A HANDFUL OF AUTHORS

by G.K. Chesterton


CONTENTS

With source and dates of essays

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (Composite essay:  Daily News, 1901,
and Morning Post, 1907)

MARK TWAIN (T. P.'s Weekly, 1910)

ON SEEING Les Quinze (Illustrated London News, 1931)

THE TRUE ROMANCE (Daily News, 1911)

THE DIVINE PARODY OF Don Quixote (Daily News, 1901)

W. W. JACOBS (The Tribune, 1906)

VICTOR HUGO (Pall Mall Magazine, 1902)

THE GREAT GUSTO (The Great Victorians, published by Ivor R Nicholson, 1932)

VANITY FAIR (Limited Edition Club, U.S.A., 1930)

THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF MEREDITH (The Contemporary Review, 1909)

THE HEROINES OF SHAKESPEARE (The Speaker, 1901)

THE TASTE FOR MILTON (Daily News, 1908)

WILLIAM BLAKE AND INSPIRATION (Illustrated London News, 1929)

A GRAMMAR OF SHELLEY (Daily News, 1901)

POETRY--OLD AND NEW (Illustrated London News, 1928)

BROWNING AND HIS IDEAL (Daily News, 1901)

TENNYSON (Bookman, 19O2)

THE BONES OF A POEM (The Speaker, 1901)

THE CASE FOR MACAULAY (Daily News, 1909)

LEWIS CARROLL (New York Times, 1932)

HOW PLEASANT TO KNOW MR. LEAR (The Nation, 19O8)

THE GENIUS OF GILBERT (The Nation, 19O8)

THE STYLE OF NEWMAN (The Speaker, 1904)

IBSEN (Composite essay: Daily News 1906 and G.K.'s Weekly, 1928)

OSCAR WILDE (Daily News, 1909)

JOHN RUSKIN (The Book Fair, 1908)

W. E. HENLEY: POET (The Bibliophile, 1908)

LOUISA ALCOTT (The Nation, 1907)

SHERLOCK HOLMES (Composite essay:  Daily News, 1901 and 1907)

VICTORIAN BIOGRAPHY AND ALICE MEYNELL (G.E.'s Weekly, 1929)

MR. MASEFIELD'S SHORT STORIES (Daily News, 1905)

ERIC GILL AND NO NONSENSE (The Studio, 1930)

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE (Daily News, 1904)

ROMANTIC LOVE (Illustrated London News, 1931)

HISTORICAL NOVELS (Daily News, 1901)

ON WRITING BADLY (Daily News 1907)

A SJY BIRD (Composite essay:  Empire Review, 1923,
and British Council pamphlet, 1935)


ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

WHEN Robert Louis Stevenson was a little boy, he once made
the following remark to his mother:  "Mother, I ve drawed a man.
Shall I draw his soul now?"  This remark bears some traces perhaps
of that over-formalised Scottish religion in which a man's soul
was not so much himself as a very delicate younger brother whom
he had to save at all costs.

But the remark has, nevertheless, a great deal of cogency in
the question of all biographies, and especially in the biography
of a man like Stevenson.  Even if Mr. Graham Balfour's _Life_ be
the best ever written of one man by another, we cannot escape from
the reflection of how strange it is to call such a thing a man's life.
A man's life is held to mean what he did, the whole external
pantomime of his existence.  But this is in fact the most lifeless
part of him, being the furthest removed from the centre of life.
No one can know what Stevenson's life was, except, perhaps,
Stevenson, who no doubt had glimmerings from time to time.
The only biography that is really possible is autobiography.
To recount the actions of another man is not biography, it is zoology,
the noting down of the habits of a new and outlandish animal.
It is most valuable and interesting, but it does not deal
with the spring and spirit of a man's existence.  It may fill
ten volumes with anecdotes without once touching upon his life.
It has drawed a man, but it has not drawed his soul.  Such a statement,
for example, as the statement that Stevenson was a "faddling hedonist"
ought to have aroused any friend of Stevenson to an access of the most
creditable bad temper.

Let us consider for a moment what were the facts.  A certain
human being, no matter who, was so heavily stricken with the deadly
danger of the lungs that he had to lie in bed day and night,
and was permitted neither to move nor to speak.  On the top of this
his right arm was put into a sling to prevent haemorrhage.
When the joys of this condition were but half exhausted,
it was discovered that his eyesight was endangered by ophthalmia
from the dust, and he was consequently condemned in addition to lie
in complete darkness.  In this state of things his "faddling hedonism"
led him to compose the greater part of The Child's Garden of Verses.
Out of that horrible darkness and silence and immobility comes
a voice that says:

  The world is so full of a number of things
  I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.

To read of such a thing is like hearing a corpse speak suddenly
of birds and sunshine.  It is the sublimest testimony to creation that
the Creator himself could ask; the testimony of one who had lost all.
Let anyone who thinks little of it smash his own lungs, disable his
own arm, gag his own mouth, blind his own eyes, and then resign
himself with self-indulgent gaiety to being a faddling hedonist.
Is it possible that even the sevenfold stupidity of the critical
spirit does not see that gaiety was valuable to Stevenson
precisely because it is the most difficult of all the virtues?
As most men have triumphantly maintained a level of sobriety,
he triumphantly maintained a level of exhilaration.
He discovered the new asceticism of cheerfulness, which will prove
a hundred times harder than the old asceticism of despair.
It is an idle thing, comparatively speaking, to remind the world that,
gay as Stevenson was, he was only a Puritan in fancy dress.
It is futile to say that, although he was hilarious, he was serious.
For, as a matter of fact, no man can be merry unless he is serious.
Happiness is as grave and practical as sorrow, if not more so.
We might as well imagine that a man could carve a cardboard chicken
or live on imitation loaves of bread, as suppose that any man could
get happiness out of things that are merely light or laughable.
The really frivolous man, not unknown in fashionable circles, is the man
who is too frivolous to enjoy himself.  Stevenson's enormous capacity
for joy flowed directly out of his profoundly religious temperament.
He conceived himself as an unimportant guest at one eternal
and uproarious banquet, and, instead of grumbling at the soup,
he accepted it with that careless gratitude which marks the baby
and the real man of the world.  He rode on the great galloping
gift-horse of existence with the joy of a horseman at once dexterous
and reckless, and did not, like so many more ambitious philosophers,
nearly fall off in his desperate efforts to look the gift-horse
in the mouth.

His gaiety was neither the gaiety of the Pagan nor the gaiety
of the bon vivant. It was the greater gaiety of the mystic.
He could enjoy trifles, because to him there was no such thing
as a trifle.  He was a child who respected his dolls because they
were the images of the image of God; portraits at only two removes.
He was a boy who thought his fireworks were as splendid as the stars,
but it was only because he thought the stars were as youthful
and as festive as the fireworks.

Very few people, however, quite understand the nature of
Stevenson's play.  Nothing can be more ridiculous, for example,
than the solemn way in which a great many people treat Stevenson's
characteristic and insane excursus into wood engraving.
They gravely discuss the artistic qualities of those preposterous designs,
and almost would appear to hint that Stevenson had a vocation for
pictorial art.  The whole thing is an admirable example of the fact
that those understand Stevenson best who take him most lightly.
The sole and sufficient reason why Stevenson did wood engraving
was because he couldn't. It was to him simply a new game,
and the pride with which he explained that he had turned an
accidental scratch on the block to "a sacred ibis in the distance"
was a pride in just the same blundering and foolish skill as that of
a clown who tries to jump on a donkey and falls on the other side.
The traces of the same mistake may be found in many observations
about Stevenson's efforts in music, of which to the day of his death
he knew absolutely nothing.

Stevenson's experiments in these things arose from a splendid scorn
for that most false and contemptible of maxims, the statement
that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.
Stevenson was one of the few modern philosophers who realised
the essential truth that a thing is good in its quality and not
only in its perfection.  If music and wood engraving are really
good things they must be good even to the disciple and the fool.
If an invention is marvellous and beneficent, it must be worth
beholding even partially and through a glass darkly.

Doubtless it is difficult and hazardous to dogmatize about a man
like Stevenson, and one estimate of his character may well be
as true as the opposing one.  In the honest study of a human
soul we have to fling behind us such idle fictions as the notion
that a thing cannot at the same time be black and white.
But when every allowance has been made, I fancy that the best test
of whether we understand Stevenson would be the test of whether
we understand a man spending uproarious and triumphant evenings
in the practise of a trade of which he knew well that he would
never gain the rudiments in an eternity of lives.

Stevenson is a peculiarly difficult man for any biographer
to estimate fairly.  The reason lies in the fact that his
personality was, as it were, singularly light and slippery,
and that this slipperiness and levity arose not from eccentricity,
but from a swift and unconquerable common sense.  We are so rooted
in open and systematic morbidities, in inhuman prejudices,
in respectable monomanias, that a sane man terrifies us all
like a lunatic.  To us sense seems as illusive as imagination;
intellectual temperance seems something wilder than excess.
Stevenson was peculiarly an embodiment of this elvish sanity.
He is continually startling us in his letters, not because his
remarks are peculiar, but because they are a little more sensible
than anything we had ever thought of.  He was a sincere moralist and
a sincere artist, but neither the old morality of light and darkness
nor the new morality of light and shade could capture or contain him.
He danced beyond them all with that divine frivolity which is the best
definition of faith.

It is said in some quarters that Stevenson has been overpraised,
that a reaction has set in against him, that he will not fascinate
the next generation.  It matters not one rap whether he does or not
to anyone who has perceived his absolute solidity and his eternal use
to mankind.  If we in this age had a little more faith in certainties
and a little less dread of caprice and reaction and changes of
public opinion, we should gain more credit for sense in the long run.
To the childish spirit of modern pessimism every defeat is the end
of the world, every scudding cloud is the twilight of the gods.
In literature, above all things, we must resist this inane panic.
Stevenson will win, not because he has friends or admirers
or the approval of the public or the assent of the aesthetes.
He will win because he is _right_--a word of great practical
import which needs to be rediscovered.  He may or may not be
eclipsed for a time; it would be a truer way of putting it
to say that the public may or may not be eclipsed for a time.
But the idea that a great literary man who has said something novel
and important to mankind can vanish suddenly and finally is ridiculous.
The pessimists who believe it are people who could believe that
the sun is destroyed for ever every time it sinks in the west.
Nothing is lost in the magnificent economy of existence; the sun returns,
the flowers return, the literary fashions return.  If life is a
continual parting it is also a continual heaven of reconciliation.
The old legends were right when they said that Arthur would come back.
All things return; the world uses all its forces, the return
of the stars, the return of the seasons, the return of the heroes.

A complete edition of Stevenson is a valuable possession for a reason
which may not appear on the surface.  Stevenson's method is exactly
of that kind that could easily be mistaken for the mere finnicking
polish of the finished artist.  But he was not a mere finished artist.
No mere finished artist attaches to him lovers so ardent or champions
so military as Stevenson does.  When ordinary men have to do with
the finished artist they commonly confine themselves to wishing
that he were a finished artist in another sense of the word.
But Stevenson's artistic style (especially in two or three
of his most celebrated books) was exactly such a performance
of picked words and deliberate phrases which might easily be
mistaken for a performance of dexterity and literary juggling.
A strong example of this almost excessive tact and technique
may be found in the tone and landscape of each of his stories.
We often speak metaphorically of the colour of a narrative.
In the case of Stevenson we can speak of the colour of a narrative,
and use the word colour quite literally, as of the colours
in a paint-box.

Each of his stories is a picture which could actually be painted in oils
or water-colours, and in which there would scarcely be a jarring tint.
_The Master of Ballantrae_ is literally a sketch in black and white.
I cannot at this moment remember a strong colour in the story;
I cannot remember anyone who had red hair or anyone who habitually
wore bright vesture.  Dominating all is the dark figure of the Master,
who always went clad in splendid black from head to foot,
save for the white of his powder and the white of his ruffles.
His plain brother was in complexion as dark as he.  Mackellar one always
conceives as dressed in dim clothes, with somewhat colourless hair.
The tragedy falls mainly amid snow or storm; it is as Stevenson
called it in a suggestive sub-title, "A Winter's Tale".
The main events stand against a background of grey rocks, of grey
and rainy sea, or of shrubbery, which looks as grey as they do in
the grey starlight of winter.  The same is true of all Stevenson's
most typical stories; _Treasure Island_ can at once be recognised
as being picked out in the brighter colours of a boy's toy theatre.
Squire Livesey's face is a strong salt red; one can see it against
the bright bitter green of the sea.  This small matter of strictly
visual colour will serve for all the other examples of this quality
in Stevenson that seemed like an excess of artistic caution.
He furnished his tale as if it were an artistic flat.  He matched
the hair of his heroine with the landscape as if he were buying
her a bonnet.  He made sure that the hat of the hero harmonised
with the breeches of the villain.  When a man does this in his two
or three most celebrated books I repeat that people cannot be blamed
if they get the impression that he is a mere finished technician;
they cannot be blamed very much if they feel inclined to finish
him with an axe.

Nevertheless, this is all a huge slander on Stevenson, and that it
is a huge slander can be proved.  It can be proved, that is to say,
by insisting on having the whole of Stevenson and reading him en bloc.
We should not learn his real greatness from his quality.
We can only learn his real greatness from his quantity.  For this
exuberance and variety of work, this readiness of the man to turn
his hand to anything, this vitality in so many violent experiments,
all this is exactly the kind of thing that mere finnicking aesthetes
never do exhibit.  Mere finicking aesthetes have neither the courage
to do unfamiliar things nor the humility to try to do them well.
One who merely worships manner apart from matter will certainly adhere
to the manner that he happens to understand and to find successful.
If we have all Stevenson's work before us we appreciate far better the
real dimensions of his human energy and the scope of his human ambition.
The man who wrote _The Master of Ballantrae_ might possibly
have been a mere artistic craftsman with a very congenial theme.
But the man who wrote _The Master of Ballantrae_ and also
_The Wrong Box_ must have been something greater than an artist.
The man who succeeded with _Treasure Island_ might be a mere stylist,
but the man who succeeded with _Treasure Island_ and also failed
with _The Wrecker_ must have been a great man.

Stevenson did not like the grotesque story of _The Body Snatcher_,
but I think Stevensonians do.  As in the case of all great writers,
there is not one book of his that does not contain more than it seems
to contain.  The strongest example, perhaps, is _The Wrecker_.
It is the only one of his novels that is not quite artistic in structure,
and it is exactly the one of them that can be opened anywhere
and read over and over again like a book of Dickens.

The real enduring quality about Stevenson even as a stylist is that there
is something militant about his style; he holds the pen decisively
as a man holds a sword.  The quietest of his phrases has a ring
of steel in it, a sound of finality.  Walter Pater may be writing
in good style when he tells us to burn with a hard gem-like flame.
But there is something quite simple and sudden when Stevenson
tells us so to live that our entrance to a room shall be like
another candle being lighted.  The precision of his choice
of words is a deadly precision like the precision of dogma.
He may be aiming very carefully, but he is aiming with a gun.
The sighting may take long, but not the explosion.
And this is the point of sympathy between his style and his spirit;
for it was his whole business to preach that we can only have peace
in this world if we accept it as a world of war.


MARK TWAIN

WE ARE always told that there is something specially sinister
in the death of a great jester.  I am not so sure about
the point myself, seeing that so many thousand human beings,
diplomatists, financiers, kings, bankers, and founders of philosophies,
are engaged in functions far more ultimately fruitless and
frivolous than really making the smallest schoolboy laugh.
If the death of a clown makes pantomimes for a moment tragic,
it is also true that the death of a statesman makes statesmanship
for a moment highly comic; the irony cuts both ways.  But in the case
of Mark Twain there is a particular cause which at once emphasises
and complicates this contrast between the comic and the serious.
The point I mean is this:  that while Mark Twain's literary merits
were very much of the uproarious and topsy-turvy kind, his personal
merits were very much of the stoical or even puritanical kind.
While irresponsibility was the energy in his writings, an almost
excessive responsibility was the energy in his character.
The artistic European might feel that he was, perhaps, too comic
when he was comic; but such a European would also feel that he was
too serious when he was serious.

The wit of Mark Twain was avowedly and utterly of the extravagant order.
It had that quality of mad logic carried further and further into
the void, a quality in which many strange civilizations are at one.
It is a system of extremes, and all extremes meet in it; thus houses
piled one on top of the other is the ideal of a flat in New York and
of a pagoda in Pekin.  Mark Twain was a master of this mad lucidity.
He was a wit rather than a humorist; but I do not mean by this
(as so many modern people will certainly fancy) that he was something
less than a humorist.  Possibly, I think, he was something more than
a humorist.  Humour, a subtle relish for the small incongruities
of society, is a thing that exists in many somewhat low society types,
in many snobs and in some sneaks.  Like the sense of music, it is
exquisite and ethereal; but, like the sense of music, it can exist
(somehow or other) in utter blackguards or even in utter blockheads;
just as one often meets a fool who can really play the fiddle,
so one often meets a fool who can really play the fool, But wit
is a more manly exercise than fiddling or fooling; wit requires
an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic.
A wit must have something of the same running, working, and staying
power as a mathematician or a metaphysician.  Moreover, wit is
a fighting thing and a working thing.  A man may enjoy humour
all by himself; he may see a joke when no one else sees it;
he may see the point and avoid it.  But wit is a sword;
it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.
All honest people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit.
Not a few dishonest people felt it.

But though it was wit it was wild wit, as wild as the pagoda
in China or the other pagodas in New York.  It was progressive,
and the joke went forward by arithmetical progression.
In all those excruciating tales of his, which in our youth made us
ill with laughing, the idea always consisted in carrying some small
fact or notion to more and more frantic lengths of deduction.
If a man's hat was as high as a house Mark Twain would think
of some way of calling it twenty times higher than a house.
If his hat was smashed as flat as a pancake, Mark Twain would invent
some startling and happy metaphor to prove that it was smashed twenty
times flatter than a pancake.  His splendid explosive little stories,
such as that which describes how he edited an agricultural paper,
or that which explains how he tried to decipher a letter from
Horace Greeley, have one tremendous essential of great art.
I mean that the excitement mounts up perpetually; the stories grow
more and more comic, as a tragedy should grow more and more tragic.
The rack, tragic or comic, stretches a man until something breaks
inside him.  In tragedy it is his heart, or, perhaps, his stiff neck.
In farce I do not quite know what it is--perhaps his funny-bone
is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly cracked.

Anyhow, the humour or wit of Mark Twain was of this ascending
and exaggerative order.  As such it was truly mountainous,
and almost apocalyptic.  No writer of modern English, perhaps, has had
such a genius for making the cow jump over the moon; that is,
for lifting the heaviest and most solemn absurdity high up into the most
starry adventures.  He was never at a loss for a simile or a parable,
and they were never, strictly speaking, nonsense.  They were rather
a kind of incredible sense.  They were not suddenly inconsequent,
like Lewis Carroll; rather they were unbearably consequent,
and seemed capable of producing new consequences for ever.
Even that fantastic irreverence and fantastic ignorance which sometimes
marked his dealings with elements he insufficiently understood, were never
abrupt departures, but only elaborate deductions from his idea.
It was quite logical that when told that a saint's heart had
burst his ribs he should ask what the saint had had for dinner.
It was quite logical that his delightful musician, when asked to play
music appropriate to the Prodigal Son, should play, "We all get
blind drunk when Johnny comes marching home."  These are things
of real wit, like that of Voltaire; though they are not uttered
with the old French restraint, but with a new American extravagance.
Voltaire is to them as the Rhone is to Niagara; not inferior
in quality, but merely in quantity, for Niagara is not only one
of the violences, but almost one of the vulgarities of Nature.
The laughter of Mark Twain was like Niagara.

Such was Mark Twain; such was not Samuel Clemens.  His lonely hgure
stands up in strange solitude and severity against the confusion
and extravagance of the background of his works.  The virtues which we
have all now to regret in their return to God were specially virtues
rather of the restrained than of the riotous or sympathetic order.
We know, indeed, that he rose from the ranks, in the sense
that he was poor and pugnacious in a rich and pugnacious society;
that he came of Southern folk, served with the heroic Southern armies,
but that the greater part of his life was such a scramble of incalculable
successes and unavoidable failures as Stevenson has well described
in the one convincing picture of a good American, Jim Pinkerton,
in _The Wrecker_. The words Stevenson used of Pinkerton might quite
truly be used of Clemens.  "He was stuffed full of manly virtues.
Thrift and courage glowed in him."  When his hair was white and his soul
heavy with years an accident led him into liabilities which the law
would have discharged by the ordinary arrangements of bankruptcy.
The old man refused to accept the ordinary arrangements which the law
allowed him, He set to work strenuously, writing and lecturing as if
he were at the beginning of his life rather than at the end of it.
He repaid his unrecognised and unlegal debt, and a little later he died.
Thus the primary paradox is emphasised almost in the article of death;
the man whom ten million people had adored as a tom-fool was too
serious even for the expectation of his own creditors.

The credit of such glowing thrift and courage (to quote an
admirable phrase again) must be ascribed to something or somebody;
I will no longer disguise the dreadful fact that I ascribe it
exactly where Mark Twain would have ascribed it.  I ascribe it
to the Republican virtue of America.  Of course, if Mark Twain had
said that in so many words, everybody in England would have thought
he was making one of his best jokes; whereas, in truth, he would
have been indulging in one of his worst pieces of seriousness.
Somebody in an advanced Socialist paper that I saw the other
day said that Mark Twain was a cynic.  I suppose there never
was a person so far removed from cynicism as Mark Twain.
A cynic must at least mean a man who is flippant about serious things;
about things that he thinks serious.  Mark Twain was always serious
to the verge of madness.  He was not serious about St. Francis;
he did not think St. Francis serious.  He honestly supposed the marvels
of St. Francis to be some ecclesiastical trick of Popes and Cardinals.
He did not happen to know that the Franciscan movement was something
much more certainly popular than the revolution that rent America
from England.  He derided King Arthur's Court as something barbaric.
He did not happen to know that the only reason why that dim and highly
dubious Court has made a half-entry into history is that it stood,
if it ever stood at all, for the remnant of high civilization against
the base advance of barbarism.  He did not happen to know that,
in his time, St. Francis stood for the ballot-box.  He did not happen
to know that, in his time, King Arthur stood for the telephone.
He could never quite get rid of the American idea that good sense and
good government had begun quite a little while ago; and that the heavier
a monumental stone was to lift the more lightly it might be thrown away.
But all these limitations of his only re-emphasise the ultimate fact:
he never laughed at a thing unless he thought it laughable.
He was an American; that is, an unfathomably solemn man.
Now all this is due to a definite thing, an historical thing,
called Republican virtue.  It was worth while to issue the
Declaration of Independence if only that Mark Twain might declare
his independence also.

In this the great humorist not only represents his country, but a big
mistake about his country.  The apparent clamour and complexity
of America is very superficial; America is not really advanced or
aggressively civilized.  New York, Philadelphia, Chicago are jokes;
just such tall jokes as Mark Twain would have made.  American commerce
is all one tall story; American commerce is a vast American lie.
But the American lie is a very serious, separate, and authoritative
institution, which could only exist among a singularly truthful people.
Behind these extravagances, whether in words or wealth, whether in books
or bricks, there remains a grave simplicity which is truly American.
The genuine value of the Yankee is not his forwardness.  Rather it
is his backwardness that is the real beauty of the Yankee.  There is
in the depths of him the rural stillness of an intellectual backwater:
he is a great rustic.  The log-hut, and not the sky-scraper,
is the American home.  Therefore, despite the revolting vices
of wealth and all the vulgarities of unhistorical individualism,
there does remain in the Americans a certain average of virile
virtues, equality, hard work, patriotism, and a plain ideality.
Corrupt fatigue is uncommon; unclean despair is almost unknown.
You could not have made Mark Twain even understand either of
these things.  He was radiant with a rectitude none the less noble
for being slightly naive; he carried everywhere those powerful
platitudes that are like clubs of stone.  With these he hammered
Calvinism in his youth and Christian Science in his old age.
But he was not an "advanced" thinker, not a mind in revolt; rather he was
a conservative and rustic grandfather older than all such follies.
But this strength in him and his country truly came from a great spirit
which England resisted and has forgotten; the spirit which, when all
is said, made it no nonsense to compare Washington to Cincinnatus;
the austere love of liberty and of the ploughshare and the sword.


ON SEEING LES QUINZE

I TWICE had the pleasure of seeing the admirable performance of the French
company "Les Quinze du Vieux Colombier", who performed first at
the Arts Theatre Club and afterwards, I think, at the Ambassadors.
The pleasure was of many kinds, and not least in hearing, what I have
not heard for a long time, the living and leaping beauty of the great
French language, as spoken by those who know how to speak it.
Like most pleasures that have that peculiar quality of swiftness,
it seems at the moment dificult even to record or recall,
let alone to define.  The first suggestion that occurs to
the mind is that all other languages move on hinges or joints,
but that the French language darts and flickers like a flame.
But this suggestion would be incorrect as an explanation.  A flame
is a fluid, in a sense; it is elemental in the sense of indivisible.
But the best French speech is not only very much more than mere sound,
but very much more than mere music.  It is flexible, because it is not
less but more articulate than what we commonly call articulate speech.
It is significant that we use the word articulation in two senses;
we talk of the articulation of a sentence and of the articulation
of a skeleton.  The French tongue is like a serpent; in that it has
so many articulations as to produce the general impression of a curve.
It has so many joints that it seems to have no joints at all.
A man can coil a snake round and round inside his hat, though only
a few individuals have indulged in this form of nature-study.
If a man were to attempt to fold up a giraffe, or even to deal
in this manner with the most compact or collapsible horse or dog,
he would find that they were not sufficiently articulated animals.
The rapid French talk is flexible in the sense of seeming to fit
into every inch or corner of conversation; because those who speak it,
the heirs of the most central civilization of civilized Europe,
are the most articulate of all those whom the Greek poet
called "articulate-speaking men".

But the problem of folding up a giraffe so as to pack him in a hat,
like the analogous problem of coaxing the camel through the eye
of the needle, belongs to an order of animal fantasies which are
suggested by this text in another way.  The first play which I saw
performed by the French players was a play about Noah and the Ark;
and necessarily consisted largely of animals.  The production or stage
management had very wisely made them comic and symbolic animals.
In fact, they might fairly be described as heraldic animals.
I remember, with a slight shudder, that there was a time
when theatrical managers prided themselves on their realism.
I know not whether these realists would really have brought real
lions and tigers among the actors.  Perhaps that would have caused
too realistic a shudder even for realists.  But they would be quite
capable of sinking huge sums of money, and going through agonies
of artificial lighting, grouping, stuffing and winding up of clockwork,
with the base and degrading purpose of making the lions look
like lions.  The result of such bravado of realism is always
the loss of reality.  What was the matter with these theatrical
managers was that they were such very theatrical managers.
The object of their accuracy was not truth, but a triumph of deception.
About the fantastic animals of the Ark there was no deception.
They were facts; as all avowed fables are facts.  It struck me
that there was a certain parallel between this affair of the animals
and the setting of the second French play I saw in the same place;
a play about the old Roman story of Lucretia and Tarquin.
The dreadful realists of the theatre, the men who spared no expense,
were often particularly proud of a pedantic accuracy about
historical costume.  And in this case I felt that the accuracy
would be very pedantic.  Brutus and Collatinus or Tarquin would
have been heavily attired in togas and tunic, if possible of
the precise date of the first foundation of the Roman Republic.
I am glad to say that in this case the producers did not bother
about pedantic accuracy, or indeed about accuracy at all.  They boldly
set the whole scene amid the conventions of Renaissance tragedy;
Tarquin might have been a rather extra paganised Caesar Borgia;
while Brutus wore his hair in a way that was more reminiscent of Moliere.
I felt at once that it was exactly right; nay, that it was
historically right.  And it seemed to me that both in the case
of the comic animals and the conventional costumes, there was
a principle involved that has never been expressed rightly.
I will therefore proceed to express it wrongly.

Shapes that have passed through the mind of man exist, in a second
and special sense, which does not belong to them while they are
merely in unconscious nature.  There must be many minute creatures
that have passed through the microscope and have not yet fully passed
into the mind.  If a man were to blazon a bacillus on his shield,
it would not be instantly recognized, like a lion or a leopard.
Yet the lion that is recognized is quite unlike the lion that is real;
and the leopard on the shield is a very unscientific version
of the leopard in the Zoo.  If a man were to wave a flag decorated
with three microbes on a chevron, it would not have the inspiring
effect of the old French flag decorated with lilies, or even of
the yet older Frankish flag said to have been decorated with toads.
There are at least legends about toads; they had an undeserved
reputation for carrying jewels in their heads; but nobody has
ever started digging for diamonds in the inside of a microbe.
A microbe is perhaps not a fair test, because of its small stature
and shy and retiring disposition.  But it would be just as true
of a mammoth as of a microbe, if we really had no poetic associations
or literary legends about mammoths.  We hear a great deal of the huge
inhuman impersonal powers of cosmos or chaos and how inspiring they
are to the imagination; but they are not really very inspiring
until the imagination has worked on them for some time.  The mind
of man is the mirror in which these shapes become shapes of doom.
And if the object be an instant attack on the imagination, as it
is in the case of the drama, it is strictly true to say that a thing
is not even fearful unless it is familiar.

Thus the true image of the lion is that which has been made
part of the image of God.  It is the lion of magnanimity,
the lion of royalty, the lion who will not hurt virgins,
the lion who was the emblem of the humanity of Christ.
It is not the large cat whom somebody shoots with a gun or shuts
up in a cage.  For the purpose of immediate dramatic effect,
it is necessary to be conventional; because convention does
really mean the meeting-place of the emotions of myriads of men.
The same truth applies to tragedies like that of Tarquin; and their
deliberate disguise in externals centuries later than Tarquin.
These things represent not only Tarquin but the terror of Tarquin;
the long shadow that his deed of shame cast down the centuries.
We feel it more and not less when we hear that terrible voice
in an Elizabethan echo; or see that dark figure in strange
Florentine armour.  As the only real lion is the lion that a child
can dream of, so the only convincing Tarquin is the Tarquin
who has been a nightmare to numberless dramatists and dreamers.
This concerns artistic truth, of course, as distinct from scientific
and historical truth; which have their own objective object.
But if we are talking of the effect of symbols on the soul,
it is broadly true that they are best when they are most symbolic.
For in man also is something of the divine; and the things that enter
his world pass through a second creation.


THE TRUE ROMANCE

THIS IS a perfectly true story; but there is in it a certain
noble irony, not very easy to analyse, which goes down to the very
roots of Christianity.

Some hundreds of years ago there was born in one of the southern
peninsulas of Europe a man whose life was very like the life of a boy
in one of Mr. Henty's books.  He did everything that could possibly be
expected of a boy's hero; he ran away to sea; he was trusted by admirals
with important documents; he was captured by pirates; he was sold
as a slave, Even then he did not forget the duties of a Henry hero.
He made several picturesque and desperate attempts at escape,
scaling Moorish walls and clambering through Moorish windows.
He confronted the considerable probability of torture, and defied it.
But he was not like the unscrupulous prison-breakers, like Cellini
or Casanova, ready to break the world as well as the wall,
or his promise as well as his prison.  He remembered that he was
the hero of an honest boy's story-book, and behaved accordingly.
Long afterwards his country collected the depositions of the other
Christian captives, and they were an astonishing chorus.
They spoke of this man as if he were a sort of saint, of the almost
unearthly unselfishness with which he divided their distresses and defied
their tormentors.  As one reads the coldest biographical account one
can feel the alien air, that enormous outside world of Asia and Africa
that has always felt slavery to be a natural and even monotonous thing.
One feels the sunny silence of great open courts, with fountains in
the midst, guarded here and there by mute, white-clad, unnatural men;
dim and secret divans smelling of smoke and sweet stuff; grass burnt
out of the bare ground, and palm trees prised like parasols.
And in all this still horror of heat and sleep, the one unconquered
European still leaping at every outlet of adventure or escape;
climbing a wall as he might a Christian apple tree, or calling
for his rights as he might in a Christian inn.

Nor did our hero miss that other great essential of the
schoolboy protagonist; which is accidental and even improbable
presence on a tremendous historical occasion.  All who love boys'
books as they should be loved know that Harry Harkaway, as well
as crossing cutlasses with an individual smuggler or slaver,
must also manage to be present at the Battle of Trafalgar.
The young musketeer from Gascony, however engrossed by duels with
masked bravos or love-letters to Marguerite de Valois, must not
forget to put in an appearance at the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Here also my hero in real life equalled any of the heroes
of juvenile fiction; for he was present and took an active part
in one of the most enormous and earth-changing events in history.
Europe, in the age in which he lived, was, as it is now,
in one of its recurring periods of division and disease.
The Northern nations were full of sombre fanaticisms;
the Southern nations of equally sombre statecraft and secrecy.
The country of the man I describe was indeed rich in territory;
but its King was morbid, mean, and lethargic; a man of stagnant mysteries,
as he looks in those fishy, pasty-faced portraits which still endure.
His strong but sinister imperial armies were engaged in wars,
more or less unjust on both sides, with the sinister enthusiasms
of the North; the whole civilization was bitter and trivial,
and apparently tumbling to pieces.  And at this moment appeared
upon its Eastern borders its ancient and awful enemy, the Turk.

Like genii summoned out of that Eastern sea by the seal of Solomon,
robed in the purple of the twilight or the green of the deep,
rose the tall, strange, silent sails of the admirals of Islam.
The very shapes of the ships on the horizon were unfamiliar and fearful;
and when they came close to the Greek islands, prow and stern showed
the featureless ornament of the foes of idolatry; that featureless
ornament in which one seems to see a hundred faces, as one does
in a Turkey carpet.  The ships came silently and ceaselessly,
in numbers that, it seemed, had never been seen since Xerxes seemed
stronger than the gods.  And every hermit on a Greek headland,
or little garrison of knights upon an islet in the Mediterranean,
looked at them and saw the sunset of Christendom.

They encircled and besieged a stronghold in that central sea,
whose fall would have been the fall of Europe.  In the general paralysis
the Pope, with one exception, was the only man who moved promptly;
he put out the Papal galleys and addressed a public prayer for help
to all the Christian princes.  The cold and sluggish King doubted
and hung back, just as he would have done in the historical novel.
But he had a half-brother--as he would have had in the novel.
The half-brother was every bit as brave, handsome, brilliant,
and generous as he would have been in the novel.  The King
was as jealous of him as he would have been in the novel.
This quite genuine hero rushed to the rescue, and in such
crises it is popularity that tells, even in empires.
The young Prince had already won romantic victories in Africa,
but he could bring only a few ships in time for the attack.
Then was waged on that blue and tideless sea what must have been one
of the most splendid and appalling battles that ever stained the sea
or smoked to the sun.  The Turks slew eight thousand Christian soldiers,
and the sea drank galley after galley of the Christian fleet.
But the fight was sustained with that terrible and intolerant
patience that only comes in a collision of strong creeds,
when one whole cosmos really crashes into the other.
Before night the tide of that river of blood began to turn.
Thirty thousand of the Turks were killed or taken prisoners,
and out of the Turkish ports and galleys came into light and liberty
twelve thousand European slaves.

This was the great battle of Lepanto, and of course our hero
was there, sword in hand; of course he was wounded there.
I can fancy him standing on the deck, with his arm in a sling
and looking at the slender escape of Europe and the purple wreck
of Asia with a sad, crooked smile on his face.  For he was a person
whose face was capable of expressing both pity and amusement.
His name was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, commonly called Cervantes.
And having another arm left, he went home and wrote a book called
_Don Quixote_, in which he ridiculed romance and pointed out the grave
improbability of people having any adventures.


THE DIVINE PARODY OF DON QUIXOTE

IT IS the peculiar fate of things several centuries old that they
have to be treated with the most prodigious austerity, even when
they are in themselves things entirely hilarious and simple.
Venerable doctors of the Church spend their lives in studying ancient
Roman pots and pans, the replicas of which hang up in their own kitchens,
and in editing and annotating ancient Greek pantomimes which they
would petition the County Council, in the name of public decency,
to turn off the boards of the Tivoli.

To the merely literary mind there seems something quite
as superfluous in treating _Don Quixote_ as a learned matter
as in so treating _The Bab Ballads_ or _The Innocents Abroad_.
Literature celebrates the eternal youth of humanity;
in literature all men are equal, in century as well as in station.
The feelings with which it deals are always fresh; in its wild
empire an Englishman may fall in love with an Ancient Egyptian
princess, and by its laws a man may marry his grandmother.
Don Quixote may be read by a child without preface or explanation;
it tells its own story; and if there is much more in the story
than most of us have ever found, that dark treasure is to be sought
in the story and not in the notes.

The second part of _Don Quixote_, which is generally reckoned inferior
to the first, is superior to it in many qualities of construction
and verisimilitude even if it is entirely inferior in farcical episode,
in burlesque force, and in the most obvious effects of humour.
But I venture to question whether the superiority which Goethe and Lamb
found in the first part was based merely upon that preposterous
picturesqueness which lends such an everlasting vividness to the
tournament of the windmills and the castle that was really an inn.
The first part is probably superior because it contains more
of the fire of that essential philosophy which lies at the heart
of this great romance.  In order fully to realise this we must make
some attempt to bring before our minds the spiritual energy of which,
as in all books, the story is only the product and the symbol.

The great truth which lies at the heart of _Don Quixote_ is the truth
that the conflict of the world is chiefly a conflict between goods.
The battle between the idealism of Don Quixote and the realism of the
inn-keeper is a battle so hot and ceaseless that we know that they must
both be right.  A vulgar philosophy laments the wickedness of the world,
but when we come to think of it we realise that the confusion of life,
the doubt and turmoil and bewildering responsibility of life,
largely-arise from the enormous amount of good in the world.

There is much to be said for everybody; there are too many points
of view; too many truths that contradict each other, too many
loves which hate each other.  Our earth is not, as Hamlet said,
"an unweeded garden", but a garden which is choked and disordered
with neglected flowers.  The eternal glory of Don Quixote in
the literary world is that it holds perfectly even the two scales,
of the mysticism of the Knight and the rationalism of the Squire.
Deep underneath all the superficial wit and palpable gaiety of
the story there runs a far deeper kind of irony--an irony that is
older than the world.  It is the irony that tells us that we live
in a maddening and perplexing world, in which we are all right;
and that the battle of existence has always been like King Arthur's
last battle in the mist, one in which "friend slew friend,
not knowing whom he slew".

That is a sobering thought, but assuredly it is not a depressing one.
Scarcely any book is more profoundly humane and steadfast than
_Don Quixote_, more filled with a vast and elemental assumption
that human nature is good.  The threads of our life cross and tangle,
but it is not we who hold the skein.  The philosophy of Cervantes cries
aloud to the world the much misunderstood and increasingly forgotten,
but always divine and wholesome, science of minding one's own business.
It stands for the great and practical paradox that the narrowest duty
is also the broadest, that it is very universal to bake a cake or rock
a cradle, and generally very vulgar and provincial to take charge
of the universe.  This great hospitality of the brain of Cervantes,
this readiness to admit that lawlessness itself was only a war
of a hundred justices, gives him his great place in literature.

He does not in any pre-eminent degree owe that place to his diction
or his style.  He owes it to the fact that this impartiality
of his is the very soul of great literature, for literature
should know all men and judge none.  It is the dead who are judged,
and the creatures of literature should never die.

An example of somewhat the same inscrutable and therefore
eternal situation that is found in Don Quixote may be found,
for instance, in the Sacchae of Euripides.  There also we have
to do with the war waged by a robust and righteous common sense
with a fierce, fugitive, and unclassified religious transport.
In that, also, we are left at the end doubtful which party was right,
and whether the author of that dark play was writing as a pious
enthusiast or as a sneering sceptic.  In _Don Quixote_, however,
the matter is clearer.  He belongs to our own civilization,
and between that civilization and the civilization of the ancient
world there is a great gulf fixed.  The madness of Don Quixote
seems to us much less mad than the sanity of antiquity.
The windy and crazy adventures which set him to smite windmills
and slaughter sheep are to us less monstrous and imbecile than many
of the established loves and traditions which were followed in broad
daylight by sublime philosophers in the streets of sublime cities.
For the core of the truth is that we have the follies of Don Quixote
in our very blood; we are by irrevocable generation children of
the Middle Ages.  Adventure and ceremonial, chivalry and idolatry,
fantastic pride and a fantastic humility lie at the very root
of our institutions and in the imnost chamber of our imagination.
Cervantes, with a fearless realism, led his hero almost a dance
of degradation through the man-traps and cross-purposes of the
coarse world, rolled him in ditches, and beat him with cudgels.
But the fact remains that we all read _Don Quixote_ because we are
all knight-errants; we read it for the sake of Don Quixote's dream,
and without that dream the whole story would be as flat and common
as the chronicles of Camden Town.

Don Quixote, then, is a part of all of us, and a part which will always
remain and give a great deal of trouble to any persons who wish to tie
us up finally in any political constitution or synthetic philosophy.
The knight figures in Cervantes' romance as the foe of that civilization
which thinks that everything is best trusted to an institution.
In the story he is the last individual; he has the hopeless individualism
of the Irishman.  If injustice is being done he cannot see that
cutting down the oppressor with the sword is any less reasonable than
writing to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
To trust entirely to this hare-brained justice as a basis
of our civilization would be absurd, but it will be found even
more absurd in the long run to ignore it or to root it out.
For the whole of our huge weight of laws and restrictions hangs
in the last resort upon this single thread of visionary valour.
Our whole social ideal is as daring and fanciful as Don Quixote's dream,
and there is not much to choose between his tilting at the sails
of the windmills and our tilting at the great wheel of the world.


W. W. JACOBS

MR.  JACOBS is in a real sense a classic.  When I say he is classical,
I do not merely mean that he is eminently able; Mr. Rudyard Kipling
(for example) is eminently able, but he has not the pure marmoreal
classicism of Mr. Jacobs.  Compared with Mr. Kipling, Mr. Jacobs
is like the Parthenon.

He is strictly to be described as classical for this reason--
that he is a return to the central and sane tradition of
humorous literature.  He is the child of Dickens, and he has
wiped out the weary interregnum between himself and his father.
We find ourselves again in a farce older than Aristophanes;
and we realize that of all the iron elements in the eternal
soul none is more fixed or more enduring than its frivolity.
Man has remembered his ancient laughter.  In the period between
the end of Dickens and the appearance of Mr. Jacobs we have had
a great number of really great wits and of really great humorists.
We have had men like Whistler whose wit seemed almost inspired,
and whose repartee came like a bolt from the blue.  We have
had humorists like Mr. Max Beerbohm whose humour was so dainty
and delicate as to be a kind of topsy-turvy transcendentalism.
But these great wits and great humorists had one genuine defect--
they could not laugh.  They could smile, they could sneer, they could
in desperate cases chuckle; but laughter, which is an elemental agony,
shaking the jester himself, was a thing outside their mode of life.

There is no necessary connexion between wit and mirth.
A man's wit overpowers his enemies; but his mirth overpowers him.
As long as a man is merely witty he can be quite dignified;
in other words, as long as he is witty he can be entirely solemn.
But if he is mirthful he at once abandons dignity, which is another
name for solemnity, which is another name for spiritual pride.
A mere humorist is merely admirable; but a man laughing is laughable.
He spreads the exquisite and desirable disease by which he is
himself convulsed.  But our recent comedians have distrusted laughter
for exactly the same reason that they have distrusted religion
or romantic love.  A laugh is like a love affair in that it carries
a man completely off his feet; a laugh is like a creed or a church
in that it asks that a man should trust himself to it.

A man must sacrifice himself to the God of Laughter, who has stricken
him with a sacred madness.  As a woman can make a fool of a man,
so a joke makes a fool of a man.  And a man must love a joke
more than himself, or he will not surrender his pride for it.
A man must take what is called a leap in the dark, as he does when
he is married or when he dies, or when he is born, or when he does
almost anything else that is important.

Now there are at least four points in which Mr. Jacobs represents
the return to the great comic classics; and this is the first of them--
the fact that he re-establishes humour as something violent
and involuntary and outside ourselves.  His best humour is outside
criticism, in the sense that physical pain is outside criticism.
With him as with Dickens, an absurdity is an absurdity as a blow
in the face is a blow in the face.  You cannot pause to call the joke
a bad joke.  You cannot pause to call the joke a good joke.
It is simply a fact of natural history that you, having read a certain
remark two minutes before, are now rolling about on the carpet
and waving your legs in the air.

There can be no criticism about this comic genius, because nobody in
its presence can remain in a critical frame of mind, When, let us say,
Mr. Dick Swiveller is cut out by Mr. Cheggs, the market gardener,
he prepares a dramatic departure, and Miss Wackles says she is
very sorry.  "Sorry!" says Mr. Swiveller, "sorry in the possession
of a Cheggs!"  Nobody reading those words for the first time
could ever decide whether they were low comedy or high comedy,
broad humour or fine humour, large, small, long, short, fat,
or thin humour; he would merely realize that they were humorous.
He would be stunned by the simple fact that the thing was funny.

So it is in the best of Mr. Jacobs' work.  In one of his stories,
for instance, the night-watchman expresses a contempt for the
pugilistic device of the punch-ball, and recalls the exploits
of a more uncorrupted pugilist who was in the habit, when he
wanted practice, of putting on a soft hat like a Nonconformist
minister and going into a pub and contradicting people.
"He'd 'ave no more thought of 'ittin' a pore 'armless ball than I
should of thought of 'ittin' 'im." That kind of sentence has
the same direct Dickens quality.  It is an unanswerable absurdity.
It is very difficult to judge it, although doubtless after some
little time or in some special detachment we can judge it.
But we can only judge it after we have laughed at it.
In other words, we can only judge it after we have acquitted it.

The second point is this:  that he re-establishes the old comic
importance of the thing called plot.  Many other modern humorists have
written short tales that were inspirations, fancies, glimpses, ideas.
He alone has written short tales that are ingenious merely as tales.
Every one of Mr. Jacobs' stories is an amplified anecdote;
that is to say, it is a thing with a complication and a climax,
a climax which must be at once expected and unexpected.  In this matter
Mr. Jacobs is entirely in line with the oldest mirth of mankind.
The great classic conception of a good story is that it should have
a point, and that the principal character should sit down on it.
Thus, for instance, the story of Polyphemus and No-man is an
enlarged anecdote.  Thus the many old tales of ingenious riddles and
still more ingenious answers (such as that of King John and the Abbot
of Canterbury and several about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba)
are all enlarged anecdotes.  The fun is not merely in the characters,
it is in the whole framework of the thing; it is structurally funny,
architecturally funny.  Here, then, we have the second of the four
classical qualities of Mr. Jacobs.  We have here the fact that he is
greatly concerned with the argument of his epic; with the thing
to be done and the outer fate that falls upon his characters.
And he feels and satisfies that desire for mere funny incidents
well narrated which was once satisfied in savage tents and is still
satisfied in smoking-rooms.

His third agreement with the classics lies in his lucidity.
His humorous style is indeed allusive; and the nature of that allusiveness
I shall discuss in a moment; but it is perfectly popular and clear.
Consequently he has no concern with that air of mystery
in which so many able moderns have wrapped their amusement.
The old jester was disappointed that men did not see the joke.
The new jester is delighted that they do not see the joke.  Their blank
faces are a proof of his own exquisite and individualised talent;
the joke is too good to be seen.  Laughter has been from the beginning
the one indestructible brotherhood, the one undeniably social thing.
But these moderns have made even laughter a lonely thing.  They are always
hunting for a humour that shall be completely original.  But if a thing
were completely original it would be completely unintelligible.
If a man made an entirely new language it would not be a language at all.
Mr. Jacobs represents here again a return to the normal; to a humour
that is rich but simple, to a humour that is humorous but also obvious,
to a humour which is not vulgar but which is common.

But there is one point in which Mr. Jacobs touches greatness,
compared with which all these others are unimportant.  This is his
achievement as an interpreter of a great element of the democracy.
He is the artistic expression of the humour of the people; a.
point in which (in the phrase of the French Revolution) "the people
is supreme".  He exaggerates that popular humour undoubtedly.
But that popular humour is itself in its nature an exaggeration;
and the more exaggerated his popular humour is, the more like it is
to popular humour.  He over-states the actual statements of navvies
or sailors; but they themselves would over-state them if they could.
It would be a mistake to say that he made plebeian satire an art;
but the plebeians have already made it an art.  It would be truer
to say that Mr. Jacobs' gibes are masterpieces where the real gibes
of the street are merely works of art.  Mr. Jacobs' labourers say
better things than most real labourers, but the same kind of things.
The first bears the same relation to the second that the rustic
songs of Shakespeare bear to the rustic songs of Stratford-on-Avon.

"Take your face 'ome and bury it; not under plants as you're fond of."
That might stand as a comparatively central and typical example
of the tradition of satire that can actually be heard in the streets.
That has all the three essential characteristics of the wit of
the populace.  First, it is poetical, or, at least, close to poetry;
for everything that is close to the people is close to poetry.
It is poetical, I mean, in the essential sense that it is connected
with the ultimate enigma of nature and with wild and beautiful images.
There is all the strength of a dark and grotesque lyric of Heine
in the idea of the hideousness of the buried head polluting the very
process of life, and distorting the very flowers and leaves.
It is like the tale of the Pot of Basil.  Second, the expression
typifies popular humour in the fact that it is a joke about the body,
about physical ugliness; a kind of joke that is an essential of
moral health.  To take the body seriously is to take the first step
towards all the disasters that destroyed the Pagan civilization.
Of all the quaint sanities which are the secrets of Christianity perhaps
the sanest is the fact that it feels the body to be something grotesque.
And of all forms of taking the body seriously, not one (not even
the vile thing called hygiene) is so bad as the form that takes ugliness
seriously as a sacred unmentionable thing.  If you make a point
of delicacy out of ugliness, you make a religion out of ugliness.
Our moderns think it very shocking to pour any derision upon the body:
they prefer to pour it upon the soul.

But the people never are and never can be moderns.  That is why I am
a democrat.  The men in the street laugh at a man's nose which they
can see, and which is often absurd, not at his religion, which they
cannot see, and which is never absurd.  Mr. Jacobs is the champion
of the old, healthy habit of telling people how funny they look.
All his conversationalists are given to being what is called
"personal". I do not know anything more reasonable than being personal
when you are talking about a person.  But undoubtedly for the last
thirty years our discussions have been growing more impersonal.
There has been more airiness, detachment, and refinement in our arguments,
and in consequence much more swindling in our public service.

No one can forget the almost endless list of Mr. Jacobs'
popular discussions of physiognomy.  There was Mr. Bob Pretty,
who told his colleague, the old game-keeper, that he "'oped
his face wouldn't get knocked about like that", and when
the game-keeper indignantly denied that his face had been
knocked about, said, with sudden meekness, "Oh!  I beg your pardon.
I didn't know it was natural."  There was the sarcastic bar-keeper,
who met his match in the more sarcastic boy, telling the youth
to take the head off his beer, or he'd "muss his moustache up".
To whom the boy replied that "as long as it didn't turn 'em
red he didn't mind so much".  There was the meditative miller,
who remarked to the farmer with inconsiderate emphasis on the mystery
of where the farmer's daughter could have got her good looks from.
"She's no more like you than you're like a warming-pan--
not so much."

Finally, the farcical speech of Mr. Jacobs' characters is
undoubtedly ingenious, and even elaborate, but in this respect
more than in any other it is the real speech of the populace.
The real speech of the real mob is more intricate than medieval heraldry.
To anybody who has ever talked to the man in the street it must
be infinitely amusing to hear the philosophers of aristocracy
talking about the sort of joke the vulgar can understand.
There is not one of those philosophers of aristocracy who could before
an impartial tribunal hold his own for five minutes against a cabman.
Mr. Jacobs is in literature the voice of the inspired cabman.
But the wit of the cabman and the populace is not merely excellent--
it is even subtle.  It is even too subtle.  Slang is the very
reverse of a coarse thing.  It is, if anything, an over-complex
and over-civilized thing.  It has some of that systematic indirectness
which makes a darkness in the late medieval philosophy and poetry.
This twisted luxuriance is perfectly represented in the admirable
locutions of Mr. Jacobs' angry sailors.  Taking the nose,
or mental capacity, or family circumstances of an enemy as a mere text
or starting point, the Jacobs sailor gets out of it a sort of jungle
of tropical taunts.  One thing at least Mr. Jacobs has done Ã--
he has compiled the most reliable encyclopedia of insults that can
be purchased in the market.

I repeat, then, that I find Mr. Jacobs a classic; that is,
a return to the enduring style.  Many who have enjoyed his
books will think that I have here taken him too seriously.
On that point I have one word to say in conclusion.
I have had no space to deal adequately with his amazing tales
of tragedy, such as _Jerry Bundler_ or the admirable _Monkey's Paw_.
But if the reader will look at them he will notice this fact:
that they stand alone among our modern tales of terror in the fact
that they are dignified and noble.  They rise out of terror into awe.
Everyone will remember the mother who wished to see the mangled
nothing that was once her son.  Everyone will remember that other
tale of the son who sat in darkness because of his blasted face,
and its final sentiment, "Here is to the children my son saved."
Everyone will remember them; but it is more important that,
ghastly as they are, everyone will be glad to remember them.
His humour is wild, but it is sane humour.  His horror is wild,
but it is a sane horror.  His farce is classic farce because,
however violent it is, it leaves the heart more happy.
And his tragedy is classic tragedy, because however heartrending it is,
it leaves the heart more strong.


VICTOR HUGO

THE CENTENARY of Victor Hugo, which has just been celebrated
in Paris, arouses some of the deepest thoughts which are possible
in the human mind.  Hugo represents the culmination of a revolution
which almost in our own time shook the foundations of humanity,
and already that revolution is old, and Hugo is a vague and remote figure,
a doubtful and little discussed author.  Yet he was, beyond question,
one of the greatest men of letters that Europe has seen, and the day
of his return into intellectual triumph is remote indeed, but certain.
There can be little doubt that we are divided from the generations
that immediately precede us by a gulf far more unfathomable than that
which divides us from the darkest ages and the most distant lands.
There are art-critics who maintain that the most archaic and
Byzantine beginnings of Christian art are superior to everything
that goes by the name of an Italian master.  There are art-critics
who maintain that a portion of a Persian carpet contains and eclipses
everything that can be found in the National Galleries of Europe.
It is, upon the whole, exceedingly probable that there are
art-critics who maintain that the two idols from the Fiji Islands
which used to stand outside the British Museum are artistically
superior to all the Greek gods and goddesses which are to be
found inside.  But there is a limit to this modern liberality:
there are certain forms of art which are most recent and
most effective upon the minds of our immediate forbears.
No one declares that the Regency style of dress, or style of poetry,
or style of architecture, was the most perfect in the world.
No one says that Opie was the first painter, or Flaxman the
first sculptor, or George IV the first gentleman of Europe.

The time is no doubt coming when a languid and esthetic collector
will exhibit, as treasures dating from the true time of art's
supremacy, the furniture and costume of the Ear1y Victorian Era.
He will boast of possessing a real case of wax flowers under glass,
an authentic sampler, and a real lustre chandelier from a real
Brighton landlady.  But that time is not yet.  For the present
we are doomed to misunderstand the time which produced us.
We can comprehend the most immoral outbursts of ancient Israel;
but our immediate progenitors are strangers to us.  We worship
our remotest ancestor, but we teach our grandmother.

I have dwelt upon this particular aspect of the matter because it
is supremely necessary to understand it if we wish properly
to understand Victor Hugo.  He represented two great revolutions,
the first artistic and the second political.  The artistic
revolution was that connected with the word romanticism:
the political revolution was that connected with the word democracy.
And the great difficulty involved in properly appreciating him
lies in this, that both romanticism and democracy have conquered
and therefore become commonplace.  They have been so triumphant
as to become invisible; just as existence itself is triumphant
and invisible.  And like existence itself they have become truisms:
and while it is fatally easy to turn a truth into a truism,
it is fatally difficult to turn a truism back into a truth.
We may sympathise with a dead faith, but it is difficult to sympathise
with an apparently dead scepticism.  In history even a molehill is
more expressive than an extinct volcano.  Those who may be called,
with all respect, the eternal tootlers of the ages, Horace and
Catullus and Villon and Tom Moore, are always sure of sympathy.
But those who have blown the trumpet to a veritable charge,
like Luther and Victor Hugo, are doomed to exhibit themselves
to history as making a gigantic fuss about nothing.

The great achievements of Hugo are sufficiently obvious even if we
consider only his novels, which are probably the most popular,
though certainly not the most important of his works.
Every one of his great novels was in itself a small French Revolution.
_In Notre Dame de Paris_ he revealed to the modern world all
the beauties and terrors of the old medieval order, and showed
how pitilessly the individual was sacrificed to such an order.
In _Les Miserables_ he showed, with a far more sensational illumination,
how our own modern order of law and judgment and criminal
procedure was, as far as the sacrifice of individuals was concerned,
as cruel as any medieval order.  In _Ninety-Three_ he showed
that such a sacrifice of individuals became necessary, and in
a strange, bitter manner, attractive, even in the modern age.
In all his works alike there are two common characteristics.
The first is a tendency to what is called sensationalism;
the second is a tendency to what is called democracy.
It is necessary to realise his feeling upon both these points
before we do anything like justice to him.

It is the custom among certain literary men of this era to sneer at
the novels of Hugo, chiefly on the ground that they are sensational;
as if all art were not sensationalism and the whole artistic
temperament best definable as the temperament which is sensational
or receptive of sensations.  But the novels of Victor Hugo have
one very actual and direct claim upon the attention of everybody.
They are, in one sense, the most interesting of all novels.
The reason is that Hugo is typically a mystic, a man who finds
a meaning in everything.  We all know what are the uninteresting,
the inevitably uninteresting parts of fiction; we all know
what parts of a novel to skip.  We skip the long description
of the country where the hero was born, with its flat sandy wastes,
made ragged with fir trees and tumbling towards the West into low
discoloured hills.  We skip the long account of the heroine's room,
with its quaint old carved furniture and the portraits on the wall,
dim with age but gorgeous with ancient colour.  We skip the account
of the hero's great-grandfather, who was so manly and honourable
a lawyer in a country town.

Now the greatest and boldest tribute that can be paid to Hugo,
the greatest and boldest, perhaps, that can be paid to any novelist,
may be stated in the form that it is not safe to skip these passages
in a novel by Victor Hugo.  In other novelists all these details are dead;
in Hugo they are all alive.  In Hugo we may be certain that the sandy
waste will be made typical, in some wild way, of the type and tribe of
characters to which it gives birth; we may be certain that the furniture
in the room will be packed with symbolism like an antique chapel.
There will be something human and horrible about the tree,
something significant and psychological about the three-legged stool.
This is no exaggeration; in this sense it is literally true that there
is not a dull line in Hugo.

The description of the wooded Breton country in _Quazre-Vingz-Treize_
is really a string of primeval epigrams about the effect
of the forest-darkness upon the soul of man.  The description
of the room of the Duchess in +L'Homme Qui Rit_ is really
a riot of a kind of bestial mysticism and of evil sanctities,
such as might have filled some forgotten Phallic temple.
This is the first and most admirable thing about Hugo as a novelist--
that he is always interesting, and interesting for the best and most
impressive reason, that in everything, however small, he is interested.
Those parts of a novel, scenery, minutiae, explanations, which in most
novelists are the most tedious, in him are almost the most fascinating.
He takes the details which the best authors alive are forced to make
too tame and too long, and at the end our complaint against him is
that they are too brilliant and too overstrained.  Where none else
can be tolerably vivacious, he contrives to be intolerably eloquent.
For to him there is neither a large thing nor a small one;
he has abolished the meanest and most absurd of all human words,
the word "insignificant": he knows that it is impossible for anything
to signify nothing.

Thus in what is, as a work of art, perhaps his most successful novel,
_Notre Dame de Paris_, the sumptuous and fantastic details of
Gothic architecture are practically almost as alive as the people
that pass underneath them.  In the presence of the mazy background
of pious sculpture that runs like a pattern through the tale,
we have something of the same sensation which we have sometimes
in looking at such a facade as that of Rouen Cathedral; the network
of stone is so rich and changing that we can almost believe it
to be continually in motion, rippling underneath like a sea,
with writhing serpents and fluttering birds.  Hugo's backgrounds
are never "set-pieces". So again in _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_
the background to the two or three central figures is the most
appalling of all possible backgrounds--a sea of faces.
Cimourdain and Lantenac and the young Republican soldier have to act
as stern and simple a drama as any old Greeks in a glade or wood;
but instead of acting it in the midst of a wood they act it in the midst
of a mob.  "A two-legged forest" Hugo would probably have said.
But his subordinate features are always thus terrific if our eye
falls upon them; he will slaughter millions to make an accessory.
In _Les Miserables_, as in _Notre Dame_, Paris is almost the chief
character of the novel.  In _L'Homme Qui Rit_ the best description
is that of two very weird and fierce and inscrutable things--
the sea, and the English aristocracy according to Victor Hugo.
In _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ he spends a vast deal of trouble
on the reality of the cuttle-fish, and very little on the possibility
or probability of the gentleman who fights with him.  Hugo is not
a successful novelist according to the conception that a novelist
must understand human nature.  He does not even pretend to understand
human nature; he is a poet, and boasts of understanding nothing;
he glories in an astounded and uplifted ignorance.  Human nature
to Hugo was a spontaneous and unbegotten and thrilling thing,
a thing like the lightning and the burst of song among the birds.
He did not profess to have vivisected man in the modern manner.
Man was to him an awful thing, a thing to fly from, as he must
have been to the animals in Eden.

The manifest theatricality and vanity of Victor Hugo have
undoubtedly interfered with his appreciation by English readers,
for we English people have thoroughly embedded in our minds the idea
that vanity is a morbid and fantastic thing, developed by a high
degree of hyper-civilization.  We think this although every
one of us has constantly noticed vanity in a child of three.
We think this although every one of us knows that savages are vainer
than civilized men, and that even the bonnets of Bond Street are not more
elaborately feathered than the head-dresses of the Cannibal Islands.
The truth is that Hugo represents all the ultimate and fundamental
things--love, fury, pity, worship, hatred, and consequently,
among other things, vanity.  Vanity is not only not the same thing
as self-consciousness, it is very often the opposite of it.
When a man becomes self-conscious he very often becomes painfully
and abominably humble.  But so long as a man is healthily
unconscious he is almost certain to be healthily vain.
He will take a delight, without a moment's arriere pensee,
in any of his own powers or characteristics.  Hugo had, more than
any other great man of modern times, this self-enjoying faculty.
To him delight in himself was the first condition of all optimism,
and faith in himself the first condition of all faith.
If a man does not enjoy himself whom
he has seen, how shall he enjoy God whom he has not seen?
To the great poet, as to the child, there is no hard-and-fast
line drawn between the Ego and the Cosmos.

Anyone who has ever watched a child for the first five years of its life
will know that when the human soul first awakens to the immensities
of mere existence, the first thing it does is to begin to act a part.
In that first movement of the child we see the great part of
the literary and political history of Victor Hugo.  He had in all
things an innocent arrogance; he had, if a paradoxical but accurate
phrase may be employed, an utterly unconscious self-consciousness.
And this quality fitted him supremely to be the expression of France
in the nineteenth century; for France, having renewed her youth in
that century, was really young.  She had not only the fire and anger
and hope of youth, she had also that more obvious and more painful
characteristic of youth, its cleverness.  Quazre-Vingr-Treige, the great
novel of the Revolution, was not the most successful, perhaps;
it was possibly the most Hugo-esque of the works of Hugo;
for Hugo was supremely at one with the spirit of the Revolution,
and his novel, like the Revolution itself, was one mass of epigrams.
The story of the Revolution, indeed, gives an exceedingly good
example of how misleading are many of the narrow English notions
about sincerity and affectation, and how artificial is their idea
of artificiality.  If an Englishman read in a novel by Victor Hugo
that a man about to be beheaded asked permission to take leave
of a friend, and when forbidden exclaimed in a resonant voice,
"Our two heads will seek each other in the sack," he would
say that it was a monstrous example of Hugo's exaggeration.
In the best style of the latter-day realist and psychologist
he would point out how impossible it would be for a man paralysed
with the last proximity of death to have his wits polished for such
neat and fantastic discourse.  If he read it in a novel of Hugo's,
in short, he would say that it showed all the weakness of Hugo;
but as a matter of fact it does not occur in a novel of Hugo's,
but in the actual history of the French Revolution, The words were
the precise words, attested by numerous witnesses, used on this
prosaic earth of ours by a living man, Georges Jacques Danton,
within ten minutes of becoming a dead one.  Until we have realised
this fact about the Revolution, all criticism of Hugo must remain
vain and superficial.

Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share
the emotions they represent:  thus the Hebrew songs appeared
turgid to Voltaire and the critics of the eighteenth century;
thus the epigrams of the French Revolution appear turgid to ourselves.
The reason is not that the Hebrew psalmists or the French Revolutionists
were affected, but that we are not so interested in religion
as the Hebrew psalmists, nor so interested in democracy as the
French Revolutionists.  The great demagogues of the Terror were
so filled with the unifying convictions, that their life became
a poetical unity, a work of art like the legend of a medieval saint.
The extravagant appropriateness of Hugo's conversations are
thoroughly in harmony with the extravagant appropriateness
of the actual incidents of that period of French history.
If Hugo does not honestly copy the Revolution, the only possible
alternative is the somewhat improbable one that the Revolution
honestly copied Hugo.

The second of the misunderstandings which interfere with the general
appreciation of Victor Hugo is the misunderstanding of his idea
of Republicanism or democracy.  He appears at the first glance,
from our point of view, a furious poet and an ineffectual politician,
who was exiled from his country by the decision of a Bonapartist
majority of his countrymen.  He never ceased from calling down curses
on the majority which was the basis of his own political creed,
he never ceased from clamouring and praying for the rule of the very
people whose decision had set him upon a lonely rock in the Channel.
To the ordinary eye of these days nothing can be more pitiable
than the position of the unpopular democrat.  There is nothing
more contemptible, af the first glance, than the man who has appealed,
as Hugo appealed, from the people to a tyrant, and who finds immediately
that the people and the tyrant are indissolubly allied against him.
But to misunderstand Hugo on this point is to misunderstand the whole
idea of democracy as Hugo understood it.

If there be one thing more than another which is true of genuine
democracy, it is that genuine democracy is opposed to the rule
of the mob.  For genuine democracy is based fundamentally on
the existence of the citizen, and the best definition of a mob
is a body of a thousand men in which there is no citizen.

Hugo stood for the fact that democracy isolated the citizen
fully as much as the ancient religions isolated the soul.
He resisted the rule of the Third Napoleon because he saw that it
had the supreme and final mark of the rule of the tyrant,
the fact that it relied on the masses.  As if a million
of the images of God could by any possibility become a mass.
He made his appeal to the individual, as every poet must do, and asked
the solitary citizen to act as if he were really not only the only human
being on the earth, but the only sentient being in the universe.
He realised the obvious and simple truth, so often neglected,
that if the individual is nothing, then the race is nothing--
for the plain mathematical reason that a hundred times nought is nought.
Therefore his sublimest figure, his type of humanity, was not either
a king or a republican, but a man on a desert island.


THE GREAT GUSTO

IN CONSIDERING Dickens as a Victorian, perhaps the first necessity
is considering him as a Pre-Victorian.  It is not so much a matter
of dates as of derivations; it must be remembered, to begin with,
that he is much less completely inside the period, much less covered
at both ends by the conventions of the period, than many great men whom
some would call more original, like Ruskin or Meredith or Browning.
On this side, indeed, Dickens is outside the Victorian enclosure,
not so much because he was original as because he was traditional.
Though labelled Radical, where others were labelled Tory, he carries
on a rank, rowdy, jolly tradition of men falling off coaches,
before the sons of Science and the Great Exhibition began to travel
primly on rails or grooves.  He carries on the old English legend
of the coarse and comic novels of Smollett and Fielding, and none
the less because under the gradual pressure of Victorianism his
work is still comic but no longer coarse.  The sort of comicality
that commonly went with coarseness is apparent enough, especially at
the beginning, while many of the other Victorians seem to have grown up,
not merely Victorian--but something that should be called Albertian.
This is the first and perhaps the frankest phase of Dickens;
and but for refinements that really started later than this phase,
it might easily have been even more frank.  It may or may not be right
to call him a caricaturist.  But certainly, considered as a caricaturist,
he starts straight away out of the world of Gilray and Rowlandson;
a world widely different from that of Du Maurier or even Keene.
We hardly feel any such direct heritage of the old comic writers
even at the beginning of the other Victorian novelists; because they
are more completely Victorian.  And before we come to the application
of this fact to his fiction, it has some application to his life.
For circumstances started him almost unconsciously with a certain
very ancient tradition, which for special reasons had become a very
English tradition.  It makes an immortal appearance in his first great
masterpiece of Pickwick, but it is connected also with something
in his personal position as well as in his literary lineage.
It is perhaps the simplest figure in which we can summarise
his primary position both in life and letters.  I will call
it for convenience the great tradition of the Comic Servant.
And though in special ways it had been softened by being Christian
and emphasised by being English, it is a very venerable tradition,
which works back to the position in antiquity of The Comic Slave.

To explain this, we may briefly allude to his life, though there
is no space for his biography.  He was born in Portsea,
a part of Portsmouth, in 1812, but was soon removed to Chatham,
around which neighbourhood his early life largely revolved.
His father was an impecunious old party, whose occupation
was often shadowy and what the hasty will describe as shady.
But he was the model of Micawber, and therefore must have had
in him something great and good.  He and his son later went
to London, where they both became Parliamentary reporters;
but the son soon turned from reporting politics to reporting life.
As a journalist he wrote under the name of "Boz", and certain sketches
of his attracted attention; a friend and patron named Hogarth had
a family of daughters, among whom he found first a wife and afterwards
a friend; but his first great opportunity came with the offer to write
a story round Seymour's sketches of the pranks of the Nimrod Club,
which he managed to turn into the more famous Pickwick Club.
The book was hugely popular, and ever afterwards he was busy,
successful, laborious, inventive, excited and exhausted until he died.
Oliver Twist, which stands somewhat alone, was followed by a serial
scheme of stories within a story called _Master Humphrey's Clock_,
in which _Barnaby Rudge_ and _The Old Curiosity Shop_ both appeared.
Later, at regular intervals, came _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Martin Chuzzlewit_
and _Dombey and Son_; and with the latter we reach and recognise
a change in his mood and method; the frank farce begins to fade away,
and the more subtle, sober and realistic Dickens of later years develops.
He reaches his most sincere moment in the semi-autobiographical
_David Copperfield_; his most earnest social philosophy in _Hard Times_,
with something of the same graver reforming spirit in _Bleak House_;
and his most restrained and delicate artistic success in
_Great Expectations_.  _Little Dorrit_ was something of an interlude;
and then he gathered up into his last complete book, _Our Mutual Friend_,
all his growing knowledge of the realities of society, of the growth
of plutocracy and the peril now threatening the national tradition.
His furious industry, combined with yet more devastating tours
in America, to say nothing of the private tragedy that separated
him from his wife, gave something gloomy and feverish to his end;
and he died in 1870, leaving unsolved other mysteries besides
_The Mystery of Edwin Drood_.

It is rather symbolic that he died in that year of Prussian victory,
which was the eclipse of Liberty throughout the world.
For he had grown up with the growing liberalism of England,
and is perhaps the one great Englishman who consciously devoted
himself to democracy, as a feeling as well as a theory.
He stands for all the hearty humanitarianism of that age at its best;
and yet there is a deeper and older element in him, which I have put
first because it came first.  I mean what I have already called
the tradition of The Comic Servant.

If we call Dickens democratic, we must qualify it by saying that
he is the derisive democrat rather than the dignified democrat.
If he looks down on worldly rank, it is not from the severe
status of the citizen of antiquity; it is not even from the solid
status of the peasant in any peasantry.  It is rather with that
inverted and comic contempt, which looks down when it looks up.
It derives, not so much from any levelling dogma that Jack is
as good as his master, in the sense that he should have no master;
it derives rather from the old joke, found in many an old legend,
that Jack is better than his master; that in the last scene the last
are first and the first last.  We could hardly summon the solemnity
to say that Samuel Pickwick and Samuel Weller are two equal citizens;
if only because in some ways the servant is the superior.
But the superiority is the superiority of a comic servant, not of a
master or even a peasant proprietor; superiority in wit and satire
and cunning, but not superiority in status or seriousness or dignity.
Now despite the growth of more grave and ideal democratic views,
this did long remain the real attitude of the real Dickens.
He was, first of all, the poorer man making fun of the richer;
but instinctively using fun as his weapon, and not minding if in the
process he seems merely the funny man.  This was complicated afterwards,
as will be noted later, by many less natural ambitions touching
rhetoric and sentiment.  But when Dickens is most like himself he is
most like Sam Weller; and least like Wat Tyler or William Tell.
He is more really concerned to show that the tyrant is undignified
than that the slave is dignified.

The point is that the comic Dickens existed before the tragic
or melodramatic; the comic was older than the tragic; the comic
was deeper than the tragic.  It was partly because there was already
a tradition of popular joviality rather than popular justice, of riot
rather than revolt.  It was partly because Dickens as an individual
had lived for a long time amid this laughter of the populace,
before he began to think more seriously of that social ideal;
which is not merely the populace, but rather the people.
Just as Sam Weller had run wild as a sort of guttersnipe,
before he became a gentleman's servant and something of a philosopher,
so Dickens had been one of the old English crowd, from which a nameless
voice cries, "Three cheers for the Mayor; and may he never desert
the nail and sarspan business as 'e made 'is money by", long before
he had ever dreamed of seeing the tragic vision of a French crowd,
as in _The Tale of Two Cities_, through the visionary eyes of Carlyle.
That is the real comparison between Dickens the humorist and Dickens
the sentimentalist, the sociologist, the realist, the reformer
and all the many aspects that have been unfavourably or favourably
compared with it.  Not that his social criticism was bad,
not even that his sentimentalism was always necessarily bad;
but that his humour was the elder brother, more hardy, more mature,
more expert and experienced; more genuine and more national and historic.
For the English populace has lived on laughter; its substitute
for religion, for property, and sometimes even for food.

We may say that in this matter there is a curious contrast with Scott.
We may also say that in this matter Scott was really Scottish,
and therefore the reverse of English.  For the Scots, having a real
religion of the people, have had a real dignity in the democracy.
Nothing is more notable than this curious contradiction:
that while Dickens called himself a Radical and really was
a Democrat, and Scott called himself a Tory and really rejoiced
in some qualities of the older aristocrat, Scott has a far nobler
sense than Dickens of the natural human dignity of the poor.
Small farmers or fishermen in Scott do not have to become
comic servants in order to score off their masters; do not
have to become Court fools in order to criticise the Court.
They can be eloquent in plain words; they can be eloquent
in poor man's speech; they can be eloquent in broad Scots.
Nobody doubts the sincerity of Dickens or the justification of Peggotty;
but they could not speak over the ruined hearth with the tongue of
Meg Merrilees over the gipsy fires; a speech that almost rises into song.
Nationality is not a matter of praise or blame, for by its very
nature a nation gives a colour to things both good and evil;
but it is important to realise that Dickens could no more have
imagined Meg Merrilees than Scott could have invented Mrs. Wilfer.

Oddly enough, Dickens could only write good rhetoric when
he meant it for bad rhetoric.  When he himself seriously meant
it for good rhetoric, it was generally bad.  So completely was
the comic spirit his spirit, almost in the sense of his soul,
that anything he wrote with expansion and exaggeration was for him
a liberation of the soul, and took on swelling contours of the comic,
which really have their own beauty and even their own harmony.
But when he was only making his serious characters dramatic, he often
only made them melodramatic.  When he was only stuffing the gaps of
the mere story with serious matter, he was not enjoying himself so much;
and the stuffing was often poor stuff.  His fools could talk poetry,
while his knaves could only talk sentiment.  Therefore, strange as it
may seem, the one or two occasions, on which Dickens may actually
be said to be an English stylist, are those in which he is a
satirist of what he considers a pompous and preposterous style.
About as good a piece of English as he ever wrote in his life
is Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz's speech, which is really an uncommonly
good speech.  We can see the difference at once, when we compare it
with the really pompous and preposterous speeches he was putting,
almost at the same time, into the mouths of his serious villains.
For instance, _Nicholas Nickleby_ is an early work; but _Pickwick_
is even earlier.  But the raving of Ralph Nickleby is not even
good as raving; while the ranting of Serjeant Buzfuz is very good
as ranting; nay, is classical and almost rational as ranting.
Few, I imagine, who have had business interviews with a money-lender,
or even a stingy uncle, have ever heard him conclude the conversation
with the words, "My curse, my bitter curse upon you, boy!";
or formed a high opinion of his literary style if he did.
But then Dickens was not enjoying himself in writing about Ralph;
and he was enjoying himself in writing about Buzfuz.
Therefore, as I say, he so heartily enters into the real spirit
of the old forensic eloquence and so fills it with his own
ecstasy of emphasis, that he really writes a piece of good style
worthy of a great stylist.  After describing darkly how "a being,
erect upon two legs and bearing all the outward semblance of a man
and not of a monster", entered Mrs. Bardell's lodging-house,
he has the art and restraint to close the passage with simplicity
and severity:  "This man was Pickwick; Pickwick the defendant".
Then, by a true stylistic inspiration, he starts afresh,
as with a new paragraph; "Of this man Pickwick I will say little.
The subject presents but few attractions; and I, gentleman, am not
the man, nor are you, gentlemen, the men, to delight in the
contemplation of revolting heartlessness and systematic villainy."
Which is, quite seriously, a rattling good piece of English rhetoric;
a thousand times better than anything Dickens could have written
when he wanted to be serious.

It would be an exaggeration to say that this is because Dickens
was not serious about being serious.  But it is true to say that his
whole soul was seldom in anything about which he was wholly serious.
He was a man with much of the actor in him; he was in fact an
admirable amateur actor; the real sound old-fashioned sort of actor,
who was proud of versatility and the taking of varied parts.
When he took the part of a rhetorician or a sentimentalist
or a social idealist, he was sincere as an actor is sincere;
that is, as any other artist is sincere.  He had something to say
and he said it; not always perfectly, but often very well.
But when he was describing something funny, he was himself.
He was not acting but enjoying; he was almost the audience rather
than the artist.  There was something gigantic, as of the joy
of a whole crowd, in his enjoyment.  He was essentially the man
who laughs at his own jokes, and his own jokes inspired him like wine
to wilder and wilder creation; but always to the creation of beauty
in his own department of the far-fetched and the fantastic.
What is more to the purpose here, they could inspire him even
in the department of the forensic or the classic.

In Dickens it is the man who is entirely in the wrong who invariably says
the right thing.  All the genius is in that saying of the right thing;
that is, of the exquisitely and ecstatically wrong thing.
His fun is a form of poetry; and quite as personal and indefinable
as poetry.  Like poetry, it is for the moment on one note,
and making the most of one notion; like poetry, it leaves us amazed
at what can be made out of one notion.  That is what the critics mean
who say it is not like life; because it is more living than life.
It is a magic accelerating growth; so that one seed out of a
thousand seeds of fact visibly springs and sprouts into a tree,
as in a fairy-tale.  Certainly this is not dealing with all the facts;
but it is releasing all the potential life in one of them.
Dickens saw something, whether in a man's notions or in his nose,
which could be developed more than dull life dares to develop it.
The Dickens comic character is in that sense real and in that
sense unreal.  We may call it a caricature; though indeed
it is a caricature of Dickens to call him a caricaturist.
The very criticism itself has the oversimplification of a caricature.
But if anybody thinks that anybody can do it, that it is a vulgar
trick of exaggerating anything, that it is not a work of art,
that it is not a work of genius then that critic may be curtly
recommended to become a great comic novelist and create a score
of Dickens characters out of the next twenty people he meets.
He will soon find that he can no more do it than he can become
a great poet merely by admiring the sunset.  In this sense we
may say that Dickens was really too subtle and distinguished;
and that is why it was easy to call him obvious and vulgar.

We may here recur to the fact first stated; that Dickens,
who was in a family sense almost as new and nameless as a foundling,
or at least often almost as lonely as an orphan, had in a literary
sense something like a pedigree.  He called one of his sons
Henry Fielding Dickens, and we instantly feel that he had a sort
of natural right to make a godfather out of Henry Fielding;
more than he had, in that sense, to make one out of a pure
Victorian like Alfred Tennyson.  But the comic literature was not
all great literature, nor its exponents all men like Fielding;
and there were two sides to the very broad farce prevailing
before the time when the Tennysonian refinement finally prevailed.
In some ways this crude comic tradition did him harm even then;
and in one particular way it does him even greater harm now.
It is notable that he took over certain stock stage figures,
of the farcical sort, and many modern readers are still repelled
by a general impression that the story is stale, before they go
on to discover that the story-telling is almost startlingly fresh.
For instance, they feel that it is not very funny that Mr. Tupman
was a fat man who dressed up as a dandy and a lady-killer.
It is not very funny; and for that reason Dickens really tells
us very little more about Mr. Tupman.  It marks the inspired
inconsequence of his method, that the story of Pickwick is not
chiefly the story of the Pickwickians.  Dickens started with
the stock characters, but he crowded the stage with superb supers
who have nothing to do with the play, and who are the making of it.
By the end, the story is full of entirely new and original characters,
and none more new than Mr. Samuel Pickwick; who has somehow changed
from a goggle-eyed old buffoon to a most mellow and well-mannered
old English merchant.

Nobody does justice to Dickens the creative artist who has
a general prejudiced impression of Dickens the caricaturist.
He actually began with a commission to write what were little more than
captions for caricatures.  The point is that while the caricatures
remained stiff or vulgar, the new captions grew more and more
inventive and imaginative.  The test is not in the situations,
but in the treatment of the situations.  There must have been
many tipsy clerks, in many comic novels, who roystered in their
cups in the manner of robbers carousing.  But only one of them,
whose name was Richard Swiveller, when crying "Some wine here, ho."
ever carried dramatic versatility so far as to hand the flagon
to himself with profound humility and then receive it haughtily.
There must have been many jokes about Valentine's Day as vulgar
as the valentines, but only in the Weller family was there that
remarkable debate on diction, which decided whether "circumscribed"
or "circumwented" is a more "tenderer" word.  Many allusions less
than delicate were made to Mrs. Gamp's profession; but only one gave
us a flashing glimpse of that distracted husband, and the invalid
who was told "to ease 'er mind, 'is 'owls was organs".

Nevertheless, Dickens did gain something essential to his greatness
from that old tradition of England, and even from that relatively
old tradition of revolution.  I know not what it should be called;
if I had to invent a name for it I should call it The Great Gusto;
something whole-hearted and precipitate about the mirth and
the anger of that age, when there were mobs and no ballot-boxes.
When all is allowed for the many noble names that are native
to the Victorian time as such, to their several forms of sincerity
or self-direction, it is true that the great force, or even
the great violence of Dickens flows through them all, like an
ancestral river coming from older places and more historic hills.
He is all the more traditional because he is ignorant.
He has that vast silent incessant traditionalism that we call
the ignorance of the populace.  And it is right to say that when more
sophisticated Victorians set up fads like fences, and established
new forms of narrowness, that flood of popular feeling, that was
a single man, burst through them and swept on.  He was a Radical,
but he would not be a Manchester Radical, to please Mr. Gradgrind.
He was a humanitarian, but he would not be a platform Pacifist,
to please Mr. Honeythunder.  He was vaguely averse to ritual religion;
but he would not abolish Christmas, to please Mr. Scrooge.
He was ignorant of religious history, and yet his religion was historic.
For he was the People, that is heard so rarely in England; and, if it
had been heard more often, would not have suffered its feasts
to be destroyed.


VANITY FAIR

THE rising generations, when confronted with _Vanity Fair_,
as with the _Iliad_, the _Book of Job_ or other works, are fully
entitled to be struck, or even repelled, by the appearance of
something old-fashioned; so long as they remember that they will not go
on rising very long, before they become old-fashioned themselves.
But in the matter of the form of fiction, fashions follow each
other today with rather bewildering rapidity.  _Vanity Fair_
might have appeared somewhat formless to some of the old supporters
of the classical unities; it might again have appeared somewhat
formless to the exact artistry of the school and generation
of Stevenson; but even if it were much more formless than it is,
it could hardly reach the superb ecstasy of formlessness,
which is admired in many of the long realistic novels of today.
As a matter of fact, it is far less formless than it looks.  The narrative
style of the novelist is garrulous and therefore discursive.
Indeed the way in which the tale is told is in a rather special
sense the manner of gossip.  It is gossip not only in being
casual and allusive; but also in actually being indirect.
Much of the story comes to us by rumour; tales are told by one club man
to another club man; we might say by one Thackeray to another Thackeray.
He often manages to suggest more than he is prepared to say,
by putting up some jolly old snob to say it.  The method of gossip has
a certain realism; it suggests the same figure seen from many sides;
like a single man seen in all the mirrors of the London club.
It will at least be well if the younger critic realises
that Thackeray's style, which seems to be one of drawling and
dawdling irrelevancy, is not an accident but an artistic method,
suitable to his special purposes; and that sometimes his very
irrelevance is as relevant as a conjurer's patter.  In more direct
and economical stylists, such as Stevenson, we know what the author
thinks of the character; and possibly what the character thinks
of the other character whom he marries or murders with a cutlass.
In books like _Vanity Fair_, it is very necessary that we
should also know what the World thinks of the character;
for indeed in _Vanity Fair_ the chief character is the World.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the World is the villain
of the piece; but it may well be said that in this sense it is
a novel without a hero.  The theme of it is what the old comic
dramatist called _The Way of the World_; and a sort of satiric
but not too severe judgment on it, for the way in which it treats all
its characters, including the comparatively rare heroes and villains.
For this purpose it is necessary that the club of Thackeray,
like the island of Prospero, should be "full of voices";
and that we should get a general sense of much that is mere talk,
or even mere echoes.  For instance; I doubt if it would have been
possible to convey the historic but rather unique position of
the few very great, because very rich, English Dukes or Marquises
(who were something quite different from mere nobility or gentry,
in the sense in which any squire or soldier might happen to have
a title); it would have been impossible to suggest the strange
public position of a man like Lord Steyne, without all those
scattered allusions to him and I momentary glimpses of him,
in the distance, on the high places of English social life.
That sort of man is Somebody through all the nobodies who never knew him.
We should not feel it enough by being suddenly introduced into
his presence; we have to feel that his very absence is as impressive
as his presence.  All this gossip about the great House of Gaunt
is deliberate and even delicate, and without it we should not get
the distance or the perspective that points to the ultimate scene;
or feel the full force of that splendid blow which the obscure
and stupid husband struck, leaving the scar which Lord Steyne
carried till his death.

Allowing for this wandering style (which as I say is often
artful as well as artless), I repeat that there is a real form
in _Vanity Fair_, the lines of which are kept more carefully
than in much modern fiction.  The pattern or outline of the story
consists of the parallel or divergent careers of two girls,
who start together from the same school in the first chapter.
Vanity Fair, or the fashion of this world that passes away, is tested
by its treatment of these two types and tests the types in its turn.
One is the celebrated Becky Sharpe, the adventuress with many of
the attractions of adventure; courageous, humorous, quick-witted,
but under these natural defences somewhat hard and entirely cynical;
one of those children of the poor who are born with a curious moral
conviction of a right to possess riches and to rob the rich.
The other is a more normal young woman of the sort that most would
call ordinary; not demanding much from life, but expecting at the best
a happiness of the sort called sentimental; and in all her views
of existence at the best traditional, and at the worst conventional.
I may remark here that I think it was one of Thackeray's real
mistakes that he made her hold on such things rather conventional
than traditional.  Indeed in this case he was too conventional himself.
He was so occupied with his contrasted pattern, with the good
golden-haired heroine on one side and the wicked red-haired heroine
on the other, that he made the golden-haired heroine a great deal
less heroic than she might reasonably have been.  It is not stating
the alternative of vice and virtue fairly to make the vicious
person a wit and imply that the virtuous person must be a fool.
If he had been less anxious to make her a pathetic figure,
she would have been more of a tragic figure.

Indeed, I think one disadvantage about Vanity Fair, especially today,
is that one or two of these weak exaggerations occur very early
in the book:  and some greater passages only towards the end.
Amelia is made at the very beginning a mere pink and white doll
to be a foil to Becky; and if she represents a rather stale
and vapid sort of sentimental comedy, her brother, Jos Sedley,
represents a rather stale and vulgar sort of sentimental farce.
I never could understand, even in youth, why that fat and featureless
buck was allowed to sprawl across so much of the opening of the story;
and I think it is rather a false note to make Becky deliberately set
her cap at him.  I imagine Miss Sharpe as already knowing the world
well enough not to waste herself on so socially fourth-rate a figure.
It almost seems as if the Sedley family were more unfairly treated
by Thackeray than by fortune; since the brother is vulgarised merely
that he may be a slightly more vulgar copy of the dandy Osborne;
while the sister suffers throughout from that first water-colour
sketch of the two schoolgirls, in which Amelia is given all the water
and Rebecca all the colour.

But, allowing for this, which I confess to thinking a mistake,
we can still trace the clear outline and the largely convincing
logic in the contrast of the two heroines.  The contrast is
of importance, for it involves the chief debates about Thackeray:
the sense in which he was wrongly called cynical; the sense
in which he may rightly be called sceptical.  First of all,
any number of idiots doubtless did call him cynical, because the
story of these two girls was not what they called a moral tale;
by which they meant the grossly immoral tale which tells,
in the teeth of Job and Jesus Christ, the lie that the virtuous
are rewarded with wealth.  It is not, certainly, in that sense,
a story of the Idle and Industrious Apprentice.  It is certainly not
modelled on the disgusting morals of "Pamela or Virtue Rewarded".
But (and this is the important point) neither is it made to enforce
the opposite modern moral of "Amelia or Virtue Punished".
There are many twisted and poisoned writers today, who would have
played out the whole play with the opposite anti-moral purpose;
leaving the wicked Becky in the blaze of the candelabra of Gaunt House
and the kind Amelia picking up bits of coal, with a smut on her nose.
This tragic trick (which was only too attractive to Thomas Hardy)
is quite as much of a refusal to see life steadily and see it whole
as the opposite artifice of the most artificial happy ending.
It is not probable, but improbable, that Becky, with her desperate double
or triple life, would have remained the Queen of Society for ever.
It is not probable, but improbable, that anyone with the virtues
and old connections of Amelia would have found absolutely
none of her old friends ready to patch up her life for her.
The point is that it is a sort of patching up in both cases.
And with that we come near to the real meaning of Thackeray and
the real moral of Vanity Fair.

The general inference from Vanity Fair is that life
largely deceives and disappoints all people, bad and good;
but that there is a difference, and that is (though the stupid
optimist could not see it) rather on the side of the good.
If we judge even Becky's life by the ambitious flights and flirtations
of the beginning she is a ragged and disreputable failure at the end.
If we judge Amelia's life by the romantic hopes of her
first engagement, she is a stunned and helpless victim at the end.
But if we compare the failure of Becky with the failure of Amelia,
we see something that is profoundly true and is the chief truth
of Vanity Fair, though most of the critics have missed it.
The simpler, more innocent and more bewildered person is still capable
of settling down into some sort of consolation and contentment;
whereas she who has hardened herself against scandal or remorse
has also hardened herself against hope.

A good novelist always has a philosophy; but a good novel is never
a book of philosophy.  The moral philosophy of Thackeray unites him
rather with the old moralists than with the modern pessimists.
He says, as his favourite authors, Solomon and Horace, would say,
that life is in a sense vanity.  He would never admit, in the sense
of more modern authors like Zola and Dreiser, that life is also vileness.
His view may be called stoic or sceptic or anything else rather
than pessimist.  But because he was a novelist and a narrative artist,
and not merely a man with a theory, it is true that there did appear
in his works something of a personal note, not to be explained
by any impersonal system.  There is, when all is said and done,
something which haunts the air and discolours the very scenery of
Vanity Fair though it has never been satisfactorily stated or explained.
It is a vivacious book, passing chiefly through scenes of gaiety
and fashion; it is often witty and satirical; it contains
a great deal of humorous interlude and comic characterization;
some of it, as I have noted, being even too broadly comic.
But it is not a jolly book; even when it is for the moment a funny book.
There really is something about it faintly acid and antagonistic;
and that something did belong partly to Thackeray the man,
as well as to Thackeray the philosopher.

There is an awful human weakness, dating from the days of the Victorian
novel but not at all unknown today, which drives men madly
and blindly to make a comparison between Thackeray and Dickens.
Humanity is apparently expected to divide into two parties, as if they
were following two political leaders; and every man expected to adorn
his coat with the red rosette of a roseate optimism more or less
untruly attributed to Dickens, or else with the yellow rosette
of a bilious cynicism equally incorrectly identified with Thackeray.
It was never apparently hinted that man, being divinely endowed with
free will and the use of reason, to the point of unreasonableness,
was perfectly at liberty to like both Dickens and Thackeray,
or to dislike both Thackeray and Dickens, or to enquire why
he should be compelled to couple these two names at all, any more
than those of Scott and Balzac or Tolstoy and George Eliot.
In nine cases out of ten in which this comparison has been used,
it is quite useless.  In one particular point, in which it has
not been used, it is really of some use.

If we want to understand the tone of Thackeray, the thing
which is rather subtle and often misunderstood and makes up
so much of the atmosphere of Vanity Fair, we must look first at
something in his life and character, which can really be seen
most sharply in contrast with that of Dickens.  Dickens was a man
who began in poverty and fought his way up to relative riches.
Thackeray was a man who began with the reasonable prospect of riches,
lost that prospect and had to work under conditions of relative poverty.
With all his social type, tastes, and intentions, those of a
gentleman of private means, or at least of considerable leisure,
he became a hack and hung about Grub Street for a long time,
before he had anything resembling the rapid rise and popularity
of Dickens.  It happened, as most people know, through his
being ruined by professional gamblers, with whom he had played
cards in his capacity of casual and lordly man of the world.
The theme of such a swindle occurs again and again throughout his work,
notably his minor works; especially in the story of the dashing
methods of the Honourable Percy Deuceace.

Now this did really involve a tone, which the comparison
with the other novelist may make more clear.  Money was a sore
subject with Thackeray.  But it was not so much a sore as an itch;
in the sense that he could not let it alone and was always
irritating it anew.  Money was not a sore subject with Dickens.
What is much more important, poverty was not a sore subject
with Dickens.  It did not really depress him; because he had faced
it from the first and triumphed over it long before the end;
and for both reasons he was familiar with it and not ashamed of it.
Dickens does not describe the poor as merely unhappy, because he
remembers being happy when he was young, and even when he was poor.
The festivities of the families of Nubbles or Cratchit are
perhaps the most successful pictures of positive happiness in
human literature; for it is a very difficult thing to describe.
Now it is sometimes said that Thackeray confined all his
attention to the rich and to being a mere novelist of society.
This is meant for a sneer; but I rather wish for his sake that it
were a truth.  The truth is that Thackeray often did describe dismal
lodgings and dreary privations and even high life below stairs.
But what he could not bring himself to believe was that the lodgings
were not always dismal; from the point of view of the lodgers.
That is where the real difference from Dickens came in;
for, much as Dickens suffered in youth, the lodgings had once,
for him, really been home.  He knew that it was really possible
for poor people to feel at home in them on Christmas Day.
To Thackeray they had never been home, but a miserable seedy asylum
for a man who had lost the home of his fathers or his equals.
Hence it is not so much that Thackeray never looks at mean houses,
as that he never looks at them from within; there is written
across all that part of his work the title of one of his tales;
_A Shabby Genteel Story_.  Dickens was happier and more all of a piece;
partly because he had been more shabby and partly because he had
never been so genteel.

In the particular case of Vanity Fair this tone can be easily caught
in the description of the broken fortunes of the Sedleys; Dickens would
never have thought that the Sedleys were so completely defeated
by the Osbornes, merely because they lost a lot of money.
But the paradox is that Dickens thought less of poverty because he had
known it, and thought less of money because he had earned it.
To have that particular Thackerayan tone, compounded of pity
and acrimony, it is necessary to have a certain bitterness;
which is the bitterness of the man who has lost money rather
than of the man who has failed to gain it.  This tone has been
called pessimistic or stoical or helpless or a hundred things;
it has been called cynical by the old, and sentimental by the young;
and it has elements of all these things.  But the essential of it,
which determines the idea of _Vanity Fair_, is a certain feeling,
which no novelist had yet really introduced into the fiction of England;
though Balzac had already introduced it into the fiction of France.
It would be putting it too simply to call it The Importance of Money.
For it is also a particular sense of something ghastly and unnatural
about the Importance of Money.  It is the cry of somebody who has
found out, by falling over it, or breaking it, or losing it,
that it is important; and yet cannot reconcile its importance
with his own inner dignity and right reason.  Hence the metaphor
which makes the whole apparent world a sort of show with booths
and puppet-theatres:  Vanity Fair.  In a sense he could not believe
in this world; as smaller sceptics cannot believe in the other.
For we may say of Thackeray what he said of Swift; that there did
remain at the back of his mind, in spite of all apparent scepticism,
a noble but rather dark reality that is of the substance of religion.
The Victorian Age had made it vague; the tradition of classical
scholarship had made it seem almost heathen; but it was there,
by the unanswerable test that applies to all the prophets and
the saints.  Thackeray thought the world false; which alone proves
the presence of something contrasted with it which is true.
Despite the superficial irritability which I have described,
and which accounts for some of his lighter and less convincing sneers,
it is true that he was too great a man to be godless and that he did
not in his heart doubt that the injustices of the earth stand
in contrast with a real justice.  That is why I say that he stands
rather with the ancient moralists than with the modern pessimists.
It is true that this phrase also has been used incessantly and
invariably wrongly.  He himself confessed to a tendency to moralise;
and many modern readers will doubtless repeat with far fiercer
contempt this charge of moralising.  But as a fact, it is not
moralising at all.  It is not strictly even philosophising.
It is repeating old proverbs like the burden of an old song.
It is not surprising that people once called it cynical and now
call it sentimental.  "Oh, it's the old story" is a sentence
that can easily be said, both in a cynical and a sentimental tone.
Thackeray was penetrated through and through with the conviction
that this story is only the old story; and no criticisms can anticipate
him on that.  But its importance is that, like many old stories,
it is in its way a great tragedy; and tragedy is that point when
things are left to God and men can do no more.


THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF MEREDITH

I HAVE just read a letter on the subject of Meredith and Dickens,
which is very typical of all that we must throw off in the modern
world or perish.  Why anybody should want to compare Meredith
and Dickens any more than Hesiod and Thackeray, I do not know.
But the letter was to this effect; that Dickens could not really
be a great artist, because in his books one could divide men into
good and bad; and with Meredith, it was alleged (very unjustly)
one could not do this.  There could be no stronger case of that strange
fanaticism which fills our time; the fanatical hatred of morality,
especially of Christian morality.  This attempt to condemn all working
moral judgments in fiction was made the instrument of a eulogy
upon Meredith.  Meredith, it was suggested, exhibited his characters
not only as compounded of good and evil, but always, I presume,
compounded of them (by some strange coincidence) in equal quantities.
Meredith did not offer good people or bad people, but merely people;
like animals to be considered scientifically and (I suppose)
coldly, without reference to any high crisis of the conscience or wars
between heaven and hell.  That was the claim made for Meredith.

This being so, it is plain that Meredith, like Browning, must be
rescued from his admirers.  And there could hardly be a better end
to begin at than this simple matter of the allegation about ethics.
It is an atrocious libel upon Meredith to say that he was
scientific or purely psychological or even purely aesthetic.
It is a black slander to say that he did not preach, or that
his characters are not properly placarded as good and bad.
They are; just as much and just as little as in Dickens or any
other writer whose books it is endurable to read.  Books without
morality in them are books that send one to sleep standing up.
Meredith at least was not of that sort; he was complex but quite
the reverse of colourless.  His convictions may have been
right or wrong; but they were very burning convictions.
Are there no ethical sympathies in Harry Richmond; no political
sympathies in Vittoria?  But the most famous case is, of course,
the most crushing of all.  Meredith did what Dickens never did.
He wrote a Morality; a pure and stern satiric allegory for the lashing
of one special vice.  The Egoist is not a man; he is a sin.  And, as in
all the old and wholesome Moralities of the ages of faith, the object
of fixing the vice on one man is really to fix it upon all men.
We have all posed with the Egoist, just as we have all fallen with Adam.
There is no character in Dickens which is symbolic and moral in that
extreme sense and degree.  Micawber is not Improvidence, Sikes is
not Brutality, in the utterly naked and abstract sense in which
Sir Willoughby Patterne is Selfishness.

What is interesting about Meredith, was not that he did not recognise
right and wrong; but what things he thought right and what wrong,
and how far he differed from the current conceptions of his society.
He left the world in comparatively little doubt about these things,
except in so far as his mere mode of expression was dubious or indirect.
Fantastic as he was, he was a fighter; and when you have understood
a Meredith sentence you will generally find it is a stab.
The argument of Meredith is that our little lives always stagnate
into hypocrisy or morbidity unless the general wave of the world
continually refreshes and re-creates us, and he maintains that the gods
are a necessity of man.  He prefers to say the gods rather than God;
but that is a nineteenth-century prejudice.

Since Christianity broke the heart of the world and mended it, one cannot
really be a Pagan; one can only be an antiChristian.  But, subject to this
deeper difficulty, Meredith came much nearer to being a real Pagan
than any of the other moderns for whom the term has been claimed.
Swinburne was not a Pagan; he was a pseudo-Parisian pessimist.
Thomas Hardy is not a Pagan; he is a Nonconformist gone sour.
It is not Pagan to revile the gods nor is it Pagan to exalt a streetwalker
into a symbol of all possible pleasure.  The Pagan felt that there
was a sort of easy and equable force pressing upon us from Nature;
that this force was breezy and beneficent, though not specially just
or loving; in other words, that there was, as the strength in wine
or trees or the ocean, the energy of kindly but careless gods.
This Paganism is now impossible, either to the Christian or the sceptic.
We believe so much less than that--and we desire so much more.
But no man in our time ever came quite so near to this clean
and well-poised Paganism as Meredith.  He took the mystery of
the universe lightly; and waited for the gods to show themselves
in the forest.  We talk of the curiosity of the Greeks; but there
is also something almost eerie about their lack of curiosity.
There is a wide gulf between the gay unanswered questions
of Socrates and the parched and passionate questions of Job.
Theirs was at least a light curiosity, a curiosity of the head;
and it seems a sort of mockery to those Christians or unbelievers
who now explore the universe with the tragic curiosity of the heart.
Meredith almost catches this old pre-Christian levity; this spirit
that can leave the gods alone even when it believes in them.
He had neither the brighter nor the darker forms of spiritual
inquiry or personal religion.  He could neither rise to prayer nor
sink to spirit-rapping.

Yet he was a religious Pagan because he had that great and central
sacramental idea which is the one thing which marks religion
from all imitations of religion or false definitions of it.
It is the thing which is in all things that are religions, Brahminism,
or Mormonism, or Catholicism, or Thuggee, or Devil-worship;
but which is not in any of the things that merely pretend to
be religions, such as Ethical Societies or Higher Thought Centres.
This element can only be called the materialism of the true mystic.
Those who do not like it call it fetish-worship.  It is the idea
that to enter upon abstractions and infinities is to get further
and further from the mystery; to come near some particular stone
or flame or boundary is to get nearer and nearer to the mystery.
All unsophisticated human beings instinctively accept the sacramental
principle that the particular thing is closest to the general,
the tangible thing closest to the spiritual; the child with a doll,
the priest with a relic, the girl with an engagement ring, the soldier
with a medal, the modern agnostic with his little scarab for luck.
One can recall the soul of boyhood better by smelling peppermint
than by reading about adolescence; one could talk for hours about
a person's identity and still jump on hearing his voice; and it
is possible for Putney to be a much more pathetic word than Memory.
I have heard modern people talk of the needlessness of all the old
rituals and reliquaries and the need for a simple religion of the heart.
But their demand is rather dangerous, especially to themselves.
If we really had a simple religion of the heart we should all be
loaded with relics, and rituals would be going on all day long.
If our creed were only of the higher emotions, it would talk of nothing
else but special shrines, sacred spots, indispensable gestures,
and adorable rags and bones.  In short, a religion of pure good feeling
would be a positive orgy of superstition.  This seems to me excessive;
I prefer a little clean theology to keep the thing within bounds.
But the thing itself is the essence of genuine religion;
every genuine mystic, even the diabolist, adores something material.
In short, both the mystic and the mere philosopher agree that the
spiritual is more important than the material considered in itself.
The philosopher thinks that the spiritual lies very far
beyond the material, like a remote landmark behind a plain.
The mystic thinks that the spiritual is very close behind the material,
like a brigand hiding behind a bush.  Science is always saying
that the other world, if it exists, is too distant to be seen.
Religion is always saying that it is too close to be seen.
The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Meredith in this deep sense is a mystic, though perhaps a Pagan mystic.
He is a mystic in so far that he is a materialist.  In all his work
there is the smell and taste of things; it is grass and not the ghost
of grass; fire and not the shadow of fire; beer and not the chemical
analysis of beer.  Nothing is so fine in Meredith as the satisfying
solidity of everything.  The wind in which Clara Middleton walked
is a real wind; the reader can feel it in his hair.  The wine which
Dr. Middleton drank is a real wine; the reader can get drunk on it.
It is true that Meredith, when one does not understand him,
appears like a bewildering filigree or a blinding spider's web; but this
is a question of the difficulty of finding his meaning, not of what it
is like when found.  Meredith's language is indefensibly intricate;
but it is Meredith's language, not Meredith.  It is as if someone
were saying something quite hearty and sensible in Hebrew.
In this sense Meredith is not only vivid but almost outrageous;
and many Meredithian ladies have simpered somewhat sadly over the
amount of space devoted to the taste, fullness, flavour and bouquet
of Dr. Middleton's wine.

Meredith made us feel the bodily presence of people as well as
their spiritual presence; and even delighted in the very bodily,
as in schoolboys.  And all this is, I think, ultimately connected
with his conception of the universe, vague or pantheist as many
may call it.  But meredith was not a pantheist; he was a Pagan.
The difference consists in this tremendous fact; that a Pagan always
has sacraments, while a pantheist has none.  Meredith always sought
for special and solid symbols to which to clingl as in that fine poem
called "A Faith on Trial", in which all his agonies are answered,
not by a synthesis or a cosmology, but suddenly by a white
cherry-branch in bloom.


THE HEROINES OF SHAKESPEARE

It is an odd thing that the words hero and heroine have in their constant
use in connection with literary fiction entirely lost their meaning.
A hero now means merely a young man sufiiciently decent and reliable to go
through a few adventures without hanging himself or taking to drink.
The modern realistic novelist introduces us to a weak-kneed young
suburban gentleman who varies dull respectability with duller vice,
and consumes three thick volumes before he has decided which woman
he will marry.  And by the strange, blasphemous perversion of words,
he is called "The Hero."  He might just as well, in reason,
be called "The Saint," or "The Prophet," or "The Messiah."
A hero means a man of heroic stature, a demigod, a man on
whom rests something of the mystery which is beyond man.
Now, the great and striking thing about heroines like Portia
and Isabella and Rosalind is that they are heroines, that they
do represent a certain dignity, a certain breadth, which is
distinct from the mere homely vigour of the Shakespearian men.
You could not slap Portia on the back as you could Bassanio.
There may or may not be a divinity that doth hedge a king,
but there is certainly a divinity that doth hedge a queen.
To understand this heroic quality in the Shakespearian women it
is necessary to grasp a little the whole Elizabethan, and especially
the whole Shakespearian, view of this matter.
The great conception at the back of the oldest religions in the
world is, of course, the conception that man is of divine origin,
a sacred and splendid heir, the eldest son of the universe.
But humanity could not in practice carry out this conception
that everyone was divine.  The practical imagination recoils from
the idea of two gods swindling each other over a pound of cheese.
The mind refuses to accept the idea of sixty bodies, each filled
with a blazing divinity, elbowing each other to get into an omnibus.
This mere external difficulty causes men in every age to fall back upon
the conception that certain men preserved for other men the sanctity
of man.  Certain figures were more divine because they were more human.
In primitive times of folklore, and in some feudal periods,
this larger man was the conquering hero, the strong man who slew
dragons and oppressors.  To the old Hebrews this sacred being was
the prophet:  to the men of the Christian ages it was the saint.
To the Elizabethans this sacred being was the pure woman.

The heroic conception of womanhood comes out most clearly in
Shakespeare because of his astonishing psychological imagination,
but it exists as an ideal in all Elizabethans.  And the precise reason
why the heroines of Shakespeare are so splendid is because they stand
alone among all his characters as the embodiments of the prirnal
ages of faith.  They are the high and snowy peaks which catch
the last rays of the belief in the actual divinity of man.
We feel, as we read the plays, that the women are more large,
more typical, belong more to an ideal and less to a realistic literature.
They are the very reverse of abstractions; considered merely
as women they are finished down to the finest detail.
Yet there is something more in them that is not in the men.
Portia is a good woman and Bassanio is a good man.  But Portia
is more than a woman:  Portia is Woman and Bassanio is not Man.
He is merely a very pleasant and respectable individual.

There are Elizabethan plays so dark and frightful that they read
like the rubbish from the waste-paper basket of a mad-house.
No one but a prophet possessed of devils, one might fancy,
could produce incidents so abrupt and so sombre, could call up scenes
so graphic and so unmeaning.  In one play a man is forced to watch
the murder of those he loves and cannot speak because his tongue
is nailed to the floor with a dagger.  In another a man is torn
with red-hot pincers; in another a man is dropped through a broken
floor into a caldron.  With horrible cries out of the lowest hell it
is proclaimed that man cannot be continent, that man cannot be true,
that he is only the filthiest and the funniest of monkeys.
And yet the one belief that all these dark and brutal men admit,
is the belief in the pure woman.  In this one virtue, in this
one sex, something heroic and holy, something, in the highest sense
of that high word, fabulous, was felt to reside.  Man was natural,
but woman was supernatural.

Now, it is quite clear that if this was the Elizabethan view of woman,
Portia is not only the most splendid and magnanimous woman in literature.
She is not only the heroine of the play, she is the play.
She is the absolute heroic ideal upon which the play is built.
Shakespeare had conceived, with extraordinary force, humour and sympathy,
a man to express the ideal of technical justice, formal morality,
and the claim of a man to his rights:  the man was Shylock.
Over against him he set a figure representing the larger
conception of generosity and persuasion, the justice that is fused
of a score of genial passions, the compromise that is born of a
hundred worthy enthusiasms.  Portia had to represent the ideal
of magnanimity in law, morality, religion, art, and politics.
And Shakespeare made this figure a good woman because, to the mind
of his day, to make it a good woman was to ring it with a halo
and arm it with a sword.


THE TASTE FOR MILTON

OF ALL poets Milton is the one whom it is the most difficult
to praise with real delicacy and sincerity of definition.
Of all poets Milton is the one whom it is most easy to praise
with mere facile phraseology and conventional awe.  There is
one thing about Milton which must have been generally observed--
that he is really a matured taste, a taste that grows.
Shakespeare is really for all ages, for all the seven ages of man.
I was fond of Shakespeare when I crept unwillingly to school,
and I am fond of him now when I can be more vividly described
as a lean and slippered pantaloon.  And I do not mean that as
a child I was fond of his romantic tales merely; I was fond
of his poetry, especially when it was entirely unintelligible.
The open and rolling rhythm seemed to be speaking plainly
even when I could not comprehend it.  The huge heraldic imagery
of red and gold was obvious, though I could not take it in.
Members of my family who collect coincidences have assured me
that I was small enough to run along the street and fall on my nose
in the very act of saying the lines:

  Do not for ever with thy veiled lids
  Seek for they noble father in the dust.

Lines like

  Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,

or like

  Still climbing trees in the Hesperides

were not only good poetry, they were good children's pictures
like the cow who jumped over the moon, or the number of red herrings
that grow in a wood.

But Milton at his best is absolutely nothing to childhood.
I do not mean that children cannot enjoy Milton; children can
enjoy the Post Office directory.  That is the kingdom of heaven;
to enjoy things without understanding them.  But I say that
children cannot enjoy the Miltonism of Milton; the thing that no
one but Milton can do.  A boy does not appreciate that wonderful
and controlled style, which, like a well-managed war-horse,
even capers and caracoles rather by restraint than impetus.
A boy does not feel the lift of those great lines, as of a great
eagle leaving the nest,

  That with no middle flight presumes to soar
  Above the Aonian mount.

I think a great part of the trouble which the ordinary mind
has in appreciating Milton (or, rather, Milton in pleasing
the ordinary mind, for please remember that the popular mind
is much more important than Milton) lies in the mistake
of always describing him as a pure and classical writer.
Really he was a highly complex and in some ways too modern writer.
The perfectly classical can be understood by anybody.
No charwoman would say that the tale of Ulysses coming back in rags
to the woman who had been faithful to him was not a touching tale.
No dog-fancier in the street would be indifferent to the death of Argus.
No man in the street could ever say upon his conscience that the Venus
of Milo was not a fine woman.

It is the secondary and distorted art which really and suddenly loses
the sympathies of the people.  The charwoman would fail in seeing
the peculiar pathos of Mr. Robert Elsmere, who wanted to be a curate
and also an agnostic.  The dog-fancier would be justly indifferent
to the rhetoric of the numerous modern animal lovers who could not look
after a dog for a day.  And the man in the street will not admit that
the women of Aubrey Beardsley are fine women, because they are not.
The tastes of the man in the street are classical.

And if Milton were really as straightforward as Homer or the
Elgin Marbles he would be, in practice, uproariously popular.
The real reason that he cannot make his glory quite as broad as it
is undoubtedly deep and high is that there was in him something
of the modern individualist, something of the social schismatic.
He had that weird and wicked ambition of the modern artist;
he wanted "to think for himself".  But Dante and Dickens wanted
to think for other people also.

Milton stands between the very social society in which Dante
lived and the very social society which Dickens always desired
and occasionally experienced, with that fastidious isolation which
belongs to art in our time and belonged to religion in his time.
He is the seventeenth-century individualist.  He is the perfect Calvinist;
the man alone with his God.  He is also the perfect artist;
the man alone with his art.  No man, perhaps, has ever had
such power over his art since the arts of humanity were made.
And yet there is something that makes one turn to the firesides
of the Pickwick Papers, and even to the fires of the Purgatorio.


WILLIAM BLAKE AND INSPIRATION

Much has been said about Inspiration, especially in works
of imagination, by authorities whom I profoundly respect and with
whom I violently disagree.  For one thing, it is commonly regarded
as a religious or spiritual view of art to suppose that it does
not come from the artist.  It is implied that only a cynical,
or at least a mundane view of it, would suggest such a profanity
as that it does come from the artist.  And this, to begin with,
seems to me to be based on a bad religion and philosophy.
We are supposed to rejoice unreservedly in the idea that a
spirit has inspired what would otherwise be only a man.
But it is really a blasphemy to talk about a man being "only a man".
And it is really a heresy to talk of it as if a spirit must always
be better than a man.  A good man might possibly be prompted
by a bad spirit; and in any case a man is himself also a spirit.
And it seems to me nearer to the true Christian tradition
to hold that man creates in his capacity of the image of God;
and he is in nothing so much the image of God as in creating images.
On the other hand, it is by no means impossible that such direct
and all but divine creation might be deflected and confined,
if he merely listened to all the loose elemental forces that might
be wandering about in the universe.  It seems to me that this did,
in fact, very often happen, in the actual history of literature.
Very great men have certainly talked of being inspired, but I doubt if it
was when they were most great.  To take a famous case, William Blake
certainly did claim that his works were sometimes dictated by more
exalted spirits.  But what works did the exalted spirits dictate?
With the most polite apologies to them, and with the warmest and even
wildest admiration for Blake, I think that any impartial person,
reading steadily through some of his most specially inspired
Prophetical Books, will form a rather low opinion of the lucidity
and capacity for connected narrative shown by the presiding angels.
It is typical of the whole trouble that he was often eager
to explain that his favourite angels were really devils.
But he did not mean that they were bad; he meant something else
in a symbolic or cabalistic system of his own, in which words did
not mean what they are supposed to mean.

He meant, for instance, that devils stood for the divine principle
of energy and angels for the divine principle of wisdom.
But nobody reading his mystifying but amusing notes can say he was on
the side of the angels.  He is disposed rather to sniff and even to sneer
at angels, preferring the more energetic department; and he refers
affectionately to one of his familiar spirits in the phrase:
"This angel, who is now a devil, is a great friend of mine."
All this occult cryptogram is very interesting in its way to
those who like the Gnostic type of theology.  But when we talk
of a poet being inspired, we imply that he is inspired to poetry.
And nobody shall persuade me that this tangle of dogma and doggerel
is an improvement on Blake's poetry--

  O sunflower weary of time
  That countest the steps of the sun.

Those two lines rise with the sweep and curve of a bird;
and I doubt whether any Gnostic devil was needed to dictate them.
But the reader weary of time, who counteth the steps of reasoning
in the densest parts of Blake's more metaphysical volumes, will feel
a great deal less like a bird and a great deal more like a snail.
I know well that there are in these books interesting and
original ideas, because Blake was an interesting and original man.
But such a man, if he is helped, should be helped to express himself.
And I fancy that, when the devils left him to himself, he expressed
himself much better.

I know that I have against me here, at least apparently,
some of the things in which I am most proud to believe.
I know that mythology is always true, or at least largely true:
a great deal more true than the scientific study of myths.
I believe profoundly in tradition; and there certainly is a great
tradition of the poet and the Muse.  Therefore, I speak tentatively;
but even here I would tentatively suggest a correction.
There is something that very few modern men understand, which I
can only call the Levity of the Classics.  The Classics are always
treated as heavy, and therefore treated heavily; but there is a sense
in which they should always be taken lightly.  The men of the older
civilizations had a certain subtle and mellow habit of mind,
which has largely been lost in the dry earnestness of modern debates.
They often dealt with things in which they only half-believed;
and they somehow understood how to distinguish them from
the things in which they really believed.  That is why the men
of the Renaissance, and even the men of the Middle Ages, could keep
up a Pagan imagery running parallel to their Christian imagery.
Chaucer will make his Knights worship Venus and Mars without the least
sense of dislocation with the loftier passage, only a few pages after,
in which the Duke of Athens celebrates the Christian Sacrament of
Marriage in words that seem to come straight out of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Shakespeare will have the same marriage celebrated by Hymen, the heathen
goddess, and within a few lines of the same play talk of the sinner
having retired to a monastery under the influence of a holy hermit.
It is the same with the expression of many philosophical moods
or spiritual emotions.  These great traditional poets often express
an idea of Vanillas sanitarium which might be mistaken for despair,
and which in a modern writer probably would be despair.
Yet in their religion despair was itself a mortal sin.  They did
not quite mean what they said; and they had some elusive lyrical
faculty for suggesting that they did not quite mean what they said.
The men of the old European culture could take pessimism lightly.
The men of the new American culture can only take optimism heavily.

In this spirit all these poets claimed inspiration by a Muse, and there
was something in what they said; but it was not exactly what they meant.
It was not exactly meant as it would have been meant by somebody engaged
in Psychical Research or claiming to be a Medium under a Control.
The two successive ideas of serious Christian belief and serious
scientific discovery have sharpened our minds to the definite question
of whether a thing is strictly true.  I am sure the old poets used
the image of a Muse in a vaguer sense.  Homer began by invoking
the goddess; but I fancy he would have been very much annoyed to be
told that he had not really composed the great speech of Sarpedon.
And even Milton, though claiming inspiration from the Holy Spirit,
would have been distinctly cross with the suggestion that anybody had
written the invocation to Light except himself.  In this vaguer sense,
of an inspiration from God and Nature flowing into the personality,
the conception is, of course, entirely true and valid.
But in these days of psychic phenomena, or renewed mythology,
it may be well to keep Inspiration within bounds.


A GRAMMAR OF SHELLEY

A SEVERELY scholastic text-book of the poems of Shelley,
in a hard and ugly cover, with notes at the end of each poem
explanatory of the difficult words, appeals to the literary
instinct as a somewhat incongruous and fantastic thing.
It is like a whole public school with all its masters and head-master
going out in search of the key at the foot of the rainbow.
Shelley was only the earthly name for a spirit that every vivacious
child must meet once, if only once, and must meet alone.
He is not a companion for the road of life, not a philosopher,
not a prophet, not, properly speaking, even a man.  But that we
have each of us found him once for ourselves suddenly in some
silent field has left in us a strain of salutary wildness without
which we should have been Brixton burgesses to our dying day.
That a spirit so valuable and so unreliable with whom we can no more
agree or disagree than we can measure a cloud with a yard measure
should be hacked up into squares and sections for Class I or Standard III
is sufficiently curious.  We do not envy the task of the compiler
of the notes, who has to state in simple language what Shelley meant,
which Shelley himself would have found it uncommonly difficult to do.
But if these pedantic mutilations are indeed to be permitted
and these prosaic paraphrases and synonyms piled up in the notes,
the thing should at least be done well and carefully.

A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery
of the vastness of the word Education.  Men have discovered that
singing and wandering, the toys that are broken and the flowers
that are plucked and thrown away, the dreams that have no archetype
and the projects that have no fulfilment, are parts of one great thing
that is called Education--education which in older and somewhat
plainer language would have been called "the saving of a soul".
But in many modern educationists the effect of this great discovery
has been precisely the opposite to that which it should have been.
Instead of making Greek and geography as healthy as "Hunt-the-slipper"
they have set to work to make "Hunt-the-slipper" as mechanical,
as coercive, as meanly conscientious as Greek and geography.
The new lesson should have made them see the ancient studies
as the ancient scholars and humanists saw them, as ventures full
of youthful freedom and magnanimity, parts of what was called
in a fine and significant old phrase "a liberal education".
Instead of that, they have put the very follies of childhood into
unimpeachable grammars and constructed, out of wind and sunshine
and the truant impulse and the caress for the wild beast and bird,
the most illiberal education that the world has ever seen.
Let anyone who thinks such a description too strong to be appropriate
turn to the last page of an edition of Shelley, which is called
"Teaching Exercises".  The first question is as follows:

Discuss the suitability of the following expressions:
lips of lurid hue; 'lorn bard; bright silver dream; deeper solitude;
the caves of divine sleep; elemental diamond; arrowy odour; coming bulk
of death;... keen pyramid; aerial merriment; webs of melancholy mirth;
lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams.

I must admit that, just as Mr. Pecksniff would have liked to know
Mrs. Todgers' notion of a wooden leg, I should very much like
to know the ordinary schoolboy's notion of an "arrowy odour".
It would be interesting to possess the answer of any set of average pupils
as to the suitability of "'lorn bards" and "bright silver dreams".
But the vital objection to this question about the suitability of
certain poetic phrases does not lie in the fact that no children could
answer it, it lies in the fact that nobody in the world can answer it.
Pleasure in the beautiful is a sacred thing; if a child feels
that there is an indescribable witchery in the wedding of two words
he feels it alone, as he feels his vanities and his dreams, in places
where he cannot be badgered or overlooked or philosophically educated.
The act of insisting upon his analysing the holy thing, I think,
without the smallest doubt or the smallest desire to exaggerate,
is as insolent as asking him to dissect his favourite kitten
or account for his preference for his mother.

Such a project is especially absurd in the case of Shelley.
It is possible to read Chaucer with a view to language or Milton
with a view to theology, though the proceeding is not much more
sensible than reading the Odyssey in order to learn navigation
or "Jack and the Beanstalk" in order to study the habits of plants.
But Shelley's works are not concerned, I do not say with material
ideas, but scarcely even with material symbols or incidents.
The whole of his work amounts to a great epic about an inspiring
example of nothing in particular that was done nowhere in particular
at no particular time.  It was entirely consistent with this
characteristic that he considered the Universe as the most exquisite
masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.  He was, as it were, a dealer
in all disembodied good.  He was an instinctive optimist, and thought
that the Universe could contain every good thing except a deity.
It is remarkable how Shelley and the school to which he belonged
reconciled the optimism of their natural philosophy with the
unflinching pessimism of their view of political institutions.
At first sight one would think that the optimist would be a conservative.
It is a strange truth that no force has been so disruptive
and iconoclastic, has torn up so many ancient roots and pulled
down so many holy places, as contentment with the world.
Pessimism has never been a force, not even a destructive one.
Before a man like Shelley could heartily disbelieve in a College Synod or
a Lord Chancellor he had first heartily to believe in a whole Universe.
In order to reconcile their two positions as the praisers and
the denouncers of things, the school of Shelley fell back upon
that extraordinary theory of the cunning of priests and kings--
the theory that several centuries of human history had been
occupied in the conduct and continuation of one prolonged hoax.
The thing when realised is vastly more incredible than the legend
of St. Denis.  The Shelleyites never realised that it is the people
who make the priests, and that all kings, including Nero,
are elected by universal suffrage.  They did not realise that,
whether for good or evil, kings and priests were in their season
as natural blossoms upon the tree of life as birds or babies,
even if they were often as stupid as the babies and as cruel
as the birds.  This pasting down of whole pages in the book of man,
this outrageous expurgation of history, seriously impaired
the validity of Shelley's view; that it only impaired it is because
that view was in itself essentially universal and full of faith.
Few men in the world's history had more faith than Shelley.
He had faith in the end of the most earthquake speculations,
in the licence of the most confounding passions.  Indeed, he could
bring himself to have faith in anything except in the faiths
of everybody else.


POETRY--OLD AND NEW

ONE of the new theories about poetry is that the poet must
seek to isolate an image, and even a word.  He must, to use
the military phrase, cut all its connections and leave it in the air.
To begin with, this interests me in the most superficial sense;
because what strikes me about poets is that they were all
hopelessly traditional, even when they tried to be revolutionary.
Nobody could be more entirely in the air, to all appearance,
than Shelley.  Nothing could be more entirely in the air
than his little pet, the Skylark.  And no mind could be more
filled with the conviction that it was completely in revolt
against all tradition, and especially against all religion.
And yet it would be quite an amusing exercise to take Shelley's
poem about the Skylark, line by line and verse by verse, and show
how entirely dependent it is upon traditional ideas, and even rather
specially upon religious ideas.  Here perhaps it would be rather
too long an exercise to work my way through that rather long poem.
But it is really true that it could be analysed, point by point,
in that traditional sense.  The song of the radiant young atheist would
probably turn out in the end to be a most orthodox theological tract.
He begins by saying, "Hail to thee, blithe spirit".  What does he mean
by talking about spirits, if he is not in any sense a spiritualist?
What would be the meaning of the remark, if he were really a materialist?
He would never have had even the idea of a spirit, but for the
religious tradition represented in the idea of the Holy Spirit.
He then says, "Bird thou never wert"; which is obviously a lie.
But it is a lie symbolising a truth; and what he really means by it
may be stated thus:  "I refuse to believe that a bird is only a bird,
or that there is nothing more in such things than the material
facts that we know about them."  That thought is the beginning
of all theology.  Shelley's next surrender to superstition
is absolutely abject and appalling.  He says, "from heaven,
or near it"; a remark which must make all modern and rational
persons with one concerted movement cover their faces in shame.
In plain words, he not only talks as if there were something divine
in the mere empty space above our planet.  He actually talks
as if there were a paradise of saints and angels somewhere located,
like a coloured cloud, in that space; so that a skylark could be said
to be more or less near to it.  The lapse is so distressing that I
will not linger upon the minor barbarism of medieval physiology,
by which the emotions of the bird are represented as coming from
its "heart"; as if that organ were a centre of consciousness.
I was going to say that I "had not the heart" to dwell any longer
on the depressing orthodoxy of Shelley; whereby I should myself have
fallen into the physical image that is so superstitious and medieval.
It is so very difficult to write any intelligible English without
being superstitious and medieval.

Needless to say, the criticism could not only be continued
through the whole poem, but it becomes conspicuously clear
and true in the most poetical parts of the poem.  Certainly the
finest passages, and perhaps the most frequently quoted passages,
are those that really celebrate what is not only a Christian dogma,
but one now often abandoned as an antiquated and benighted dogma.
Those great movements of verse do not really correspond
to the Rise of the Skylark, but rather to the Fall of Man.
I daresay Shelley would have been very much surprised, if he had been
told that he was subscribing to the doctrine of the Fall of Man.
But he certainly was; and that was why his words at that moment
really become weighty and human.  "We look before and after and
pine for what is not", has the sound of a great tolling bell.
Nobody needs to be told that some spiritual tragedy has already
happened to the race of him who cries aloud:

  But if we could scorn
  Hate and pride and fear;
  If we were things born
  Not to shed a tear.

or to the poet who can compare such a tragedy with the more trivial
bliss of a little feathered creature in the empty air.

At the very beginning of the debate, therefore, and even on
the face of it, I have generally noticed that in the past all
the poetry that professed to be particularly revolutionary was
in fact particularly traditional.  In this and in many things
most of the revolutions of the past were pretty much alike;
and there are some of us who rather doubt whether the revolutions
of the future will be particularly different.  But even if we ignore
this tradition of traditionalism, and suppose that the futurists
have really something novel in the way of a novelty, the logical
difficulty of their position still remains.  We may, for the sake
of argument, treat this change as if there had been no other changes.
We may isolate the Imagist as he would isolate the image.
We may treat the art as if it had no history; just as the artist
tells a story as if it had no beginning.  But the fact still
remains that, since he has to use the words of some language,
he has got the words from somewhere and learned them from somebody.
And the words are in fact winged or weighted with the thoughts
and associations of a thousand years.  If they were not, he would
not use them; he might just as well say "Grunk", or "Quoggle".

I have just read an example given by Mr. Humbert Wolfe of the sort
of detached poem that the admirers of detachment chiefly admire.
I may remark that Mr. Wolfe does not especially admire it;
in fact he calls it a meaningless anecdote.  But he is undoubtedly
right in classing it as an example of the sort of thing that the school
in question regards as the necessary isolation and intrinsic value
of an image.  Its substance is as follows; a Japanese general whose
long trousers are twisted like corkscrews sees a European army pass,
in the middle of which is a bishop who has one or two hairs on his
chin and water in his eyes.  That is all.  The message is conveyed.
The revelation is complete.  Now I would not affect to misunderstand
any notion that may require a little understanding.  And I take it
that even the poet would admit in such a case that, in a certain sense,
the pointlessness is the point.  The Japanese standpoint is
selected because it is distant and indifferent; the bishop because,
from such a standpoint, he is only a dull detail and nothing else.
But even this effect still depends upon tradition and association.
It would not be the same if the bishop were a biscuit-manufacturer.
It would not be the same if the Jap were a Jewish army-contractor.
It is because of what the bishop is to us that we remark that
he is something different to the Mongol; it is even because he is
something to us, that we note that he is nothing to somebody else.
Even by this method of the detached detail, of the fragment of fact,
of the experience isolated from all its surrounding experiences,
we do not really get rid of the traditional might and magic in the words
that are used to describe it.  I suspect, therefore, that there
is something wrong after all in the metaphysics of the new poetry;
and that it is, much more than it fancies, in traditional continuity
with the old poetry.  The effect of callous and colourless record,
produced by the picture of the Jap staring coldly at the bishop,
is really every bit as much dependent on the long literary legend
about the mystical priesthood and the mysterious East, as if it
had been the most passionate battle-hymn of charging Crusaders,
carrying the emblazoned Cross of a Prince Bishop against the banners
of the Rising Sun.


BROWNING AND HIS IDEAL

ROBERT BROWNING has been called a religious teacher, to which objection
can be raised, for, generally speaking, a poet cannot be properly
appreciated if we separate one of his functions from the rest.
Poets represent to a greater degree than any other men the conception
of the unity of things.  The poet includes the theologian,
but he also includes the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker.
It is one of the curses of the criticism of poetry that it tends to
detach the ideas of a poet from the forms by which he expresses them,
which is like detaching the abstract idea of vegetation from all
conceivable forms of vegetables.  It is entirely useless to attempt
to discuss the philosophy of Robert Browning apart from his poetry.
The project is quite as ridiculous as the project of explaining
the inspirations of Turner to a blind man, or of making
the peculiar gospel of Wagner or Chopin clear to a deaf one.
There is something in Turner beyond paint and turpentine, there is
something in Wagner which could not be expressed by any instrument.
But to describe the message of Turner without ever mentioning
chrome yellow or Rake white, to convey the importance of Wagner's
work without any reference to the musical laws by which he worked,
would be entirely ridiculous.  It is nevertheless assumed
that in literature the message can be detached from the words,
a thing unknown in any other art.

This is more especially impossible in the case of Browning, because in him
an intellectual revolution went hand in hand with an aesthetic one.
It would be possible, indeed, to go further, and say that Browning's
peculiar triumph consisted in the fact that he expressed normal
truths with an abnormal accuracy, that he asserted in the language
of a splendid revolutionist the feelings of an ordinary human being.
It was by Browning's astonishing originality of technique
that he really lent value to his virile and eternal ideas.
Every religious writer had echoed the conception that all created
things praise the Lord; but Browning was the first to take it literally
as applying even to the grotesque and the unpresentable; he was
the first to realise practically that hogs and monkeys praise the Lord.
Those who speak, for example, of Robert Browning's neglect of form utter
a wholly senseless criticism.  Perhaps no English poet had as keen
an instinct for form as Browning had.  But form can be grotesque as well
as dignified, ugly in the conventional sense as well as beautiful.
A rhinoceros has as definite and unmistakable a form as a swan
or a turtle dove; it would be no worse to set the rhinoceros'
horn upon the swan than to clap the swan' s wings on the rhinoceros.
Even in the search after the fantastic there is a sense of form;
even in artistic lawlessness there is a law.  If any of those critics
who think Browning indiflerent to form imagine that they could write
the "Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister", or "Bishop Blougram's Apology",
without possessing an artistic sense, there is nothing to be done
or said except earnestly to recommend them to try.  At a superficial
glance the cathedrals of the Middle Ages appear often to be mere
confusions of barbaric and almost demented sculpture in comparison
with the frigid rectangular monuments of classical architecture.
A very little knowledge, however, is suffcient to show us
that it is amid these unbridled fantasies in stone that we find
the swell and triumph of the great principles of engineering.
Precisely in a similar manner we realise that all the flying buttresses
and hideous gargoyles of Browning are portions of a great cathedral.
The net effect of the work of a great artist is like the net
effect of the works of Nature--it is conflict everywhere, and yet
harmony above all.

The ordinary objection to Browning, the charge of needless obscurity,
is just in a certain degree, yet requires a serious qualification.
Browning is the simplest and most manly of poets in his message
and intention.  It is only his speech that is rough and quaint.
There are writers of great depth and delicacy, such as Mr. Henry James,
against whom the charge of obscurity is brought, but here the sense
is very different.  The writings of Mr. Henry James are obscure
even when we understand them.  They have to do (even as they
are seen by the eyes of the author) with dim and fugitive
and anomalous sentiments.  But the moment that the cotton-wool
of mere Philistinism is taken out of our ears the message of
Robert Browning is a single trumpet calling thousands to the charge.
He was only a splendid demagogue with an impediment in his speech.
We speak, for the sake of convenience, of Browning being obscure;
but it would be far truer to say that it is we who are obscure,
hampered and blinded by elaborate and ceremonial speech, while he stands
in the heart of the maze of life and speaks with an assurance which cows,
and with an obviousness and simplicity which confound us.

There are certain central and important respects in which Browning
is actually the simplest of all poets.  No writer of his order of
intellect that ever lived had the courage to be so direct and emotional--
one might almost say, so babyish.  If we turn to some of Browning's
love-lyrics we find that he will take readily some figure of endearment,
some phrase from the secret scriptures of folly, and write it boldly
in blank isolation in the middle of a page:

  Aught like this tress, see, and this tress,
  And this last fairest tress of all,
  So fair, see, ere I let it fall.

It may be seriously doubted whether Shelley or Tennyson or Swinburne
would ever have had the intellectual courage to compose, write down
and leave untouched a lyric containing so much passion and so little
of the faintest trace of thought or even common intelligence.
Browning was a thinker, but he was not primarily a thinker.
He had the courage to be everything--a prophet, a buffoon, a scholar,
including the valuable courage to be a sentimentalist.

Odd as it may seem at first sight, the grotesqueness of Browning's
poetry is definitely connected with this brazen emotionalism.
In moments of strong feeling we do not speak in an exalted tone;
we curse and stammer like a man drenched with water or thumped
over the head with a walking-stick.  Browning was too passionate
to be poetical.  Passion makes every detail important;
there is no realism like the insatiable realism of love.
Poetry is only the algebra of life; passion is its arithmetic.
If we recall to ourselves any deep sentiment; if we think of a dead
friend or a primitive attachment, it is a hundred to one that we
shall not think of any poetic images, stars, or thrones, or angels,
but of something utterly trivial and ugly--a railing, a door-knocker,
a lost umbrella.  Men talk foolishly of these things not rising
into poetry; on the contrary, it is poetry that falters feebly
behind and does not rise to the graphic passion of these things.
But scarcely any poet has come nearer to these queer memories,
the veritable rag-bag of passion, than Browning in the incomparable
realism of his love-poems.  No one, surely, can forget the dark
and gorgeous emotion of the lover groping his way to the seaside
cottage in "Meeting at Night":

  A tap at the pane, the quick, sharp scratch,
  And blue spurt of a lighted match.

It is that blue-flaring match that burns in Browning's poetry
and endures after the wreck of all the eternal stars of Shelley.

It is the supreme misfortune of Browning that he has been chiefly
expounded by men who bear as little resemblance to him as a circle
of long-haired Parisian aesthetes could bear to Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
He has been made a matter of painful intellectual study, when his own
soul went always like a horse at full gallop or a river in spate.
He has been presented as a riddle for the wise, when he himself first and
foremost saluted the simple.  The weedy and short-sighted "intellectuel"
has found his chief pabulum in a series of poems which mean nothing
if they do not mean that the essential merits are strength and
spontaneity and the universal heart.  Browning was, indeed, a logician,
because he was a man and something much bigger and better than a poet.
He was a logician because a logician is not, as is idly supposed,
a frigid person, but a man hot for battle even in the aether of
the abstract.  A man must have loved much, must have loved God and men
and animals, before he can really love even a distinction in terms.
Browning loved reasoning as a man loves hunting or fencing or
playing leap-frog, because it is an expansion and use of his powers.
He had that lost and splendid attitude towards the things
of the mind which marked the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
To him scholarship was one of the pleasures of youth; to know
and reason was a delight and almost a dissipation.


TENNYSON

IT WAS merely the accident of his hour, the call of his age,
which made Tennyson a philosophic poet.  He was naturally
not only a pure lover of beauty, but a pure lover of beauty
in a much more peculiar and distinguished sense even than a man
like Keats, or a man like Robert Bridges.  He gave us scenes
of Nature that cannot easily be surpassed, but he chose them
like a landscape painter rather than like a religious poet.
Above all, he exhibited his abstract love of the beautiful in one
most personal and characteristic fact.  He was never so successful
or so triumphant as when he was describing not Nature, but art.
He could describe a statue as Shelley could describe a cloud.
He was at his very best in describing buildings, in their blending
of aspiration and exactitude.  He found to perfection the harmony
between the rhythmic recurrences of poetry and the rhythmic
recurrences of architecture.  His description, for example,
of the Palace of Art is a thing entirely victorious and unique.
The whole edifice, as described, rises as lightly as a lyric,
it is full of the surge of the hunger for beauty; and yet a man
might almost build upon the description as upon the plans
of an architect or the instructions of a speculative builder.
Such a lover of beauty was Tennyson, a lover of beauty most
especially where it is most to be found, in the works of man.
He loved beauty in its completeness, as we find it in art,
not in its more glorious incompleteness as we find it in Nature.
There is, perhaps, more loveliness in Nature than in art,
but there are not so many lovely things.  The loveliness is broken
to pieces and scattered; the almond tree in blossom will have
a mob of nameless insects at its root, and the most perfect dell
in the great forest-house is likely enough to smell like a sewer.
Tennyson loved beauty more in its collected form in art,
poetry, and sculpture; like his own "Lady of Shalott", it was
his office to look rather at the mirror than at the object.
He was an artist as it were, at two removes:  he was a splendid
imitator of the splendid imitations.  It is true that his natural
history was exquisitely exact, but natural history and natural
religion are things that can be, under certain circumstances,
more unnatural than anything in the world.  In reading Tennyson's natural
descriptions we never seem to be in physical contact with the earth.
We learn nothing of the coarse good-temper and rank energy of life.
We see the whole scene accurately, but we see it through glass.
In Tennyson's works we see Nature indeed, and hear Nature, but we
do not smell it.

But this poet of beauty and a certain magnificent idleness,
lived at a time when all men had to wrestle and decide.
It is not easy for any person who lives in our time, when the dust
has settled and the spiritual perspective has been restored,
to realise what the entrance of the idea of evolution meant
for the men of those days.  To us it is the discovery of another
link in a chain which, however far we follow it, still stretches
back into a divine mystery.  To many of the men of that time it
would appear from their writings that it was the heartbreaking
and desolating discovery of the end and origin of the chain.
To them had happened the most black and hopeless catastrophe conceivable
to human nature; they had found a logical explanation of all things.
To them it seemed that an Ape had suddenly risen to gigantic stature
and destroyed the seven heavens.  It is difficult, no doubt,
for us in somewhat subtler days, to understand how anybody could
suppose that the origin of species had anything to do with the origin
of being.  To us it appears that to tell a man who asks who made
his mind that evolution made it, is like telling a man who asks
who rolled a cab-wheel over his leg that revolution rolled it.
To state the process is scarcely to state the agent.
But the position of those who regarded the opening of the "Descent
of Man" as the opening of one of the seals of the last days,
is a great deal sounder than people have generally allowed.
It has been constantly supposed that they were angry with Darwinism
because it appeared to do something or other to the book of Genesis;
but this was a pretext or a fancy.  They fundamentally rebelled
against Darwinism, not because they had a fear that it would
affect Scripture, but because they had a fear, not altogether
unreasonable or ill-founded, that it would affect morality.
Man had been engaged, through innumerable ages, in a struggle with sin.
The evil within him was as strong as he could cope with--
it was as powerful as a cannonade and as enchanting as a song.
But in this struggle he had always had nature on his side.
He might be polluted and agonised, but the flowers were innocent
and the hills were strong.  All the armoury of life, the spears
of the pine-wood and the batteries of the lightning went into
battle beside him.

Tennyson lived in the hour when, to all mortal appearance,
the whole of the physical world deserted to the devil.
The universe, governed by violence and death, left man to fight alone,
with a handful of myths and memories.  Men had now to wander
in polluted fields and lift up their eyes to abominable hills.
They had to arm themselves against the cruelty of flowers and the
crimes of the grass.  The first honour, surely, is to those who did
not faint in the face of that confounding cosmic betrayal; to those
who sought and found a new vantage ground for the army of Virtue.
Of these was Tennyson, and it is surely the more to his honour,
since he was the idle lover of beauty who has been portrayed.
He felt that the time called him to be an interpreter.
Perhaps he might even have been something more of a poet if he had
not sought to be something more than a poet.  He might have written
a more perfect Arthurian epic if his heart had been as much buried
in prehistoric sepulchres as the heart of Mr. W. B. Yeats.
He might have made more of such poems as "The Golden Year"
if his mind had been as clean of metaphysics and as full of a poetic
rusticity as the mind of William Morris.  He might have been a greater
poet if he had been less a man of his dubious and rambling age.
But there are some things that are greater than greatness;
there are some things that no man with blood in his body would
sell for the throne of Dante, and one of them is to fire
the feeblest shot in a war that really awaits decision, or carry
the meanest musket in an army that is really marching by.
Tennyson may even have forfeited immortality:  but he and the men
of his age were more than immortal; they were alive.

Tennyson had not a special talent for being a philosophic poet,
but he had a special vocation for being a philosophic poet.
This may seem a contradiction, but it is only because all the Latin
or Greek words we use tend endlessly to lose their meaning.
A vocation is supposed to mean merely a taste or faculty,
just as economy is held to mean merely the act of saving.
Economy means the management of a house or community.  If a man starves
his best horse, or causes his best workman to strike for more pay,
he is not merely unwise, he is uneconomical.  So it is with a vocation.
If this country were suddenly invaded by some huge alien and
conquering population, we should all be called to become soldiers.
We should not think in that time that we were sacrificing our unfinished
work on Cattle-Feeding or our hobby of fretwork, our brilliant
career at the bar, or our taste for painting in water-colours.
We should all have a call to arms.  We should, however, by no means
agree that we all had a vocation for arms.  Yet a vocation is only
the Latin for a call.

In a celebrated passage in "Maud", Tennyson praised the moral
effects of war, and declared that some great conflict might call
out the greatness even of the pacific swindlers and sweaters whom
he saw around him in the commercial age.  He dreamed, he said, if--

  ... the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out
      of the foam,
  That the smooth-faced, snubnosed rogue would leap from his
      counter and till,
  And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yard-wand,
      home.

Tennyson lived in the time of a conflict more crucial and frightful
than any European struggle, the conflict between the apparent
artificiality of morals and the apparent immorality of science.
A ship more symbolic and menacing than any foreign three-decker
hove in sight in that time--the great, gory pirate-ship of Nature,
challenging all the civilizations of the world.  And his supreme honour
is this, that he behaved like his own imaginary snubnosed rogue.
His honour is that in that hour he despised the flowers and embroideries
of Keats as the counter-jumper might despise his tapes and cottons.
He was by nature a hedonistic and pastoral poet, but he leapt
from his poetic counter and till and struck, were it but with his
gimcrack mandolin, home.

Tennyson's influence on poetry way, for a time, be modified.
This is the fate of every man who throws himself into his own age,
catches the echo of its temporary phrases, is kept busy in battling
with its temporary delusions.  There are many men whom history has
for a time forgotten to whom it owes more than it could count.  But if
Tennyson is extinguished it will be with the most glorious extinction.
There are two ways in which a man may vanish--through being
thoroughly conquered or through being thoroughly the Conqueror.
In the main the great Broad Church philosophy which Tennyson
uttered has been adopted.  This will make against his fame.
For a man may vanish as Chaos vanished in the face of creation,
or he may vanish as God vanished in filling all things with
that created life.


THE BONES OF A POEM

IT IS remarkable that Browning should have the name of an obscure
and Tennyson of a lucid poet, when there are certainly passages
of _In Memoriam_ which are very much more difficult to understand
than the mass of Browning's philosophical poetry.  Browning's speech
was quaint and twisted and tail foremost, but it was never vague.
One of his sentences is like a dragon with his tail in his mouth;
one of Tennyson's is often like a resplendent cloud that has neither
head nor tail.  The speaker in Sordello is like an excited man
telling us something very important in an incomprehensible dialect.
The speaker in _In Memoriam_ is often like a man talking to himself
about things of which we have never heard.

Properly speaking, indeed, Tennyson was more typically the poet
of thought than Browning.  He really attached primary importance
to speculative ideas and passionless meditations upon theories about
deity and immortality.  In the case of Browning we feel rather that
he loved a speculation as he loved a sunrise or a gallop on horseback,
because it was a man's business to love as many things as he could.
Browning had literally a passion about ideas; an actual human appetite.
Tennyson had not a passion about ideas, he had ideas about passion.
Since, therefore, _In Memoriam_ has so strongly intellectual a character,
a great interest attaches to attempts which have been made to detach
the thread of metaphysics in it from the gorgeous and coloured threads
of description and metaphor.  But this is struggling with a hopeless
task which would be quite simple if poetry really were what it
has in most ages of classical criticism been conceived to be,
a decoration or beautification of thought by simile and example.
But herein has lain the great error that has much falsified
criticism in this matter.  Poetry is not a selection of the images
which will express a particular thought; it is rather an
analysis of the thoughts which are evoked by a certain image.
The metaphor, the symbol, the picture, has appeared to most critics
to be a mere ornament, a piece of moulding above the gateway;
but it is actually the keystone of the arch.  Take away the particular
image employed and the whole fabric of thought falls with a crash.
It is not the thought that is the deep or central thing;
one might almost say that it is the phrase.  In _In Memoriam_,
for example, there is a description incomparably vague and perfect
of the empty and idle mood often produced by sorrow:

  "The stars," she whispers, "blindly run,
  A web is wov'n across the sky;
  From out waste places comes a cry,
  And murmurs from the dying sun."

The metaphors of the passage, the stars, the web, the murmurs of the sun,
are not mere illustrations, they are the original part of the thought.
The idea of the world as a chance product has often been uttered,
what is new and thrilling in the matter is the fact that the waste
places and the cry of the dying sun make the idea so suddenly vivid
to us that it ceases to become a thought and becomes a feeling.
The phrases are strange and almost monstrous:  the poet has
to speak of a sun that murmurs, and a cobweb across the sky
like that which the old woman swept away in the nursery rhyme.
But a certain intense conception of cosmic futility was never
expressed until those two or three queer words were joined together,
and may never be expressed again if they are put asunder.

We may go further than this.  The language of metaphysics is
invariably and inevitably clumsy, because it is bound to class
together moods and mental attitudes which, while they are one if
expressed in terms of philosophy, would be found to be a hundred
and one if they were expressed in music or landscape or literature.
We speak of pessimism or idealism or a transitory product of
blind necessity; but when we come to actual states of feeling we
find that one pessimism may differ from another as much as heaven
from hell.  The attitude of Walt Whitman could scarcely differ
more from that of Schopenhauer than one thing that we call
melancholy differs from another that we call melancholy or one
thing that we call joy differs from another that we call joy.
So it is with the instance from _In Memoriam_ I have quoted above,
which represents a frame of mind which I should not attempt
to describe in prose (to do so would destroy by its own thesis),
but the nature of which may be vaguely indicated by saying that it
depicts a certain ghastly indolence of sorrow, an aching sterility
in the hours, the sorrow of an endless afternoon.

Pessimism is not always inane and drifting, like the kind
described by Tennyson; pessimism is sometimes courageous;
strange as it may seem, it is sometimes cheerful.  The good done
by sceptical philosophers, indeed, has almost always resolved
itself into the fact that while they were pessimists about
everything else they were optimists about their own opinions:
they might be living in the worst of all possible worlds, but they
were the best of all possible judges of it.  Between this kind
of fighting inspiriting pessimism and the empty and floating kind
described above in the verse from _In Memoriam_, there are innumerable
shades and gradations, every one of which is a separate religion.
Not only are there blue, green and crimson types both of joy and
melancholy, but there is every tint of green and every tint of crimson.
Yet pure verbal philosophy has no vocabulary for these degrees.
It has the same word for a pessimism that drives a man to commit
suicide and a pessimism that drives him to the Earls Court Exhibition.
It is, as it were, still speaking of things in the gross classes
of animal, vegetable and mineral, while art has found a definition
for the cowslip and a worthy name for the eagle.

This is the fundamental difficulty with which the metaphysician
has to contend.  He tries to convey the substance of a passage
by stripping away the ornaments and the verbiage, and he finds
he has nothing left but the shadow.  The process resembles a sort
of conjuring trick in which a man should tear off the hat and coat
of a man and fling them out of the window, and then discover that they
remained in his hands, and it was the man that he had thrown away.
For poetry is not an ornamental and indirect way of stating
philosophy but a perfectly simple and direct way of stating something
that is outside philosophy.  There are fleeting and haphazard
sights of nature that are words out of an unknown dictionary:
every sunset might have founded a separate creed.

In one sense, _In Memoriam_ is a work which it is especially
profitable to study in detail, since not only has the whole poem
a noble structure and development, but every section has a noble
structure and development, and could stand, from rise to climax,
as a separate poem.  This unity built up of unities is one of
the most perfect pieces of pure literary workmanship ever achieved.
The metre, of course, is an inspiration, the two central
lines falling with an almost weary harmony and the last line
like an echo of something distant, a sound heard years before.
Above all, it is needless to say, it is the noblest monument
ever raised, a sepulchre so high as to be a cathedral for all men.
And it is devoted to the expression of the most profound and stirring
paradox that experience ever grew certain of, the paradox that a man
can never really be miserable if he has known anything worth being
miserable for.  Sorrow and pessimism are by their natures opposite:
sorrow rests upon the value of something; pessimism upon
the value of nothing.


THE CASE FOR MACAULAY

WE HAVE all heard of prophets and poets being unpopular;
and also of unpopularity as a thing that may purify the soul.
But there is this further and rather odd fact--that every great man
must go through a period of unpopularity, not while he is alive,
but shortly after he is dead.  That after eclipse is essential because in
that is settled the difference between temporary and eternal oblivion.
The prophet and the quack are alike admired for a generation,
and admired for the wrong reasons.  Then they are both forgotten,
for no reason at all.  But if the man is a mere quack he never returns.
If he is a great man he returns, and he returns for the right reasons.

We need not dwell on the obvious instances of this.
Dr. Johnson was enthroned as a cold arbiter, and dethroned
as a cold arbiter.  Now he has been restored as a most hot
and human Christian soul, and Christians can never forget him.
Dickens was adored for Little Nell, and then despised for Little Nell.
It is only when Little Nell is quite dead and out of the way that he can
be sufficiently adored for Dick Swiveller.  Of these once popular
figures there is one who has not yet recaptured his popularity.
Just as a little while ago it was thought cultured to sneer
at Dickens, so it is still thought cultured to sneer at Macaulay.
Perhaps I had come myself to be too much under that cloud of disillusion;
for when I opened Macaulay's History by accident the other day
I was startled by the unmistakable roll of rich style and real
greatness in the thing.

Macaulay's popularity was shallow; he was popular for the wrong reasons.
The wit of those ringing and arresting sentences is constantly coarse
and unfair, though I wish it were more often remembered that this
old lucid cleverness really had to be clever; whereas our vague
culture is quite free to be stupid.

Wit is lower than humour; but sham humour is much easier than sham wit.
You can pretend that you have made an atmosphere; you cannot pretend
that you have made a pun.  Similarly many a modern professes that his
style has the nameless charm of Newman, because he could not possibly
invent one clever antithesis of Macaulay.  Still, Macaulay's mere
wit and logic are shallow, and would not make him great.
What is it, after all, that makes him great?

This, I think, makes him great and even eternal; that he had
the high passion of history.  He understood the word glory;
the glory of man as a thing like the glory of God.

The only difference between the warrior and the poet is that the warrior
seeks this thing in the future and the poet or the historian in the past.
Macaulay had the music of history in him, just as Walter Scott had it.
He was passionately traditional.  There is one unquestionable
test of this:  he was fond of proper names.  Some of the best
lines of Scott's poetry consist entirely of the names of places.
Some of the strongest sentences of Macaulay hang wholly on words
like Milton or Rome.

There is something that is higher than impartiality, and Macaulay
possessed it; poetical justice; the living impartiality of
the imagination rather than the dead impartiality of the reason.
He sometimes made good men bad and bad men good in the heat of
political prejudice; but he always made them men, and even great men.
He slandered his opponents, but he did not belittle them.
He had a high pleasure in mixing with heroic affairs;
he liked to crowd his stage with men of stature and presence;
he had a warlike sort of wish to see villains worthy of his heroes.
Though he was not enough of a Christian to love his enemies,
he was enough of a heathen to admire them; and a heathen is the next
best thing.  Take the case of the celebrated Graham of Claverhouse,
afterwards Lord Dundee.  Macaulay starts, by prejudice or purpose,
indecently or even insanely against the man.  He is really unreasonable
in the whole affair of the Covenanters.  Claverhouse, I imagine,
was an ordinary officer of Dragoons, a type that does not always
specialize in the Christian virtues, in the later seventeenth century,
a time when the Scotch nobility and gentry were cynical and gross.
It was his merely military duty to put down a rebellion of men
whom you may call prophets or maniacs according to taste,
but who were utterly exceptional, ruthless, and beyond common reason;
who gave no quarter in battle, and wished to persecute every
other religion upon earth.  I daresay Claverhouse did wrong;
just as any bullnecked English officer would probably do wrong
in dealing with some swarm of alien fanatics.  But that is all.
Macaulay gives a picture of harmless and laborious peasants
trampled down in blood by a monstrous fiend in top-boots,
who dances on them apparently for fun.  In the first few pages
about John Graham, Macaulay describes a beast rather than a man.
Whether he was like that in real life we need not elaborately discuss.
One thing is certain:  that he does not remain like that
in Macaulay's History.

As soon as Dundee begins to play his great part at the very crisis
of the English kingship, an extraordinary impression begins to grow.
Macaulay begins to like him.  Macaulay is mad for the Revolution;
and he becomes quite fond of Dundee because he came so near
to frustrating the Revolution.  Macaulay is glad with every cell
of his brain that James II should go.  Yet he is thrilled through
every drop of his blood when the arresting voice of Graham calls
James like a trumpet to remain.  When Dundee is mounted, and rides
down the street, Macaulay's prose moves to the tune of Walter Scott.
Stroke after stroke changes the beast to a prince of chivalry.
Macaulay talks of the calm magnanimity of this monster.
He goes out of his way to mention that he reproved the rapine of
the clans; that he held heroic language in the council of the chiefs;
and that on the eve of his last battle he asked for peril as a favour,
that he might show that he was a soldier as well as a general.
When the claymores come cleaving their way down Killiecrankie, Macaulay is
almost a Jacobite.  The last words of the great persecutor of the Covenant
are lofty and unselfish; and in death he is as pure as Hector.
I know no more singular change of tone in the description of one man.

This is a striking instance of what I may call the abstract enthusiasm
of Macaulay.  He had a passion for the cause; but he also had
a passion for the subject, for the period and everybody in it.
A stranger and stronger case still is that of Marlborough.
If ever there was a moral dwarf, a spiritual monkey, it was he.
He was a lump of littleness just large enough to be seen.
He combined all despicable qualities in combinations hitherto untried.
He was a thrifty profligate.  He was an unpatriotic militarist.
He sold his sister and his country, not madly, like a gambler,
but quite quietly and explanatorily.  It is almost incredible that
any man, or even any animal, should be such an object of contempt.
And yet Macaulay is so carried away with the great Whig Crusade,
the great story that he is telling, that when dealing with one who
played a large part in it, he cannot help making the man magnificent,
although the part was base.  He tells all the truths about
Marlborough that I have cited, without the least doubt or favour;
and yet he gives the impression that he has been describing
a great man.

I have heard that somebody has started something else which
is called scientific history, and I once tried to read it.
It appears to avoid the dangers of describing great men by the bright
and simple solution of not describing men at all.  By this method
the historian looks down on all the movements of men as if they
were ants.  If I want truth I must confess that I prefer Macaulay.
I prefer to look up at men as if they were angels, even if they
are angels of darkness.


LEWIS CARROLL

THE celebration of the birth of Lewis Carroll is really the celebration
of the birth of Alice in Wonderland; the imaginary child being much
more imaginable than the real one.  Both perhaps exhibited the primness
of their period; in both perhaps the primness was more formal than real.
Most of us have had a glimpse, as in some stiff daguerrotype or early
photograph of that epoch, of the holiday group in that sunny hour
of vacation, in which a somewhat demure parson, who was a "don"
or lecturer at Oxford, sat surrounded by equally demure little girls
(at least in appearance) and began idly to scrawl extravagant pictures
and tell a tale of topsy-turvydom apparently more crack-brained
and crazy than anything that had ever been imagined in the lies
of Munchausen or the lunar voyage of Ariosto.  It was a new thing;
Nonsense for Nonsense' sake; on the principle of art for art's sake.
Nobody indeed would have been more shocked than Mr. Dodgson
(which was the parson's real name) at being classed with the anarchical
artists who talked about l'art pour l'art. But, in spite of himself,
he was a much more original artist than they.  He had realised that
certain images and arguments could sustain themselves in the void
by a sort of defiant folly; an incongruous congruity; the very
aptitude of ineptitude.  It was not only very new but very national.
We may even say that for some time it was a secret of the English.
M. Cammaerts has brilliantly described what a puzzle it appears at
first to the more logical nation.  It was the wild fruit of one age
and people, as is proved by the fact that its only other professor,
Edward Lear of the Nonsense Rhymes, was also an Englishman and
also a Victorian.

Any educated Englishman, and especially any educational Englishman
(which is worse), will tell you with a certain gravity that _Alice
in Wonderland_ is a classic.  Such is indeed the horrid truth.
The original hilarity that was born on that summer afternoon
among the children, in the mind of a mathematician on a holiday,
has itself hardened into something almost as cold and conscientious
as a holiday task.  That logician's light inversion of all the standards
of logic has itself, I shudder to say, stiffened into a standard work.
It is a classic; that is, people praise it who have never read it.  It has
a secure position side by side with the works of Milton and Dryden.
It is a book without which no gentleman's library is complete, and which
the gentleman therefore never presumes to take out of his library.
I am sorry to say it, but the soap-bubble which poor old Dodgson
blew from the pipe of poetry, in a lucid interval of lunacy,
and sent floating into the sky, has been robbed by educationists
of much of the lightness of the bubble, and retained only the horrible
healthiness of the soap.

This is not the fault of Lewis Carroll, but it is in one sense the fault
of Charles Dodgson; at least the fault of the world which he inhabited
and incorporated and to some extent encouraged and carried forward.
His nonsense is a part of the peculiar genius of the English;
but a part also of the elusive paradox of the English.  None but they
could have produced such nonsense; but none but they, having produced
such nonsense, would ever have attempted to take it seriously.
There is, by this time, a sort of implication of national loyalty
about the thing; against which I for one would mildly protest.
It is a moral duty to listen to reason, but it is not a moral
duty to listen to unreason.  It is only a lark, and no admirer
of Lewis Carroll can outstrip me in liking it as a lark.
As I shall suggest later, many of its really original merits
as a fantasia have been missed by this heavy-handed applause;
applause of work that should be criticised as it was created,
with a light touch.  Men may be told to listen, and in a sense even
made to listen, when a man of adequate authority is talking sense.
But we cannot be made to listen to a man who is talking nonsense;
it sins against the whole spirit and atmosphere of the occasion,
which is a holiday.  Yet I have a dreadful fear that
the works of Lewis Carroll are now a part of education,
which in these liberal modern days means compulsory education.
I once lectured before a congress of elementary schoolmasters,
trying to persuade them to tolerate anything so human as Penny Dreadfuls
or Dime Novels about Dick Turpin and Buffalo Bill.  And I remember
that the Chairman, with a refined and pained expression said,
"I do not think Mr. Chesterton's brilliant paradoxes have persuaded
us to put away our splice in Wonderland and our"--something else,
possibly _The Vicar of Wakefield_ or _Pilgrim's Progress_. It
never struck him that the nonsense tale is as much an escape
from educational earnestness as the gallop after Buffalo Bill.
For him it was simply a classic, and it went along with the
other classics.  And I thought to myself, with a sinking heart,
"Poor, poor little Alice!  She has not only been caught and made
to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others."
Alice is now not only a schoolgirl but a schoolmistress.
The holiday is over and Dodgson is again a don.  There will be lots
and lots of examination papers, with questions like:

(1) What do you know of the following; mime, mimble, haddock's eyes,
treacle-wells, beautiful soup? (2) Record all the moves in the chess
game in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, and give diagram.
(3) Outline the practical policy of the White Knight for dealing
with the social problem of green whiskers.  (4) Distinguish between
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

I will give only one deadly and devastating fact, to show how Nonsense,
in the case of Alice's story, has been allowed to become cold
and monumental like a classic tomb.  It has been parodied.
People sit down solemnly to burlesque this burlesque.
They imagine they can make it funny, or at least make it funnier,
by twisting its features into paltry political caricatures.
They think they can give a twist, to that which has no imaginable
purpose except to be twisted, by wreathing it into emblems of everyday
comedy and commonplace farce.  Now that is a thing that nobody
would dream of doing with anything he really thought _funny_. It
is only serious, and even solemn things, that can be made funny.
It may be said that Sheridan burlesqued Shakespeare; at least
he burlesqued the sham Shakespearean historical drama in The Critic.
But nobody could burlesque The Critic.  It may be said that Gilbert
burlesqued Swinburne and Rossetti and all the rest of the half-pagan
Pre-Raphaelites in his picture of the aesthetes in _Patience_. But no
man in his senses would try to burlesque _Patience_. Nobody would think
it a novelty to throw off a frivolous version of _The Bab Ballads_,
and it was only an embittered enemy who uttered the celebrated sarcasm:
"Why doesn't somebody bring out a comic _Punch_?"  We have had
Comic Histories of England and Comic Latin Grammars, because there
remains a tradition that there is something serious, and even sacred,
about the story of the English nation and the strong tongue of Rome.
But even those who can enjoy, more than I can, what is now called
a Comic Strip, would not think it a promising venture to bring
out a Comic Comic Strip.

But, in the case of Alice in wonderland, so strangely solid
was this impression that the thing was a national institution,
an educational classic, a well of English undefiled,
a historic heritage like Othello or the Samson Agonistes,
that satirists set seriously to work on it to make it amusing.
Political parodists actually thought it a sort of improvement
to give all that pure and happy pointlessness a point.
They even felt, I think, a tingle of timid daring, in taking
liberties with this monumental Victorian volume.  They felt they
were shaking the pillars of the British Constitution, when they
ventured to joke about such jokes.  They blasphemed the divinity
of the Mock Turtle and defied the lightnings of the Mad Hatter.
And each of them felt almost like a Red Republican when he took
liberties with the Red Queen.

It is a delightful but difficult enterprise to liberate Lewis Carroll
from the custody of Charles Dodgson.  It is a hard though happy task
to try to recapture the first fresh careless rapture of the days
when Nonsense was new.  We have to put ourselves in an utterly
different attitude from that of the admirers who have come after
the achievement, and feel something of the first stir and movement
that went before it.  In the eyes of a number of those admirers our
attitude will seem like an antic, and they will be far too serious
to see that it is like the original antics of Lewis Carroll.
To appreciate it we must appreciate more deeply the paradox
of the whole people and its literature, and the really comic
contrast between its responsible and its irresponsible moods.
There were a great many things that Charles Dodgson took only
too seriously; but the things which his devotees have taken seriously
were the things which he took lightly.

Everybody knows, I imagine, that the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
was a Fellow of Christ Church College, which nobody is allowed to call
Christ Church College, but only "The House", and was a successful
and even distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Logic.
Superficially speaking, the most curious thing about him was that it was
only through these iron gates of reason that he entered his own private
paradise of unreason.  All that part of the man that might have been,
and in a literary man often has been, loose or light or irresponsible,
was in his case particularly prim and respectable and responsible.
It was only his intellect that took a holiday; his emotions never
took a holiday; and certainly his conscience never took a holiday.
It was perhaps a rather conventional conscience; but his moral views
were quite incapable, I will not say of wavering, but even of moving
or stirring; whether we class them as conventions or convictions.
He had no outlet, even of imagination, on the moral or social
or philosophical side:  he had it only on the mathematical side.
Though a conscientious mathematical teacher, he could imagine something
that made plus equal to minus.  But though a conscientious Christian,
he could not really imagine anything that made the first last and
the last first; that put down the mighty from their seat or exalted
the humble and the poor.  His remarks about social justice and reform,
in Sylvie and Bruno, are more worthy of a feeble curate in a farce
than of a Christian priest teaching in a historic seat of learning.
He was, in the ordinary sense, limited everywhere by convention;
and yet it was he who with one wild leap burst the very limits of reason.
It was this stodgy and stuffy Victorian parson, who followed the wild
vision of utter unreason further than it was ever pursued by any wild
poet working without a conscience or an aim; by any wild painter
when he dips his brush in hues of earthquake and eclipse.

The liveliest thing about him, no doubt, on the purely human side,
was a real affection for children; especially for certain children.
But though this was doubtless the motive that made him tell the children
a story, it was not this, or anything like this, that made the story.
It is a story for children, but it is not a story about children,
in the same sense as the majority of children's stories.
The natural extension of his imagination was all in the direction
of the inverted ideas of the intellect.  He could see the logical
world upside down; he could not see any other kind of world
even right side up.  He took his triangles and turned them
into toys for a favourite little girl; he took his logarithms
and syllogisms and twisted them into nonsense.  But, in a rather
special sense, there is nothing but nonsense in his nonesense.
There is no sense in his nonsense; as there is in the more human
nonsense of Rabelais or the more bitter nonsense of Swift.
If he had been suggesting any moral or metaphysical ideas, they would
never have been so deep or grand as those of Rabelais or Swift.
But he was only playing The Game of Logic; and it is his glory
that it was a new game, and a nonsensical game, and one of the best
games in the world.

Nevertheless, in a certain subconscious world of the English spirit,
of his whole home and tradition and ancestry, there is something
rather deeper than this.  There was something that a man must perhaps
be an Englishman to understand; something perhaps that he must
even have been a Victorian to understand; something, after all,
that he must perhaps reconcile himself to enjoy and not understand.
It works back to that word "holiday", that I have used several times
in this connection, and which is really the key of the problem.
There is a sense in which a man like Rabelais was not really
on a holiday.  He really was building The Abbey of Theleme,
however fantastically and with whatever wild gargoyles or
toppling spires.  In every sense we may say that Mr. Lemuel Gulliver,
when he went on his travels, was not going merely on his holidays.
These writers had a purpose, and it was, whatever its defects,
very largely the serious intellectual purpose of their lives.
But the strange nation of the English, in their strange phase
of Victorianism, had something much more subtle about their
ideas of business and pleasure; and the pure nonsense they
invented really was a holiday of the mind.  I have said that it
was an original thing, and it was; one of the few things,
like Gothic architecture, that had really never been done before.
It was something to invent a happy nightmare; it was something
more to create a thing that was at once lawless and innocent.
It was a sort of dream-life, lived by the nineteenth-century
Englishman parallel to his rather too realistic real life.
It had something of Dual Personality, though without any savour
of diabolic possession.  It had a suggestion of living a double life;
though without anything of the mortal moral issue of Jekyll and Hyde.
Dr. Jekyll tried to perform a surgical operation to remove
his conscience; Mr. Dodgson only amputated his common sense.
It was his head, and not his heart, that he detached and sent
adrift like a bubble in a world of merely abstract anarchy.
And in this he discovered some secret in the mind of the modern
Englishman, which has given the story and the style a secure position;
even, as has been hinted, a position almost too secure.
It was the avowal of a sport or enjoyment to which the whole
mind of the people must have been already tending.  Perhaps it
was not for nothing that one of the comic artists of Punch wrote
a serious novel, about a man who lived a continuous dreaming life,
side by side with his waking life.  The Victorian Englishman
walked the world in broad daylight, a proverbially solid figure,
with his chimney-pot hat and his mutton-chop whiskers, with his
business bag and his businesslike umbrella.  But something happened
to him at night; some wind of nightmare blowing through his soul
and his subconsciousness dragged him out of bed and whirled him
out of the window, where he rose into a world of wind and moonshine;
his chimney-pot hat sailing high above the chimneys and his umbrella
bellying like a balloon or bearing him upwards like a witch's broom;
with his whiskers waving like wings.

HOW PLEASANT TO KNOW MR. LEAR

MANY who remember the admirable poem in which Mr. Edward Lear professed
to describe his own personality will probably prefer it to a longer
account of him in prose.  It is not supremely important to know
where Edward Lear was born, or what were his views on politics;
but the information conveyed in the line--

  He weareth a runcible hat

is really solid and important.  It was also essential to appreciate
the distinction involved in the words--

  He reads, but he cannot speak Spanish,
  He cannot abide Ginger Beer.

And, after reading the poem, we were all quite ready to agree
in concluding the verse:--

  Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish
    How pleasant to know Mr. Lear.

I, for one, am prepared to believe in the eternal and spiritual
Edward Lear against all shows of this world and all phantoms
of the flesh.  I believe that "his body was perfectly spherical",
and that he did verily and in truth wear a runcible hat.
I will have no Modernism on this subject; or indeed on any other.
Perhaps there was a sensible Edward Lear who wrote letters and criticised
current affairs.  But the great Edward Lear, the serious Edward Lear,
was the silly one.

It is a remarkable fact that the two great English masters
of nonsense in the nineteenth century were both men whose
private personalities were, I will not say prosaic, but at
least rational, respectable, and containing no suggestion at all
either of pure poetry or of any particular oddity in humour.
Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear were neither of them really people
with perverse or whimsical temperaments; they were neither of them men
like Charles Lamb or Robert Louis Stevenson, men who could not write ten
words on a postcard without the sentence taking a sort of tender twist.
The views of Edward Lear, like those of the respected don who wrote
under the name of Lewis Carroll, were sensible and slightly
Philistine views.  It would immediately be supposed that this sane
but stolid character would be somewhat unsuited for two wild poets,
who were to write about the Jabberwock and the Dong with the
Luminous Nose.  I am not so sure that this is really the case.
I go so far as to say that the solid mid-Victorian lives led
by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear had a great deal to do with their
creating themselves kings of the remote empire of unreason.
The simplicity and rationality of that race attracted the fairies.
They had a basis, moral and material, on which the bizarre pagodas 
couldbe built. It is too little remembered that if you want
to reach nonsense you must go through sense.

Of course there was a difference of degree in the two cases
and even, perhaps, a difference of kind.  Edward Lear in his
letters is not subtle, but he is exhilarating.  Mr. Dodgson,
in his private utterances, was neither exhilarating nor subtle.
But they were both very good examples of the well-informed Englishman
of the mid-Victorian time.  And the chief mark of the well-informed
Englishman of that time was that he was an ill-informed Englishman.
It is impossible to read Lears letters without feeling how insulated
and provincial were the best English minds during a certain period.
Here is a man of genius, a good Greek scholar, a traveller
of experience, a man priding himself on the liberality of his mind;
and yet he criticises all things not English as if they
were indefensible eccentricities in an English village.
He has the typical mid-Victorian habit of getting horribly angry
with the tyrants or impostors who are not oppressing him, but being
perfectly genial and self-satisfied about those who really are.
He breaks out, as Thackeray did, into pages of denunciation of the life
of a monastery; though he does not (as Thackeray did) actually propose
that monastic vows should be legally forbidden, like human sacrifice.
But he does fly into a furious and sustained passion against a system
which is, after all, a voluntary system, while it never occurs to him
to make any protest against the dominance of the English aristocracy,
which is not voluntary ... except on the part of the aristocrats.
A few poor old monks who have chosen to live hard lives on their own
responsibility strike him as monsters of darkness and hypocrisy.
"I still maintain that Blasphemy and lying are the Prerogatives
of Priestcraft."  But when he comes to a quite typical diplomatist
and cynical oligarch like Lord Palmerston, that statesman's
front bench clap-trap strikes him as "all straightforward
bluff truth".  Like all the English of his strange time
he could have seen that the Irish were a priest-led people;
but could not have seen that the English are a squire-led people.
And it is surely more manly to follow the leaders of your own
philosophy than merely to follow the owners of your own farms.
Such are at least the letters of Edward Lear; full of broad English fun,
full of splendid English high spirits.  But the very broadness of
the fun only illustrates the narrowness of the outlook.  Even the high
spirits only show the low political education.  Everything that
is English is liberal; especially the illiberal aristocracy.
Everything that is un-English is illiberal, especially the
tradition which has been the mother of all the liberal arts.
Nobody wants him to go into a monastery; yet he will soothe his soul
with incessant roarings against the hocus-pocus of monasteries.
As if all the hocus-pocus of all the priests in history could really
be much more dangerous than the hocus-pocus of Lord Palmerston.

To say this is of course to leave out of the real Edward Lear
a great mass of real humour, of real liberality, and knowledge
of the world.  Nevertheless, if we drop the real Edward Lear and
turn to the unreal one--oh, bless him, how much more real he is!
The mystical Edward Lear, the one who wore the runcible hat,
is one of the great masters of English literature.  He has, no doubt,
essential points in common with his mere earthly counterpart.
When we read those criticisms of Continental religion mentioned above,
we may perhaps see a deep truth in the line--

  He reads, but he cannot speak Spanish.

That was really what was the matter with the Englishman of the Lear
period; he could read about foreigners, but he could not speak with them.
And when we delight (as we certainly do when reading his letters)
in the heartiness, the good fellowship, the Dickensian camaraderie
of that fine old English world, we may add with enthusiasm the line,
as if we were shouting it all together in a chorus--

  He cannot _abide_ Ginger Beer!

But the Lear of the nonsense world still remains a sort of super-Lear,
a being far more transcendental and awful.

For the truth is that Edward Lear was greater than Lewis Carroll;
at least, he could do what Lewis Carroll could not do.
Lewis Carroll's nonsense was merely mathematical and logical.
Edward Lear's nonsense was emotional and poetical.  The long
rolling lines of Lear have the feeling of fine poetry in them,
which does not exist in the excellent poem of "Jabberwocky".
It does exist in

  Far and few, far and few,
  Are the lands where the Jumblies live

or in those splendid lines--

  When awful darkness and silence reign
  Over the great Gromboolian plain,
  Through the long, long wintry nights;--
  When the angry breakers roar
  As they beat on the rocky shore;--
  Then Storm-clouds brood on the towering heights
  Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore.

No one was ever quite at home in Wonderland--not even Alice.
But the English romanticism in those lines of Lear is so strong
that I feel as if the Chankly Bore were in Berkshire or Sussex,
and I know I am native to the Gromboolian Plain.


THE GENIUS OF GILBERT

AN EDITION of "Her Majesty's Ship Pinafore" in a prose form
with pictures is presumably meant strictly for the nursery;
and in such a light it is excellent, first because of the genuine
excellence of the pictures, and second because there is something
in Sir William Gilbert's fancy which pleases children, though it
certainly was not meant for them.  It is an awful rebuke for the satirist
that children enjoy his work without seeing the satire.  That harsh
outline and emphatic colour which for us makes a caricature cruel,
for a child only makes it clear.  Swift created Gulliver as a cataract
of contempt for the children of men.  And the children of men
have drunk it delightedly and washed in it innocently ever since.
Swift described his giants and pigmies in order to show how vile and vain
a world it is in which everything is at the mercy of relativity.
But the child reading Swift merely thinks how living and lovely
a world it is, in which there are giants and pigmies at all.
Much in the same way there must be many people (I am one of them)
who owe their first primitive poetic impression of a modern
English ship to the preposterous ship "Pinafore". I actually
received the whole naval romance from this fantasia, which had no
apparent object except to make game of the whole naval romance.
The clean look of a deck, the smartness of the white sailors,
the cocked hat and strict blue uniform of a captain, all these picturesque
images I saw while sitting, as a small boy, in the pit of the theatre,
long before I saw them anywhere else.  As I was an English school-boy,
it is as needless to say that I was taught no English History during
the term as to say that I was taken to "Pinafore" during the holidays.
That is the way we do things; and there may be something in it.
But certainly I saw the great satire on the national navy long
before I saw the national navy, or had even, in any serious sense,
heard of it.  I knew all the ropes and the rig of "H.M.S. Pinafore"
before I had counted the masts of any craft to be seen at Margate;
that caricatured and comic ship was really (in the words
of its own satiric verse) the only ship I had ever seen.
I knew something of the routine of sailors and the position
of the quarter deck before I had seen the harbour of Portsmouth,
or the spot where Nelson fell.

This is no doubt the justification of such a simplified and illustrated
reproduction of the thing for children.  Nevertheless it cannot be
regarded as other than an inversion of the proper state of affairs.
It is wrong that children should complete their own excellent
common sense by staring at the mature madness of their elders.
It is unreasonable that a child should never have heard of tea until
he reads about the Mad Hatter's tea-party.  It is wrong that he should
never have heard of babies until he has read The Water Babies.
Some more simple and solid picture of this earth as it is will always
delight children, and ought to be prepared and preserved for them.
Sense is the suitable atmosphere of children, because they never get
tired of it.  Nonsense is a playground for grown-up people; and I,
for one, object to a lot of officious children coming and interfering
with my play.

At any rate, the true genius of Gilbert is at the opposite extreme
to the genius of childhood.  The magic of a man like Gilbert is
that he can see things just slightly crooked; the magic of a child
is that he sees things startlingly and almost shockingly straight.
Both bear witness to truth; but the humorist bears witness
by exaggerating, the child by not exaggerating at all I give
the nearest example I have known.

A little boy was sitting on my knee the other day while I was reading
a new book of philosophy.  He could just read capital letters,
and he read across the top of a chapter "What is truth?"
And the moment he saw this grey and ironical riddle of old Pontius Pilate,
he called out in a sudden shrill and exultant voice, "Oh, that is
an easy question.  I know what truth is.  It's saying things right."
And so indeed it is; that is the best answer to the question,
except the colossal silence of Christ.  But the point is here,
that the whole strength of the child lay not in the fact that he solved
the difficulty, but that he did not admit that there was any difficulty.
That is really to be close to God.  But the whole point of humour
in the Gilbertian sense is that it does see the difficulty, that it
sees innumerable difficulties arising out of the difficulty, and that
by turning the riddle back upon itself, it comes back to common sense.
Compare with the boy's boisterous disdain for so simple a problem
as that of truth, the treatment of the same thing in the "Mikado".
Modern philosophers and psychologists (being by no means near
to God) have started all sorts of fads about truthfulness;
and one of them is this:  that certain people (Teutons especially)
are so splendidly strong and brave that truth comes out of them
naturally and is part of their animal dignity and simplicity.
Of course, every child knows that this is nonsense; every child
(Teutonic or otherwise) knows that it is nice to tell a lie,
but that by a considerable effort one can tell the truth.
But the philosophers do suggest that there is a truth-telling type,
a person to whom deception is instinctively painful.  Gilbert, the great
satirist of our subtleties, seizes hold of this particular subtlety
and smashes it for ever in four ironical lines.

  We know him well, he cannot tell
    Untrue or groundless tales,
  He always tries to utter lies
    And every time he fails.

That is the summary of the supreme inspiration of Gilbert;
to take some nonsense that is said everywhere; and to say it
so nonsensically that no one can ever say it again.

In all this, Gilbert was very much the precursor and even
the anticipator of Mr. Bernard Shaw.  He had the power of putting
a prejudice suddenly under a light in which it could not live.
He performed the true purpose of a plague or a consuming fire;
he burnt up everything that can be burnt.  For instance, the real idea
of patriotism cannot be burnt; it is incombustible and incorrupt.
Whatever anyone says, it is true that Frenchmen not only live in France,
but live by France.  Whatever anyone says, where two or three Frenchmen
are gathered together, France shall be in the midst of them.
But there is an element in patriotism, especially, I am afraid,
in English patriotism, which invites a slaughterous scientific attack.
It has invited it, and it has got it.  A number of young Englishmen
have obviously got into their minds the extraordinary notion
that the greatness of England ought to make an Englishman proud.
The truth is just the reverse, the greatness of England ought
to make an Englishman humble.  One ought not to swagger about
being the fellow citizen of Shakespeare; rather one ought to feel
that Shakespeare might have had a better fellow citizen.
In other words, an Englishman ought to feel unworthy of
his country; it is only fools or aliens who feel worthy of it.
But there does exist this false patriotism which is not
so much love of England as pleasure in being an Englishman.
I say it does exist; but its back has been broken with a blow.
Gilbert has in one phrase defined and destroyed it.  In the moment
when Gilbert wrote the lines 

  But in spite of all temptations
  To belong to other nations
  He remains an Englishman--

in that hour he effaced the folly of making national peculiarities
a ground of spiritual pride.


THE STYLE OF NEWMAN

A FINE style is not a narrow or fastidious or aristocratic thing,
as many think.  On the contrary, style is the truly democratic thing,
since it touches all common things with the same fairy wand.
A man who loves all men enough to use them rightly is a democrat.
A man who loves all words enough to use them rightly is a stylist.
Style comes out, as the fraternal human sentiment comes out, pre-eminently
and most definitely in dealing with coarse or everyday things.
An eloquent outburst from Carlyle about the stars and the heroes is,
in its own way, fine style.  But a page of Newman's Apologia
which merely describes how he left off living at some college
and went to live in some settlement is also fine style.  The ideal
lover of mankind would linger over a postcard to his washerwoman,
transposing words and modifying adjectives until it was as perfect
as a sonnet.

The one weakness of Newman's temper and attitude as a whole was,
I think, that he lacked the democratic warmth.  This had nothing
to do with his religion; for in Manning, who was a far more rigid
and central Catholic than he, democracy roared like a bonfire.
It had something to do with his character and something to do with
his training.  But in this matter of a fine style Newman was not doing
anything precious or exclusive; he was doing something entirely
human and sociable.  Good style treats verbs and particles as good
manners treats chairs and tables, easily but in the proper way.
There is no such thing as being a gentleman at important moments;
it is at unimportant moments that a man is a gentleman.
At important moments he ought to be something better.  So while we
can consent to receive some poignant message or violent and sudden
sincerity in any language that the man chooses to use, we feel that
the finest instinct of geniality is to speak of common things with
some dignity and care.  No man has ever done this so well as Newman.
A magic that is like a sort of musical accompaniment changes
and heightens the most prosaic fragments of personal biography
or scholastic explanation.  And in this, as I say, he achieves
for a time that awful and beautiful thing which is the dream
of all democracy, the seeing of all things as wonderful, the thing
for which Whitman strove and which he did not perfectly attain.
In this respect Carlyle and Walt Whitman (that immeasurably greater man)
are even the aristocrats compared to this classical embroiderer.
They spoke in a tongue not understanded of the people.
They were bold and boisterous and personal, as the better kind
of aristocrats are always bold and boisterous and personal.

There is another element in Newman's style which is worth noticing as a
guide for all controversialists.  He had the same knack in discussion
which Gladstone had, the air of not being in any way in a hurry.
Young men who read Gladstone's speeches in printed books just after
his career had closed in unpopularity often could not see wherein
lay the overwhelming witchcraft which made vast audiences rise
like one man and vast combinations follow the orator to defeat.
The oratorical style seemed to them wordy and winding, full of endless
parentheses and needless distinctions.  The truth is, I imagine,
that it was precisely the air of leisure and large-mindedness,
this scrupulosity about exceptions, this allowance for misunderstandings,
that gave to the final assertion its sudden fire.  Both Newman
and Gladstone often seemed, in their mildness and restraint,
a long time coming to the point, but the point was deadly sharp.
This is very much mirrored in their style.  Both men had one
particularly rhetorical effect perfectly:  the art of passing
smoothly and yet suddenly from philosophical to popular language.
A hundred examples or parallels might be given if I had all their
works before me:  one parallel, which I happen to remember,
may suffice.  Gladstone, in answering one of the early Unionist
orators who had appealed to the idea that all the intellectual
people were Unionist, very gently deprecated this mode of argument.
He asked his hearers (I have forgotten the words, but there were
a great many of them and they were very long ones) to confess,
if necessary, that they were the inferiors of their opponents
in erudition, in opportunities, in culture.  "So that nothing remains
for us," he said, "but to show that we have better _manners_"
--and the sudden stress on the word must have been like a blow.
Almost exactly the same kind of abrupt colloquialism marks
the wonderful termination of the introduction to the Apologia.
With careful and melancholy phrases Newman describes how delicate
and painful a matter it must necessarily be to give an account
to the world of all the secret transitions of the soul.
"But I do not like to be called a knave and liar to my face, and--"
The dramatic effect is almost exactly the same.  It is, indeed,
a rather singular fact that although Newman's style is so harmonious
and limpid, yet the peculiar force of that style generally consists
in its use for sharply different purposes.  Nobody, I imagine,
who has read the Apologia will ever forget that transition,
which strikes the reader not only as thrilling but almost as queer,
in the passage dealing with his first relations with Edgbaston.
He describes, in quiet detail, how he went to this place and that place;
how he was, in consequence, asked this and that question; how his
opponents could not explain legitimately his reason for leaving
on such and such a day or going to such and such a destination;
how they plied him with questions and haunted him with suggestions.
Then he turns and calls them, with a cry like thunder, "Cowards."
"It is not you," he says, "that I fear; it is not you from whom I
am hiding, Di me terrent et Jupiter hostis."

The truth was, as I fancy, that it was very fortunate for Newman,
considered merely as a temperament and a personality, that he was
forced into that insatiably fighting thing, the Catholic Church,
and that he was forced into it in a deeply Protestant country.
His spirit might have been too much protected by the politeness
of our English temper and our modern age, but it was flayed alive
by the living spirit of "No Popery".  The frigid philosopher was called
a liar and turned into a man.  We might also dwell upon that one
outburst of wild and exuberant satire in which Newman indulged:
I mean his comparison (in the first lecture on "The Position
of English Catholics") of the English view of the Catholic Church
to the probable Russian view of the British Constitution.
It is one of the great pages of fierce English humour.
Why he thus once exploded into fantastic derision I do not know.
But I suspect that it was because Birmingham was full of "No Popery"
rioters and his back was to the wall.  This man, when he was in
the sweet but too refined atmosphere of the Oxford High Churchmen,
had shed many tears.  But, like all brave men when he first saw
the face of battle, he began to laugh.


IBSEN

IBSEN belongs to a certain group which it is a delicate point
to define.  To call them the great Provincials may be mistaken
for offensive patronage; but surely all will agree that it is
less offensive to call men Provincial than to call them Nordic.
God forbid that we should say that Ibsen was Nordic; but it was not
an accident that he was Norwegian.  The point about the group is this:
that they were men thinking for themselves, but largely cut off
from the old thought of the world; by an accidental barrier
of recent revolts and negations in the North.  A Catholic
naturally feels this, especially in their exile from Catholicism;
but it is true of much else, as generally of Classicism.
It meant an under-estimate of Aristotle as well as of Aquinas.  It knew
too little of the vine and olive as well as of the bread and wine.
It was not rebelling against these ancient things, but entirely
against the modern things that had been built to block them out;
the Victorian comfort and convention.  And these nobler barbarians,
remote from Rome, were sometimes so ignorant that they did not know
when they were Roman--or when they were right.

When popular tradition resists by instinct some crude or
questionable novelty, it has a curious way of giving the wrong reason
even for doing the right thing.  When the Victorian Philistine first
grumbled at Ibsen, he always had the tone of saying, "Oh, I daresay
all this dismal pessimism may be very deep and philosophical;
but I don't go to the theatre for philosophy; I like a play to be
a play, and have a plot, and be about ordinary jolly people."
Now in fact that criticism allows far too much to Ibsen, while it
also grants him too little.  The solid merits by which Ibsen really
won his way were, first, that he had a highly original but a highly
practical and effective stage-craft; and sense of a play as a play.
And, second, that he was interested in real human beings;
and in the curious clashes and deadlocks that do really happen
in parlours and dining-rooms.  His philosophy, as philosophy,
was generally extremely poor.  His thinking about abstract things
was often strangely thin and shallow.  It was he, I think,
who coined the phrase:  "How do we know that two and two do not
make five in the fixed stars?" to which the obvious answer is:
"At least as well as we know there are any fixed stars."
The very distinction between fixed and unfixed stars is only
established by pages of mathematics; or, in other words, by assuming
about two thousand times over that two and two do not make five.
That there is a mental limit in man, at which mathematics
also become mysteries, is quite true; but it has nothing to do
with a vulgar test of locality; and the riddle is not found
in the Pleiades at a certain distance from the earth, any more
than it is in the earth at a certain distance from the Pleiades.
It is as if a man were to say, "I have never been in Upper Norwood;
so existence and non-existence may be the same in that suburb."
If we were to attempt to state Ibsen in mere terms of thought,
especially of what is called free thought, we should find ourselves
dealing with a great deal of this very thoughtless thought.
It is not even pessimism; it is rather that sort of bewildered
optimism which is so often left in vague minds by the frustration
of an impossible freedom.  When the soul has wandered among all
the wandering stars, without finding one of them in which four is
the same as five, it can only come home again with a dazed expression;
and that is often the end of Ibsen, considered as a thinker.
But there is a great deal more to be said about Ibsen considered
as a creator.  The moment he is content to be a craftsman, and express
himself through the images of his craft, he expresses living truths
too great to be defined by the craftsman, let alone critic.
Pessimism is nonsense; but the sullen energy of Borkman is not nonsense.
Optimism is nonsense; but the innocent violence of the Enemy of
the People is not nonsense.  Hedda Gabler is a very unpleasant person;
but, to do her justice, she is not an "ism." In other words,
she is not a heresy; an infectious disease of the intellect.
Ibsen's work had certain elements of imaginative truth, which overcame
all the intellectual falsehood implied in being "modern."
And when he thus trusted his imagination, it is curious to note
how near he was to much older things than the nineteenth century.
He was really in revolt against the nineteenth century; just as his
doctor was in revolt against its "compact liberal majority."

Thus, the Master Builder is as medieval as his name.
He is all the more medieval for not knowing it.  For the chief charm
of medieval people was that they never thought about being medieval.
It is the chief inferiority of modern people that they do think
about being modern.  But not only does his very title imply
the old conception of a craft, the real moral of the tragedy
is the noble conception of the responsibility of the craftsman.
It really is the great modern immorality that builders cannot climb
their own towers; that men do not see the end of their own work;
that an indirect and servile complexity has excused the shop-keeper
from living over his shop or the captain from going down in his ship.
Men make machines larger than they can control, as Ibsen's
hero made a tower higher than he could climb.  Men grow dizzy
with their own civilization, as he grew giddy on his own spire.
Probably Ibsen would have defined it very imperfectly as an idea;
but he made it immortal as an image.

                                II

The great dramatist Ibsen will certainly be of enduring interest
as a dramatist; he will also be of enduring interest as the symbol
of the very strange period through which we have just passed.
That period is very hard to describe.  It was the period during which
the great European effort to break down inequality itself broke down.
Before Democracy had become successful it had become old-fashioned.
Just as the dogmas of Republicanism were triumphing over the dogmas
of Oligarchy, the world suddenly wearied of both dogmas alike.
There ensued an extraordinary period in which most men of my
generation or of any approximate generation grew up; a period in
which the dogmas of Democracy, being the most historically immediate,
were felt to be the most dogmatic, and therefore the most irritating.
Because they were the newest dogmas, men felt them to be the most
antiquated dogmas.  During this period the one thing that seemed far
off and feeble and almost legendary was the austere humanitarianism,
the stern humanitarianism of the French Revolution.  During this
period the one thing that was felt to be wrong was the conception
of the rights of man.

But there were in this strange and empty epoch another class of men,
a class of men really great and serious, who were superior to all
these things.  They saw that the breakdown of the pure democratic
doctrine was but a symbol of the breakdown of all doctrines.
They said that a man must be free as regards his individuality,
not merely as regards his citizenship.  Democracy declares that
a man should have liberty indeed, but should have that liberty
which other men have.  This school felt that the particular
liberty which a man should above all things have, was the liberty
which other men did not have.  Their individual aimed not merely
at being free, but at being unique, indeed, at being solitary.
They set the claims of men against the rights of men.  Of these there
were many brilliant and base within the period of the last fifty years.
Of these the greatest was Ibsen.

He made no disguise of being in ethics merely a gigantic opportunist.
He made no disguise at all of his passionate hatred of Democracy.
In the old epic or legend of nineteenth-century reform the hero
was the People.  Ibsen's hero was the Enemy of the People.
He did not use that phrase in irony; he deliberately made
Dr. Stockmann at the very beginning of his remarks, and before
anyone worth mentioning has attacked him at all, deliver a wild
and whirling defence of aristocracy, full of the suggestion
that the minority is always right and the majority always wrong.
Ibsen himself was in spirit and essence always the enemy of the people;
far more the enemy of the people than poor Nietzsche.  To this day
those few of the real people who have heard his name hate it.

In all this he was sincere beyond the point of sublimity.  He had the
largest kind of courage and what commonly goes with courage--simplicity.
I cannot understand those who regard him as a mere artist.
He seems to me to be as fierce as Mr. Bernard Shaw upon his own dogma.
Only, as in the case of Mr. Bernard Shaw, his dogma is that there
is no dogma.  It is quite true, as so many of his critics have said,
that he writes one play against one doctrine and then another play
against the opposite doctrine.  It is quite true that in the "Enemy
of the People" he attacks the ideal of decorous silence, and that
in "The Wild Duck" he attacks the ideal of indecorous candour.
But this is because what he wants to attack in both cases is ideals.
He is not really angry with the ideal of silence or with
the ideal of candour; he is angry with the ideal of idealism.
And in this he seems to me to have been always splendidly consistent,
splendidly fierce, splendidly wrong.

His dislike of idealism would alone separate him from the populace and
the popular theory of government, for the populace is always idealistic.
But there is here a deeper matter also.  The whole of that problem
play which will be always associated with his name is a thing
profoundly plutocratic.  The whole of the modern attack upon
marriage and the family is in its inmost nature plutocratic.
In every problem play that ever I saw or heard of there was
one assumption--that all the people in it had plenty of money.
And the necessity of this is obvious.  In the majority of sane
human lives there is no problem of sex at all; there is no problem
of marriage at all; there is no problem of temperament at all;
for all these problems are dwarfed and rendered ridiculous by the standing
problem of being a moderately honest man and paying the butcher.
The philosophical upshot of most problem plays is practically this,
that if two married people moon about in large rooms all day long,
it is highly probable that they will get on each other's nerves.
On this basis (a purely plutocratic basis) a large number
of modern people have erected an attack upon monogamy;
saying that it is not good for two people to be always together.
The only weakness in the argument is that in actual human monogamy
the two people are not always together.  Both the man and the woman
have apart from each other an exceedingly hard time.  We read poems
and legends of parted lovers.  Why, half the affectionate married couples
of the world are perpetually parted lovers.  An omnibus conductor
and his wife see almost as little of each other as Romeo and Juliet.
A postman and his chosen meet if not secretly, at least by night.
Hence follows the fact that none of our intellectuals can understand;
that the actual emotions of the democracy are much simpler and younger
and more straightforward than those of a more fortunate class.
A very hard-working man cannot get tired of his family.
A very hard-working man can hardly get used to them.

But this is a truth which literally cannot be expressed in any drama,
however realistic.  For this purpose the closest realism is
as useless as the wildest sentimentalism.  Ibsen brought to
the most astonishing perfection the technical talent of reality;
and he has had many imitators more realistic, if less inspired.

We can have in our plays the realism of the man who turns up his
trousers before going out at the back door.  We can have in our plays
the realism of the man who goes out at the back door and then comes
back for his umbrella.  But there is one thing that no realist,
however daring, however frantic, would venture to depict upon
the stage.  He may make indecencies walk naked in the open day.
He may cry from the housetops the things of shame which humanity
has kept secret for centuries.  But there is one thing that no
dramatist dare produce upon the stage.  That thing is the thing
called "Work," There is no playwright who would reproduce upon
the stage the first four hours of an ordinary clerk's day.
Nobody would send up the curtain at 8 o'clock on a man adding up figures,
and send it down at 10 o'clock on a man still adding up figures.
Even an Ibsenite audience would not support the silent symbolism
of three scenes all of which were occupied with the same bricklayer
laying bricks.  We dare not say in artistic form how much there is
of prose in men's lives; and precisely because we cannot say how much
there is of prose, we cannot say how much there is of poetry.
It was not merely that Ibsen was not enough of a democrat to understand
and respect marriage.  It was also that Ibsen was not enough
of a realist to understand and respect marriage.

Marriage and the family fidelity are essential and sacred things,
exactly for those reasons that cannot be adequately expressed in art
at all; for all art is a thing of glimpses, and marriage is a thing
of continuity.  Dramas, however realistic, deal with events.
But monogamy is not merely a good event; it is a good habit.
Ibsen was a very great man who made art as realistic as it can well be;
it cannot be entirely realistic.  But if it were entirely realistic,
it would be almost entirely romantic.

I do not take the view that Ibsen was a mere iconoclast by temperament
and desire.  I believe that he would, like most men of his time,
have been sincerely glad to have possessed a positive philosophy;
I believe he did not possess it, and I believe he was a profoundly
unhappy man.  It is true that he admired youth and its beautiful energy,
as in Hilda Wangel.

But then people who can believe in nothing else always do believe
in that; the last statues that the Romans made were the statues
of young barbarians.  It is true, and it is a merit of his,
far too little admired by his admirers, that he had a vast
amount of poetry in his composition and that he reminds one
constantly of northern folk-lore and fairy-tales.  Ibsen is much
more like Hans Andersen than he is like any English writer.
The man with the strange eyes in the "Lady from the Sea,"
the Rat Wife in "Little Eyolf," the queer business of the bird
in the "Wild Duck," the queer business of the tower in the
"Master Builder"--all those things are very full of mysticism.
No one wishes to underrate Ibsen so far as to deny that he was a mystic.
But all this does not affect the question of Ibsen's positive
belief about things; it does not show that Ibsen had any religion.
It only shows that Ibsen had plenty of superstition, which in the case
of so sensible a man might be taken for granted.  Religion is a rare
and definite conviction of what this world of ours really is.
Superstition is only the commonsense acceptation of what it obviously is.
Sane peasants, healthy hunters, are all superstitious;
they are superstitious because they are healthy and sane.
They have a reasonable fear of the unknown; for superstition
is only the creative side of agnosticism.  The superstitious man
sees quite plainly that the universe is a thing to be feared.
The religious man maintains paradoxically that the universe is
a thing to be trusted.  The awe is certainly the obvious thing;
the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and no one
denies that Ibsen and the savages have begun to be wise.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom--but not the end.


OSCAR WILDE

THE time has certainly come when this extraordinary man,
Oscar Wilde, may be considered merely as a man of letters.
He sometimes pretended that art was more important than morality,
but that was mere play-acting.  Morality or immorality
was more important than art to him and everyone else.
But the very cloud of tragedy that rested on his career makes it
easier to treat him as a mere artist now.  His was a complete life,
in that awful sense in which your life and mine are incomplete;
since we have not yet paid for our sins.  In that sense one might
call it a perfect life, as one speaks of a perfect equation;
it cancels out.  On the one hand we have the healthy horror of the evil;
on the other the healthy horror of the punishment.  We have it
all the more because both sin and punishment were highly civilized;
that is, nameless and secret.  Some have said that Wilde was sacrificed;
let it be enough for us to insist on the literal meaning of the word.
Any ox that is really sacrificed is made sacred.

But the very fact that monstrous wrong and monstrous revenge
cancel each other, actually does leave this individual artist
in that very airy detachment which he professed to desire.
We can really consider him solely as a man of letters.

About Oscar Wilde, as about other wits, Disraeli or Bernard Shaw,
men wage a war of words, some calling him a great artist and others
a mere charlatan.  But this controversy misses the really extraordinary
thing about Wilde:  the thing, that appears rather in the plays than
the poems.  He was a great artist.  He also was really a charlatan.
I mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks
that he employs.

A vulgar demagogue is not a charlatan; he is as coarse as his crowd.
He may be lying in every word, but he is sincere in his style.
Style (as Wilde might have said) is only another name for spirit.
Again, a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw is not a charlatan.
I can understand people thinking his remarks hurried or shallow
or senselessly perverse, or blasphemous, or merely narrow.
But I cannot understand anyone failing to feel that Mr. Shaw
is being as suggestive as he can, is giving his brightest
and boldest speculations to the rabble, is offering something
which he honestly thinks valuable.  Now Wilde often uttered
remarks which he must have known to be literally valueless.
Shaw may be high or low, but he never talks down to the audience.
Wilde did talk down, sometimes very far down.

Wilde and his school professed to stand as solitary artistic souls
apart from the public.  They professed to scorn the middle class,
and declared that the artist must not work for the bourgeois.
The truth is that no artist so really great ever worked so much
for the bourgeois as Oscar Wilde.  No man, so capable of thinking
about truth and beauty, ever thought so constantly about his own
effect on the middle classes.  He studied them with exquisite
attention, and knew exactly how to shock and how to please them.
Mr. Shaw often gets above them in seraphic indignation,
and often below them in sterile and materialistic explanations.
He disgusts them with new truths or he bores them with old truths;
but they are always living truths to Bernard Shaw.  Wilde knew how to
say the precise thing which, whether true or false, is irresistible.
As, for example, "I can resist everything but temptation."

But he sometimes sank lower.  One might go through his swift
and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil marking two
kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please
his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote
to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization.
This is what I mean by saying that he was strictly a charlatan--
among other things.  He descended below himself to be on top of others.
He became purposely stupider than Oscar Wilde that he might seem
cleverer than the nearest curate.  He lowered himself to superiority;
he stooped to conquer.

One might easily take examples of the phrase meant to lightly touch
the truth and the phrase meant only to bluff the bourgeoisie.
For instance, in "A Woman of No Importance," he makes
his chief philosopher say that all thought is immoral,
being essentially destructive; "Nothing survives being thought of."
That is nonsense, but nonsense of the nobler sort; there is
an idea in it.  It is, like most professedly modern ideas,
a death-dealing idea not a life-giving one; but it is an idea.
There is truly a sense in which all definition is deletion.
Turn a few pages of the same play and you will find somebody asking,
"What is an immoral woman."  The philosopher answers, "The kind
of woman a man never gets tired of."  Now that is not nonsense,
but rather rubbish.  It is without value of any sort or kind.
It is not symbolically true; it is not fantastically true;
it is not true at all.

Anyone with the mildest knowledge of the world knows that nobody
can be such a consuming bore as a certain kind of immoral woman.
That vice never tires men, might be a tenable and entertaining lie;
that the individual instrument of vice never tires them is not,
even as a lie, tenable enough to be entertaining.  Here the great
wit was playing the cheap dandy to the incredibly innocent;
as much as if he had put on paper cuffs and collars.  He is simply
shocking a tame curate; and he must be rather a specially tame
curate even to be shocked.  This irritating duplication of real
brilliancy with snobbish bluff runs through all his three comedies.
"Life is much too important to be taken seriously"; that is the
true humorist.  "A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life";
that is the charlatan.  "Man can believe the impossible, but man can
never believe the improbable"; that is said by a fine philosopher.
"Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises,
unless it be telling the truth"; that is said by a tired quack.
"A man can be happy with any woman so long as he does not love her";
that is wild truth.  "Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical";
that is tame trash.

But while he had a strain of humbug in him, which there is not
in the demagogues of wit like Bernard Shaw, he had, in his own
strange way, a much deeper and more spiritual nature than they.
Queerly enough, it was the very multitude of his falsities that
prevented him from being entirely false.  Like a many-coloured
humming top, he was at once a bewilderment and a balance.
He was so fond of being many-sided that among his sides he even
admitted the right side.  He loved so much to multiply his souls
that he had among them one soul at least that was saved.
He desired all beautiful things even God.

His frightful fallacy was that he would not see that there is reason
in everything, even in religion and morality.  Universality is a
contradiction in terms.  You cannot be everything if you are anything.
If you wish to be white all over, you must austerely resist the temptation
to have green spots or yellow stripes.  If you wish to be good all over,
you must resist the spots of sin or the stripes of servitude.
It may be great fun to be many-sided; but however many sides one has
there cannot be one of them which is complete and rounded innocence.
A polygon can have an infinite number of sides; but no one of its
sides can be a circle.


JOHN RUSKIN

MEN are constantly saying true things without really thinking them true;
there is a great deal of difference between a truth and a true speech,
for a true speech implies a true speaker.  One of the glib phrases
which one hears everywhere, for instance, is this, that we must
get some way away from a great man in order to appreciate him.
Now there is a truth in this; but have most of us ever found
any truth in it?  Nothing is worse than the physical metaphors
that are used in the matter.  A physical metaphor is never an idea,
it is only an attempt to help out or re-inforce an idea.
When people say that a great man is like a mountain, that we
cannot see him when we are under his shadow, but must look back
at him from more distant plains, they mean nothing at all.
A great man is not in the least like a mountain.  There is no kind
of really intelligible idea involved in comparing a poet to a peak.
We cannot see a mountain when we are close to it because the whole
point of a mountain is that it has a physical size unrelated
to our physical power of sight, that it cannot get itself into our
focus or get itself mirrored on the human mind.  But the whole
point of a poet is that he can become related to our vision.
The whole point of a poet is that he does know how to get himself
into the human focus and mirror himself on the human mind.
In so far as a mountain is too big to be taken in, it is all
the more a mountain.  But in so far as a poet is too big to be
taken in, he is all the less a poet, for the poet means the man
who can express himself; the poet means the man who can make
himself understood.  That the mountain cannot explain itself
until it is dwarfed by distance is a weakness in the mountain.
That it is too large to grasp is not a part of the strength of
the mountain; it is a part of the huge helplessness of the mountain.
The mountain is unimaginable because it is half-witted;
rather the mountain is unimaginable because it is dead.
It cannot explain itself because it has not intelligence as a man has.
The man cannot imagine the mountain, but far less can the
mountain imagine him.

I take this current figure as an example of the fallacy
of all such cheap physical parallels.  None of these things
describes why a thinker or artist whose sole and special gift
is explaining himself should yet be so strangely unable to explain
himself to those nearest to him, to those whom he knows best.
None of this explains why a prophet should be without honour
in his own country or in his own epoch.  A mountain cannot convince
those near to it because a mountain cannot contract into a small
picture of itself, it cannot reduce itself to scale.  But the whole
essence of art is that it contracts and reduces itself to scale.
Those who talk of the artist nature swelling and expanding,
those who talk of the outbreak, licence and overflowing of art are
people with no sort of feeling of what art is.  Art means diminution.
If what you want is largeness, the universe as it is is large enough
for anybody.  Art exists solely in order to create a miniature universe,
a working model of the universe, a toy universe which we can play
with as a child plays with a toy theatre.

Yet with all this the fact remains that great men, especially such great
men as Ruskin and the more combative critics of the nineteenth century,
will require separation and distance before we can appreciate
them justly.  The real reason of this lies, I think, in something
quite different from the average imagery about mere bulk.
The reason most probably is one which can be more correctly
stated by saying that such combative figures produce a reaction
which is almost simultaneous with their energy.  Yet this again
is a metaphor drawn from physical science and is therefore futile.
The most approximately exact statement would perhaps be this:
that any man who speaks truth and speaks anything less than the full and
divine truth draws attention to all the doctrines that he himself omits.
Men grow angrier with him for the two or three things which he states
wrongly than for the two or three hundred that he states rightly;
his incompleteness exasperates exactly because he is plausibly
and apparently complete.  This is the case with all the
nineteenth-century prophets, and especially the case with Ruskin.
He has very specially the disadvantage of being nearly right,
therefore of exasperating us by being wrong.  We do not disagree
with Ruskin as we disagree with the great decisive philosophers
who are our decisive opponents or offer to us decisive alternatives.
We do not disagree with Ruskin as we might disagree with Lucretius
or with Calvin or with Mahomet or with Professor Haeckel.
We disagree with Ruskin as we disagree with a friend gone wrong;
with a man who ought to understand and does not; or (in some cases
I think) who does understand but will not.  For the irritation against
an enemy is a sudden and exceptional passion; but the irritation against
a friend is a thing that grows and bears fruit like a living orchard.
It is possible to be content with our enemies; it is not possible
to be content with our friends.  Our irritation against a friend
always arises, I think, from the good that he has suggested and has
not fulfilled; and this is exactly the feeling which a modern man
has about Ruskin.

Partly the reaction against Ruskin has been due to a consciousness
in the man himself that he was restless and partisan.
He was irritating because he was irritated.  It was said
that Carlyle wrote twenty volumes in praise of silence;
it would be fairer to say that Ruskin was perpetually restless
in advocating rest.  All this should be said and has here been
said as an essential preliminary; because this reaction against
the nineteenth-century prophet is coming, and indeed has come.
There will be a reaction against Ruskin as there was against Dr. Johnson.
And there will be a return of Ruskin as there has been a return
of Dr. Johnson.

I do not mean merely that there will be a return to the appreciation
of his art and style, because there could not possibly be any
reaction against that.  If there were an age which did not realize
that Ruskin wrote great English, it would be an age that had ceased
to write English at all; probably an imperial age.  Nor is his
purely technical triumph wholly unconnected with his philosophy.
The main thing that Ruskin existed to preach was this:
that life (in the vital sense of vitality) is not a thing of gasps
and spasms, but a thing consecutive, interdependent, nay laborious.
Life that is alive, he meant, is continuous.  Life that is
alive is even conventional.  The hailstones fall in reckless
and scattered independence because the hailstones are dead.
The Virginia creeper falls in one connected chain, because the Virginia
creeper is alive.  Dull savages advance into battle individually
and at random; great civilized armies like those of Napoleon
or the Crusades advance in long lines of coherence and necessity.
But that is only because the lawless fighters are more dead;
the ordered fighters are more alive.  Now in this respect Ruskin can
claim that highest element of greatness, the fact that the meaning
and the style are identical.  We in the modern very ignorant
world have to use short and explosive sentences, like the volleys
of the dead hailstones.  But Ruskin's long rolling sentences,
with their triumphant rise and fall, were themselves expressions
of his belief in continuity, and the sublime curves of history.
A Ruskin sentence is long as the swinging creeper is long;
it is long as the line of the Napoleonic army was long.
It is long because it is continuous and because it is alive.

Like all the fighters of his time, Ruskin is under one great disadvantage;
that of victory.  He has convinced the old, heavy and half-witted
utilitarian world; his main historical theories are commonplaces
among educated men.  Some may or may not think the Middle Ages
a nice civilization, but we all know that it was a civilization.
The idea that Medievalism was barbaric is now relegated to quite
obscure and uninstructed corners--for instance, to the daily papers.
A man may be bored with Amiens Cathedral, but he does not now say
that he is bored with its extreme savagery and superstition.
He says, as has always been said by the man bored with Dante,
that he is bored with its extreme civilization.  So far no one now
quarrels with what Ruskin said, the only quarrel can be with how
he said it.

There is a truth in the statement that Ruskin was egotistical.
But the truth in the statement is not such as is supposed by most
of those who make it.  The great majority of casual critics
call Ruskin egotistical when they mean that he is dogmatic.
As far as that goes there is no evidence at all of his egotism.
To be dogmatic and to be egotistic are not only not the same thing,
they are opposite things.  Suppose, for instance, that a vague
sceptic eventually joins the Catholic Church.  In that act he has
at the same moment become less egotistic and become more dogmatic.
The dogmatist is by the nature of the case not egotistical, because he
believes that there is some solid obvious and objective truth outside
him which he has perceived and which he invites all men to perceive.
And the egotist is in the majority of cases not dogmatic, because he,
has no need to isolate one of his notions as being related to truth;
all his notions are equally interesting because they are related to him.
The true egotist is as much interested in his own errors as in his
own truth; the dogmatist is interested only in the truth, and only
in the truth because it is true.  At the most the dogmatist believes
that he is in the truth; but the egotist believes that the truth,
if there is such a thing, is in him.

In so far as Ruskin was dogmatic he was divine.  In so far as he was
saying that he was right and that all the other people were wrong he was
doing what every healthy man ought to do, nay, he was more than healthy;
he was humble.  There are not many generalizations that can be made
about the relations between the morals and the manners of men.
Cleanliness may be next to godliness as the proverb says,
or godliness may be next to cleanliness and a bad second,
as the modern aristocracy says; but the fact certainly remains
that some of the best men the world has ever seen have been dirty,
and that some of the worst men that will ever go to hell are clean.
There are not many statements that a man can make about the things
that a man does in connection with the thing that he is.
But this generalization is almost always safe:  that a man
who talks like a torrent for hours on end is a humble man.
Dr. Johnson was dogmatic and humble; Mr. Bernard Shaw was dogmatic
and humble.  The proud man will scarcely ever lay down the law.
The proud man will scarcely ever talk too much.  He will lie
in wait and drop in the epigram where it is exactly needed.
He will feast upon speechless superiority, while the modest
and unconscious man goes on like Niagara explaining the principles
of socialism or the humours of his eldest son.  The humble man will be
always talkative; for he is interested in his subject and knows that it
is best shown in talk.  But the proud man will be generally silent;
for he is not interested in his subject but in himself.
And he knows that he looks best when he is not talking.

First of all therefore let us clear Ruskin of egotism on all
such counts as these; let us clear him of egotism in so far
that he was long, loquacious, emphatic, explanatory, taking his
subject seriously, bothering and blustering at the reader.
In all this he was merely simple and sincere.
In so far as he was a bully he was an essentially modest man.
It is true that he applied dogmatism to things to which dogmatism
cannot be applied.  It is true that the things about which he was
serious were very often exactly the things about which man ought
not to be serious--taste, ornament, art, criticism.  It is true
even that in him with all his Puritanism had been effected something
of that inversion which marks the aesthete; I mean the taking
of light things too seriously and of serious things too lightly.
It was partly because he did make too much of understanding a light
subject like art that he could not (apparently) understand at all
an important subject like liberty.  But when all this is conceded
it remains true that his outpourings of passionate assertion on
the subject of art were the outpourings of a simple and sincere spirit;
the outpourings of a modest heart and not of an egotistic one.
Not upon this ground, if upon any, will we accuse him of egotism.
Nevertheless there was mingling with all his honesty a certain
curious kind of egotism, and in order to explain its nature it
is necessary to look back for a moment at a phrase employed above:
at the passage in which I said that the true egotist was
as much interested in his own errors as in his own truth.
This is the real test of whether man has only a righteous trust
in his own divine intellect, or whether he has also a morbid pleasure
in the mere contemplation of his own human ego.  The entirely
honest man will have no doubt that he is right:  and he will wish
to assert it; but he will also have no doubt that he was wrong:
and he will wish to forget it.  He will grasp his truth like gold.
But he will drop his errors like hot bricks.  But if there be in him
any trace or version of that disease which Meredith satirized
in Sir Willoughly Patterne, then he will treasure up his errors
and fondle them and turn them over, and perhaps love them more than
his truths.  This, wherever it occurs, is really a mark of egotism.
And this did really occur in the case of Ruskin.

It is a good sign of health in a writer if he thinks a book irrevocable.
If the writer is very healthy he will probably regard the book
as an irrevocable mistake.  But in any case there is something
so sacred and final about the giving forth of anything organic that
most people with sound instincts will always regard it as something
like the birth of a child:  a child who may grow up well or ill.
Like the birth of a child it is the giving of liberty to something.
Henceforth the thing we have made is truly sundered from us,
as we are sundered from God.  In some atmospheres, however, there has
arisen a very bad artistic habit of going over and over artistic
work and talking about it as if no one could ever get tired
of the subject.  Mr. George Moore has specially distinguished
himself by purring over his work and petting it as a cat does
a mouse, gently commending this and gently lamenting that,
as if it were the character of some erring but adorable friend.
This fashion is bad everywhere; and into this fashion Ruskin fell.
It is this habit in him and this alone, I think, that really irritates us
in his later works.  I can read a page of his dogmatism with pleasure.
But I cannot endure the little notes that he puts at the bottom
of the page to point out where he made a mistake and how much he has
grown since he made it.  That is real vanity; that is real self-love.
He is not an egotist when he says that he is right.
But he is an egotist when he says that he was wrong.

Such mere iteration of his own individuality (as distinct from his own
convictions) was a weakness that grew on him mainly in his later years.
It was probably the result of that self-realization in a particular
dramatic part which is the nemesis of so many picturesque and
partisan writers.  It is a good thing to tell a half-truth so long
as one thinks that it is the whole truth.  But when an enthusiast
discovers through experience and sympathy that there is another
half of the truth that he has not told, then there is presented
to him a perilous alternative.  He can go on to the whole truth.
In that case he will become more wise, but he will look more ordinary;
his special colour, mixed with the complementary colours, will turn
into the white light of common day.  Perhaps that was what happened
to Shakespeare when he went down to buy a farm in Warwickshire.
On the one hand, then, he may accept the whole truth; on the other hand
he may exaggerate his half-truth, knowing it to be a half-truth.
This is what Ruskin did.  He could not abandon the youthful
pleasures of fanaticism; he refused to grow mellow with age.
And young fanaticism cultivated in old age, like young love cultivated
in old age, turned sour and unwholesome.  It made his work pointed
and energetic to the last.  But there was something fretful and insecure
about it because he was being consciously and deliberately one-sided.
In this one cannot but feel that he falls a little below, not only
the great men who ended simply and serenely like Shakespeare or Browning,
but even below men who were immensely his inferiors in real intellectual
courage and vision--men, for instance, like Herbert Spencer.
Herbert Spencer lived in a very small mental world, but it
was a complete one.  He was bounded in a nutshell, but counted
himself a king of infinite space.  He thought he was telling
the whole truth like a medieval philosopher, like a medieval
philosopher he would have nothing less than the whole truth.
To the medieval thinker the man "with a message" was simply a heretic,
that is a nuisance because he only told part of the truth.
Herbert Spencer was very like a smaller Thomas Aquinas; he was
the last of the medievals.  Herbert Spencer, who thought all Gothic
ornament barbarous, was nevertheless much more medieval than John Ruskin,
who celebrated every crumbling cloister and every splintered spire.


W. E. HENLEY:  POET

THE changes that pass over great societies are often too big to be seen.
That is they are too big to be summarized under a public name;
but it is a gross mistake to suppose that each of them is not felt
as a private fact.  Every man feels the faith or the sin; but every
man feels it as something peculiar to himself.  It is the most secret
part of every separate man that makes up a real social movement,
The general philosophy is drawn not from what everybody says,
but rather from what everybody does not say, but feels the more.
Public opinion is made up of all the most peculiarly private opinions.
Hence we always find a paradox in the fashion of speech and thought.
The changes which men in any age are always talking about are never
the changes that are really going on.  The changes that are really going
on are not those which men pompously applaud when they get together,
but those which they vigorously promote when they get by themselves.
For instance, England was turned from an agricultural to a
cornmercial country, while people were talking publicly about things
quite different; chiefly about whether Charles I's head ought
to have been cut off.  But because the change came privately,
do not suppose that it came unconsciously.  On the contrary, it was
quite specially conscious because it was quite specially private.
Every man was publicly interested in Charles I's head; but every
man was privately interested in making money at any cost.
And the mad factory chimneys we see everywhere, and the monstrous
cities in which we walk, have been created, not by public speeches,
but by private thoughts.

Now in the whole literature in the later nineteenth century there was
an analogous process; a process which every man felt inside himself
and which was yet not much mentioned in the many open debates about art.
The change I think was this:  that every literary man began consciously
to consider himself as a character in a play.  He exaggerated his own
oddities because he had to conflict with other and opposite oddities.
He was the black spot in the picture; someone else was the white.
In all the most striking writers of our own time one can feel
this picturesque and partisan quality, this quality which
assumes the existence of dialogue and of different figures.
One can feel it for instance in Mr. Rudyard Kipling and
Mr. Bernard Shaw; one can feel the footlights at their feet.
Nothing could be more different from this than the old,
especially the medieval conception of the function of a man.
The medievals believed that one man should have in his head the balance
of the whole Universe; a smaller cosmos, but still a cosmos.
The medievals thought that a man should have inside his skull a little
sun and a little moon, and yet littler stars, all drawn justly
and to scale.  Every man should have the equipoise of everything.
There must be no conscious pitting of red against green
according to the medievals; every man as far as his intellect
went must be perfect even as his Father in heaven was perfect.
The last of the medievals in England was Herbert Spencer.

This modern literary method, that of exaggerating one's own peculiarities
as if one were playing in a farce, gave the world a number of arresting
and exciting personalities.  Its great defect however was this:
that it tended to give many men quite false personalities.
I mean that even great men sometimes took so totally wrong
a view of themselves that much of their work was wasted.
They preferred their own masks to their own faces.  They painted
themselves so fiercely for the footlights that they concealed their own
original good looks.  It is only these men who had real reputations
to spoil and spoilt them who are of any interest in literary history.
We need not concern ourselves with mere imbeciles and impostors.
We are not troubled about asses in a lion's skin.  The only interesting
cases are just those two or three cases of one lion dressing up
in the skin of another.

One of these curious cases is that of W. E. Henley.
He was a man who really suffered from the histrionic habit.
He was a man of large heart who deliberately narrowed his heart.
He was a man of large brain who deliberately narrowed his brain.
He was a man thoroughly by nature a poet who forced himself, against all
his own emotional trend, to be a boisterous and topical balladmonger.
The critics of the future will have to take a great deal of trouble
to extricate the real Henley from under the heavy accretions of
the fictitious or dramatic Henley.  But they will take the trouble;
for they will be digging up gold.

No critic will ever be accused of misrepresenting Henley;
the only man who misrepresented Henley was Henley himself.
If we read those poems in which Henley was striking a deep note,
as distinct from those in which he was thumping a tin kettle,
we shall not find it at all difficult without having ever known him,
to say what kind of man he was.  He was a sad, sensitive and
tender-hearted pessimist, who endured pain that came from nowhere,
and enjoyed pleasure that came from nowhere, with the exquisite
appreciation of some timid child in Maeterlinck's plays.
He was not so much a Stoic as a tragic Epicurean.  But he had
this truly sublime quality in the highest type of Epicurean;
that he enjoyed a pleasure so much that it reconciled him even to pain.
He certainly believed (in his soul) that the rule of the universe
was bad.  But his glory was that he was ready to accept the rule
for the sake of the exceptions.  He enjoyed a red rose so poignantly
and perfectly that he was ready to go through thorns for it,
even though it was only an accident of the tree and not its crown.
His poetry rose to its noblest height when he spoke of the strange joy
of having snatched some good from an evil world.  This led him to dwell
much upon the past; and to him memory was a kind of intoxication.
Neither he nor anyone else ever wrote anything much better or more
real in its own way than those lines about things already secured.

  What is to come we know not.  But we know
  That what has been was good--was good to show,
  Better to hide, and best of all to bear.
  We are the masters of the days that were:
  We have lived, we have loved, we have suffered
                       even so.

  Shall we not take the ebb, who had the flow?
  Life was our friend.  Now, if it be our foe--
  Dear, though it spoil and break us--need we care
                   What is to come?

That is the true Henley; and as I have said it is not very difficult
to understand him.  He was what every poet must be who shares
the unbelief of his age; a man melancholy though not without happiness;
a man reconciled to a second best.  A poet who has lost his gods
must always be like a lover who has lost his love and has married
a sensible woman.  For the earth which Henley enjoyed has never
been the original starting point of men's thoughts or labours.
Heaven was man's first love; and the earth is only a substitute;
even when it is not only a marriage of convenience.

Unfortunately in his life-time, and especially in his later years,
Henley hid himself behind the mask of what he thought he ought
to stand for.  Somebody told him, or he somehow got into his head
that he was the representative of rude energy and militant empire.
His talents were entirely in the other direction.
So far from specializing in strength he describes in his
most penetrating poems a condition of beautiful weakness.
So far from being by nature a prophet of the British Empire he had
not the temperament to be a prophet of his own town or street.
He did not believe in them enough; he did not believe much in anything.
There were some things (it is true) which he definitely disbelieved in;
he certainly had a sincere hatred for democracy and for Christian morals.
But positive belief involves a certain simple fixity of the intellect
which was not at all a part of his personality.  He did not really
believe even in the stone of the street or the stars in the sky,
But he had this strange quality of a great imagination about him;
that he could enjoy things even without believing in them.

This quite false conception of himself as a Raw Head and Bloody Bones
produced a crop of poems which are not in Henley's good manner
or even in his bad manner; they are not in Henley's manner at all.
It would be untrue to say that Henley was ever a hypocrite;
but some of his poems are hypocritical.  "The Song of the Sword"
is, I am afraid, hypocritical.  It is all about the Lord and
the Sword; two things that Henley knew nothing whatever about.
Of the sword he had no grasp or experience, and in the Lord
he didn't believe.  The heavy Old Testament manner of the whole
thing was utterly alien to his true nature which was sensitive
and modern, exquisitely attuned to pleasure and to pain.
He was not a solemn youth like David; he was an Epicurean invalid.
A man more unmilitary cannot be conceived; if he had ever held
a sword in his hand, he would have been filled either with pain
at having to inflict wounds or with pleasure in inflicting them.
Both these emotions are feminine and unsoldierly.  And the most painful
evidence of all of his unfitness for such topics can be found in this;
that when he was attempting to be specially masculine he always
came near to that most unmasculine of all ideas--cruelty.

But it is not with the false Henley, but the true Henley that the
world will deal.  He caused his own exquisite voice to be drowned
in the clamour of his own quite fictitious reputation as a sort
of a political ruffian.  He drowned his own voice with his own drum.
But anyone who cares to-day to take up one of his books of poems
will suddenly find himself in an atmosphere utterly unexpected
and very calm.  He will break into a sudden stillness.
He will read a few quiet poems about grey streets and silver sunsets.
He will find that the poet has a peculiar power of describing
the voiceless and neglected corners of a great city; the little
grass-grown squares, the little streets that lead nowhere.
The poet feels the lost parts of London as more lost than
the lost parts of the wilderness; and he loves them more.
He has an almost eerie power of realizing certain aimless emotions of
an empty afternoon.  All will seem full of a kind of quiet irrelevance;
and yet the very foundations of the reader's heart will be moved.
The sadness will only seem an expression of the sacred value of things;
and as he walks home at evening after reading such a book,
every paving-stone and lamp-post will be pathetic because it
is precious.  Nay, the world will seem brittle because it is precious;
as if it might be broken, by accident.

LOUISA ALCOTT

IT IS very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand;
as long as he understands that he does not understand it.
Agnosticism (which has, I am sorry to say, almost entirely
disappeared from the modern world) is always an admirable thing,
so long as it admits that the thing which it does not understand
may be much superior to the mind which does not understand it.
Thus if you say that the cosmos is incomprehensible, and really mean
(as most moderns do) that it is not worth comprehending; then it
would be much better for your Greek agnosticism if it were called
by its Latin name of ignorance.  But there is one thing that any man
can fairly consider incomprehensible, and yet in some ways superior.
There is one thing that any man may worry about, and still respect;
I mean any woman.  The deadly and divine cleavage between the sexes
has compelled every woman and every man, age after age, to believe
without understanding; to have faith without any knowledge.

Upon the same principle it is a good thing for any man to have to
review a book which he cannot review.  It is a good thing for his
agnosticism and his humility to consider a book which may be much
better than he can ever understand.  It is good for a man who has
seen many books which he could not review because they were so silly,
to review one book which he cannot review because it is so wise.
For wisdom, first and last, is the characteristic of women.
They are often silly, they are always wise.  Commonsense is
uncommon among men; but commonsense is really and literally
a common sense among women.  And the sagacity of women,
like the sagacity of saints, or that of donkeys, is something
outside all questions of ordinary cleverness and ambition.
The whole truth of the matter was revealed to Mr. Rudyard Kipling
when the spirit of truth suddenly descended on him and he said:
"Any woman can manage a clever man; but it requires a rather clever
woman to manage a fool."

The wisdom of women is different; and this alone makes the review
of such books by a man difficult.  But the case is stronger.
I for one will willingly confess that the only thing
on earth I am frightfully afraid of is a little girl.
Female children, she babies, girls up to the age of five are
perfectly reasonable; but then all babies are reasonable.
Grown girls and women give us at least glimpses of their meaning.
But the whole of the period between a girl who is six years old
and a girl who is sixteen is to me an abyss not only of mystery,
but of terror.  If the Prussians were invading England, and I
were holding a solitary outpost, the best thing they could do would
be to send a long rank or regiment of Prussian girls of twelve,
from which I should fly, screaming.

Now the famous books of Miss Alcott are all about little girls.
Therefore, my first impulse was to fly screaming.
But I resisted this impulse, and I read the books; and I discovered,
to my immeasurable astonishment, that they were extremely good.
Little Wonmen was written by a woman for women for little women.
Consequently it anticipated realism by twenty or thirty years;
just as Jane Austen anticipated it by at least a hundred years.
For women are the only realists; their whole object in life
is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive,
and occasionally drunken idealism of men.  I do not hesitate.
I am not ashamed to name Miss Alcott and Miss Austen.
There is, indeed, a vast division in the matter of literature
(an unimportant matter), but there is the same silent and unexplained
assumption of the feminine point of view.  There is no pretence,
as most unfortunately occurred in the case of another woman of genius,
George Eliot, that the writer is anything else but a woman,
writing to amuse other women, with her awful womanly irony.
Jane Austen did not call herself George Austen; nor Louisa Alcott
call herself George Alcott.  These women refrained from that abject
submission to the male sex which we have since been distressed to see;
the weak demand for masculine names and for a part in merely
masculine frivolities; parliaments, for instance.  These were
strong women; they classed parliament.  with the public-house.
But for another and better reason, I do not hesitate to name
Miss Alcott by the side of Jane Austen; because her talent,
though doubtless inferior, was of exactly the same kind.
There is an unmistakable material truth about the thing; if that
material truth were not the chief female characteristic, we should
most of us find our houses burnt down when we went back to them.
To take but one instance out of many, and an instance that a man
can understand, because a man was involved, the account of the quite
sudden and quite blundering proposal, acceptance, and engagement
between Jo and the German professor under the umbrella, with parcels
falling off them, so to speak, every minute, is one of the really
human things in human literature; when you read it you feel sure
that human beings have experienced it often; you almost feel that you
have experienced it yourself.  There is something true to all our own
private diaries in the fact that our happiest moments have happened
in the rain, or under some absurd impediment of absurd luggage.
The same is true of a hundred other elements in the story.
The whole affair of the children acting the different parts in Pickwick,
forming a childish club under strict restrictions, in order to do so;
all that is really life, even where it is not literature.
And as a final touch of human truth, nothing could be better than the way
in which Miss Alcott suggests the borders and the sensitive privacy
of such an experiment.  All the little girls have become interested,
as they would in real life, in the lonely little boy next door;
but when one of them introduces him into their private club
in imitation of Pickwick, there is a general stir of resistance;
these family fictions do not endure being considered from the outside.

All that is profoundly true; and something more than that is
profoundly true.  For just as the boy was an intruder in that club
of girls, so any masculine reader is really an intruder among this pile
of books.  There runs through the whole series a certain moral philosophy,
which a man can never really get the hang of.  For instance,
the girls are always doing something, pleasant or unpleasant.
In fact, when they have not to do something unpleasant,
they deliberately do something else.  A great part, perhaps the more
godlike part, of a boy's life, is passed in doing nothing at all.
Real selfishness, which is the simplest thing in the world
to a boy or man, is practically left out of the calculation.
The girls may conceivably oppress and torture each other;
but they will not indulge or even enjoy themselves--not, at least,
as men understand indulgence or enjoyment.  The strangest things are
taken for granted; as that it is wrong in itself to drink champagne.
But two things are quite certain; first, that even from
a masculine standpoint, the books are very good; and second,
that from a feminine standpoint they are so good that their
admirers have really lost sight even of their goodness.
I have never known, or hardly ever known, a really admirable woman
who did not confess to having read these books.  Haughty ladies confessed
(under torture) that they liked them still.  Stately Suffragettes
rose rustling from the sofa and dropped Little Women on the floor,
covering them with public shame.  At learned ladies' colleges, it is,
I firmly believe, handed about secretly, like a dangerous drug.
I cannot understand this strange and simple world, in which unselfishness
is natural, in which spite is easier than self-indulgence.
I am the male intruder, like poor Mr. Laurence and I withdraw.
I back out hastily, bowing.  But I am sure that I leave a very
interesting world behind me.


SHERLOCK HOLMES

THE RETURN of Sherlock Holmes to the Strand Magazine some years
after his death, put a finishing touch to the almost heroic
popularity of a figure whose reality was like the universally
admitted reality of some old hero of medieval fable.
Just as Arthur and Barbarossa were to return again,
men felt that this preposterous detective must return again.
He had emerged out of the unreality of literature into the glowing
reality of legend, and in proof of this he has inherited the most
widespread and pathetic of the characteristics of legendary heroes;
that characteristic which makes men incredulous of their death.
A slight and fantastic figure in a fugitive and ironical type of romance,
he may seem too insignificant a subject for such a description.
Nevertheless the fact remains that Mr. Conan Doyle's hero is
probably the only literary creation since the creations of Dickens
which has really passed into the life and language of the people,
and become a being like John Bull or Father Christmas.
It is remarkable to notice that although we possess many writers whose
popularity is attested by enormous sales and general discussion,
there is hardly one of them except Conan Doyle in this instance
whose characters are familiar to everyone as types and symbols,
as Pecksniff was the type of hypocrisy or Bumble of officialism.
Rudyard Kipling, for example, is undoubtedly a popular writer.
But if we were to go up to any man in the street and say that a
particular problem would have puzzled Strickland he would receive
it with a very different expression of countenance to that which
he would wear if we said that it would puzzle Sherlock Holmes.
Mr. Kipling's stories give inexhaustible intellectual delight,
but the personality which we remember is the personality of the story,
not the personality of the character.  We remember the action,
but forget the actors.  In no other current creation except
Sherlock Holmes does the character succeed, so to speak,
in breaking out of the book as a chicken breaks out of the egg.
The characters of Dickens had this capacity.  The Pickwick Papers
only prepared Sam Weller for us; after the book was written, Sam Weller
is greater than the book.  We can apply his philosophy for ourselves;
we can continue his adventures in our dreams.

The fact that Sherlock Holmes alone has succeeded in familiarising
himself at once with the cultured and the un-cultured and turned his name
into almost as descriptive a word as Dr. Guillotin or Captain Boycott,
involves certain conclusions, which are for the most part worthy
and reassuring.  The phenomenon corrects finally, for example,
much of the foolish and foppish talk about the public preferring
books because they are bad.  The stories of Sherlock Holmes are
very good stories; they are perfectly graceful and conscientious
works of art.  The thread of irony which runs through all the solemn
impossibilities of the narrative gives it the position of a
really brilliant addition to the great literature of nonsense.
The notion of the greatness of an intellect, proved by its occupation
with small things instead of with great, is an original departure;
it constitutes a kind of wild poetry of the commonplace.
The intellectual clues and cruces upon which the development
of each story turns are perhaps incredible as fact, but they are
thoroughly solid and important as logic; they are such problems
as a great lawyer might extract from two bottles of champagne;
they are full of the very revelry of reason.  The figure of Conan Doyle's
detective is, in its own wild and trifling way, good literature.

Now, there are in London more than nine hundred and ninety-nine
detective stories and fictitious detectives, nearly all of which are
bad literature, or rather not literature at all.  If, as the saying goes,
the public likes books because they are bad, it would not be the fact
that the one fictitious detective who is familiar to the whole
public is the one fictitious detective who is a work of art.
The fact of the matter is that ordinary men prefer certain kinds
of work, good or bad, to certain other kinds of work, good or bad,
which they have a perfect and obvious right to do.  They prefer romance,
farce, and everything that concerns the material diplomacy of life,
to psychological delicacies or the more secret humours of existence.
But, preferring a certain thing, they prefer it good if they can get it.
The man in the street may prefer ale to creme de menthe, but it
is nonsense to say that he prefers bad ale to good ale.  He does
not read George Meredith because he does not want that kind of book,
however good it is, and he would not want it however bad it was.
Surely we all know that there are hundreds of pigmy Merediths eternally
engaged upon their unsightly embroideries and their bungling dissections.
Bad literature is not confined to romance.  The whole army of men
in the street is scarcely so large as the army of young gentlemen
who make it their business to despise the man in the street.
Yet the sonnets of these young symbolists and the novels of these
young psychologists are not sold like hot cakes upon bookstalls
or read aloud in uproarious inn-parlours.  The man who writes
such literature as _The Egoist_ has no right to expect to be as
popular as Conan Doyle any more than a man who made incomparable
astronomical telescopes would expect them to sell like umbrellas.
But it would be odd to deduce from this that the ordinary man has
a weird and occult tenderness for a bad umbrella.

                              II

All English people have read the stories about Sherlock Holmes.
Work like this is so good of its kind that it is difficult
to endure patiently the talk of people who are occupied
only in pointing out that it is not work of some other kind.
The specific quality of a story of this sort is strictly what may
be called wit; it is obliged to have some definite invention,
construction and point, like a joke in the comic papers.
Such work is inexpressibly superior to most mediocre serious work.
There has to be something in it; it cannot be an entire imposture.
A man can pretend to be wise; a man cannot pretend to be witty.
His jokes may be much worse in your opinion than they are in his opinion;
but after all they must be jokes; they cannot be entirely
shapeless mysteries, like many modern works of philosophy.

Many men can make an epic who could not make an epigram.
What is true of the comic anecdote is true also of that extended anecdote,
the sensational story with a point to it.  All real philosophy
is apocalyptic, and if a man can give us revelations of heaven it
is certainly better than giving us horrible revelations of high life.
But I would rather have the man who devotes a short story to saying
that he can solve the problem of a murder in Margate than the man
who devotes a whole book to saying that he cannot solve the problem
of things in general.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle certainly weakened his excellent series of stories
by being occasionally serious; especially he weakened it by introducing
a sort of sneer at Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin, with whom he sustained
no comparison.  Sherlock Holmes's bright notions were like bright
Cockney flowers grown in very shallow soil in a suburban garden;
Dupin's were flowers growing on a vast, dark tree of thought.
Hence Dupin, when he quits the subject of crime, talks in the tongue
of permanent culture of the relations of imagination to analysis
or of the relations of the supernatural to law.  But the greatest
error of the Sherlock Holmes conception remains to to be remarked:
I mean the error which represented the detective as indifferent
to philosophy and poetry, and which seemed to imply that philosophy
and poetry would not be good for a detective.  Here he is at once eclipsed
by the bolder and more brilliant brain of Poe, who carefully states
that Dupin not only admired and trusted poetry, but was himself a poet.
Sherlock Holmes would have been a better detective if he had been
a philosopher, if he had been a poet, nay, if he had been a lover.
It is remarkable to notice (I assume that you are as intimate
with Dr. Watson's narratives as you should be)--it is remarkable
to notice that the very same story in which the biographer
describes Holmes's inaccessibility to love and such emotions,
and how necessary it was to the clear balance of his logic,
is the very same story in which Holmes is beaten by a woman because
he does not know whether a certain man is her fiance or her lawyer.
If he had been in love he might have known well enough.

The only real danger is that Conan Doyle, by spreading the notion
that practical logic must be unpoetical, may have encouraged the notion,
too common already, that imagination must be absent-minded.
It is a false and dangerous doctrine that the poet must be absent-minded.
The purely imaginative man could never be absent-minded.
He would perceive the significance of things near to him as clearly
as he perceived the significance of things far off.  In the highest
imaginative sense man has no right whatever to forget his tea-cup
because he is thinking about Plato.  If he does not understand
his tea-cup which he has seen, how shall he understand Plato whom
he has not seen?  The best and last word of mysticism is an almost
agonising sense of the preciousness of everything, the preciousness
of the whole universe, which is like an exquisite and fragile vase,
and among other things the preciousness of other people's tea-cups.
The last and best word of mysticism is not lavishness, but rather
a sublime and sacred economy.

The perfect mystic would be always socially alert.
The perfect mystic would be always correctly dressed.
To such heights of transcendentalism some of us may find it difficult
to soar; and such honest and unselfconscious failure, though it
is certainly a weakness, is not an unpardonable or inhuman one.
Some of the best men in the world--Dr. Johnson, for instance--
have been specially remarkable for being conventional in theory
and unconventional in practice.  But if once a man is unconventional
in theory, then the situation is atrocious.  It almost certainly
means either that a man has no morals or that he has no brains.
The type of man does exist who says clearly and deliberately that he does
not want to observe the little laws that surround him, that he is proud
of being absent-minded, that he is proud of his disdain of detail.
Whenever this occurs it certainly arises in another and most literal
sense from absence--of Mind.

The real moral of the popularity of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes
lies in the existence of a great artistic neglect.  There are a
large number of perfectly legitimate forms of art which are almost
entirely neglected by good artists--the detective story, the farce,
the book of boyish adventure, the melodrama, the music-hall song.
The real curse of these things is not that they are too much regarded,
but that they are not regarded enough; that they are despised even by
those who write them.  Conan Doyle triumphed and triumphed deservedly,
because he took his art seriously, because he lavished a hundred
little touches of real knowledge and genuine picturesqueness
on the police novelette.  He substituted for the customary keen
eyes and turned-up collar of the conventional detective a number
of traits, external and pictorial, indeed, but honestly appropriate
to the logical genius, traits such as an immeasurable love of music
and an egotism which was abstract and, therefore, almost unselfish.
Above all, he surrounded his detective with a genuine atmosphere
of the poetry of London.  He called up before the imagination
a new and visionary city in which every cellar and alley hid
as many weapons as the rocks and heather-bushes of Roderick Dhu.
By this artistic seriousness he raised one at least of the popular
forms of art to the level which it ought to occupy.

He wrote the best work in a popular form, and he found
that because it was the best it was also the most popular.
Men needed stories, and had been content to take bad ones;
and they were right, for a story in itself is a marvellous
and excellent thing, and a bad story is better than no story,
just as half a loaf is better than no bread.  But when a detective
story was written by a man who refused to despise his art, who carried
all their dreams to fulfilment, they preferred him to the bungling
and irresponsible authors who had catered for them before.
It is no discredit to them that psychologies and philosophies had
not sated their need for the rush of a climax and the fascination
of a riddle.  It would be as reasonable to blame men for not
accepting cats as watch-dogs, or using pocket-knives as fire-irons.
Men must have detective stories; they must have farces and melodramas
and comic songs.  For anyone who is honest enough to take trouble
and invoke inspiration over these other forms, the road lies open
to rich and many-coloured fields of undiscovered art.


VICTORIAN BIOGRAPHY AND ALICE MEYNELL

THE Victorian Age suffered from being, not the time in which the domestic
spirit was at its highest, but the time when it was at its lowest.
It was an age of doubt rather than of doctrine; and that was precisely
the reason why, in most cases, the convictions only remained
as conventions.  The Victorian domestic biography, of the type
of the offcial biography of Tennyson, failed, not by being domestic,
but by being official, The writer did not present the hero as seen
from the inside; but was careful to go a long way off and look
at him from the outside, as if he were a public building.
The duty of building the sepulchre often meant merely the duty
of making it a whited sepulchre.  But there is nothing to whitewash
about Alice Meynell; and in her family there has been a tradition
older than the Victorian Age and indifferent to all the ages.
Hence the book, written by her daughter in a really easy
and humorous style, is full of the comments of real children on
a real mother.

In the case of Alice Meynell, we may employ a paradox of the mind
which doctors sometimes use of the body when they say that a delicate
person can be healthy, while a strong person can be diseased.
She was healthy and delicate; but her social surroundings,
her critics and even her admirers, tended to talk too much about
the delicacy and too little about the health.  What always strikes me
about her writings is not their fastidiousness but their freshness.
She was in a sense fastidious about selecting or rejecting words;
but she selected them because they were fresh, or rejected them
because they were not fresh enough.  Not everybody will feel this;
because we have fallen into a rather false association of ideas about
freshness of language.  It will sound too comic even for a contrast
to mention the name of Alice Meynell with the name of O. Henry.
I may even claim some largeness of taste in enormously enjoying
them both.  I think that O. Henry was possibly the best American poet.
There is often in his prose a thread of fancy that is really poetical,
though entirely farcical.  But his style and language are the reverse
of fresh.  Those arabesques of slang are full of traditions of travesty;
parodies of parodies, desperate misquotations of too familiar quotations,
the attempt to give a last twist to infinitely twisted things.
It is language on its last legs; and there is a sense in which
a comic writer like Henry suffers from the excess of culture.
Only our prejudice in favour of America as a New Country (whatever that
may mean) disguises what is jaded in this journalistic ingenuity.
If it were not American, we should call it Byzantine.  At the opposite
extreme, Alice Meynell stood for the sort of style which uses words
in a primitive fashion.  When she said, "light", it was the first light;
when she said "shadow", it was the first shadow on the light.
I think the most characteristic thing she ever wrote was the little
lyric called "Rivers Unknown to Song"; by which she meant the rivers
most repeatedly recognised in song; the Nile or the Tiber or the Rhine.
Hundreds of poets have praised the antiquity of the rivers
when they were really praising the antiquity of the valleys.
But she felt suddenly the freshness of the waters themselves;
as she would have felt the actual shock of cool water.
She was the first to point out that the waters themselves
were always fresh:

  But these, they are new, they are fresh; there's no surprise
  Like their's on earth; O strange for evermore!
  This moment's Tiber, with his shining eyes,
  Never saw Rome before.

It is not without a mystical moral, which she would have
specially approved, about her generation and all newer generations,
as each discovers for itself the immortal novelty of Rome.

Now a study of her life does reveal the paradox or perplexity;
that she was surrounded by a world which cared too much for
subtlety and did not adequately value her very real simplicity.
She saw the primal mystery of light and shade; but her friends were
rather too fond of fine shades.  They were rather too fond of her own
fine shades; and of encouraging her to nothing else but fine shades;
and the result is rather to exchange mystery for mystification.
With all possible intellectual admiration for Coventry Patmore,
it is impossible not to be impatient with the very fine, not to say
flimsy shade, which he allowed to pass over their friendship.
My whole heart goes out in a warmth of sympathy to Francis Thompson
when he interrupted one of their literary readings, at some
tense and exquisite moment, by exclaiming, "Here's a go!
Mrs. Meynell!  I've lost the Athenaeum cheque."  But my whole heart
does not go out to him when he writes her about three pages of tortuous
and rather sulky self-analysis; all because she forgot to read
some particular manuscript with him on some particular afternoon.
These people were too touchy; they wounded each other, but they also
encouraged each other to be wounded.  And my sympathies are altogether
with Mrs. Meynell, and I will add with Mr. Meynell, when tender hints
are even now thrown out that she sometimes failed in the more officious
offices of friendship, through a disposition to mind her own business.
I think there is much truth in a suggestion that she ought to have
been in a bigger and more regular business.  She ought to have been
more in the public battle and less in the private bickerings.
For she was a fighter; though a fighter with the rapier.
It is a very deadly weapon; and no critics could be more completely
dead than those mockers of Mrs. Johnson or Mrs. Dingley whom she
transfixed with so slender a blade.


MR.  MASEFIELD'S SHORT STORIES

IF A MAN should have the misfortune to die suddenly while wearing
a pink shirt, a violet waistcoat, and a neck-tie of electric blue, with
(let us say) scarlet spots, it is the general opinion of the intellectual
in the modern world that he would not very easily go to heaven.
A person struck by a thunderbolt when in art colours, it is
generally felt, would stand a considerably better chance.
Now on this delicate point of doctrine I have always felt differently.
It appears to me that the fault of the man in pink and blue is a fault
of arrangement merely.  He tries to have too many incompatible things;
he tries to have too many of the divine blessings in one divine moment.
But in regarding blue as a divine blessing and scarlet as a divine
blessing he is surely quite right.  Green is a good thing;
scarlet is a good thing; violet is a good thing, and his fierce
delight in them is a good thing.  When he goes above, the angels will
only have to rearrange his costume.  Perhaps they will have to affix
his bow-tie to some part of his back, in the capacity of wings,
or arrange the red spots in a kind of circle round his head;
but in any case they will approve his love of loud colours
in themselves.  His neck-tie is not bluer than the walls of sapphire;
his spots not more red than the flaming robes of the martyrs.
But about the fate of the art colours I am not so clear; I fear
they may find a too congenial position in the shadows and vapours
of another place.

As I close a book of Mr. Masefield's short stories, the impression
that chiefly remains with me is an impression of the splendour of
common colours.  These queer and cunning tales of the sea have a hundred
other merits, but this happens to be the taste left in the mouth.
He has a tropical taste in some ways; in some ways almost a negro one.
But here we have the strong colours which my imaginary friend
so unfortunately mismanaged, managed shrewdly and well.
Here we have colours that would captivate a Cockney used so as
to captivate an artist.  The strong blue and green of the sea,
the strong red and gold of the sunset, the fierce colours of fishes,
the startling colours of flowers, are all vivid and yet never,
thank God, realistic.

The technique of Mr. Masefield's tales in this matter of colour
deserves a word to itself; for it is interesting in no small degree.
The chief impression which his pictures produce is the sense of his
great love of colour.  But, while it is a love of colour, it is,
so to speak, a love of primary colour.  From the beginning to the end
of his books you will hardly find, I think you will never find,
any of those mongrel colours so dear to the mongrel modern mind.
You will not find any of the nameless colours, the colours
that have lost their names in unlawful unions.  You will not find
the evil purple of the decadents, the greys and greens of Whistler,
the greys and browns of Zola, the strange yellow and orange
that curled round Aubrey Beardsley, the queer and cruel Oriental
reds and ivories that glare from the tropic temples of Kipling.
Mr. Masefield uses colour as the old epics or the old ballads loved
to use it; very simply and very recurrently.  His tales remind
us of the ballads in which gold is called red gold three times
in a page or the wood is called green every time it is mentioned.
Pedants used to smile at this custom, but the simple men who heard
the ballads and the wise men who have revived them alike knew better;
they knew that the red gold and the green woodland thus continually
repeated made a kind of pattern of clear colours, like a child's
wall-paper, to be the background of a noble and simple tale.

Mr. Masefield's tales are of a more fantastic pattern than these old
English or Scotch ballads; for no tales of the green wood can
in their nature be so terrible as the tales of the green sea.
But however sprawling or eccentric may be the story he has to tell,
the details are always picked out in these plain and infantile colours,
like the greenness of woodlands or the redness of gold.  And in each case,
as we read the passage, we can feel how a modern realist or a modern
professor of "word-painting" would have done the thing; we can feel
how much more ingenious he would have been and how much less effective.
In one of Mr. Masefield's sketches, for instance, a sketch called
"Port of Many Ships", the old sailor describes the manner in which
the Day of Judgment shall come upon the sea.  And he says that every
drowned sailor will rise from the sea "with the green weeds on him".
That seems to me like Homer or some grand barbaric classic;
so picturesque, so plain-spoken, so scornful of elaboration, so prosaic,
so poetic.  The adjective comes with the noun, easily to the mind ...
and yet the adjective is quite enough to make a coloured picture.
And then we think of how the "word-painter" would have dealt
with it, with his tortured sentences and his insane epithets.
We can imagine the sentence:  "Quickly come up sailors, all clogged
and clumsied in the weeds of greasy green-umber, crawling with salt wet."
Or "The sick sea spits out here and again a sea man bundled in
the foul salt foliage, coloured like absinthe".  It is so in page
after page of these bright and direct descriptions, all full of
the colours of a shilling paint-box--which were the colours of Eden.
"All her buckets were green," says Mr. Masefield of a fantastic ship,
"and in every bucket there were big red roses growing."
I know that the word-painter would sit down and try and think of some
extraordinary adjective for big red roses.  Let me ease his mind
by suggesting the word "apoplectic", which, if he applies it somewhere
prominently to a big red rose, will immediately make his fortune.
But I will not have this sort of thing in the case of good strong
legends of the sea.  Mr. Masefield's style, in fact, is symbolised
accidentally by himself.  In a very weird and, to tell the truth,
a somewhat bewildering story called "A Deal of Cards", he describes
a sort of mystical negress in "a plain gown of scarlet".
That plain gown of scarlet is the garb of Mr. Masefield's muse;
as plain as it is scarlet, as scarlet as it is plain.

Mr. Masefield has the true spirit of the ancient childhood of the earth.
He has the real spirit of the poets, and he has it precisely in that
particular in which the poets and the tellers of fairy-tales most
seriously and most decisively differ from the realists of our own day.
Mr. Masefield tells a story that is in itself strange, or splendid,
or even supernatural, but tells it in the common, graphic language
of life.  The realist tells a story which is commonplace and trivial,
but tells it in the vocabulary of a lunatic asylum.  The one describes
Polyphemus or Leviathan in the terms applicable to turnips and crockery.
The other describes a clerk in Camberwell in terms only suitable
to the demons in Pandemonium.  It is not my business here to attempt
to hold any balance of justice between these two methods of literature,
or even to say what is chiefly to be said for one or other of them.
Probably they are both right, and both express needs of the soul
which we must never underrate or forget.  Perhaps the old simple
fearlessness and plainness in the presence of the prodigious
is rightly to be balanced with our mystery and excitement in the
presence of the small.  Certainly we ought to be more courageous
in the presence of Polyphemus.  Certainly, I think, we ought
to be more awe-struck and terrified in the presence of the clerk.
But for the old tale of prodigies plainly told there is always this
one small thing to be said--that children will always like it better.
And one of the children who like it better is the writer of the
present article.  Another, I fancy, is Mr. Masefield.


ERIC GILL AND NO NONSENSE

I SHOULD really be rather curious to know what is made of Mr. Eric Gill's
vigorous book Art Nonsense, for even I, who sympathise with so many
of his primary principles, find them almost too primary to be reduced
to any secondary terms.  He begins so very much at the right end,
that is he begins so very much at the beginning, that there is no getting
behind him or treating his absolutes as relative to anything else.
And the problem would be equally difficult for the sort of critic whom
his friends call modern, and his foes call mad, and the sort of critic
whom his friends call sane and his foes call Philistine.  Mr. Gill does
in a quite definite and dogmatic sense treat art as religious art.
And he treats it in such stark and startling contrast with most recent
associations of religious art, that all the anti-religious art critics
will find their useful and familiar insults frozen on their lips.
It is no use to say that Mr. Gill wishes to be a moralist rather
than an artist; because people can see for themselves that much of his
work consists of balance and proportion as abstract as mathematics:
and is often expressed in stern and stubborn stone-cutting
which may or may not be carving but is certainly not moralising.
It will be absurd to say that Mr. Gill is a Christian craftsman
because he is an old-fashioned craftsman; when half his work
horrifies the old-fashioned public and turns the elder critics
to stone like any Gorgon of Epstein.  It is absurd to say that
Mr. Gill is sentimental and affected by the anecdotal picture;
when he is obviously exactly the opposite.  The theory of art
he propounds, if anything, does not allow art to be anecdotal enough.
It will be utterly hopeless to pretend that Mr. Gill continues
what may be called the ethical bias of Ruskin; since it is obvious
on the face of it that what Mr. Gill says is almost exactly
the opposite of what Ruskin says.  For instance, in the Ruskinian
thesis of _The Two Paths_, the beginnings of a realistic treatment
of the snake and the apple are represented as the roots of all
fruitful art, while the mere balanced diagram of an angel in Celtic
ornament is treated as a geometrical prison, from which such a barren
art will never escape.  Mr. Gill is more likely, on the whole,
to regard the realistic apple as that trebly forbidden fruit
of "photographic" art, at which the birds peeked in the old anecdote;
and to advise the artist, like the angel, to remain in the eternal
liberty of his pure mathematical limitations.

Expressed approximately, in popular language, Mr. Gill's thesis is this.
The Victorian moralists allowed the artist to exist, on condition
that he represented the wonders of creation.  Mr. Gill allows him
to exist on condition that he expresses the wonder of creation;
but it all turns on the two senses of the word "creation",
almost in the manner of a pun.  To put it another way, the artist
is not so much to copy the works of God as to copy the work of God,
in the sense of the working of God; or the way in which God works.
There will be in his art the same, or some approximation to the same,
spirit and tendency of line and motion and balance; because there
is only one creation and no inspiration from outside it.  But the work
will rather be that of the child of God making his own smaller world
than the servant of God copying the details of the larger one.
And as even the Divine Creator pours forth his cataracts in a manner
proper to water and not to something else, as he carves even his trees
in a style properly to be called wood-carving and not stone-carving,
as he hollows the rock in one way and the wave in another,
so the human creator also is right to recognise the materials
in which his meaning is bodied forth; and to express it in his
own materials and not in an imitation of the cosmic materials.
As Mr. Gill once expressed it in a speech somewhere,
"A sculptor has to make a man; but it has to be a stone man.
It has to be the sort of man that God would have made, if He had
chosen to make him in stone."

So far as that fundamental thesis is concerned, I think Mr. Gill
rams his point home with admirable energy.  It is a principle
which liberates the artist from the trivial tyranny of mere mimicry.
It also liberates the moral spirit of man (which happens to be
more important) from any mere stunned submission or trance of fatalism;
all the worse, if anything, when it is optimistic fatalism.
It is consonant with that original and heroic doctrine of Christianity,
which distinguishes the son from the slave, and salutes in his
free will the highest crest and signal of his divine origin.
God created a creature, and indeed many creatures; but here,
we insist, he created a creative creature.

It is when Mr. Gill comes to deal directly with the representative
test in art, or what some call "photographic art", that I
am not so sure that I agree with him.  Perhaps it would be
truer to say that I am not so sure that I understand him.
Perhaps it would be truest of all to say that I am not so sure that I
understand myself; for it seems to me that in these metaphysical
things it is too easily assumed that men understand themselves.
To begin with, it is unfair to talk about "photographic art"
as an equivalent to representative or realistic art.
A camera does not copy the details of every weed and nettle
with the pious patience of a Pre-Raphaelite; because a camera is
not pious or even patient.  A camera does not work out thoroughly
the whole scheme of a piece of still life, with the craftsmanship
and technical honesty of a Dutch painter; because a camera is not
a craftsman; and a camera can no more be honest than dishonest.
The English Pre-Raphaelite or the Dutch realist may have taken a wrong
view of their business; but they took some view of their business.
And the view that the mind takes of its function must always be
different from the "view" which the camera takes of the landscape.
That "view" is not a view or a vision or a version of anything;
it is simply something that happened outside the realm of mind.
It is a brute collision between mechanics and matter; between the blind
sun and the brainless stones.  No art ever was this, or ever could be;
it has all passed through the mind; and the question is whether
the mind may make its effects out of real things or no.
I imagine that Mr. Gill, with his generous love of liberty, would say
that it may; but I do not think he always makes this part of his
argument as clear as the rest.  It seems to me that there certainly
is something, which is not pure rhythm or balance or movement,
but which does affect the imagination and the sense of beauty;
something that may be rather darkly described as identity.
It is a certain recognition and realisation of things,
with the associations of those things and those alone.  I warmly
and willingly agree that an artist may represent these recognisable
things under all sorts of severe conventions or curt symbols,
according to the style in which he works.  If Mr. Gill chooses
to carve an escalloped line of curves across a blank stone,
I will admit that they make a rhythmic scheme of decoration.
But I will not admit that it does not matter, to my imagination
or anybody else's, whether they are meant for sea-waves or birds
flying or snakes linked together.  I say it matters immensely,
because you cannot so much as say the words "sea" or "snakes"
without waking a thousand thronging echoes in the human soul.
And it is exactly this human soul, according to Mr. Gill,
into which we must look to find the true creative forces of art.
May I suggest, that, as a fact, a joy in the right realisation
of real things is one of the things that we find there?
Perhaps the solution of the problem lies somewhere here.
Mr. Gill says, "Look inside you, for the wonderful plastic
powers that God has given you."  Ruskin said, "Look outside you,
for the wonderful sea and birds that God has made."  But is it
so absolutely certain that the sea and birds are outside you?
Are not the sea and birds you really look at, when you recall
them artistically, things already soaked in your own mystical nature,
reshaped and simplified by your own instinct for symbol and design;
so that being true to that truth is not merely photographic, but something
which quacks call psychological, and sensible men call spiritual.
I put this rather in the form of a question than a condemnation;
for among my doubts about it is a grave doubt about whether Mr. Gill
would really disagree at all.  The two outstanding things about this
book are; first that it is so original that most people will say
it is nonsense; and second, that, in the most emphatic sense,
there is no nonsense about it.  If there is another word that would
occur to me in describing it, after the term "virility", it would
be the term "commonsense". It is not Eric Gill's fault if he lives
in an age of dirty favouritism and perversion, in which we shall
have to wait for some time for commonsense to become common.
If his forthright style and fundamental convictions bewilder
many people of many groups, possibly even including his own,
it will not be because there is anything in him of what moderns call
the mystic when they mean the mystagogue; but because he belongs
to the great company of those who talk too plainly to be understood.


THE SPIRIT OF PLACE

IN THE greatest of patriotic speeches (tragic, like all true patriotism)
it is lamented that the beloved city had not known the things
that belong to its peace.  A similar phrase would define the failure
of almost any community.

There are special things which belong to the peace of special places;
a place may find its peace in noise.  But it must be its own kind
of noise; the noise of carts may be appropriate; the noise of perfect
music may be discordant.  There is still, as in pagan times,
a god of every city, since there is a soul of every city;
unless the god build the city, their labour is but lost that build it;
unless the soul keep the city, the watchman watcheth but in vain.
We shall soon--please God--be engaged in some kind of public attempt
to purify and recreate the cities of modern Europe.

Before we enter on that task let us get it clearly into our heads
that even if they are perfect they must not be uniform.  Let us realise
that there is a difference in cities as there is a difference in soils.
There is one thing that can be done with a place and another thing
that cannot be done with it; there is one kind of perfection
that can be given to it and another that cannot be given to it.
You can make a mountain village a miserable mountain village or a perfect
mountain village, but you cannot make it a perfect sea-port town.
You can make hill-men happy or unhappy hill-men, but you cannot make
them men of the fens; you may drain the fens, but you do not make them
any more like the hills.  The same principle is even truer of cities,
for in the growth of cities there has been more choice and less accident.
By all means let us purify London; let us reform London.
Let us, if you will, remake London.  But let us remake it as London,
not as Paris or as New York.

There could not be a better instance of the special oddity
of the London atmosphere than its relations to literature.
In one sense, London is a much less literary city than Paris,
but in another sense a much more literary city.  One distinction
must stare every one in the face; literature is much more publicly
and powerfully brought home to the mind in the streets of Paris
than in the streets of London.  In Paris all the great French
authors are worthily represented in the great streets and squares,
not only by names but by fine statues and monuments.
In London the streets and squares are commonly called after the less
known part of the names of aristocrats.

Under the French system Grosvenor Square would probably be called
Milton Square and have a huge statue of Milton in the middle.
But the London method is so confused that if we did have a square
called Milton Square it would probably have a statue of Chaucer
in the middle.  The one standing case in point is a paradox of almost
bewildering complexity.  The only square which has a statue of Shakespeare
is named after the Earls of Leicester, but is chiefly remembered
in connection with an oligarch of briefer tenure, called Baron Grant.
Between Grant and Leicester, at any rate, Shakespeare is quite forgotten,
and his statue is generally regarded as a kind of joke.
Hence it arises, as a characteristic of literary London, that nobody
ever remembers, even for a moment, the meaning of the names
or the association of the spots.

As a matter of fact, of course, the absence of literary names
for London streets is very remarkable; a Frenchman must find it
incredible that there is no Shakespeare Street, no Milton Street,
no Bacon Street, no Byron Street, no Wordsworth Street,
no Dickens Street, no Keats Street--though the last might be
considered cacophonous.  But I mean that, apart from this,
where there really is an English literary name identical with the name
of a place we do not think instinctively of the connection.
In Paris on the Quai Voltaire one does really think of Voltaire;
there is his great sneering statue to remind one in any case.
But, moreover, the mere sight of the straight roads and the strong city
would recall the intellect and energy of eighteenth-century France.
But I wonder how many men catching a train at Addison Road Station
have ever thought of the elegance and the irony of Joseph Addison.

Yet, oddly enough, the very fact that London is not in that
sense literary, makes it particularly appropriate as a place
for literary men.  It is all the easier to dream of or create
a work of art in the midst of London, because London is
not itself, like Paris or Florence or Venice, a work of art.
Many English authors have written about Florence, but most of them
have written about it in London.  Many "great English poets"
have admired Venice, but most great English poets were born in London.
No one wishes to write a poem when he is inside a poem.
No one composes a drama on the stage.

For the purposes of poetic creation there is required rather
a certain atmosphere of quiet, unconsciousness and carelessness;
exactly that sort of soundless confusion which can be found,
for instance, in a forest.  For a forest may be defined as a sort
of silent anarchy.  These qualities of the forest can really be found
to a considerable extent in London.  London has the unconsciousness
of the forest; for London has grown vaguely and without any plan,
and is still strangely lacking in a real common public spirit.
London has the variety of the forest; for all historical strata
can be found there, and an A.B.C. tea-shop may easily be next door
to a mansion which remembers the great aristocracy of the Reformation,
or a church which recalls the more democratic atmosphere of
the thirteenth century.

It may seem strange to add that London has even the quiet of the forest.
There is a certain amount of noise in London, but it might be called
dead silence compared with the particular clatter and clamour which
belongs to the streets of Paris, and which is the positive product
of that splendid impatience which is the deepest fact about the French.
It has been well for Europe that the French have been impatient.
All the rest of us are only too patient; and but for them should
be still asleep under every cowardice and political corruption.
But the fact remains that the permanent French capacity for revolution
(that is, for intolerance) expresses itself in the very pace
of French horses, in the very gestures of French coachmen.
If the cracks of their whips come like pistol shots, it is
because they would let off pistol shots almost as readily;
if they shout and yell at their colleagues or competitors, it is
because liberty of speech is to them a reality and not a form.
The excitement of their streets is a purely intellectual excitement.
They are trained eternally for street fights, and their very traffic
is a street fight.

London has in comparison the ease and obscurity of a forest-glade.
I do not know how far men still remember the very real
genius of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, but he wrote
at least one line which has the elements of eternal poetry.
In the well-known song, "When the kye come hame" he describes
the perfect conditions of love-making:

  But beneath the spreading birk in a dell without a name.

It would be going too far to say that Addison Road was a dell
without a name, but at least it has a name that nobody need
pay any attention to.  The London literary man may wander
up Addison Road without any particular danger of his style
(his rugged, suggestive style) becoming in any way Addisonian.
A London literary man might with cheerful unconsciousness compose
a Cavalier lyric in the Cromwell Road.

London, literally because it is chaotic and ill-governed, has for
the literary man something of the careless contentment of nature.
And, however much we may shatter abuses and reshape civic rights,
it is to be hoped that this casual, erratic, and even secret quality
will never be altogether removed from London; for it is as essential
to London as the sea to Venice.  Nowhere certainly is it better
expressed than in the peculiar quality of the literary part of London:
in the smell and the spirit of Fleet Street.

A personal parallel will put the fact with a final clearness.
In the great eighteenth century, almost contemporaneously, France and
England produced two great men of letters.  Each typified his country;
each ruled his time; each was regarded by almost all men as an oracle;
each was, perhaps, the real ruler of his country's destinies through
the after-centuries of revolution and war.  In the blaze of the Paris sun,
along the side of the splendid river runs the Quai Voltaire,
with its great statue which almost defies the Cathedral.
But if you know very well the dark and dirty byways of Fleet Street,
if you love them for themselves, and search them patiently,
you may at last find Johnson's Court.


ROMANTIC LOVE

THIS morning I read an article in a very serious magazine,
in which the writer quoted the remark of Byron that a certain sort
of romantic love is woman's whole existence.  The writer then
said that the first people who ever challenged this view were
the revolutionary Suffragettes at the end of the nineteenth century.
The truth is that the first people who ever maintained this view were
the revolutionary Romantics at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The habit of giving to romantic love this extravagant and
exclusive importance in human life, was itself an entirely
modern and revolutionary thing, and dates from the romantic
movement commonly traced to Rousseau; but I think much more truly
to be traced to the influence of the German sentimentalists.
Most people who curse Rousseau have never read Rousseau;
or have only read the _Confessions_ and not the _Contrat Social_.
The critics read the _Confessions_, if only to condemn them;
because the critics themselves are modern romantics and sentimentalists;
men who like Confessions and dislike Contracts.  The critics hate
or avoid the _Contrat Social_ not because it is sloppy and sentimental
(for it is not) but because it is hard and clear and lucid and logical.
Rousseau had his emotional weaknesses as an individual,
like other individuals; but he was not an eighteenth-century
philosopher for nothing.  What the moderns dislike about him
is not the silliness of his confessions, but the solidity
of his convictions; and the fact that, like the old theologians,
he could hold general ideas in a hard and fast fashion.  When it comes
to defining his fundamentals, Rousseau is as definite as Calvin.
They were both ruthless theorists from Geneva; though one preached
the theory of pessimism and the other the theory of optimism.
I am not maintaining that I agree with either; but Rousseau would be
as useful as Calvin in teaching some of his critics how to criticise.

But Rousseau is a parenthesis.  Wherever the real Romantic Movement
came from, whether from the German forests or the Geneva lake,
it was a recent and revolutionary business, as compared
with history as a whole.  But it is obvious that the ordinary
modern critic is entirely ignorant of history as a whole.
He knows that his mother read Tennyson and his grandmother read Byron.
Beyond that he can imagine nothing whatever; he supposes that his
great-great-grandmothers and their great-great-great-grandmothers
had gone on reading Byron from the beginning of the world.
He imagines that Byron, who was a disinherited and disreputable rebel
to the last, has been an established and conventional authority
from the first.  He therefore supposes that all women, in all ages,
would have accepted the prehistoric Byronic commandment that the Byronic
sort of romantic passion was the sole concern of their lives.
Yet it is certain that women have had a great many other concerns
and have been attached to a great many other convictions.
They have been priestesses, prophetesses, empresses, queens,
abbesses, mothers, great housewives, great letter-writers,
lunatics founding sects, blue-stockings keeping salons, and all
sorts of things.  If you had said to Deborah the mother in Israel,
or Hypatia the Platonist of Alexandria, or Catherine of Siena,
or Joan of Arc, or Isabella of Spain, or Maria Theresa of Austria,
or even to Hannah More or Joanna Southcott, that Byronic
love was "woman's whole existence", they would all have been
very indignant and most of them flown into a towering passion.
They would have asked in various ways whether there was no such
thing as honour, no such thing as duty, no such thing as glory,
no such thing as great studies or great enterprises, no such thing
as normal functions and necessary labours; incidentally, we may add,
no such thing as babies.  They differed a great deal in their type
of vocation and even in their theory of virtue; but they all had
some theory of virtue that went a little further than that.
Up to a particular moment in the eighteenth century, practically
every thinking person would have accepted the colossal common
sense expressed by a French poet of the seventeenth century:
"L'amour est un plaisir; l'honneur est un devoir".

Then came the extreme emphasis on romance among the Victorians;
for the Victorians were not notable for their emphasis on virtue,
but for their emphasis on romance.  Queen Victoria lived so long,
and the Victorian Age was such an unconscionably long time dying,
that by the time Mr. Bernard Shaw and others began what they called
a realistic revolt against romance, the sentimental German movement
seemed to be not only as old as Victoria, but as old as Boadicea.
It is highly typical, for instance, that Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one
of his earliest criticisms, complained of the convention according
to which anybody was supposed to have "penetrated into the Holy
of Holies" so long as he was content to say that "Love is Enough".
But, as a matter of fact, the very phrase "Love is Enough"
did not come to him from any conventional or classical authority;
not even from any conventional or conservative Victorian.
It came from a book by a Socialist and Revolutionist like himself;
from a book by William Morris.

Of course the anti-romantic movement led by Shaw, like the romantic
movement led by Byron, has gone forward blindly and blundered in every
sort of way.  The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving
different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate
place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture.
It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying
nearly everything; whether it be Rousseau breaking up kingdoms
in the name of reason; or Byron breaking up families in the name
of romance; or Shaw breaking up romances in the name of frankness
and the formula of Ibsen.  I myself value very highly the great
nineteenth-century illumination of romantic love; just as I value
the great eighteenth-century ideal of right reason and human dignity,
or the seventeenth-century intensity, or the sixteenth-century expansion,
or the divine logic and dedicated valour of the Middle Ages.
I do not see why any of these cultural conquests should be lost
or despised; or why it is necessary for every fashion to wash away
all that is best in every other.  It may be possible that one good
custom would corrupt the world; but I never could see why the second
good custom should deny that the first good custom was good.
As it is, those who have no notion except that of breaking away
from romance, are being visibly punished by breaking away from reason.
Every new realistic novel serves to show that realism, when entirely
emptied of romance, becomes utterly unreal.  For romance was
only the name given to a love of life which was something much
larger than a life of love, in the Byronic or sentimental sense.
And anything from which it has passed is instantly corrupt and crawling
with the worms of death.


HISTORICAL NOVELS

THE rapid change of literary fashions, which may be accountable
for the temporary obscuration and the present resurrection of
Anthony Trollope, is strongly marked in the current taste for fiction.
There are fashions in novels as much as in bonnets or sleeves,
though the great masters are little affected by them.
A very thoughtful and widely read French critic, M. Emile Faguet,
endeavoured to show that the "boom" in historical novels, which has
been almost as obvious in France as it is in this country and in
the United States, corresponded to a necessity of the human mind.
He declared that the favourite types of novels varied in successive
periods, and that it was now time for the historical type to enter
on another period of vigorous life similar to that which it enjoyed
in the first half of the nineteenth century under the genial
and commanding inffuence of Scott.  We have no Scott, worse luck--
even Robert Louis Stevenson was "a very twopenny pirate", as his own
Attwater might say--but we still read and re-read the Waverley Novels,
and their spirit has again moved on the face of the waters of fiction.
M. Faguet points out that realism, by its very nature
and essence, is doomed periodically to weary its readers.
The subject afforded by "contemporary manners", which alone
the realist permits himself to paint, is necessarily limited.
One La Bruyere is sufficent for a generation, and in the same
proportion ten brilliant and two hundred respectable novels ought
to be ample to cover the same time.

It has often been debated whether the historical novel is or is
not a quite modern invention.  In one sense there is no doubt
about it; the first really great historical novelist was Scott,
and his supremacy was so easy and so brilliant that many are content
to count him the inventor of the type.  The historical novel,
in the modern sense of the word, was born about the time when
the Ballantynes began--happily for us--to be pressed for money,
and their poetical sleeping partner thought that it might be worth
while to turn his attention to prose.  Its second birth was in 1830,
and the godfathers were Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, At the same time,
the careful student of literary genealogies can trace a much longer--
though not a more honourable--pedigree for the historical novel.
Mr. George Saintsbury carried the pedigree back more than two
thousand years--to the times of Xenophon.  The _Cyropaedia_is,
no doubt, as near an approach to the historical novel as classical
antiquity can show:  which such as have read through that ponderous
and dull volume will admit to be rather hard on the ancients.
If some learned German iconoclast would, indeed, only prove
that Xenophon himself never existed, and that the Retreat of
the Ten Thousand was an exercise in historical fiction by some
late Alexandrian--Porphyry, for choice--we should readily admit
that Scott had a worthy forerunner.  It is rather a long step--
even for a genealogist--from Xenophon to Scott, but we can only find
a few medieval romances, Icelandic sagas, and "chansons de geste,"
with which to make even a show of stepping-stones.

One reason for this spacious void, of course, may be found in the very
vague line which was, until quite recent days, drawn between history
and fiction.  It is only when the two things are kept carefully distinct
that the "tertium quid" called a historical novel, which is really
an artful blend of the two, can have any justification for existing.
It seems to have been the sceptical and prosaic eighteenth century
which first attempted seriously to define such a boundary.  It has thus
been said that we owe, in some sort, Scott and Dumas, _Salammbo_ and
_A Gentleman of France_, and _The White Company_ and _Brakespear_,
to Gibbon and Voltaire.

Before systematic historical criticism came into existence,
all-armed like Pallas from the brain of Jove, it was hardly possible
to draw a distinction between history proper and the historical novel.
Pliny declared that all the world's historians down to his own time
were but "narrators of fables", and his opinion still finds supporters,
who unkindly refuse to acquiesce in his own exception of himself.
Have we not seen Lord Wolseley enter Macaulay's History among the works
of fiction which he was accustomed to carry for light reading
on campaigns?  "Whatever you read to me," said Sir Robert Walpole,
"it shall not be history, for I know that to be false."
Charles Kingsley was apparently dominated by the same spirit when
he resigned his Oxford Chair on the ground that history was "largely
a lie".  Two, at least, of his successors, Freeman and Froude,
would probably have expressed a similar opinion of one another's works.
It has even been put forward, and seems to be a defensible
if not a true opinion, that the whole works of Tacitus are a bold
forgery of the Renaissance, in which case we should see our best
authority on the reigns of Tiberius and Nero relegated to the shelf
of _Quo Radish_ and _Salammbo_. In the Middle Ages history
and fiction had a persistent trick of merging into one another.
"You never," said Mr. Saintsbury, "(or, at any rate, very seldom)
can put your finger on any part of any medieval history, in prose
or verse, whether it be avowedly chronicle or half-avowedly fiction,
and say, 'Here the man consciously and deliberately left his
facts and took to his fiction'."  As long as this was the case,
there could be no room for the historical novelist by profession;
his place was usurped by the historian.

When, however, a new conception of the responsibilities of history
slowly arose, and what is called "respect for the documents"
began to sit on the pen and hamper the imagination of the historian,
there speedily arose the demand for a previously unworked form
of literature.  A new maxim was constructed, which declared
... unlike its predecessor--that, while the poet need not be
a historian, the historian must carefully guard himself against
Mr. Silas Wegg's tendency to drop into poetry--even as a friend.
Even if he flattered himself that he had the true poetic heart,
he lived in fear of the new criticism, and no longer ventured
to adorn his historical works with the airy produce of imagination.
It was no longer permissible for a Thucydides to ornament his work
with speeches which might, would, should, or could have been
but never were--delivered, nor was there any longer tolerance
for an Abbe Vertot to explain that "his siege was finished"
when long delayed documents intended to explain that military operation
arrived in due course of post.  Sometimes the historian was driven
to resort to Mr. Dick's expedient with his law-copying and his petition;
he kept a work of fiction on the stocks beside his history,
and turned to it when the afflatus of imagination carried him away
from the dull and plodding work of investigation and reconstruction.
William Godwin tried such a plan, and came very near writing our
earliest historical novel in consequence.  In his famous essay
on Hallam, Macaulay ascribes a similar device to a well-known
French historian.  But the actual invention--and, for that matter,
the perfection--of the historical novel in English was left to Scott,
already a considerable antiquary as well as a poet, who might in other
conditions or in an earlier age have become a reputable historian
instead of the first of historical, and, perhaps, the greatest
of all novelists.


ON WRITING BADLY

MANY people have suggested that every book ought to be reviewed
as if it were published for the first time, even if it be
_Aesop's Fables_ or the _Odyssey_. In the first case we ought to say:
"In the character of the Wolf Mr. Aesop has hardly broken fresh ground
in moral psychology; nevertheless there is a certain quiet humour in this
little work which is refreshing in these complex and morbid days."
Or in the case of the epic poem we are to be imagined as saying:
"By this work Mr. Homer has hardly added to his reputation.
The success which attended his brisk and suggestive Iliad
should not have betrayed him into supposing that the public
would endure from him the mere garrulity of a ballad-monger."
This idea is attractive, but after all it is unfair.
In order to judge a book fairly we must not merely look at it
as if we had never seen it.  We must also look at it as if we
had never seen any of its effects, of its branching influence,
of its million imitators, of its eulogists, of its critics,
of the eulogists of its eulogists and the critics of its critics.
As it is we approach a masterpiece like Hamlet through the haze
of an atmosphere which the masterpiece has itself created.
We know that the thing is great before we begin to ask if it is good.
There is something absurd in the very attempt to discuss how
the thing should have been done; just as there is something absurd
in the modern philosophical attempts to point out how the cosmos
or the creation should have been conducted.  How can we discuss
how we should have written Shakespeare?  Shakespeare has written us.
And you and I (I am sure you agree) are two of his best characters.

In a very inferior degree, but still in the same significance, we may say
that Alexandre Dumas occupies this primary position, from which he cannot
be dislodged.  He has many qualities in common with the classics,
even with the classics who are much more important in literature than he.
This certainly he has in common with the very great men:
that he is indefensible.  He sprawls at full length like Shakespeare,
and shows all his imbecilities; he is so open to attack that the word
for him is not so much indefensible as defenceless, smilingly and
superbly defenceless.  He has the nakedness of the giants.
He has that absolutely healthy characteristic of the really strong;
I mean that his weakness is mere weakness, and nothing else.
His lapses are long, steady, healthy lapses, like great stretches
of healthy slumber; the strong man's stupidity is as strong as sleep.
It is not, like the stupidity of lesser minds, merely a nervous nap.
The man who wrote The Three Musketeers must certainly have been
a man of startling literary talent and also of what the moderns
call temperament, which means a power of seeing the world
as the highly poetical thing that it quite obviously is.
Yet this same man could write (or, as some say, cause to be written)
hundreds of novels of which _Ascanio_ and _The War of the Women_
are examples:  colossal and interminable volumes in which there
is often no trace at all of that sudden and swaggering inspiration
which sent out D'Artagnan to fight three fire-eaters who were
all each other's seconds, or which carried off a great English
soldier and politician inside a wooden box.  Writing badly anyone
can understand who writes at all; I for one do it perpetually.
Writing badly is the definition of journalism; writing badly
is almost in such cases the definition of living honestly.
But writing badly on such an enormous scale; writing badly with
such immense ambition of design; writing badly with such immense
industry of words and pages; and writing so badly as Dumas did--
these things are the marks of no common mind.  It requires a great
man to write so badly as that.  It is as courageous as building an
ugly Cathedral, and staring at it as it sits triumphant in the sky.
It is as bold as building the great wall of China, and deliberately
building it wrong.  If Dumas was futile it was almost in the same
sense that Napoleon was futile, Good, bad, and indifferent,
Dumas must be treated as a classic; good, bad, and indifferent,
he must be published entire by those who care for classics.
This course has been most wisely adopted in regard to all the works
of all the great but uneven workers.  Critics included among
Shakespeare's works almost reluctantly such works as _Troilus and
Cressida_ or _Cymbeline_, merely with the result that another generation
of critics said they were the only good plays of Shakespeare.
The old and hearty admirers of Dickens were sorry that the uproarious
Master of the Revels who had made Pickwick became at last so sad
and faint and ineffectual as to descend to Little Dorrit.
Whereupon Mr. George Gissing, a man of real literary inspiration,
almost said he thought Little Dorrit was Dickens's best book.
It is never safe to throw away the works of the best men as refuse;
if you do you will have all the best critics with their heads
in the dustbin.  Nevertheless, we may all quite fearlessly assert
the badness of great masses of their work, so long as we do not
propose thus coercively to carry it into effect.  Shakespeare and
Dickens resemble Dumas, not only in the fact that their bad parts
are very bad, but in the fact that their bad parts are very long.
When they began talking nonsense they went at it steadily,
and there was no doubt about it.  You could compile, I should think,
the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages
from the best writers in the world.

Nothing shows more clearly the essential health of human democracy
in the judging of such things than the fact that it is just this
unpardonable prodigality and prolixity that is most easily pardoned.
In the abstract, one would have thought that it was safer to write
no book than to write a bad book.  In the abstract, one would have
thought that if the public had damned anybody, it would have been
the man who went on writing books when they wanted him to leave off.
But as a fact, the mass of men has done for its favourite authors,
like Dumas, exactly what one would have thought would have been
most tiresome and impossible; they have selected for themselves.
They read the _Three Musketeers_ with a just and honourable rapture.
They read _The Memoirs of a Physician_ with a definite pleasure.
And they read _Ascanio_ without any apparent resentment.


A SHY BIRD

THE problem of presenting the English culture to that general
European culture, of which it must always be a part, is made more
problematical by one practical fact; which is partly an accident.
It is the coincidence that the very best English things have to
be translated.  And anybody who has ever tried to translate anything knows
there is continual danger of a sort of despair; he is tempted to say
that what has to be translated is always what cannot be translated.
From the standpoint of anyone who can see it from the inside,
but see it sanely, the best things in England are poetry and humour;
and it so happens that they are both locked up in a language.
The Continent can be more cosmopolitan, partly because Continental
countries have produced masterpieces in more cosmopolitan arts.
You do not need an Italian dictionary or a Spanish phrase-book in order
to appreciate a statue of Donatello or a painting of Velasquez.
And the other two great cultures of Western Europe both in some
sense escape from language, though they escape, so to speak,
at opposite ends or at opposite extremes; one at the extreme of reason
and the other at the extreme of emotion.  France has affected and
altered all nations by a logic almost as abstract as mathematics;
and Germany has moved all nations by the wordless might of music.
Now scientific argument can be translated; and music does not need
to be translated.  But some slight acquaintance with the tongue
talked in one particular corner of the Continent of Europe is
necessary in order to realise that "night's candles are burnt out"
is rather fine poetry, or that Mr. Swiveller's gazelle who married
a market-gardener is distinctly funny.

But this has a sort of secondary result, even in contacts necessarily
cosmopolitan or international.  We also, of course, must have a
diplomatic language; but we have never had the knack of putting much
of what is national into what is official.  It is a paradox; or it would
seem to the more logical nations a paradox, for it means that there
is less of what is national in what is said in the name of the nation.
It is a paradox to say that what is responsible is not representative.
But the English are the most paradoxical of all the peoples of the earth.
And whatever be the reason, it is certainly the fact that the organs
of the State are very seldom the really organic organs of the people.
Of all peoples we English are possibly the most purely patriotic,
possibly excessively and narrowly patriotic, but anyhow tacitly
taking the nation as a sort of religion or substitute for religion.
And yet we have hardly a decent patriotic song to our name, and nothing
whatever in the way of a National Anthem or official patriotic
song that any of the singing or marching nations would tolerate
for ten lines.  If any intelligent foreigner would get a glimpse
of the paradox that is the secret of the English, let him compare
the astonishingly low literary level of the patriotic music-hall song,
about waving the flag, with the exceedingly high literary level
of the domestic music-hall song, about hanging out the washing.
As has been said, poetry and humour are the good fairies of England;
and the poetry may be found in the poor man's front-garden
and the humour in the poor man's back-yard.  By another quaint
perversity we alone retain a Poet Laureate, when we have lost touch
with those ancient classical or medieval traditions which would make
much more comprehensible to the Continent the idea of an official
ode or a national bard or a minstrel singing before the king.
One or two of our best poets have been Laureates, and one
or two of their very worst poems have been Laureate Odes.
But our very best poet came from nowhere, and very much resembles our
very greatest humorist; for in that sense both Shakespeare and Dickens
were poets, and poets coming from nowhere and even going nowhere.
Neither of them can be quite conceived as going into the Government
service and becoming the official voice of the English State.
They lacked something of that classic solidity which can alone
give dignity to a completely collective institution like the
French Academy or even the Comedic Franqaise.  Even when talents
of that classical type exist among us, they exist under conditions
that are so individualistic or patchy or sectarian that it is
difficult to use them as they were used in the great classical
century in France by a classic dramatist who could command a chorus.
We have had perhaps two poets, of very different scale, who had by nature
that sort of impersonal grandeur that might have given dignity, as did
the French classic poets, to an accepted loyalty to a great monarchy.
And Landor was a Radical and Milton was a regicide.

Now it cannot be denied that in many merely international relations
we have to remove an impression of pomposity.  But pomposity is only
the failure of pomp.  So we say that an actor is too theatrical,
because he is not sufficiently at home in the theatre to be dramatic.
We fail in official poetry, or official prose, or official proclamations,
because it is not our job and we do not do it well.  But we fail in common
intelligence if we do not realise that other nations often do do it well.
We must not underrate the achievement of France in making drama a
public institution, or of Germany in making music a public institution,
merely because we ourselves are not very bright about institutions.
We must not make a superiority out of an incapacity; but we must,
and the increasing international pressure forces us to repeat most
emphatically that we must, make other nations understand the nature
of our capacity and the things of which we are really capable.


We all recognise the curse on those who say that charity begins
at home; that they so often mean that charity ends at home.
But by various historical accidents it is unfortunately true that
English charity has had no obvious duty except to begin and end
at home, not because England would not have sympathised with Europe,
but because England knew hardly anything about anything but England.
This fact has unfortunately hidden the much more important fact
that English charity is really quite exceptionally charitable.
When seen from the inside the English are of all the peoples the
most soft-hearted; I shall not deny that it sometimes bears a resemblance
to being soft-headed.  On the other hand there is an international
impression at least a hundred years old that the Englishman is cold
and proud and insensitive.  The problem of explaining the English
culture is the problem of explaining these two things together and
inducing the foreigner to look at the inside rather than the outside.
In other words, in some way or other he must come and find us at home,
not necessarily by coming to our country, but by reading the books
or knowing the circumstances in which we are most at home.
It is exactly the humanity of England that has never been
explained to humanity.

Now it is exactly here that a sort of rescue comes with a real
experience of some of the finest foreign culture.  For it is
not only the finest but even the most fastidious foreign critic
who can sometimes appreciate our coarsest or most comic creations.
He can often appreciate what we do not appreciate; because it is too
popular to be fashionable.  I live in dread that some European judge
will discover the vigour of our Cockney Comic Songs; and publish them,
as we should have done, in a companion volume to the Golden Treasury.
Anyhow, it is a very practical clue to the right method in the matter.
We might well suppose, for instance, that of all thinkable things Pickwick
would be most essentially and exclusively a sort of family joke.
But large numbers of Frenchmen know it is a good joke.  Any number
of Frenchmen would have seen the fun of the jokes of Pickwick who would
have seen nothing but the cant of the speeches of Pitt.  Daudet almost
modelled himself on Dickens; Maurois might be called a Dickensian;
and there is a real imprint of Dickens on French literature, precisely
because it is the imprint of entirely genuine English literature.
It is interesting to note in international influence the difference
between Dickens and Thackeray.  Thackeray, with all his merits,
was only too much the English gentleman who represents us abroad.
But Dickens really works for us abroad, precisely because Dickens
was only at home when he was at home.  Thackeray, Anglo-Indian by
birth and Anglo-European by travel, never quite understood Europe,
just as the Anglo-Indian never quite understood India.
Dickens never tried to understand either of them; but the result
is that Europeans who love sincerity do want to understand Dickens.

Now the Englishman at home is almost the exact opposite of the
Englishman abroad, or at least the legend of the Englishman abroad.
Daudet, whom I have mentioned as an admirer of Dickens,
expressed surprise when he visited England to find the people
so different from what he had expected.  For he had expected
"men with all the vices of conquerors".  Of course the English,
being weak and human like other people, love to be told that they
have the vices of conquerors.

Indeed, I almost feel a sort of traitor to my country in giving them
away by saying that they very often have the virtues of saints.
Especially the patience of saints.  But if anybody wants
to understand that patience he will find it much more genuine
in Pickwick than in any Pacifist pamphlets.  Note how Dickens
takes for granted the patience of old Weller with his preposterous
wife and her preposterous pastor, whom he nevertheless shows
himself capable afterwards of ducking in a horse-trough, and you
will be very near the nerve of something that is really English.
The question is, how can we explain so secret a virtue to those who have
other virtues, and cannot directly perceive that we have this one?
Only one thing is certain; that we cannot do it by perpetually
calling ourselves virtuous.

It is vital that we should avoid the appearance of offering
ourselves as moral models, not because we have not moral advantages,
in this or that respect, even as compared with others,
but because we have not the intellectual advantages that would
enable us to make the comparison or anyhow to make it correctly.
In other words, our difficulty in helping them to know us has been,
not only that we did not know them, but also that we did not know
how much they knew already.  There are some features about which
some foreigners know much more about us than we do ourselves,
but they are not the most genuine or the most general features.
For instance, the fact that our populace does not really care
much about politics, especially foreign politics, really acquits
such a people of many charges that foreigners might bring,
even if it might be a charge in itself.  Our newspapers never tell
us very much of what really is said about us, or against us,
by responsible opinion; but the fact remains that the most
genuine truth about England is to be found in England and not
in what Europe says about England or England says about Europe.
The former may be a muddle or a misunderstanding, but there
still remains something much more worthy of being understood;
and concerning that we come back to what may seem the same somewhat
frivolous moral, that it is much more likely to be found in our
novels than in our newspapers.

                              II

Continental criticism, broadly speaking, has made a mistake
about England.  It was a very natural mistake, founded on certain
superficial truths, such as those which have so long hidden from
England the thrift and the tenacity of France.  It largely arose out
of the religious quarrel and the rise of the Puritans.  And the Puritan
was the sort of solitary figure which, when it happened to appear in one
particular country, frequently falsified international impressions.
Such a person is associated with such a place, not so much because
he is often found there as because he is never found anywhere else.
Nowhere else has the Puritan been dominant as he was in this island;
for his presence here was despotic rather than democratic.
His original power was due to militarism.  His more modern power is
due to plutocracy.  But the English populace has never been Puritan
even in the sense in which the Scottish populace has been Puritan;
still less in the sense in which the Irish populace has been Catholic.
Nobody who thinks in terms of real popularity, right or wrong,
can have the smallest doubt about whether our democracy is normally
on the march to Exeter Hall or to the Derby.

Along with this historical accident of the Puritan aristocracy
went several other things equally accidental.  A certain shyness
and moody embarrassment that come from much more complex causes;
the fact that, like most Northern peoples, including the
Northern French, we have not the rapid gestures of the South;
an exaggerated reputation for roughness, curiously compounded
of the legend of physical exercise and the legend that business
is business, combined, with the puzzle of Protestantism, to create on
the Continent an imaginary Englishman as stiff and stern as a Prussian.
So far the mistake need not have troubled us very much.
Nations normally do misunderstand each other; and it is not worse
than the notion that the Frenchman is immoral or that the Irishman
does not know what he wants.  Unfortunately, this slander had in it
something horribly like a compliment.  Still more unfortunately,
some Englishmen were so weak as to accept the compliment.
They liked to be called stiff because they thought it meant
that they were strong.  They liked to be called solemn
because they thought it meant that they were responsible.
Vanity of this sort is not of course peculiar to them; it is common
to the whole human race.  But it was simply out of the weakness
of vanity that they confessed to the sin of pride.  In reality,
they are not particularly proud and certainly not in the least stern;
they are an exceptionally kindly and even soft-hearted people.
They do not even take their pleasures sadly; they only take an
incidental and I think regrettable pleasure in being called sad.

The meaning of Merry England was in this old original character
of the English.  In medieval times their public and proverbial
character was festive and full of fun; and even in modern
times their private and personal character is the same.
The witness to it is the great national literature, especially as it
was when it was still entirely normal, and had not been crossed
and confused by the self-conscious poses of more recent times.
The last full and free manifestation of this normal and national spirit
is represented by the name of Pickwick, It is the last expression
of the complete freedom and fullness, not only in the literature
of England, but even in the literature of Dickens.

The truth about the English adventure even outside England, is that
the type of endurance has not been stoicism but rather tolerance.
We might say it was much too tolerant, if it had not the rare
virtue of tolerating the intolerable.  What has really made
the English, apart from mere jingo journalistic flatteries,
a success in colonies and in campaigns in savage countries,
was a certain comic acceptance of the incongruous; a certain capacity
in the English Cockney or yokel of continuing to be absurdly like
himself even when, in the ritual formula, he don't know where he are.
This is a national merit which, like other national merits, is gained
at the expense of missing other things; of missing, for instance,
the full status of the citizen and the full inherited experience
that comes of remaining rooted in very sold civilizations.  But it
is perhaps the most humorous and attractive of all national virtues;
and men who really know from the inside the various nations of European
humanity have found nothing more human than the ordinary English
comic song or the talk of the Tommies in the trenches.

Nothing is more English than the fact that a band of comrades
are comic in their incongruity.  They differ and do not quarrel;
or they quarrel and do not part.  There must have been many groups
of Englishmen in camps and colonial holes and corners, consisting of
men who got on with each other somehow, though each was regarded
lightly enough as an individual.  They were comic characters,
if not to themselves, at least to each other.

The English spirit is really a shy bird, and differs therein from
both the American and the German Eagle.  And the shyness is mixed up
with that misunderstanding by which a people very poetic have come
to be called prosaic; and the bird is indeed as shy as the nightingale
in the dark wood of Keats or the albatross flying over the desolate
seas of Coleridge.  We must above all things be the reverse of vulgar,
and therefore the reverse of vainglorious, if we are really to convey
what freedom, what humour and what greatness of heart are hidden
in the very seclusion of England.