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The Art of Letters

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Title: The Art of Letters

Author: Robert Lynd


        
Release date: October 16, 2004 [eBook #13764]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ART OF LETTERS ***

THE ART OF LETTERS

by

ROBERT LYND

New York

1921







TO J.C. SQUIRE

My Dear Jack,

You were godfather to a good many of the chapters in this book when they
first appeared in the _London Mercury_, the _New Statesman_, and the
_British Review_. Others of the chapters appeared in the _Daily News_, the
_Nation_, the _Athenæum_, the _Observer_, and _Everyman_. Will it
embarrass you if I now present you with the entire brood in the name of a
friendship that has lasted many midnights?

Yours,

Robert Lynd.

Steyning,

30th August 1920




CONTENTS

    I. MR. PEPYS

   II. JOHN BUNYAN

  III. THOMAS CAMPION

   IV. JOHN DONNE

    V. HORACE WALPOLE

   VI. WILLIAM COWPER

  VII. A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS

 VIII. THE OFFICE OF THE POETS

   IX. EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC

    X. GRAY AND COLLINS

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

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

 XIII. TENNYSON: A TEMPORARY CRITICISM

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

   XV. THE PERSONALITY OF MORRIS

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

 XVII. OSCAR WILDE

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

  XIX. AN AMERICAN CRITIC: PROFESSOR IRVING BABBIT

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

  XXI. LABOUR OF AUTHORSHIP

 XXII. THE THEORY OF POETRY

XXIII. THE CRITIC AS DESTROYER

 XXIV. BOOK REVIEWING




THE ART OF LETTERS




I.--MR. PEPYS


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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a sad world for idealists.

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

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

Those who find one of the world's puzzles in the fact that Mr. Pepys
wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant no
other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains unnecessarily.
Pepys was not the first human being to make his confession in an empty
confessional. Criminals, lovers and other egoists, for lack of a priest,
will make their confessions to a stone wall or a tree. There is no more
mystery in it than in the singing of birds. The motive may be either to
obtain discharge from the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store up
the very echoes and last drops of pleasure. Human beings keep diaries for
as many different reasons as they write lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy,
the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure.
The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the world
made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in the
early days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write in
cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common
prudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret and
solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. He had discovered a
room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see the
respectable man liberated. He no longer needs to be on his official
behaviour, but may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind the
safety of shorthand. And how he takes advantage of his opportunities! He
remains to the end something of a Puritan in his standards and his public
carriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from the sty of
Epicurus, naked and only half-ashamed. He never, it must be admitted,
entirely shakes off his timidity. At a crisis he dare not confess in
English even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad French with a blush.
In some instances the French may be for facetiousness rather than
concealment, as in the reference to the ladies of Rochester Castle in
1665:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Though page after page of the Diary reveals Mr. Pepys as an extravagant
pleasure-lover, however, he differed from the majority of pleasure-lovers
in literature in not being a man of taste. He had a rolling rather than a
fastidious eye. He kissed promiscuously, and was not aspiring in his
lusts. He once held Lady Castlemaine in his arms, indeed, but it was in a
dream. He reflected, he tells us,

    that since it was a dream, and that I took so much real pleasure in
    it, what a happy thing it would be if when we are in our graves (as
    Shakespeare resembles it) we could dream, and dream but such dreams
    as this, that then we should not need to be so fearful of death, as
    we are this plague time.

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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




II.--JOHN BUNYAN


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

If Bunyan was a realist, however, as regards place and character, his
conception of life was none the less romantic. Life to him was a story of
hairbreadth escapes--of a quest beset with a thousand perils. Not only was
there that great dragon the Devil lying in wait for the traveller, but
there was Doubting Castle to pass, and Giant Despair, and the lions. We
have in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ almost every property of romantic
adventure and terror. We want only a map in order to bring home to us the
fact that it belongs to the same school of fiction as _Treasure Island_.
There may be theological contentions here and there that interrupt the
action of the story as they interrupt the interest of _Grace Abounding_.
But the tedious passages are extraordinarily few, considering that the
author had the passions of a preacher. No doubt the fact that, when he
wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_, he was not definitely thinking of the
edification of his neighbours, goes far towards explaining the absence of
commonplace arguments and exhortations. "I did it mine own self to
gratify," he declared in his rhymed "apology for his book." Later on, in
reply to some brethren of the stricter sort who condemned such dabbling in
fiction, he defended his book as a tract, remarking that, if you want to
catch fish,

  They must be groped for, and be tickled too,
  Or they will not be catch't, whate'er you do.

But in its origin _The Pilgrim's Progress_ was not a tract, but the
inevitable image of the experiences of the writer's soul. And what wild
adventures those were every reader of _Grace Abounding_ knows. There were
terrific contests with the Devil, who could never charm John Bunyan as he
charmed Eve. To Bunyan these contests were not metaphorical battles, but
were as struggles with flesh and blood. "He pulled, and I pulled," he
wrote in one place; "but, God be praised, I overcame him--I got sweetness
from it." And the Devil not only fought him openly, but made more subtle
attempts to entice him to sin. "Sometimes, again, when I have been
preaching, I have been violently assaulted with thoughts of blasphemy, and
strongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth before the
congregation." Bunyan, as he looked back over the long record of his
spiritual torments, thought of it chiefly as a running fight with the
Devil. Outside the covers of the Bible, little existed save temptations
for the soul. No sentence in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is more suggestive
of Bunyan's view of life than that in which the merchandise of Vanity Fair
is described as including "delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives,
husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls,
silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." It is no wonder
that one to whom so much of the common life of man was simply Devil's
traffic took a tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, and
applied to himself, on account of his love of strong language, Sunday
sports and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strong
if he had committed all the crimes of the latest Bluebeard. He himself,
indeed, seems to have become alarmed when--probably as a result of his own
confessions--it began to be rumoured that he was a man with an unspeakable
past. He now demanded that "any woman in heaven, earth or hell" should be
produced with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage. "My
foes," he declared, "have missed their mark in this shooting at me. I am
not the man. I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all the
fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they
be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would still be alive and
well." Bunyan, one observes, was always as ready to defend as to attack
himself. The verses he prefixed to _The Holy War_ are an indignant reply
to those who accused him of not being the real author of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_. He wound up a fervent defence of his claims to originality by
pointing out the fact that his name, if "anagrammed," made the words: "NU
HONY IN A B." Many worse arguments have been used in the quarrels of
theologians.

Bunyan has been described as a tall, red-haired man, stern of countenance,
quick of eye, and mild of speech. His mildness of speech, I fancy, must
have been an acquired mildness. He loved swearing as a boy, and, as _The
Pilgrim's Progress_ shows, even in his later life he had not lost the
humour of calling names. No other English author has ever invented a name
of the labelling kind equal to that of Mr. Worldly Wiseman--a character,
by the way, who does not appear in the first edition of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_, but came in later as an afterthought. Congreve's "Tribulation
Spintext" and Dickens's "Lord Frederick Verisopht" are mere mechanical
contrivances compared to this triumph of imagination and phrase. Bunyan's
gift for names was in its kind supreme. His humorous fancy chiefly took
that form. Even atheists can read him with pleasure for the sake of his
names. The modern reader, no doubt, often smiles at these names where
Bunyan did not mean him to smile, as when Mrs. Lightmind says: "I was
yesterday at Madam Wantons, when we were as merry as the maids. For who do
you think should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-flesh, and three or four
more, with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth, and some others?" Bunyan's
fancifulness, however, gives us pleasure quite apart from such quaint
effects as this. How delightful is Mr. By-ends's explanation of the two
points in regard to which he and his family differ in religion from those
of the stricter sort: "First, we never strive against wind and tide.
Secondly, we are always most zealous when Religion goes in his silver
slippers; we love much to walk with him in the street, if the sun shines,
and the people applaud him." What a fine grotesque, again, Bunyan gives us
in toothless Giant Pope sitting in the mouth of the cave, and, though too
feeble to follow Christian, calling out after him: "You will never mend
till more of you be burnt." We do not read _The Pilgrim's Progress_,
however, as a humorous book. Bunyan's pains mean more to us than the play
of his fancy. His books are not seventeenth-century grotesques, but the
story of his heart. He has written that story twice over--with the gloom
of the realist in _Grace Abounding_, and with the joy of the artist in
_The Pilgrim's Progress_. Even in _Grace Abounding_, however, much as it
is taken up with a tale of almost lunatic terror, the tenderness of
Bunyan's nature breaks out as he tells us how, when he was taken off to
prison, "the parting with my wife and four children hath often been to me
in the place as the pulling the flesh from the bones ... especially my
poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the
thoughts of the hardship I thought my poor blind one might go under would
break my heart to pieces!" At the same time, fear and not love is the
dominating passion in _Grace Abounding_. We are never far from the noise
of Hell in its pages. In _Grace Abounding_ man is a trembling criminal. In
_The Pilgrim's Progress_ he has become, despite his immense capacity for
fear, a hero. The description of the fight with Apollyon is a piece of
heroic literature equal to anything in those romances of adventure that
went to the head of Don Quixote. "But, as God would have it, while
Apollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this
good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and caught
it, saying: 'Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy! when I fall I shall
arise'; and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back,
as one that had received a mortal wound." Heroic literature cannot surpass
this. Its appeal is universal. When one reads it, one ceases to wonder
that there exists even a Catholic version of _The Pilgrim's Progress_, in
which Giant Pope is discreetly omitted, but the heroism of Christian
remains. Bunyan disliked being called by the name of any sect. His
imagination was certainly as little sectarian as that of a
seventeenth-century preacher could well be. His hero is primarily not a
Baptist, but a man. He bears, perhaps, almost too close a resemblance to
Everyman, but his journey, his adventures and his speech save him from
sinking into a pulpit generalization.




III.--THOMAS CAMPION


Thomas Campion is among English poets the perfect minstrel. He takes love
as a theme rather than is burned by it. His most charming, if not his most
beautiful poem begins: "Hark, all you ladies." He sings of love-making
rather than of love. His poetry, like Moore's--though it is infinitely
better poetry than Moore's--is the poetry of flirtation. Little is known
about his life, but one may infer from his work that his range of amorous
experience was rather wide than deep. There is no lady "with two pitch
balls stuck in her face for eyes" troubling his pages with a constant
presence. The Mellea and Caspia--the one too easy of capture, the other
too difficult--to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are addressed, are
said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love. But he has buried
most of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead language. His
English poems do not portray him as a man likely to die of love, or even
to forget a meal on account of it. His world is a happy land of song, in
which ladies all golden in the sunlight succeed one another as in a
pageant of beauties. Lesbia, Laura, and Corinna with her lute equally
inhabit it. They are all characters in a masque of love, forms and figures
in a revel. Their maker is an Epicurean and an enemy to "the sager sort":

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campion, at the same time, if he was the poet of the higher flirtation,
was no mere amorous jester, as Moore was. His affairs of the heart were
also affairs of the imagination. Love may not have transformed the earth
for him, as it did Shakespeare and Donne and Browning, but at least it
transformed his accents. He sang neither the "De Profundis" of love nor
the triumphal ode of love that increases from anniversary to anniversary;
but he knew the flying sun and shadow of romantic love, and staged them in
music of a delicious sadness, of a fantastic and playful gravity. His
poems, regarded as statements of fact, are a little insincere. They are
the compliments, not the confessions, of a lover. He exaggerates the
burden of his sigh, the incurableness of his wounded heart. But beneath
these conventional excesses there is a flow of sincere and beautiful
feeling. He may not have been a worshipper, but his admirations were
golden. In one or two of his poems, such as:

  Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet;
  Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet,

admiration treads on the heels of worship.

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

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

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

seems but the ultimate perfection among valentines. Others of the songs
hesitate between compliment and the finer ecstasy. The compliment is
certainly of the noblest in the lyric which sets out--

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

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

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

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

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

  There is a garden in her face,
  Where roses and white lilies grow,

he brings into his songs none of the dye and fragrance of flowers.

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

Irish critics have sometimes hoped that certain qualities in Campion's
music might be traced to the fact that his grandfather was "John Campion
of Dublin, Ireland." The art--and in Campion it was art, not
artlessness--with which he made use of such rhymes as "hill" and "vigil,"
"sing" and "darling," besides his occasional use of internal rhyme and
assonance (he rhymed "licens'd" and "silence," "strangeness" and
"plainness," for example), has seemed to be more akin to the practices of
Irish than of English poets. No evidence exists, however, as to whether
Campion's grandfather was Irish in anything except his adventures. Of
Campion himself we know that his training was English. He went to
Peterhouse, and, though he left it without taking a degree, he was
apparently regarded as one of the promising figures in the Cambridge of
his day. "I know, Cambridge," apostrophized a writer of the time,
"howsoever now old, thou hast some young. Bid them be chaste, yet suffer
them to be witty. Let them be soundly learned, yet suffer them to be
gentlemanlike qualified"; and the admonitory reference, though he had left
Cambridge some time before, is said to have been to "sweet master
Campion."

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

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

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

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




IV.--JOHN DONNE


Izaak Walton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of almost
seraphic beauty. When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said that
the age had brought forth another Pico della Mirandola. As a young man in
his twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his secret marriage
with his patron's niece--"for love," says Walton, "is a flattering
mischief"--purchased at first only the ruin of his hopes and a term in
prison. Finally, we have the later Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul's
represented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of his own images, as
"always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none;
carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticing
others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives." The picture is
all of noble charm. Walton speaks in one place of "his winning
behaviour--which, when it would entice, had a strange kind of elegant
irresistible art." There are no harsh phrases even in the references to
those irregularities of Donne's youth, by which he had wasted the fortune
of £3,000--equal, I believe, to more than £30,000 of our money--bequeathed
to him by his father, the ironmonger. "Mr. Donne's estate," writes Walton
gently, referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, "was the
greatest part spent in many and chargeable travels, books, and dear-bought
experience." It is true that he quotes Donne's own confession of the
irregularities of his early life. But he counts them of no significance.
He also utters a sober reproof of Donne's secret marriage as "the
remarkable error of his life." But how little he condemned it in his heart
is clear when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne and his wife
"with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their
sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than the
banquets of dull and low-spirited people." It was not for Walton to go in
search of small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the
world--him whose grave, mournful friends "strewed ... with an abundance of
curious and costly flowers," as Alexander the Great strewed the grave of
"the famous Achilles." In that grave there was buried for Walton a whole
age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety and beauty. More than
that, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an inimitable
Christian. He mourns over "that body, which once was a Temple of the Holy
Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust," and, as he
mourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "But I shall see it
reanimated." That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed three hundred
years after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan,
this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his
biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his _Songs and
Sonnets_ and _Elegies_ rather than in his _Divine Poems_. We find, in some
of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with
the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the
temptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but for
experience--experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. He
has left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at one
period of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic, immoderate desire of
human learning and languages." Faust in his cell can hardly have been a
more insatiate student than Donne. "In the most unsettled days of his
youth," Walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond the
hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him
out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study;
though he took great liberty after it." His thoroughness of study may be
judged from the fact that "he left the resultance of 1,400 authors, most
of them abridged and analyzed with his own hand." But we need not go
beyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning that he had made
his own. He was versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. He
subdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. Nine
Muses were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He called
in to their aid Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and the
springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the
library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works
of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom London
may almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime. I do not
think his verse or correspondence contains a single reference to
Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later.
The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded with
interest and even friendship was Ben Jonson. Jonson's Catholicism may have
been a link between them. But, more important than that, Jonson was, like
Donne himself, an inflamed pedant. For each of them learning was the
necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the
classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to
a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was, I think, because
Donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the Renaissance, loving the
proud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, that
he found it easy to abandon the Catholicism of his family for
Protestantism. He undoubtedly became in later life a convinced and
passionate Christian of the Protestant faith, but at the time when he
first changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious
convert. He wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had
liberated from dogma-worship. Nor did he ever lose this rationalist
tolerance. "You know," he once wrote to a friend, "I have never imprisoned
the word religion.... They" (the churches) "are all virtual beams of one
sun." Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such
wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In _Love Progress_ he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography of a
woman's body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the beautiful
seems almost beastly. In _The Anagram_ and _The Comparison_ he plays the
Yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses in insulting two
of them. In _The Perfume_ he relates the story of an intrigue with a girl
whose father discovered his presence in the house as a result of his using
scent. Donne's jest about it is suggestive of his uncontrollable passion
for ugliness:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover real people
in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift's Stella and Vanessa, and
his relations to them. It is enough for us to feel, however, that these
poems railing at or glorying in Platonic love are no mere goldsmith's
compliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford.
Miracles of this sort are not wrought save by the heart. We do not find in
them the underground and sardonic element that appears in so much of
Donne's merely amorous work. We no longer picture him as a sort of Vulcan
hammering out the poetry of base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. He
becomes in them a child Apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him.
He makes music of so grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonder
at all the critics who have found fault with his rhythms--from Ben Jonson,
who said that "for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging," down to
Coleridge, who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots," and described
him as "rhyme's sturdy cripple." Coleridge's quatrain on Donne is, without
doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne rode
no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a master, even
if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an encyclopædia
in his saddle-bags.

Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he also
remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue each
other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two
beautiful poems, _The Relic_ and _The Funeral_, addressed to the lady who
had given him a bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells what will
happen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton discovered with

  A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

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

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

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

  All women shall adore us, and some men.

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

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

In _The Funeral_ he returns to the same theme:

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

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

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

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

  As glad to have my body as my mind.

_The Primrose_ is another appeal for a less intellectual love:

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

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

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

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

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

It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it is
useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love. His
poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no other
English poet--not even, perhaps, Browning's--does. He was by destiny the
complete experimentalist in love in English literature. He passed through
phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase of the
love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect marriage. In
his youth he was a gay--but was he ever really gay?--free-lover, who sang
jestingly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate
verse--verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne's genius--was a
mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been
pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. His
greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of
the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in the
history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his
meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered
dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been less of a frustrated
lover, less of a martyr, in whom love's

                     Art did express
  A quintessence even from nothingness,
  From dull privations and lean emptiness,

much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been
written.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is as much
divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of the religious
ones. Donne's last word as a secular poet may well be regarded as having
been uttered in that great poem in celebration of lasting love, _The
Anniversary_, which closes with so majestic a sweep:

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

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

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

  John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone.

His married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries due to
ill-health, debt and thwarted ambition, seems to have been happy beyond
prophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his wife died in childbed,
after having borne him twelve children, a religious crisis resulted that
turned his conventional churchmanship into sanctity. His original change
from Catholicism to Protestantism has been already mentioned. Most of the
authorities are agreed, however, that this was a conversion in a formal
rather than in a spiritual sense. Even when he took Holy Orders in 1615,
at the age of forty-two, he appears to have done so less in answer to any
impulse to a religious life from within than because, with the downfall of
Somerset, all hope of advancement through his legal attainments was
brought to an end. Undoubtedly, as far back as 1612, he had thought of
entering the Church. But we find him at the end of 1613 writing an
epithalamium for the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is a curious
fact that three great poets--Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion--appear,
though innocently enough, in the story of the Countess of Essex's sordid
crime. Donne's temper at the time is still clearly that of a man of the
world. His jest at the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower,
is the jest of an ungenerous worldling. Even after his admission into the
Church he reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess of
Bedford, in trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no more
than £30 to pay his debts. The truth is, to be forty and a failure is an
affliction that might sour even a healthy nature. The effect on a man of
Donne's ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory of
his dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a
long family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous. To
such a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were to
Swift. One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing less
and less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in them some
volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through the bars and
sung above the ground. Donne and Swift were morbid men suffering from
claustrophobia. They were pent and imprisoned spirits, hating the walls
that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush them. In his poems
and letters Donne is haunted especially by three images--the hospital, the
prison, and the grave. Disease, I think, preyed on his mind even more
terrifyingly than warped ambition. "Put all the miseries that man is
subject to together," he exclaims in one of the passages in that luxuriant
anthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has made from the _Sermons_;
"sickness is more than all .... In poverty I lack but other things; in
banishment I lack but other men; but in sickness I lack myself." Walton
declares that it was from consumption that Donne suffered; but he had
probably the seeds of many diseases. In some of his letters he dwells
miserably on the symptoms of his illnesses. At one time, his sickness
"hath so much of a cramp that it wrests the sinews, so much of tetane that
it withdraws and pulls the mouth, and so much of the gout ... that it is
not like to be cured.... I shall," he adds, "be in this world, like a
porter in a great house, but seldomest abroad; I shall have many things to
make me weary, and yet not get leave to be gone." Even after his
conversion he felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details of his
ill-health. Those amazing records which he wrote while lying ill in bed in
October, 1623, give us a realistic study of a sick-bed and its
circumstances, the gloom of which is hardly even lightened by his odd
account of the disappearance of his sense of taste: "My taste is not gone
away, but gone up to sit at David's table; my stomach is not gone, but
gone upwards toward the Supper of the Lamb." "I am mine own ghost," he
cries, "and rather affright my beholders than interest them.... Miserable
and inhuman fortune, when I must practise my lying in the grave by lying
still."

It does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by wretchedness
and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily corruptions was often
tempted, by "a sickly inclination," to commit suicide, and that he even
wrote, though he did not dare to publish, an apology for suicide on
religious grounds, his famous and little-read _Biathanatos_. The family
crest of the Donnes was a sheaf of snakes, and these symbolize well enough
the brood of temptations that twisted about in this unfortunate
Christian's bosom. Donne, in the days of his salvation, abandoned the
family crest for a new one--Christ crucified on an anchor. But he might
well have left the snakes writhing about the anchor. He remained a tempted
man to the end. One wishes that the _Sermons_ threw more light on his
later personal life than they do. But perhaps that is too much to expect
of sermons. There is no form of literature less personal except a leading
article. The preacher usually regards himself as a mouthpiece rather than
a man giving expression to himself. In the circumstances what surprises us
is that the _Sermons_ reveal, not so little, but so much of Donne. Indeed,
they make us feel far more intimate with Donne than do his private
letters, many of which are little more than exercises in composition. As a
preacher, no less than as a poet, he is inflamed by the creative heat. He
shows the same vehemence of fancy in the presence of the divine and
infernal universe--a vehemence that prevents even his most far-sought
extravagances from disgusting us as do the lukewarm follies of the
Euphuists. Undoubtedly the modern reader smiles when Donne, explaining
that man can be an enemy of God as the mouse can be an enemy to the
elephant, goes on to speak of "God who is not only a multiplied elephant,
millions of elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied world, a
multiplied all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite many times over;
nay (if we may dare to say so) a multiplied God, a God that hath the
millions of the heathens' gods in Himself alone." But at the same time one
finds oneself taking a serious pleasure in the huge sorites of quips and
fancies in which he loves to present the divine argument. Nine out of ten
readers of the _Sermons_, I imagine, will be first attracted to them
through love of the poems. They need not be surprised if they do not
immediately enjoy them. The dust of the pulpit lies on them thickly
enough. As one goes on reading them, however, one becomes suddenly aware
of their florid and exiled beauty. One sees beyond their local theology to
the passion of a great suffering artist. Here are sentences that express
the Paradise, the Purgatory, and the Hell of John Donne's soul. A noble
imagination is at work--a grave-digging imagination, but also an
imagination that is at home among the stars. One can open Mr. Pearsall
Smith's anthology almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passage
which gives us a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror and
hope that was Donne's contribution to the art of prose. Listen to this,
for example, from a sermon preached in St. Paul's in January, 1626:

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

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

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

Excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final beauty which
we expect in a work of art; and the reader of Donne's _Sermons_ in their
latest form will be wise if he comes to them expecting to find beauty
piecemeal and tarnished though in profusion. He will be wise, too, not to
expect too many passages of the same intimate kind as that famous
confession in regard to prayer which Mr. Pearsall Smith quotes, and which
no writer on Donne can afford not to quote:

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

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

Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose
personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousand
bays and creeks and river-mouths, to the same degree as the personality
that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of John Donne. It is
a mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies only intermittently in
the sun. A fog hangs around its coast, and at the base of its most radiant
mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp. There are
jewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its surface, and by
miners in the dark. It is richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals
and curious ornaments than in flowers. The shepherd on the hillside seldom
tells his tale uninterrupted. Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal
deities that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo
of these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even
as he looks at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. The
chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is, no
doubt, Walton's story of the last days of Donne's life that makes us, as
we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this ghostly
apparition. Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of his death,
dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his head and
feet," and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with so much of
the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face,"
while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral monument. He then had
the picture placed at his bedside, to which he summoned his friends and
servants in order to bid them farewell. As he lay awaiting death, he said
characteristically, "I were miserable if I might not die," and then
repeatedly, in a faint voice, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done." At the
very end he lost his speech, and "as his soul ascended and his last breath
departed from him he closed his eyes, and then disposed his hands and body
into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that
came to shroud him." It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral
monument almost uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great
Fire, and no other monument in the cathedral escaped. Among all his
fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last
fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a
fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight
days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently
egoistic amid its worship, as in the verse:

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

Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God.
Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, but
none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places,
now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of the
first man in a new found land.




V.--HORACE WALPOLE[1]

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


Horace Walpole was "a dainty rogue in porcelain" who walked badly. In his
best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he
"tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he wrote when he was
just under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dab-chick's." A lady
has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on
tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his feet were not swollen with
the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on
a silver penny." He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with
his unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not
particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk
stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an
impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a
beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a
china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded
everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not
be helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence
of the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was
more likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an empire. His
most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime
ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George
II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand--You love
laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That
represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh all
the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written a
letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, begging
Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's hand. His attitude
to the Court he described to George Montagu as "mixing extreme politeness
with extreme indifference." His politeness, like his indifference, was but
play at the expense of a solemn world. "I wrote to Lord Bute," he informed
Montagu; "thrust all the _unexpecteds, want of ambition,
disinterestedness, etc._, that I could amass, gilded with as much duty,
affection, zeal, etc., as possible." He frankly professed relief that he
had not after all to go to Court and act out the extravagant compliments
he had written. "Was ever so agreeable a man as King George the Second,"
he wrote, "to die the very day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?"
"For my part," he adds later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will always
be a favourite; he tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the
late Prince of Wales's death, and to-day of the King's." It is not that
Walpole was a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toy
republican who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind
their backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of
Beau Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a public
display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatest
private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the great,
as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the thoughts of
the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, Conway, "and even laugh
to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill will on the subjects
I mention." His letters are for the most part those of a good-natured man.

It is not that he was above the foible--it was barely more than that--of
hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own, but he never
could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His ridicule of the Duke
of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the baiting of a mean and
treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling out," and whose mouth was
"tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity of
the Duke, as when he describes him going to Court on becoming Prime
Minister in 1754:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole was
merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He had a
sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence of
Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his own
writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the poets. He
felt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was diffident
both for his times and for himself. So difficult do some writers find it
to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him that they ask us to
regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence. They do not
realize that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was an
enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion. His airs and
graces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure in wearing a
mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable, and only withdrew into, the
similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes into his tub, through
philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who are tolerable are those
whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our interest in character is largely
an interest in contradictions of this kind. The beau capable of breaking
into excitement awakens our curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a
humane action, the Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the
pacifist in a rage of violence. The average man, whom one knows
superficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. That
is why we find him dull. The characters who interest us in history and
literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the
formulae we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They give us
pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to me
absurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only real
thing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels among
the Alps with Gray down to his senile letters to Hannah More about the
French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity
of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his
sensations like an æsthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant
at a fire as George Selwyn at an execution." If he cared for the crownings
of kings and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in
the fireworks and illuminations.

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

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

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

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

It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into playing
with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is in this spirit
that he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses and
sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared at
the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom has consisted in forming a
baby-house full of playthings for my second childhood." That explains why
one almost loves the creature. Macaulay has severely censured him for
devoting himself to the collection of knick-knacks, such as King William
III.'s spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend Walpole as a
collector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a
mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself
quite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up
Magna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the warrant for the
execution of King Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who
can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway:
"Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my
new divine closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of
Pembroke and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and
ended: "I never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old ward-robe
there still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and
Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good-night." He
laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends.
"As to snuff-boxes and toothpick cases," he wrote to the Countess of
Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year."
Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded in
the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a
spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself as a
master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and the
goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley fishing
in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin and a
tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese method." This
was in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who "carried a dozen
to town t'other day in a decanter." Walpole is similarly amused by the
spectacle of himself as a planter and gardener. "I have made great
progress," he boasts, "and talk very learnedly with the nursery-men,
except that now and then a lettuce runs to seed, overturns all my botany,
and I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering
shrub. Then the deliberation with which trees grow is extremely
inconvenient to my natural impatience." He goes on enviously to imagine
the discovery by posterity of a means of transplanting oaks of a hundred
and fifty years as easily as tulip-bulbs. This leads him to enlarge upon
the wonders that the Horace Walpole of posterity will be able to possess
when the miraculous discoveries have been made.

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

Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself, it is
impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that the wolf
carried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels, or the more
imperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to prevent from
biting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with Madame du Deffand
herself "grows the greater favourite the more people he devours." "T'other
night," writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand afterwards bequeathed
the dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's face, and I thought
would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting her finger. She was
terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand, who has too much parts
not to see everything in its true light, perceiving that she had not
beaten Tonton half enough, immediately told us a story of a lady whose dog
having bitten a piece out of a gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a
great fright, cried out, 'Won't it make him sick?'" In the most attractive
accounts we possess of Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the
breakfast-table, drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient
porcelain of Japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (now
grown almost too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and
afterwards going to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to
the squirrels in the garden.

Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was an
excitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet or the
prospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de l'Enclos at
Strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of Anne Boleyn, or
Ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes." What is not
generally realized is that he was also a high-strung and eager spectator
of the greater things. I have already spoken of his enthusiasm for wild
nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is true he grew weary of
them. "Such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such uncomely inhabitants." "I
am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if I had eat them," he groaned
in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was at least as genuine as the
fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves only that there were two
Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic enthusiasms was insincere.
He was a devotee of romance, but it was romance under the control of the
comic spirit. He was always amused to have romance brought down to
reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of Scots, he said: "I believe I
have told you that, in a very old trial of her, which I bought for Lord
Oxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Take
sentiments out of their _pantaufles_, and reduce them to the infirmities
of mortality, what a falling off there is!" But see him in the
picture-gallery in his father's old house at Houghton, after an absence of
sixteen years, and the romantic mood is upper-most. "In one respect," he
writes, speaking of the pictures, "I am very young; I cannot satiate
myself with looking," and he adds, "Not a picture here but calls a
history; not one but I remember in Downing Street or Chelsea, where queens
and crowds admired them." And, if he could not "satiate himself with
looking" at the Italian and Flemish masters, he similarly preserved the
heat of youth in his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. "When," he wrote, during
his dispute with Voltaire on the point, "I think over all the great
authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and English (and I know no
other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew."
One is astonished to find that he was contemptuous of Montaigne. "What
signifies what a man thought," he wrote, "who never thought of anything
but himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?"
This sentence might have served as a condemnation of Walpole himself, and
indeed he meant it so. Walpole, however, was an egoist of an opposite kind
to Montaigne. Walpole lived for his eyes, and saw the world as a masque of
bright and amusing creatures. Montaigne studied the map of himself rather
than the map of his neighbours' vanities. Walpole was a social being, and
not finally self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know
himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by
Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. Like
Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his
literary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple as regards
Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the other hand, how
foolish it is to regard him as being critically a fashionable trifler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after writer
that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them mainly for
gossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great fight for good
causes while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he the temper of a
ruler of men. But as a commentator on politics and a spreader of opinion
in private, he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious,
humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events. His detestation of the
arbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion. He detested it
alike in a government and in a mob. He loathed the violence that compassed
the death of Admiral Byng and the violence that made war on America. He
raged against a public world that he believed was going to the devil. "I
am not surprised," he wrote in 1776, "at the idea of the devil being
always at our elbows. They who invented him no doubt could not conceive
how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of
a fiend. Don't you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he
would have been invented on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy has
a poor chance with me," he wrote a little later in regard to America,
"when my warmth is stirred--and yet I know that an angry old man out of
Parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal."
The war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed
over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all but the
unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened into
contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but it is a
pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty
larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his comment
on the Wilkes riots, when he declares:

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

Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them with an
aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance was that
which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It was of the
mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory: "They were, as
George Montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you might have stroked
them_." When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out in
Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the French with the
hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce the
Bolshevists. He called them "_inferno-human_ beings," "that atrocious and
detestable nation," and declared that "France must be abhorred to latest
posterity." His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may
be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They
are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier
age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in
Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried
angrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics never
got beyond an angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of
him:

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

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

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

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

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




VI.--WILLIAM COWPER


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

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

I do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to trifling.
Even in the days when he was studying law in the Temple he dined every
Thursday with six of his old school-fellows at the Nonsense Club. His
essays in Bonnell Thornton and Coleman's paper, _The Connoisseur_, written
some time before he went mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, lead
one to believe that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might have
equalled or surpassed Addison as a master of light prose. He was something
of the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during his first years in a
solicitor's office, as we gather from the letter in which he reminds Lady
Hesketh how he and Thurlow used to pass the time with her and her sister,
Theodora, the object of his fruitless love. "There was I, and the future
Lord Chancellor," he wrote, "constantly employed from morning to night in
giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law." Such was his
life till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two. He
had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as a
schoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at St.
Margaret's rolled towards him and struck him on the leg. Again, in his
chambers in the Middle Temple, he suffered for a time from religious
melancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems of
George Herbert. Even at the age of twenty-three he told Robert Lloyd in a
rhymed epistle that he "addressed the muse," not in order to show his
genius or his wit,

  But to divert a fierce banditti
  (Sworn foe to everything that's witty)
  That, in a black infernal train,
  Make cruel inroads in my brain,
  And daily threaten to drive thence
  My little garrison of sense.

It was not till after his release from the St. Alban's madhouse in his
thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures
on the ruins of the old. He now set himself of necessity to the task of
creating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in his
brighter moments, a sort of Epicurean of evangelical piety. He was a
damned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still
deeper in the process. His round of recreation, it must be admitted, was
for the most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seeker
quail worse than any inferno of miseries. Only a nature of peculiar
sweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and hymns
in which Cowper learned to be happy in the Unwins' Huntingdon home.
Breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and nine. Then, "till eleven, we
read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of
those holy mysteries." Church was at eleven. After that he was at
liberty to read, walk, ride, or work in the garden till the three o'clock
dinner. Then to the garden, "where with Mrs. Unwin and her son I have
generally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea-time." After tea
came a four-mile walk, and "at night we read and converse, as before, till
supper, and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon; and
last of all the family are called to prayers." In those days, it may be,
evangelical religion had some of the attractions of a new discovery.
Theories of religion were probably as exciting a theme of discussion in
the age of Wesley as theories of art and literature in the age of cubism
and _vers libre_. One has to remember this in order to be able to realize
that, as Cowper said, "such a life as this is consistent with the utmost
cheerfulness." He unquestionably found it so, and, when the Rev. Morley
Unwin was killed as the result of a fall from his horse, Cowper and Mrs.
Unwin moved to Olney in order to enjoy further evangelical companionship
in the neighbourhood of the Rev. John Newton, the converted slave-trader,
who was curate in that town. At Olney Cowper added at once to his
terrors of Hell and to his amusements. For the terrors, Newton, who seems
to have wielded the Gospel as fiercely as a slaver's whip, was largely
responsible. He had earned a reputation for "preaching people mad," and
Cowper, tortured with shyness, was even subjected to the ordeal of leading
in prayer at gatherings of the faithful. Newton, however, was a man of
tenderness, humour, and literary tastes, as well as of a somewhat savage
piety. He was not only Cowper's tyrant, but Cowper's nurse, and, in
setting Cowper to write the Olney Hymns, he gave a powerful impulse to a
talent hitherto all but hidden. At the same time, when, as a result of the
too merciless flagellation of his parishioners on the occasion of some
Fifth of November revels, Newton was attacked by a mob and driven out of
Olney, Cowper undoubtedly began to breathe more freely. Even under the eye
of Newton, however, Cowper could enjoy his small pleasures, and we have an
attractive picture of him feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons every
morning on the gravel walk in the garden. He shared with Newton his
amusements as well as his miseries. We find him in 1780 writing to the
departed Newton to tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener.
"I draw," he said, "mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and
dab-chicks." He represents himself in this lively letter as a Christian
lover of baubles, rather to the disadvantage of lovers of baubles who are
not Christians:

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

In this and the following year we find him turning his thoughts more and
more frequently to writing as a means of forgetting himself. "The
necessity of amusement," he wrote to Mrs. Unwin's clergyman son, "makes me
sometimes write verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, a
gardener; and has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with ...
surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance of it
two months ago." His impulse towards writing verses, however, was an
impulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning imagination. "I have
no more right to the name of poet," he once said, "than a maker of
mouse-traps has to that of an engineer.... Such a talent in verse as mine
is like a child's rattle--very entertaining to the trifler that uses it,
and very disagreeable to all beside." "Alas," he wrote in another letter,
"what can I do with my wit? I have not enough to do great things with, and
these little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at the
subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke. I must do with it as I do
with my linnet; I keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and then
set open the door, that he may whisk about the room a little, and then
shut him up again." It may be doubted whether, if subjects had not been
imposed on him from without, he would have written much save in the vein
of "dear Mat Prior's easy jingle" or the Latin trifles of Vincent Bourne,
of whom Cowper said: "He can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so
exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws that one would suppose
him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes."

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

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

Nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of such an
attack on the "pleasant-Sunday-afternoon" kind of pastor as is contained
in the lines:

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

These, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best in the
moral satires; but the latter is worth quoting as evidence of the way in
which Cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a rather narrow creed.
The satires are hardly more than denominational in their interest. They
belong to the religious fashion of their time, and are interesting to us
now only as the old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. The
subject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere almost
always remains evangelical. The Rev. John Newton wrote a preface for the
volume, suggesting this and claiming that the author "aims to communicate
his own perceptions of the truth, beauty and influence of the religion of
the Bible." The publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of the
piety of the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the first
edition. Cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal his
pious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this reason
opened the book, not with _The Progress of Error_, but with the more
attractively-named _Table Talk_. "My sole drift is to be useful," he told
a relation, however. "... My readers will hardly have begun to laugh
before they will be called upon to correct that levity, and peruse me with
a more serious air." He informed Newton at the same time: "Thinking myself
in a measure obliged to tickle, if I meant to please, I therefore affected
a jocularity I did not feel." He also told Newton: "I am merry that I may
decoy people into my company." On the other hand, Cowper did not write
_John Gilpin_ which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a man
using wit as a decoy. He wrote it because it irresistibly demanded to be
written. "I wonder," he once wrote to Newton, "that a sportive thought
should ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that it
should gain admittance. It is as if harlequin should intrude himself into
the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state." Harlequin,
luckily for us, took hold of his pen in _John Gilpin_ and in many of the
letters. In the moral satires, harlequin is dressed in a sober suit and
sent to a theological seminary. One cannot but feel that there is
something incongruous in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had "found
occasion towards the close of my last poem, called _Retirement_, to take
some notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments, and to
direct the means by which they might be made useful as well as agreeable."
This might serve well enough as a theme for a "letter to the editor" of
_The Baptist Eye-opener_. One cannot imagine, however, its causing a
flutter in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses.

Cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a letter-writer.
The interest of his verse is chiefly historical. He was a poet of the
transition to Wordsworth and the revolutionists, and was a mouthpiece of
his time. But he has left only a tiny quantity of memorable verse. Lamb
has often been quoted in his favour. "I have," he wrote to Coleridge in
1796, "been reading _The Task_ with fresh delight. I am glad you love
Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not
call that man my friend who should be offended with the 'divine chit-chat
of Cowper.'" Lamb, it should be remembered, was a youth of twenty-one when
he wrote this, and Cowper's verse had still the attractions of early
blossoms that herald the coming of spring. There is little in _The Task_
to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of literary
history. Like the Olney Hymns and the moral satires it was a poem written
to order. Lady Austen, the vivacious widow who had meanwhile joined the
Olney group, was anxious that Cowper should show what he could do in blank
verse. He undertook to humour her if she would give him a subject. "Oh,"
she said, "you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any;
write upon this sofa!" Cowper, in his more ambitious verse, seems seldom
to have written under the compulsion of the subject as the great poets do.
Even the noble lines _On the Loss of the Royal George_ were written, as he
confessed, "by desire of Lady Austen, who wanted words to the March in
_Scipio_." For this Lady Austen deserves the world's thanks, as she does
for cheering him up in his low spirits with the story of John Gilpin. He
did not write _John Gilpin_ by request, however. He was so delighted on
hearing the story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and the
next day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad.
"Strange as it may seem," he afterwards said of it, "the most ludicrous
lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that
saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all." "The grinners at
_John Gilpin_," he said in another letter, "little dream what the author
sometimes suffers. How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!"
It was the publication of _The Task_ and _John Gilpin_ that made Cowper
famous. It is not _The Task_ that keeps him famous to-day. There is, it
seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good letters
than there is in the entire six books of _The Task_. One has only to read
the argument at the top of the third book, called _The Garden_, in order
to see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written. Here is the
argument in full:

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

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

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

Having further prepared the ground:

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

The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper
does not survive the test. Had _The Task_ been written in couplets he
might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it
is, he is merely ponderous--a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy
shell of eloquence. In the fragment called _Yardley Oak_ he undoubtedly
achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not
think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet.
He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write
it. "I reckon it," he wrote in 1781, "among my principal advantages, as a
composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen
years, and but one these thirteen years." So mild was his interest in his
contemporaries that he had never heard Collins's name till he read about
him in Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Though descended from Donne--his
mother was Anne Donne--he was apparently more interested in Churchill and
Beattie than in him. His one great poetical master in English was Milton,
Johnson's disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence. He was
probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education. He
described himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later
years, as "a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of
them are your brother Chester's." The passages I have quoted give, no
doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper's indifference to literature.
His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters.
But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature
as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Though
Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer
into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical
reservations. "I should not have chosen to have been the original author
of such a business," he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth
book of the _Iliad_, "even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow. Time
has wonderful effects. We admire that in an ancient for which we should
send a modern bard to Bedlam." It is hardly to be wondered at that his
translation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of
Vincent Bourne's _Jackdaw_ has.

Cowper's poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because
it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius.
It brought him one of the best of his correspondents, his cousin, Lady
Hesketh, and it gave various other people a reason for keeping his
letters. Had it not been for his fame as a poet his letters might never
have been published, and we should have missed one of the most exquisite
histories of small beer to be had outside the pages of Jane Austen. As a
letter-writer he does not, I think, stand in the same rank as Horace
Walpole and Charles Lamb. He has less wit and humour, and he mirrors less
of the world. His letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothing
charm. Cowper's occupations amuse one, while his nature delights one. His
letters, like Lamb's, have a soul of goodness--not of mere virtue, but of
goodness--and we know from his biography that in life he endured the
severest test to which a good nature can be subjected. His treatment of
Mrs. Unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its way
as Lamb's treatment of his sister. Mrs. Unwin, who had supported Cowper
through so many dark and suicidal hours, afterwards became palsied and
lost her mental faculties. "Her character," as Sir James Frazer writes in
the introduction to his charming selection from the letters,[2] "underwent
a great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness in
ministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought but for
his welfare, now became querulous and exacting, forgetful of him and
mindful, apparently, only of herself. Unable to move out of her chair
without help, or to walk across the room unless supported by two people,
her speech at times almost unintelligible, she deprived him of all his
wonted exercises, both bodily and mental, as she did not choose that he
should leave her for a moment, or even use a pen or a book, except when he
read to her. To these demands he responded with all the devotion of
gratitude and affection; he was assiduous in his attentions to her, but
the strain told heavily on his strength." To know all this does not modify
our opinion of Cowper's letters, except is so far as it strengthens it. It
helps us, however, to explain to ourselves why we love them. We love them
because, as surely as the writings of Shakespeare and Lamb, they are an
expression of that sort of heroic gentleness which can endure the fires of
the most devastating tragedy. Shakespeare finally revealed the strong
sweetness of his nature in _The Tempest_. Many people are inclined to
over-estimate _The Tempest_ as poetry simply because it gives them so
precious a clue to the character of his genius, and makes clear once more
that the grand source and material of poetry is the infinite tenderness of
the human heart. Cowper's letters are a tiny thing beside Shakespeare's
plays. But the same light falls on them. They have an eighteenth-century
restraint, and freedom from emotionalism and gush. But behind their
chronicle of trifles, their small fancies, their little vanities, one is
aware of an intensely loving and lovable personality. Cowper's poem, _To
Mary_, written to Mrs. Unwin in the days of her feebleness, is, to my
mind, made commonplace by the odious reiteration of "my Mary!" at the end
of every verse. Leave the "my Marys" out, however, and see how beautiful,
as well as moving, a poem it becomes. Cowper was at one time on the point
of marrying Mrs. Unwin, when an attack of madness prevented him. Later on
Lady Austen apparently wished to marry him. He had an extraordinary gift
for commanding the affections of those of both sexes who knew him. His
friendship with the poet Hayley, then a rocket fallen to earth, towards
the close of his life, reveals the lovableness of both men.

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

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

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion
that of all the English poets "the one who, but for a stroke of madness,
would have become our English Horace was William Cowper. He had the wit,"
he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness." As for the wit, I doubt
it. Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five words
long." Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was
never a master of the Horatian phrase. Such phrases of his--and there are
not many of them--as have passed into the common speech flash neither with
wit nor with wisdom. Take the best-known of them:

                        "The cups
  That cheer but not inebriate;"

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

  "I am monarch of all I survey;"

  "Regions Cæsar never knew;" and

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

This is lead for gold. Horace, it is true, must be judged as something
more than an inventor of golden tags. But no man can hope to succeed
Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pass
into golden tags. This, I know, is a matter not only of style but of
temper. But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs from
Horace. Horace mixed on easy terms with the world. He enjoyed the same
pleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties. He was a man of the
world above all other poets. Cowper was in comparison a man of the
parlour. His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat,
even if he had been neither mad nor pious. He was the very opposite of a
worldling. He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, "of a very
singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed
with." While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: "If I
was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and God forbid I
should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions with any saint in
Christendom." Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost
certainly have been a Deist. Cowper was very nearly a Methodist. The
difference, indeed, between them is fundamental. Horace was a pig, though
a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon.

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

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

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

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

Cowper's "versification" of the incident is vapid compared to this. The
incident of the viper and the kittens again, which he "versified" in _The
Colubriad_, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. His quiet
prose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which
was the deepest need of his nature. He made a full confession of himself
only to his friends. In one of his letters he compares himself, as he
rises in the morning to "an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the
ooze and mud of melancholy." In his most ambitious verse he is a frog
trying to blow himself out into a bull. It is the frog in him, not the
intended bull, that makes friends with us to-day.




VII.--A NOTE ON ELIZABETHAN PLAYS


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

If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans in
general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespeare
his claim would have been just. Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire's
vanity. He did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans as
a patron: he regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated by
the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb probably
looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in this as wide of
the mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise has made famous among
virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have
been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. Everyone goes to the
Elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long
succession of sleeping beauties. The average man retires disappointed from
the quest. He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be
disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man can
read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb's enthusiasm, however, who never
could have read them with his own.

One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse's books, he took down
Lamb's _Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets_, and, turning to Mr.
Gosse, said, "That book taught me more than any other book in the
world--that and the Bible." Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other
men's enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, the
Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb. He had not, as Lamb
had, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had the Elizabethan love of
phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave. Swinburne
had none of this rich taste in speech. He used words riotously, but he did
not use great words riotously. He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb was
carefully extravagant. He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a
beautiful noise. Nor was this the only point on which he was opposed to
Lamb and the Elizabethans. He differed fundamentally from them in his
attitude to the spectacle of life. His mood was the mood not of a
spectator but of a revivalist. He lectured his generation on the deadly
virtues. He was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than to
entertain the bar-parlour. Lamb himself was little enough of a formal
Puritan. He felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had been
clipped by the descendants of the Puritans. He did not scold, however, but
retired into the spectacle of another century. He wandered among old plays
like an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle.
Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much for
saying things. As a result, a great deal of his verse--and still more of
his prose--has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life.

His posthumous book on the Elizabethans is liveliest when it is most
argumentative. Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting the
Elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion. His
style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable for
intimate conversation. He writes in superlatives that give one the
impression that he is furious about something or other even when he is
being fairly sensible. His criticism has thus an air of being much more
insane than it is. His estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both far
more moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading. He out-Lambs
Lamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious
excess when he says of Brome:

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

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

It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the average
reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointed
in them. He must not expect to find them giants on the Shakespeare scale.
Better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetry
rather than for the genius of separate plays. Of most of them it may be
said that their age is greater than they--that they are glorified by their
period rather than glorify it. They are figures in a golden and teeming
landscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their noble
circumstances.

They are less great individually than in the mass. If they are giants, few
of them are giants who can stand on their own legs. They prop one another
up. There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that are
individually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by
Wordsworth is. The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious
possession than the plays. The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets
by destiny and dramatists by accident. It is conceivable that the greatest
of them apart from Shakespeare--Marlowe and Jonson and Webster and
Dekker--might have been greater writers if the English theatre had never
existed. Shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as in poetry.
Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. _The Alchemist_ is a brilliant
heavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another of
Jonson's songs. As for Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the
excellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy
which survive in his dialogue, his _Sweet Content_ is worth all the purely
dramatic work he ever wrote.

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

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

Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of
Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have
added to one's enjoyment of them. His _Chapman_ gives us a portrait of a
character. Several of the chapters in _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_,
however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than
the summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature. Even
Mr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in his _Life of Swinburne_,
described one of the chapters as "unreadable." The book as a whole is not
that. But it unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fog
rather than by the full light of day.




VIII.--THE OFFICE OF THE POETS


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

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

That they were right seems probable in view of the excellence of the poems
and songs that survive among a peasantry that has not been de-educated in
the schools. If the arts were not a natural inheritance of simple people,
neither the Irish love-songs collected by Dr. Douglas Hyde nor the Irish
music edited by Moore could have survived. I do not mean to suggest that
any art can be kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet,
the singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily alive
without the popular audience. Tolstoy's use of the unspoiled peasant as
the test of art may lead to absurdities, if carried too far. But at least
it is an error in the right direction. It is an affirmation of the fact
that every man is potentially an artist just as Christianity is an
affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially a saint. It is also
an affirmation of the fact that art, like religion, makes its appeal to
feelings which are shared by the mass of men rather than the feelings
which are the exclusive possession of the few. Where Tolstoy made his
chief mistake was in failing to see that the artistic sense, like the
religious sense, is something that, so far from being born perfect, even
in the unspoiled peasant, passes though stage after stage of labour and
experience on the way to perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed:
he is not an artist in the flower. He may pass all his life without ever
coming to flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universal
potentiality of beauty. Tolstoy's most astounding paradox came _to_
nothing more than this--that art exists, not for the hundreds of people
who are artists in name, but for the millions of people who are artists in
embryo.

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

Men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order to
liberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember things. Poetry
has a double origin in joy and utility. The "Thirty days hath September"
rhyme of the English child suggests the way in which men must have turned
to verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial
wisdom, of legend and narrative. Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from his _New
Study of English Poetry_, would deny the name of poetry to all verse that
is not descended from the choric dance. In my opinion it is better to
recognize the two lines, as of the father and the mother, in the pedigree
of poetry. We find abundant traces of them not only in Hesiod and Virgil,
but in Homer and Chaucer. The utility of form and the joy of form have in
all these poets become inextricably united. The objection to most of the
"free verse" that is being written to-day is that in form it is neither
delightful nor memorable. The truth is, the memorableness of the writings
of a man of genius becomes a part of their delight. If Pope is a
delightful writer it is not merely because he expressed interesting
opinions; it is because he threw most of the energies of his being into
the task of making them memorable and gave them a heightened vitality by
giving them rhymes. His satires and _The Rape of the Lock_ are, no doubt,
better poetry than the _Essay on Man_, because he poured into them a still
more vivid energy. But I doubt if there is any reasonable definition of
poetry which would exclude even Pope the "essayist" from the circle of the
poets. He was a puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they are
to-day, of all shapes and sizes.

Unfortunately, "poetry," like "religion," is a word that we are almost
bound to use in several senses. Sometimes we speak of "poetry" in
contradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry.
Similarly, "religion" would in one sense include the Abode of Love as
opposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the Abode of
Love as opposed to the religion of St. James. In a common-sense
classification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind of literature
written in verse or in rhythms akin to verse. Sir Thomas Browne may have
been more poetic than Erasmus Darwin, but in his best work he did not
write poetry. Erasmus Darwin may have been more prosaic than Sir Thomas
Browne, but in his most famous work he did not write prose. Sir Henry
Newbolt will not permit a classification of this kind. For him poetry is
an expression of intuitions--an emotional transfiguration of life--while
prose is the expression of a scientific fact or a judgment. I doubt if
this division is defensible. Everything that is literature is, in a sense,
poetry as opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a great
deal of work that is preponderantly the result of observation and
judgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly imaginative.
Poetry is a house of many mansions. It includes fine poetry and foolish
poetry, noble poetry and base poetry. The chief duty of criticism is the
praise--the infectious praise--of the greatest poetry. The critic has the
right to demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a noble
transfiguration of life. Swinburne transfigures life in _Anactoria_ no
less than Shakespeare transfigures it in _King Lear_. But Swinburne's is
an ignoble, Shakespeare's a noble transfiguration. Poetry may be divine or
devilish, just as religion may be. Literary criticism is so timid of being
accused of Puritanism that it is chary of admitting that there may be a
Heaven and a Hell of poetic genius as well as of religious genius. The
moralists go too far on the other side and are tempted to judge literature
by its morality rather than by its genius. It seems more reasonable to
conclude that it is possible to have a poet of genius who is nevertheless
a false poet, just as it is possible to have a prophet of genius who is
nevertheless a false prophet. The lover of literature will be interested
in them all, but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to the
fact that the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well as
aesthetically, great. If Shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of the
Elizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the greatest;
it is also because he had a soul incomparably noble and generous. Sir
Henry Newbolt deals in an interesting way with this ennoblement of life
that is the mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox
code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the
path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate
egotism.

The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treats
poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must be
able to meet the challenge to its right to exist. The extreme moralist
would deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to make
men more moral. The hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure. The
greatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of the
extreme moralist or of the hedonist. Poetry exists for the purpose of
delivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure. It exists for the
purpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this
scene of wonder, beauty and terror. It is consonant both with the world of
good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and an
enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth and
heaven. Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost always
fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away so
resolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula.
Poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by the
home-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world. But it must always use
the life we live as the material of its joyous vision. It is born of our
double attachment to Earth and to Paradise. There is no formula for
absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it in
the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. It is open to
question whether

  There is a fountain filled with blood

expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as

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

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

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

and declares:

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

Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold that here
Keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. But how noble is
Keats's dissatisfaction with himself! It is such noble dissatisfaction as
this that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs. Poetry and
religion--the impulse is very much the same. The rest is but a
parlour-game.




IX.--EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC


So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost forgotten
how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. It was not merely
that he was popular in England, where his satires, _The Love of Fame, the
Universal Passion_, are said to have made him £3,000. He was also a power
on the Continent. His _Night Thoughts_ was translated not only into all
the major languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. It was
adopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France. Even his
_Conjectures on Original Composition_, written in 1759 in the form of a
letter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that has
lasted till our own day. A new edition of the German translation was
published at Bonn so recently as 1910. In England there is no famous
author more assiduously neglected. Not so much as a line is quoted from
him in _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. I recently turned up a fairly
full anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has
room for Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not been
allowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. I look round my
own shelves, and they tell the same story. Small enough poets stand there
in shivering neglect. Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have all been
thought worth keeping. But not on the coldest, topmost shelf has space
been found for Young. He scarcely survives even in popular quotations. The
copy-books have perpetuated one line:

  Procrastination is the thief of time.

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

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

Readers who, after a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined to look
satirically on Young as a time-server, oily with the mediocrity of
self-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read his _Conjectures on
Original Composition_ for the first time. It is a bold and masculine essay
on literary criticism, written in a style of quite brilliant, if
old-fashioned, rhetoric. Mrs. Thrale said of it: "In the _Conjectures upon
Original Composition_ ... we shall perhaps read the wittiest piece of
prose our whole language has to boast; yet from its over-twinkling, it
seems too little gazed at and too little admired perhaps." This is an
exaggerated estimate. Dr. Johnson, who heard Young read the _Conjectures_
at Richardson's house, said that "he was surprised to find Young receive
as novelties what he thought very common maxims." If one tempers Mrs.
Thrale's enthusiasms and Dr. Johnson's scorn, one will have a fairly just
idea of the quality of Young's book.

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

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

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

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

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

The truth is, the man of letters must in some way reconcile himself to the
paradox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival of the ancients.
Young is optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to surpass them.
In the mechanic arts, he complains, men are always attempting to go beyond
their predecessors; in the liberal arts, they merely try to follow them.
The analogy between the continuous advance of science and a possible
continuous advance in literature is perhaps, a misleading one. Professor
Gilbert Murray, in _Religio Grammatici_, bases much of his argument on a
denial that such an analogy should be drawn. Literary genius cannot be
bequeathed and added to as a scientific discovery can. The modern poet
does not stand on Shakespeare's shoulders as the modern astronomer stands
on Galileo's shoulders. Scientific discovery is progressive. Literary
genius, like religious genius, is a miracle less dependent on time. None
the less, we may reasonably believe that literature, like science, has
ever new worlds to conquer--that, even if Æschylus and Shakespeare cannot
be surpassed, names as great as theirs may one day be added to the roll of
literary fame. And this will be possible only if men in each generation
are determined, in the words of Goldsmith, "bravely to shake off
admiration, and, undazzled by the splendour of another's reputation, to
chalk out a path to fame for themselves, and boldly cultivate untried
experiment." Goldsmith wrote these words in _The Bee_ in the same year in
which Young's _Conjectures_ was published. I feel tolerably certain that
he wrote them as a result of reading Young's work. The reaction against
traditionalism, however, was gathering general force by this time, and the
desire to be original was beginning to oust the desire to copy. Both
Young's and Goldsmith's essays are exceedingly interesting as
anticipations of the romantic movement. Young was a true romantic when he
wrote that Nature "brings us into the world all Originals--no two faces,
no two minds, are just alike; but all bear evident marks of separation on
them. Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we are Copies?" Genius, he
thinks, is commoner than is sometimes supposed, if we would make use of
it. His book is a plea for giving genius its head. He wants to see the
modern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil, staking out a claim
in the perfectly virgin field of his own experience. He cannot teach you
to be a man of genius; he could not even teach himself to be one. But at
least he lays down many of the right rules for the use of genius. His book
marks a most interesting stage in the development of English literary
criticism.




X.--GRAY AND COLLINS


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

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

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

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

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

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

We have only to compare these lines with Claudio's terrible speech about
death in _Measure for Measure_ to see the difference between pretence and
passion in literature. Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew
about fear. Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob
off a disease on us as an accomplishment. What perpetually delights us in
the _Ode to Evening_ is that here at least Collins can tell the truth
without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the
world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of
personifications, but they have been transmuted by his emotion into
imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up
his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon
expressing any other man's experiences but his own when he described how
the

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

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

Assuredly Gray, though he was as fastidious in his appetites as Collins
was wild, cannot be called in as a witness to prove the Castle of
Indolence a happy place. "Low spirits," he wrote, when he was still an
undergraduate, "are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me,
go to bed with me, make journeys and return as I do; nay, and pay visits,
and will even affect to be jocose, and force a feeble laugh with me." The
end of the sentence shows (as do his letters, indeed, and his verses on
the drowning of Horace Walpole's cat) that his indolent melancholy was not
without its compensations. He was a wit, an observer of himself and the
world about him, a man who wrote letters that have the genius of the
essay. Further, he was Horace Walpole's friend, and (while his father had
a devil in him) his mother and his aunts made a circle of quiet tenderness
into which he could always retire. "I do not remember," Mr. Gosse has said
of Gray, "that the history of literature presents us with the memoirs of
any other poet favoured by nature with so many aunts as Gray possessed."
This delicious sentence contains an important criticism of Gray. Gray was
a poet of the sheltered life. His genius was shy and retiring. He had no
ambition to thrust himself upon the world. He kept himself to himself, as
the saying is. He published the _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_ in 1751
only because the editors of the _Magazine of Magazines_ had got hold of a
copy and Gray was afraid that they would publish it first. How lethargic a
poet Gray was may be gathered from the fact that he began the _Elegy_ as
far back as 1746--Mason says it was begun in August, 1742--and did not
finish it until June 12, 1750. Probably there is no other short poem in
English literature which was brooded over for so many seasons. Nor was
there ever a greater justification for patient brooding. Gray in this poem
liberated the English imagination after half a century of prose and
rhetoric. He restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an
individual soul. Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at least,
assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into English
literature. But poetic diction was in use long before Gray. He is
remarkable among English poets, not for having succumbed to poetic
diction, but for having triumphed over it. It is poetic feeling, not
poetic diction, that distinguishes him from the mass of eighteenth-century
writers. It is an interesting coincidence that Gray and Collins should
have brought about a poetic revival by the rediscovery of the beauty of
evening, just as Mr. Yeats and "A.E." brought about a poetic revival in
our own day by the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight. Both schools of
poetry (if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillness
of the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from the
tyrannical prose of common day. There have been critics, including Matthew
Arnold, who have denied that the _Elegy_ is the greatest of Gray's poems.
This, I think, can only be because they have been unable to see the poetry
for the quotations. No other poem that Gray ever wrote was a miracle. _The
Bard_ is a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric. But the _Elegy_ is more
than this. It is an autobiography and the creation of a world for the
hearts of men. Here Gray delivers the secret doctrine of the poets. Here
he escapes out of the eighteenth century into immortality. One realizes
what an effort it must have been to rise above his century when one reads
an earlier version of some of his most famous lines:

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

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

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

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

One of the so-called mysteries of literature is the fact that Gray, having
written so greatly, should have written so little. He spoke of himself as
a "shrimp of an author," and expressed the fear that his works might be
mistaken for those of "a pismire or a flea." But to make a mystery of the
indolence of a rather timid, idle, and unadventurous scholar, who was
blessed with more fastidiousness than passion, is absurd. To say perfectly
once and for all what one has to say is surely as fine an achievement as
to keep restlessly trying to say it a thousand times over. Gray was no
blabber. It is said that he did not even let his mother and his aunts know
that he wrote poetry. He lacked boldness, volubility and vital energy. He
stood aside from life. He would not even take money from his publishers
for his poetry. No wonder that he earned the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who
said of him to Boswell, "Sir, he was dull in his company, dull in his
closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many
think him great." Luckily, Gray's reserve tempted him into his own heart
and into external nature for safety and consolation. Johnson could see in
him only a "mechanical poet." To most of us he seems the first natural
poet in modern literature.




XI.--ASPECTS OF SHELLEY


(1) THE CHARACTER HALF-COMIC

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

Godwin is related to have said that "Shelley was so beautiful, it was a
pity he was so wicked." I doubt if there is a single literate person in
the world to-day who would apply the word "wicked" to Shelley. It is said
that Browning, who had begun as so ardent a worshipper, never felt the
same regard for Shelley after reading the full story of his desertion of
Harriet Westbrook and her suicide. But Browning did not know the full
story. No one of us knows the full story. On the face of it, it looks a
peculiarly atrocious thing to desert a wife at a time when she is about to
become a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of
£1,000 a year to make an annual allowance of only £200 to a deserted wife
and her two children. Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love.
A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in
order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. At the end of
three years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides this, she had an
intolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated. Harriet's sister, it is
suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops
instead of su

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