Platform Monologues
by T. G. Tucker · English · Gutenberg #18969 · 333,752 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Platform Monologues
Author: T. G. Tucker
Release date: August 2, 2006 [eBook #18969]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLATFORM MONOLOGUES ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the
Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe at
http://dp.rastko.net
PLATFORM
MONOLOGUES
By
T. G. TUCKER
LITT.D. (CAMB.); HON. LITT.D. (DUBLIN)
Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Melbourne
MELBOURNE
THOMAS C. LOTHIAN
1914
_PRINTED IN ENGLAND_
Copyright.
First Edition May, 1914.
PREFACE
The following monologues were given as public addresses, mostly to
semi-academical audiences, and no alteration has been made in their
form. Their common object has been to plead the cause of literary study
at a time when that study is being depreciated and discouraged. But
along with the general plea must go some indication that literature can
be studied as well as read. Hence some of the articles attempt--what
must always be a difficult task--the crystallizing of the salient
principles of literary judgment.
The present collection has been made because the publisher believes that
a sufficiently large number of intelligent persons will be interested in
reading it. On the whole that appears to be at least as good a reason as
any other for printing a book.
The addresses on "The Supreme Literary Gift," "The Making of a
Shakespeare," and "Literature and Life," have appeared previously as
separate brochures. Those on "Two Successors of Tennyson" and "Hebraism
and Hellenism" were printed in the Melbourne _Argus_ at the time of
their delivery, and are here reproduced by kind permission of that
paper. The talk upon "The Future of Poetry" has not hitherto appeared in
print.
Though circumstances have prevented any development of the powers and
work of the two "Successors of Tennyson," there is nothing either in the
criticism of those writers or in the principles applied thereto which
seems to call for any modification at this date. For the rest, it is
hoped that the lecture will be read in the light of the facts as they
were at the time of its delivery.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 5
THE SUPREME LITERARY GIFT 9
HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM 53
THE PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM, APPLIED
TO TWO SUCCESSORS OF TENNYSON 95
THE MAKING OF A SHAKESPEARE 147
LITERATURE AND LIFE 191
THE FUTURE OF POETRY 219
The Supreme Literary Gift
When we have been reading some transcendent passage in one of the
world's masterpieces we experience that mental sensation which Longinus
declares to be the test of true sublimity, to wit, our mind "undergoes a
kind of proud elation and delight, as if it had itself begotten the
thing we read." We are disposed by such literature very much as we are
disposed by the Sistine Madonna or before the Aphrodite of Melos. Things
like these exert a sort of overmastering power upon us. Our craving for
perfection, for ideal beauty, is for once wholly gratified. Our spirit
glows with an intense and complete satisfaction. It would build itself a
tabernacle on the spot, for it recognizes that it is good to be there.
We do not analyse, we do not criticize, we simply deliver over our souls
to a proud elation and delight. Nay, at the moment when we are in the
midst of such spontaneous and exquisite enjoyment, we should, in all
likelihood, resent any attempt to make us realize exactly _why_ this
particular creation of art so fills up our souls down to the last cranny
of satisfaction while another stops short of that supreme effect.
And yet, afterwards, when we are meditating upon this strange potency of
a poem or a building or a statue, or when we are trying to communicate
to others the feeling of its charm, do we not find ourselves
importunately asking wherein lies the secret of great art? And, in the
case of literature, we think it at such times no desecration of our
delight to put a passage of Shakespeare or of Milton beside a passage of
Homer, of AEschylus, or of Dante, an essay of Lamb beside a chapter of
Heine, a lyric of Burns by one of Shelley, and to seek for some common
measure of their excellence.
Suppose that, in these more reflective moments, we can come near to some
explanation; suppose we can realize what it is that these supreme
writers alone achieve; then, when we read again, the very perfection of
their achievement springs forward and comes home to us with a still
keener delight. We feel all we felt before, but we enjoy it more,
because we understand in some degree why we feel it. Say what we will,
we are never really content with an admiration which cannot render to
itself a reason. What are all the thousand works of literary criticism
called forth by, unless it be by that perpetual question which nags for
an answer in all intelligent minds, the question "What is the gift
which, behind all mere diction, behind all cadence and rhythm and rhyme,
behind all mere lucidity, behind all mere intellect, and behind all
variety of subject matter, makes writing everlastingly fresh, admirable,
a thing of beauty and a joy for ever"?
Alas! we cannot, indeed, necessarily hope to get that gift into our own
power because we can perceive it in the great masters. According to the
Apostle, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and
cometh down from the Father of lights." "Their vigour is of the fire and
their origin is celestial," says the pagan. The _coelestis origo_ is
unpurchasable. Nevertheless, even for the ordinary being who aspires
himself to write, there is this practical benefit to be derived from an
insight into the truth--that he will know in what the supreme gift does
consist. He will not delude himself into fancying that it means merely
grammatical accuracy, or a command of words, or tricks of phrase, or a
faculty for rhyming, or logical precision, or any of those other
commonplace qualities and dexterities which are almost universally
attainable.
He will at least aim at the right thing, and, even if he fails, his work
will be all the higher for that aim.
* * * * *
I do not propose to speak in general of great books, but only of great
literature. Literature proper is not simply writing. You may tell in
writing the most important and unimpeachable truths concerning science
and history, concerning nature and man, without being in the least
literary. You may argue and teach and describe in books which are of
immense vogue and repute, without pretending to be a figure in
literature. But, on the other hand, you may be very wrong; logically,
scientifically, historically, ethically altogether wrong; and yet you
may exercise an irresistible literary fascination over your own
generation and all that follow. Charles Lamb speaks disdainfully of
books which are no books, things in books' clothing. He had in mind Adam
Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, essays on population, treatises on moral
philosophy, and so forth. He meant that such works are works, but no
literature. Mill's _Logic_, geographical descriptions, guidebooks, the
_Origin of Species_, whatever may be the value of such volumes for
thought or knowledge, they are not literature. There is only one test to
apply to such books as those. If their statements are true, if their
reasoning is accurate, if their exposition is clear, such works are good
of their kind. Nevertheless, it is scarcely literary judgment which
judges them. You might as well apply "architectural" criticism to our
rows of tin-roofed cottages or to the average warehouse or wool-store or
tramshed. These are buildings, but they are not architecture.
Meanwhile Herodotus, with all his superstitions, his credulity and
mistakes; Plato, with all his blunders in elementary logic; Homer,
with all his naive ignorance of science and the wide world; Dante,
despite his cramped outlook; Milton, in spite of his perverse
theologizing--these and their like are, and will always be, literature.
No matter if Carlyle's _French Revolution_ be in reality as far from
the literal truth as the work of Froude, yet Carlyle and Froude are
literature, along with Herodotus and Livy and Froissart, while the most
scrupulously exact of chronicles may be but books.
The charm of supreme literature is independent of its date or country.
The current literary taste varies, we know, at different periods and in
different places. There are successive fashions and schools of
literature and literary principle--an Attic, an Alexandrian, an
Augustan, a Renaissance Italian, an Elizabethan, a Louis Quatorze, a
Queen Anne, a nineteenth century Romantic. And yet from each and all of
these there will stand out one or two writers, sometimes more, whom we
have enthroned in the literary Pantheon, and whose place there among the
gods seems only to grow the more assured as time goes on.
Now, what is it that is left, the common _residuum_, to all these
literary masters; to Homer, Sappho, AEschylus, Plato, Theocritus,
Juvenal; to Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Moliere; to Goethe, Shelley,
Victor Hugo, Carlyle, in spite of all their manifest differences in
subject, and style, in ideas and ideals, in range of thought and
knowledge? When we have got behind all the varying and often
contradictory criticism of their several epochs; when we have stripped
away the characteristics which mark a special era; what is there
essentially and everlastingly good--in the true sense "classic"--in
virtue of which these particular writers renew for themselves with every
generation the suffrages of understanding humanity? If there is a
"survival of the fittest" anywhere, it is assuredly in art, and
especially in the art of literature. Seeing then that writer is so
unlike to writer, both in what he says and the way in which he says it,
what is that cardinal literary virtue, that quintessential _x_, in
virtue of which both alike are masters in their craft?
The answer is very elusive. Let us seek it, in the Socratic spirit,
together.
* * * * *
But first let me remind you that in order to find the answer, the seeker
must possess both literary cultivation and also breadth of mind. Unless
we have read widely in literature of many sorts and kinds; unless we
have developed a generous catholicity of taste and appreciation, a
many-sidedness of sympathy and interest; unless we have corrected our
natural idiosyncrasies by what Matthew Arnold, after Goethe, calls a
"harmonious expansion of all our powers," we cannot see clearly; we
cannot distinguish between the impressions which we derive from literary
power and art, and the impressions which we derive from something else
to which we happen to be partial, but which is quite irrelevant to the
question. Any one who belongs to a particular "school," whether of style
or thought; any one who approaches literature with a spirit overweighted
by political bias, scientific bias, or religious bias, is disqualified.
He cannot hope to stand equally away from, or equally near to, Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, and, after setting aside their elements
of disagreement, distinguish and admire that which is definitely and for
ever admirable in their creations. Do we lack sympathy with the tragic
feeling? Do we shrink from it? Then we can be no judges of tragic art,
of _King Lear_ or the _OEdipus_. Have we no sense of humour, or only a
gross and vulgar sense of humour? Then we can be no judges of the
writings of Cervantes or of Sterne. Are we incapable of ardent idealism?
Then we cannot be just to Shelley. Is a capacity for profound reverence
and adoration not ours? Then we must not claim to say the last word on
Dante. The uncongenial subject prevents us from feeling with the writer,
and we therefore fancy a defect of literary power or charm in him, while
the defect is all the time in ourselves. We will, for the moment,
suppose ourselves to be the ideal critics. And let us first see what the
supreme literary gift is _not_.
* * * * *
We may admit that, in all literature which the world will not willingly
let die, there must be expressed something worth expressing. The matter
must be, in some way, of interest. But it appears to signify little
_how_ it interests. It may be enlightening, elevating, or inspiriting:
it may be profoundly touching: it may be of a fine or gracious sentiment
or fancy: it may be startling: it may be simply entertaining. Some
people, perhaps, remembering certain French and other fiction, would say
that it may even be deliberately wicked. That I do not believe. On the
contrary, it is much to the credit of a world which is declared to be so
rotten with original sin, that deliberately wicked writing finds so
little lasting favour with it. It does gladly let such writing die,
however well written. Interest fails, and admiration of the literary
skill is speedily swallowed up in disgust. Moreover it is seldom that
the true possessor of the supreme literary gift turns it to base ends.
Consummate literature, we have admitted, must be interesting. It would
be truer to say that the possessor of the supreme literary gift will
_make_ his matter interest us, however light or serious, however literal
or imaginative, it may be. But, when once of interest, the matter may be
anything you will.
The supreme literary gift, for example, does not imply profundity or
originality of thought. Homer and Chaucer are not deep thinkers, nor is
Herodotus or Virgil, Burns, Keats, or Tennyson. There need be nothing
philosophically epoch-making about a literary creation which is destined
to be immortal. Nor yet does the supreme literary gift necessarily imply
extraordinary depth of emotion. Of the writers just named Burns and
Keats perhaps have this capacity, but the rest--including
Tennyson--reveal little of it. We do not find burning passion to be a
distinct feature in Plato, in Milton, in Goethe, or in Matthew Arnold,
while it is emphatic in Sappho, in Byron, and in Shelley. Again, the
supreme literary gift does not imply any special expression of truth or
instruction, moral, religious or other. Homer and Dante cannot both be
right. If Homer is right, then Dante is lamentably wrong; and if Dante
is right, Goethe is unforgivably wrong. Wordsworth cannot be harmonized
with Shelley. Milton was a Puritan, Keats a neo-pagan. In the domain of
literal and historical truth what becomes of _Gulliver's Travels_, or
Scott's novels, or, for the matter of that, _Paradise Lost_?
All this is self-evident. Yet, if we do not ask our superlative writers
to be heaven-sent teachers, to be prophets, to be discoverers, what do
we ask of them? Is it to write in a particular style, in a given lucid
style, a given figurative style, or a given dignified style? Nay, it is
only very mediocre writers who could obey such precepts. Every supreme
writer has his own style, inalienable and inimitable, which is as much a
part of him as his own soul, the look in his eyes, or his tones of
voice. Bethink yourselves of Carlyle, how his abrupt, crabbed, but
withal sinewy and picturesque, prose compares with the pure crystalline
sentences of Cardinal Newman, and how these again compare with the
quaintly and pathetically humorous chat, the idealized talk of Charles
Lamb. Think how easy it is to recognize a line of Shakespeare, of
Milton, or of Wordsworth, almost by the ear; how audibly they are
stamped with the character of their creator. There are, in fact, exactly
as many styles as there are superlative writers. Indeed this
individuality of style is the outward and visible sign of their inward
and spiritual literary gift, which is the gift to express--_oneself_.
* * * * *
Then what does the superlative writer do? The fact is that literature in
the proper sense is an art, as much an art as painting or sculpture or
music. The supreme masters in literature are artists, and the consensus
of the world, though unconsciously, comes to judge them simply as
such--not as thinkers or teachers, sages or prophets. They are artists.
And what is the province of art? After all the definitions and
discussions are exhausted, we are, I believe, brought down to one solid
answer, the answer of Goethe, "art is only the giving of shape and
form." That is to say, the object of art, whether in words or colours or
shapes or sounds, is simply to give expression to a conception, to a
thought, a feeling, an imagined picture which exists in the mind of the
artist. His aim is to communicate it truly, wholly, perfectly to the
minds of his fellow men, by one of the only two possible channels. By
means of art mind can communicate itself to mind either through the eyes
or through the ears; by spoken words and music through the ears, by
painting and sculpture and written words through the eyes.
I need not dwell upon the thought what a wonderful thing this
communication is, whereby the pictures and feelings existing in one
brain are flashed upon another brain. Nor need I elaborate the point
that this communication is rarely absolute, rarely even adequate. To
make people understand, even those who know us best, how difficult that
is!
The Greek sculptor Praxiteles conceives a human form of perfect beauty,
posed in an attitude of perfect grace, wearing an expression of perfect
charm and serenity. It exists but as a picture in his brain; but he
takes marble and hews it and chisels it till there stands visible and
unmistakable before us his very conception. He has given body and form
to his imagination. Perfect artist as he is, he communicates with
absolute exactness his mental picture to all the world of them who
behold his work.
The Italian painter Raphael conceives a woman of infinite loveliness and
purity and tenderness to represent the mother of Christ. How are we to
be sharers in that conception? He takes brushes and paint, and there
grows upon his canvas the Sistine Madonna, that picture of such mystic
potency, which to see at Dresden is never to forget. He stamps upon our
minds the very image and the very feeling which were upon his own.
The great musician hears imaginary sounds and harmonies within his
brain, proceeding from or accompanying emotions of divers kinds. He
forthwith, by arrangements and combinations of musical notes, their
times and qualities, communicates to us also those sounds and harmonies;
he reproduces in us those same emotions.
Do not say that it is the function of an artist to communicate to us
beautiful things or ugly things, things graceful or things profound,
things of pleasure or things of grief. Say rather, simply, it is his
function, as artist, to communicate--perfectly, absolutely--whatsoever
he seeks to communicate, in its form, with its feeling, in its mood;
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of his conception
and its atmosphere. No doubt the thing of beauty, the profound thing,
the thing of joy, is most delightful for the spectator to contemplate;
to the artist himself it is apt to be most inspiring, and therefore art
seems to be concerned mainly with beauty and joy. But that is the only
reason. As artist, his function is simply to body forth, and present to
other minds, whatever he conceives, and he is consummate artist just in
proportion as he secures that end.
Now take the literary artist. He in his turn conceives a thought, or
picture of the imagination or fancy. A feeling may come over him with a
gentle grace, a subtle influence, an overmastering passion. A mood--a
state of soul--may colour all his view, tinging it with some haunting
melancholy or irradiating his whole world till it seems a Paradise. How
is he to communicate to us this thought, this picture, this fancy, the
grace and subtlety and passion, the precise hues of his mood for
sombreness or radiancy? Well, he takes words, and by selecting them, by
combining them, by harmonizing them with a master's hand, he sets
before us certain magic phrases wrought into a song, an ode, an elegy,
or whatsoever form of creation is most apt and true, and he makes us see
just what he sees and feel just what he feels, printing it all upon our
own brains and hearts.
In this then must lie the essence of the literary gift--in the power of
a writer to express himself, to communicate vividly, without mistiness
of contents or outline, his own spirit and vision. I repeat that it is
irrelevant whether what he sees and feels be beautiful or not, joyful or
not, profound or not, even true or not. Nor does it matter either what
his style may be. He is a master in the art of writing when he can make
his own mind, so to speak, entirely visible or audible to us, when he
can express what his inward eye beholds in such terms that we can behold
it in the same shape and in the same light--if, for example, when he
sees a thing in "the light which never was on sea or land, the
consecration and the poet's dream," he can make us also see it in that
faery light.
This is no such easy thing. The fact that there are a hundred thousand
words in the English dictionary does not make it easier. It is not
those who know the most words that can necessarily best express
themselves. Neither is it true that, because feeling is real, it can
therefore speak. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh"
has no such sense as that. Many and many a fine thought is lost to the
world, and all the value of many a deep emotion, because he who thinks
or feels cannot voice himself, any more than you or I can necessarily
take a brush and paint, like Turner, the unspeakable glories of a sunset
which our eyes and soul can nevertheless appreciate to the very full.
"What makes a poet?" says Goethe, and he replies, "A heart brimful of
some noble passion." No doubt the noble passion must be there _before_ a
man can be a poet, but equally beyond doubt the passion alone cannot
make him one. To say that a heart full of the ardour of religion, of
love, of hope, of sorrow or joy, can always express its ardour, is an
assertion against which thousands of poor inarticulate human beings
would rise in protest. It is simply contrary to experience. There is
many a man and woman besides Wordsworth to whom "the meanest flower that
blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"; but,
unlike Wordsworth, no sooner do these less gifted men and women attempt
to express one such thought and impart it to others, than lo! the subtle
thought evades them and is gone. They can give it no embodiment in
language. Their attempt ends in words which they know to be obscure,
cold, trivial, hopelessly ineffectual.
* * * * *
How unevenly distributed is this power of expression! Let us begin as
low in the scale of verbal art as you choose. Let two observers chance
to see some previously unknown plant, with novel leaf and flower and
perfume. If they could paint the leaf and flower, well and good; but ask
each separately to communicate to you in words a mental picture of that
plant. Observe how, with equal education in the matter of language, the
one will describe you the forms and colours and fragrance in apt and
expressive terms and comparisons, which seem to paint it before your
eyes. The other plods and halts and fails, and leaves no clear
impression. If to the one the flower is just red and pointed, to the
other it is, perhaps, a tongue of flame. The one has but literal facts
to tell, the other is full of imagination and similitude.
Take a step higher. Have you seen and heard the lark, and studied his
movements and his song aloft in the sky of Europe? Can you express
simply what you then saw and heard, so that all who have witnessed the
same can see and feel it over again? How many words would you take, and
how vivid might your picture be? Then compare your effort with Shelley's
famous
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun!
Another step, and we come to a region no longer of outward description,
but of thought, of feeling, of delicate fancy, of soaring imagination.
I suppose thousands upon thousands of persons possessed of what our
great-grandfathers used to call "sensibility," have felt at eventide,
when alone in certain spots, a kind of subduing awe, as if some great
spirit-existence pervading all nature were laying a solemn hush upon
the world. In various degrees one here and one there can express that
feeling, but how many can express it as simply and yet effectually as
Wordsworth does:--
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder--everlastingly!
* * * * *
To express and body forth: there is room for the manifestation of this
prime literary gift in all sort of subjects. It may be shown in a fable
of AEsop, in _Robinson Crusoe_, in a children's story, in Mark Twain's
boyish experiences on the Mississippi, in a Barrack-room Ballad of
Rudyard Kipling, in Thackeray's _Esmond_, in Shelley's _Ode to a
Skylark_, in either a comedy of Shakespeare or his _Hamlet_, in a sonnet
of Dante's _Vita Nuova_ or in his _Inferno_. AEsop's communication of his
point of view is final. So is Defoe's communication of mental pictures.
So is Mark Twain's of that Mississippi pilotage. So is Kipling's in his
_Drums of the Fore and Aft_, or his _Mandalay_. These men are all
admirable literary artists in their own domains. Each fulfils all that
is demanded of his art. If we could keep this fact clearly before us,
our judgments of writers might be more discriminating. Do we think
Kipling possessed of an extraordinary degree of the literary gift? Who
could think otherwise, seeing that he can effect exactly what he sets
out to effect by means of words? His scenes and his thoughts--such as
they are--start forth living before us. But do we then think a Kipling
proved equal to a Shakespeare in sheer excellence of his gift? That is
another question. The things which Shakespeare realizes and expresses
demand powers of realization and expression more far-reaching and more
subtle than are required by those things to which a Kipling gives shape
and form. In Shakespeare are multitudes of deep and rare reflections,
vivid imaginings, penetrations of sympathy and insight, and all so
clearly crystallized, with such apparent ease, that they become ours at
once, as if they were natural to us. His communication of the most
subtle states of mind is complete. But in a Kipling we cannot pretend
that there is infinite subtlety and elusiveness, that there is a cosmic
condensing of a whole nebula of spiritual experience. His task was less
hard.
And what then of Homer? Can we call _his_ task a difficult one? Is he,
too, full of infinitely delicate or far-reaching thoughts and feelings?
No. But his aim is to reproduce all the freshness and breeziness of a
fresh and breezy atmosphere, to make us live again amid all that
simple wholesome strenuousness of the childhood of the western world.
That, too, is exceedingly elusive, and almost impossible to
catch--immeasurably more difficult than all those coarsely, if
strenuously, marked characteristics of the British soldier and other
bold figures on the canvas of Kipling.
That, I believe, is the right attitude to assume, when we endeavour to
measure the literary power of one writer against that of another--if we
must do such a thing at all. It is not the morality or non-morality, the
importance or non-importance, the beauty or ugliness, inherent in what
is said, which determine the degree of the literary gift. It is rather
the relative elusiveness of the thing said, the difficulty of
surrounding it, of condensing it, of giving it perfect body, and
communicating it in that body. And that is why it is an error to put,
let us say Gray, in the foremost rank of literary artists. How well he
does this thing! But was it, after all, so transcendently difficult to
do?
The vaguer, the deeper, the more comprehensive, the subtler the thought
or feeling or fancy, the greater demand is there upon the literary
power. One can say no more. It is as in sculpture, which finds it
infinitely easier to give embodiment to straining muscles and an
agonized face than to carve a statue in perfect restful beauty and with
a countenance of benign and strong tranquillity.
Ask a hundred people to write about the spring--simply to describe it
with its sights and sounds and odours--and most of them can perform the
task more or less well. Ask them to bring home the physical and
emotional influence of spring, and many of those who feel that influence
most keenly will give up the task. And then comes Chaucer with his few
touches, his "blissful briddes" and "fressche flowres," and tells us how
"full is my heart of revel and solace," and behold! the passage breathes
to the reader's heart the very spirit of youth and springtide.
A simple statement of a simple fact calls for no "literary" gift. A
description of externals demands some, but not often a great, degree of
it. A thought or feeling, which is suggested by the fact or object, may
require either little or much in proportion as the thought or feeling is
fine and fugitive. But a _mood_ induced by the thought or feeling
generally demands the gift in its highest degree. "A primrose by the
river's brim," whether "a yellow primrose 'tis to him," or a
dicotyledon, may be outwardly described more and less well; but we
require for that purpose only the rudiments of literary prose. But,
next, there is the pure and appealing beauty of the flower; and that
evokes gathering recognitions of the beauty of nature and its grace to
us. Then upon this there steals a feeling of exhilaration in the glad
and gay atmosphere of the re-awakening world; and this, again, may open
into a whole vista of recollections far back from childhood; and so the
result may be one of many moods. We have all this time been brought up a
sort of gradient of literary difficulty; and he is the supreme of
supreme literary artists who can body forth the most subtle of all these
thoughts and moods.
Let me illustrate. Take for the purpose of contrast this passage of
purely external description from Cowper:--
Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcerned
The cheerful haunts of man, to wield the axe
And drive the wedge in yonder forest drear,
From morn to eve his solitary task.
Shaggy and lean and shrewd, with pointed ears
And tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur,
His dog attends him. Close behind his heel
Now creeps he slow, and now with many a frisk,
Wide-scampering, snatches up the drifted snow
With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout:
Then shakes his powdered coat and barks for joy--
and so forth. There you have clear and faithful observation, clearly and
faithfully reproduced. I do not want to depreciate the amount of
literary skill necessary for putting those right words in their right
places. Nevertheless I cannot bring myself to think it particularly
remarkable. The picture is distinct, but it is of the eye alone; it
involves nothing in the way of imagination, nothing in the way of subtle
feeling blending with the sight in the brain of the writer. Next take a
stanza from Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_:--
So, some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,
Before the roses and the longest day--
When garden walks and all the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And chestnut flowers are strewn--
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
"_The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I._"
Now to me that passage expresses something immeasurably more difficult
of expression. The whole tone of the environment is reproduced in a few
touches. We not only realize the scene, but we also feel in its
description the same mood of subtle pensiveness, with its flavour of
melancholy, in which the writer saw and felt it. For myself I know that
the passage brings back to me, exactly and perfectly, not only a mental
picture, but also a frame of mind, which I can recognize across the
years which now separate me from those English "garden walks and all the
grassy floor" strewn with "blossoms red and white of fallen May and
chestnut flowers."
If you have never experienced precisely that frame of mind, you cannot,
of course, appreciate the literary power, any more than you can
appreciate Shelley's all-exquisite
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments--
unless you have pondered the mystery of life and eternity somewhat as he
had done.
Yes! that must be premised all through. You must have had your own mood
of profound world-weariness, before you can appreciate the utter
completeness of the cry of Beatrice Cenci:--
"Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world,
The wide, gray, lampless, deep unpeopled world!"
The highest attainment then of literary power is the "exquisite
expression of exquisite--that is to say, rarely intense or
subtle--impressions." The language, said Wordsworth, should be the
"incarnation of the thought." The highest gift of the writer is to make
his words and their combinations not clever, not dazzling, not merely
lucid, but to make them, by their meanings, their associations, and
their musical effects, exactly reproduce what he thinks and sees and
feels, just in the special light in which he thinks and sees and feels
it.
This involves, of course, a perpetual struggle between thought and
language. Language is for ever striving to overtake thought and feeling.
Browning indeed may say:--
Perceptions whole, like that he sought
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language.
But in this we must not acquiesce. Browning himself, indeed, however
immense his range of sympathies, however extraordinary his dramatic
insight, falls far short in the purely literary gift. He is not a master
of language as Shakespeare was or as Tennyson was. Extremist votaries of
Browning are accustomed to say either that he is not obscure at all, or
else that his obscurities are inseparable from the thoughts. We must not
admit this latter plea until we are prepared to call Isaiah and
Shakespeare shallower than Browning.
The transcendent literary artist is always compelling language to
express what it had seemed incapable of expressing. Indeed the "advance
of literature" often means no more than a greater degree of success in
giving recognizable shape to the hitherto vague and elusive, in
communicating what was supposed to be incommunicable. Often, when we
say that such and such a writer gives us "new glimpses," or "opens up
new thoughts," it only means that he has discovered how to express such
thoughts, so that we can realize and recognize them. He is not an
inventor, but a revealer.
And the highest revealer is the great poet. Poetry is language and
music. Musicians tell us that music is intended to impart what language
cannot express--something unspeakably more delicate, more subtle,
emotionally more powerfully or more tranquillizing. But music must not
aim at too much. It cannot really describe action or define thoughts; it
can only translate feelings and moods into sounds. Now just as music is
always advancing, always endeavouring to fulfil more perfectly the
functions of art--which are, as I have said, to communicate the spirit
of one human being to his fellows--so language also is ever struggling
to enlarge its powers and to do what musicians tell us music alone can
do. Language, too, must translate feeling, and moods, but into words. It
in a sense invades the region of music. And herein lies the
justification--the necessity--for poetry, or for a prose which is
virtually poetry in its language and movement and imagination. Poetry,
in that broad sense, must always be the literary form for the expression
of that which is most difficult to express, I mean of anything which is
pervaded by a rare exaltation and passion of feeling, or by a delicate
grace and charm.
* * * * *
Some people pretend to think that poetry is a wholly artificial thing;
that it is merely a pleasing trick, when it is not an irritating trick,
with language. Well, alas! it is quite natural that many stern spirits
should be irritated by verses; for it is entirely true that nine-tenths
of what is being, or has been, written in verse might better have been
written in prose, or rather not written at all. The young author, and,
for the matter of that, the old author, who thinks that he has a perfect
right to choose between the verse form and the prose form simply
according as he can versify or not, is grievously in the wrong. There is
no more justification for, say, a purely didactic poem or descriptive
poem than there is for the rhyming which begins somebody's treatise on
optics with these egregious words:--
When parallel rays
Come opposite ways
And fall upon opposite sides.
Everything depends upon the nature of that which a man has to say.
What are the external marks of poetry as distinct from real prose?
These: the choice of words of a special emotional or pictorial force,
combined with musical cadences, rhythm, and sometimes rhyme. And why are
these employed? To tickle the ear? By no means. It is simply because
they are most effective agents in that communication of his mood and
spirit which is the aim of the artist. When a mere fact has to be
stated, there is no defence for verse, unless as an aid to memory, just
as we say--
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November.
When a thing can be said just as well in prose, there is no excuse for
not putting it in prose. That axiom should kill off half our amateur
poets and rid the world of a nuisance. On the other hand, when a thought
or a feeling is to be communicated from a mind profoundly stirred,
exalted, filled with fervour, or from a mind tingling with exquisite
perceptions, then there can be no true and full communication to
another mind, unless that mind also is stirred, exalted or made to
tingle. Music can so dispose that other mind. So too can language; for,
under the influence of poetry of perfect sound, we find stealing over
us, thanks largely _to_ the sound, a mood which could never result from
prose; and so our minds are polarized to feel the actual thing expressed
exactly as the writer feels it, to see it exactly as he sees it.
Verse-poetry, therefore, is no idle invention. It has its sound
philosophical basis; and where poetry is really demanded by the subject,
it is part and parcel of the supreme literary gift to wed the music of
the verse so aptly to the thought, that the communication from soul to
soul is utterly complete.
Is verse a mere conviction? Let us see. Does any one pretend that his
spirit would be just as much moved by the mere sense of this passage of
Tennyson, if it were stripped of its verse form and turned into prose:--
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
and--
Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
If he does, let us not envy him his powers of perception or sensation.
Would you feel for Coleridge just the same mood of sympathy, if he told
you his sad case in prose, as when he writes:--
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word or sigh or tear.
Listen once more to this:--
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers--
And _that_ cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west--
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!--
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
Verily I believe a few of these stanzas of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
have more effect in moving the average human soul than forty prose
sermons and a hundred prose tracts. And why? Because they express, not
mere thoughts, not mere arguments, but a mood, a disposition, a soul.
Verse-poetry can never die. It is for evermore inseparable from the
art of communicating the spirit in words.
* * * * *
The supreme literary gift then is the power to embody even the most
subtle conception in a communicable shape. And is this a mere knack,
with which brain-power has little or nothing to do? Not so. Observe what
the task implies on the part of the writer, over and above his perfect
control of words.
It implies, to wit, that he shall first realize those conceptions
luminously to himself. Before he can utter them, his brain must have
grasped them, formed a vivid picture of them. Most of us, when we become
aware of a fancy or a feeling within ourselves, are unable to get it
into focus. The power of undergoing a deep emotion, of thinking a
far-reaching thought, of experiencing a keen sensation, is, I assert,
by no means rare in the world. But as soon as we begin to look
steadfastly at it and try to realize to ourselves exactly what it is
like and what it means; when we ask ourselves, "what precisely is it I
am thinking and feeling?" it evades us; it begins to break up and fade
away, like a phantom or like mist. It is as when we think of some one's
face, filled with a certain expression. The face starts out before our
mind's eye, and for a moment we see it well and truly. But for most of
us, unless we are painters, or possess the gift which might make us
painters, it is impossible to keep that face, with that expression,
steadily before our inward vision. As we gaze upon it, it changes and
passes into a blur and refuses to be held.
But the mental retina of the great painter can hold such things as he
has seen till he transfers them to the canvas; so can the brain of the
great masters who paint for us in words, till they embody them in
delicate prose or exquisite poetry. The lack of power to express often
comes of a lack of this power to realize; and that power, I believe, is
what is meant by "the vision and the faculty divine," and by "shaping
imagination," and by other phrases which get so bandied to and fro that
the world almost ceases to attach any meaning to them at all.
I remember some years ago, in an essay on _Literary Judgment_, asserting
that the quality which chiefly distinguished the immortal works from the
transient was sincerity, single-heartedness, reality of intention and
love of the work for the work's sake. That was only a partial view of
the truth. It is right in a measure, since that sincerity, that absence
of make-believe, in the literary creation is a prime necessity; but it
is not sufficient. It is, indeed, a prime necessity, because it means
that the superlative writer must write at first hand of things genuinely
conceived and realized by his very self. It is, indeed, a prime
necessity, because you cannot conjure up vividly and hold in steady view
the communicable picture of your feeling or your thought, _unless_ you
feel it or think it with all your own being. But the sincerity is only a
pre-supposed condition. The supreme literary quality is the power to
realize the picture and so body forth the thing thought or felt. The
great dramatic genius, for example, first realizes a character and his
thoughts and feelings, and then, identifying himself with that
character, gives them expression. When Homer imagines Odysseus
descending to the nether world and meeting there the shades of heroes
whom he had known at Troy, his Odysseus accosts this one or that and
receives answer as befits the person. But to Ajax, son of Telamon,
Odysseus had indirectly done a wrong, and caused his suicide, and, when
the ghost of Ajax appears, Odysseus speaks to it gentle and soothing
words of explanation and self-defence. And what does that proud injured
Ajax reply? Well, on Homer's brain the picture is very vivid. His brain
becomes practically the brain of the very Ajax, and the continuation
shows it: "So I spake, but he answered me not a word, and passed on to
Erebus after the other spirits of the departed dead." That silence of
Ajax is truer than the most scathing of speeches.
So is it with Shakespeare. He sees his characters and realizes their
sensations so vividly that his brain and feelings become the brain and
feelings of his creations; and thus only does his Lear say with such
perfect naturalness, "Pray you, undo this button." Hence, too, all the
distinctness of character in his lifelike men and women, be it Hamlet or
Falstaff, Cordelia or Lady Macbeth.
"Imagination," "the shaping gift of imagination," is this power of first
presenting a thing to your own brain with luminousness. For once
etymology lends real aid. _Imaginatio_ is "the making of pictures." It
is inseparable from the power of perfect expression.
Why did the people of Verona whisper of Dante, "Yonder is the man who
has been in Hell?" Simply because of this power. Dante saw the place of
torment in his imagination, not as any of us might see it, vaguely
terrible, but clear in every dread and horrid detail. And, having so
seen it, he lends to that seeing the gift of expression, and with a few
simple verbs and nouns and plain forceful similes he makes his readers
see what he had seen. So did it come about that he was regarded as the
man who had actually "been in Hell." How far does Milton stand below him
in this imaginative vision! Milton, too, describes an Inferno, but it
lacks the convincingness of one who has seen it for himself. We could
never say that Milton was the man who had "been in Hell."
What is the special power of Carlyle in his dealings with history? It is
the power of summoning up visions of the past, standing out clear to
the last particular, as if lightning illuminated them against the
background of the ages.
I do not know whether any better definition of imagination can be given
than that of Ruskin in his _Modern Painters_. "Imagination is the power
of seeing anything we describe as if it were real, so that, looking at
it as we describe, points may strike us which will give a vividness to
the description that would not have occurred to vague memory, or been
easily borrowed from the expressions of other writers." I do not say we
can necessarily describe a thing _because_ we so see it, but I do say
that we cannot describe it _unless_ we so see it. Therefore the supreme
literary gift of communicating exactly what we think and feel, exactly
as we think and feel it, involves no mere control of language, but,
therewith, an imaginative brain to realize conceptions as vivid
pictures. To combine these powers is to be a genius of great rarity.
In one part of the _Inferno_ of Dante it rains fire. To say that much
would be enough for the ordinary writer. But Dante not only sees fire
falling; he sees exactly how it falls, and the picture in his mind
becomes the picture in ours, when he simply says that it fell silently,
steadily "as fall broad flakes of snow when winds are still." Perfectly
easy, is it not? Yes, for Dante. But for the ordinary writer it would
have been no more than "A rain of fire." But what manner of rain, O thou
ordinary and inadequate writer? We do not, indeed, want scorching
rhetoric and verse piled on verse. We want the "inevitable" word, the
simple and the home-coming, the Dantesque. Byron now and again exhibits
the power. Mazeppa is bound naked on the wild horse, and--
The skies spun like a mighty wheel,
I saw the trees like drunkards reel,
And a slight flash sprang o'er my eyes,
Which saw no further....
* * * * *
With the consummate literary artists the picture, whether it be of a
real scene, an imagined scene, or a feeling, is given in few but
effective strokes. And it is so given simply because they see it all so
distinctly. As Longinus says of Sappho's famous ode of passion, the
supreme writer seizes upon the essential and salient features, combines
them, and trusts to your and my imagination to supply the rest. When a
writer welters in words and lines, when he elaborates touch upon touch,
you may be sure that he is trying to fill the picture into his
imagination, instead of being possessed by an imagination which
determine the picture.
In the _Ancient Mariner_ Coleridge describes the passing of the spectral
ship:--
The western wave was all aflame,
The day was well-nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun,
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.
And straight the Sun was fleck'd with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
As if through a dungeon-grate he peer'd
With broad and burning face.
Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that Woman's mate?
and then--
The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.
For my own part those words make me see it all fully, vividly. I do not
merely behold the scene: I feel the peculiar awe of the narrator. Can
you doubt that Coleridge saw this in his brain exactly as if it were
real?
When Keats in his mind's eye saw Madeline praying under that Gothic
window which was so "innumerable of stains and splendid dyes" he beheld
the scene as if he were positively on the spot to paint it. And how does
he paint it? What an opportunity for the display of pictorial technique
in words! But Keats is not thinking of that. One does not really
perceive a myriad little details at such a time. You never do actually
see all the things which you would describe if you sat down to think
details out one by one. If you had really fixed your eyes on the
kneeling Madeline, as Porphyro did on that eve of St. Agnes, you could
not also be taking an inventory of the particulars in the situation. The
inferior writer forgets this, because he is writing from his wits, and
not, as Keats wrote, from the spontaneous picture of imagination. What
Keats sees is this:--
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for Heaven's grace and boon;
Rose bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross fair amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint.
That is all, and it is enough. A kneeling figure, the wintry moon, and
some few of the colours of the glass, described as they fall upon what
you would really note, the head and breast and the clasped hands. What
would not a Rossetti have done with such material!
These are descriptions. It is the same with emotions. "Pray you, undo
this button." The supreme writer does not tear passion rhetorically to
pieces. He does not elaborate it till he fritters it away. He condenses
it all into the poignant cry which goes straight from heart to heart.
What in the circumstances could Burns have said more final than--
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met and never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
I know that there are people who cannot see that these four simple lines
are the consummate expression of a vast range of feeling. We can only
pray that Heaven will some day be merciful to them.
* * * * *
One word more seems necessary to be said. How can we tell when a writer
is succeeding in his effort to communicate, to body forth what he seeks
to body forth? Simply by our own complete apprehension, by the universal
humanity in us, by the fact that we keenly recognize that such and such
a sensation is one in which we have at least shared, but which we have
never known how to express. We realize how it has been brought over us
by loneliness, mountain solitude, a sunset, great heights, stormy seas,
music, sorrow, love, the sound of distant bells, calm evenings, summer
and the perfume of the flowers, fine characters, heroic deeds, and a
thousand other causes, within us and without: and, when the supreme
writer voices it for us, whatever it may be, we feel and know it at once
for the final and the perfect.
If that test is not sufficient, I know no other.
Hebraism and Hellenism
Students of the history of society and literature have grown fond of
distinguishing between two powerful influences upon our ways of thinking
and of looking at life. They find two chief attitudes of mind, two chief
animating spirits, so different from each other in the main that they
deserve and have received special and practically antithetical names.
Our manner of regarding life and society, morals and sentiment, nature
and art, is determined by whichever of these two spirits predominates in
us. Sometimes one whole nation has its view in almost all things
pervaded by the one set of principles; another nation is no less
manifestly informed by the other set. At other times it is an individual
who stands out in broad spiritual and intellectual contrast with another
of the same people and the same age. These two spirits have been called
by Matthew Arnold the "Hebraic" and the "Hellenic"; the one Hebraic,
because its clearest and most consistent manifestation has been among
the Hebrews; the other Hellenic, because its clearest and most
consistent manifestation has been among the Hellenes, or ancient Greeks.
And not only have these two spirits been specially manifested there, but
it is directly from those peoples that two corresponding influences have
spread to all the more highly civilized portions of the world. From the
Hebrews there has spread one great force, and from the Hellenes another
great force, and these two forces have in a larger or smaller measure
determined the characters and views of those peoples, who, being neither
Hebrews nor Hellenes, had not of themselves developed so intense a
spirituality or so active an intellectuality as one or other of these
two possessed.
It is rather in their historical aspect that I propose to make some
observations upon these two forces.
I feel a natural diffidence and some little constraint in treating such
a subject before a specially Hebrew gathering. But the Hebrews of whom I
have to speak are not yourselves, but your ancestors, and they are
ancestors with a history so remarkable and a spirit so potent that,
though I have no share in your pride, I can in a large measure cordially
share in your admiration of them. In a large measure, I say, for I
propose to show how the mental view and temperament of Israel, when
Israel was his truest self, needed to be qualified and corrected by
another mental view and temperament--that of the Greeks, when the Greeks
were their truest selves. And if there were here any descendant of
Pericles or Sophocles or Phidias, I should similarly say to him that,
though I feel the keenest zest of admiration for the many sublime things
which his Athenian ancestors did and wrote and wrought, yet the full
perfection of human character and life was not reached by them, and
could not be reached by them, until their own spirit was corrected by
another, the spirit exemplified in the Hebrews. You will, I am sure,
allow me to say whatever I feel to be just. And that there may be no
misconception, let me add that, whenever I speak of the Hebraic spirit,
I shall mean, not the spirit which an individual contemporary Hebrew may
happen to display, but the spirit which was characteristic of Israel as
a nation before the dispersion. In the same way the Hellenic spirit
will mean the spirit which was characteristic of the pure Hellene before
he was demoralized and adulterated by Roman, Slav, and Turk.
Man, chameleon-like, is apt to take the colour of the land on which he
happens to be, and a Jew who lives in modern times, amid social and
religious conditions, education, and material circumstances so different
from those of ancient Palestine, may differ very widely from the type of
the race as we gather it from history and literature. Nor is race
everything. Even if the Jews once more gathered together into one nation
from all quarters of the earth, we should by no means necessarily behold
a people of the same spiritual attributes and ideals as the Hebrews who
built the Temple under Ezra, or who fought like lions under the
Maccabees. As with the early Saracens, it is often some one great idea
or principle which--for the time at least--determines the whole current
of a nation's mental and spiritual being. But that idea may gradually
lose its intensity and its energizing power, and the Saracen sinks into
the voluptuous Mussulman. Hebraism and Hellenism, therefore, mean the
diverse spirits of two peoples as they once were, not as they may be
now, or will necessarily be again.
One cannot with truth draw absolutely clear and sharp distinctions
between the mental processes of different peoples. One cannot say that a
Hebrew, in virtue of being a Hebrew, would necessarily act and think
thus and thus, while a Greek, in virtue of being a Greek, would
necessarily act and think in some other definite way. Here and there a
fervid or brooding mind among the Greeks, such as that of AEschylus,
might often approach the lines of Hebraism. Here and there some son of
Shem must have been mentally constituted more like the sons of Javan.
None the less, when we survey the history and study the literature of
these two races as a whole, it is impossible not to perceive a clear and
consistent difference between their respective ways of looking at
things, at life and conduct, sentiment and nature and art.
Max Mueller, speaking of the English people, says that we are Jewish in
our religion, Greek in our philosophy, Roman in our politics, and Saxon
in our morality. This ingenious remark is, as such absolute analyses are
apt to be, only partially true. We have, indeed, borrowed from the
Jews, from the Greeks, and from the Romans, in those several
departments. But those departments over-lap and interpenetrate each
other. The fact is that, in us English, with certain Teutonic qualities
ineradically at the bottom of our nature, the modes in which our
religion, philosophy, politics, and morality have developed themselves
have been determined by a blending of all that we have learned from
Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike. In the workings of our intellect and
morals, Athens and Jerusalem in particular have operated upon us far
more than we can now exactly estimate.
Looking at the matter historically, the special quality and type of
Hebraism we must deduce from Hebrew literature, from Hebrew history,
from the characteristics of eminent Hebrews, and from the average of
testimony to Hebrew character supplied to us by reputable authors, Jew
and Gentile, in poetry, drama, fiction, or other forms of literary
creation. The special quality and type of Hellenism we must deduce from
similar material concerning Greeks and things Grecian. And here I must
confess that I am no Hebraist. I am not intimately acquainted with the
heterogeneous compilation called the Talmud, nor with Alexandrine and
mediaeval Jewish literature. Nevertheless no one brought up strictly in a
Christian Church can help becoming in some measure versed in things
Hebraic. To be perpetually exercised from early childhood in reading,
marking, learning, and inwardly digesting the one great Hebrew document,
the Bible; to have its very words and phrases ready to spring to one's
lips; to be saturated with its sentiments; to have been made much more
familiar with the sayings and doings of Abraham and Joseph, David and
Solomon, Isaiah and Ezekiel, than even with those of the kings, heroes,
and poets of one's own people--all this cannot but impart to a receptive
mind the power of distinguishing with fair accuracy the Hebraic quality
from the un-Hebraic. On the other hand, in Hellenic studies I may be
allowed to take a more confident stand; and as sometimes the long august
procession of Hebrew history and Hebrew letters passes across the mind,
and sometimes again the brilliant march of Grecian deeds and Grecian
words, one cannot fail to be more and more impressed with the contrast
between the excellences or the shortcomings of the two.
Up till the present time, the life and literature of Europe in general
has twice passed beneath Hebraic influences, twice beneath Hellenic.
Each influence has been greater or less, more or less durable, in
different regions; nevertheless there are two clearly distinguishable
invasions of the influences in each case. The intellectual influence of
Greece was first felt in pagan times, when Greek ideas and Greek
philosophy passed westward to Rome and through Rome permeated the
peoples under Roman sway. The spiritual influence of Hebraism was first
felt when, soon after this, the Christian Jews carried the doctrine of
one God amongst the pagans, and when Christianity,--which, however
otherwise diverse from Judaism, is none the less its outcome--became the
religion of all the European stocks. The first influence which came from
Greece was an intellectual influence, the passing of a fresh and
stimulating breeze. The first influence of Jerusalem was a moral
re-awakening and revelation, the shaking of a rushing mighty wind. The
moral principle of Hebraism, in the special guise of Christianity,
transformed the whole life and conduct and ideals of European men. What
had been virtues in some cases became vices, what had been weaknesses
became virtues.
We need not dwell upon this immense change; its nature is known to all,
and its source was Jewish. Centuries pass by. The Christianised world
has sunk its intelligence beneath the prescriptions of a demoralized
Church; the moral impulse of the religion borrowed from the Hebrews has
died down into formalism. I speak of the period immediately preceding
the later Renaissance and the Reformation. Strange to say, it was in a
large measure the Ottoman Turk who came to the rescue. He over-ran
Greece, captured Constantinople, and was the cause of a great westward
exodus of Greek talent and learning. Italy in particular was filled with
Greeks whose profit and pride it was to spread far and wide the
literature and culture of their nation. The avidity with which this new
learning was received was marvellous; still more marvellous was the
effect. It was, in truth, a _renaissance_, a new birth of intellect. It
meant no less than a general revival of the spirit of inquiry, of
open-eyed observation, of a desire and a resolve to see things as they
were, and not as tradition and dogma had taught men to see them. Italy,
France, Germany and England became alive with fresh efforts of the
reason, inspired with fresh ideas of taste and beauty in artistic
creation, and with new hopes and schemes of progress. The astonishing
abundance, the immense variety, and the splendid quality of the
Elizabethan literature are due to no other recognisable cause. It was
one and the same cause that made Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, and Bacon
possible. A new springtime seemed to have dawned upon the world of
thought. This was the second period of Hellenic influence, an influence
wholly intellectual and artistic.
Following the re-awakening of speculation came the Reformation. The
Reformation brought the reading of the Bible at first hand, and a new
style of preaching and exhorting directly from it. In religion and
morals the reformers fell back upon the Scriptures themselves. They
drank in the Scriptures, and therewith the Hebraic spirit which pervades
them. In most cases the salutary effect upon character and conduct can
hardly be overstated. In other cases there was extravagance and harm.
Uncompromisingly, and not very intelligently, did they speak Scripture,
think Scripture, and act Scripture, like Hebrews born out of due
season. Knox invested himself with the austere authority of the Hebrew
prophet; Calvin was fain to hew Agag in pieces before the Lord. The
Puritans of England became fanatical in their sombre conception of sin
and in the rigour of their exaggerated Hebraism. Here was the second
period of Hebraic influence, an influence wholly moral and religious.
In each case the new invasion of the Hellenic spirit precedes, and is
the handmaid of, the Hebraic. In each case the influence of Greece is to
procure the open mind, that of Jerusalem, to mould the unsteady heart.
The Greek works first upon the intellect to make it supple, the Hebrew
comes after and gives robustness to the moral will. Such, in the main,
is the distinction and the historic sequence of the two forces. We have
twice passed under each, and we shall, I believe and hope, feel the
strong power of each again, for we sorely need, on the one hand,
something to give stamina to our weak moral conceptions, and, on the
other, something to give us clear principles of social life, art, and
culture.
Let us look a little closer at what our distinction implies.
Physically the unlikeness of Hebrew to Greek was very marked. Allowing
for climatic effects, the Hebrew physiognomy has preserved itself until
to-day. The true, or at least the ideal, Greek type is almost lost in
hybrid forms, yet we know what it was. The ideal Hellene was tall,
upright, strong and supple withal, his lightish hair and beard were
thick and curling, his features straight and firm, his brow broad, his
eyes full and light. The whole form and aspect expressed a healthy zest
of life, an open-eyed contemplation of men and things, and a belief in
the sovereign virtue of reason. The outward aspect of the Hebrew type is
very different from this. The inward difference of the two races was no
less great. The essential contrast between them is not one of brow and
eye, it is one of thinking and seeing, a contrast between two sets of
ideals and principles, two ways of looking at life and the world. Romans
like Juvenal, who saw both Greeks and Jews numerous in the imperial
city, could only superficially observe that the Jew was unsocial, narrow
in his prejudices and obstinate in his superstitions, while the Greek
was as devoid of principle as he was brilliantly versatile. The Jew and
Greek whom he saw were those of a demoralised period; but in any case
the Roman did not understand either; he did not know that each was the
representative of a certain important set of principles carried to
excess. He would hardly have thought it worth his while to reflect on
such a matter. It is otherwise with us, to whom all great human
phenomena are of significance for that sound thinking which is essential
to progress.
How can we describe in brief and intelligible terms these two spirits,
the Hebraic and the Hellenic? One might use many figures of speech.
Matthew Arnold's antithesis of Hellenic thinking to Hebraic doing needs
much qualification. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that the
Hebraic spirit is heat, the Hellenic spirit is light. Hebraism means
moral fervour; Hellenism means intellectual sensibility. Hebraism
suggests strength of conviction, tenacity of resolve, prophetic
vehemence; Hellenism suggests flexibility of thought, adaptability to
circumstances, artistic serenity. Hebraism suggests the austere and
spiritual life, Hellenism the social and sensuous life. Yet none of
these brief antitheses can be wholly or exclusively true. The difference
is not thus to be labelled away, any more than one can label the
difference between scents of flowers or tones of voices. There are two
experiences which are apt to change the whole complexion of things; the
one is religious conversion, the other falling in love. Yet how could
one sum up the transformation except by those terms "converted" and "in
love"? So, when the Hebrew, morally introspective, reliant on some great
power outside himself, fervid in his beliefs as in his passions, intense
in his imaginations and enthusiasms, is compared with the Hellene, a
being intellectually open and curious, artistically sensitive, a
cultivator of humanity and its delights, many-sided and self-possessed,
by what condensed terms shall one describe their diverse ways of taking
the whole of life and its concerns? In default of such terms let us hear
a modern descendant of Israel, one who was at the time half thinking of
this very distinction. Heinrich Heine, though an apostate from Judaism,
and though he liked to fancy himself a Hellene, was nevertheless by
constitution a Hebrew. He describes a visit which he paid to Goethe,
than whom in form and mind and principle no more perfect Hellene ever
lived in Hellas itself. When Heine came face to face with Goethe at
Weimar, he tells us that he felt as if Goethe must be Jupiter, and that
he involuntarily glanced aside to see whether the eagle was not there
with the thunderbolt in his beak. He almost addressed him in Greek, but,
finding he "understood German," he made the profound remark that the
plums on the road were delicious. And now, hear how Heine draws the
contrast between the Hellenic Teuton and himself, the Teutonic Hebrew:
"At bottom Goethe and I are opposite natures and mutually repellent. He
is essentially a man on whom life sits easily, who looks on enjoyment of
life as the highest good, and though at times he has glimpses and vague
feelings of the ideal life and expresses them in his poems, yet he has
never comprehended it, much less lived it. I, on the contrary, am
essentially an enthusiast, that is, so inspired by the ideal as to be
ready to offer myself up to it, and even prompted to let myself be
absorbed by it. But, as a fact, I have caught at the enjoyments of life,
and found pleasure in them; hence the fierce struggle that goes on in me
between my clear reason, which approves the enjoyments of life, and
rejects the devotion of self-sacrifice as a folly, and my enthusiasm,
which is always rising up and laying violent hands on me, and trying to
drag me down again to her ancient solitary realm. Up, I ought perhaps to
say, for it is still a grave question whether the enthusiast who gives
up his life for the idea does not in a single moment live more and feel
more than Herr von Goethe in his sixth-and-seventieth year of egotistic
tranquillity." Heine was not a typical Hebrew, and hence the struggle of
which he speaks; but his words express what we want to have expressed.
The true Hellene lives for the sake of life, and for whatsoever things
are lovely and charming. The true Hebrew lives for the sake of his idea,
and for whatsoever things are of spiritual power.
The consequence is that, while the imagination, the rapture, and the
pathos of the Hebrew rose to heights and descended to depths utterly
beyond the consciousness of the ordinary Hellene, the Hellenes, on the
contrary, attained to a justness of intellectual and artistic perception
which formed no part of the ordinary Hebrew culture. The general manner
of all the Hebrew prophets, of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, or Joel, is
the same--the manner of the fiercest afflatus, of entire abandonment,
finding expression in phrases of magnificent solemnity and in imagery
of the profoundest awesomeness. This manner the Greeks never show. Not
even AEschylus, the most Hebraic of Hellenes, has any passages in which
he loses control of his artistic sense. Neither he nor any other Hellene
sees ecstatic visions or dreams ecstatic dreams. There is no place in
the Greek comprehension for that state of mind which can beget visions
like these: "And I looked, and behold! A whirlwind came out of the
north, a gray cloud and a fire enfolding itself, and a brightness was
about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of
the midst of the fire"--with the further visions of living creatures
"like burning coals of fire," and the "wheels within wheels," with the
rings of them full of eyes. To this there is not and could not be any
parallel in the Greek. When the Persian queen in AEschylus dreams the
most startling dream of her life, it is obviously a vision constructed
by the poet's intellect alone. When Plato sees visions, they, too, are
intellectual constructions with the meaning as clear as the words. There
is nothing rapt, nothing fantastic. Greek imagery in this region is to
Hebrew imagery what the sculpture of Greece is to those weird creations
of symbolism at Nineveh and Babylon, the colossal human-faced bulls and
the genii with the eagle-head. And if you remind me that I am comparing
prophet with poet, and not prophet with prophet, I answer that the poets
are the only analogue of the prophets that Greece possessed; and that
very fact illustrates what is meant when we say that the Hellenic spirit
had no capacity for, the Hellenic view of life no impulse to, that
intensity of feeling which could produce imagery so stupendous in such
awe-inspiring phrase.
The Hebraic character, therefore, is one of strength and depth. Even now
no Jew in fiction is ever a weakling or a trifler. In whatever light he
is presented, a Shylock of Shakespeare, an Isaac of Scott, a Nathan of
Lessing, a Sidonia of Disraeli--revengeful, avaricious, bigoted,
benevolent, magnificent, talented--he is always a character of striking
power and intensity. The ancient type of Greek does not appear in modern
fiction. If he did, it would be as a subtle reasoner, perfect critic,
polished man of the world, full of the intellectual and social graces,
ever adaptable to circumstance, choosing his idea and never letting the
idea govern him. And, in the matter of loves and hates, it was rather
his maxim that one should neither hate nor love over-much, since he
might some day come to hate the person he loved and love the person he
hated. The Hellenic watchwords "nothing too much"; and "measure in
everything"; the Hellenic hatred of "unseasonableness" and dread of
"infatuation"--these things show how the ideal of the Greek was ever to
be master of himself by aid of reason. The Hebraic spirit, on the
contrary, would strive and cry without scruple of measure or season in
any matter on which its conscience or desire was fixed.
The Hebraic spirit is uncompromising; it does not readily admit other
points of view. Hebrew history, for example, is wholly one-sided, seen
wholly in the colour of a Hebrew's feelings. The peoples with whom
Israel comes in contact are either so many impious men made to be slain,
or they are wicked tyrants, allowed by Heaven to chastise the chosen for
some allotted period. This was the necessary outcome of the theocratic
principle. How different from history as written by the Greek
Thucydides! To that historian facts are so many facts, to be seen as
they are, and to be told without undue enthusiasm, without obtrusive
expression of moral approval or disapproval. Never since those Hellenic
days has a historian been able so perfectly to contemplate the triumphs
and disasters of his own country as if himself quite aloof from personal
interest or stake in the result. Unclouded vision, purely intellectual
observation, could no further go.
With such temperaments and mental habits, what view of life did the
Hebrews entertain, and what the Hellenes? Our view of life is in the
greatest measure a matter of religion or non-religion, and the Hebrews
possessed a highly spiritualised and devotional religion, while the
Greeks, if not easy-going polytheists, had at best some rationalistic
system of philosophy. The difference is immense. The Hebrew creed, a
real and absorbing belief, involved a certain code of laws for the
guidance of conduct, certain definite sentiments, certain definite hopes
and fears, certain definite axioms as to the aim and end of existence.
The highest good and the worst evil had for the Hebrews unmistakable
senses. It was not so with the Greeks. They too--when they thought at
all--sought for a systematic conception of life, but not for one in
which they should be subordinated to some authority outside themselves.
They desired to see life steadily and see it whole, but they must do so
by the light of their intellect. Their conduct, aims, sentiments, hopes,
fears, must depend upon axioms to which their reasoning brought them.
What the Hebrews called sin in the sight of Heaven, the Greeks called an
error or an offence to society. It was wrong socially, or it was wrong
intellectually. Greece therefore had no place for religious fervour. It
was tolerant almost to indifference. Athens might arraign Anaxagoras for
impiety or Socrates for heresy, but these charges were either mere
pretexts or were viewed simply in their social bearing. When a Hebrew
speaks of a valley full of dry bones, and of life being breathed into
them, we know that he is speaking in the moral sense. A Hellene would
have meant a revival of intelligence. The Hebrew prophet speaks of
"taking the heart of stone out of them and giving them a heart of
flesh." A Plato would rather have spoken of taking the films from their
intellectual gaze and opening their eyes to the pure essences of things.
The Hebrew would sit in sackcloth and ashes to atone for his offences
and to induce the proper spiritual submission. The Hellene would only
fast, if he fasted at all, so that he might by his plain living secure
high thinking. No ardent missionaries, Jonahs or Pauls, could come out
of Greece; it could produce no martyrs. The _De Profundis_ of a Greek
would signify, not moral abasement, but physical and mental suffering.
Not that the Hellenes were shallow. Far from it. Racially, indeed, they
had neither the Hebraic zeal nor the Hebraic conscience. But of vastly
more importance is the fact that in their conception of life they
started with different premises. They found themselves in life, their
hope ending with life, and their object was to make the best and
happiest of it. The hereafter was not pleasant to contemplate. Achilles,
when he meets Odysseus in the netherworld, declares that he would rather
be a poor labouring thrall on earth than a king among the dead. Had the
Hellenes been shown the modern doctrine of evolution, it is easy to
fancy how eagerly they would have sprung at it. To the Hebraic spirit it
would have been flat, stale, and unprofitable. In a word, while to the
best of Hebrews life was almost a sacrament, to the best of Hellenes
there was nothing sacramental but intelligence. The national pride of
the Hebrews lay in a religious reason--their election as a peculiar
people; the national pride of the Greeks lay in the intellectual,
social, and artistic culture which distinguished them from the
_barbaroi_. If Hellas had had its Zion, it would have meant a city which
was the pre-eminent abode of perfected human thought, society, and arts.
"The name of the city of that day shall be the 'Lord is there,'" is of
the essence of Hebraism. The Hellene would have thought of a city filled
with Hymns to Intellectual Beauty, hymns to Athena, goddess of arts and
wisdom, and to Apollo, the embodied idea of light.
In their outlook upon nature, animate and inanimate, there was a
corresponding contrast. Neither Greek nor Hebrew, indeed, contemplated
nature as we do in modern times. Neither was haunted as with a passion
by the beauty and grandeur of woods and streams and hills. To the
Hellene, as to Dr. Johnson or to Sydney Smith, nature was but a
background for man. Homer's moons and clouds, rainbows and hail-storms,
are used for the most part only for similitudes. To the Hebrew the glory
of the Heavens and the wonders of the deep are meet subjects upon which
to praise the Lord for his wonderful works. At the most, the Hellene
found in nature a sensuous delight, a part of the multitudinous joy
which, in a healthy condition, he found in all life. It is a mistake,
indeed, to suppose that the Greek was insensible to natural beauty. The
daffodils, crocuses, anemones, and hyacinths, the countless laughter of
the AEgean and the gleaming Cyclades, were delightful to his eye, the
trill of the nightingale to his ear; but neither he nor the Hebrew could
have felt much sympathy with the state of mind of a Wordsworth, to whom
nature, in and for itself, had the effect of a living and inspiring
power. Neither would have understood Wordsworth's--
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Of the Hebrew conception of nature as shown in the Psalms or the book of
Job we need say nothing. Let us by an instance or two show just how far
the Greek appreciation of it went. In Theocritus a number of friends
walk into the country to a harvest festival:--"There we reclined on deep
beds of fragrant lentisk, and rejoicing we lay in new-stripped leaves of
the vine. And high above our heads waved many a poplar, while close at
hand the sacred water from the nymphs' own cave welled forth with
murmurs musical. On shadowy boughs the brown cicalas kept their
chattering toil. Far off the little owl cried; in the thick thorn-brake
the lark and finches sang; the ringdove moaned; the yellow bees were
flitting round the springs. All breathed the scent of opulent summer, of
the season of fruits. The pears at our feet and apples by our side were
rolling plentiful; the tender branches, with wild plums laden, were
earthward bowed." Here, it will be seen, the delight is purely sensuous,
a delight in sweet sighs, sweet sounds, sweet smells. In the _OEdipus
Coloneus_ of Sophocles there is a choral song of somewhat higher note
than this: "Stranger, thou hast come to earth's fairest home, to white
Colonus, where the nightingale, a constant guest, trills her clear note
in the covert of green glades, dwelling amid the wine-dark ivy and the
God's inviolate bowers, rich in berries and fruit, unvisited by sun,
unvexed by wind of any storm; where the reveller Dionysus ever walks the
ground, companion of the Nymphs, and, fed by heavenly dew, the narcissus
blooms morn by morn with fair clusters, crown of the great Goddess from
of yore, and the crocus blooms with golden beam. Nor fail the sleepless
founts whence the waters of Cephisus wander, but each day with stainless
tide he moveth over the land's swelling bosom for the giving of quick
increase."
Yet here, too, so far as the charm is not merely sensuous, Nature is but
the background for the passing of the bright Gods to whom humanity owes
progress and delights. There is nothing awesome, nothing pride-abasing,
in nature to the Hellene as to the Hebrew.
When we come to deal with art, whether plastic art or the art of
letters, there stands out the same difference of spirit. And on all
sides it is admitted that in this region Hellenism reached nearly to
perfection. It is scarcely worth while here to descant upon the work of
Phidias or Sophocles, and to analyse its excellence. In the domain of
art the word 'Hellenic' implies absolute truth of form, absolute truth
of taste, grace and elegance. It means the selecting and simplifying of
essentials into an ideal shape; and therefore it implies the absence of
all superfluity, incongruousness, bombast, extravagance or
purposelessness. The Parthenon and the statue of the grey-eyed goddess
standing up in faultless symmetry against the clear blue sky of Attica;
Plato's _Apology of Socrates_ breathing serene and lucid thought in
language lucid and serene--these are the types of art as understood by
the Hellenic spirit. We nowadays prate much of real and ideal. The Greek
combined them without prating. The anatomy of a Grecian statue is
anatomically true in proportion and in pose, while the whole figure is
none the less of an ideal beauty which could rarely have existed outside
the imagination. To the French the word _emphase_ has come to mean, not
emphasis, but fustian. To the Greeks, with their love of measure, their
instinctive avoidance of the "too much," _emphase_ in letters or other
arts was irritating and distressful. Mr. Andrew Lang selects a sentence
of Macaulay: "Even the wretched phantom who still bore the imperial
title stooped to pay this ignominious blackmail." And Mr. Lang justly
says: "The picture of a phantom who is not only a phantom, but wretched,
stooping to pay blackmail which is not only blackmail, but ignominious,
may divert the reader." The Greeks were neither deceived nor diverted by
such bad art; their sympathies were chilled, and they called the thing
"frigid." Meanwhile the special art of the Hebrews is, perhaps, the art
of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, music which is so often joined to
profound emotional susceptibility. They had no statuary, their
architecture does not remain for us to criticise it, their literature
alone supplies us with material for comparison, and even in this there
is not that diversity of epic, dramatic, and lyric matter, of history,
oratory and philosophy, which we have from Greece. Nevertheless, so far
as material offers itself, we find in Hebrew art just those qualities we
might expect from Hebraism.
The Hebrews had none of the Hellenic instinct for simplicity and grace
and directness. They delighted in deep symbolism and parable, in thunder
and lightning of diction and imagery, in pomp and state and grandeur.
They felt no scruples about going beyond the golden mean. With them all
art of writing or creating was but means to an end, and not an end in
itself. Let any one read the Bible and observe its unqualified figures
of speech--how the hills skip and the floods clap their hands--and then
let them ponder this Hellenic criticism of Longinus: "AEschylus, with a
strange violence of language, represents the palace of Lycurgus as
'possessed' at the appearance of Dionysus: '_The hills with rapture
thrill, the roof's inspired._' Here Euripides, in borrowing the image,
softens its extravagance: _and all the mountain felt the God_.'"
The Hellene, you observe, is not to let his intellect lose control over
his imagination; the Hebrew wholly abandons his imagination to his
master passion.
This, you may say, is merely the difference between being inspired and
not being inspired; and it may be urged that Plato himself puts the
Greek conception otherwise:
"All good poets compose their beautiful poems, not as works of art, but
because they are inspired and possessed ... for the poet is a light and
winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has
been inspired. When he has not attained to this state he is powerless
and unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets
speak of the actions which they record, but they do not speak of them by
any rules of art, they are inspired to utter that to which the Muse
impels them, and that only."
All of which is true enough, but what it amounts to is this--that
artistic rules cannot invent the poetic thought and utterance; it does
not mean that the inventing Muse ever ignores the rules of art. And, as
a matter of fact, there never is, in Hellenic poetry, anything of utter
abandonment. There is reason, warmed and coloured by sentiment and
imagination, but reason is never imperilled by any conflagration of
emotion.
We began by saying that in all our modern thought and conduct we are
either more Hebraic or more Hellenic one than another. In what Carlyle
would call our heroes, in our writers, and in our own lives, the one
spirit or the other predominates. Happy, but exceeding rare, is he who
blends the best elements of both. Literature, perhaps, affords the
readiest means of illustration. Not every sentiment, it is true, of
modern European letters has been either distinctly Hellenic or
distinctly Hebraic in its character. The spirit of romantic poetry, and
of the poetry of nature, has no analogy in Greece or Palestine.
Nevertheless, inasmuch as no great European writer has failed to pass
under the moral influence of Christianity or of Judaism, or to feel
directly or indirectly the intellectual influence of Greece, we may, in
those great voices of a generation who are called its great writers,
listen for the differing tones of these differing forces, as betrayed
either in their substance or in their form.
It is not easy to select complete types of one or the other. Roughly,
perhaps, one might speak of the Hebraic Dante, Bunyan, or Carlyle; of
the Hellenic Johnson, Goethe or Tennyson: but one could not rightly draw
up two catalogues of authors and set them in contrast as perfect
embodiments, the one of Hebraism, the other of Hellenism. On the other
hand, it is not so difficult in the case of a great writer to
distinguish his Hebraic from his Hellenic moods and manners, and to
gather how far the one element or the other holds the chief sway in him.
That Dante's moral force is Hebraic is the natural and correct
impression of one who compares the _Divine Comedy_ with the _Odyssey_ of
Homer on the one side, and with the _Psalms_ or Isaiah on the other. Yet
even in Dante there is a certain repose of contemplation and a careful
justness of language which belong rather to the Hellene. The character
of Luther, again, might seem wholly Hebraic to those who see him only as
a zealot of fiery controversy, so carried out of himself that his very
visions of Beelzebub acquired all the vividness of reality. Yet there
are times when another spirit is upon him, when his reasoning is cool
and colourless as that of a Greek philosopher. The misfortune of Luther
is that he could not, as a Melancthon in large measure could, amalgamate
the best elements of these complementary natures.
If from the names of English literature one were asked to choose our
most Hebraic poet, the name of Milton would perhaps be the first to
offer itself to many minds. Yet this would be a mere illusion. We must
not confound the subject of poetry with its spirit. The subject of
_Paradise Lost_, _Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_ is Hebraic;
the spirit and manner are by no means so. Distinguish in these works all
that which cannot properly be said to belong to the poet himself, the
evident paraphrase of Bible language and Bible narrative; set by itself
that which is Milton's own imagining; mark the spirit and manner which
pervade it; and it will be seen that prophetic fervour is hardly there,
profound moral enthusiasm is hardly there. What we chiefly discover is
the intellect of a theological student, working in a certain rich
material, the magnificent Miltonic diction. The true Hebraic note is
rather struck in the sonnet, "_Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints,
whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold_," in that
fierce reproach of the Church in _Lycidas_, and in certain passages of
his prose. Milton is in fact a Hellene made subject to Hebraic moods by
his Hebrew studies, the Puritan Hebraism of his training, and the Hebrew
connexion of his subjects. It is when he writes _Comus_ or _L'Allegro_
that he is giving expression to his natural poetic bent. It may seem a
paradox if, on the other hand, we say that there was much of Hebraism in
one whose purity and justness of language and grace of form seem wholly
Hellenic; I mean Shelley. Shelley was intense in imagination, capable of
boundless rapture and absorption, subject to white heats of passion and
conflagration of moral wrath. In truth his nature was a rare blending,
left crude by his early death. As faultless in diction as a Hellene, in
philosophical speculation almost a copy of Plato, he was in capacity for
reaching the heights and depths of spiritual possession the equal of any
Hebrew. And this it is which makes one think that Shelley's early death
robbed us of much that would have been of quite supremest worth in
poetry.
This is not the time and place to take authors and deal with them one by
one, showing how the moral Hebraism is entirely possessed of Bunyan,
how entirely Hellenic are the spirit and style of Goethe and the clear
criticism and unperturbed intellectual processes of Johnson. I will
content myself with touching in no ordered way upon the Hebraic and
Hellenic note as it is uttered by one or two passages which I choose
almost at random. And first let us hear this passage of Carlyle:--
"A second thing I know. This lesson will have to be learned under
penalties. England will either learn it or England also will cease to
exist amongst nations. England will either learn to reverence its
heroes, and discriminate them from its sham heroes and valets and
gas-lighted histories, and to prize them as the audible God's voice
amid all inane jargons and temporary market-cries, and say to them with
heart loyalty, 'Be ye King and Priest and Gospel and guidance for us,'
or else England will continue to worship new and ever new forms of
Quackhood and so, with what resiliences and reboundings matter little,
go down to the Father of Quacks. Can I dread such things of England?
Wretched, thick-eyed, gross-hearted mortals, why will ye worship lies
and stuffed cloth suits, created by the ninth parts of men? It is not
your purses that suffer, your farm rents, your commerces, your mill
revenues--loud as ye lament over these things. No, it is not these
alone, but a far deeper than these. It is your _souls_ that lie dead,
crushed down under despicable nightmares, atheisms, brain fumes."
What is there here but the uncompromising moral attitude and
denunciation of the Hebrew seer? What is there but the same stormy
phrase, tumultuous almost to chaos? Carlyle is our own era's type of the
Hebraic temperament. Behind him follows Ruskin, a Carlyle tempered by
the spirit of Hellenic art without the balance of Hellenic calm. In what
Ruskin has to say on how we live and think, his sentences are one and
all of Grecian form, but the breath they breathe is Hebrew. I read in
Swinburne this address to England:--
Oh thou clothed round with raiment of white waves,
Thy brave brows brightening through the gray wet air,
Thou lulled with sea-sounds of a thousand caves
And lit with sea-shine to thine inland lair:
Whose freedom clothed the naked souls of slaves
And stripped the muffled souls of tyrants bare:
O! by the centuries of thy glorious graves,
By the live light of th' earth that was thy care,
Live! thou must not be dead!
Live! let thine armoured head
Lift itself to sunward and the fair
Daylight of time and man,
Thine head republican,
With the same splendour on thine helmless hair
Within his eyes kept up a light,
Who on thy glory gazed away their sacred sight.
These verses might almost be the verses of a Greek. And this is true not
merely of the art and grace of form; it is equally true of the mental
condition of the writer. The sentiment is intellectually just, and the
expression is artistically just. Exhortation there is, a certain ardour
there is, but it is the sober and restrained ardour of the Greeks; it is
not Hebraic. But I read again of how the Armada flies:--
Torn by the scourge of the storm-wind that smites as a harper smites
on a lyre,
And consumed of the storm as the sacrifice, loved of their God, is
consumed with fire,
And devoured of the darkness as men that are slain in the fires of his
love are devoured,
And deflowered of their lives by the storms as by priests is the spirit
of life deflowered.
And here is neither Hellenic seasonableness and proportion, nor Hebraic
fervour, nor truth as it is understood by either Hebrew or Hellene. It
is the work of a man who endeavours to lash himself into an intensity
which is not of him, and who trifles with a Hebraism which rejects him.
Tennyson is, in point of the adaptation of form to matter, in the
absolute justice and delicacy of his diction, in the perfect proportion
and symmetry of his images, the completest reproduction among moderns of
the Hellenic literary artist. What could be more luminously seen or more
luminously expressed than
The curled white of the coming wave,
Glassed in the slippery sand before it breaks?
Hellenic Tennyson is also in his appreciation of all beauty. More
important, he is Hellenic in his tranquil open-eyed outlook upon the
world. It is in these things that he is his best self. He is least
himself when he seeks to pass into the prophetic sphere. He is _poeta_
more than _vates_, and he is least Tennysonian in a poem like "Maud."
The Hebraic element in Tennyson is not innate, it is but what he has
gathered from his training in Hebraic morality and the sentiment which
comes of it. "His strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart
was pure" is not a sentiment natural to a pagan Greek, but it is natural
enough to a christianised Hellene whose Hellenic temperament is
otherwise quite unchanged.
But we must not let ourselves be lured on by specimen after specimen
over the wide field of literature. Rather let us return to some
practical bearing of this whole question. For a practical bearing it
has. It is this. Life consists of knowing, acting, admiring, loving, and
hoping. The ideal man would be at the same time sage, poet, artist, man
of virtue, and man of deeds. The perfect man would have all his
faculties of thinking, feeling, and doing wholesomely blended. Now
neither Hebraism nor Hellenism could produce the ideal man or
harmoniously develop all his best powers. Each had its defects. The
Hebrew, along with his intense spirituality and his moral strenuousness,
lacked intellectual justness, sense of proportion, social
appreciativeness, artistic truth and sobriety. The Hellene, along with
his lucidity of intellect, his justness of perception in art, and his
social aptitudes, lacked that sustained zeal for some moral principle
which leads either to the doing of great things or to the attainment of
sublime character. The dangers of Hebraism lay in excess of absorption,
in a proneness to fanaticism, in an obstinacy which might become
rabidness, in a certain misplaced loudness and disregard of dignity. The
dangers of Hellenism lay in proneness to sacrifice character to talent,
and deeds to thought. Hebraism tended towards asceticism and bigotry;
Hellenism towards indifference and self-indulgence. The narrow Puritans
of the seventeenth century revealed some of the dangers of excessive
Hebraism; some of the dangers of excessive Hellenism have appeared in
France. The modern French are in many things, though by no means in all
things, a copy of the ancient Greeks. They are so in their passion for
clear ideas. France is the land of the _philosophes_ and the critics.
The French are Hellenic in their dislike of _emphase_ and of
_originalite_, a word which comes to mean not so much originality as
eccentricity. And in such a connotation of _originalite_, there betrays
itself an important fact--that France is hardly the best country for the
production of great characters. "The great Frenchmen," it has been said,
"are apt to be Italians." Greece, too, failed to produce great
characters. Homer's heroes, like the eminent figures of Grecian history,
are of little moral force. Where the correct state of mind is to have
_point de zele_, as at Paris and Athens, mankind may avoid the
ridiculous, but can scarcely reach the sublime. Where the guiding force
is some clear idea, men may rise to some signal effort, like the battle
of Salamis or the French Revolution; but intellectual impulse has none
of the durability of moral impulse, and the fibre of resolve is soon
relaxed into languid discontent. Thus much may be said of Hellenism in
excess. Yet its services are immense. The social and material progress
of the world requires free play of thought, a certain boldness and
open-mindedness of inquiry; and for this we look rather to the spirit of
the _audax Iapeti genus_--the Hellenic spirit--than to the firm-set
minds of the sons of Shem. And, on the contrary, whatever may be urged
against Hebraism in excess, it is all the better for human life that men
should have the capacity for emotional depth and fervour, for tenacious
adherence to some high moral purpose. In these days of clamour and
dispute we need a diffusion of the Hellenic spirit to enable us to look
out on things exactly as they are, and to deliver us from fads and
fatuous agitations. But in these same days of weak convictions we need a
measure of Hebraic ardour and Hebraic fortitude to make our conduct
answer to what we see, and to prevent our seeing from ending in thoughts
and words.
What is principally needed is a blending in just proportion of the two
spirits. We want Hellenism for knowing and enjoying, Hebraism for
acting, loving, and hoping. "Without haste, without rest," should be our
maxim for progress. And that is equivalent to saying that neither the
Hebraic zeal nor the Hellenic repose can of itself satisfy our needs.
This blending could be obtained, more than we now seek to obtain it. The
leopard cannot change his spots, and the human being cannot wholly rid
himself of his congenital qualities. Nevertheless culture and habit are
second nature. There is scarcely a disposition of mind or manner of
sentiment into which we cannot bring ourselves by steadily encouraging
it. The faculties of the mind are like the muscles of the body. They
shrink to nothing if not exercised; they can be exercised symmetrically;
or some can be exercised at the expense of the rest. What we want is a
school culture, and a self-culture, which shall bring out all our best
powers, not one only of them or some few of them. At present our system
is all for knowledge. We seek for understanding of facts, but we do not
seek for a systematic view of life, for clear principles of art, or for
social many-sidedness. Of the best elements of the Hebraic spirit, we
are almost ceasing to seek anything at all. And this is wholly bad. We
shall breed up a race not only without what Matthew Arnold calls
distinction, but without any common animating soul, unless it be a
general selfishness and a general Philistinism.
What we want is a broader, less mechanical culture. We want to be
steeped not only in facts, but in stimulating thoughts, religious and
poetical. Splendid culture means splendid ideals, and if a nation could
acquire the clear thinking of Hellenism combined with the immense moral
resolve of Hebraism, that nation, knowing its aims, and making steadily
towards them, would afford a spectacle of grandeur and of power such as
no nation now presents.
The Principles of Criticism
Applied to
Two Successors of Tennyson
It is perhaps hardly necessary to explain that in the words "successors
of Tennyson" I make no reference to an actual or a prospective Poet
Laureate. The position primarily held by Tennyson in his lifetime, and
the only position in which posterity will regard him, is the position of
the poet. That he was the laureate also is no doubt a matter of some
biographical interest, but it is of little further significance. It will
be doing no injustice to the large quantity of agreeable verse-writing
which has been executed by Mr. Alfred Austin if we take it for granted
that his appointment carries the laureateship back to what it was before
Wordsworth and Tennyson lent it the lustre of their names. The laureate
is now, as in the days of Southey, a literary officer in the Queen's
service, chosen, as other officers are wont to be chosen, by the
political powers that be. Our present interest is rather in those who
come after Tennyson as pre-eminent among the free and single-hearted
servants of the Muses.
Again, by his "successors" I mean simply those who come after--those
masters of younger birth who seem most nearly to take his place now that
he is gone--not any avowed disciples, still less servile imitators of
his thought or style. Following upon Homer there was the school of the
Homeridae, or "sons of Homer." A cluster of poets at the beginning of the
seventeenth century were styled "the sons of Ben Jonson." There are no
doubt "sons of Tennyson" at this present date. With these we have now no
concern. They are but satellites, while that for which we are scanning
the poetical horizon is a rising star of a magnitude in some degree
comparable with the stars which have set with the deaths of Matthew
Arnold, Browning and Tennyson. There is, I believe, more than one such
star already well advanced into the firmament. I am one of those who
believe that this is an age unusually rich in genuine poetry. There are
to-day singing in the English tongue enough of so-called minor poets to
have made the poetical fortune of any epoch between the Elizabethan
period and our own. This century has seen re-enthroned the Miltonic
doctrine that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and passionate"; it
has learned from Wordsworth of the divinity in Nature, from Shelley of
the passion in it, from Tennyson how to express its moods; it has
learned from Byron how to be frank about humanity, from Wordsworth how
to sympathize with it, from Browning how to understand it; it has been
taught by Shelley how to write with melody, by Keats how to write with
richness, by Wordsworth with simplicity, by Tennyson with grace and
luminousness, by Arnold with chasteness. It has availed itself of these
great examples to such good purpose that the average of reputable verse
written to-day is more instinct with feeling, more vitalised with
thought, more satisfying in expression, than much which is studied and
belauded and quoted because it was written a century or two ago.
With great boldness perhaps, but with no less deliberateness of
judgment, I maintain that contemporary men and women might better spare
for the living, breathing, and often very beautiful work of their
contemporaries, some of the time and appreciation which they do not
grudge to give over and over again, even if it be with some conscious
effort, to the elaborate conceits of the seventeenth century, to the
rather frigid frugalities of a Gray, the laborious melancholies of a
Collins, or the cold transparencies of a Landor. No doubt justice will
be done in the end, but why not do as much of it as possible at once?
It is for these reasons that I beg your attention to an attempt at an
appreciation of two contemporary singers, both excellent, though
differing in the nature of their excellence. Their names are John
Davidson and William Watson.
But first it would be well to look a little closely at that word
"appreciation," and to examine frankly the considerations which make up
a literary judgment. I am induced to take this course after a somewhat
amused survey of a series of criticisms which have been passed upon the
two poets who are our immediate subject. One writer, for instance,
speaks of Mr. Davidson's works as "marked from end to end by the
careless fecundity of power," while the next tells us of the self-same
verses that they have "the severe restraint and very deliberately willed
simplicity of M. Guy de Maupassant." Careless fecundity and deliberate
restraint are sufficiently irreconcilable terms to apply to the same
creations. Another critic tells us of Mr. Watson that "it is of
'Collins' lonely vesper-chime' and 'the frugal note of Gray' that we
think as we read the choicely worded, well-turned quatrains that succeed
each other like the strong unbroken waves of a full tide," and I cannot
but wonder how a full tide of strong waves can suggest anything either
"frugal" or "well-chosen." It is turbid judgments such as these, and an
intellectual slovenliness which is content to accept words and phrases
without attaching definite notions to them, that discredit the average
English criticism, when set beside the lucid Greek appreciation of
Aristotle and Longinus, or of those Frenchmen like Taine or Ste. Beuve
who know exactly what they look for and why they look for it. We still
require a few Matthew Arnolds to drill us in the first steps in
criticism. It seems almost as if we had accepted for literature the
ultra-democratic maxim that every man has as much right as every other
man to judge a poem--if not a good deal more right.
The appreciation of a poet means the estimation of his rank, the
separation of his precious metal from his dross, to the end that we may
get the utmost enjoyment out of his beauties, while we feel the
intellectual satisfaction which comes of a reasoned opinion at first
hand. We appreciate the poet at his true value when we set his
particular contribution to the literary joys of life neither too high
nor too low. We fully appreciate him when we derive from him the keenest
delight which he is capable of affording. And I know of no other process
for the attainment of this end than the one which I am about to
propound. It is, I think, a method which is analytical without being
mechanical, and judicial without being cold.
The excellence of the poems of Tennyson has been placed beyond doubt by
a consensus of the best judgment, when there some day swim into our ken
first one and then another small volume bearing the name of William
Watson or John Davidson. We perhaps read these volumes receptively
enough, and form some sort of impression concerning them. But we are not
sure of ourselves; we wait to hear what other people have to say. If we
hear praise, we feel encouraged to join in it; if we hear disparagement,
we grow suspicious of our own more favourable judgment. Perhaps, on the
other hand, with that half-resentment which we are always apt to feel at
new claims to poetic eminence, and for which a large measure of excuse
is to be found in the fact that ambitious but futile rhymesters are a
veritable plague of flies to publisher and public--in this spirit of
half-resentment we ask, "Who is this Watson?" "Who is this Davidson?"
and incontinently proceed to examine them in a cold and carping spirit,
with a keen eye to their faults of detail, and with a sort of illogical
assumption that if they had been of much account we should somehow have
heard of them before.
It is but rarely that an accomplished judge of literature will speak out
boldly and unequivocally, without "hedging," so to speak, and not only
declare that such-and-such a work reveals a rising genius, but give his
reasons why he declares it, distinguishing the poetical elements in
which the genius is shown. The critic should frankly analyse; but mostly
he does not. He tells us, for instance, that Walt Whitman is the "Adam
of a new poetical era," or else that he is "a dunce of inconceivable
incoherence and incompetence"; but usually he does not show us the
precise data upon which either conclusion is based. Cannot profundity of
thought, ardour of emotion, power and charm of expression, be actually
demonstrated as present or absent in a poet, when the critic is
addressing himself to his natural readers, to wit, persons in whom are
pre-supposed a certain amount of brains and heart, and cultivation of
both? If they cannot, has criticism any real existence?
To begin with, each reader is bound to recognise how far he is himself
at any time capable of appreciating particular kinds of poetry. Out of
epic, lyric, dramatic, and descriptive poetry there is usually some one
kind with which we have no natural sympathy. It follows not that,
because a man is fond of peaches, pears, and grapes, he is also fond of
passionfruit or tomatoes. Of these latter he may be no judge whatever.
_Non omnia possumus omnes_ in the criticism of poetry, any more than in
other departments of activity.
There are, for instance, some who have no patience with poetry of the
mystic, half-dreamy kind, but must have their conceptions one and all
definitely realized for them. They cannot away with emotional
arabesques; they must have recognizable and rememberable outlines. There
are others who cannot bring themselves to care for the poetry which
broods upon inanimate nature; their interest centres wholly on the
problems of man; just as there are limited souls who find no delight in
landscapes, and think figure-painting the only field of art. These are
no critics, perhaps never could be critics, of more than the verbal
expression in those uncongenial regions of poesy. To be a true
appreciator of all poetry a man must possess a harmoniously-developed
nature, as full and large and liberal as poetry itself. Let us,
therefore, begin by admitting and allowing for our limitations where we
feel them to exist.
In the first place, we must set about our reading only when we are in
the proper mood of receptivity. Poetry is not science, any more than
painting is photography, or architecture is building in squares and
cubes and circles. To approach the great poetry of "high seriousness"
when we are in a cynical or flippant mood; to snatch glances at a great
drama or epic when we are in a hurry; to begin from the very first line
by examining with a cold-blooded criticism a passionate elegy or fiery
lyric, is to act as if one sat at a concert of unfamiliar music only to
criticise the gestures of the performers or to watch for an occasional
weakness of the second violin. It is almost always open to adult human
beings not to be reading poetry if they are not feeling disposed for it.
I say "almost always" because the "indolent reviewer" is apt to be an
exception. Yet even the indolent reviewer might with advantage often
remind himself that poetry is written for people who want to read it,
and when they want to read it, and that no art pretends to force men
into enjoying it at all times and seasons. Granting, then, that we know
our own personal limitations, and what particular sense our organisation
lacks; granting also that we are reading our poet spontaneously, simply
because the pleasure of poetry is the pleasure we happen to be seeking;
granting, further, that we are sufficiently cultivated and experienced
in literature to possess ready apprehension of a thought, a fair taste
in expression, and an ear for cadence and melody, there is, I believe,
but one certain way of telling whether a verse-writer is a poet at all,
and then whether as poet he is greater or less.
He must be read a first time without effort at criticism of any kind.
The words and rhythms, the thoughts and feelings contained in a
particular poem will thus leave a certain general effect, an unanalysed
impression. It will be as it is with the true judge of art when he
stands before a picture, a statue, or a building. In its presence he
either feels the spontaneous delight which comes of a general
satisfyingness, or he feels the annoyance of a general unsatisfyingness,
or he feels neither one nor the other. So with a poem. We shall either
feel that the sounds and melodies have bathed us in delight, or we shall
think them harsh, or we shall think nothing about them at all. We shall
feel a high intellectual stimulation or a strong emotional excitement,
or we shall think the passage rather futile, or we shall be aware of no
pronounced feeling one way or the other. If we are constrained to say to
ourselves, "What a noble passage!" "What splendid verse!" "What a sweet
song!" or to use any of those unstudied exclamations which spring to the
lips before we have had time or inclination to realize our impressions
more definitely--then, I maintain, we are justified in calling the
writer at once and definitively a poet. Whether he is a greater poet or
a minor poet remains still to be estimated, but poet he is, be he Burns
or Swinburne, Tennyson or Watson or Davidson. Here, for instance, is a
passage from Watson's elegy upon Tennyson, which he has called _Lachrymae
Musarum_. I do not choose it because it is his best, but because it is
typical:--
He hath returned to regions whence he came;
Him doth the spirit divine
Of universal loveliness reclaim,
All nature is his shrine.
Seek him henceforward in the wind and sea,
In earth's and air's emotion or repose,
In every star's august serenity,
And in the rapture of the flaming rose.
There seek him if ye would not seek in vain,
There, in the rhythm and music of the whole,
Yea, and for ever in the human soul
Made stronger and more beauteous by his strain.
For lo! Creation's self is one great choir,
And what is Nature's order but the rhyme
Whereto the world keeps time,
And all things move with all things from their prime?
Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre?
In far retreats of elemental mind
Obscurely comes and goes
The imperative breath of song, that as the wind
Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows.
Demand of lilies wherefore they are white,
Extort her crimson secret from the rose,
But ask not of the Muse that she disclose
The meaning of the riddle of her might.
Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite,
Save the enigma of herself, she knows.
The master could not tell, with all his lore,
Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped;
E'en as the linnet sings, so I, he said--
Ah! rather as the imperial nightingale
That held in trance the ancient Attic shore,
And charms the ages with the notes that o'er
All woodland chants immortally prevail!
And now from our vain plaudits, greatly fled,
He with diviner silence dwells instead,
And on no earthly sea, with transient roar,
Unto no earthly airs, he trims his sail,
But, far beyond our vision and our hail,
Is heard for ever and is seen no more.
Now it matters not what flaws the austere critic might find with a
microscope in those lines. I feel certain that there is no one who would
not at this first reading experience that inevitable glow of
satisfaction which, in the cultured mind, is the unfailing criterion
that the art is good. Whether Mr. Watson is further an original poet, a
signal poetic force; whether he is a poet for the mind as much as for
the ear, is a further question to be decided by a detailed analysis; but
that he is a poet is, I beg leave to think, wholly undeniable. At first
sight, has there been anything better in this vein since _Lycidas_?
Here, again, is a brief part of a song from Davidson's _Fleet Street
Eclogue_ of May Day. I quote these lines in particular, because, unlike
most very short passages of this poet, they admit of being disentangled
from their setting. They are typical of only one side of a many-sided
being, the side which exults in the simple sensuous delights of nature.
They are two stanzas from the song of the nightingale as interpreted by
Basil:--
The lark from the top of heaven raved
Of the sunshine sweet and old;
And the whispering branches dipped and laved
In the light; and waste and wold
Took heart and shone; and the buttercups paved
The emerald meads with gold.
* * * * *
Now it is night, and--
The wind steals down the lawns
With a whisper of ecstasy,
Of moonlit nights and rosy dawns,
And a nest in a hawthorn tree;
Of the little mate for whom I wait,
Flying across the sea,
Through storm and night as sure as fate,
Swift-winged with love for me.
And again I ask, has there, at first sight, been anything more like
Shelley since Shelley's _Cloud_?
Assuming that the first step in our method has left us quite satisfied
that a writer (and here I leave Mr. Watson and Mr. Davidson and revert
to the general case) possesses enough share in the divine gift to be
called "poet," we may, if we are bent upon truly "appreciating" him,
proceed to taste his lines over and over, to dwell in detail upon his
expression, upon its charms and splendours and felicities, its vigour
and terseness and simplicity. It may be that we shall find our first
admiration continually increased, especially when we learn to realise
the full music of the verse, the subtle tones of its "flutes and soft
recorders," or the swell of the "organ-voice." We may come to taste "all
the charms of all the Muses often flowering in one lonely word." It
might be, on the other hand, that we should detect a certain
over-fulness--what Coleridge has called a too-muchness--of diction; or a
certain want of correspondence between the melodious language and any
clearly apprehended mental picture. We might find the vigour too often
lapsing into sheer bad taste, or the simplicity taking the fatal step
into simpledom, as when Tennyson ends the story of Enoch Arden with the
banal remark that
the little port
Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.
We might, unhappily, discover these things, or, on the contrary, we
might find them so rare that our admiration at the expressive genius of
the poet would increase, until we were sure that the thing of beauty was
really and truly a superlative joy for ever.
And not only in diction and melody, but in that supreme Shakespearian
poetic gift of imagination which can vividly portray, body forth in
clear form, what others can only feel in a vague and misty way while
lacking the power to express it--in this gift also the great poet is
known, not at the first reading, nor at the second, nor at the third. An
image, a metaphor, which seems most perfect when first met, may lose
much of its apparent completeness and depth when the mind examines it;
whereas upon many another, which appeared at first so easy and obvious,
there is revealed the very stamp of that godlike genius which creates,
as if without effort, the one unsurpassable, soul-satisfying "name."
If, the more we return to a poet's work, the more it grows upon us and
the more we see in it, then, as Longinus truly declares, it possesses
the quality of the sublime. Without that result the poet may be great,
but not of the greatest. To employ once more that definition which I
still find the best yet constructed, true poetry is the "exquisite
expression of an exquisite impression." For a reader to reach the
apprehension of such an impression in all its exquisiteness, and to
recognize the full exquisiteness of its expression, requires some
effort. Under the pellucid diction may lurk amazing depths. We must
therefore read a poet, and read him anew. This is the way to attain to a
reasoned and discriminating judgment, and to escape those vain and vague
impressions which we can neither trust ourselves nor impart to others.
So much for the heads of the sermon. The application is to Tennyson's
successors. Of William Watson and John Davidson as men, I know
practically nothing. I am fain to confess that I have no desire to know
anything. There is too much personal gossip already interfering with our
enjoyment of literature. These men's work is presumably their best
selves, and except for such hints of their personality as occur in their
poems, I know not "whether they be black or white." Incidentally, Mr.
Watson lets us learn that he is from the North of England, and I gather
that Mr. Davidson is a Scot from the fact that he scans "world" as two
syllables, uses "I mind" in the sense of "I remember," and talks
unpatriotically enough of his nurture in that easily identifiable region
where are to be found--
A chill and watery clime; a thrifty race
Using all means of grace
To save their souls and purses.
Among their many points of difference, the two men have this prime
quality in common, that they are ready to rely upon their own poetical
resources. Their work contains, indeed, many an echo of their great
predecessors, many a suggestion of familiarity with Milton or Pope,
Wordsworth, Shelley, or Tennyson. It is evident that both have steeped
themselves in the literature which is best calculated to make an English
poet. But it is equally evident that they have mastered their material,
and not allowed their material to master them. Watson, it is true, has
attained to a much less firm and spontaneous style than Davidson, but it
would be false to say of him that he is, in point of diction, the
imitator of any poet in especial, or that he moulds his style upon
Tennyson more than on Milton, or upon Milton more than on Wordsworth.
And what is true of their form is true of their matter. They think with
their own brains and feel with their own natures. They fall back upon no
master and no fashion to direct them what to say or leave unsaid.
Whatever opinion we may form of their force and range, we cannot but
recognise that it is themselves whom they are expressing. And it may be
taken as an axiom that nothing so commends the man who speaks to the
interest of the man who listens as this--the fact that the speaker is
telling his own thought. That, I believe, is the secret of the hold
which Browning possesses upon his votaries, and which Goethe will for
all time exercise.
We recognise with both our poets that this initial charm is theirs, and
if we find in Davidson the richer nature and the more robust, the more
infused with Browning's rough, virile strain, we are no less confident
that Watson's verse is the natural cream gathered from his daintier and
more purely intellectual moods. But in thus comparing the men I
anticipate my evidence.
The poems of John Davidson upon which I have based my judgment are those
contained in the _Fleet Street Eclogues_ (the first and second series),
and in the volume of _Ballads and Songs_. The name of the latter
explains itself. In the former are contained some dozen pieces, written
in dialogue, in various metres. The interlocutors are London journalists
and poets, who meet in Fleet Street on such holidays as Lammas, May Day,
Michaelmas, and the New Year, and there hold a kind of discursive
symposium on such themes as then and there present themselves. I mildly
call the discussion "discursive," though it would be fair in one or two
instances to dub the piece frankly a medley. Usually the special holiday
suggests a reference to the charms of nature as they are to be seen in
the country at that date, and as they are, alas! not to be seen in Fleet
Street. This device affords scope for not a few charming word-pictures,
as simple in outline and as complete in suggestion as the drawings of
flowers and tree sprays made by the Japanese, and as effective in the
artistic directness and simplicity of the language as if they had been
written by Burns or by a Greek lyrist. I do not think that it would be
possible to find anywhere in the English language more pure and fresh
delight in the sights and sounds of rural nature expressed with such
apparent naivete. And all the time the mind's eye is kept so closely, so
distinctly, on the object that the result is often the sublimity of art
as defined by Longinus, the selection and combination of exactly those
features which are the most essential and most telling. For instance, no
man who did not feel and realize with vividness, no man who lacked a
genius for expression, could so select and place just the touches which
describe the sudden descent of the lark in the evening sky. The lines
occur in the song of "Spring" in _Ballads and Songs_:--
High, O high, from the opal sky,
Shouting against the dark,
"Why, why, why, must the day go by?"
Fell a passionate lark.
The words "opal," "shouting," "fell," and "passionate," are exactly the
words, and all the words, which could be demanded in an ideal
word-picture by those who have been familiar with the scene itself. And
to make the ideal twice ideal, the very sound of the bird is brought
before one's mind after a score of years, by the whole passage, and
particularly in the reiterated "Why, why, why." If there is more
consummate simplicity of art anywhere contained in as small a compass of
words, I confess I do not know where it is to be found. Shelley does not
surpass this.
Throughout Davidson's poems there is this same positive revelling in
those delights of the eye and ear and smell which meet the wanderer in
the country. They are fresh to him every time; and he realizes and
fulfils that function of the poet, the bringing back of new freshness
into things common, at which he hints when he makes one of his
characters say:--
Dear Menzies, talk of sight and sound,
And make us _feel_ the blossom-time.
In these more sensuous moods he is so filled with the simple Chaucerian
gladsomeness of spring that he can sing, or make one of his characters
sing--for after all, his characters are but so many sides of himself--
I have been with the nightingale;
I have learned his song so sweet;
I sang it aloud by wood and dale,
And under my breath in the street.
And again--
I can hear in that valley of mine,
Loud-voiced on a leafless spray,
How the robin sings, flushed with his holly-wine,
Of the moonlit blossoms of May.
In all such passages there is the genuine note of the vernal joy which
stirs naturally in the blood of all men who are men. The writer feels as
the birds feel, nay, as the burgeoning hedges feel, when--
The blackbirds with their oboe voices make
The sweetest broken music, all about
The beauty of the day, for beauty's sake,
And all about the mates whose love they won,
And all about the sunlight and the sun.
Or when--
A passionate nightingale adown the lane
Shakes with the force and volume of his song
A hawthorn's heaving foliage.
But this sensuous rapture, which reminds us of Keats, though of a Keats
whose expression is more like that of Shelley, is by no means all that
Davidson can feel in nature. Through the eyes and other senses the
influence of nature penetrates to his soul and spirit. He touches
Wordsworth in such lines as these:--
All my emotion and imagining
Were of the finest tissue that is woven,
From sense and thought....
I seemed to be created every morn.
A golden trumpet pealed along the sky:
The sun arose: the whole earth rushed upon me.
Sometimes the tree that stroked my windowpane
Was more than I could grasp; sometimes my thought
Absorbed the universe.
It is true that these words are put in the mouth of that one of his
dramatis personae who is of the most melancholy and brooding disposition;
but he who can make another say--
I am haunted by the heavens and the earth;
... I am besieged by things that I have seen:
Followed and watched by rivers; snared and held
In labyrinthine woods and tangled meads;
Hemmed in by mountains; waylaid by the sun;
Environed and beset by moon and stars;
Whispered by winds and summoned by the sea.
--he who can put this thought in another's mouth has necessarily first
experienced some measure of it himself.
But it is not merely about external nature that our Fleet Street
journalists talk. They speak of such questions of man and life and
destiny as are wont to engage any gathering of thoughtful men, and
particularly those who are poetically disposed. The contrasts between
the beauty of rural nature and the squalor of life, especially the life
of the town, these and other matters receive such suggestive treatment
as can be given to them by a poet who has no desire to become a
preacher, and no desire to pose as an exhaustive philosopher. Upon such
questions the many-sided poet, whose sympathies are wide, and whose
moods are varied, will touch with a certain suggestiveness; he will
flash a ray of cheerfulness into the haunts of pessimism, or throw a new
pathos into common situations. And Mr. Davidson possesses a large
measure of this many-sidedness, this versatility of sympathy. He appears
a very human man, a man unfettered by cant or creed, observing men and
things from various sides, and entering into their circumstance. Is he
without a creed? From his verses on the _Making of a Poet_ it would
appear so--
No creed for me! I am a man apart:
A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world;
* * * * *
A martyr for all mundane moods to tear;
The slave of every passion, and the slave
Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light;
A trembling lyre for every wind to sound.
I am a man set to overhear
The inner harmony, the very tune
Of nature's heart; to be a thoroughfare
For all the pageantry of Time: to catch
The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour
And make them known.
* * * * *
Nevertheless he, or one of his avatars, can also say of the celebration
of Christmas with its "sweet thoughts and deeds"--
A fearless, ruthless, wanton band,
Deep in our hearts we guard from scathe
Of last year's log a smouldering brand,
To light at Yule the fire of faith.
He makes no vulgar boast about escaping from the fetters of religion. He
spares us any flouts of intellectual superiority. He is apparently an
evolutionist, but withal finds little saving grace in that doctrine, and
is not uninclined to envy the old days
When Heaven and Hell were nigh.
It is true that behind his Basil and Herbert and Brian and Sandy and
Menzies and Ninian, who converse there in Fleet Street, we find it hard
to discover any definite synthetic philosophy of Davidson himself. On
the other hand, we have no particular wish to discover one. He is a
poet, not a Herbert Spencer. We may reasonably be content to catch the
side-lights which a poet throws from a large and liberal nature; to be
led by him to different points of view. If the result is that we find
the man himself to evade us, we can only admit that the same result
occurs with Shakespeare. Indeed, there is a hint that a synthetic
philosophy is exactly what Davidson never seeks to attain. Says
Ninian:--
Sometimes, when I forget myself, I talk
As though I were persuaded of the truth
Of some received or unreceived belief;
But always afterwards I am ashamed
At such lewd lapses into bigotry.
And though another immediately ejaculates
Intolerantly tolerant!
we have a feeling that the poet has betrayed an attitude of mind not
wholly unlike his own.
His outlook is both bright and dark. The modern dragons, it has been
said, are dooming "religion and poetry." The answer comes--
They may doom till the moon forsakes
Her dark, star-daisied lawn;
They may doom till Doomsday breaks
With angels to trumpet the dawn;
While love enchants the young
And the old have sorrow and care,
No song shall be unsung,
Unprayed no prayer.
Nature is full of joy, man may find abounding delight of life in the
midst of it; but what of his destiny?
For the fate of the elves is nearly the same
As the terrible fate of men;
To love, to rue, to be, and pursue
A flickering wisp of the fen.
We must play the game with a careless smile,
Though there's nothing in the hand;
We must toil as if it were worth our while
Spinning our ropes of sand;
And laugh, and cry, and live, and die
At the waft of an unseen hand.
And again--
I am not thinking solely of myself,
But of the groaning cataract of life,
The ruddy stream that leaps importunate
Out of the night, and in a moment vaults
The immediate treacherous precipice of time,
Splashing the stars, downward into the night.
And apart from destiny, which is beyond human control, society is much
at fault. Not only is Davidson plainly democratic, he expresses the
complaints and aspirations of the higher type of those who might be
socialists, if socialism were allowed to be a development, and not
tyrannously imposed as a system. He talks of--
... Slaves in Pagan Rome--
In Christian England--who begin to test
The purpose of their state, to strike for rest
And time to feel alive in.
And--
Hoarsely they beg of Fate to give
A little lightening of their woe,
A little time to love, to live,
A little time to think and know.
There are other wrong elements in society besides poverty, and the poet
finds occasion to express one in particular. But what Mrs. Grand
requires three volumes to discuss is treated with infinitely more effect
by him in a dozen lines. The purport may be gathered from these three:--
... My heart!
Who wore it out with sensual drudgery
Before it came to me? What warped its valves?
It has been used; my heart is secondhand.
This is not the time to exhaust the Davidsonian philosophy, if there be
such. We are treating the writer as a poet, and the examples which I
have quoted of his joy in nature and his fellow-feeling with mankind,
should, I think, demonstrate that he has the gifts of vivid seeing, of
vivid feeling, and of vivid expression. If genuine poetry consists of
two essentials, substance and form, we cannot deny the substance in Mr.
Davidson. He has the gift of "high seriousness," which Arnold declares
to be a requisite of all that is classic. He is not always deep; he is
not faultless. The same writer who can condense a thought thus--
On Eden's daisies couched, they felt
They carried Eden in their heart,
is also capable of writing, as poetry, these lines:--
For no man ever understood a woman,
No woman ever understood a man,
And no man ever understood a man:
No woman ever understood a woman,
And no man ever understood himself;
No woman ever understood herself.
We can only surmise that Mr. Davidson had just been reading Whitman, and
was under the temporary hallucination that this poor stuff was profound
thinking. But all poets, nay, all prose-writers, even the greatest,
have their lapses into bathos. Yes, even--and I say it with
trembling--even Shakespeare.
Let us look, now, for a few moments, more closely, in order to
appreciate the particular elements of his genius, as manifested in the
form which is his style.
And first, his language. To be perfect, expression must be luminous yet
terse, vigorous, yet in taste and keeping. It must be without
mannerisms, without inadequacy, without flatness, without obscurity.
"Clear, but with distinction," is the brief definition of Aristotle.
Davidson has learned his lesson well from Shelley and Wordsworth and
Arnold. He cultivates all the virtues, and not without success. He has
not been tempted to leave the true path and court singularity, whether
in the shape of Browning's verbal puzzles or of Swinburne's luscious and
alliterative turgidness. His diction is of the simplest. Says one of his
personae--
I love not brilliance; give me words
Of meadow-growth and garden plot,
Of larks and black-caps; gaudy birds,
Gay flowers and jewels like me not.
It is astonishing how expressive the simple word can become in the
hands of a master. Dante's verb and noun are now proverbial. As for Mr.
Davidson, Gray's clear-cut lines in the _Elegy_ can supply no more
instances of perfect aptness than those which I quoted some time ago of
the lark. Notice the exactness of choice in--
The patchwork sunshine _nets_ the lea,
The flitting shadows _halt and pass_
Forlorn, the mossy humble-bee
_Lounges_ along the flowerless grass,
and in "I heard the _husky_ whisper of the corn." Yet I am disposed to
think that, like many another finished artist, he has passed through
stages of various practice, and has exercised much self-restraint before
attaining to that naturalness which, as Goethe reiterates, is the last
crown of art-discipline. From sundry indications I conclude that
passages of his _Fleet-street Eclogues_ were written independently at
different dates, and have been fitted later into the dialogue form.
However that may be, it is possible to detect instances in which he
falls below his own maturer ideal of natural language. The diction, that
is to say the choice of mere vocables, is eminently natural, except for
the odd words "muted," "writhen," "watchet-hued," "dup," "swound,"
which I have collected with a rather laborious captiousness. But diction
is only part of expression, and, as I have just hinted, it would seem as
if, before his lesson in pure style was fully learned, he had passed
under the fascination of the mannerists, and particularly of Pope.
Otherwise it is hard to account for such entirely eighteenth century
lines as--
And brimming echoes spill the pleasant din,
or--
The sloping shores that fringe the velvet tides;
and (speaking of steamers)--
Or, fiery-hearted, cleave with iron limbs
And brows precipitous the pliant sea.
How different are these mechanical constructions from that expression of
the birds
hid in the white warm cloud
Mantling the thorn.
Whether I am right or wrong as to the process of his development, the
fact remains that he can be, if he chooses, a master in language of
poetic simplicity. Even a fire of garden rubbish can be expressed
without becoming altogether unpoetical when one speaks of
the spicy smoke
Of withered weeds that burn where gardens be.
Perhaps there do exist some things which cannot be made poetical in any
diction whatsoever. Tennyson could only express "tea" by "and on the
board the fluttering urn," and if Mr. Davidson has to speak of whisky
and calls it
amber spirit that enshrines the heart
Of an old Lothian summer,
we have to recognise that he has come very well out of a difficulty. If
at another time he refers to it as
things which journalists require,
we must remember that the context implies a certain humour.
"Clear, but not flat," is an easy maxim to utter, but, as Wordsworth too
often shows, the danger of falling from studied simplicity into bald
prose is always present; and for that reason do smaller artists rather
choose to trick their thoughts in verbal jewellery. We cannot say that
Davidson, who undertakes to run the risk, never makes the fatal step. In
the address to the daisy--
Oh, little brave adventurer!
We human beings love you _so_,
the last word, and indeed the whole line, verges on the infantile. So it
is a shock when, after a passage of some pretensions, we come upon the
lines--
My way of life led me to London town,
And difficulties, which I overcame;
or--
But yet my waking intuition,
That longed to execute its mission.
It is extremely difficult to realise that the same man wrote these sorry
lines who, in another place, adopts this for his style--
... Here spring appears
Caught in a leafless brake, her garland torn,
Breathless with wonder, and the tears half dried
Upon her rosy cheek.
For our comfort and his let us remember that it was the same Wordsworth
who wrote both the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ and also the
lines--
I've measured it from side to side:
It's three feet long and two feet wide!
Nevertheless flaws of this kind are few, and it is almost unfair for me
to be the means perhaps of conveying even thus much impression of
faultiness about verses which sustain so high a general level of
excellence of language.
In point of melody and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt
that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a
vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great
vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he
would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and
"athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees"
and "palaces," "shade is" and "ladies," "giftless" and "swiftness," are
far from pleasing; and though I am almost ashamed to play the detective
in work which is mostly full of charm, I find myself distressed by such
cacophonies as--
Hid in its hoard of haws,
and--
Pierces a rushlight's ray's length into it.
John Davidson, then, is a genuine son of his age; free in his thought,
wide in his sympathies, eager for the amelioration of man's estate,
divided between the hopes of science and the regret for a lost religion,
compelled to fall back on the everlasting consolations of love and
nature, an ardent lover of the country and its sights and sounds,
constrained to draw word-pictures of the things which thus delight him,
and drawing them with the consummate skill of the man who keeps his eye
on the essentials of the thing he draws. His charm lies in his frank
sincerity, and in the clear healthy sweetness of his utterance. That he
is a poet none can doubt; if he is comparatively young, as I surmise he
is, and if he pursues his true development, he may, I believe, easily
take his place in the first rank, not only as a successor, but as the
successor, of Tennyson.
On William Watson I shall dwell less long. To begin with, he is already
better known. Moreover, his special virtues as a poet are more easy to
apprehend, for they lie somewhat prominently upon the surface. Better
still, he apparently apprehends them himself, and is in that unusually
happy position for an artist, of knowing exactly where his own strength
lies. And undoubtedly in those departments his strength is great. We
need not hold the mention of them in reserve. I have already quoted a
passage of admirable rhetorical and musical skill and taste from the
_Lachrymae Musarum_. That was sufficient to illustrate one of this
poet's great gifts--the gift of writing splendid verse, as harmonious as
Milton's and as choice in expression as Tennyson's. His other chief
endowment is that of literary critic. On Burns, Shelley, and Wordsworth
he has said almost the final saying, and assuredly in almost the final
language. We may pick faults now and again in his expression, and we may
suspect a mannerism here and there, especially when we read large
quantities of his verse at one time; nevertheless, each individual piece
which fairly represents him is very nearly perfect in its way.
The works of his with which I am acquainted are the volumes entitled
_Wordsworth's Grave and Other Poems_, _The Father of the Forest and
Other Poems_, _Lachrymae Musarum_, and the series of sonnets upon
Armenia, called _The Purple East_. There is in Watson nothing of the
dramatist or of the epic writer. He is a lyrist and a sonneteer. He is
also a critic, and might very conceivably be a satirist. But, whatever
he is in writing, he is mainly and before all things an intellectual
rather than an emotional poet; he is an artist rather than a seer. His
poems are constructions of taste and intellectual judgment. Let me take,
as an example, his poem upon the _Father of the Forest_. A yew tree,
which may be fifteen centuries old, is addressed by him; and, musing on
the historical scenes it must have lived through, he gives us a series
of verses which touch musically upon salient epochs and characteristic
figures in the history of England. To this the yew practically replies
that the so-called historical events amount to nothing, and that "wars
and tears" will repeat themselves, until men are some day civilized into
pursuing but one object, which shall be Beauty. The piece itself reveals
nothing profound, awakes no particular emotion. Given the first idea of
the plot, so to speak--an idea which is not far to seek for any
reflective man--the rest of the material follows as a matter of course.
But where is the man besides Mr. Watson who will give us such lines as--
The South shall bless, the East shall blight,
The red rose of the Dawn shall blow;
The million-lilied stream of night,
Wide in ethereal meadows flow.
I do not say that the poet is without his measure of feeling; but it is
rather the pensive feeling of a Jaques, the dainty interest of a Matthew
Arnold, than any surge of emotion. The poet seems to me to encourage his
brain to feel--to give it that passing luxury with a certain amount of
deliberation.
The _Hymn to the Sea_ is the only real poem written in the English
language in hexameters and pentameters. There have been many attempts at
these metres, but they have been failures, one and all. And nothing
shows Mr. Watson's skill, nay genius, more than the fact that his
attempt is a great and conspicuous success. The sea, confined within its
shores, never resting, yet never able to pass its bounds, at war with
the winds, and serving the moon with its tides, is compared to man, with
his unrest, his limitations, his aspirations. As before, when the clue
is once given, the thread is easily followed to the end. The result is
simply an intellectual operation done into verbal music. Yet who but
William Watson, having to speak of the moon as mistress of the sea,
could express his fancy in words like these:--
When, as yonder, thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories,
Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale.
Ah, she comes, she arises--impassive, emotionless, bloodless,
Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl.
Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses abounding:
Surely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering youth!
Surely not all unimpassioned, at sound of thy rough serenading,
She from the balconied night unto her melodist leaned,--
Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her commandments,
All for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it lie.
Surely such verse would have a claim to endurance, even if the thought
were less of a thought than it is.
_Autumn_, again, is a short piece upon the suggestions of that season.
What would those suggestions naturally be? Obviously, the passing and
perishing of all things that are. True; but to express those
suggestions, obvious as they are, as Watson expresses them, requires a
rhetorical power and a taste in melodious words such as would make their
possessor eminent in the judgment of men who care anything for beauty.
There may be no particular depth in the work; it may be less passionate,
less full of thought, than the _Ode to the West Wind_, but we could ill
afford to spare such combinations of sound as--
Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne
From undiscoverable lips, that blow
An immaterial horn.
In _Liberty Rejected_ we meet once more with the similitude of the moon
and the tide. Mr. Watson's range of purely intellectual imagination is,
like that of his emotion, limited. But we do not mind meeting the
comparison again, when the lover who refuses to be free expresses
himself thus--
The ocean would as soon
Entreat the moon
Unsay the magic verse
That seals him hers
From silver noon to noon.
When he touches upon nature, we feel again that Watson is not "letting
himself go." When he escapes from town it is not to revel and to make us
revel in the sheer delight of rural sights and sounds. He feels as
before, with the eye and the understanding, not with the buoyant blood
of the full heart. No matter, he feels enough to give us this quatrain--
In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll;
Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky:
Then journeyed home to carry in his soul
The torment of the difference till he die.
Why should I go on to quote such lines as--
That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea,
or,
Curls the labyrinthine sea
Duteous to the lunar will.
Enough that, thanks to a study of Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Keats,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and therefore a delicate taste in word and phrase,
and thanks also to an innate genius for verbal music, restrained from
Swinburnian riot by a true artistic instinct, Mr. Watson is a poet most
delightful to the physical and the mental ear. That he has taken pains
with his study is avowed by himself. Beginning with Shelley and passing
through Keats to Wordsworth, he says--
In my young days of fervid poesy
He drew me to him with his strange far light,--
He held me in a world all clouds and gleams,
And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself
Moved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams.
Anon the Earth recalled me; and a voice
Murmuring of dethroned divinities
And dead times, deathless upon sculptured urn--
And Philomela's long-descended pain
Flooding the night--and maidens of romance
To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come--
Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse
And thraldom, lapping me in high content,
Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms.
And then a third voice, long unheeded--held
Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame--Found
me at last with ears to hear. It sang
Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys,
Of simple manhood, artless womanhood,
And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn;
And from the homely matter nigh at hand,
Ascending and dilating, it disclosed
Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths
Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass
With roots that groped about eternity,
And in each drop of dew upon each blade
The mirror of the inseparable All.
It is also clear from such reminiscences as--
The laurel glorious from that wintry hair,
which is practically Tennyson, or
The maker of this verse, which shall endure
By splendour of its theme, that cannot die,
which, if I mistake not, is echoed Spenser, or--
And ghostly as remembered mirth,
which is largely Tennyson again.
I do not call these plagiarisms, I call them reflections of wide and
retentive reading.
William Watson has thus formed a style which is almost perfect. I say
"almost," not quite. There are some few mannerisms which we might wish
away. He speaks of "greatly inert," "greatly lost in thee," "greatly
slain," "doomed splendidly to die," "loudly weak," "immutably prevail,"
and "vainly great," till we are forced to recognize what looks very
much like a trick. He has occasional moments of tautology, which may
possibly be deliberate, but is none the better for that, as when he
says:--
Not mine the rich and showering hand, that strews
The facile largess of a stintless muse.
And
The retrospect in Time's reverted eyes.
And worst of all--
"Fair clouds of gulls that _wheel_ and _swerve_
In unanimity divine,
With _undulation serpentine_,
And wondrous consentaneous _curve_."
He sometimes falls into lines which ring of the mint of Pope--
No guile may capture and no force surprise.
Or--
Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn.
Or--
Towers to a lily, reddens to a rose.
In one passage only do I find him falling, falling, falling into the
flattest style of the _Excursion_:--
"I overheard a kind-eyed girl relate
To her companions how a favouring chance
By some few shillings weekly had increased
The earnings of her household."
But as I read this, I murmur to myself those lines from Wordsworth--
"And I have travelled far as Hull to see
What clothes he might have left, or other property,"
and wonder how it is that such aberrations can befal even the very man
who seems most determined to avoid them.
Watson's second endowment is still one of taste and intellect. It is the
gift of literary criticism. The special charm of the great poets is so
subtly apprehended by him, and so exquisitely expressed, that it will be
a source of much surprise if many of his concise verdicts do not become
the household words of students of literature. Let me quote a passage
from his poem on _Wordsworth's Grave_:--
You who have loved, like me, his simple themes,
Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain,
And loved the land whose mountains and whose streams
Are lovelier for his strain.
It may be that his manly chant, beside
More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune;
It may be, thought has broadened, since he died,
Upon the century's noon;
It may be that we can no longer share
The faith which from his fathers he received;
It may be that our doom is to despair
Where he with joy believed;--
Enough that there is none since risen who sings
A song so gotten of the immediate soul,
So instant from the vital fount of things
Which is our source and goal;
And though at touch of later hands there float
More artful tones than from his lyre he drew,
Ages may pass e'er trills another note
So sweet, so great, so true.
Take again--
Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine;
Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless, human view;
Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine;
Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew.
And these:--
Shelley, the hectic flamelight rose of verse,
All colour and all odour and all bloom.
And on Burns--
But as, when thunder crashes nigh,
All darkness opes one flaming eye,
And the world leaps against the sky,
So fiery clear
Did the old truths that we pass by
To him appear.
These, then, are the prominent poetical virtues of William Watson,
virtues which none can avoid observing--his magnificent power of
expression and his literary acumen. He is an intellectual poet, and
therefore not devoid of substance. Yet his substance alone would never
make him a _vates_. I can imagine that in prose criticisms and in satire
he would make a distinguished figure. Here is his answer to Mr. Alfred
Austin when the laureate advised him to be patient with the Armenian
question:--
"The poet laureate assured me--first, that whosoever in any
circumstances arraigns this country for anything that she may do or
leave undone thereby covers himself with shame; secondly, that although
the continued torture, rape, and massacre of a Christian people, under
the eyes of a Christian continent, may be a lamentable thing, it is best
to be patient, seeing that the patience of God Himself can never be
exhausted; and, thirdly, that if I were but with him in his pretty
country house, were but comfortably seated 'by the yule log's blaze,'
and joining with him in seasonable conviviality, the enigmas of
Providence and the whole mystery of things would presently become
transparent to me, and more especially after 'drinking to England' I
should be enabled to understand that 'she bides her hour behind the
bastioned brine.'"
It would be hard to better that.
But though I call him intellectual, and more artistic than inspired, I
have no wish to underrate the intrinsic poetry in such lines as these,
on the _Great Misgiving_:--
Ah, but the apparition--the dumb sign--
The beckoning finger bidding me forego
The fellowship, the converse, and the wine,
The songs, the festal glow!
And, ah, to know not, while with friends I sit,
And while the purple joy is passed about,
Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit
Or homeless night without.
Nor the graceful fancy in these, from _Beauty's Metempsychosis_:--
From wave and star and flower,
Some effluence rare
Was lent thee; a divine but transient dower;
Thou yield'st it back from eyes and lips and hair
To wave and star and flower.
Should'st thou to-morrow die,
Thou still shalt be
Found in the rose, and met in all the sky;
And from the ocean's heart shalt sing to me,
Should'st thou to-morrow die.
I have also said that Mr. Watson knows his own strength and his
limitations. Let me conclude by quoting a passage from his _Apologia_,
the very style of which will be in itself the justification of the man
whom it argues to justify:--
... Because I have full oft
In singers' selves found me a theme of song,
Holding these also to be very part
Of Nature's greatness....
* * * * *
And though I be to these but as a knoll
About the feet of the high mountains, scarce
Remarked at all, save when a valley cloud
Holds the high mountains hidden, and the knoll
Against the clouds shows briefly eminent;
Yet, ev'n as they, I, too, with constant heart,
And with no light or careless ministry,
Have served what seemed the voice; and unprofane
Have dedicated to melodious ends
All of myself that least ignoble was.
For though of faulty and of erring walk,
I have not suffered aught in me of frail
To blur my song; I have not paid the world
The evil and the insolent courtesy
Of offering it my baseness for a gift.
And unto such as think all Art is cold,
All music unimpassioned, if it breathe
An ardour not of Eros' lips, and glow
With fire not caught from Aphrodite's breast,
Be it enough to say, that in Man's life
Is room for great emotions unbegot
Of dalliance and embracement, unbegot
Even of the purer nuptials of the soul;
And one not pale of blood, to human touch
Not tardily responsive, yet may know
A deeper transport and a mightier thrill
Than comes of commerce with mortality,
When, rapt from all relation with his kind,
All temporal and immediate circumstance,
In silence, in the visionary mood
That, flashing light on the dark deep, perceives
Order beyond this coil and errancy;
Isled from the fretful hour he stands alone,
And hears the eternal movement, and beholds
Above him and around and at his feet,
In million-billowed consentaneousness,
The flowing, flowing, flowing of the world.
The
Making of a Shakespeare
There is nothing both wholly new and wholly true to be said concerning
Shakespeare. Eckermann, who played Boswell to Goethe's Johnson, was once
disposed to discuss Shakespeare with that great master. Alone of modern
poets Goethe has revealed a capacity in some degree comparable with that
of the myriad-minded Englishman. Yet Goethe replied to Eckermann, "We
cannot talk about Shakespeare; everything is inadequate." If the German
intellectual colossus, whose conversation bestrode the narrow world from
comparative anatomy and scientific optics to the principles of art,
could not talk of Shakespeare; if a poet whose writings, next to those
of our own unrivalled bard, are most thickly studded with great stars of
thought, could not talk of Shakespeare, what is to be said by us punier
men who are compelled to peep about for matter of discourse? "Everything
is inadequate." That perhaps is the reason why talk about Shakespeare,
even from the sanest of men, is apt to convert itself into perfervid
rhapsody. Meanwhile, from those whose sanity is less assured, it runs to
the delirium of some harebrained cipher of Shakespeare-Geheimnis, and an
amused world is asked to listen while some female Dogberry asserts that
the truth, too long concealed, has been proved, and it will soon go near
to be thought, that _Romeo and Juliet_ was written by none other than
Anne Hathaway.
I do not come before you to-night with either a rhapsody or a
mare's-nest. Nor do I come with criticism of that marvellous creator,
who, to use the bold expression of the Frenchman, _apres Dieu crea le
plus_. When, with the progress of the years, a supreme writer is read
more and more over all the world; when his plays are translated from
English into Hebrew and Japanese, and performed in Roumanian and
Hindustani, criticism should become simply a humble endeavour to realize
the various powers and beauties which constitute such triumphant
greatness.
That is my attitude to-night. To me Shakespeare--though not flawless,
because human--is the crown and consummation of literature. Ardently and
reverently as I admire Homer, AEschylus, Dante and Goethe, my mind places
even these on somewhat lower seats than the creator of _Hamlet_ and
_Othello_. My object is to review--however imperfectly--what went to his
making, what elements of gift and character, circumstance, training and
experience were so mixed in him that nature could stand up and say:
"This is a man." This is not the same idle performance as to descant
rapturously upon his purely inborn genius. It is no purpose of mine to
attempt a definition or dissection of genius. It is only in our youth or
ignorance that we possess the confidence to define such abstractions as
beauty, goodness, genius, and art. Still less do I propound a recipe for
its manufacture. If I knew the secret of its attainment I should first
try it upon myself.
Shakespeare was made by the right native genius, by the right
environment, and by the right training. We will take these factors in
that order.
Genius, like every other good gift and every perfect gift, "is from
above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights." We feel its presence
when we are fortunate enough to meet with it. In our hearts we know that
it is some strange and incommunicable faculty for performing with a
divine ease those achievements which are the despair of other men, or to
which they can only make some approach by "infinite pains."
Brains have been classified as brains of one, two and three storeys. As
you cannot, by thinking, add a cubit to your stature, so can you not, by
thinking, add a storey to your brain. You may furnish and brighten the
one storey or the two storeys with which your mental house was built
before your birth. You may open the windows and let in the sun and air.
By the best education and habit you may fill that house with art and
beauty and light and comfort, or, by the worst, you may render it ugly,
foul, bleak and dark; but you can never add a new floor. Shakespeare's
brain was not only built by mother Nature in three storeys, but those
storeys were lofty and roomy in an astonishing degree. They were also
full of windows.
His natural gifts were vast. No writer ever possessed such a
manifoldness, or rather, totality of them. In a different branch of
art, one cannot but think of Michael Angelo, who could carve the Moses,
paint the Sistine ceiling, or build St. Peter's, with equal grasp and
mastery over conceptions each too sublime for ordinary men.
If we analyse and enumerate the endowments lavished by Nature on her
"darling" of the Avon, we shall find, as in the case of Angelo, that he
not only displays each separate gift, but that he displays each in its
highest form and fullest measure. His own modesty may be permitted to
envy this man's art or that man's scope, but never was envy more
misplaced.
This is no rhapsody. Longinus tells us that an unassailable verdict upon
the sublime must be the consensus of different ages, pursuits, tastes
and walks in life. Concerning Shakespeare's gifts there is no discord
among the competent--the Hazlitts, Coleridges, Emersons, Carlyles. Some
of those gifts can be cultivated in considerable measure, some in a
less; some lie beyond all training and all art. But no art or
cultivation whatever can bring any one of them to the Shakespearean
height and fulness, if Nature herself has been less kind than she was
to the child of John Shakespeare, that unsuspecting burgess of Stratford
town.
If, before we attempt to realise the supremacy of Shakespeare in any
particular attribute, we have recognised how miserably we ourselves have
managed, at some time or other, to fail in every one of them; if, before
we approach an appreciation of Shakespeare, we have applied to other
great creators the same analysis which we are about to apply to him; if
we have learned from the most instructive examples what is meant by
creation, by imagination, by insight, by wisdom, by wit, by humour, by
eloquence, and by verbal music; then we cannot fail to acknowledge that
here is the all-round, the all-comprehensive genius, superlatively
dowered with each and all of them; that here is the entire mind, where
others are partial; that here, as I believe some one has put it, is the
man who, when others have said, or depicted, or argued, or pleaded,
seems to come along and say, "let me show you how this should be done,"
and so does it once and for ever.
It is but few, one may believe, who are fully conscious of the reasons
why Shakespeare could fill the Elizabethan pit with the rough London
apprentices and the Elizabethan boxes with superfine gallants and
courtiers; why he has been a delight equally to the worldling, to whom
always "the play's the thing," and to the sedate scholar, who has
perchance never set foot in a theatre, and to whom a play is a dramatic
poem printed in a book. Yet the reason is simple. It is because
Shakespeare's gifts are numerous and varied enough to appeal to populace
and gallant, to worldling and student; they meet to the full each and
every demand that can be made upon a work of dramatic art.
To begin with, he possesses the true constructive power, the first
secret of the playwright's craft. He can visualise an extensive or
complicated passage of human life, with its cross streams of action, its
moving world of persons, its intricate motives and passions--whether it
surround Julius Caesar in ancient Rome or Othello in Cyprus or one of his
kings of English history--whether he find it recorded in Holinshed, or
in Plutarch, or in some novel of Italy--and, with the swift intuition of
the master craftsman, he grasps the essentials, arranges and links them,
and renders them organic and compact. With sure judgment of effect he
adds to his original or subtracts from it, and he rounds off the whole
into an absorbing and unflagging story to be told in action during but
"two hours traffic of the stage." No one can fully realise this immense
selective and constructive power until he has analysed the action of
_Macbeth_, and observed the marvellous skill which has compressed into
those five short acts a whole world of great and little things done and
said and thought.
But greater and rarer still than this architectural gift is the creative
power which lies in imagination. And by imagination I do not mean merely
the play of fancy in Mercutio's famous speech, nor simply the conjuring
up of pictures as in Clarence's dream, nor the invention of those
perfect similitudes which meet us everywhere. In these, it is true,
Shakespeare is consummate. But I mean that deeper and more pervasive
power, which beholds beings of the imagination as if they were flesh and
blood realities, and presents men and women of the past or of nowhere as
if they were breathing in the living present before our eyes; the
shaping power which--to make a quotation that never stales--
gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name--
so that to us Elsinore for ever means Hamlet, Verona means Juliet, and
we think of Shylock and Jessica as historical beings who veritably once
trod the Piazza and the Merceria of Venice. The great novelist who wrote
_Vanity Fair_ possessed a rare measure of this power; but in him it was
limited by the limitations of his sympathies and by his less amiable
view of men. So was it with Carlyle. In Shakespeare it is boundless. To
him all ages, all sorts and conditions of men and women, are
understandable and worthy of interest. Intuitively he knows them, walks
with them, talks with them, feels with them. They may be heroes, sages,
fools, villains: they may be witty or stupid, refined or gross. Their
characters may be direct and plain as those of Lear and Kent, or they
may be as subtly shaded as that of Hamlet or of the melancholy
soliloquist of Arden. He can in imagination traverse the whole gamut of
feeling. He can be what or whom he will. This is the imagination in
which Shakespeare is unsurpassable. This more than all powers, unless it
be that of humour, is the one which Nature must bestow, and which
nothing but Nature can bestow. And this is the power which alone can
make drama convincing and immortal. Compare with the living and
breathing reality of the characters in even the poorest of the
Shakespearean plays, the wordy automata of Swinburne's _Faliero_ or the
frigid figures who talk through Tennyson's _Cup_. There are those who
compare Scott with Shakespeare in the gift of visualising and vitalising
the past. We Englishmen may leave it to the Scotchman Carlyle to settle
with that comparison. For my own part, as a student of antiquity, I
would maintain that, despite all petty anachronism, Shakespeare in his
Roman plays comes nearer to the essential truth than any merely
professional student can ever come. What he gives us is not archaeology,
not the exact Forum nor the precise etiquette of the toga, but the man,
the Caesar, the Coriolanus, the greasy populace, their heart and
mind--these he sees with the penetrating eye of an imagination which
never fails.
Of imagination, in this sense, wit and humour are a vital part. Without
them you may imagine an Othello or a Lear, but you cannot imagine a
Falstaff, a Touchstone, a Mercutio, or a Bottom. In this domain
Shakespeare is sometimes thought to be rivalled by Aristophanes and
Moliere. Yet one who read all three will find that these are his rivals
rather in broad strokes of humour and flashes of wit than in the
subtler virtues of his humour. His humour is all-pervading, it is colour
woven into the whole tissue of thinking, speaking, and action. Nay, true
humour is like the colour of a flower or leaf. It belongs to the nature
of the plant, and is carried in the sap of its life. To talk like
Falstaff, you must in imagination become Falstaff, feel as he would do,
think as he would think. You cannot lay on the Falstaffian humour by a
reasoning process from the outside. The result may be clever, but it
will lack just that subtle and evasive quality which the modern cant
seeks to describe by the word "inevitable." A merely brilliant man--a
Sheridan, for instance--might make the endeavour, and gain some
considerable applause. But Shakespeare for the moment lived the part,
the humour came to him with the part, whether the humour of clowns and
gravediggers, of Jaques, or of the moody prince of Denmark.
Essential also to such humour is the broad and tolerant temper which can
not only suffer fools gladly, as being a large and representative class
of God's creatures, but can actually rejoice in their folly as a thing
delectable to a healthy contemplation.
But when the piece has been thus constructed with a master hand, and
when the characters have been informed by imagination with all the
convincingness of infinitely varied life, with humour, with sound and
healthy and impartial understanding, much is still left. There is still
to be considered the language or expression in which all is clothed. And
in this respect the writer who has written best in any tongue, falls,
when compared with Shakespeare, a step into the rear. Not Milton, for
all his organ flood of noble phrase; not Shelley, for all his burning
and rapturous utterance, can vie with the actor-playwright of the Globe
in his gift of eloquence. It is entirely marvellous and beyond all
explanation. No mere study or scholarship could attain to that
inexhaustible fund, not merely of words, but of the right words. Orators
and writers there are a many who never fail to find a word, and a good
word, for the rounding of their sentences. But Shakespeare's words are
not merely good words; they are the best words. Even the bare vocabulary
of Burke or Macaulay would seem second-rate beside the vocabulary of
Shakespeare. It is a commonplace to dilate upon the fact that
Shakespeare has used 15,000 words, while Milton, our poet of widest
reading and erudition, has but 8,000. I do not attach so much importance
to that enumeration. The subjects, the sides of life, the classes of
persons of whom Shakespeare treats, are so comprehensive of high and
low, serious and jocose, while Milton's are confined to a range of such
seriousness and dignity, that the comparison is but fallacious.
Nevertheless this vast repertoire of words is in itself an amazing
phenomenon. Still more amazing is the consummate tact with which he
makes use of them, in sentences so terse and clear that they
increasingly pass into the proverbs of everyday. And most amazing is
that, with all his characters, and all their speeches, he never repeats
himself. No better proof could be given that the speaker is for the
moment not Shakespeare, but the character in which he has sunk himself.
We need not pretend that he does not sometimes run riot in his power;
yet, how seldom, in the day of his maturity, is that "sometimes," when
we rightly understand his meanings.
Let critics, observing always who speaks and in what spirit he speaks,
try to improve a word in a typical passage of Shakespeare. They speedily
realise the error of their ways.
Take at random the very simplest line, say: "How sweet the moonlight
sleeps upon this bank"; substitute some other word for "sweet" or
"sleeps," and examine the result. The very sound of the line possesses
the tone of the moonlight and the hour, the mood of Lorenzo and Jessica.
Try an easy-looking similitude:--
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like a prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind!
And, if the man who writes this nervous Saxon, writes elsewhere--
No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
that also is a lesson to those who have any notion of what is meant by
the right word in the right place.
To me Shakespeare is the most stupendously eloquent man who ever set pen
to paper. Shakespeare, says Goethe, offers us golden apples in silver
dishes. But Goethe was a foreigner, he perhaps hardly realised that the
dishes of English expression are, to the English reader who responds to
the niceties of his own tongue, not less golden than the apples.
To these perfections let us add another, his superb sense of rhythm.
Properly speaking, this is but an integral part of perfect eloquence. It
is the concern of the poet, not only to make the words express the
meaning, but to make the cadence express the tone and mood; to make it,
in fact, answer to those rhythmic vibrations of the brain which go with
all states of mental exaltation. It is Emerson who observes that
"Shakespeare's sonnets are like the tone of voice of some incomparable
person." He was doubtless thinking of their general effect upon our mood
and spirit, but his remark is true of the mere movement of Shakespeare's
lyric lines:--
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
Or--
When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,
and so on.
Here, as in the dramas, are no mechanical tricks, no obvious compassing
of sickly sweetnesses. The accent falls where it should, unstrained. The
disguised alliteration comes, as almost always in Milton also, not from
set and conscious purpose, but from the promptings of a mind vibrating
with harmonious suggestion.
This catalogue of virtues has been long, but it has required some
self-command to prevent it from being longer. It justifies the
exclamation with which Mr. Sidney Lee closes his life of Shakespeare, an
exclamation which he deftly borrows from Hamlet: "How noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in apprehension how like a God!"
So much for Nature's making. With such lavish powers, or at least
potentialities, was Shakespeare born. It is appalling to reflect that
their fruit might all have been lost to the world if John Shakespeare,
the father, had been but a little poorer than he actually was; if
William, the son, had been sent to the plough-tail without the
rudiments of education, and so had been banished for ever from contact
with bright spirits and all the brilliant motley of London life. His
fate would have been that of Gray's rural "mute inglorious Milton" and
the headstone with "Here lies William Shakespeare" would have meant
nothing outside the parish, and very little inside it. It is an alarming
thought also that, had he been born half a century later, though with
every educational advantage, his manhood would have fallen under the
grim Puritan tyranny, and he would never have written a play. It is a
peculiarly happy combination of circumstances which we must thank for
the making of Shakespeare as he is.
Nature produced the wonderful plant, but, for its perfect development, a
plant requires a congenial soil and atmosphere; it needs light and
water; it needs protection from early destruction, or stunting, or
starvation. It may seem heterodox, but I would maintain stubbornly,
against all the phalanx of Baconians and Bedlamites, that, for the
cultivation of Shakespeare's peculiar genius, circumstances were almost
wholly propitious. His very poverty was his stimulus. Even that school
education of his, which is made by misunderstanding to appear so scant
and pitiful, was, I doubt not, better adapted to his career than if he
had been filled with all the learning of Verulam or Ben Jonson. But of
that anon.
The first happy circumstance was the epoch at which he saw the light.
In modern times two forms of poetry contend for the supremacy. The third
kind, the epic, is dead. No Homer or Virgil can ever more arise, unless
as a novelist in prose. Of the two perennial kinds, one is the
lyric--the consummate blending of language and music which utters the
cry of individual passion from the individual heart. The other is the
drama, the presentation of human life in visible form, realised in all
its complexity of motives, characters and moods. Both of these
flourished mightily in Shakespeare's generation. Lyric poets were
innumerable. The whole country rang with songs. The Elizabethan
Miscellanies and Rhapsodies and Dainty Devices are testimony stronger
even than the great names of Spenser and the sonneteers. No less did
drama appeal to high and low, the Puritan always excepted. But the day
of the Puritan had not yet dawned. The taste of society of every grade
was for the theatre, but a theatre without scenery, in which it was
required of the drama that it should be rich in high poetry. Poetry was
just then both a fashion and a passion of the nation, as it never was
before and never has been since. To a man born, like Shakespeare, with
both the lyric and the dramatic gift, the age was full of example and
stimulus, and, better still, full of challenge and exacting poetic
standards. There is an immense difference between writing an artistic
sonnet for a wide public which desires to read artistic sonnets, or
composing a poetic drama for a wide public which desires to see poetic
dramas, and doing these things for a narrow public which, after all,
rather tolerates your efforts than demands them.
We are not concerned with the question what Shakespeare might have been
if he had lived in his prime to-day. He might perhaps have become a
superlative novel-writer, since that is the field in which creation
appears to be playing its chief part. But our concern is to perceive
what causes helped to fashion him to that which he in fact became.
Let us first glance for a few moments at those spacious times of great
Elizabeth. Why so wondrously prolific in song and play? Why so
provocative of genius?
First, we may lay down the proposition that it is not times of national
misery and poverty, not times of insecurity and fear, not times of weak
convictions and cynicism, that produce a wealth of either great poets or
great art. There is not one distinguished literary or artistic period
of any country at which the national spirit was not full of the
animation, enterprise, and confidence of a general well-being, or at
which it was not possessed by high ideas and strong aims or strong
convictions. I am speaking in broad summary. Whatever qualifications may
be made for unique phenomena, this statement in the main is true. At
such periods the mental vitality of a community is high; the air is
charged with intellectual and artistic electricity, and great talents
everywhere become the receivers and gathering-points of those electric
currents. Hence poets, artists, and other creators appear simultaneously
in clusters; production is abundant both in matter and in kind. At such
times there is nothing withdrawn or particularly refined about the
creations which pour forth. There is no room for the dilettante or
_petit maitre_, and not much for the professional critic; it is the age
of strong men; writing, painting, sculpture are full of vigour,
inspiration, earnestness.
It was so at Athens in that glorious age of Pericles and the succeeding
generation, the age of the great tragedians, of Thucydides, of
Aristophanes and of Phidias. It was so--though with men of less
original genius--in the Augustan Rome of Virgil, Horace and Livy. It was
so in the rich and ardent cities of Renaissance Italy, where Da Vinci,
Raphael, Michel Angelo, and Titian flourished in the same space of
thirty years. It was so in the France of Louis Quatorze, when Corneille,
Racine, Moliere, Pascal, and numbers of others of hardly smaller note,
were writing side by side. And it was so in the times of great
Elizabeth. According to Emerson there is a mental zymosis or contagion
prevailing in society at such epochs. Some one has said that "No member
of either house of the British Parliament will be ranked among the
orators whom Lord North did not see or who did not see Lord North." If
so, the cause will be found to lie in the encouragement which noble
oratory then received, whereas at a later day it has "fallen into
abatement and low price."
The age of Elizabeth was one of material prosperity and comfort. It was,
in the main, well with men's bodies and well with their minds. They
possessed not only the leisure, not only the means, but also the
disposition to enjoy. It is not for the artist in any field to scorn the
material prosperity of the community in which he works. After all, as
history will show, it is that prosperity which makes him possible.
"Plain living and high thinking" is good for himself; it is good for a
nation; but plain living does not mean poverty, squalor or starvation,
while high thinking cannot be done without leisure and resource. You
cannot build glorious Gothic cathedrals or order sublime Madonnas out of
nothing.
Elizabethan England lived in comfort. It lived also in the security of
at least internal peace. The Civil Wars, which had unsettled men of all
ranks and distracted their thoughts and energies, were over. Those
thoughts and energies now sought another outlet. On the whole it was
also an age of tolerance. England had not entered upon its phase of
Puritan bigotry, nor on its licentious Anti-Puritan vengeance. Religion
was in less degree a battle-ground. There were, of course, hostilities
of Protestants, Catholics, and Brownists, but the two hundred and odd
sects of the twentieth century were still far off, and men's time and
intellectual energies--of which there is but a limited amount--were not
wasted in futile discussion of sectarian minutiae.
At ease in mind, body and estate, it was natural that the age should be
one of frank enjoyment--enjoyment of all that gladdens mind or eye or
ear, enjoyment of rich clothes, fine houses, shows, pageantries, music,
song, stories, and plays. In the revels which Scott in his _Kenilworth_
makes Leicester prepare for the reception of Elizabeth, he is drawing
upon his study of the times. Above all entertainments the play was the
thing, and whether performed before the mixed auditory of the new
theatres of Shoreditch or on the Southwark side, or before the Benchers
of the Inns of Court, or before the Queen's Majesty herself, the drama
received a welcome compared with which its appreciation in our midst is
as cold as it is stinted.
And yet all this might have produced in literature and art nothing but
pomp and show, or amusement more or less vulgar. In the theatre it might
have ended in farce or melodrama. But happily, along with prosperity and
the feeling for enjoyment, conditions were at work which made for the
keenest activity of mind and every form of intellectual expansion. It
would be to enlarge upon a trite theme indeed, if one dwelt upon the
enterprise and discovery of bold spirits like Francis Drake, and upon
the eager curiosity, the ready imagination, the universal
open-mindedness, which ran through the nation, as new worlds were opened
or looked for in the western or southern seas.
More important, all-important in truth, was the avid mastery of new
knowledge which had followed the Renaissance and the invention of
printing. The ancient writers of Greece and Rome were all recovered, and
were being greedily absorbed. Old thoughts, ideas, fancies,
knowledge--long buried and shamefully forgotten--had become new again.
The curiosity which followed the voyages of Drake or Raleigh to America,
followed also the explorations of the scholar in the ever-opening seas
of ancient literature. The age became one of wide and plenteous reading.
Moreover men read then, as they ought to read, for the matter. They tore
the heart out of books, from Homer to Seneca; they were greedy for the
substance, the thoughts, the imaginations, the fancies. If they could
not read the originals, they insisted on the translations. Nor did they
stay at the classics. They devoured books in Italian and French. Never
has England been so cosmopolitan, at least so European, in its
absorption of ideas and knowledge. It is only since the icebound
Puritan days that England has become insular, self-contained, in part
hugely conceited, and in part absurdly diffident, concerning itself. The
best work of Byron and Shelley aimed at breaking down this attitude, and
if we are again growing out of our insularity--which is open to much
doubt--it is in no small measure due to writers of their kind.
I do not offer all these commonplaces as information. I offer them
simply as reminders, and as a necessary introduction to the remark which
I have next to make--that the enlightenment, the education, above all
the spirit, derived from this wealth of reading were precisely that sort
of enlightenment and education and spirit which make for splendid
poetry. The learning of the day was in no wise scientific in the
narrower modern sense. It was not of the material and utilitarian, still
less of the sordid, kind. The age was the least Philistine of all epochs
of English history. We were not yet a nation of shopkeepers. It is
inevitable that nowadays an immense proportion of our study and reading
should run to social and economic questions, to applied sciences, to the
investigation of germs and gases, political problems, electric forces,
and manures. There is, I have often maintained, no necessary antagonism
whatever between these intellectual pursuits and the pursuit of art and
literature. One should be but the complement of the other. Goethe and
Shelley could combine the love of both science and poetry. If the
physicist and the artistic creator quarrel, then each is blind in one
mental eye.
Be that as it may, the fact for us just now is that the reading and
learning of those spacious Elizabethan days were such that, with the
brightening of the intellect, there was no dimming of the imagination.
On the contrary, the effect of the recovery and the spread of all the
rich, warm, many-coloured creations of the world's best minds, was to
steep the English nation in enthusiasm for great lyrics, great dramas,
any great production which carried with it the warmth and brightness and
exhilarating breath of noble poetry.
There was no weakening of character in this, no loss of practical
efficiency. A Sidney or a Raleigh could fight as well as turn a verse; a
Shakespeare could prove as sound a man of business as he was a poet.
Elizabethan men were all-round men, like the best men in Periclean
Athens.
Moreover, the recovered classics imparted not only enthusiasm, but
standards. An ambitious writer of the Elizabethan age must do his best
to live up to Homer and Plato, to Virgil and Catullus, just as he must
live up to Petrarch.
And one thing more. When Spenser or Shakespeare or their contemporaries
took up their pens, there was ready to their use the magnificent
Elizabethan English tongue--a store inexhaustibly rich, and all the
richer for being free from huge piles of needless rubbish, called
vocabulary, which modern times have heaped into the long-suffering
dictionary. The speech of the English Bible, which rightly seems to us
so inimitably noble in its simplicity, was but the contemporary speech
of educated England. Fine expressive words had not yet been soiled with
all ignoble use. They had not been debauched by slang or vulgarized by
affectation. The Elizabethan language possessed the noble solid grandeur
of a statue of Phidias or Angelo. At its best now it is apt to pose like
the enervated Apollo Belvedere or an over-refined production of Canova.
Says that vigorous writer, Lowell: "In reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are
almost startled now and then to find that even common sailors could not
tell the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean
strain, and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy back
from desuetude at any cost."
Here, then, is an epoch of history, prosperous, high-spirited, tolerant,
enterprising, joyous, alert for knowledge, enamoured of high fancies and
imagination. Here also is a language of ample scope and noble powers.
And into the midst of a London like this there comes up from Stratford,
we know not how, a man marvellously dowered with all those supreme gifts
which I have endeavoured to describe.
Towards the making of Shakespeare, Nature has contributed her utmost.
For the full encouragement of his genius the environment is most apt. It
remains briefly to see what experience did for him, or what he did for
himself. What was his preparation?
His origin was lowly, and, as with Robert Burns, we may be glad of it.
He thus saw intimately certain sides of life and conditions of men which
otherwise he might never have touched so closely. He learned to know all
their strange and naive humours, their ignorance and muddlement. From
them he realised those strong and elemental passions which finer folk
attenuate or disguise. He acquired a stock of sinewy and home-coming
Saxon phrase, which often stood him in good stead, and which forms no
small factor in his vast eloquence. He is manifestly a man who forgot
nothing. In after days he mingled with wits and players, with poets and
peers, but, while ever acquiring diction of wider range and choicer
degree, he kept always ready to hand the language of peasant and clown.
No man ever enjoyed more full instruction in the speech, the thoughts,
or the manners, of all degrees of men.
Of women toward the social summits he perhaps never knew so much, but he
had not studied their humbler sisters in vain, and beneath all the width
of ruff and opulence of silk, he knew well enough what primal feelings
lurked, what affections, what jealousies, what caprices of the eternal
feminine. As for the mere externals of their behaviour, he had abundant
opportunities of noting them.
When modern readers censure Shakespeare for dubious things which he
makes his gentlewomen say and do, they are apt to forget how surprising
were the canons of behaviour and decorum for gentlewomen under good
Queen Bess. For my part I am prepared in all such cases to give their
keen-eyed and marvellous contemporary the benefit of the doubt. He would
not represent ladies as any coarser than they were.
Of his education, in the narrower sense, we can really make sure of
little; but, like that of Burns, it was indisputably far more liberal
than the devotees of miracle are wishful to suppose. To-day no competent
inquirer doubts that, with the grammar-school at Stratford opening its
doors free to the son of John Shakespeare, burgess and alderman, the
opportunity was grasped by that struggling but ambitious person. Nor is
it doubted that there, under some Holofernes or Sir Hugh Evans, the boy
learned his Lyly's grammar, and read his share of Latin authors--his
Terence, Ovid, and Seneca, together with Baptista "the old Mantuan." In
French he assuredly did more than dabble, if his _Henry V_ be taken as
any proof. The other day Mr. Churton Collins essayed to prove, by an
array of quotations, that he was tolerably read in Greek. For my own
part I confess that I find, in the passages of AEschylus cited with
passages of Shakespeare, no more than happy coincidences in the
thinking of two kindred original minds. Yet some Greek at least he had.
Our witness is Ben Jonson. Rare Ben was himself a monument of learning,
and to him the ordinary mortal's modicum was but a trifle. When he
observes "and though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek," we should
do well to take him as meaning precisely what he says. If he had meant
"no Latin and no Greek," he would have written it so; the line would
have scanned as easily, and the desired point would have been made still
more effective. Add to these studies of Shakespeare his early study in
the Bible; early familiarity with that book, apart from all questions of
character and religion, will always shoot a rich woof of word and
thought through all the warp of writing.
Remember that Shakespeare at school was not distracted by hours of
mathematics and other agreeable but alien pursuits. Remember also--what
is so strangely forgotten--that he was a genius, whose capacious mind
would grasp and retain with unique facility. Remember that at school
there are boys and boys, and that, while some of them waste time in
laboriously endeavouring to assimilate the shells of knowledge along
with the oysters, others instinctively use their powers of secretion to
better purpose. Remember also that in Elizabethan times school-boy study
was a far more strenuous matter than it is in these degenerate days, and
that it was not chiefly directed towards examinations.
Be assured that Shakespeare's school education was as good as your own;
or, if you are not convinced of that, be at least assured that an
illiterate man never did, and never will, write even tolerable poetry.
It may seem as if I were acting the traitor to my own profession when I
rejoice that Shakespeare was never turned into what is technically
called a learned man. He was something better, he was an educated man.
You do not need erudition to be a creator of great works of imagination,
whether it be erudition concerning Latin syntax or concerning the Origin
of the Concept or concerning the life-history of the worm. What you
chiefly require to know is the human heart; and the best books for that
knowledge are human beings. Learning is after all but the milch-cow of
education. If Shakespeare had been as learned as Ben Jonson, or the
so-called University Wits,
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