really become a

pessimist.

One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his

metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a

hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron’s language is of

horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding pas de quatre. He may

arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the

most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk

in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood

alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:

“Oh, there’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,

When the glow of early youth declines in beauty’s dull decay;

‘Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast,

But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past.”

That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.

The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the

unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most

uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their

nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the

whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident,

and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional

artifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard,

political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the

time that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of

that buried and subconscious happiness which is in all of us, and which

may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears

of the enemy.

POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE

The general critical theory common in this and the last century is

that it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry.

The classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that

goes, one may justifiably answer by asking anyone to try. It may be

easier really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring

sense, to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to

have imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a

sham rhapsody, because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be

unintelligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is

the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet:

he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits

out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuror. Therefore, it may

be submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical

couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great

liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did it

permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of

small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but

at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of

example, such a line as Pope’s:

“Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,”

the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written

such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.

Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with

such an idea as that expressed in Pope’s line about Man:

“A being darkly wise and rudely great,”

Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than

that old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would

really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound.

The one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of

writing,

“A being darkly wise and rudely great,”

the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses,

would produce something like the following:

“A creature

Of feature

More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,

Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:

Darkly wise as a formless fate.

And if he be great,

If he be great, then rudely great,

Rudely great as a plough that plies,

And darkly wise, and darkly wise.”

Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to

spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet

might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.

There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis of the

typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have occasion

more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever been

artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element of

paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the

realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we

cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a

space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of

divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was

truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, in

the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we

cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or

magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to

meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural

irrationality, they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheses

were fully in harmony with existence, which is itself a contradiction in

terms.

Pope was really a great poet; he was the last great poet of

civilisation. Immediately after the fall of him and his school come

Burns and Byron, and the reaction towards the savage and the elemental.

But to Pope civilisation was still an exciting experiment. Its perruques

and ruffles were to him what feathers and bangles are to a South Sea

Islander—the real romance of civilisation. And in all the forms of art

which peculiarly belong to civilisation, he was supreme. In one

especially he was supreme—the great and civilised art of satire. And in

this we have fallen away utterly.

We have had a great revival in our time of the cult of violence and

hostility. Mr. Henley and his young men have an infinite number of

furious epithets with which to overwhelm anyone who differs from them.

It is not a placid or untroubled position to be Mr. Henley’s enemy,

though we know that it is certainly safer than to be his friend. And

yet, despite all this, these people produce no satire. Political and

social satire is a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It may be

worth while to make some attempt to point out a reason for this.

It may seem a singular observation to say that we are not generous

enough to write great satire. This, however, is approximately a very

accurate way of describing the case. To write great satire, to attack a

man so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice, it is

necessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity which realises the

merits of the opponent as well as his defects. This is, indeed, only

another way of putting the simple truth that in order to attack an army

we must know not only its weak points, but also its strong points.

England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the same

simple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In matters of

battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (an

idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on a

people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance of

trampling upon us. It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the

enemy; whereas, when the enemy is strong, every honest scout ought to

praise the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish an army without having a

full account of its strength. It is impossible to satirise a man without

having a full account of his virtues. It is too much the custom in

politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhuman, as utterly

careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever was since

the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may often have a

great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it may

raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there is one

man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it hardly

ever touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. The one

person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man

whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. He

knows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he is

not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous

and revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can

count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours

of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But behind

all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:

behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven

silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly

visions of revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is to

touch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and

salute a whole army of virtues.

If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough, but

firm, grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of

their adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a

splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning

of the

“daring pilot in extremity,”

who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and

“Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit.”

The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the

great Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and

picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very

pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the

ancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill,

both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly,

as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented him

as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied

the lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even gross

faults, a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, a

certain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. But

he was a much larger man than satire depicted him, and therefore the

satire could not and did not overwhelm him. And here we have the cause

of the failure of contemporary satire, that it has no magnanimity, that

is to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that its opponent

has his strong points, just as Mr. Chamberlain could not endure to be

told that the Boers had a regular army. It can be content with nothing

except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly

stupid—that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. If

we take any prominent politician of the day—such, for example, as Sir

William Harcourt—we shall find that this is the point in which all

party invective fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir William

Harcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent that he is

inept, that he makes a fool of himself, that he is disagreeable and

disgraceful and untrustworthy. The defect of all that is that we all

know that it is untrue. Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt is not

inept, but is almost the ablest Parliamentarian now alive. Everyone

knows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, but a gentleman of the

old school who is on excellent social terms with his antagonists.

Everyone knows that he is not untrustworthy, but a man of unimpeachable

honour who is much trusted. Above all, he knows it himself, and is

therefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if

we were accused of being black or of keeping a shop for the receiving of

stolen goods. We might be angry at the libel, but not at the satire: for

a man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because

it is true.

Mr. Henley and his young men are very fond of invective and satire; if

they wish to know the reason of their failure in these things, they need

only turn to the opening of Pope’s superb attack upon Addison. The

Henleyite’s idea of satirising a man is to express a violent contempt

for him, and by the heat of this to persuade others and himself that the

man is contemptible. I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr.

Gladstone by one of the young anarchic Tories, which began by asserting

that Mr. Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If these people would, as I

have said, go quietly and read Pope’s “Atticus,” they would see how a

great satirist approaches a great enemy:

“Peace to all such! But were there one whose fires

True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires,

Blest with each talent, and each art to please,

And born to write, converse, and live with ease.

Should such a man—”

And then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was not

such a fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew that

Addison was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, in

Pope’s case, had become so great and, I was almost going to say, so

pure, that it illuminated all things, as love illuminates all things. He

said what was really wrong with Addison; and in calm and clear and

everlasting colours he painted the picture of the evil of the literary

temperament:

“Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,

View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,

And hate for arts that caused himself to rise.

     *       *       *       *       *

Like Cato give his little Senate laws,

And sit attentive to his own applause.

While wits and templars every sentence raise,

And wonder with a foolish face of praise.”

This is the kind of thing which really goes to the mark at which it

aims. It is penetrated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, and it is

addressed directly to a man. This is no mock-tournament to gain the

applause of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore.

In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption

that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can

benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his

merits, we cannot even hurt him.

FRANCIS

Asceticism is a thing which, in its very nature, we tend in these days

to misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation

of the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the

one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined

to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts

that truth is alone satisfying: there is æsthetic asceticism which

asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which

asserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean

asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying.

Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the

speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and

essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that “love

is enough,” it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art,

science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts,

gloves, walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals, and

any other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar

Khayyam says:

“A book of verses underneath the bough,

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness—

O wilderness were Paradise enow.”

It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does

æsthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more.

The same thing was done by a mediæval monk. Examples might, of course,

be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our

younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that

“From quiet home and first beginning

Out to the undiscovered ends--

There’s nothing worth the wear of winning

But laughter and the love of friends."

Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true

joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.

But if, in any case, it should happen that a class or a generation lose

the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they

immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and

self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called

the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of

liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank

Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the

pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,

however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English

athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if

science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting

the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute

contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is

easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state that

in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and Cambridge

were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They were

forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or tobacco

during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal

fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours

and running violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their

health in these dens of superstition, many died there. All this is

perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism,

as much as the monastic rules. Men have overstrained themselves and

killed themselves through English athleticism. There is one difference

and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not feel the love of

religious offices. We see only the price in the one case and only the

purchase in the other.

The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian

ascetics of which their asceticism was merely the purchasing price? The

mere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in

which we miss the main points of human history. We are looking at

humanity too close, and see only the details and not the vast and

dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it

as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur

to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe

is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit

to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with

joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.

The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood

up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea

gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these

disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one

dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.

That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly

tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We

insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that

the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and

ten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition of

an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times more

optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias.

Mr. Adderley’s life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this

out; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather

the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing,

but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason

that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman,

because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to

their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline,

because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of

benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not

in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance,

in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost

indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.

It is natural, of course, that Mr. Adderley should see Francis primarily

as the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one,

perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of

the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast

practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this

amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple-minded infant was one

of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this

bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is

their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the

truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe

in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his

success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of

this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons.

Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their

common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the

Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of “his little sisters the

larks.” He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their

misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It

was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often “got round him,”

as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had

“got round” them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret

nobility.

Conceiving of St. Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan

Order, Mr. Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the

history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in

the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichæan

ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of

self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But

he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the

absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason

that, not being an outsider, he does not find it a problem at all.

To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the

position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language

than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as

tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to

take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water, as

it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of

men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation

of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of

poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he

loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most

large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial

atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all

men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a

monk, and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be

answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to

have been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered, we

should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours

was answered also. So it was with the monks. The two great parties in

human affairs are only the party which sees life black against white,

and the party which sees it white against black, the party which

macerates and blackens itself with sacrifice because the background is

full of the blaze of an universal mercy, and the party which crowns

itself with flowers and lights itself with bridal torches because it

stands against a black curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are

old, and the monks are young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts

of happiness, and we who are its misers.

Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr. Adderley’s book, the clear and

tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the

genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his

literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire “brother,” and the

water “sister,” in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the

sermon to the fishes “that they alone were saved in the Flood.” In the

amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments,

and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing, his

genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided the

weakness of Burns’ verses to animals, the occasional morbidity, bombast,

and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a cleaner and

more transparent life.

The general attitude of St. Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a

kind of terrible common sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in

“Alice in Wonderland”—“Why not?” impresses us as his general motto. He

could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The

pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages, and all

its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of

that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like

the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the

nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world

was small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the

reason that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives

were to be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that

the madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in

it the features of a new friend.

ROSTAND

When “Cyrano de Bergerac” was published, it bore the subordinate title

of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which

would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a

poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the

hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is

systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power

of a man’s spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy

into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive

legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have

a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain

optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of

the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential

disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself

with a hyper-æsthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due

to the influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies

of Monsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct for

remedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for

“Frenchiness.” The idea of comedy which is held in England by the school

which pays most attention to the technical niceties of art is a view

which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible.

The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our younger

writers is that comedy is, par excellence, a fragile thing. It is

conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and

gimcrack description. Such stories as Mr. Max Beerbohm’s “Happy

Hypocrite” are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utter

nonsense if viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy,

the comedy of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, taken

seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with

more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such

comedies one laughs with the heroes, and not at them. The humour which

steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and

philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not

superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading.

Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were

the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of

comedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. He

seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John

Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she

named it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work, “A

Sentimental Comedy.” The ground of this conception of the artificiality

of comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful

buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as

a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly

speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over

the eternal waters of bitterness.

“Cyrano de Bergerac” came to us as the new decoration of an old truth,

that merriment was one of the world’s natural flowers, and not one of

its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the

Rabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had

been in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as

old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong

and haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at his

highest moment of happiness, Il me faut des géants. An essential

aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in

rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the

dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his

canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing

some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party

playing bouts rimés. In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous

that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should

obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and

convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the

fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by a

poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which

are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama

follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme for

the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme

appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of

heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not

difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far

more conceivable that men’s speech should flower naturally into these

harmonious forms, when they are filled with the essential spirit of

youth, than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial

destiny. The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an

unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the

moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak, it is because we have

an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or

artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering

attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like

“Cyrano de Bergerac,” speaking in rhyme, it is not our language

disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes

answer each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each

other. Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or

in love they talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepresent

the speech one half so much as the speech misrepresents the soul.

Monsieur Rostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called

“Cyrano de Bergerac” a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking,

it ends with disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is a

spiritual breakdown or decline, and in the great French play the

spiritual sentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not

the facts themselves, but our feeling about them, that makes tragedy and

comedy, and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeterlinck.

The same apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of

“L’Aiglon,” now being performed with so much success. Although the hero

is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and a

personal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme, which might have

been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable pæan of the

praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet’s song swells so

high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of the

characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. A

multitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate and

illustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern

life. When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of

the wounded cry out, Les corbeaux, les corbeaux, the Duke, overwhelmed

with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, _Où, où, sont les

aigles?_ That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the

beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When

an ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the

Emperor, he replies, La fatigue, and at that a veteran private of the

Great Army rushes forward, and crying passionately, Et nous? pours out

a terrible description of the life lived by the commoner soldier.

To-day, when pessimism is almost as much a symbol of wealth and fashion

as jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life

in few other words but la fatigue, there might surely come a cry from

the vast mass of common humanity from the beginning—et nous? It is

this potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes the

function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare’s “Much Ado

About Nothing” is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole

pressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world, which is

common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will die

bachelors and old maids. “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is filled with the same

energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our

subject, since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically

as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love

is to the Shakespearean comedies, that other and more mysterious human

passion, the love of death, is to “L’Aiglon.” Whether we shall ever have

in England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present

to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that

comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things,

that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb.

Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not

shrink from bringing about the Duke’s ears the frightful voices of

actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when

the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final

word, they all cry together Vive l’Empereur! Monsieur Rostand,

perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that field

of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing

but the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is

right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of

them should be silenced; but these cries of distress are not in life, as

they are in modern art, the only voices; they are the voices of men, but

not the voice of man. When questioned finally and seriously as to their

conception of their destiny, men have from the beginning of time

answered in a thousand philosophies and religions with a single voice

and in a sense most sacred and tremendous, Vive l’Empereur.

CHARLES II

There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles II.,

one of the idlest men of one of the idlest epochs. Among other things

Charles II. represented one thing which is very rare and very

satisfying; he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scepticism, both in

its advantages and disadvantages, is greatly misunderstood in our time.

There is a curious idea abroad that scepticism has some connection with

such theories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of

course a mistake; the true sceptic has nothing to do with these theories

simply because they are theories. The true sceptic is as much a

spiritualist as he is a materialist. He thinks that the savage dancing

round an African idol stands quite as good a chance of being right as

Darwin. He thinks that mysticism is every bit as rational as

rationalism. He has indeed the most profound doubts as to whether St.

Matthew wrote his own gospel. But he has quite equally profound doubts

as to whether the tree he is looking at is a tree and not a rhinoceros.

This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in

the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in

the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between

atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and

fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the

most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day

of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man

to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there

are no insects in any of the stars.

Thus it was with that wholesome and systematic sceptic, Charles II. When

he took the Sacrament according to the forms of the Roman Church in his

last hour he was acting consistently as a philosopher. The wafer might

not be God; similarly it might not be a wafer. To the genuine and

poetical sceptic the whole world is incredible, with its bulbous

mountains and its fantastic trees. The whole order of things is as

outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

Transubstantiation might be a dream, but if it was, it was assuredly a

dream within a dream. Charles II. sought to guard himself against hell

fire because he could not think hell itself more fantastic than the

world as it was revealed by science. The priest crept up the staircase,

the doors were closed, the few of the faithful who were present hushed

themselves respectfully, and so, with every circumstance of secrecy and

sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the prayers poured out, was

consummated the last great act of logical unbelief.

The problem of Charles II. consists in this, that he has scarcely a

moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that

some of the virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the

saints and sages, and that Charles II. was pre-eminently successful in

these wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and

the real relation of Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth somewhat

more exhaustive study.

It is a commonplace that the Restoration movement can only be understood

when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it is

insufficiently realised that the tyranny which half frustrated all the

good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fire

of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint,

which passed away; that still burns in the heart of England, only to be

quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered that

the Puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that

they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that

they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans

fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life,

through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never

satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French

Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lesson

that men’s wants have always been right and their arguments always

wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the

head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily

men of violence. We speak of “touching” a man’s heart, but we can do

nothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over the

bodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and

conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the

tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human

spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved

and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial,

madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were

fanatics, but because they were rationalists.

When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which

means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in

that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a

little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality

of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a

pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed

parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be

left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely

account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and

horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts

also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a

nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it

something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and

nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the

type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of

politeness. There was some moral and social value in his perfection in

little things. He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the

ten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts

of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those

acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which

lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. “Charles II.,” said

Thackeray, with unerring brevity, “was a rascal, but not a snob.” Unlike

George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys

strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises

strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.

So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was

the revolt of something human, if only the debris of human nature. But

more cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a

recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength.

That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too

far, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of an

almost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Restoration

infinitely more excusable, but it does not make it any the less a

collapse. Nothing can efface the essential distinction that Puritanism

was one of the world’s great efforts after the discovery of the true

order, whereas it was the essence of the Restoration that it involved no

effort at all. It is true that the Restoration was not, as has been

widely assumed, the most immoral epoch of our history. Its vices cannot

compare for a moment in this respect with the monstrous tragedies and

almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of James I. But

the dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia of Charles II.

seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and

poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears

inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with

the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not

only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even

for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the

pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game

of lawn tennis. It would have appeared to Charles II.’s poets quite as

arduous to write “Paradise Lost” as to regain Paradise.

All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors, which,

though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves, and

poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terribly

significant as the phrase “killing time.” It is a tremendous and

poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide. There are on

the earth a race of revellers who do, under all their exuberance,

fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of these were Charles II. and the

men of the Restoration. Whatever may have been their merits, and as we

have said we think that they had merits, they can never have a place

among the great representatives of the joy of life, for they belonged to

those lower epicureans who kill time, as opposed to those higher

epicureans who make time live.

Of a people in this temper Charles II. was the natural and rightful

head. He may have been a pantomime King, but he was a King, and with all

his geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, the aimless

flaneur that he has been represented. He was a patient and cunning

politician, who disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of folly

that he not only deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceived

almost all the historians that have come after him. But if Charles was,

as he emphatically was, the only Stuart who really achieved despotism,

it was greatly due to the temper of the nation and the age. Despotism is

the easiest of all governments, at any rate for the governed.

It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the slave.

Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them,

professionals to dance for them, and a professional to rule them.

Almost all the faces in the portraits of that time look, as it were,

like masks put on artificially with the perruque. A strange unreality

broods over the period. Distracted as we are with civic mysteries and

problems we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate than

their laughter, our restraints are larger than their liberty.

STEVENSON[1]

A recent incident has finally convinced us that Stevenson was, as we

suspected, a great man. We knew from recent books that we have noticed,

from the scorn of “Ephemera Critica” and Mr. George Moore, that

Stevenson had the first essential qualification of a great man: that of

being misunderstood by his opponents. But from the book which Messrs.

Chatto & Windus have issued, in the same binding as Stevenson’s works,

“Robert Louis Stevenson,” by Mr. H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that he

has the other essential qualification, that of being misunderstood by

his admirers. Mr. Baildon has many interesting things to tell us about

Stevenson himself, whom he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms by

any means valueless. That upon the plays, especially “Beau Austin,” is

remarkably thoughtful and true. But it is a very singular fact, and goes

far, as we say, to prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable quality

which belongs to the great, that this admiring student of Stevenson can

number and marshal all the master’s work and distribute praise and blame

with decision and even severity, without ever thinking for a moment of

the principles of art and ethics which would have struck us as the very

things that Stevenson nearly killed himself to express.

Mr. Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his

“pessimism”; surely a strange charge against a man who has done more

than any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. But

he complains that, in “The Master of Ballantrae” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde,” Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good. Now if there was

one point that Stevenson more constantly and passionately emphasised

than any other it was that we must worship good for its own value and

beauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in space

and time. “Whatever we are intended to do,” he said, “we are not

intended to succeed.” That the stars in their courses fight against

virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope, this was the very

spirit that through the whole of Stevenson’s work sounded a trumpet to

all the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but could anyone

stand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? It

is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an

old church and see none in the ruins of a man.

The author has most extraordinary ideas about Stevenson’s tales of blood

and spoil; he appears to think that they prove Stevenson to have had (we

use Mr. Baildon’s own phrase) a kind of “homicidal mania.” “He

[Stevenson] arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly be

better employed than in taking life.” Mr. Baildon might as well say that

Dr. Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr.

Clark Russell is a notorious pirate, and that Mr. Wilkie Collins thought

that one could hardly be better employed than in stealing moonstones

and falsifying marriage registers. But Mr. Baildon is scarcely alone in

this error: few people have understood properly the goriness of

Stevenson. Stevenson was essentially the robust schoolboy who draws

skeletons and gibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took

pleasure in death, but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular

and emphatic action of life, even if it were an action that took the

life of another.

Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman

and pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there

are in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view.

The point of view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point of

view, and this Stevenson showed clearly that he understood in such

stories as “The Master of Ballantrae” and “Weir of Hermiston.” But there

is another view of the matter—that in which the whole act is an abrupt

and brilliant explosion of bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with a

blow of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred gate. This is the

standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of “Treasure Island” and “The

Wrecker.” It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that he

loved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouring

universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as

has not been known since St. Francis called the sun brother and the well

sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch that

Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bones left

at the “Admiral Benbow,” with the knife that Wicks drove through his own

hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain clean-cut

angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting wood with

an axe.

Stevenson’s new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this

deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing

something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an

object. He says of that glorious riot of horror, “The Destroying Angel,”

in “The Dynamiter,” that it is “highly fantastic and putting a strain

on our credulity.” This is rather like describing the travels of Baron

Munchausen as “unconvincing.” The whole story of “The Dynamiter” is a

kind of humorous nightmare, and even in that story “The Destroying

Angel” is supposed to be an extravagant lie made up on the spur of the

moment. It is a dream within a dream, and to accuse it of improbability

is like accusing the sky of being blue. But Mr. Baildon, whether from

hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least

comprehend that rich and romantic irony of Stevenson’s London stories.

He actually says of that portentous monument of humour, Prince Florizel

of Bohemia, that, “though evidently admired by his creator, he is to me

on the whole rather an irritating presence.” From this we are almost

driven to believe (though desperately and against our will) that Mr.

Baildon thinks that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously, as if he

were a man in real life. For ourselves. Prince Florizel is almost our

favourite character in fiction; but we willingly add the proviso that

if we met him in real life we should kill him.

The fact is, that the whole mass of Stevenson’s spiritual and

intellectual virtues have been partly frustrated by one additional

virtue—that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his great

message on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and straggling letters,

it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his

light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-book hand that everyone

supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his

versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every department well

enough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney,

pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could

not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can

play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he

is called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly

well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common

fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has

happened in the case of Stevenson. If “Dr. Jekyll,” “The Master of

Ballantrae,” “The Child’s Garden of Verses,” and “Across the Plains” had

been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone

would have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but by

succeeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once, he

has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But

the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mohamet, as moral

as that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical as

that of James Watt. The conception which unites the whole varied work of

Stevenson was that romance, or the vision of the possibilities of

things, was far more important than mere occurrences: that one was the

soul of our life, the other the body, and that the soul was the precious

thing. The germ of all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape

or scrap of scenery has a soul: and that soul is a story. Standing

before a stunted orchard with a broken stone wall, we may know as a

mere fact that no one has been through it but an elderly female cook.

But everything exists in the human soul: that orchard grows in our own

brain, and there it is the shrine and theatre of some strange chance

between a girl and a ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for

the conception that ideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are

our adventures. To think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met

one. And this is the reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he

had to make one story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a

hoary monolith: for the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of

the bodily vision. It is quite inappropriate to judge “The Teller of

Tales” (as the Samoans called him) by the particular novels he wrote, as

one would judge Mr. George Moore by “Esther Waters.” These novels were

only the two or three of his soul’s adventures that he happened to tell.

But he died with a thousand stories in his heart.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism.” By H. Bellyse

Baildon. Chatto & Windus.

THOMAS CARLYLE

There are two main moral necessities for the work of a great man: the

first is that he should believe in the truth of his message; the second

is that he should believe in the acceptability of his message. It was

the whole tragedy of Carlyle that he had the first and not the second.

The ordinary capital, however, which is made out of Carlyle’s alleged

gloom is a very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, both as a man and

as a writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his

“liver” is merely pitiful. If indigestion invariably resulted in a

“Sartor Resartus,” it would be a vastly more tolerable thing than it is.

Diseases do not turn into poems; even the decadent really writes with

the healthy part of his organism. If Carlyle’s private faults and

literary virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he is only in the

situation of every man; for every one of us it is surely very difficult

to say precisely where our honest opinions end and our personal

predilections begin. But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savage

egotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to grasp

Carlyle’s gospel. “Ruskin,” says a critic, “did, all the same, verily

believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself.” This is certainly a

distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has

not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have

believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God,

because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin,

themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was

not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief

in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his

message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St. Francis,

Bunyan, Wesley, Mr. Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable

variety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average man

as their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear

and without condescension. It was this simplicity of confidence, not

only in God, but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.

But the attempts to discredit Carlyle’s religious sentiment must

absolutely fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle’s sense

of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has

the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets—humour. A man

must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan

delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysus, no vague, half-converted

Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of

cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion

was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of

its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow.

So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and

literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had

seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of

them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and

eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something

elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the

passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates

that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as “falling asleep in the

Lord.” “Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick

night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through

unending ages, insult the face of the sun any more … and we go on, if

not to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher ones.”

The supreme value of Carlyle to English literature was that he was the

founder of modern irrationalism; a movement fully as important as modern

rationalism. A great deal is said in these days about the value or

valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive

tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual

system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the

trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the

trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual

intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic

is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.

But though this may be true enough in practice, it scarcely clears up

the position of logic in human affairs. Logic is a machine of the mind,

and if it is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion.

When people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using

words in a fair sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything by

bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an

extraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ, when what is meant

is the abuse or decay of that organ. Thus we speak of a man suffering

from “nerves,” which is about as sensible as talking about a man

suffering from ten fingers. We speak of “liver” and “digestion” when we

mean the failure of liver and the absence of digestion. And in the same

manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the

danger of fallacy.

But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partial

overthrow of logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and somewhat

different. The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they

bring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all.

Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend to

forget that there are two parts of a logical process, the first the

choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it, and

humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound

reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound

assumption. It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rational

and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as “He did not prove the

very thing with which he started,” or, “The whole of his case rested

upon a pure assumption,” two peculiarities which may be found by the

curious in the works of Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how

constantly one hears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic,

apparently without troubling about the deep assumptions involved, having

lost their sense, as it were, of the real colour and character of a

man’s assumption. For instance, two men will argue about whether

patriotism is a good thing and never discover until the end, if at all,

that the cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the idea that man

should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies and no

prejudices, while the nationalist denies any such duty at the very

start, and regards man as an animal who has preferences, as a bird has

feathers.

   *       *       *       *       *

Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments,

but assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men

of the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed

directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be

true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and

more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where

his view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing and

beneficent heresy. He denied every one of the postulates upon which the

age of reason based itself. He denied the theory of progress which

assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth

century. Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth century,

according to him, depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved to

be.

He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which

threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but

the individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real

ground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the last

era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there

has been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.

Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a mystic, and mysticism was with him,

as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of common

sense. Mysticism and common sense alike consist in a sense of the

dominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formally

demonstrated or even formally named. Mysticism and common sense are

alike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which have

no place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle’s work did consist in

breaking through formulæ, old and new, to these old and silent and

ironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times

over, he maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man and

woman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for

the exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness,

it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe. About

hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justice to

Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which he

sometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which were

a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his

philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle’s theory

of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and

arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some

questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is not

that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided

and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous

and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it in

them to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to

rebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle’s tone

invariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled with

admiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Christianity.

Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle’s utterances, his hero

worship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired great

men primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they were

more human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle and

his religion of hero worship did not consist in the emotional worship

of valour and success; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part

of all healthy children. Where Carlyle really did harm was in the fact

that he, more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of

that modern habit of what is vulgarly called “Going the whole hog.”

Often in matters of passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog.

This remarkable modern craze for making one’s philosophy, religion,

politics, and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for

opportunities to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is

a thing which existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon

and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were

melancholy, and optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of

to-day seems obliged to prove that gout and unrequited love make him

dance with joy, and the pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a

good supper convulse him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly

possessed with this mania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take

the same view of the wars of the angels and of the paltriest riot at

Donnybrook Fair. It was this species of insane logic which led him into

his chief errors, never his natural enthusiasms. Let us take an example.

Carlyle’s defence of slavery is a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak

alike in argument and in moral instinct. The truth is, that he only took

it up from the passion for applying everywhere his paradoxical defence

of aristocracy. He blundered, of course, because he did not see that

slavery has nothing in the world to do with aristocracy, that it is,

indeed, almost its opposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its

thoughtful defenders have made for aristocracy was that a few persons

could more rapidly and firmly decide public affairs in the interests of

the people. But slavery is not even supposed to be a government for the

good of the governed. It is a possession of the governed avowedly for

the good of the governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service

of the weak; slavery uses the weak for the service of the strong. It is

no derogation to man as a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed

he was, that he should be ruled and guided for his own good like a

child—for a child who is always ruled and guided we regard as the very

type of spiritual existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute

contradiction to that human spirituality in which Carlyle believed that

a man should be owned like a tool for someone else’s good, as if he had

no personal destiny in the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular

error of Carlyle’s because we think that it is a curious example of the

waste and unclean places into which that remarkable animal, “the whole

hog,” more than once led him.

In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and an

unquestionably bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethic

which conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for

once and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberately

deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example.

Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern

times the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency. Though

Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle

being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat,

they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and

pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to

everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed,

embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges

himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with

which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as

a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient

necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it

can hardly be denied, has Carlyle’s intellectual courage brought many at

last.

TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY

The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, not

deliberately, but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of false

innocence, like that of the French aristocrats before the Revolution,

who built an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peasantry for the enormous

expenditure which is needed in order to live the simple life of

peasants. The simplicity towards which the world is driving is the

necessary outcome of all our systems and speculations and of our deep

and continuous contemplation of things. For the universe is like

everything in it; we have to look at it repeatedly and habitually before

we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth time that

we see it for the first time. The more consistently things are

contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to

simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always

sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as

if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and,

suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge and

staring face.

Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time are

upon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more

fundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to

undermine the other. In art, for example, the old conception of man,

classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist,

who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature with

colourless hair and a freckled face. Then comes the Impressionist, going

yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical eye, which alone is

certain, man is a creature with purple hair and a grey face. Then comes

the Symbolist, and says that to his soul, which alone is certain, man is

a creature with green hair and a blue face. And all the great writers of

our time represent in one form or another this attempt to reestablish

communication with the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more roughly

and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the

return to nature consists in drinking no wine; some think that it

consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think

that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into

ploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares into

very ineffectual British War Office bayonets. It is natural, according

to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself

with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionist, to

kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would

be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the

claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is

interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of

paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth

of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike

in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the

return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of

fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to

nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much he

can reject.

Now, this heroic desire to return to nature, is, of course, in some

respects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own

tail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and

soothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor but

characteristic qualities of a tail that it should hang behind. It is

impossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character if

attached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is like a tail in

the sense that it vitally important, if it is to discharge its real

duty, that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see

nature, especially our own nature, face to face, is a folly; it is even

a blasphemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy-tale, who

should set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he would

find his tail growing like a tree in the meadows at the end of the

world. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in search

of nature, when seen from the outside, looks very like the gyrations of

the tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity,

much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she is

omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we think

that she is heeding us least. “Thou art a God that hidest Thyself,” said

the Hebrew poet. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind a

man’s back that the spirit of nature hides.

It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to

all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. We

feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on

complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments, that a man cannot

make himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far

more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of

the pomp and sumptuousness of the world’s history was simple in the

truest sense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the

work of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.

“King Solomon brought merchant men

Because of his desire

With peacocks, apes, and ivory,

From Tarshish unto Tyre."

But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was a

part of his folly—I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoy, we feel,

would not be content with hurling satire and denunciation at “Solomon in

all his glory.” With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a step

further. He would spend days and nights in the meadows stripping the

shameless crimson coronals off the lilies of the field.

The new collection of “Tales from Tolstoy,” translated and edited by Mr.

R. Nisbet Bain, is calculated to draw particular attention to this

ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy’s work. In one sense, and that the

deepest sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a genuine and noble

appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach is

pretty well exploded by now. But the truth of the matter is, that an

artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his

landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique—all the part of his

work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by

the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his

opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the

ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the

bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the real

moral of Tolstoy comes out constantly in these stories, the great moral

which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably

unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently

disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all

the tales, the folklore simplicity with which “a man or a woman” are

spoken of without further identification, the love—one might almost say

the lust—for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood,

and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient

kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man—these

influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and

tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene

purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small

sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect

to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan

and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy

has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist

who is inhabiting one corner of a great and good man.

It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with

Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a

man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of

humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that

dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a

man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending

emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of

their pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to

believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the

earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the

landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that

which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is

difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable

insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay

the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search

after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more

natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it

would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest

kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done,

accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called,

the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth.

The work of Tolstoy has another and more special significance. It

represents the re-assertion of a certain awful common sense which

characterised the most extreme utterances of Christ. It is true that we

cannot turn the cheek to the smiter; it is true that we cannot give our

cloak to the robber; civilisation is too complicated, too vain-glorious,

too emotional. The robber would brag, and we should blush; in other

words, the robber and we are alike sentimentalists. The command of

Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached

to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world was suddenly stricken with a

sense of humour it would find itself mechanically fulfilling the Sermon

on the Mount. It is not the plain facts of the world which stand in the

way of that consummation, but its passions of vanity and

self-advertisement and morbid sensibility. It is true that we cannot

turn the cheek to the smiter, and the sole and sufficient reason is that

we have not the pluck. Tolstoy and his followers have shown that they

have the pluck, and even if we think they are mistaken, by this sign

they conquer. Their theory has the strength of an utterly consistent

thing. It represents that doctrine of mildness and non-resistance which

is the last and most audacious of all the forms of resistance to every

existing authority. It is the great strike of the Quakers which is more

formidable than many sanguinary revolutions. If human beings could only

succeed in achieving a real passive resistance they would be strong with

the appalling strength of inanimate things, they would be calm with the

maddening calm of oak or iron, which conquer without vengeance and are

conquered without humiliation. The theory of Christian duty enunciated

by them is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can,

conquer by persuasion. In their mythology St. George did not conquer the

dragon: he tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer of

milk. According to them, a course of consistent kindness to Nero would

have turned him into something only faintly represented by Alfred the

Great. In fact, the policy recommended by this school for dealing with

the bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this world is accurately summed

up in the celebrated verse of Mr. Edward Lear:

“There was an old man who said, ‘How

Shall I flee from this terrible cow?

I will sit on a stile and continue to smile

Till I soften the heart of this cow.’”

Their confidence in human nature is really honourable and magnificent;

it takes the form of refusing to believe the overwhelming majority of

mankind, even when they set out to explain their own motives. But

although most of us would in all probability tend at first sight to

consider this new sect of Christians as little less outrageous than some

brawling and absurd sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall into a

singular error in doing so. The Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we come

to consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our

modern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religion

more sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars.

From the point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered

almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It

turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially

possible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty

casket of some discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to consider this

phenomenon as it realty is.

The religion of Christ has, like many true things, been disproved an

extraordinary number of times. It was disproved by the Neo-Platonist

philosophers at the very moment when it was first starting forth upon

its startling and universal career. It was disproved again by many of

the sceptics of the Renaissance only a few years before its second and

supremely striking embodiment, the religion of Puritanism, was about to

triumph over many kings and civilise many continents. We all agree that

these schools of negation were only interludes in its history; but we

all believe naturally and inevitably that the negation of our own day

is really a breaking up of the theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a

Ragnorak, a twilight of the gods. The man of the nineteenth century,

like a schoolboy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and depression are

symbols of the end of the world. In our day the great irreligionists who

did nothing but dethrone God and drive angels before them have been

outstripped, distanced, and made to look orthodox and humdrum. A newer

race of sceptics has found something infinitely more exciting to do than

nailing down the lids upon a million coffins, and the body upon a single

cross. They have disputed not only the elementary creeds, but the

elementary laws of mankind, property, patriotism, civil obedience. They

have arraigned civilisation as openly as the materialists have arraigned

theology; they have damned all the philosophers even lower than they

have damned the saints. Thousands of modern men move quietly and

conventionally among their fellows while holding views of national

limitation or landed property that would have made Voltaire shudder like

a nun listening to blasphemies. And the last and wildest phase of this

saturnalia of scepticism, the school that goes furthest among thousands

who go so far, the school that denies the moral validity of those ideals

of courage or obedience which are recognised even among pirates, this

school bases itself upon the literal words of Christ, like Dr. Watts or

Messrs. Moody and Sankey. Never in the whole history of the world was

such a tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of an ancient creed.

Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven

asunder, or the sun did stand still at midday. We are faced with the

phenomenon that a set of revolutionists whose contempt for all the

ideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves’ kitchen,

who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the

gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilisation, cannot rid

themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes

written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it

something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in

its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees

the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way of

a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the dark

sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may, indeed, contain in

themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.

This value which we have above suggested unquestionably belongs to the

Tolstoians, who may roughly be described as the new Quakers. With their

strange optimism, and their almost appalling logical courage, they offer

a tribute to Christianity which no orthodoxies could offer. It cannot

but be remarkable to watch a revolution in which both the rulers and the

rebels march under the same symbol. But the actual theory of

non-resistance itself, with all its kindred theories, is not, I think,

characterised by that intellectual obviousness and necessity which its

supporters claim for it. A pamphlet before us shows us an extraordinary

number of statements about the new Testament, of which the accuracy is

by no means so striking as the confidence. To begin with, we must

protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time.

When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all

what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had

expressed Himself more clearly. Here is an instance of question and

answer:

Q. “How did our Master Himself sum up the law in a few words?”

A. “Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even as your Father; your Father in

the spirit world is merciful, is perfect.”

There is nothing in this, perhaps, which Christ might not have said

except the abominable metaphysical modernism of “the spirit world”; but

to say that it is recorded that He did say it, is like saying it is

recorded that He preferred palm trees to sycamores. It is a simple and

unadulterated untruth. The author should know that these words have

meant a thousand things to a thousand people, and that if more ancient

sects had paraphrased them as cheerfully as he, he would never have had

the text upon which he founds his theory. In a pamphlet in which plain

printed words cannot be left alone, it is not surprising if there are

mis-statements upon larger matters. Here is a statement clearly and

philosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves with

flatly denying: “The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should take

special pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreign

countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have

an antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people,

and those who are in sympathy with us.” I should very much like to know

where in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent,

unnatural, and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind of

regard for one person as for another. We are specifically told that

there were certain persons whom He specially loved. It is most

improbable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own.

The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highest

compliment He paid was, “Behold an Israelite indeed.” The author has

simply confused two entirely distinct things. Christ commanded us to

have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to

speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering

nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he produces on us must

be vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom we

love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about as

sensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards.

Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity; He loved

men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a

gigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure

to think of an equally distributed affection is that their love of

humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their

own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.

But the greatest error of all lies in the mere act of cutting up the

teaching of the New Testament into five rules. It precisely and

ingeniously misses the most dominant characteristic of the teaching—its

absolute spontaneity. The abyss between Christ and all His modern

interpreters is that we have no record that He ever wrote a word, except

with His finger in the sand. The whole is the history of one continuous

and sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from it

before these Tolstoian rules were made, and thousands will be deduced

afterwards. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for any

elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle

words that the cross was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and the

sun was darkened at noonday.

SAVONAROLA

Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until we

know what horror may lie at the heart of civilisation. This we shall not

know until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we may

never understand Savonarola.

The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them from

calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the

ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy:

the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers saved

us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil compared

with which all these are fleabites, the most desolating curse that can

fall upon men or nations, and it has no name except we call it

satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order;

not from pestilence, but from paralysis; not from starvation, but from

luxury. Men like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendous

psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name

has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and

civilisation potentially the end of man.

For I fancy that Savonarola’s thrilling challenge to the luxury of his

day went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern

rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards,

dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of

Savonarola’s anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the

crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not

be so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely

picked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggish

enlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate

the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that is

precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist.

He saw, that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen

jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms;

that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and

pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics

and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not

always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist

would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred

of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are

sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.

Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making

war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless

quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which

all creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the

sign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that

clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as

to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has

truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally

anti-æsthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli,

and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity

are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than

for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently

the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires

a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude.

The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a

civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads

to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old

with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new. The

monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of

imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of

imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as

it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be

surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the

stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist.

Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, that

of making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learnt

to ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines is the

doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which

Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is

nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings.

Christianity, in Savonarola’s mind, identical with democracy, is the

hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as

the saying that they are all the sons of God.

Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered

to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the

present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for

mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an

improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men

as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to

fear. We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those

which awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola—a hedonism that is

more sick of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense

that seeks the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In

many modern works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly

Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The

bankrupt and depraved imagination does not see that a living man is far

more dramatic than a dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the

Medici, goes the falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for

the strong man which is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is

worshipped as he is worshipped by the readers of the “Bow Bells

Novelettes,” and for the same reason—a profound sense of personal

weakness. That tendency to devolve our duties descends on us, which is

the soul of slavery, alike whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs

or emperors. Against all this the great clerical republican stands in

everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival’s success. The

issue is still between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of

liberty and the license of slavery, between the perils of truth and the

security of silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of

pleasure. The supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among

us, men for whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the

moment, men to whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp

and wintry spring. They have an art, a literature, a political

philosophy, which are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon

the taste, not for what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their

statuettes and sonnets are rounded and perfect, while “Macbeth” is in

comparison a fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their

campaigns and battles are always called triumphant, while Cæsar and

Cromwell wept for many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell

of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole

nature recoils into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer

merely a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.

This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent

his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course.

Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a

charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have

understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them

from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and

sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent

danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also

are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.

Mr. M’Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works

of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much

exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of

incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment

more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola’s friend Michael

Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other,

and burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow

transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.

THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own

high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now

dwindling, schools of severely technical and æsthetic criticism have

been unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if

there is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it is

in consistency and equality. It would perhaps be unkind to inquire

whether the level of the modern man of letters, as compared with Scott,

is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in any

case, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effects

carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in the

incidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to arrange.

It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter

could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are

neglected by Providence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as it

exists, must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like

the beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely a peculiar thing

that in literature alone a house should be despised because it is too

large, or a host impugned because he is too generous. If romance be

really a pleasure, it is difficult to understand the modern reader’s

consuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it is

difficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere size, it

seems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in some

disproportion. If some of Scott’s stories are dull and dilatory, it is

not because they are giants, but because they are hunchbacks or

cripples. Scott was very far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I

do not think that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan on

which his stories are built was by any means an imperfection. He

arranged his endless prefaces and his colossal introductions just as an

architect plans great gates and long approaches to a really large

house. He did not share the latter-day desire to get quickly through a

story. He enjoyed narrative as a sensation; he did not wish to swallow a

story like a pill, that it should do him good afterwards. He desired to

taste it like a glass of port, that it might do him good at the time.

The reader sits late at his banquets. His characters have that air of

immortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dickens. We should not

be surprised to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott, in his heart

of hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story without

either beginning or close.

Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious man. He will never

be understood until Romance is understood, and that will be only when

Time, Man, and Eternity are understood. To say that Scott had more than

any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these

days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises

from one fundamental mistake—the idea that romance is in some way a

plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the

outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have

grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life, but

absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man’s existence is a

dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like

toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege

and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

The boast of the realist (applying what the reviewers call his scalpel)

is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes a very shallow

incision, if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities and sins.

Deeper than all these lies a man’s vision of himself, as swaggering and

sentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of can-dour unearths

innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called

romance. It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, but

it does not perceive the deepest of sins—the sin of vanity—vanity

which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that

is not shared with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest.

In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott’s pre-eminence in romance

we must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or adventure

are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a plot or the

multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is, like tragedy

or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and elemental

reason which we can never understand, this state of the soul is evoked

in us by the sight of certain places or the contemplation of certain

human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and covered wooden

bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber. In the

selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romance as in a

net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached. His finest scenes

affect us like fragments of a hilarious dream. They have the same

quality which is often possessed by those nocturnal comedies—that of

seeming more human than our waking life—even while they are less

possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and the old beggar

crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the tide closes

around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of practical

situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only be called

boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible sunset. Rob

Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie Nicol Jarvie,

draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the dazzling

external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that plain

and humourous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of romance

which is an almost equal betting upon man and destiny. Perhaps the most

profoundly thrilling of all Scott’s situations is that in which the

family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage which may or

may not arrive by night to bring an unknown man into a princely

possession. Yet almost the whole of that thrilling scene consists of a

ridiculous conversation about food, and flirtation between a frivolous

old lawyer and a fashionable girl. We can say nothing about what makes

these scenes, except that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that

here the wind blows strong.

It is in this quality of what may be called spiritual adventurousness

that Scott stands at so different an elevation to the whole of the

contemporary crop of romancers who have followed the leadership of

Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great and inspiriting revival of

romance in our time, but it is partly frustrated in almost every case by

this rooted conception that romance consists in the vast multiplication

of incidents and the violent acceleration of narrative. The heroes of

Mr. Stanley Weyman scarcely ever have their swords out of their hands;

the deeper presence of romance is far better felt when the sword is at

the hip ready for innumerable adventures too terrible to be pictured.

The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to eat his supper except in

the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other hand is employed in

lunging with a rapier. In Scott’s heroes, on the other hand, there is no

characteristic so typical or so worthy of humour as their disposition to

linger over their meals. The conviviality of the Clerk of Copmanhurst

or of Mr. Pleydell, and the thoroughly solid things they are described

as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott’s poetic touches. In

short, Mr. Stanley Weyman is filled with the conviction that the sole

essence of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity from incident to

incident. In the truer romance of Scott there is more of the sentiment

of “Oh! still delay, thou art so fair”! more of a certain patriarchal

enjoyment of things as they are—of the sword by the side and the

wine-cup in the hand. Romance, indeed, does not consist by any means so

much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them. How little

the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison to tools and weapons

may be tested by the fact that the most popular story of adventure is

concerned with a man who lived for years on a desert island with two

guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.

Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought

against Scott, particularly in his own day—the charge of a fanciful

and monotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The

critic in the Edinburgh Review said indignantly that he could tolerate

a somewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when it

came to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages and

yeomen the mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said about

that critic is that he had never been a little boy. He foolishly

imagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of Marmion for Marmion’s

sake. Not being himself romantic, he could not understand that Scott

valued the plume because it was a plume, and the dagger because it was a

dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons with a manual materialistic love,

as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of the

profound philosophical truths which are almost confined to infants is

this love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their own

inherent characteristics, the child’s love of the toughness of wood, the

wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was with

Scott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were perhaps

the principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not the

only characters. A battle-axe was a person of importance, a castle had a

character and ways of its own. A church bell had a word to say in the

matter. Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between the

animate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by a

menial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurably

fascinating—it was a two-handed sword.

There is one quality which is supreme and continuous in Scott which is

little appreciated at present. One of the values we have really lost in

recent fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist is

compounded of almost every man except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and

Scott are certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literature

had failed, have earned a living as professional demagogues. The feudal

heroes in the “Waverley Novels” retort upon each other with a passionate

dignity, haughty and yet singularly human, which can hardly be

paralleled in political eloquence except in “Julius Cæsar.” With a

certain fiery impartiality which stirs the blood, Scott distributes his

noble orations equally among saints and villains. He may deny a villain

every virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling

word; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one of

Scott’s most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity,

for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revolting

miscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own hero. Though

his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a king.

This quality, as I have said, is sadly to seek in the fiction of the

passing hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea of

putting a bold and brilliant tongue in every man’s head, but even where

the moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems

frozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the

scene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then

compare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing

bore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy’s declaration of himself,

or Athelstane’s defiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion

upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just

now at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulating

ourselves because we can see the mud and the monsters at the bottom.

In politics there is not a single man whose position is due to eloquence

in the first degree; its place is taken by repartees and rejoinders

purely intellectual, like those of an omnibus conductor. In discussing

questions like the farm-burning in South Africa no critic of the war

uses his material as Burke or Grattan (perhaps exaggeratively) would

have used it—the speaker is content with facts and expositions of

facts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that great song in

prose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilies

hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain: “Ride your ways. Laird

of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram—this day have ye

quenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlour

burns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar

houses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may

stable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the hare

does not couch on the hearthstane of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey

Bertram.”

The reason is, of course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scott

was not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just

as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object

of all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men’s souls,

to fall just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously have

any chance with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside

it. It is quite right to invent subtle analyses and detached criticisms,

but it is unreasonable to expect them to be punctuated with roars of

popular applause. It is possible to conceive of a mob shouting any

central and simple sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible to think

of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In the matter of eloquence,

the whole question is one of the immediate effect of greatness, such as

is produced even by fine bombast. It is absurd to call it merely

superficial; here there is no question of superficiality; we might as

well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merely superficial.

The very word “superficial” is founded on a fundamental mistake about

life, the idea that second thoughts are best. The superficial impression

of the world is by far the deepest. What we really feel, naturally and

casually, about the look of skies and trees and the face of friends,

that and that alone will almost certainly remain our vital philosophy to

our dying day.

Scott’s bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone who

approaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child.

We could easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiring

melodramas and adventure stories, and Punch and Judy, if he would admit

that it was a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibilities. Beyond

all question, it marks a lack of literary instinct to be unable to

simplify one’s mind at the first signal of the advance of romance. “You

do me wrong,” said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca. “Many a law, many

a commandment have I broken, but my word, never.” “Die,” cries Balfour

of Burley to the villain in “Old Mortality.” “Die, hoping nothing,

believing nothing—” “And fearing nothing,” replies the other. This is

the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by the

great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes along

with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with

children or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves,

and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly

effected.

Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fiction

by this quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work of

the modern novelist (such as the work of Mr. Henry James) is primarily

concerned with that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeper

and deeper like a mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech which

mounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration.

Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is

Mr. Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play of “Candida” it is clearly a

part of the character of the Socialist clergyman that he should be

eloquent, but he is not eloquent because the whole “G.B.S.” condition of

mind renders impossible that poetic simplicity which eloquence requires.

Scott takes his heroes and villains seriously, which is, after all, the

way that heroes and villains take themselves—especially villains. It is

the custom to call these old romantic poses artificial; but the word

artificial is the last and silliest evasion of criticism. There was

never anything in the world that was really artificial. It had some

motive or ideal behind it, and generally a much better one than we

think.

Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is not very necessary to speak,

for faults are generally and easily pointed out, while there is yet no

adequate valuation of the varieties and contrasts of virtue. We have

compiled a complete botanical classification of the weeds in the

poetical garden, but the flowers still flourish, neglected and nameless.

It is true, for example, that Scott had an incomparably stiff and

pedantic way of dealing with his heroines: he made a lively girl of

eighteen refuse an offer in the language of Dr. Johnson. To him, as to

most men of his time, woman was not an individual, but an institution—a

toast that was drunk some time after that of Church and King. But it is

far better to consider the difference rather as a special merit, in that

he stood for all those clean and bracing shocks of incident which are

untouched by passion or weakness, for a certain breezy bachelorhood,

which is almost essential to the literature of adventure. With all his

faults, and all his triumphs, he stands for the great mass of natural

manliness which must be absorbed into art unless art is to be a mere

luxury and freak. An appreciation of Scott might be made almost a test

of decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one most reckless and

defective writer, it will be a proof to us that we have erected round

ourselves a false cosmos, a world of lying and horrible perfection,

leaving outside of it Walter Scott and that strange old world which is

as confused and as indefensible and as inspiring and as healthy as he.

BRET HARTE

There are more than nine hundred and ninety-nine excellent reasons

which we could all have for admiring the work of Bret Harte. But one

supreme reason stands not in a certain general superiority to them

all—a reason which may be stated in three propositions united in a

common conclusion: first, that he was a genuine American; second, that

he was a genuine humourist; and, third, that he was not an American

humourist. Bret Harte had his own peculiar humour, but it had nothing in

particular to do with American humour. American humour has its own

peculiar excellence, but it has nothing in particular to do with Bret

Harte. American humour is purely exaggerative; Bret Harte’s humour was

sympathetic and analytical.

In order fully to understand this, it is necessary to realise, genuinely

and thoroughly, that there is such a thing as an international

difference in humour. If we take the crudest joke in the world—the

joke, let us say, of a man sitting down on his hat—we shall yet find

that all the nations would differ in their way of treating it

humourously, and that if American humour treated it at all, it would be

in a purely American manner. For example, there was a case of an orator

in the House of Commons, who, after denouncing all the public abuses he

could think of, did sit down on his hat. An Irishman immediately rose,

full of the whole wealth of Irish humour, and said, “Should I be in

order, Sir, in congratulating the honourable gentleman on the fact that

when he sat down on his hat his head was not in it?” Here is a glorious

example of Irish humour—the bull not unconscious, not entirely

conscious, but rather an idea so absurd that even the utterer of it can

hardly realise how abysmally absurd it is. But every other nation would

have treated the idea in a manner slightly different. The Frenchman’s

humour would have been logical: he would have said, “The orator

denounces modern abuses and destroys to himself the top-hat: behold a

good example!” What the Scotchman’s humour would have said I am not so

certain, but it would probably have dealt with the serious advisability

of making such speeches on top of someone else’s hat. But American

humour on such a general theme would be the humour of exaggeration. The

American humourist would say that the English politicians so often sat

down on their hats that the noise of the House of Commons was one

crackle of silk. He would say that when an important orator rose to

speak in the House of Commons, long rows of hatters waited outside the

House with note-books to take down orders from the participants in the

debate. He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised

by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the

subject of the imports of Jamaica. In short, American humour, neither

unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and

appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of

realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination.

It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of

heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.

With this distinctively American humour Bret Harte had little or nothing

in common. The wild, sky-breaking humour of America has its fine

qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two

qualities, not only of supreme importance to life and letters, but of

supreme importance to humour—reverence and sympathy. And these two

qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte’s humour.

Everyone who has read and enjoyed Mark Twain as he ought to be read and

enjoyed will remember a very funny and irreverent story about an

organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the

parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded to play with great

spirit, “We’ll all get blind drunk, when Johnny comes marching home.”

The best way of distinguishing Bret Harte from the rest of American

humour is to say that if Bret Harte had described that scene, it would

in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the

incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the theme. You

would have felt that the organist’s tune was funny, but not that the

Prodigal Son was funny. But America is under a kind of despotism of

humour. Everyone is afraid of humour: the meanest of human nightmares.

Bret Harte had, to express the matter briefly but more or less

essentially, the power of laughing not only at things, but also with

them. America has laughed at things magnificently, with Gargantuan

reverberations of laughter. But she has not even begun to learn the

richer lesson of laughing with them.

The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of

reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist.

This may have the appearance of being a paradox, but, as in the case of

many other paradoxes, it is not so important whether it is a paradox as

whether it is not obviously true. Mere derision, mere contempt, never

produced or could produce parody. A man who simply despises Paderewski

for having long hair is not necessarily fitted to give an admirable

imitation of his particular touch on the piano. If a man wishes to

parody Paderewski’s style of execution, he must emphatically go through

one process first: he must admire it, and even reverence it. Bret Harte

had a real power of imitating great authors, as in his parodies on

Dumas, on Victor Hugo, on Charlotte Brontë. This means, and can only

mean, that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of Dumas

and Victor Hugo and Charlotte Brontë. To take an example, Bret Harte has

in his imitation of Hugo a passage like this:

“M. Madeline was, if possible, better than M. Myriel. M. Myriel was an

angel. M. Madeline was a good man.” I do not know whether Victor Hugo

ever used this antithesis; but I am certain that he would have used it

and thanked his stars if he had thought of it. This is real parody,

inseparable from admiration. It is the same in the parody of Dumas,

which is arranged on the system of “Aramis killed three of them. Porthos

three. Athos three.” You cannot write that kind of thing unless you

have first exulted in the arithmetical ingenuity of the plots of Dumas.

It is the same in the parody of Charlotte Brontë, which opens with a

dream of a storm-beaten cliff, containing jewels and pelicans. Bret

Harte could not have written it unless he had really understood the

triumph of the Brontës, the triumph of asserting that great mysteries

lie under the surface of the most sullen life, and that the most real

part of a man is in his dreams.

This kind of parody is for ever removed from the purview of ordinary

American humour. Can anyone imagine Mark Twain, that admirable author,

writing even a tolerable imitation of authors so intellectually

individual as Hugo or Charlotte Brontë? Mark Twain would yield to the

spirit of contempt which destroys parody. All those who hate authors

fail to satirise them, for they always accuse them of the wrong faults.

The enemies of Thackeray call him a worldling, instead of what he was, a

man too ready to believe in the goodness of the unworldly. The enemies

of Meredith call his gospel too subtle, instead of what it is, a

gospel, if anything, too robust. And it is this vulgar misunderstanding

which we find in most parody—which we find in all American parody—but

which we never find in the parodies of Bret Harte.

“The skies they were ashen and sober,

The streets they were dirty and drear,

It was the dark month of October,

In that most immemorial year.

Like the skies, I was perfectly sober,

But my thoughts they were palsied and sear,

Yes, my thoughts were decidedly queer.”

This could only be written by a genuine admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, who

permitted himself for a moment to see the fun of the thing. Parody might

indeed be defined as the worshipper’s half-holiday.

The same general characteristic of sympathy amounting to reverence marks

Bret Harte’s humour in his better-known class of works, the short

stories. He does not make his characters absurd in order to make them

contemptible: it might almost be said that he makes them absurd in order

to make them dignified. For example, the greatest creation of Bret

Harte, greater even than Colonel Starbottle (and how terrible it is to

speak of anyone greater than Colonel Starbottle!) is that unutterable

being who goes by the name of Yuba Bill. He is, of course, the

coach-driver in the Bret Harte district. Some ingenious person, whose

remarks I read the other day, had compared him on this ground with old

Mr. Weller. It would be difficult to find a comparison indicating a more

completely futile instinct for literature. Tony Weller and Yuba Bill

were both coach-drivers, and this fact establishes a resemblance just

about as much as the fact that Jobson in “Rob Roy” and George Warrington

in “Pendennis” were both lawyers; or that Antonio and Mr. Pickwick were

both merchants; or that Sir Galahad and Sir Willoughby Patten were both

knights. Tony Weller is a magnificent grotesque. He is a gargoyle, and

his mouth, like the mouths of so many gargoyles, is always open. He is

garrulous, exuberant, flowery, preposterously sociable. He holds that

great creed of the convivial, the creed which is at the back of so much

that is greatest in Dickens, the creed that eternity begins at ten

o’clock at night, and that nights last forever. But Yuba Bill is a

figure of a widely different character. He is not convivial; it might

almost be said that he is too great ever to be sociable. A circle of

quiescence and solitude such as that which might ring a saint or a

hermit rings this majestic and profound humourist. His jokes do not flow

upon him like those of Mr. Weller, sparkling, continual, and deliberate,

like the play of a fountain in a pleasure garden; they fall suddenly and

capriciously, like a crash of avalanches from a great mountain. Tony

Weller has the noisy humour of London, Yuba Bill has the silent humour

of the earth.

One of the worst of the disadvantages of the rich and random fertility

of Bret Harte is the fact that it is very difficult to trace or recover

all the stories that he has written. I have not within reach at the

moment the story in which the character of Yuba Bill is exhibited in its

most solemn grandeur, but I remember that it concerned a ride on the

San Francisco stage coach, a difficulty arising from storm and darkness,

and an intelligent young man who suggested to Yuba Bill that a certain

manner of driving the coach in a certain direction might minimise the

dangers of the journey. A profound silence followed the intelligent

young man’s suggestion, and then (I quote from memory) Yuba Bill

observed at last:

“Air you settin’ any value on that remark?”

The young man professed not fully to comprehend him, and Yuba Bill

continued reflectively:

“‘Cos there’s a comic paper in ‘Frisco pays for them things, and I’ve

seen worse in it.”

To be rebuked thus is like being rebuked by the Pyramids or by the

starry heavens. There is about Yuba Bill this air of a pugnacious calm,

a stepping back to get his distance for a shattering blow, which is like

that of Dr. Johnson at his best. And the effect is inexpressively

increased by the background and the whole picture which Bret Harte

paints so powerfully; the stormy skies, the sombre gorge, the rocking

and spinning coach, and high above the feverish passengers the huge

dark form of Yuba Bill, a silent mountain of humour.

Another unrecovered and possibly irrecoverable fragment about Yuba Bill,

I recall in a story about his visiting a lad who had once been his

protége in the Wild West, and who had since become a distinguished

literary man in Boston. Yuba Bill visits him, and on finding him in

evening dress lifts up his voice in a superb lamentation over the

tragedy of finding his old friend at last “a ‘otel waiter.” Then,

vindictively pursuing the satire, he calls fiercely to his young friend,

“Hi, Alphonse! bring me a patty de foy gras, damme.” These are the

things that make us love the eminent Bill. He is one of those who

achieve the noblest and most difficult of all the triumphs of a

fictitious character—the triumph of giving us the impression of having

a great deal more in him than appears between the two boards of the

story. Smaller characters give us the impression that the author has

told the whole truth about them, greater characters give the impression

that the author has given of them, not the truth, but merely a few hints

and samples. In some mysterious way we seem to feel that even if

Shakespeare was wrong about Falstaff, Falstaff existed and was real;

that even if Dickens was wrong about Micawber, Micawber existed and was

real. So we feel that there is in the great salt-sea of Yuba Bill’s

humour as good fish as ever came out of it. The fleeting jests which

Yuba Bill throws to the coach passengers only give us the opportunity of

fancying and deducing the vast mass of jests which Yuba Bill shares with

his creator.

Bret Harte had to deal with countries and communities of an almost

unexampled laxity, a laxity passing the laxity of savages, the laxity of

civilised men grown savage. He dealt with a life which we in a venerable

and historic society may find it somewhat difficult to realise. It was

the life of an entirely new people, a people who, having no certain

past, could have no certain future. The strangest of all the sardonic

jests that history has ever played may be found in this fact: that

there is a city which is of all cities the most typical of innovation

and dissipation, and a certain almost splendid vulgarity, and that this

city bears the name in a quaint old European language of the most

perfect exponent of the simplicity and holiness of the Christian

tradition; the city is called San Francisco. San Francisco, the capital

of the Bret Harte country, is a city typifying novelty in a manner in

which it is typified by few modern localities. San Francisco has in all

probability its cathedrals, but it may well be that its cathedrals are

less old and less traditional than many of our hotels. If its

inhabitants built a temple to the most primal and forgotten god of whose

worship we can find a trace, that temple would still be a modern thing

compared with many taverns in Suffolk round which there lingers a faint

tradition of Mr. Pickwick. And everything in that new gold country was

new, even to the individual inhabitants. Good, bad, and indifferent,

heroes and dastards, they were all men from nowhere.

Most of us have come across the practical problem of London landladies,

the problem of the doubtful foreign gentleman in a street of respectable

English people. Those who have done so can form some idea of what it

would be to live in a street full of doubtful foreign gentlemen, in a

parish, in a city, in a nation composed entirely of doubtful foreign

gentlemen. Old California, at the time of the first rush after gold, was

actually this paradox of the nation of foreigners. It was a republic of

incognitos: no one knew who anyone else was, and only the more

ill-mannered and uneasy even desired to know. In such a country as this,

gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their gentility than thieves

living in South Kensington would take to conceal their blackguardism. In

such a country everyone is an equal, because everyone is a stranger. In

such a country it is not strange if men in moral matters feel something

of the irresponsibility of a dream. To plan plans which are continually

miscarrying against men who are continually disappearing by the

assistance of you know not whom, to crush you know not whom, this must

be a demoralising life for any man; it must be beyond description

demoralising for those who have been trained in no lofty or orderly

scheme of right. Small blame to them indeed if they become callous and

supercilious and cynical. And the great glory and achievement of Bret

Harte consists in this, that he realised that they do not become

callous, supercilious, and cynical, but that they do become sentimental

and romantic, and profoundly affectionate. He discovered the intense

sensibility of the primitive man. To him we owe the realisation of the

fact that while modern barbarians of genius like Mr. Henley, and in his

weaker moments Mr. Rudyard Kipling, delight in describing the coarseness

and crude cynicism and fierce humour of the unlettered classes, the

unlettered classes are in reality highly sentimental and religious, and

not in the least like the creations of Mr. Henley and Mr. Kipling. Bret

Harte tells the truth about the wildest, the grossest, the most

rapacious of all the districts of the earth—the truth that, while it is

very rare indeed in the world to find a thoroughly good man, it is

rarer still, rare to the point of monstrosity, to find a man who does

not either desire to be one, or imagine that he is one already.

ALFRED THE GREAT

The celebrations in connection with the millenary of King Alfred struck

a note of sympathy in the midst of much that was unsympathetic, because,

altogether apart from any peculiar historical opinions, all men feel the

sanctifying character of that which is at once strong and remote; the

ancient thing is always the most homely, and the distant thing the most

near. The only possible peacemaker is a dead man, ever since by the

sublime religious story a dead man only could reconcile heaven and

earth. In a certain sense we always feel the past ages as human, and our

own age as strangely and even weirdly dehumanised. In our own time the

details overpower us; men’s badges and buttons seem to grow larger and

larger as in a horrible dream. To study humanity in the present is like

studying a mountain with a magnifying glass; to study it in the past is

like studying it through a telescope.

For this reason England, like every other great and historic nation, has

sought its typical hero in remote and ill-recorded times. The personal

and moral greatness of Alfred is, indeed, beyond question. It does not

depend any more than the greatness of any other human hero upon the

accuracy of any or all of the stories that are told about him. Alfred

may not have done one of the things which are reported of him, but it is

immeasurably easier to do every one of those things than to be the man

of whom such things are reported falsely. Fable is, generally speaking,

far more accurate than fact, for fable describes a man as he was to his

own age, fact describes him as he is to a handful of inconsiderable

antiquarians many centuries after. Whether Alfred watched the cakes for

the neat-herd’s wife, whether he sang songs in the Danish camp, is of no

interest to anyone except those who set out to prove under considerable

disadvantages that they are genealogically descended from him. But the

man is better pictured in these stories than in any number of modern

realistic trivialities about his favourite breakfast and his favourite

musical composer. Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells

us about one man and fable tells us about a million men. If we read of a

man who could make green grass red and turn the sun into the moon, we

may not believe these particular details about him, but we learn

something infinitely more important than such trivialities, the fact

that men could look into his face and believe it possible. The glory and

greatness of Alfred, therefore, is like that of all the heroes of the

morning of the world, set far beyond the chance of that strange and

sudden dethronement which may arise from the unsealing of a manuscript

or the turning over of a stone. Men may have told lies when they said

that he first entrapped the Danes with his song and then overcame them

with his armies, but we know very well that it is not of us that such

lies are told. There may be myths clustering about each of our

personalities; local saga-men and chroniclers have very likely

circulated the story that we are addicted to drink, or that we

ferociously ill-use our wives. But they do not commonly lie to the

effect that we have shed our blood to save all the inhabitants of the

street. A story grows easily, but a heroic story is not a very easy

thing to evoke. Wherever that exists we may be pretty certain that we

are in the presence of a dark but powerful historic personality. We are

in the presence of a thousand lies all pointing with their fantastic

fingers to one undiscovered truth.

Upon this ground alone every encouragement is due to the cult of Alfred.

Every nation requires to have behind it some historic personality, the

validity of which is proved, as the validity of a gun is proved, by its

long range. It is wonderful and splendid that we treasure, not the

truth, but the very gossip about a man who died a thousand years ago. We

may say to him, as M. Rostand says to the Austrian Prince:

“Dors, ce n’est pas toujours la Légende qui ment:

Une rêve est parfois moins trompeur qu’un document.”

To have a man so simple and so honourable to represent us in the

darkness of primeval history, binds all the intervening centuries

together, and mollifies all their monstrosities. It makes all history

more comforting and intelligible; it makes the desolate temple of the

ages as human as an inn parlour.

But whether it come through reliable facts or through more reliable

falsehoods the personality of Alfred has its own unmistakable colour and

stature. Lord Rosebery uttered a profound truth when he said that that

personality was peculiarly English. The great magnificence of the

English character is expressed in the word “service.” There is, perhaps,

no nation so vitally theocratical as the English; no nation in which the

strong men have so consistently preferred the instrumental to the

despotic attitude, the pleasures of the loyal to the pleasures of the

royal position. We have had tyrants like Edward I. and Queen Elizabeth,

but even our tyrants have had the worried and responsible air of

stewards of a great estate. Our typical hero is such a man as the Duke

of Wellington, who had every kind of traditional and external arrogance,

but at the back of all that the strange humility which made it

physically possible for him without a gleam of humour or discomfort to

go on his knees to a preposterous bounder like George IV. Across the

infinite wastes of time and through all the mists of legend we still

feel the presence in Alfred of this strange and unconscious

self-effacement. After the fullest estimate of our misdeeds we can still

say that our very despots have been less self-assertive than many

popular patriots. As we consider these things we grow more and more

impatient of any modern tendencies towards the enthronement of a more

self-conscious and theatrical ideal. Lord Rosebery called up before our

imaginations the picture of what Alfred would have thought of the vast

modern developments of his nation, its immense fleet, its widespread

Empire, its enormous contribution to the mechanical civilisation of the

world. It cannot be anything but profitable to conceive Alfred as full

of astonishment and admiration at these things; it cannot be anything

but good for us that we should realise that to the childlike eyes of a

great man of old time our inventions and appliances have not the

vulgarity and ugliness that we see in them. To Alfred a steamboat would

be a new and sensational sea-dragon, and the penny postage a miracle

achieved by the despotism of a demi-god.

But when we have realised all this there is something more to be said in

connection with Lord Rosebery’s vision. What would King Alfred have said

if he had been asked to expend the money which he devoted to the health

and education of his people upon a struggle with some race of Visigoths

or Parthians inhabiting a small section of a distant continent? What

would he have said if he had known that that science of letters which he

taught to England would eventually be used not to spread truth, but to

drug the people with political assurances as imbecile in themselves as

the assurance that fire does not burn and water does not drown? What

would he have said if the same people who, in obedience to that ideal of

service and sanity of which he was the example, had borne every

privation in order to defeat Napoleon, should come at last to find no

better compliment to one of their heroes than to call him the Napoleon

of South Africa? What would he have said if that nation for which he had

inaugurated a long line of incomparable men of principle should forget

all its traditions and coquette with the immoral mysticism of the man of

destiny?

Let us follow these things by all means if we find them good, and can

see nothing better. But to pretend that Alfred would have admired them

is like pretending that St. Dominic would have seen eye to eye with Mr.

Bradlaugh, or that Fra Angelico would have revelled in the posters of

Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. Let us follow them if we will, but let us take

honestly all the disadvantages of our change; in the wildest moment of

triumph let us feel the shadow upon our glories of the shame of the

great king.

MAETERLINCK

The selection of “Thoughts from Maeterlinck” is a very creditable and

also a very useful compilation. Many modern critics object to the

hacking and hewing of a consistent writer which is necessary for this

kind of work, but upon more serious consideration, the view is not

altogether adequate. Maeterlinck is a very great man; and in the long

run this process of mutilation has happened to all great men. It was the

mark of a great patriot to be drawn and quartered and his head set on

one spike in one city and his left leg on another spike in another city.

It was the mark of a saint that even these fragments began to work

miracles. So it has been with all the very great men of the world.

However careless, however botchy, may be the version of Maeterlinck or

of anyone else given in such a selection as this, it is assuredly far

less careless and far less botchy than the version, the parody, the

wild misrepresentation of Maeterlinck which future ages will hear and

distant critics be called upon to consider.

No one can feel any reasonable doubt that we have heard about Christ and

Socrates and Buddha and St. Francis a mere chaos of excerpts, a mere

book of quotations. But from those fragmentary epigrams we can deduce

greatness as clearly as we can deduce Venus from the torso of Venus or

Hercules ex pede Herculem. If we knew nothing else about the Founder

of Christianity, for example, beyond the fact that a religious teacher

lived in a remote country, and in the course of his peregrinations and

proclamations consistently called Himself “the Son of Man,” we should

know by that alone that he was a man of almost immeasurable greatness.

If future ages happened to record nothing else about Socrates except

that he owned his title to be the wisest of men because he knew that he

knew nothing, they would be able to deduce from that the height and

energy of his civilisation, the glory that was Greece. The credit of

such random compilations as that which “E.S.S.” and Mr. George Allen

have just effected is quite secure. It is the pure, pedantic, literal

editions, the complete works of this author or that author which are

forgotten. It is such books as this that have revolutionised the destiny

of the world. Great things like Christianity or Platonism have never

been founded upon consistent editions; all of them have been founded

upon scrap-books.

The position of Maeterlinck in modern life is a thing too obvious to be

easily determined in words. It is, perhaps, best expressed by saying

that it is the great glorification of the inside of things at the

expense of the outside. There is one great evil in modern life for which

nobody has found even approximately a tolerable description: I can only

invent a word and call it “remotism.” It is the tendency to think first

of things which, as a matter of fact, lie far away from the actual

centre of human experience. Thus people say, “All our knowledge of life

begins with the amoeba.” It is false; our knowledge of life begins with

ourselves. Thus they say that the British Empire is glorious, and at the

very word Empire they think at once of Australia and New Zealand, and

Canada, and Polar bears, and parrots and kangaroos, and it never occurs

to any one of them to think of the Surrey Hills. The one real struggle

in modern life is the struggle between the man like Maeterlinck, who

sees the inside as the truth, and the man like Zola, who sees the

outside as the truth. A hundred cases might be given. We may take, for

the sake of argument, the case of what is called falling in love. The

sincere realist, the man who believes in a certain finality in physical

science, says, “You may, if you like, describe this thing as a divine

and sacred and incredible vision; that is your sentimental theory about

it. But what it is, is an animal and sexual instinct designed for

certain natural purposes.” The man on the other side, the idealist,

replies, with quite equal confidence, that this is the very reverse of

the truth. I put it as it has always struck me; he replies, “Not at all.

You may, if you like, describe this thing as an animal and sexual

instinct, designed for certain natural purposes; that is your

philosophical or zoölogical theory about it. What it is, beyond all

doubt of any kind, is a divine and sacred and incredible vision.” The

fact that it is an animal necessity only comes to the naturalistic

philosopher after looking abroad, studying its origins and results,

constructing an explanation of its existence, more or less natural and

conclusive. The fact that it is a spiritual triumph comes to the first

errand boy who happens to feel it. If a lad of seventeen falls in love

and is struck dead by a hansom cab an hour afterwards, he has known the

thing as it is, a spiritual ecstasy; he has never come to trouble about

the thing as it may be, a physical destiny. If anyone says that falling

in love is an animal thing, the answer is very simple. The only way of

testing the matter is to ask those who are experiencing it, and none of

those would admit for a moment that it was an animal thing.

Maeterlinck’s appearance in Europe means primarily this subjective

intensity; by this the materialism is not overthrown: materialism is

undermined. He brings, not something which is more poetic than realism,

not something which is more spiritual than realism, not something which

is more right than realism, but something which is more real than

realism. He discovers the one indestructible thing. This material world

on which such vast systems have been superimposed—this may mean

anything. It may be a dream, it may be a joke, it may be a trap or

temptation, it may be a charade, it may be the beatific vision: the only

thing of which we are certain is this human soul. This human soul finds

itself alone in a terrible world, afraid of the grass. It has brought

forth poetry and religion in order to explain matters; it will bring

them forth again. It matters not one atom how often the lulls of

materialism and scepticism occur; they are always broken by the

reappearance of a fanatic. They have come in our time: they have been

broken by Maeterlinck.

RUSKIN[2]

I do not think anyone could find any fault with the way in which Mr.

Collingwood has discharged his task, except, of course, Mr. Ruskin

himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies in

passionate red ink and declared that his dear friend had selected for

admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless, and

revolting. That, however, was merely Ruskin’s humour, and one of the

deepest disappointments with Mr. Collingwood is that he, like everyone

else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humourist. Yet he was a great

humourist: half the explosions which are solemnly scolded as “one-sided”

were simply meant to be one-sided, were mere laughing experiments in

language. Like a woman, he saw the humour of his own prejudices, did not

sophisticate them by logic, but deliberately exaggerated them by

rhetoric. One tenth of his paradoxes would have made the fortune of a

modern young man with gloves of an art yellow. He was as fond of

nonsense as Mr. Max Beerbohm. Only … he was fond of other things too.

He did not ask humanity to dine on pickles.

But while his kaleidoscope of fancy and epigram gives him some kinship

with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type: he was the

last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early

Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit

above the head of his fellows. Many elements, good and bad, have

destroyed it; humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as

scepticism, have bred in us a desire to give our advice lightly and

persuasively, to mask our morality, to whisper a word and glide away.

The contrast was in some degree typified in the House of Commons under

the last leadership of Mr. Gladstone: the old order with its fist on the

box, and the new order with its feet on the table. Doubtless the wine of

that prophecy was too strong even for the strong heads that carried it.

It made Ruskin capricious and despotic, Tennyson lonely and whimsical,

Carlyle harsh to the point of hatred, and Kingsley often rabid to the

ruin of logic and charity. One alone of that race of giants, the

greatest and most neglected, was sober after the cup. No mission, no

frustration could touch with hysteria the humanity of Robert Browning.

But though Ruskin seems to close the roll of the militant prophets, we

feel how needful are such figures when we consider with what pathetic

eagerness men pay prophetic honours even to those who disclaim the

prophetic character. Ibsen declares that he only depicts life, that as

far as he is concerned there is nothing to be done, and still armies of

“Ibsenites” rally to the flag and enthusiastically do nothing. I have

found traces of a school which avowedly follows Mr. Henry James: an idea

full of humour. I like to think of a crowd with pikes and torches

shouting passages from “The Awkward Age.” It is right and proper for a

multitude to declare its readiness to follow a prophet to the end of the

world, but if he himself explains, with pathetic gesticulations, that

he is only going for a walk in the park, there is not much for the

multitude to do. But the disciple of Ruskin had plenty to do. He made

roads; in his spare moments he studied the whole of geology and botany.

He lifted up paving stones and got down into early Florentine cellars,

where, by hanging upside down, he could catch a glimpse of a Cimabue

unpraisable but by divine silence. He rushed from one end of a city to

the other comparing ceilings. His limbs were weary, his clothes were

torn, and in his eyes was that unfathomable joy of life which man will

never know again until once more he takes himself seriously.

Mr. Collingwood’s excellent chapters on the art criticism of Ruskin

would be better, in my opinion, if they showed more consciousness of the

after revolutions that have reversed, at least in detail, much of

Ruskin’s teaching. We no longer think that art became valueless when it

was first corrupted with anatomical accuracy. But if we return to that

Raphaelism to which he was so unjust, let us not fall into the old

error of intelligent reactionaries, that of ignoring our own debt to

revolutions. Ruskin could not destroy the market of Raphaelism, but he

could and did destroy its monopoly. We may go back to the Renaissance,

but let us remember that we go back free. We can picnic now in the ruins

of our dungeon and deride our deliverer.

But neither in Mr. Collingwood’s book nor in Ruskin’s own delightful

“Præterita” shall we ever get to the heart of the matter. The work of

Ruskin and his peers remains incomprehensible by the very completeness

of their victory. Fallen forever is that vast brick temple of

Utilitarianism, of which we may find the fragments but never renew the

spell. Liberal Unionists howl in its high places, and in its ruins Mr.

Lecky builds his nest. Its records read with something of the mysterious

arrogance of Chinese: hardly a generation away from us, we read of a

race who believed in the present with the same sort of servile optimism

with which the Oriental believes in the past. It may be that banging his

head against that roof for twenty years did not improve the temper of

the prophet. But he made what he praised in the old Italian

pictures—“an opening into eternity.”

FOOTNOTES:

[2] “The Life of John Ruskin.” By W.G. Collingwood. London: Methuen.

QUEEN VICTORIA

Anyone who possesses spiritual or political courage has made up his mind

to a prospect of immutable mutability; but even in a “transformation”

there is something catastrophic in the removal of the back scene. It is

a truism to say of the wise and noble lady who is gone from us that we

shall always remember her; but there is a subtler and higher compliment

still in confessing that we often forgot her. We forgot her as we forget

the sunshine, as we forget the postulates of an argument, as we commonly

forget our own existence. Mr. Gladstone is the only figure whose loss

prepared us for such earthquakes altering the landscape. But Mr.

Gladstone seemed a fixed and stationary object in our age for the same

reason that one railway train looks stationary from another; because he

and the age of progress were both travelling at the same impetuous rate

of speed. In the end, indeed, it was probably the age that dropped

behind. For a symbol of the Queen’s position we must rather recur to the

image of a stretch of scenery, in which she was as a mountain so huge

and familiar that its disappearance would make the landscape round our

own door seem like a land of strangers. She had an inspired genius for

the familiarising virtues; her sympathy and sanity made us feel at home

even in an age of revolutions. That indestructible sense of security

which for good and evil is so typical of our nation, that almost

scornful optimism which, in the matter of ourselves, cannot take peril

or even decadence seriously, reached by far its highest and healthiest

form in the sense that we were watched over by one so thoroughly English

in her silence and self-control, in her shrewd trustfulness and her

brilliant inaction. Over and above those sublime laws of labour and pity

by which she ordered her life, there are a very large number of minor

intellectual matters in which we might learn a lesson from the Queen.

There is one especially which is increasingly needed in an age when

moral claims become complicated and hysterical. That Queen Victoria was

a model of political unselfishness is well known; it is less often

remarked that few modern people have an unselfishness so completely free

from morbidity, so fully capable of deciding a moral question without

exaggerating its importance. No eminent person of our time has been so

utterly devoid of that disease of self-assertion which is often rampant

among the unselfish. She had one most rare and valuable faculty, the

faculty of letting things pass—Acts of Parliament and other things. Her

predecessors, whether honest men or knaves, were attacked every now and

then with a nightmare of despotic responsibility; they suddenly

conceived that it rested with them to save the world and the Protestant

Constitution. Queen Victoria had far too much faith in the world to try

to save it. She knew that Acts of Parliament, even bad Acts of

Parliament, do not destroy nations. But she knew that ignorance,

ill-temper, tyranny, and officiousness do destroy nations, and not upon

any provocation would she set an example in these things. We fancy that

this sense of proportion, this largeness and coolness of intellectual

magnanimity is the one of the thousand virtues of Queen Victoria of

which the near future will stand most in need. We are gaining many new

mental powers, and with them new mental responsibilities. In psychology,

in sociology, above all in education, we are learning to do a great many

clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be

to learn not to do them. If that time comes, assuredly we cannot do

better than turn once more to the memory of the great Queen who for

seventy years followed through every possible tangle and distraction the

fairy thread of common sense.

We are suffering just now from an outbreak of the imagination which

exhibits itself in politics and the most unlikely places. The German

Emperor, for example, is neither a tyrant nor a lunatic, as used to be

absurdly represented; he is simply a minor poet; and he feels just as

any minor poet would feel if he found himself on the throne of

Barbarossa. The revival of militarism and ecclesiasticism is an invasion

of politics by the artistic sense; it is heraldry rather than chivalry

that is lusted after. Amid all this waving of wands and flaunting of

uniforms, all this hedonistic desire to make the most of everything,

there is something altogether quiet and splendid about the sober disdain

with which this simple and courteous lady in a black dress left idle

beside her the sceptre of a hundred tyrants. The heart of the whole

nation warmed as it had never warmed for centuries at the thought of

having in their midst a woman who cared nothing for her rights, and

nothing for those fantastic duties which are more egotistical than

rights themselves.

The work of the Queen for progressive politics has surely been greatly

underrated. She invented democratic monarchy as much as James Watt

invented the steam engine. William IV., from whom we think of her as

inheriting her Constitutional position, held in fact a position entirely

different to that which she now hands on to Edward VII. William IV. was

a limited monarch; that is to say, he had a definite, open, and

admitted power in politics, but it was a limited power. Queen Victoria

was not a limited monarch; in the only way in which she cared to be a

monarch at all she was as unlimited as Haroun Alraschid. She had

unlimited willing obedience, and unlimited social supremacy. To her

belongs the credit of inventing a new kind of monarchy; in which the

Crown, by relinquishing the whole of that political and legal department

of life which is concerned with coercion, regimentation, and punishment,

was enabled to rise above it and become the symbol of the sweeter and

purer relations of humanity, the social intercourse which leads and does

not drive. Too much cannot be said for the wise audacity and confident

completeness with which the Queen cut away all those cords of political

supremacy to which her predecessors had clung madly as the only stays of

the monarchy. She had her reward. For while William IV.’s supremacy may

be called a survival, it is not too much to say that the Queen’s

supremacy might be called a prophecy. By lifting a figure purely human

over the heads of judges and warriors, we uttered in some symbolic

fashion the abiding, if unreasoning, hope which dwells in all human

hearts, that some day we may find a simpler solution of the woes of

nations than the summons and the treadmill, that we may find in some

such influence as the social influence of a woman, what was called in

the noble old language of mediæval monarchy, “a fountain of mercy and a

fountain of honour.”

In the universal reverence paid to the Queen there was hardly anywhere a

touch of snobbishness. Snobbishness, in so far as it went out towards

former sovereigns, went out to them as aristocrats rather than as kings,

as heads of that higher order of men, who were almost angels or demons

in their admitted superiority to common lines of conduct. This kind of

reverence was always a curse: nothing can be conceived as worse for the

mass of the people than that they should think the morality for which

they have to struggle an inferior morality, a thing unfitted for a

haughtier class. But of this patrician element there was hardly a trace

in the dignity of the Queen. Indeed, the degree to which the middle and

lower classes took her troubles and problems to their hearts was almost

grotesque in its familiarity. No one thought of the Queen as an

aristocrat like the Duke of Devonshire, or even as a member of the

governing classes like Mr. Chamberlain. Men thought of her as something

nearer to them even in being further off; as one who was a good queen,

and who would have been, had her fate demanded, with equal cheerfulness,

a good washerwoman. Herein lay her unexampled triumph, the greatest and

perhaps the last triumph of monarchy. Monarchy in its healthiest days

had the same basis as democracy: the belief in human nature when

entrusted with power. A king was only the first citizen who received the

franchise.

Both royalty and religion have been accused of despising humanity, and

in practice it has been too often true; but after all both the

conception of the prophet and that of the king were formed by paying

humanity the supreme compliment of selecting from it almost at random.

This daring idea that a healthy human being, when thrilled by all the

trumpets of a great trust, would rise to the situation, has often been

tested, but never with such complete success as in the case of our dead

Queen. On her was piled the crushing load of a vast and mystical

tradition, and she stood up straight under it. Heralds proclaimed her as

the anointed of God, and it did not seem presumptuous. Brave men died in

thousands shouting her name, and it did not seem unnatural. No mere

intellect, no mere worldly success could, in this age of bold inquiry,

have sustained that tremendous claim; long ago we should have stricken

Cæsar and dethroned Napoleon. But these glories and these sacrifices did

not seem too much to celebrate a hardworking human nature; they were

possible because at the heart of our Empire was nothing but a defiant

humility. If the Queen had stood for any novel or fantastic imperial

claims, the whole would have seemed a nightmare; the whole was

successful because she stood, and no one could deny that she stood, for

the humblest, the shortest and the most indestructible of human gospels,

that when all troubles and troublemongers have had their say, our work

can be done till sunset, our life can be lived till death.

THE GERMAN EMPEROR

The list of the really serious, the really convinced, the really

important and comprehensible people now alive includes, as most

Englishmen would now be prepared to admit, the German Emperor. He is a

practical man and a poet. I do not know whether there are still people

in existence who think there is some kind of faint antithesis between

these two characters; but I incline to think there must be, because of

the surprise which the career of the German Emperor has generally

evoked. When he came to the throne it became at once apparent that he

was poetical; people assumed in consequence that he was unpractical;

that he would plunge Europe into war, that he would try to annex France,

that he would say he was the Emperor of Russia, that he would stand on

his head in the Reichstag, that he would become a pirate on the Spanish

Main. Years upon years have passed; he has gone on making speeches, he

has gone on talking about God and his sword, he has poured out an ever

increased rhetoric and æstheticism. And yet all the time people have

slowly and surely realised that he knows what he is about, that he is

one of the best friends of peace, that his influence on Europe is not

only successful, but in many ways good, that he knows what world he is

living in better than a score of materialists.

The explanation never comes to them—he is a poet; therefore, a

practical man. The affinity of the two words, merely as words, is much

nearer than many people suppose, for the matter of that. There is one

Greek word for “I do” from which we get the word practical, and another

Greek word for “I do” from which we get the word poet. I was doubtless

once informed of a profound difference between the two, but I have

forgotten it. The two words practical and poetical may mean two subtly

different things in that old and subtle language, but they mean the same

in English and the same in the long run. It is ridiculous to suppose

that the man who can understand the inmost intricacies of a human being

who has never existed at all cannot make a guess at the conduct of man

who lives next door. It is idle to say that a man who has himself felt

the mad longing under the mad moon for a vagabond life cannot know why

his son runs away to sea. It is idle to say that a man who has himself

felt the hunger for any kind of exhilaration, from angel or devil,

cannot know why his butler takes to drink. It is idle to say that a man

who has been fascinated with the wild fastidiousness of destiny does not

know why stockbrokers gamble, to say that a man who has been knocked

into the middle of eternal life by a face in a crowd does not know why

the poor marry young; that a man who found his path to all things kindly

and pleasant blackened and barred suddenly by the body of a man does not

know what it is to desire murder. It is idle, in short, for a man who

has created men to say that he does not understand them. A man who is a

poet may, of course, easily make mistakes in these personal and

practical relations; such mistakes and similar ones have been made by

poets; such mistakes and greater ones have been made by soldiers and

statesmen and men of business. But in so far as a poet is in these

things less of a practical man he is also less of a poet.

If Shakespeare really married a bad wife when he had conceived the

character of Beatrice he ought to have been ashamed of himself: he had

failed not only in his life, he had failed in his art. If Balzac got

into rows with his publishers he ought to be rebuked and not

commiserated, having evolved so many consistent business men from his

own inside. The German Emperor is a poet, and therefore he succeeds,

because poetry is so much nearer to reality than all the other human

occupations. He is a poet, and succeeds because the majority of men are

poets. It is true, if that matter is at all important, that the German

Emperor is not a good poet. The majority of men are poets, only they

happen to be bad poets. The German Emperor fails ridiculously, if that

is all that is in question, in almost every one of the artistic

occupations to which he addresses himself: he is neither a first-rate

critic, nor a first-rate musician, nor a first-rate painter, nor a

first-rate poet. He is a twelfth-rate poet, but because he is a poet at

all he knocks to pieces all the first-rate politicians in the war of

politics.

Having made clear my position so far, I discover with a certain amount

of interest that I have not yet got to the subject of these remarks. The

German Emperor is a poet, and although, as far as I know, every line he

ever wrote may be nonsense, he is a poet in this real sense, that he has

realised the meaning of every function he has performed. Why should we

jeer at him because he has a great many uniforms, for instance? The very

essence of the really imaginative man is that he realises the various

types or capacities in which he can appear. Every one of us, or almost

every one of us, does in reality fulfil almost as many offices as

Pooh-Bah. Almost every one of us is a ratepayer, an immortal soul, an

Englishman, a baptised person, a mammal, a minor poet, a juryman, a

married man, a bicyclist, a Christian, a purchaser of newspapers, and a

critic of Mr. Alfred Austin. We ought to have uniforms for all these

things. How beautiful it would be if we appeared to-morrow in the

uniform of a ratepayer, in brown and green, with buttons made in the

shape of coins, and a blue income-tax paper tastefully arranged as a

favour; or, again, if we appeared dressed as immortal souls, in a blue

uniform with stars. It would be very exciting to dress up as Englishmen,

or to go to a fancy dress ball as Christians.

Some of the costumes I have suggested might appear a little more

difficult to carry out. The dress of a person who purchases newspapers

(though it mostly consists of coloured evening editions arranged in a

stiff skirt, like that of a saltatrice, round the waist of the wearer)

has many mysterious points. The attire of a person prepared to criticise

the Poet Laureate is something so awful and striking that I dare not

even begin to describe it; the one fact which I am willing to reveal,

and to state seriously and responsibly, is that it buttons up behind.

But most assuredly we ought not to abuse the Kaiser because he is fond

of putting on all his uniforms; he does so because he has a large number

of established and involuntary incarnations. He tries to do his duty in

that state of life to which it shall please God to call him; and it so

happens that he has been called to as many different estates as there

are regiments in the German Army. He is a huntsman and proud of being a

huntsman, an engineer and proud of being an engineer, an infantry

soldier and proud of being so, a light horseman and proud of being so.

There is nothing wrong in all this; the only wrong thing is that it

should be confined to the merely destructive arts of war. The sight of

the German Kaiser in the most magnificent of the uniforms in which he

had led armies to victory is not in itself so splendid or delightful as

that of many other sights which might come before us without a whisper

of the alarms of war. It is not so splendid or delightful as the sight

of an ordinary householder showing himself in that magnificent uniform

of purple and silver which should signalise the father of three

children. It is not so splendid or delightful as the appearance of a

young clerk in an insurance office decorated with those three long

crimson plumes which are the well-known insignia of a gentleman who is

just engaged to be married. Nor can it compare with the look of a man

wearing the magnificent green and silver armour by which we know one who

has induced an acquaintance to give up getting drunk, or the blue and

gold which is only accorded to persons who have prevented fights in the

street. We belong to quite as many regiments as the German Kaiser. Our

regiments are regiments that are embattled everywhere; they fight an

unending fight against all that is hopeless and rapacious and of evil

report. The only difference is that we have the regiments, but not the

uniforms.

Only one obvious point occurs to me to add. If the Kaiser has more than

any other man the sense of the poetry of the ancient things, the sword,

the crown, the ship, the nation, he has the sense of the poetry of

modern things also. He has one sense, and it is even a joke against

him. He feels the poetry of one thing that is more poetic than sword or

crown or ship or nation, the poetry of the telegram. No one ever sent a

telegram who did not feel like a god. He is a god, for he is a minor

poet; a minor poet, but a poet still.

TENNYSON

Mr. Morton Luce has written a short study of Tennyson which has

considerable cultivation and suggestiveness, which will be sufficient to

serve as a notebook for Tennyson’s admirers, but scarcely sufficient,

perhaps, to serve as a pamphlet against his opponents. If a critic has,

as he ought to have, any of the functions anciently attributed to a

prophet, it ought not to be difficult for him to prophesy that Tennyson

will pass through a period of facile condemnation and neglect before we

arrive at the true appreciation of his work. The same thing has happened

to the most vigorous of essayists, Macaulay, and the most vigorous of

romancers, Dickens, because we live in a time when mere vigour is

considered a vulgar thing. The same idle and frigid reaction will almost

certainly discredit the stateliness and care of Tennyson, as it has

discredited the recklessness and inventiveness of Dickens. It is only

necessary to remember that no action can be discredited by a reaction.

The attempts which have been made to discredit the poetical position of

Tennyson are in the main dictated by an entire misunderstanding of the

nature of poetry. When critics like Matthew Arnold, for example, suggest

that his poetry is deficient in elaborate thought, they only prove, as

Matthew Arnold proved, that they themselves could never be great poets.

It is no valid accusation against a poet that the sentiment he expresses

is commonplace. Poetry is always commonplace; it is vulgar in the

noblest sense of that noble word. Unless a man can make the same kind of

ringing appeal to absolute and admitted sentiments that is made by a

popular orator, he has lost touch with emotional literature. Unless he

is to some extent a demagogue, he cannot be a poet. A man who expresses

in poetry new and strange and undiscovered emotions is not a poet; he is

a brain specialist. Tennyson can never be discredited before any serious

tribunal of criticism because the sentiments and thoughts to which he

dedicates himself are those sentiments and thoughts which occur to

anyone. These are the peculiar province of poetry; poetry, like

religion, is always a democratic thing, even if it pretends the

contrary. The faults of Tennyson, so far as they existed, were not half

so much in the common character of his sentiments as in the arrogant

perfection of his workmanship. He was not by any means so wrong in his

faults as he was in his perfections.

Men are very much too ready to speak of men’s work being ordinary, when

we consider that, properly considered, every man is extraordinary. The

average man is a tribal fable, like the Man-Wolf or the Wise Man of the

Stoics. In every man’s heart there is a revolution; how much more in

every poet’s? The supreme business of criticism is to discover that part

of a man’s work which is his and to ignore that part which belongs to

others. Why should any critic of poetry spend time and attention on that

part of a man’s work which is unpoetical? Why should any man be

interested in aspects which are uninteresting? The business of a critic

is to discover the importance of men and not their crimes. It is true

that the Greek word critic carries with it the meaning of a judge, and

up to this point of history judges have had to do with the valuation of

men’s sins, and not with the valuation of their virtues.

Tennyson’s work, disencumbered of all that uninteresting accretion which

he had inherited or copied, resolves itself, like that of any other man

of genius, into those things which he really inaugurated. Underneath all

his exterior of polished and polite rectitude there was in him a genuine

fire of novelty; only that, like all the able men of his period, he

disguised revolution under the name of evolution. He is only a very

shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the

Conservative.

Tennyson had certain absolutely personal ideas, as much his own as the

ideas of Browning or Meredith, though they were fewer in number. One of

these, for example, was the fact that he was the first of all poets (and

perhaps the last) to attempt to treat poetically that vast and monstrous

vision of fact which science had recently revealed to mankind.

Scientific discoveries seem commonly fables as fantastic in the ears of

poets as poems in the ears of men of science. The poet is always a

Ptolemaist; for him the sun still rises and the earth stands still.

Tennyson really worked the essence of modern science into his poetical

constitution, so that its appalling birds and frightful flowers were

really part of his literary imagery. To him blind and brutal monsters,

the products of the wild babyhood of the Universe, were as the daisies

and the nightingales were to Keats; he absolutely realised the great

literary paradox mentioned in the Book of Job: “He saw Behemoth, and he

played with him as with a bird.”

Instances of this would not be difficult to find. But the tests of

poetry are those instances in which this outrageous scientific

phraseology becomes natural and unconscious. Tennyson wrote one of his

own exquisite lyrics describing the exultation of a lover on the evening

before his bridal day. This would be an occasion, if ever there was one,

for falling back on those ancient and assured falsehoods of the domed

heaven and the flat earth in which generations of poets have made us

feel at home. We can imagine the poet in such a lyric saluting the

setting sun and prophesying the sun’s resurrection. There is something

extraordinarily typical of Tennyson’s scientific faith in the fact that

this, one of the most sentimental and elemental of his poems, opens with

the two lines:

“Move eastward, happy earth, and leave

Yon orange sunset waning slow.”

Rivers had often been commanded to flow by poets, and flowers to blossom

in their season, and both were doubtless grateful for the permission.

But the terrestrial globe of science has only twice, so far as we know,

been encouraged in poetry to continue its course, one instance being

that of this poem, and the other the incomparable “Address to the

Terrestrial Globe” in the “Bab Ballads.”

There was, again, another poetic element entirely peculiar to Tennyson,

which his critics have, in many cases, ridiculously confused with a

fault. This was the fact that Tennyson stood alone among modern poets

in the attempt to give a poetic character to the conception of Liberal

Conservatism, of splendid compromise. The carping critics who have

abused Tennyson for this do not see that it was far more daring and

original for a poet to defend conventionality than to defend a cart-load

of revolutions. His really sound and essential conception of Liberty,

“Turning to scorn with lips divine

The falsehood of extremes,”

is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in

the Liberal century. Moderation is not a compromise; moderation is a

passion; the passion of great judges. That Tennyson felt that lyrical

enthusiasm could be devoted to established customs, to indefensible and

ineradicable national constitutions, to the dignity of time and the

empire of unutterable common sense, all this did not make him a tamer

poet, but an infinitely more original one. Any poetaster can describe a

thunderstorm; it requires a poet to describe the ancient and quiet sky.

I cannot, indeed, fall in with Mr. Morton Luce in his somewhat frigid

and patrician theory of poetry. “Dialect,” he says, “mostly falls below

the dignity of art.” I cannot feel myself that art has any dignity

higher than the indwelling and divine dignity of human nature. Great

poets like Burns were far more undignified when they clothed their

thoughts in what Mr. Morton Luce calls “the seemly raiment of cultured

speech” than when they clothed them in the headlong and flexible patois

in which they thought and prayed and quarrelled and made love. If

Tennyson failed (which I do not admit) in such poems as “The Northern

Farmer,” it was not because he used too much of the spirit of the

dialect, but because he used too little.

Tennyson belonged undoubtedly to a period from which we are divided; the

period in which men had queer ideas of the antagonism of science and

religion; the period in which the Missing Link was really missing. But

his hold upon the old realities of existence never wavered; he was the

apostle of the sanctity of laws, of the sanctity of customs; above all,

like every poet, he was the apostle of the sanctity of words.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

The delightful new edition of Mrs. Browning’s “Casa Guidi Windows” which

Mr. John Lane has just issued ought certainly to serve as an opportunity

for the serious criticism and inevitable admiration to which a great

poet is entitled. For Mrs. Browning was a great poet, and not, as is

idly and vulgarly supposed, only a great poetess. The word poetess is

bad English, and it conveys a particularly bad compliment. Nothing is

more remarkable about Mrs. Browning’s work than the absence of that

trite and namby-pamby elegance which the last two centuries demanded

from lady writers. Wherever her verse is bad it is bad from some

extravagance of imagery, some violence of comparison, some kind of

debauch of cleverness. Her nonsense never arises from weakness, but from

a confusion of powers. If the phrase explain itself, she is far more a

great poet than she is a good one.

Mrs. Browning often appears more luscious and sentimental than many

other literary women, but this was because she was stronger. It requires

a certain amount of internal force to break down. A complete

self-humiliation requires enormous strength, more strength than most of

us possess. When she was writing the poetry of self-abandonment she

really abandoned herself with the valour and decision of an anchorite

abandoning the world. Such a couplet as:

“Our Euripides, the human,

With his dropping of warm tears,”

gives to most of us a sickly and nauseous sensation. Nothing can be well

conceived more ridiculous than Euripides going about dropping tears with

a loud splash, and Mrs. Browning coming after him with a thermometer.

But the one emphatic point about this idiotic couplet is that Mrs.

Hemans would never have written it. She would have written something

perfectly dignified, perfectly harmless, perfectly inconsiderable. Mrs.

Browning was in a great and serious difficulty. She really meant

something. She aimed at a vivid and curious image, and she missed it.

She had that catastrophic and public failure which is, as much as a

medal or a testimonial, the badge of the brave.

In spite of the tiresome half-truth that art is unmoral, the arts

require a certain considerable number of moral qualities, and more

especially all the arts require courage. The art of drawing, for

example, requires even a kind of physical courage. Anyone who has tried

to draw a straight line and failed knows that he fails chiefly in nerve,

as he might fail to jump off a cliff. And similarly all great literary

art involves the element of risk, and the greatest literary artists have

commonly been those who have run the greatest risk of talking nonsense.

Almost all great poets rant, from Shakespeare downwards. Mrs. Browning

was Elizabethan in her luxuriance and her audacity, and the gigantic

scale of her wit. We often feel with her as we feel with Shakespeare,

that she would have done better with half as much talent. The great

curse of the Elizabethans is upon her, that she cannot leave anything

alone, she cannot write a single line without a conceit:

“And the eyes of the peacock fans

Winked at the alien glory,”

she said of the Papal fans in the presence of the Italian tricolour:

“And a royal blood sends glances up her princely eye to trouble,

And the shadow of a monarch’s crown is softened in her hair,”

is her description of a beautiful and aristocratic lady. The notion of

peacock feathers winking like so many London urchins is perhaps one of

her rather aggressive and outrageous figures of speech. The image of a

woman’s hair as the softened shadow of a crown is a singularly vivid and

perfect one. But both have the same quality of intellectual fancy and

intellectual concentration. They are both instances of a sort of

ethereal epigram. This is the great and dominant characteristic of Mrs.

Browning, that she was significant alike in failure and success. Just as

every marriage in the world, good or bad, is a marriage, dramatic,

irrevocable, and big with coming events, so every one of her wild

weddings between alien ideas is an accomplished fact which produces a

certain effect on the imagination, which has for good or evil become

part and parcel of our mental vision forever. She gives the reader the

impression that she never declined a fancy, just as some gentlemen of

the eighteenth century never declined a duel. When she fell it was

always because she missed the foothold, never because she funked the

leap.

“Casa Guidi Windows” is, in one aspect, a poem very typical of its

author. Mrs. Browning may fairly be called the peculiar poet of

Liberalism, of that great movement of the first half of the nineteenth

century towards the emancipation of men from ancient institutions which

had gradually changed their nature, from the houses of refuge which had

turned into dungeons, and the mystic jewels which remained only as

fetters. It was not what we ordinarily understand by revolt. It had no

hatred in its heart for ancient and essentially human institutions. It

had that deeply conservative belief in the most ancient of institutions,

the average man, which goes by the name of democracy. It had none of

the spirit of modern Imperialism which is kicking a man because he is

down. But, on the other hand, it had none of the spirit of modern

Anarchism and scepticism which is kicking a man merely because he is up.

It was based fundamentally on a belief in the destiny of humanity,

whether that belief took an irreligious form, as in Swinburne, or a

religious form, as in Mrs. Browning. It had that rooted and natural

conviction that the Millennium was coming to-morrow which has been the

conviction of all iconoclasts and reformers, and for which some

rationalists have been absurd enough to blame the early Christians. But

they had none of that disposition to pin their whole faith to some

black-and-white scientific system which afterwards became the curse of

philosophical Radicalism. They were not like the sociologists who lay

down a final rectification of things, amounting to nothing except an end

of the world, a great deal more depressing than would be the case if it

were knocked to pieces by a comet. Their ideal, like the ideal of all

sensible people, was a chaotic and confused notion of goodness made up

of English primroses and Greek statues, birds singing in April, and

regiments being cut to pieces for a flag. They were neither Radicals nor

Socialists, but Liberals, and a Liberal is a noble and indispensable

lunatic who tries to make a cosmos of his own head.

Mrs. Browning and her husband were more liberal than most Liberals.

Theirs was the hospitality of the intellect and the hospitality of the

heart, which is the best definition of the term. They never fell into

the habit of the idle revolutionists of supposing that the past was bad

because the future was good, which amounted to asserting that because

humanity had never made anything but mistakes it was now quite certain

to be right. Browning possessed in a greater degree than any other man

the power of realising that all conventions were only victorious

revolutions. He could follow the mediæval logicians in all their sowing

of the wind and reaping of the whirlwind with all that generous ardour

which is due to abstract ideas. He could study the ancients with the

young eyes of the Renaissance and read a Greek grammar like a book of

love lyrics. This immense and almost confounding Liberalism of Browning

doubtless had some effect upon his wife. In her vision of New Italy she

went back to the image of Ancient Italy like an honest and true

revolutionist; for does not the very word “revolution” mean a rolling

backward. All true revolutions are reversions to the natural and the

normal. A revolutionist who breaks with the past is a notion fit for an

idiot. For how could a man even wish for something which he had never

heard of? Mrs. Browning’s inexhaustible sympathy with all the ancient

and essential passions of humanity was nowhere more in evidence than in

her conception of patriotism. For some dark reason, which it is

difficult indeed to fathom, belief in patriotism in our day is held to

mean principally a belief in every other nation abandoning its patriotic

feelings. In the case of no other passion does this weird contradiction

exist. Men whose lives are mainly based upon friendship sympathise with

the friendships of others. The interest of engaged couples in each other

is a proverb, and like many other proverbs sometimes a nuisance. In

patriotism alone it is considered correct just now to assume that the

sentiment does not exist in other people. It was not so with the great

Liberals of Mrs. Browning’s time. The Brownings had, so to speak, a

disembodied talent for patriotism. They loved England and they loved

Italy; yet they were the very reverse of cosmopolitans. They loved the

two countries as countries, not as arbitrary divisions of the globe.

They had hold of the root and essence of patriotism. They knew how

certain flowers and birds and rivers pass into the mills of the brain

and come out as wars and discoveries, and how some triumphant adventure

or some staggering crime wrought in a remote continent may bear about it

the colour of an Italian city or the soul of a silent village of Surrey.

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