Figures of Several Centuries
by Arthur Symons · English · Gutenberg #21407 · 463,052 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Figures of Several Centuries
Author: Arthur Symons
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES ***
Produced by Ted Garvin, Martin Pettit and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
FIGURES OF SEVERAL CENTURIES
BY
ARTHUR SYMONS
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD
1917
_First published, December 1916._
_Reprinted, January, June 1917._
TO
JOSEPH CONRAD
WITH A FRIEND'S ADMIRATION
CONTENTS
PAGE
SAINT AUGUSTINE 1
CHARLES LAMB 13
VILLON 37
CASANOVA AT DUX 41
JOHN DONNE 80
EMILY BRONTË 109
EDGAR ALLAN POE 115
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 122
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 130
GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET 141
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 153
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 201
A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY 207
LÉON CLADEL 216
HENRIK IBSEN 222
JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS 268
TWO SYMBOLISTS 300
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 310
WALTER PATER 316
THE GONCOURTS 336
COVENTRY PATMORE 351
SAROJINI NAIDU 376
WELSH POETRY 390
SAINT AUGUSTINE
The _Confessions_ of St. Augustine are the first autobiography, and they
have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that they
are addressed directly to God. Rousseau's unburdening of himself is the
last, most effectual manifestation of that nervous, defiant
consciousness of other people which haunted him all his life. He felt
that all the men and women whom he passed on his way through the world
were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions.
The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the
protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him,
in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to
the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himself
was after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He felt
the silent voices within him too acutely to keep silence. Cellini wrote
his autobiography because he heard within him such trumpeting voices of
praise, exultation, and the supreme satisfaction of a violent man who
has conceived himself to be always in the right, that it shocked him to
think of going down into his grave without having made the whole world
hear those voices. He hurls at you this book of his own deeds that it
may smite you into acquiescent admiration. Casanova, at the end of a
long life in which he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth,
with a simplicity of pleasure in which the sense of their being
forbidden was only the least of their abounding flavours, looked back
upon his past self with a slightly pathetic admiration, and set himself
to go all over those successful adventures, in love and in other arts,
firstly, in order that he might be amused by recalling them, and then
because he thought the record would do him credit. He neither intrudes
himself as a model, nor acknowledges that he was very often in the
wrong. Always passionate after sensations, and for their own sake, the
writing of an autobiography was the last, almost active, sensation that
was left to him, and he accepted it energetically.
Probably St. Augustine first conceived of the writing of an
autobiography as a kind of penance, which might be fruitful also to
others. By its form it challenges the slight difficulty that it appears
to be telling God what God knew already. But that is the difficulty
which every prayer also challenges. To those we love, are we not fond of
telling many things about ourselves which they know already? A prayer,
such confessions as these, are addressed to God by one of those
subterfuges by which it is necessary to approach the unseen and
infinite, under at least a disguise of mortality. And the whole book, as
no other such book has ever been, is lyrical. This prose, so simple, so
familiar, has in it the exaltation of poetry. It can pass, without a
change of tone, from the boy's stealing of pears: 'If aught of those
pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender
human affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that be
which is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius, my sweet
friend'; and from that to the saint's rare, last ecstasy: 'And sometimes
Thou admittedst me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul,
rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know
not what in it would not belong to the life to come.' And even
self-analysis, of which there is so much, becoming at times a kind of
mathematics, even those metaphysical subtleties which seem, to sharpen
thought upon thought to an almost invisible fineness of edge, become
also lyrical, inter-penetrated as they are with this sense of the
divine.
To St. Augustine all life is seen only in its relation to the divine;
looked at from any other side, it has no meaning, and, looked at even
with this light upon it, is but for the most part seen as a blundering
in the dark, a wandering from the right path. In so far as it is
natural, it is evil. In so far as it is corrected by divine grace, it
leaves the human actors in it without merit; since all virtue is God's,
though all vice is man's.
This conception of life is certainly valuable in giving harmony to the
book, presenting as it does a sort of background. It brings with it a
very impressive kind of symbolism into its record of actual facts, to
all of which it gives a value, not in themselves, if you please to put
it so, or, perhaps more properly, their essential value. When nothing
which happens, happens except under God's direct responsibility, when
nothing is said which is not one of your 'lines' in the drama which is
being played, not so much by as through you, there can be no
exteriorities, nothing can be trivial, in a record of life so conceived.
And this point of view also helps the writer to keep all his details in
proportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least,
being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because they happened
to him. To St. Augustine, while not the smallest human event is without
significance, in its relation to eternity, not the greatest human event
is of importance, in its relation to time; and his own share in it would
but induce a special, it may seem an exaggerated, humility on his part.
Thus, speaking of his early studies, his triumphs in them, not without a
certain _naïveté_: 'Whatever was written, either in rhetoric or logic,
geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty or
any instruction, I understood, Thou knowest, O Lord my God; because both
quickness and understanding and acuteness in discerning is Thy gift.'
Or, again, speaking of the youthful excellences ('excellently hadst Thou
made him') of that son who was the son of his beloved mistress: 'I had
no part in that boy, but the sin.'
Intellectual pride, one sees in him indeed, at all times, by the very
force with which it is repressed into humility; and, in all that relates
to that mistress, in the famous cry: 'Give me chastity, but not yet!' in
all those insurgent memories of 'these various and shadowy loves,' we
see the force of the flesh, in one who lived always with so passionate a
life, alike of the spirit and the senses. Now, recalling what was sinful
in him, in his confessions to God, he is reluctant to allow any value to
the most honourable of human sentiments, to so much as forgive the most
estimable of human weaknesses. 'And now, Lord, in writing I confess it
unto Thee. Read it who will, and interpret it how he will: and if any
finds sin therein, that I wept my mother for a small portion of an hour
(the mother who for the time was dead to mine eyes, who had for many
years wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes), let him not deride
me; but rather, if he be one of large charity, let him weep for himself
for my sins unto Thee, the Father of all the brethren of Thy Christ.'
And yet it is of this mother that he writes his most tender, his most
beautiful pages. 'The day was now approaching whereon she was to depart
this life (which day Thou well knewest, we knew not), it came to pass,
Thyself, as I believe, by Thy secret ways so ordering it, that she and I
stood alone, leaning in a certain window, which looked into the garden
of the house where we now lay, at Ostia....' It is not often that
memory, in him, is so careful of 'the images of earth, and water, and
air,' as to call up these delicate pictures. They too had become for him
among the desirable things which are to be renounced for a more
desirable thing.
That sense of the divine in life, and specially of the miracles which
happen a certain number of times in every existence, the moments which
alone count in the soul's summing-up of itself, St. Augustine has
rendered with such significance, with such an absolute wiping out from
the memory of everything else, just because he has come to that, it
might seem, somewhat arid point of spiritual ascent. That famous moment
of the _Tolle, lege_: 'I cast myself down I know not how, under a
certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears ... when lo! I heard from
a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting,
and oft repeating, "Take up and read, take up and read"'; the Bishop's
word to Monnica ('as if it had sounded from heaven'), 'It is not
possible that the son of those tears should perish'; the beggar-man,
'joking and joyous,' in the streets of Milan: it is by these, apparently
trifling, these all-significant moments that his narrative moves, with a
more reticent and effective symbolism than any other narrative known to
me. They are the moments in which the soul has really lived, or has
really seen; and the rest of life may well be a blindness and a troubled
coming and going.
I said that the height from which St. Augustine apprehends these truths
may seem a somewhat arid one. That is perhaps only because it is nearer
the sky, more directly bathed in what he calls, beautifully, 'this queen
of colours, the light.' There is a passage in the tenth book which may
almost be called a kind of æsthetics. They are æsthetics indeed of
renunciation, but a renunciation of the many beauties for the one
Beauty, which shall contain as well as eclipse them; 'because those
beautiful patterns which through men's souls are conveyed into their
cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls.' And it
is not a renunciation by one who had never enjoyed what he renounces, or
who feels himself, even now, quite safe from certain forms of its
seduction. He is troubled especially by the fear that 'those melodies
which Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet and attuned
voice,' may come to move him 'more with the voice than with the words
sung.' Yet how graciously he speaks of music, allowing 'that the several
affections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper
measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence
wherewith they are stirred up.' It is precisely because he feels so
intimately the beauty of all things human, though it were but 'a dog
coursing in the field, a lizard catching flies,' that he desires to pass
through these to that passionate contemplation which is the desire of
all seekers after the absolute, and which for him is God. He asks of all
the powers of the earth: 'My questioning them, was my thoughts on them;
and their form of beauty gave the answer.' And by how concrete a series
of images does he strive to express the inexpressible, in that passage
of pure poetry on the love of God! 'But what do I love, when I love
thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the
brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of
varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and
spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of
flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind
of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement, when I
love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my
inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain,
and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what
breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not,
and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love
when I love my God.'
Mentioning in his confessions only such things as he conceives to be of
import to God, it happens, naturally, that St. Augustine leaves unsaid
many things that would have interested most men, perhaps more. 'What,
then, have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions--as if
they could heal my infirmities,--a race curious to know the lives of
others, slothful to amend their own?' Finding, indeed, many significant
mentions of things and books and persons, Faustus the Manichee, the
'Hortensius' of Cicero, the theatre, we shall find little pasture here
for our antiquarian, our purely curious, researches. We shall not even
find all that we might care to know, in St. Augustine himself, of the
surface of the mind's action, which we call character, or the surface
emotions, which we call temperament. Here is a soul, one of the supreme
souls of humanity, speaking directly to that supreme soul which it has
apprehended outside humanity. Be sure that, if it forgets many things
which you, who overhear, would like it to have remembered, it will
remember everything which it is important to remember, everything which
the recording angel, who is the soul's finer criticism of itself, has
already inscribed in the book of the last judgment.
1897.
CHARLES LAMB
I
There is something a little accidental about all Lamb's finest work.
Poetry he seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but the
supreme criticism of the _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ arose out
of the casual habit of setting down an opinion of an extract just copied
into one's note-book, and the book itself, because, he said, 'the book
is such as I am glad there should be.' The beginnings of his
miscellaneous prose are due to the 'ferreting' of Coleridge. 'He ferrets
me day and night,' Lamb complains to Manning in 1800, 'to do something.
He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressing
occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip.... He has lugged me to
the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a
first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the
anatomist of melancholy'; which was done, in the consummate way we know,
and led in its turn to all the rest of the prose. And Barry Cornwall
tells us that 'he was almost teased into writing the _Elia_ essays.'
He had begun, indeed, deliberately, with a story, as personal really as
the poems, but, unlike them, set too far from himself in subject and
tangled with circumstances outside his knowledge. He wrote _Rosamund
Gray_ before he was twenty-three, and in that 'lovely thing,' as Shelley
called it, we see most of the merits and defects of his early poetry. It
is a story which is hardly a story at all, told by comment, evasion, and
recurrence, by 'little images, recollections, and circumstances of past
pleasures' or distresses; with something vague and yet precise, like a
dream partially remembered. Here and there is the creation of a mood and
moment, almost like Coleridge's in the _Ancient Mariner_; but these
flicker and go out. The style would be laughable in its simplicity if
there were not in it some almost awing touch of innocence; some hint of
that divine goodness which, in Lamb, needed the relief and savour of
the later freakishness to sharpen it out of insipidity. There is already
a sense of what is tragic and endearing in earthly existence, though no
skill as yet in presenting it; and the moral of it is surely one of the
morals or messages of _Elia_: 'God has built a brave world, but methinks
he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they may.'
Lamb had no sense of narrative, or, rather, he cared in a story only for
the moments when it seemed to double upon itself and turn into irony.
All his attempts to write for the stage (where his dialogue might have
been so telling) were foiled by his inability to 'bring three together
on the stage at once,' as he confessed in a letter to Mrs. Shelley;
'they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there
they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw
them.' Narrative he could manage only when it was prepared for him by
another, as in the _Tales from Shakespeare_ and the _Adventures of
Ulysses_. Even in _Mrs. Leicester's School_, where he came nearest to
success in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have less
than the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb's: of _Father's
Wedding-Day_, which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called
'with the sole exception of the _Bride of Lammermoor_, the most
beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern.'
There is something of an incomparable kind of story-telling in most of
the best essays of _Elia_, but it is a kind which he had to find out, by
accident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly through
letter-writing. 'Us dramatic geniuses,' he speaks of, in a letter to
Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it was
this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessential
part of himself. 'Truth,' he says in this letter, 'is one and poor, like
the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that
multiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not
believe it could be put to such purposes.' It was to his correspondents,
indeed to the incitement of their wakeful friendship, that he owes more
perhaps than the mere materials of his miracles.
To be wholly himself, Lamb had to hide himself under some disguise, a
name, 'Elia,' taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout
borrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heighten
and soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In
the letter in which he announces the first essays of _Elia_, he writes
to Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction,
impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, the
partitions perfectly invisible.' The correspondents were already
accustomed to this 'heavenly mingle.' Few of the letters, those works of
nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken on
oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of
sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of a
preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays.
What began in mischief ends in art.
II
'I am out of the world of readers,' Lamb wrote to Coleridge, 'I hate all
that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather
myself up into the old things.' 'I am jealous for the actors who
pleased my youth,' he says elsewhere. And again: 'For me, I do not know
whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately
to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the
usual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since
seems of any value or importance compared to the colours which
imagination gave to everything then.' In Lamb this love of old things,
this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which imagination
came to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves all
through his life that child's attitude of wonder, before 'this good
world, which he knows--which was created so lovely, beyond his
deservings.' He loves the old, the accustomed, the things that people
have had about them since they could remember. 'I am in love,' he says
in the most profoundly serious of his essays, 'with this green earth;
the face of town and country; and the sweet security of streets.' He was
a man to whom mere living had zest enough to make up for everything that
was contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not unhappy.
Happiness came to him out of the little things that meant nothing to
others, or were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living,
and his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he left
to others to remember him by.
Lamb's religion, says Pater, was 'the religion of men of letters,
religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last
century'; and Hood says of him: 'As he was in spirit an Old Author, so
was he in faith an Ancient Christian.' He himself tells Coleridge that
he has 'a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit,' and,
later in life, writes to a friend: 'Much of my seriousness has gone
off.' On this, as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more into
himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent with
him. 'Such religion as I have,' he said, 'has always acted on me more by
way of sentiment than argumentative process'; and we find him preferring
churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done.
To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over
it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not
lightly, or with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude,
that he asked: 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer
holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats
and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and
fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony
itself_--do these things go out with life?'
It was what I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so
humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of
all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of
him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that
species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this
moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a
'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical,
'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and
sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone
stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth
of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the
most religious sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy.
Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid
out before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of the
most precious, and after books came pictures. 'What any man can write,
surely I may read!' he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios.
'I like books about books,' he confesses, the test of the book-lover. 'I
love,' he says, 'to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not
walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.' He
was the finest of all readers, far more instant than Coleridge; not to
be taken unawares by a Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most
extraordinary persons of the age,' he says of him, on but a slight and
partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the _Lyrical Ballads_ are
confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Among
the Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it,' and can define precisely
the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of
escape, to Manning: 'It is full of original thought, but it does not
often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of
expression.' I choose these instances because the final test of a critic
is in his reception of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found it
much easier to be right, before every one else, about Webster, and Ford,
and Cyril Tourneur, than to be the accurate critic that he was of
Coleridge, at the very time when he was under the 'whiff and wind' of
Coleridge's influence. And in writing of pictures, though his knowledge
is not so great nor his instinct so wholly 'according to knowledge,' he
can write as no one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that his
very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantly
detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of a
would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin.
Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has
been no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, so
intimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he
speaks of the stage, as in that tiny masterpiece, _On the Acting of
Munden_, which ends the book of _Elia_, with its great close, the
Beethoven soft wondering close, after all the surges: 'He understands a
leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace
materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.'
He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of Miss Kelly.
When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the very
wires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in love
with Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words that
might apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying of
Mrs. Jordan, that 'she seemed one whom care could not come near; a
privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness.'
Then he goes on: 'This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit,
escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I may
use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good
and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are
visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she
does so, I am not sure that she is not greatest.' Is not this, with all
its precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a poetry made up of
no poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but 'of imagination all
compact,' poetry in substance?
Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. 'The earth,
and sea, and sky (when all is said),' he admitted, 'is but as a house to
live in'; and, 'separate from the pleasure of your company,' he assured
Wordsworth, 'I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I
have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and
intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with
dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the
innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons,
play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden,
the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles--life
awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of
being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun
shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls,
parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens,
the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of
satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks
about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand
from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of
London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's
catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he
could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death),
'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter
not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets,
their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his
friends, 'the very streets, he says,' writes Mary, 'altering every day.'
London was to him the new, better Eden. 'A garden was the primitive
prison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself out
of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers,
goldsmiths, taverns, play-houses, satires, epigrams, puns--these all
came in on the town part, and thither side of innocence.' To love London
so was part of his human love, and in his praise of streets he has done
as much for the creation and perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth ('by
whose system,' Mary Lamb conjectured, 'it was doubtful whether a liver
in towns had a soul to be saved') has done by his praise of flowers and
hills.
And yet, for all his 'disparagement of heath and highlands,' as he
confessed to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciation
of natural things, once brought before them, as he was in his
appreciation of the things of art and the mind and man's making. He was
a great walker, and sighs once, before his release from the desk: 'I
wish I were a caravan driver or a penny post man, to earn my bread in
air and sunshine.' We have seen what he wrote to Wordsworth about his
mountains, before he had seen them. This is what he writes of them to
Manning, after he has seen them: 'Such an impression I never received
from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again.... In
fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which
tourists call _romantic_, which I very much suspected before.' And to
Coleridge he writes: 'I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the
last day I live. They haunt me perpetually.' All this Lamb saw and felt,
because no beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But he
wrote of it only in his letters, which were all of himself; because he
put into his published writings only the best or the rarest or the
accustomed and familiar part of himself, the part which he knew by
heart.
III
Beyond any writer pre-eminent for charm, Lamb had salt and sting. There
is hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere
exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with
something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says,
briefly: 'Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by
Affectation'; but then he is also never more himself than when he
expands and develops, as in this rendering of the hisses which damned
his play in Drury Lane:
It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a
congregation of mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows
and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness.
'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should
give His favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to
discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to
encourage warmly, to counsel wisely: to sing with, to drink with,
and to kiss with: and that they should turn them into the mouths of
adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit
breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse
and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow creatures who are
desirous to please them!
Or it may be a cold in the head which starts the heroic agility of his
tongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as
full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly
fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an
idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake,
which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some
unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite
through the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad,
keeps double motion, like the earth--running the primary circuit of the
tune, and still revolving upon its own axis'; and he can condense into
six words the whole life-history and the soul's essential secret of
Coleridge, when he says of him, in almost the last fragment of prose
that he wrote, 'he had a hunger for eternity.'
To read Lamb makes a man more humane, more tolerant, more dainty;
incites to every natural piety, strengthens reverence; while it clears
his brain of whatever dull fumes may have lodged there, stirs up all his
senses to wary alertness, and actually quickens his vitality, like high
pure air. It is, in the familiar phrase, 'a liberal education'; but it
is that finer education which sets free the spirit. His natural piety,
in the full sense of the word, seems to me deeper and more sensitive
than that of any other English writer. Kindness, in him, embraces
mankind, not with the wide engulfing arms of philanthropy, but with an
individual caress. He is almost the sufficient type of virtue, so far as
virtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in him which is
not the bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had an
unsocial origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noble
things, or light up an unsuspected 'soul of goodness in things evil.'
No man ever so loved his friends, or was so honest with them, or made
such a religion of friendship. His character of Hazlitt in the 'Letter
to Southey' is the finest piece of emotional prose which he ever wrote,
and his pen is inspired whenever he speaks of Coleridge. 'Good people,
as they are called,' he writes to Wordsworth, 'won't serve. I want
individuals. I am made up of queer points and want so many answering
needles.' He counts over his friends in public, like a child counting
over his toys, when some one has offered an insult to one of them. He
has delicacies and devotions towards his friends, so subtle and so noble
that they make every man his friend. And, that love may deepen into awe,
there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was
made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with
what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that
paradox of his position, by which he supports that by which he is
supported.
It is, then, this 'human, too human' creature, who comes so close to our
hearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or at
least in the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact,
flawless in technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of
'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well become
despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so
occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastly
vest of white patchwork,' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; what is it
that gives to a style, which no man can analyse, its 'terseness, its
jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?' Those are his own
words, not used of himself; but do they not do something to define what
can, after all, never be explained?
IV
Lamb's defects were his qualities, and nature drove them inward,
concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or
healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering
tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the
brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find Lamb writing to Godwin,
'cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an
author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common
letter into sane prose.... Ten thousand times I have confessed to
you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any
comprehensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or
perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This
infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two
little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader,
however partial, can find any story.'
'My brain,' he says, in a letter to Wordsworth, 'is desultory, and
snatches off hints from things.' And, in a wise critical letter to
Southey, he says, summing up himself in a single phrase: 'I never judge
system-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars.'
Is he, in these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, really
apologising for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne,
who (it is Lamb that says it) 'anticipated all the discoveries of
succeeding essayists,' affected no humility in the statement of almost
exactly the same mental complexion. 'I take the first argument that
fortune offers me,' he tells us; 'they are all equally good for me; I
never design to treat them in their totality, for I never see the whole
of anything, nor do those see it who promise to show it to me.... In
general I love to seize things by some unwonted lustre.' There, in the
two greatest of the essayists, one sees precisely what goes to the
making of the essayist. First, a beautiful disorder: the simultaneous
attack and appeal of contraries, a converging multitude of dreams,
memories, thoughts, sensations, without mental preference, or conscious
guiding of the judgment; and then, order in disorder, a harmony more
properly musical than logical, a separating and return of many elements,
which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of _Elia_ called _Old
China_, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You
will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle
memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the
actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant,
lovely last sentence is like the refrain which returns at the end of a
poem.
Lamb was a mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; he
saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of
social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney,
a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked
exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the
rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his
excesses something of 'the good clerk.'
Lamb seemed to his contemporaries notably eccentric, but he was nearer
than them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from the
very heart of light, and returned thither after the circuit. Where
Coleridge lost himself in clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearest
short-cut, and, having reached the goal, went no step beyond it.
And he was a bee for honey, not, like Coleridge, a browsing ox. To him
the essence of delight was choice; and choice, with him, was readier
when the prize was far-fetched and dear bought: a rarity of manners,
books, pictures, or whatever was human or touched humanity. 'Opinion,'
he said, 'is a species of property; and though I am always desirous to
share with my friends to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keep
some tenets and some property properly my own.' And then he found, in
rarity, one of the qualities of the best; and was never, like most
others, content with the good, or in any danger of confusing it with the
best. He was the only man of that great age, which had Coleridge, and
Wordsworth, and Shelley, and the rest, whose taste was flawless. All the
others, who seemed to be marching so straight to so determined a goal,
went astray at one time or other; only Lamb, who was always wandering,
never lost sense of direction, or failed to know how far he had strayed
from the road.
The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden
in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the
tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to
the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and,
also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike,
was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with
the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling;
madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense.
In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider
well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the
intellect. I know one who read the essays of _Elia_ with intense
delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She
had seen so well through the fun to its deep inner meaning that the fun
had not detained her. She had found in all of it nothing but a pure
intellectual reason, beyond logic, where reason is one with intuition.
1905.
VILLON
Villon was the first modern poet; he remains the most modern of poets.
One requires a certain amount of old French, together with some
acquaintance with the argot of the time, to understand the words in
which he has written down his poems; many allusions to people and things
have only just begun to be cleared up, but, apart from these things, no
poet has ever brought himself closer to us, taken us into his confidence
more simply, than this _personnage peu recommandable, fainéant, ivrogne,
joueur, débauché, écornifleur, et, qui pis est, souteneur de filles,
escroc, voleur, crocheteur de portes et de coffres_. The most
disreputable of poets, he confesses himself to us with a frankness in
which shamelessness is difficult to distinguish from humility. M. Gaston
Paris, who for the most part is content to take him as he is, for better
for worse, finds it necessary to apologise for him when he comes to the
ballad of _La Grosse Margot_: this, he professes, we need not take as a
personal confession, but as a mere exercise in composition! But if we
are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even _la grosse
Margot_ from her place in his life. He was no dabbler in infamy, but one
who loved infamous things for their own sake. He loved everything for
its own sake: _la grosse Margot_ in the flesh, _les dames du temps
jadis_ in the spirit,
Sausses, brouets et gros poissons,
Tartes, flaons, oefs frits et pochez,
Perdus, et en toutes façons,
his mother, _le bon royaume de France_, and above all, Paris. _Il a
parcouru toute la France sans rapporter une seule impression de
campagne. C'est un poète de ville, plus encore: un poète de quartier. Il
n'est vraiment chez lui que sur la Montague Sainte-Geneviève, entre le
Palais, les collèges, le Châtelet, les tavernes, les rotisseries, les
tripots et les rues où Marion l'Idole et la grande Jeanne de Bretagne
tiennent leur 'publique école'._ It is in this world that he lived, for
this world that he wrote. _Fils du peuple, entré par l'instruction dans
la classe lettrée, puis déclassé par ses vices, il dut à son humble
origine de rester en communication constante avec les sources éternelles
de toute vraie poésie._ And so he came into a literature of formalists,
like a child, a vigorous, unabashed, malicious child, into a company of
greybeards.
Villon, before any one in French literature, called things by their
names, made poetry as Homer made it, with words that meant facts. He was
a thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to be
sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him,
to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his
soul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit,
forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in the
cloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dream
exquisitely over the dead ladies who had once been young, and who had
gone like last year's snow, and then turn to the account-book of his
satirical malice against the clerks and usurers for whom he was making
the testament of his poverty. He knew winter, 'when the wolves live on
wind,' and how the gallows looks when one stands under it. And he knew
all the secrets of the art of verse-making which courtly poets, like the
King, used for the stringing together of delicate trifles, ornamental
evasions of facts. He was no poet of the people, but a scholar vagabond,
loving the gutter; and so he has the sincerity of the artist as well as
the only half-convincing sincerity of the man. There has been no greater
artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main
part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long
forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself.
1901.
CASANOVA AT DUX: AN UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER OF HISTORY
I
The _Memoirs_ of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a
bad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students
of literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr.
Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books
in the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova,
published in _Affirmations_, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety.
But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to
take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in
his relation to human problems. And yet these _Memoirs_ are perhaps the
most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth
century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality,
one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they
are more entertaining than _Gil Blas_, or _Monte Cristo_, or any of the
imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been
written in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved
life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the
most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows
us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm
resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an
adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester,
one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a
vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his
own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live
to write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no
longer.
And his _Memoirs_ take one all over Europe, giving sidelights, all the
more valuable in being almost accidental, upon many of the affairs and
people most interesting to us during two-thirds of the eighteenth
century. Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice, of Spanish and Italian
parentage, on April 2, 1725; he died at the Château of Dux, in Bohemia,
on June 4, 1798. In that lifetime of seventy-three years he travelled,
as his _Memoirs_ show us, in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, England,
Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Turkey; he met
Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Montmorency, Fontenelle, d'Alembert and
Crébillon at Paris, George III. in London, Louis XV. at Fontainebleau,
Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg, Benedict XII. at Rome, Joseph II.
at Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci. Imprisoned by the
Inquisitors of State in the _Piombi_ at Venice, he made, in 1755, the
most famous escape in history. His _Memoirs_, as we have them, break off
abruptly at the moment when he is expecting a safe conduct, and the
permission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings. He did
return, as we know from documents in the Venetian archives; he returned
as secret agent of the Inquisitors, and remained in their service from
1774 until 1782. At the end of 1782 he left Venice; and next year we
find him in Paris, where, in 1784, he met Count Waldstein at the
Venetian Ambassador's, and was invited by him to become his librarian at
Dux. He accepted, and for the fourteen remaining years of his life lived
at Dux, where he wrote his _Memoirs_.
Casanova died in 1798, but nothing was heard of the _Memoirs_ (which the
Prince de Ligne, in his own _Memoirs_, tells us that Casanova had read
to him, and in which he found _du dramatique, de la rapidité, du
comique, de la philosophie, des choses neuves, sublimes, inimitables
même_) until the year 1820, when a certain Carlo Angiolini brought to
the publishing house of Brockhaus, in Leipzig, a manuscript entitled
_Histoire de ma vie jusqu'à l'an_ 1797, in the handwriting of Casanova.
This manuscript, which I have examined at Leipzig, is written on
foolscap paper, rather rough and yellow; it is written on both sides of
the page, and in sheets or quires; here and there the paging shows that
some pages have been omitted, and in their place are smaller sheets of
thinner and whiter paper, all in Casanova's handsome, unmistakable
handwriting. The manuscript is done up in twelve bundles, corresponding
with the twelve volumes of the original edition; and only in one place
is there a gap. The fourth and fifth chapters of the twelfth volume are
missing, as the editor of the original edition points out, adding: 'It
is not probable that these two chapters have been withdrawn from the
manuscript of Casanova by a strange hand; everything leads us to believe
that the author himself suppressed them, in the intention, no doubt, of
re-writing them, but without having found time to do so.' The manuscript
ends abruptly with the year 1774, and not with the year 1797, as the
title would lead us to suppose.
This manuscript, in its original state, has never been printed. Herr
Brockhaus, on obtaining possession of the manuscript, had it translated
into German by Wilhelm Schütz, but with many omissions and alterations,
and published this translation, volume by volume, from 1822 to 1828,
under the title, _Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de
Seingalt_. While the German edition was in course of publication, Herr
Brockhaus employed a certain Jean Laforgue, a professor of the French
language at Dresden, to revise the original manuscript, correcting
Casanova's vigorous, but at times incorrect, and often somewhat Italian,
French according to his own notions of elegant writing, suppressing
passages which seemed too free-spoken from the point of view of morals
and of politics, and altering the names of some of the persons referred
to, or replacing those names by initials. This revised text was
published in twelve volumes, the first two in 1826, the third and fourth
in 1828, the fifth to the eighth in 1832, and the ninth to the twelfth
in 1837; the first four bearing the imprint of Brockhaus at Leipzig and
Ponthieu et Cie at Paris; the next four the imprint of Heideloff et
Campé at Paris; and the last four nothing but _À Bruxelles_. The volumes
are all uniform, and were all really printed for the firm of Brockhaus.
This, however far from representing the real text, is the only
authoritative edition, and my references throughout this article will
always be to this edition.
In turning over the manuscript at Leipzig, I read some of the suppressed
passages, and regretted their suppression; but Herr Brockhaus, the
present head of the firm, assured me that they are not really very
considerable in number. The damage, however, to the vivacity of the
whole narrative, by the persistent alterations of M. Laforgue, is
incalculable. I compared many passages, and found scarcely three
consecutive sentences untouched. Herr Brockhaus (whose courtesy I cannot
sufficiently acknowledge) was kind enough to have a passage copied out
for me, which I afterwards read over, and checked word by word. In this
passage Casanova says, for instance: _Elle venoit presque tous les jours
lui faire une belle visite._ This is altered into: _Cependant chaque
jour Thérèse venait lui faire une visite._ Casanova says that some one
_avoit, comme de raison, formé le projet d'allier Dieu avec le diable_.
This is made to read: _Qui, comme de raison, avait saintement formé le
projet d'allier les intérêts du ciel aux oeuvres de ce monde._
Casanova tell us that Thérèse would not commit a mortal sin _pour
devenir reine du monde_: _pour une couronne_, corrects the indefatigable
Laforgue. _Il ne savoit que lui dire_ becomes _Dans cet état de
perplexité_; and so forth. It must, therefore, be realised that the
_Memoirs_, as we have them, are only a kind of pale tracing of the vivid
colours of the original.
When Casanova's _Memoirs_ were first published, doubts were expressed as
to their authenticity, first by Ugo Foscolo (in the _Westminster
Review_, 1827), then by Quérard, supposed to be an authority in regard
to anonymous and pseudonymous writings, finally by Paul Lacroix, _le
bibliophile Jacob_, who suggested, or rather expressed his 'certainty,'
that the real author of the _Memoirs_ was Stendhal, whose 'mind,
character, ideas and style' he seemed to recognise on every page. This
theory, as foolish and as unsupported as the Baconian theory of
Shakespeare, has been carelessly accepted, or at all events accepted as
possible, by many good scholars who have never taken the trouble to look
into the matter for themselves. It was finally disproved by a series of
articles of Armand Baschet, entitled _Preuves curieuses de
l'authenticité des Mémoires de Jacques Casanova de Seingalt_, in _Le
Livre_, January, February, April and May, 1881; and these proofs were
further corroborated by two articles of Alessandro d'Ancona, entitled
_Un Avventuriere del Secolo XVIII._, in the _Nuova Antologia_, February
1 and August 1, 1882. Baschet had never himself seen the manuscript of
the _Memoirs_, but he had learnt all the facts about it from Messrs.
Brockhaus, and he had himself examined the numerous papers relating to
Casanova in the Venetian archives. A similar examination was made at the
Frari at about the same time by the Abbé Fulin; and I myself, in 1894,
not knowing at the time that the discovery had been already made, made
it over again for myself. There the arrest of Casanova, his imprisonment
in the _Piombi_, the exact date of escape, the name of the monk who
accompanied him, are all authenticated by documents contained in the
_riferte_ of the Inquisition of State; there are the bills for the
repairs of the roof and walls of the cell from which he escaped; there
are the reports of the spies on whose information he was arrested, for
his too dangerous free-spokenness in matters of religion and morality.
The same archives contain forty-eight letters of Casanova to the
Inquisitors of State, dating from 1763 to 1782, among the _Riferte dei
Confidenti_, or reports of secret agents; the earliest asking
permission to return to Venice, the rest giving information in regard to
the immoralities of the city, after his return there; all in the same
handwriting as the _Memoirs_. Further proof could scarcely be needed,
but Baschet has done more than prove the authenticity, he has proved the
extraordinary veracity, of the _Memoirs_. F. W. Barthold, in _Die
Geschichtlichen Persönlichkeiten in J. Casanova's Memoiren_, 2 vols.,
1846, had already examined about a hundred of Casanova's allusions to
well-known people, showing the perfect exactitude of all but six or
seven, and out of these six or seven inexactitudes ascribing only a
single one to the author's intention. Baschet and d'Ancona both carry on
what Barthold had begun; other investigators, in France, Italy and
Germany, have followed them; and two things are now certain, first, that
Casanova himself wrote the _Memoirs_ published under his name, though
not textually in the precise form in which we have them; and, second,
that as their veracity becomes more and more evident as they are
confronted with more and more independent witnesses, it is only fair to
suppose that they are equally truthful where the facts are such as could
only have been known to Casanova himself.
II
For more than two-thirds of a century it has been known that Casanova
spent the last fourteen years of his life at Dux, that he wrote his
_Memoirs_ there, and that he died there. During all this time people
have been discussing the authenticity and the truthfulness of the
_Memoirs_, they have been searching for information about Casanova in
various directions, and yet hardly any one has ever taken the trouble,
or obtained the permission, to make a careful examination in precisely
the one place where information was most likely to be found. The very
existence of the manuscripts at Dux was known only to a few, and to most
of these only on hearsay; and thus the singular good fortune was
reserved for me, on my visit to Count Waldstein in September 1899, to be
the first to discover the most interesting things contained in these
manuscripts. M. Octave Uzanne, though he had not himself visited Dux,
had indeed procured copies of some of the manuscripts, a few of which
were published by him in _Le Livre_, in 1887 and 1889. But with the
death of _Le Livre_ in 1889 the _Casanova inédit_ came to an end, and
has never, so far as I know, been continued elsewhere. Beyond the
publication of these fragments, nothing has been done with the
manuscripts at Dux, nor has an account of them ever been given by any
one who has been allowed to examine them.
For five years, ever since I had discovered the documents in the
Venetian archives, I had wanted to go to Dux; and in 1899, when I was
staying with Count Lützow at Zampach, in Bohemia, I found the way kindly
opened for me. Count Waldstein, the present head of the family, with
extreme courtesy, put all his manuscripts at my disposal, and invited me
to stay with him. Unluckily, he was called away on the morning of the
day that I reached Dux. He had left everything ready for me, and I was
shown over the castle by a friend of his, Dr. Kittel, whose courtesy I
should like also to acknowledge. After a hurried visit to the castle we
started on the long drive to Oberleutensdorf, a smaller Schloss near
Komotau, where the Waldstein family was then staying. The air was sharp
and bracing; the two Russian horses flew like the wind; I was whirled
along in an unfamiliar darkness, through a strange country, black with
coal mines, through dark pine woods, where a wild peasantry dwelt in
little mining towns. Here and there, a few men and women passed us on
the road, in their Sunday finery; then a long space of silence, and we
were in the open country, galloping between broad fields; and always in
a haze of lovely hills, which I saw more distinctly as we drove back
next morning.
The return to Dux was like a triumphal entry, as we dashed through the
market-place filled with people come for the Monday market, pots and
pans and vegetables strewn in heaps all over the ground, on the rough
paving stones, up to the great gateway of the castle, leaving but just
room for us to drive through their midst. I had the sensation of an
enormous building: all Bohemian castles are big, but this one was like a
royal palace. Set there in the midst of the town, after the Bohemian
fashion, it opens at the back upon great gardens, as if it were in the
midst of the country. I walked through room after room, along corridor
after corridor; everywhere there were pictures, everywhere portraits of
Wallenstein, and battle-scenes in which he led on his troops. The
library, which was formed, or at least arranged, by Casanova, and which
remains as he left it, contains some 25,000 volumes, some of them of
considerable value; one of the most famous books in Bohemian literature,
Skála's _History of the Church_, exists in manuscript at Dux, and it is
from this manuscript that the two published volumes of it were printed.
The library forms part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing
of the castle. The first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms
are arranged, in a decorative way, covering the ceiling and the walls
with strange patterns. The second room contains pottery, collected by
Casanova's Waldstein on his Eastern travels. The third room is full of
curious mechanical toys, and cabinets, and carvings in ivory. Finally,
we come to the library, contained in the two innermost rooms. The
book-shelves are painted white, and reach to the low-vaulted ceilings,
which are white-washed. At the end of a bookcase, in the corner of one
of the windows, hangs a fine engraved portrait of Casanova.
After I had been all over the castle, so long Casanova's home, I was
taken to Count Waldstein's study, and left there with the manuscripts. I
found six huge cardboard cases, large enough to contain foolscap paper,
lettered on the back: _Gräfl. Waldstein-Wartenberg'sches Real
Fideicommiss. Dux-Oberleutensdorf: Handschriftlicher Nachlass Casanova_.
The cases were arranged so as to stand like books; they opened at the
side; and on opening them, one after another, I found series after
series of manuscripts roughly thrown together, after some pretence at
arrangement, and lettered with a very generalised description of
contents. The greater part of the manuscripts were in Casanova's
handwriting, which I could see gradually beginning to get shaky with
years. Most were written in French, a certain number in Italian. The
beginning of a catalogue in the library, though said to be by him, was
not in his handwriting. Perhaps it was taken down at his dictation.
There were also some copies of Italian and Latin poems not written by
him. Then there were many big bundles of letters addressed to him,
dating over more than thirty years. Almost all the rest was in his own
handwriting.
I came first upon the smaller manuscripts, among which I found, jumbled
together on the same and on separate scraps of paper, washing-bills,
accounts, hotel bills, lists of letters written, first drafts of letters
with many erasures, notes on books, theological and mathematical notes,
sums, Latin quotations, French and Italian verses, with variants, a long
list of classical names which have and have not been _francisés_, with
reasons for and against; 'what I must wear at Dresden'; headings without
anything to follow, such as: 'Reflexions on respiration, on the true
cause of youth--the crows'; a new method of winning the lottery at Rome;
recipes, among which is a long printed list of perfumes sold at Spa; a
newspaper cutting, dated Prague, 25th October 1790, on the
thirty-seventh balloon ascent of Blanchard; thanks to some 'noble donor'
for the gift of a dog called 'Finette'; a passport for _Monsieur de
Casanova, Vénitien, allant d'ici en Hollande_, October 13, 1758 (_Ce
Passeport bon pour quinze jours_), together with an order for
post-horses, gratis, from Paris to Bordeaux and Bayonne.[1]
Occasionally, one gets a glimpse into his daily life at Dux, as in this
note, scribbled on a fragment of paper (here and always I translate the
French literally): 'I beg you to tell my servant what the biscuits are
that I like to eat, dipped in wine, to fortify my stomach. I believe
that they can all be found at Roman's.' Usually, however, these notes,
though often suggested by something closely personal, branch off into
more general considerations; or else begin with general considerations,
and end with a case in point. Thus, for instance, a fragment of three
pages begins: 'A compliment which is only made to gild the pill is a
positive impertinence, and Monsieur Bailli is nothing but a charlatan;
the monarch ought to have spit in his face, but the monarch trembled
with fear.' A manuscript entitled _Essai d'Égoïsme_, dated, 'Dux, this
27th June, 1769,' contains, in the midst of various reflections, an
offer to let his _appartement_ in return for enough money to
'tranquillise for six months two Jew creditors at Prague.' Another
manuscript is headed 'Pride and Folly,' and begins with a long series of
antitheses, such as: 'All fools are not proud, and all proud men are
fools. Many fools are happy, all proud men are unhappy.' On the same
sheet follows this instance or application:
Whether it is possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest
beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We
must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards
see who is the man who says he is the author of the distich, for
there are extraordinary people in the world. My brother, in short,
ought to have composed the distich, because he says so, and because
he confided it to me tête-à-tête. I had, it is true, difficulty in
believing him; but what is one to do? Either one must believe, or
suppose him capable of telling a lie which could only be told by a
fool; and that is impossible, for all Europe knows that my brother
is not a fool.
Here, as so often in these manuscripts, we seem to see Casanova thinking
on paper. He uses scraps of paper (sometimes the blank page of a letter,
on the other side of which we see the address) as a kind of informal
diary; and it is characteristic of him, of the man of infinitely curious
mind, which this adventurer really was, that there are so few merely
personal notes among these casual jottings. Often, they are purely
abstract; at times, metaphysical _jeux d'esprit_, like the sheet of
fourteen 'Different Wagers,' which begins:
I wager that it is not true that a man who weighs a hundred pounds
will weigh more if you kill him. I wager that if there is any
difference, he will weigh less. I wager that diamond powder has not
sufficient force to kill a man.
Side by side with these fanciful excursions into science, come more
serious ones, as in the note on Algebra, which traces its progress since
the year 1494, before which 'it had only arrived at the solution of
problems of the second degree, inclusive.' A scrap of paper tells us
that Casanova 'did not like regular towns.' 'I like,' he says, 'Venice,
Rome, Florence, Milan, Constantinople, Genoa.' Then he becomes abstract
and inquisitive again, and writes two pages, full of curious,
out-of-the-way learning, on the name of Paradise:
The name of Paradise is a name in Genesis which indicates a place
of pleasure (_lieu voluptueux_): this term is Persian. This place
of pleasure was made by God before he had created man.
It may be remembered that Casanova quarrelled with Voltaire, because
Voltaire had told him frankly that his translation of _L'Écossaise_ was
a bad translation. It is piquant to read another note written in this
style of righteous indignation:
Voltaire, the hardy Voltaire, whose pen is without bit or bridle;
Voltaire, who devoured the Bible, and ridiculed our dogmas, doubts,
and after having made proselytes to impiety, is not ashamed, being
reduced to the extremity of life, to ask for the sacraments, and to
cover his body with more relics than St. Louis had at Amboise.
Here is an argument more in keeping with the tone of the _Memoirs_:
A girl who is pretty and good, and as virtuous as you please, ought
not to take it ill that a man, carried away by her charms, should
set himself to the task of making their conquest. If this man
cannot please her by any means, even if his passion be criminal,
she ought never to take offence at it, nor treat him unkindly; she
ought to be gentle, and pity him, if she does not love him, and
think it enough to keep invincibly hold upon her own duty.
Occasionally he touches upon æsthetical matters, as in a fragment which
begins with liberal definition of beauty:
Harmony makes beauty, says M. de S. P. (Bernardin de St. Pierre),
but the definition is too short, if he thinks he has said
everything. Here is mine. Remember that the subject is
metaphysical. An object really beautiful ought to seem beautiful to
all whose eyes fall upon it. That is all; there is nothing more to
be said.
At times we have an anecdote and its commentary, perhaps jotted down for
use in that latter part of the _Memoirs_ which was never written, or
which has been lost. Here is a single sheet, dated 'this 2nd September,
1791,' and headed _Souvenir_:
The Prince de Rosenberg said to me, as we went down stairs, that
Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de
Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa
d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city
library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal
laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the
Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret.' 'Is His
Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (_sic_) he
will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is a
monument there which relates to him when he was Grand Duke.' 'In
that case, His Majesty can also see my critical remarks on the
Egyptian prints.'
The Emperor asked me this morning, 6th October, how I employed my
time at Dux, and I told him that I was making an Italian anthology.
'You have all the Italians, then?' 'All, sire.' See what a lie
leads to. If I had not lied in saying that I was making an
anthology, I should not have found myself obliged to lie again in
saying that we have all the Italian poets. If the Emperor comes to
Dux, I shall kill myself.
'They say that this Dux is a delightful spot,' says Casanova in one of
the most personal of his notes, 'and I see that it might be for many;
but not for me, for what delights me in my old age is independent of the
place which I inhabit. When I do not sleep I dream, and when I am tired
of dreaming I blacken paper, then I read, and most often reject all that
my pen has vomited.' Here we see him blackening paper, on every
occasion, and for every purpose. In one bundle I found an unfinished
story about Roland, and some adventure with women in a cave; then a
'Meditation on arising from sleep, 19th May 1789'; then a 'Short
Reflection of a Philosopher who finds himself thinking of procuring his
own death. At Dux, on getting out of bed on 13th October 1793, day
dedicated to St. Lucy, memorable in my too long life.' A big budget,
containing cryptograms, is headed 'Grammatical Lottery'; and there is
the title-page of a treatise on _The Duplication of the Hexahedron,
demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies
of Europe_.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all
stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear
in half a dozen tentative forms:
_Sans mystère point de plaisirs,_
_Sans silence point de mystère._
_Charme divin de mes loisirs,_
_Solitude! que tu m'es chère!_
Then there are a number of more or less complete manuscripts of some
extent. There is the manuscript of the translation of Homer's _Iliad, in
ottava rima_ (published in Venice, 1775-8); of the _Histoire de Venise_,
of the _Icosameron_, a curious book published in 1787, purporting to be
'translated from English,' but really an original work of Casanova;
_Philocalies sur les Sottises des Mortels_, a long manuscript never
published; the sketch and beginning of _Le Polémarque, ou la Calomnie
démasquée par la présence d'esprit. Tragicomédie en trois actes,
composée à Dux dans le mois de Juin de l'Année, 1791_, which recurs
again under the form of the _Polémoscopé: La Lorgnette menteuse ou la
Calomnie démasquée_, acted before the Princess de Ligne, at her château
at Teplitz, 1791. There is a treatise in Italian, _Delle Passioni_;
there are long dialogues, such as _Le Philosophe et le Théologien_, and
_Rêve: Dieu-Moi_; there is the _Songe d'un Quart d'Heure_, divided into
minutes; there is the very lengthy criticism of _Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre_; there is the _Confutation d'une Censure indiscrète qu'on
lit dans la Gazette de Iéna, 19 Juin 1789_; with another large
manuscript, unfortunately imperfect, first called _L'Insulte_, and then
_Placet au Public_, dated 'Dux, this 2nd March, 1790,' referring to the
same criticism on the _Icosameron_ and the _Fuite des Prisons_.
_L'Histoire de ma Fuite des Prisons de la République de Venise, qu'on
appelle les Plombs_, which is the first draft of the most famous part of
the _Memoirs_, was published at Leipzig in 1788; and, having read it in
the Marcian Library at Venice, I am not surprised to learn from this
indignant document that it was printed 'under the care of a young Swiss,
who had the talent to commit a hundred faults of orthography.'
III
We come now to the documents directly relating to the _Memoirs_, and
among these are several attempts at a preface, in which we see the
actual preface coming gradually into form. One is entitled _Casanova au
Lecteur_, another _Histoire de mon Existence_, and a third _Preface_.
There is also a brief and characteristic _Précis de ma vie_, dated
November 17, 1797. Some of these have been printed in _Le Livre_, 1887.
But by far the most important manuscript that I discovered, one which,
apparently, I am the first to discover, is a manuscript entitled
_Extrait du Chapitre 4 et 5_. It is written on paper similar to that on
which the _Memoirs_ are written; the pages are numbered 104-148; and
though it is described as _Extrait_, it seems to contain, at all events,
the greater part of the missing chapters to which I have already
referred, Chapters IV. and V. of the last volume of the _Memoirs_. In
this manuscript we find Armelline and Scolastica, whose story is
interrupted by the abrupt ending of Chapter III.; we find Mariuccia of
Vol. VII., Chapter IX., who married a hairdresser; and we find also
Jaconine, whom Casanova recognises as his daughter, 'much prettier than
Sophia, the daughter of Thérèse Pompeati, whom I had left at London.'[3]
It is curious that this very important manuscript, which supplies the
one missing link in the _Memoirs_, should never have been discovered by
any of the few people who have had the opportunity of looking over the
Dux manuscripts. I am inclined to explain it by the fact that the case
in which I found this manuscript contains some papers not relating to
Casanova. Probably, those who looked into this case looked no further. I
have told Herr Brockhaus of my discovery, and I hope to see Chapters IV.
and V. in their places when the long-looked-for edition of the complete
text is at length given to the world.
Another manuscript which I found tells with great piquancy the whole
story of the Abbé de Brosses' ointment, the curing of the Princess de
Conti's pimples, and the birth of the Duc de Montpensier, which is told
very briefly, and with much less point, in the _Memoirs_ (vol. iii., p.
327). Readers of the _Memoirs_ will remember the duel at Warsaw with
Count Branicki in 1766 (vol. x., pp. 274-320), an affair which attracted
a good deal of attention at the time, and of which there is an account
in a letter from the Abbé Taruffi to the dramatist, Francesco Albergati,
dated Warsaw, March 19, 1766, quoted in Ernesto Masi's _Life of
Albergati_, Bologna, 1878. A manuscript at Dux in Casanova's handwriting
gives an account of this duel in the third person; it is entitled,
_Description de l'affaire arrivée à Varsovie le 5 Mars, 1766_. D'Ancona,
in the _Nuova Antologia_ (vol. lxvii., p. 412), referring to the Abbé
Taruffi's account, mentions what he considers to be a slight
discrepancy: that Taruffi refers to the _danseuse_, about whom the duel
was fought, as La Casacci, while Casanova refers to her as La Catai. In
this manuscript Casanova always refers to her as La Casacci; La Catai is
evidently one of M. Laforgue's arbitrary alterations of the text.
In turning over another manuscript, I was caught by the name Charpillon,
which every reader of the _Memoirs_ will remember as the name of the
harpy by whom Casanova suffered so much in London, in 1763-4. This
manuscript begins by saying: 'I have been in London for six months and
have been to see them (that is, the mother and daughter) in their own
house,' where he finds nothing but 'swindlers, who cause all who go
there to lose their money in gambling.' This manuscript adds some
details to the story told in the ninth and tenth volumes of the
_Memoirs_, and refers to the meeting with the Charpillons four and a
half years before, described in Volume V., pages 482-485. It is written
in a tone of great indignation. Elsewhere, I found a letter written by
Casanova, but not signed, referring to an anonymous letter which he had
received in reference to the Charpillons, and ending: 'My handwriting is
known.' It was not until the last that I came upon great bundles of
letters addressed to Casanova, and so carefully preserved that little
scraps of paper, on which postscripts are written, are still in their
places. One still sees the seals on the backs of many of the letters, on
paper which has slightly yellowed with age, leaving the ink, however,
almost always fresh. They come from Venice, Paris, Rome, Prague,
Bayreuth, The Hague, Genoa, Fiume, Trieste, etc., and are addressed to
as many places, often _poste restante_. Many are letters from women,
some in beautiful handwriting, on thick paper; others on scraps of
paper, in painful hands, ill-spelt. A Countess writes pitifully,
imploring help; one protests her love, in spite of the 'many chagrins'
he has caused her; another asks 'how they are to live together'; another
laments that a report has gone about that she is secretly living with
him, which may harm _his_ reputation. Some are in French, more in
Italian. _Mon cher Giacometto_, writes one woman, in French; _Carissimo
e Amatissimo_, writes another, in Italian. These letters from women are
in some confusion, and are in need of a good deal of sorting over and
rearranging before their full extent can be realised. Thus I found
letters in the same handwriting separated by letters in other
handwritings; many are unsigned, or signed only by a single initial;
many are undated, or dated only with the day of the week or month. There
are a great many letters, dating from 1779 to 1786, signed 'Francesca
Buschini,' a name which I cannot identify; they are written in Italian,
and one of them begins: _Unico Mio vero Amico_ ('my only true friend').
Others are signed 'Virginia B.'; one of these is dated, 'Forli, October
15, 1773.' There is also a 'Theresa B.,' who writes from Genoa. I was at
first unable to identify the writer of a whole series of letters in
French, very affectionate and intimate letters, usually unsigned,
occasionally signed 'B.' She calls herself _votre petite amie_; or she
ends with a half-smiling, half-reproachful 'good-night, and sleep better
than I.' In one letter, sent from Paris in 1759, she writes: 'Never
believe me, but when I tell you that I love you, and that I shall love
you always.' In another letter, ill-spelt, as her letters often are, she
writes: 'Be assured that evil tongues, vapours, calumny, nothing can
change my heart, which is yours entirely, and has no will to change its
master.' Now, it seems to me that these letters must be from Manon
Baletti, and that they are the letters referred to in the sixth volume
of the _Memoirs_. We read there (page 60) how on Christmas Day, 1759,
Casanova receives a letter from Manon in Paris, announcing her marriage
with 'M. Blondel, architect to the King, and member of his Academy'; she
returns him his letters, and begs him to return hers, or burn them.
Instead of doing so he allows Esther to read them, intending to burn
them afterwards. Esther begs to be allowed to keep the letters,
promising to 'preserve them religiously all her life.' 'These letters,'
he says, 'numbered more than two hundred, and the shortest were of four
pages.' Certainly there are not two hundred of them at Dux, but it seems
to me highly probable that Casanova made a final selection from Manon's
letters, and that it is these which I have found.
But, however this may be, I was fortunate enough to find the set of
letters which I was most anxious to find: the letters from Henriette,
whose loss every writer on Casanova has lamented. Henriette, it will be
remembered, makes her first appearance at Cesena, in the year 1748;
after their meeting at Geneva, she reappears, romantically _à propos_,
twenty-two years later, at Aix in Provence; and she writes to Casanova
proposing _un commerce épistolaire_, asking him what he has done since
his escape from prison, and promising to do her best to tell him all
that has happened to her during the long interval. After quoting her
letter, he adds: 'I replied to her, accepting the correspondence that
she offered me, and telling her briefly all my vicissitudes. She related
to me in turn, in some forty letters, all the history of her life. If
she dies before me, I shall add these letters to these _Memoirs_; but
to-day she is still alive, and always happy, though now old.' It has
never been known what became of these letters, and why they were not
added to the _Memoirs_. I have found a great quantity of them, some
signed with her married name in full, 'Henriette de Schnetzmann,' and I
am inclined to think that she survived Casanova, for one of the letters
is dated Bayreuth, 1798, the year of Casanova's death. They are
remarkably charming, written with a mixture of piquancy and
distinction; and I will quote the characteristic beginning and end of
the last letter I was able to find. It begins: 'No, it is impossible to
be sulky with you!' and ends: 'If I become vicious, it is you, my
Mentor, who make me so, and I cast my sins upon you. Even if I were
damned I should still be your most devoted friend, Henriette de
Schnetzmann.' Casanova was twenty-three when he met Henriette; now,
herself an old woman, she writes to him when he is seventy-three, as if
the fifty years that had passed were blotted out in the faithful
affection of her memory. How many more discreet and less changing lovers
have had the quality of constancy in change, to which this life-long
correspondence bears witness? Does it not suggest a view of Casanova not
quite the view of all the world? To me it shows the real man, who
perhaps of all others best understood what Shelley meant when he said:
True love in this differs from gold or clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
But, though the letters from women naturally interested me the most,
they were only a certain proportion of the great mass of correspondence
which I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was
afterwards to bring the manuscript of the _Memoirs_ to Brockhaus; from
Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the _Piombi_; from the
Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is
some account in the _Memoirs_; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished
man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same
volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from
Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, _bel
homme, ayant de l'esprit, le ton et le goût de la bonne société_, who
came to settle at Gorizia in 1773, while Casanova was there; from the
Procurator Morosini, whom he speaks of in the _Memoirs_ as his
'protector,' and as one of those through whom he obtained permission to
return to Venice. His other 'protector,' the _avogador_ Zaguri, had,
says Casanova, 'since the affair of the Marquis Albergati, carried on a
most interesting correspondence with me'; and in fact I found a bundle
of no less than a hundred and thirty-eight letters from him, dating
from 1784 to 1798. Another bundle contains one hundred and seventy-two
letters from Count Lamberg. In the _Memoirs_ Casanova says, referring to
his visit to Augsburg at the end of 1761:
I used to spend my evenings in a very agreeable manner at the house
of Count Max de Lamberg, who resided at the court of the
Prince-Bishop with the title of Grand Marshal. What particularly
attached me to Count Lamberg was his literary talent. A first-rate
scholar, learned to a degree, he has published several much
esteemed works. I carried on an exchange of letters with him which
ended only with his death four years ago in 1792.
Casanova tells us that, at his second visit to Augsburg in the early
part of 1767, he 'supped with Count Lamberg two or three times a week,'
during the four months he was there. It is with this year that the
letters I have found begin: they end with the year of his death, 1792.
In his _Mémorial d'un Mondain_ Lamberg refers to Casanova as 'a man
known in literature, a man of profound knowledge.' In the first edition
of 1774, he laments that 'a man such as M. de S. Galt' should not yet
have been taken back into favour by the Venetian government, and in the
second edition, 1775, rejoices over Casanova's return to Venice. Then
there are letters from Da Ponte, who tells the story of Casanova's
curious relations with Mme. d'Urfé, in his _Memorie scritte da esso_,
1829; from Pittoni, Bono, and others mentioned in different parts of the
_Memoirs_, and from some dozen others who are not mentioned in them. The
only letters in the whole collection that have been published are those
from the Prince de Ligne and from Count Koenig.
IV
Casanova tells us in his _Memoirs_ that, during his later years at Dux,
he had only been able to 'hinder black melancholy from devouring his
poor existence, or sending him out of his mind,' by writing ten or
twelve hours a day. The copious manuscripts at Dux show us how
persistently he was at work on a singular variety of subjects, in
addition to the _Memoirs_, and to the various books which he published
during those years. We see him jotting down everything that comes into
his head, for his own amusement, and certainly without any thought of
publication; engaging in learned controversies, writing treatises on
abstruse mathematical problems, composing comedies to be acted before
Count Waldstein's neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages,
indeed with more patience than success, writing philosophical dialogues
in which God and himself are the speakers, and keeping up an extensive
correspondence, both with distinguished men and with delightful women.
His mental activity, up to the age of seventy-three, is as prodigious as
the activity which he had expended in living a multiform and
incalculable life. As in life everything living had interested him, so
in his retirement from life every idea makes its separate appeal to him;
and he welcomes ideas with the same impartiality with which he had
welcomed adventures. Passion has intellectualised itself, and remains
not less passionate. He wishes to do everything, to compete with every
one; and it is only after having spent seven years in heaping up
miscellaneous learning, and exercising his faculties in many directions,
that he turns to look back over his own past life, and to live it over
again in memory, as he writes down the narrative of what had interested
him most in it. 'I write in the hope that my history will never see the
broad daylight of publication,' he tells us, scarcely meaning it, we may
be sure, even in the moment of hesitancy which may naturally come to
him. But if ever a book was written for the pleasure of writing it, it
was this one; and an autobiography written for oneself is not likely to
be anything but frank.
'Truth is the only God I have ever adored,' he tells us: and we now know
how truthful he was in saying so. I have only summarised in this article
the most important confirmations of his exact accuracy in facts and
dates; the number could be extended indefinitely. In the manuscripts we
find innumerable further confirmations; and their chief value as
testimony is that they tell us nothing which we should not have already
known, if we had merely taken Casanova at his word. But it is not always
easy to take people at their own word, when they are writing about
themselves; and the world has been very loth to believe in Casanova as
he represents himself. It has been specially loth to believe that he is
telling the truth when he tells us about his adventures with women. But
the letters contained among these manuscripts show us the women of
Casanova writing to him with all the fervour and all the fidelity which
he attributes to them; and they show him to us in the character of as
fervid and faithful a lover. In every fact, every detail, and in the
whole mental impression which they convey, these manuscripts bring
before us the Casanova of the _Memoirs_. As I seemed to come upon
Casanova at home, it was as if I came upon an old friend, already
perfectly known to me, before I had made my pilgrimage to Dux.
1902.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See the account of this visit to Holland, and the reference to
taking a passport, _Memoirs_, v. 238.
[2] See Charles Henry, _Les Connaissances Mathématiques de Casanova_.
Rome 1883.
[3] See _Memoirs_, ix. 272, _et seq._
JOHN DONNE
I
Biography as a fine art can go no further than Walton's _Life and Death
of Dr. Donne_. From the 'good and virtuous parents' of the first line to
the 'small quantity of Christian dust' of the last, every word is the
touch of a cunning brush painting a picture. The picture lives, and with
so vivid and gracious a life that it imposes itself upon us as the
portrait of a real man, faithfully copied from the man as he lived. But
that is precisely the art of the painter. Walton's picture is so
beautiful because everything in it is sacrificed to beauty; because it
is a convention, a picture in which life is treated almost as theme for
music. And so there remains an opportunity, even after this masterpiece,
for a life of Donne which shall make no pretence to harmonise a
sometimes discordant existence, or indeed to produce, properly speaking,
a piece of art at all; but which shall be faithful to the document, a
piece of history. Such a book has now been written by Mr. Gosse, in his
_Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's_. It is perhaps the
most solid and serious contribution which Mr. Gosse has made to English
literature, and we may well believe that it will remain the final
authority on so interesting and so difficult a subject. For the first
time, in the light of this clear analysis, and of these carefully
arranged letters, we are able, if not indeed to see Donne as he really
was, at all events to form our own opinion about every action of his
life. This is one of the merits of Mr. Gosse's book; he has collected
his documents, and he has given them to us as they are, guiding us
adroitly along the course of the life which they illustrate, but not
allowing himself to dogmatise on what must still remain conjectural. And
he has given us a series of reproductions of portraits, of the highest
importance in the study of one who is not merely a difficult poet, but a
very ambiguous human being. They begin with the eager, attractive,
somewhat homely youth of eighteen, grasping the hilt of his sword so
tightly that his knuckles start out from the thin covering of flesh;
passing into the mature Donne as we know him, the lean, humorous,
large-browed, courtly thinker, with his large intent eyes, a cloak
folded elegantly about his uncovered throat, or the ruff tightening
about his carefully trimmed beard; and ending with the ghastly emblem
set as a frontispiece to _Death's Duel_, the dying man wrapped already
in his shroud, which gathers into folds above his head, as if tied
together like the mouth of a sack, while the sunken cheeks and hollow
closed eyelids are mocked by the shapely moustache, brushed upwards from
the lips. In the beautiful and fanciful monument in St. Paul's done
after the drawing from which this frontispiece was engraved, there is
less ghastliness and a more harmonious beauty in the brave attitude of a
man who dresses for death as he would dress for Court, wearing the last
livery with an almost foppish sense of propriety. Between them these
portraits tell much, and Mr. Gosse, in his narrative, tells us
everything else that there is to tell, much of it for the first time;
and the distinguished and saintly person of Walton's narrative, so
simple, so easily explicable, becomes more complex at every moment, as
fresh light makes the darkness more and more visible. At the end we seem
to have become singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzling
creature, whom each of us may try to understand after his fashion, as we
try to understand the real secrets of the character of our friends.
Donne's mind, then, if I may make my own attempt to understand him, was
the mind of the dialectician, of the intellectual adventurer; he is a
poet almost by accident, or at least for reasons with which art in the
abstract has but little to do. He writes verse, first of all, because he
has observed keenly, and because it pleases the pride of his intellect
to satirise the pretensions of humanity. Then it is the flesh which
speaks in his verse, the curiosity of woman, which he has explored in
the same spirit of adventure; then passion, making a slave of him for
love's sake, and turning at last to the slave's hatred; finally,
religion, taken up with the same intellectual interest, the same subtle
indifference, and, in its turn, passing also into passionate reality. A
few poems are inspired in him by what he has seen in remote countries;
some are marriage songs and funeral elegies, written for friendship or
for money. But he writes nothing 'out of his own head,' as we say;
nothing lightly, or, it would seem, easily; nothing for the song's sake.
He speaks, in a letter, of 'descending to print anything in verse'; and
it is certain that he was never completely absorbed by his own poetry,
or at all careful to measure his achievements against those of others.
He took his own poems very seriously, he worked upon them with the whole
force of his intellect; but to himself, even before he became a divine,
he was something more than a poet. Poetry was but one means of
expressing the many-sided activity of his mind and temperament. Prose
was another, preaching another; travel and contact with great events and
persons scarcely less important to him, in the building up of himself.
And he was interested in everything. At one moment he is setting himself
to study Oriental languages, a singularly difficult task in those days.
Both in poetry and divinity he has more Spanish than English books in
his library. Scientific and technical terms are constantly found in his
verse, where we should least expect them, where indeed they are least
welcome. In _Ignatius--his Conclave_ he speaks with learned enthusiasm
of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and of his own immediate contemporaries,
then but just become famous, Galileo ('who of late hath summoned the
other worlds, the stars, to come nearer to him, and to give an account
of themselves') and Kepler ('who hath received it into his care, that no
new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge'). He rebukes
himself for his abandonment to 'the worst voluptuousness, which is an
hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages.' At
twenty-three he was a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went on
the 'Islands Voyage'; later on, at different periods, he travelled over
many parts of the Continent, with rich patrons or on diplomatic offices.
Born a Catholic, he became a Protestant, deliberately enough; wrote
books on controversial subjects, against his old party, before he had
taken orders in the Church of England; besides a strange, morbid
speculation on the innocence of suicide. He used his lawyer's training
for dubious enough purposes, advising the Earl of Somerset in the dark
business of his divorce and re-marriage. And, in a mournful pause in the
midst of many harrowing concerns, he writes to a friend: 'When I must
shipwreck, I would fain do it in a sea where mine own impotency might
have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so
much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something,
but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a
planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he
confesses later in the same letter.
No doubt some of this feverish activity, this uncertainty of aim, was a
matter of actual physical health. It is uncertain at what time the
wasting disease, of which he died, first settled upon him; but he seems
to have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at times
depressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon the whole
organisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led him
to write his _Biathanatos_, with its elaborate apology for suicide, and
at the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying,
was but one symptom of a morbid state of body and brain and nerves, to
which so many of his poems and so many of his letters bear witness.
'Sometimes,' he writes, in a characteristic letter, 'when I find myself
transported with jollity and love of company, I hang lead to my heels,
and reduce to my thoughts my fortunes, my years, the duties of a man, of
a friend, of a husband, of a father, and all the incumbencies of a
family; when sadness dejects me, either I countermine it with another
sadness, or I kindle squibs about me again, and fly into sportfulness
and company.'
At the age of thirty-five he writes from his bed describing every detail
of what he frantically calls 'a sickness which I cannot name or
describe,' and ends his letter: 'I profess to you truly, that my
loathness to give over now, seems to myself an ill sign that I shall
write no more.' It was at this time that he wrote the _Biathanatos_,
with its explicit declaration in the preface: 'Whensoever any
affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own
hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own
sword.' Fifteen years later, when one of his most serious illnesses was
upon him, and his life in real danger, he notes down all his symptoms as
he lies awake night after night, with an extraordinary and, in itself,
morbid acuteness. 'I observe the physician with the same diligence as he
the disease; I see he fears, and I fear with him; I overtake him, I
over-run him in his fear, because he makes his pace slow; I fear the
more because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpness
because he would not have me see it.' As he lies in bed, he realises 'I
am mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct them.
They conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me for
dead now, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight, and ask
how I do to-morrow. Miserable and inhuman posture, where I must practise
my lying in the grave by lying still.' This preying upon itself of the
brain is but one significant indication of a temperament, neurotic
enough indeed, but in which the neurosis is still that of the curious
observer, the intellectual casuist, rather than of the artist. A
wonderful piece of self-analysis, worthy of St. Augustine, which occurs
in one of his funeral sermons, gives poignant expression to what must
doubtless have been a common condition of so sensitive a brain. 'I throw
myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and His angels
together; and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels for the
noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door;
I talk on in the same posture of prayer, eyes lifted up, knees bowed
down, as though I prayed to God; and if God should ask me when I last
thought of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I
forgot what I was about; But when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A
memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw
under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a chimera in my brain, troubles me
in my prayer.' It is this brain, turned inward upon itself, and darting
out on every side in purely random excursions, that was responsible, I
cannot doubt, for all the contradictions of a career in which the inner
logic is not at first apparent.
Donne's career divides itself sharply into three parts: his youth, when
we see him a soldier, a traveller, a lover, a poet, unrestrained in all
the passionate adventures of youth; then a middle period, in which he is
a lawyer and a theologian, seeking knowledge and worldly advancement,
without any too restraining scruple as to the means which come to his
hand; and then a last stage of saintly living and dying. What then is
the link between these successive periods, the principle of development,
the real Donne in short? 'He was none of these, or all of these, or
more,' says Mr. Gosse. But, surely, he was indeed all of these, and his
individuality precisely the growth from one stage to another, the subtle
intelligence being always there, working vividly, but in each period
working in a different direction. 'I would fain do something, but that I
cannot tell what is no wonder.' Everything in Donne seems to me to
explain itself in that fundamental uncertainty of aim, and his
uncertainty of aim partly by a morbid physical condition. He searches,
nothing satisfies him, tries everything, in vain; finding satisfaction
at last in the Church, as in a haven of rest. Always it is the curious,
insatiable brain searching. And he is always wretchedly aware that he
'can do nothing constantly.'
His three periods, then, are three stages in the search after a way to
walk in, something worthy of himself to do. Thus, of his one printed
collection of verse he writes: 'Of my _Anniversaries_, the fault which I
acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse,
which, though it have excuse, even in our times, by example of men,
which one would think should as little have done it as I, yet I confess
I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself.' Of his legal
studies he writes in the same letter: 'For my purpose of proceeding in
the profession of the law, so far as to a title, you may be pleased to
correct that imagination where you find it. I ever thought the study of
it my best entertainment and pastime, but I have no ambition nor design
upon the style.' Until he accepts religion, with all its limitations and
encouragements, he has not even sure landmarks on his way. So
speculative a brain, able to prove, and proving for its own uneasy
satisfaction, that even suicide is 'not so naturally sin, that it may
never be otherwise,' could allow itself to be guided by no fixed rules;
and to a brain so abstract, conduct must always have seemed of less
importance than it does to most other people, and especially conduct
which is argument, like the demonstrations on behalf of what seems, on
the face of it, a somewhat iniquitous divorce and re-marriage, or like
those unmeasured eulogies, both of this 'blest pair of swans,' and of
the dead child of a rich father. He admits, in one of his letters, that
in his elegies, 'I did best when I had least truth for my subjects'; and
of the _Anniversaries_ in honour of little Mistress Drury, 'But for the
other part of the imputation of having said so much, my defence is, that
my purpose was to say as well as I could; for since I never saw the
gentlewoman, I cannot be understood to have bound myself to have spoken
the just truth.' He is always the casuist, always mentally impartial in
the face of a moral problem, reserving judgment on matters which, after
all, seem to him remote from an unimpassioned contemplation of things;
until that moment of crisis comes, long after he has become a clergyman,
when the death of his wife changed the world for him, and he became, in
the words of Walton, 'crucified to the world, and all those vanities,
those imaginary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage;
and they were as perfectly crucified to him.' From that time to the end
of his life he had found what he had all the while been seeking: rest
for the restlessness of his mind, in a meditation upon the divine
nature; occupation, in being 'ambassador of God,' through the pulpit;
himself, as it seemed to him, at his fullest and noblest. It was
himself, really, that he had been seeking all the time, conscious at
least of that in all the deviations of the way; himself, the ultimate of
his curiosities.
II
And yet, what remains to us out of this life of many purposes, which had
found an end satisfying to itself in the Deanery of St. Paul's, is
simply a bundle of manuscript verses, which the writer could bring
himself neither to print nor to destroy. His first satire speaks
contemptuously of 'giddy fantastic poets,' and, when he allowed himself
to write poetry, he was resolved to do something different from what
anybody had ever done before, not so much from the artist's instinctive
desire of originality, as from a kind of haughty, yet really bourgeois,
desire to be indebted to nobody. With what care he wrote is confessed in
a passage of one of his letters, where, speaking of a sermon, he says:
'For, as Cardinal Cusanus wrote a book, _Cribratio Alchorani_, I have
cribrated, and re-cribrated, and post-cribrated the sermon, and must
necessarily say, the King, who hath let fall his eye upon some of my
poems, never saw, of mine, a hand, or an eye, or an affection, set down
with so much study and diligence, and labour of syllables, as in this
sermon I expressed those two points.' But he thought there were other
things more important than being a poet, and this very labour of his was
partly a sign of it. 'He began,' says Mr. Gosse with truth, 'as if
poetry had never been written before.' To the people of his time, to
those who came immediately after him, he was the restorer of English
poetry.
The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
O'erspread, was purged by thee,
says Carew, in those memorial verses in which the famous lines occur:
Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit.
Shakespeare was living, remember, and it was Elizabethan poetry that
Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system
of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less
arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,'
said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet,
if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasis
of what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in at
all events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way he meant
them to be delivered is not always as beautiful as it is expressive.
Donne would be original at all costs, preferring himself to his art. He
treated poetry as Æsop's master treated his slave, and broke what he
could not bend.
But Donne's novelty of metre is only a part of his too deliberate
novelty as a poet. As Mr. Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evident
truth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's real
position in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realistic
writer, who makes a clean sweep of tradition, and puts everything down
in the most modern words and with the help of the most trivial actual
images.
To what a cumbersome unwieldiness,
And burdensome corpulence my love hath grown,
he will begin a poem on _Love's Diet_. Of love, as the master of hearts,
he declares seriously:
He swallows us and never chaws;
By him, as by chain'd shot, whole ranks do die;
He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.
And, in his unwise insistence that every metaphor shall be absolutely
new, he drags medical and alchemical and legal properties into verse
really full of personal passion, producing at times poetry which is a
kind of disease of the intellect, a sick offshoot of science. Like most
poets of powerful individuality, Donne lost precisely where he gained.
That cumulative and crowding and sweeping intellect which builds up his
greatest poems into miniature Escurials of poetry, mountainous and
four-square to all the winds of the world, 'purges' too often the
flowers as well as the weeds out of 'the Muses' garden.' To write poetry
as if it had never been written before is to attempt what the greatest
poets never attempted. There are only two poets in English literature
who thus stand out of the tradition, who are without ancestors, Donne
and Browning. Each seems to have certain qualities almost greater than
the qualities of the greatest; and yet in each some precipitation of
arrogant egoism remains in the crucible, in which the draught has all
but run immortally clear.
Donne's quality of passion is unique in English poetry. It is a rapture
in which the mind is supreme, a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a
pitch of actual violence. The words themselves rarely count for much, as
they do in Crashaw, for instance, where words turn giddy at the height
of their ascension. The words mean things, and it is the things that
matter. They can be brutal: 'For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let
me love!' as if a long, pre-supposed self-repression gave way suddenly,
in an outburst. 'Love, any devil else but you,' he begins, in his abrupt
leap to the heart of the matter. Or else his exaltation will be grave,
tranquil, measureless in assurance.
All kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun itself, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no to-morrow hath, no yesterday;
Running, it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
This lover loves with his whole nature, and so collectedly because
reason, in him, is not in conflict with passion, but passion's ally. His
senses speak with unparalleled directness, as in those elegies which
must remain the model in English of masculine sensual sobriety. He
distinguishes the true end of such loving in a forcible,
characteristically prosaic image:
Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
And he exemplifies every motion and the whole pilgrim's progress of
physical love, with a deliberate, triumphant, unluxurious explicitness
which 'leaves no doubt,' as we say 'of his intentions,' and can be no
more than referred to passingly in modern pages. In a series of hate
poems, of which I will quote the finest, he gives expression to a whole
region of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, out
of Catullus, with such intolerable truth.
When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead,
And that thou think'st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see:
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call'st for more,
And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I'd rather thou should'st painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.
Yet it is the same lover, and very evidently the same, who winnows all
this earthly passion to a fine, fruitful dust, fit to make bread for
angels. Ecstatic reason, passion justifying its intoxication by
revealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the
quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to
make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly
abstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture of
solution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called _The
Ecstasy_, which seems to anticipate a metaphysical Blake; it is all
close reasoning, step by step, and yet is what its title claims for it.
It may be, though I doubt it, that other poets who have written personal
verse in English, have known as much of women's hearts and the senses of
men, and the interchanges of passionate intercourse between man and
woman; but, partly by reason of this very method of saying things, no
one has ever rendered so exactly, and with such elaborate subtlety,
every mood of the actual passion. It has been done in prose; may one not
think of Stendhal, for a certain way he has of turning the whole forces
of the mind upon those emotions and sensations which are mostly left to
the heat of an unreflective excitement? Donne, as he suffers all the
colds and fevers of love, is as much the sufferer and the physician of
his disease as we have seen him to be in cases of actual physical
sickness. Always detached from himself, even when he is most helplessly
the slave of circumstances, he has that frightful faculty of seeing
through his own illusions; of having no illusions to the mind, only to
the senses. Other poets, with more wisdom towards poetry, give us the
beautiful or pathetic results of no matter what creeping or soaring
passions. Donne, making a new thing certainly, if not always a thing of
beauty, tells us exactly what a man really feels as he makes love to a
woman, as he sits beside her husband at table, as he dreams of her in
absence, as he scorns himself for loving her, as he hates or despises
her for loving him, as he realises all that is stupid in her devotion,
and all that is animal in his. 'Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to
love,' he tells her, in a burst of angry contempt, priding himself on
his superior craft in the art. And his devotions to her are exquisite,
appealing to what is most responsive in woman, beyond those of tenderer
poets. A woman cares most for the lover who understands her best, and is
least taken in by what it is the method of her tradition to feign. So
wearily conscious that she is not the abstract angel of her pretence and
of her adorers, she will go far in sheer thankfulness to the man who can
see so straight into her heart as to have
found something like a heart,
But colours it and corners had;
It was not good, it was not bad,
It was entire to none, and few had part.
Donne shows women themselves, in delight, anger, or despair; they know
that he finds nothing in the world more interesting, and they much more
than forgive him for all the ill he says of them. If women most
conscious of their sex were ever to read Donne, they would say, He was a
great lover; he understood.
And, in the poems of divine love, there is the same quality of mental
emotion as in the poems of human love. Donne adores God reasonably,
knowing why he adores Him. He renders thanks point by point, celebrates
the heavenly perfections with metaphysical precision, and is no vaguer
with God than with woman. Donne knew what he believed and why he
believed, and is carried into no heat or mist as he tells over the
recording rosary of his devotions. His _Holy Sonnets_ are a kind of
argument with God; they tell over, and discuss, and resolve, such
perplexities of faith and reason as would really occur to a speculative
brain like his. Thought crowds in upon thought, in these tightly packed
lines, which but rarely admit a splendour of this kind:
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.
More typical is this too knotted beginning of another sonnet:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
Having something very minute and very exact to say, he hates to leave
anything out; dreading diffuseness, as he dreads the tame sweetness of
an easy melody, he will use only the smallest possible number of words
to render his thought; and so, as here, he is too often ingenious rather
than felicitous, forgetting that to the poet poetry comes first, and all
the rest afterwards.
For the writing of great poetry something more is needed than to be a
poet and to have great occasions. Donne was a poet, and he had the
passions and the passionate adventures, in body and mind, which make the
material for poetry; he was sincere to himself in expressing what he
really felt under the burden of strong emotion and sharp sensation.
Almost every poem that he wrote is written on a genuine inspiration, a
genuine personal inspiration, but most of his poems seem to have been
written before that personal inspiration has had time to fuse itself
with the poetic inspiration. It is always useful to remember
Wordsworth's phrase of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity,' for
nothing so well defines that moment of crystallisation in which direct
emotion or sensation deviates exquisitely into art. Donne is intent on
the passion itself, the thought, the reality; so intent that he is not
at the same time, in that half-unconscious way which is the way of the
really great poet, equally intent on the form, that both may come to
ripeness together. Again it is the heresy of the realist. Just as he
drags into his verse words that have had no time to take colour from
men's association of them with beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinking
heart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He gives us
the real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetry
will have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated them
into a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of ours
as the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of the
poet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supreme
poetic language of Dante. But the personal or human reality and the
imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the art
will be at fault. Donne is too proud to abandon himself to his own
inspiration, to his inspiration as a poet; he would be something more
than a voice for deeper yet speechless powers; he would make poetry
speak straight. Well, poetry will not speak straight, in the way Donne
wished it to, and under the goading that his restless intellect gave it.
He forgot beauty, preferring to it every form of truth, and beauty has
revenged itself upon him, glittering miraculously out of many lines in
which he wrote humbly, and leaving the darkness of a retreating shadow
upon great spaces in which a confident intellect was conscious of
shining.
For, though mind be the heaven, where love may sit,
Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it,
he writes, in the _Valediction to his Book_, thus giving formal
expression to his heresy. 'The greatest wit, though not the best poet of
our nation,' Dryden called him; the greatest intellect, that is, which
had expressed itself in poetry. Dryden himself was not always careful to
distinguish between what material was fit and what unfit for verse; so
that we can now enjoy his masterly prose with more equable pleasure than
his verse. But he saw clearly enough the distinction in Donne between
intellect and the poetical spirit; that fatal division of two forces,
which, had they pulled together instead of apart, might have achieved a
result wholly splendid. Without a great intellect no man was ever a
great poet; but to possess a great intellect is not even a first step in
the direction of becoming a poet at all.
Compare Donne, for instance, with Herrick. Herrick has little enough of
the intellect, the passion, the weight and the magnificence of Donne;
but, setting out with so much less to carry, he certainly gets first to
the goal, and partly by running always in the right direction. The most
limited poet in the language, he is the surest. He knows the airs that
weave themselves into songs, as he knows the flowers that twine best
into garlands. Words come to him in an order which no one will ever
alter, and no one will ever forget. Whether they come easily or not is
no matter; he knows when they have come right, and they always come
right before he lets them go. But Donne is only occasionally sure of his
words as airs; he sets them doggedly to the work of saying something,
whether or no they step to the beat of the music. Conscious writer
though he was, I suppose he was more or less unconscious of his
extraordinary felicities, more conscious probably of how they came than
of what they were doing. And they come chiefly through a sudden
heightening of mood, which brings with it a clearer and a more exalted
mode of speech, in its merely accurate expression of itself. Even then I
cannot imagine him quite reconciled to beauty, at least actually doing
homage to it, but rather as one who receives a gift by the way.
1899.
EMILY BRONTË
This was a woman young and passionate,
Loving the Earth, and loving most to be
Where she might be alone with liberty;
Loving the beasts, who are compassionate;
The homeless moors, her home; the bright elate
Winds of the cold dawn; rock and stone and tree;
Night, bringing dreams out of eternity;
And memory of Death's unforgetting date.
She too was unforgetting: has she yet
Forgotten that long agony when her breath
Too fierce for living fanned the flame of death?
Earth for her heather, does she now forget
What pity knew not in her love from scorn,
And that it was an unjust thing to be born?
The Stoic in woman has been seen once only, and that in the only woman
in whom there has been seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness.
Emily Brontë lived with an unparalleled energy a life of outward quiet,
in a loneliness which she shared only with the moors and with the
animals whom she loved. She required no passion-experience to endow her
with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is
alive in the earth. And the vehemence of that inner fire fed on itself,
and wore out her body before its time, because it had no respite and no
outlet. We see her condemned to self-imprisonment, and dying of too much
life.
Her poems are few and brief, and nothing more personal has ever been
written. A few are as masterly in execution as in conception, and almost
all have a direct truth of utterance, which rarely lacks at least the
bare beauty of muscle and sinew, of a kind of naked strength and
alertness. They are without heat or daylight, the sun is rarely in them,
and then 'blood-red'; light comes as starshine, or comes as
hostile light
That does not warm but burn.
At times the landscape in this bare, grey, craggy verse, always a
landscape of Yorkshire moors, with its touches of stern and tender
memory, 'The mute bird sitting on the stone,' 'A little and a lone green
lane,' has a quality more thrilling than that of Wordsworth. There is
none of his observation, and none of his sense of a benignant 'presence
far more deeply interfused'; but there is the voice of the heart's
roots, crying out to its home in the earth.
At first this unornamented verse may seem forbidding, may seem even to
be ordinary, as an actual moorland may, to those for whom it has no
special attraction. But in the verse, as on the moors, there is space,
wind, and the smell of the earth; and there is room to be alone, that
liberty which this woman cried for when she cried:
Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty.
To be alone was for her to be alone with 'a chainless soul,' which asked
of whatever powers might be only 'courage to endure,' constancy not to
forget, and the right to leave the door wide open to those visions that
came to her out of mere fixed contemplation: 'the God of Visions,' as
she called her imagination, 'my slave, my comrade, and my king.' And we
know that her courage was flawless, heroic, beyond praise; that she
forgot nothing, not even that love for her unspeakable brother, for
whom she has expressed in two of her poems a more than masculine
magnanimity of pity and contempt; and that at all times she could turn
inward to that world within, where her imagination waited for her,
Where thou, and I, and Liberty
Have undisputed sovereignty.
Yet even imagination, though 'benignant,' is to her a form of 'phantom
bliss' to which she will not trust herself wholly. 'So hopeless is the
world without': but is the world within ever quite frankly accepted as a
substitute, as a truer reality? She is always on her guard against
imagination as against the outer world, whose 'lies' she is resolved
shall not 'beguile' her. She has accepted reason as the final arbiter,
and desires only to see clearly, to see things as they are. She really
believed that
Earth reserves no blessing
For the unblest of heaven;
and she had an almost Calvinistic sense of her own condemnation to
unhappiness. That being so, she was suspicious of those opportunities of
joy which did come to her, or at least resolute not to believe too
implicitly in the good messages of the stars, which might be mere
dreams, or of the earth, which was only certainly kind in preparing for
her that often-thought-of grave. 'No coward soul is mine' is one of her
true sayings; but it was with difficulty that she trusted even that
message of life which she seemed to discover in death. She has to assure
herself of it, again and again: 'Who once lives, never dies!' And that
sense of personal identity which aches throughout all her poems is a
sense, not of the delight, but of the pain and ineradicable sting of
personal identity.
Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, _Wuthering Heights_, is
one long outcry. A soul on the rack seems to make itself heard at
moments, when suffering has grown too acute for silence. Every poem is
as if torn from her. Even when she does not write seemingly in her own
person, the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner,' 'Honour's
Martyr,' 'The Outcast Mother,' echoes of all the miseries and useless
rebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dying
faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely into
the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always
arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a
clear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt is itself an
affirmation, her defiance would be an entreaty but for the 'quenchless
will' of her pride. She faces every terror, and to her pained
apprehension birth and death and life are alike terrible. Only Webster's
dirge might have been said over her coffin.
What my soul bore my soul alone
Within itself may tell,
she says truthfully; but some of that long endurance of her life, in
which exile, the body's weakness, and a sense of some 'divinest anguish'
which clung about the world and all things living, had their share, she
was able to put into ascetic and passionate verse. It is sad-coloured
and desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the
clouds that hang generally above it, a rare and stormy beauty comes into
the bare outlines, quickening them with living splendour.
1906.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
The poems of Edgar Allan Poe are the work of a poet who thought
persistently about poetry as an art, and would have reduced inspiration
to a method. At their best they are perfectly defined by Baudelaire,
when he says of Poe's poetry that it is a thing 'deep and shimmering as
dreams, mysterious and perfect as crystal.' Not all the poems, few as
they are, are flawless. In a few unequal poems we have the only
essential poetry which has yet come from America, Walt Whitman's vast
poetical nature having remained a nature only, not come to be an art.
Because Poe was fantastically inhuman, a conscious artist doing strange
things with strange materials, not every one has realised how fine, how
rare, was that beauty which this artist brought into the world. It is
true that there was in the genius of Poe something meretricious; it is
the flaw in his genius; but then he had genius, and Whittier and Bryant
and Longfellow and Lowell had only varying degrees of talent. Let us
admit, by all means, that a diamond is flawed; but need we compare it
with this and that fine specimen of quartz?
Poetry Poe defined as 'the rhythmical creation of beauty'; and the first
element of poetry he found in 'the thirst for supernal beauty.' 'It is
not,' he repeats, 'the mere appreciation of the beauty before us. It is
a wild effort to reach the beauty above.... Inspired with a prescient
ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, it struggles by multiform
novelty of combination among the things and thoughts of time, to
anticipate some portions of that loveliness whose very elements,
perhaps, appertain solely to eternity.' The poet, then, 'should limit
his endeavours to the creation of novel moods of beauty, in form, in
colour, in sound, in sentiment.' Note the emphasis upon novel: to Poe
there was no beauty without strangeness. He makes his favourite
quotation: '"But," says Lord Bacon (how justly!) "there is no exquisite
beauty without some strangeness in the proportions." Take away this
element of strangeness--of unexpectedness--of novelty--of
originality--call it what we will--and all that is ethereal in
loveliness is lost at once.... We lose, in short, all that assimilates
the beauty of earth with what we dream of the beauty of heaven!' And, as
another of the elements of this creation of beauty, there must be
indefiniteness. 'I _know_,' he says, 'that indefiniteness is an element
of the true music--I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any
undue decision--imbue it with any very determinate tone--and you deprive
it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential
character.' Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine's
'Art Poétique': '_Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance_'? And is not the
essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarmé and of the French
Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation of 'that class
of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current
of meaning an under or _suggestive_ one'? To this 'mystic or secondary
impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in
music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always
a distinct, but an august soul-exalting _echo_.' Has anything that has
been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of
verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more subtly or
more precisely?
And Poe does not end here, with what may seem generalities. 'Beyond the
limits of beauty,' he says of poetry, 'its province does not extend. Its
sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has
only collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally,
upon either Duty or Truth.' And of the poet who said, not meaning
anything very different from what Poe meant, 'Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,' he says: 'He is the sole British poet who has never erred in
his themes.' And, as if still thinking of Keats, he says: 'It is chiefly
amid forms of physical loveliness (we use the word _forms_ in its widest
sense as embracing modifications of sound and colour) that the soul
seeks the realisation of its dreams of Beauty.' And, with more earnest
insistence on those limits which he knew to be so much more necessary to
guard in poetry than its so-called freedom ('the true artist will avail
himself of no "license" whatever'), he states, with categorical
precision: 'A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by
having, for its _immediate_ object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by
having, for its object, an _indefinite_ instead of a _definite_
pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance
presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with _in_definite
sensations, to which end music is an _essential_, since comprehension of
sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with
a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music;
the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.'
And he would set these careful limits, not only to the province of
poetic pleasure, but to the form and length of actual poetry. 'A long
poem,' he says, with more truth than most people are quite willing to
see, 'is a paradox.' 'I hold,' he says elsewhere, 'that a long poem does
not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat
contradiction in terms.' And, after defining his ideal, 'a rhymed poem,
not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour,' he says,
very justly, that 'within this limit alone can the highest order of true
poetry exist.' In another essay he narrows the duration to 'half an
hour, at the very utmost'; and wisely. In yet another essay he suggests
'a length of about one hundred lines' as the length most likely to
convey that unity of impression, with that intensity of true poetical
effect, in which he found the highest merit of poetry. Remember, that of
true poetry we have already had his definition; and concede, that a
loftier conception of poetry as poetry, poetry as lyric essence, cannot
easily be imagined. We are too ready to accept, under the general name
of poetry, whatever is written eloquently in metre; to call even
Wordsworth's _Excursion_ a poem, and to accept _Paradise Lost_ as
throughout a poem. But there are not thirty consecutive lines of
essential poetry in the whole of _The Excursion_, and, while _Paradise
Lost_ is crammed with essential poetry, that poetry is not consecutive;
but the splendid workmanship comes in to fill up the gaps, and to hold
our attention until the poetry returns. Essential poetry is an essence
too strong for the general sense; diluted, it can be endured; and, for
the most part, the poets dilute it. Poe could conceive of it only in the
absolute; and his is the counsel of perfection, if of a perfection
almost beyond mortal powers. He sought for it in the verse of all poets;
he sought, as few have ever sought, to concentrate it in his own verse;
and he has left us at least a few poems, '_ciascun distinto e di fulgore
e d'arte_,' in which he has found, within his own limits, the absolute.
1906.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
With the strange fortune that always accompanied him, in life and in
death, Beddoes has not merely escaped the indiscriminate applause which
he would never have valued, but he has remained a bibliographical rather
than a literary rarity. Few except the people who collect first
editions--not, as a rule, the public for a poet--have had the chance of
possessing _Death's Jest-Book_ (1850) and the _Poems_ (1851). At last
Beddoes has been made accessible, the real story of his death, that
suicide so much in the casual and determined manner of one of his own
characters.
'The power of the man is immense and irresistible.' Browning's emphatic
phrase comes first to the memory, and remains always the most
appropriate word of eulogy. Beddoes has been rashly called a great poet.
I do not think he was a great poet, but he was, in every sense of the
word, an astonishing one. Read these lines, and remember that they were
written just at that stagnant period (1821-1826) which comes between the
period of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, and the period of Browning and
Tennyson. It is a murderer who speaks:
I am unsouled, dishumanised, uncreated;
My passions swell and grow like brutes conceived;
My feet are fixing roots, and every limb
Is billowy and gigantic, till I seem
A wild, old, wicked mountain in the air:
And the abhorred conscience of this murder,
It will grow up a lion, all alone,
A mighty-maned, grave-mouthed prodigy,
And lair him in my caves: and other thoughts,
Some will be snakes, and bears, and savage wolves,
And when I lie tremendous in the desert,
Or abandoned sea, murderers and idiot men
Will come to live upon my rugged sides,
Die, and be buried in me. Now it comes;
I break, and magnify, and lose my form,
And yet I shall be taken for a man,
And never be discovered till I die.
How much this has of the old, splendid audacity of the Elizabethans! How
unlike timid modern verse! Beddoes is always large, impressive; the
greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful
consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have
achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he
is a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs.
The one important work which Beddoes actually completed, _Death's
Jest-Book_, is nominally a drama in five acts. All the rest of his work,
except a few lyrics and occasional poems, is also nominally dramatic.
But there never was anything less dramatic in substance than this mass
of admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes' genius was essentially
lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a
strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic power
he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a
credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no
conception of what character might be in men and women, he had no
faculty of expressing emotion convincingly. Constantly you find the most
beautiful poetry where it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do you
find one of those brief and memorable phrases, words from the heart,
for which one would give much beautiful poetry. To take one instance: an
Arab slave wishes to say that he has caught sight of a sail nearing the
coast. And this is how he says it:
I looked abroad upon the wide old world,
And in the sky and sea, through the same clouds,
The same stars saw I glistening, and nought else,
And as my soul sighed unto the world's soul,
Far in the north a wind blackened the waters,
And, after that creating breath was still,
A dark speck sat on the sky's edge: as watching
Upon the heaven-girt border of my mind
The first faint thought of a great deed arise,
With force and fascination I drew on
The wished sight, and my hope seemed to stamp
Its shade upon it. Not yet is it clear
What, or from whom, the vessel.
In scenes which aim at being passionate one sees the same inability to
be natural. What we get is always literature; it is never less than
that, nor more than that. It is never frank, uncompromising nature. The
fact is, that Beddoes wrote from the head, collectively, and without
emotion, or without inspiration, save in literature. All Beddoes'
characters speak precisely the same language, express the same desires;
all in the same way startle us by their ghostly remoteness from flesh
and blood. 'Man is tired of being merely human,' Siegfried says, in
_Death's Jest-Book_, and Beddoes may be said to have grown tired of
humanity before he ever came to understand it.
Looked at from the normal standpoint, Beddoes' idea of the drama was
something wildly amateurish. As a practical playwright he would be
beneath contempt; but what he aimed at was something peculiar to
himself, a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia. He would have admitted
his obligations to Webster and Tourneur, to all the _macabre_
Elizabethan work; he would have admitted that his foundations were based
on literature, not on life; but he would have claimed, and claimed
justly, that he had produced, out of many strange elements, something
which has a place apart in English poetry. _Death's Jest-Book_ is
perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page
without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A
slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable
of death:
Sleeping, or feigning sleep,
Well done of her: 'tis trying on a garb
Which she must wear, sooner or later, long:
'Tis but a warmer, lighter death.
Not Baudelaire was more amorous of corruption; not Poe was more
spellbound by the scent of graveyard earth. So Beddoes has written a new
Dance of Death, in poetry; has become the chronicler of the praise and
ridicule of Death. 'Tired of being merely human,' he has peopled a play
with confessed phantoms. It is natural that these eloquent speakers
should pass us by with their words, that they should fail to move us by
their sorrows or their hates: they are not intended to be human, except,
indeed, in the wizard humanity of Death.
I have said already that the genius of Beddoes is not dramatic, but
lyrical. What was really most spontaneous in him (nothing was quite
spontaneous) was the impulse of song-writing. And it seems to me that he
is really most successful in sweet and graceful lyrics like this
_Dirge_, so much more than 'half in love with easeful death.'
If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep;
And not a sorrow
Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
Lie still and deep,
Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
The rim o' the sun to-morrow,
In eastern sky.
But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then die, dear, die;
'Tis deeper, sweeter,
Than on a rose-bank to lie dreaming
With folded eye;
And then alone, amid the beaming
Of love's stars, thou'lt meet her
In eastern sky.
A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming, morbid, and magnificent poetry
in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, of
English poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones and
Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writer
of more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had
certainly a more personal passion to express in his rough and
tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actual
poetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts:
actual poetical genius.
1891.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
_Salammbô_ is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told
us, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the
modern novel.' By the modern novel he means the novel as he had
reconstructed it; he means _Madame Bovary_. That perfect book is perfect
because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject suited to his
method, had made his method and his subject one. On his scientific side
Flaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps a more intimately
personal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in a large, sweeping way.
The lyric poet in him made _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_, the analyst
made _L'Education Sentimentale_; but in _Madame Bovary_ we find the
analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman,
as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and
observed in surroundings of the most ordinary kind. But Flaubert finds
the romantic material which he loved, the materials of beauty, in
precisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly.
Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical,
incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile
aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to
Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of
reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes
exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a
commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric
in his rendering of it.
In writing _Salammbô_ Flaubert set himself to renew the historical
novel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted,
doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible,
by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of the
reality of the things about us, only able to translate them
approximately into any form of art. How much is left over, in the
closest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a passing
steamer, of one's next-door neighbour, of the point of view of a
foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind, moment
by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble Arch? Think,
then, of the attempt to reconstruct no matter what period of the past,
to distinguish the difference in the aspect of a world perhaps bossed
with castles and ridged with ramparts, to two individualities encased
within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his antiquity wisely: a period of
which we know too little to confuse us, a city of which no stone is left
on another, the minds of Barbarians who have left us no psychological
documents. 'Be sure I have made no fantastic Carthage,' he says proudly,
pointing to his documents; Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him
with 'the _exact_ form of a door'; the Bible and Theophrastus, from
which he obtains his perfumes and his precious stones; Gresenius, from
whom he gets his Punic names; the _Mémoires de l'Académie des
Inscriptions_. 'As for the temple of Tanit, I am sure of having
reconstructed it as it was, with the treatise of the Syrian Goddess,
with the medals of the Duc de Luynes, with what is known of the temple
at Jerusalem, with a passage of St. Jerome, quoted by Seldon (_De Diis
Syriis_), with the plan of the temple of Gozzo, which is quite
Carthaginian, and best of all, with the ruins of the temple of Thugga,
which I have seen myself, with my own eyes, and of which no traveller or
antiquarian, so far as I know, has ever spoken.' But that, after all, as
he admits (when, that is, he has proved point by point his minute
accuracy to all that is known of ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to
every indication which can serve for his guidance, his patience in
grouping rather than his daring in the invention of action and details),
that is not the question. 'I care little enough for archæology! If the
colour is not uniform, if the details are out of keeping, if the manners
do not spring from the religion and the actions from the passions, if
the characters are not consistent, if the costumes are not appropriate
to the habits and the architecture to the climate, if, in a word, there
is not harmony, I am in error. If not, no.'
And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can give
a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time a definition
of the merit which sets _Salammbô_ above all other historical novels.
Everything in the book is strange, some of it might easily be
bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony. The harmony is like
that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying its charm, or even the
secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a monotony coiling
perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its own. Or rather, it is
like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite colours, firmly
detached from a background of burning sky; a procession of Barbarians,
each in the costume of his country, passes across the wall; there are
battles, in which elephants fight with men; an army besieges a great
city, or rots to death in a defile between mountains; the ground is
paved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living burden, stand
against the sky; a few figures of men and women appear again and again,
expressing by their gestures the soul of the story.
Flaubert himself has pointed, with his unerring self-criticism, to the
main defect of his book: 'The pedestal is too large for the statue.'
There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more about Salammbô.
He declares: 'There is not in my book an isolated or gratuitous
description; all are useful to my characters, and have an influence,
near or remote, on the action.' This is true, and yet, all the same, the
pedestal is too large for the statue. Salammbô, 'always surrounded with
grave and exquisite things,' has something of the somnambulism which
enters into the heroism of Judith; she has a hieratic beauty, and a
consciousness as pale and vague as the moon whom she worships. She
passes before us, 'her body saturated with perfumes,' encrusted with
jewels like an idol, her head turreted with violet hair, the gold chain
tinkling between her ankles; and is hardly more than an attitude, a
fixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom one sees passing, with
oblique eyes and mouths painted into smiles, their faces curiously
traced into a work of art, in the languid movements of a pantomimic
dance. The soul behind those eyes? the temperament under that at times
almost terrifying mask? Salammbô is as inarticulate for us as the
serpent, to whose drowsy beauty, capable of such sudden awakenings, hers
seems half akin; they move before us in a kind of hieratic pantomime, a
coloured, expressive thing, signifying nothing. Mâtho, maddened with
love, 'in an invincible stupor, like those who have drunk some draught
of which they are to die,' has the same somnambulistic life; the prey of
Venus, he has an almost literal insanity, which, as Flaubert reminds us,
is true to the ancient view of that passion. He is the only quite vivid
person in the book, and he lives with the intensity of a wild beast, a
life 'blinded alike' from every inner and outer interruption to one or
two fixed ideas. The others have their places in the picture, fall into
their attitudes naturally, remain so many coloured outlines for us. The
illusion is perfect; these people may not be the real people of history,
but at least they have no self-consciousness, no Christian tinge in
their minds.
'The metaphors are few, the epithets definite,' Flaubert tells us, of
his style in this book, where, as he says, he has sacrificed less 'to
the amplitude of the phrase and to the period,' than in _Madame Bovary_.
The movement here is in briefer steps, with a more earnest gravity,
without any of the engaging weakness of adjectives. The style is never
archaic, it is absolutely simple, the precise word being put always for
the precise thing; but it obtains a dignity, a historical remoteness, by
the large seriousness of its manner, the absence of modern ways of
thought, which, in _Madame Bovary_, bring with them an instinctively
modern cadence.
_Salammbô_ is written with the severity of history, but Flaubert notes
every detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural things.
A slave is being flogged under a tree: Flaubert notes the movement of
the thong as it flies, and tells us: 'The thongs, as they whistled
through the air, sent the bark of the plane trees flying.' Before the
battle of the Macar, the Barbarians are awaiting the approach of the
Carthaginian army. First 'the Barbarians were surprised to see the
ground undulate in the distance.' Clouds of dust rise and whirl over
the desert, through which are seen glimpses of horns, and, as it seems,
wings. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the desert? The
Barbarians watch intently. 'At last they made out several transverse
bars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser, larger;
dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes came into
view; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, "The
Carthaginians!" arose.' Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes,
unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves,
taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert puts
himself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them as
to see for them.
Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will find
that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its
subject-matter. That style, which has almost every merit and hardly a
fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that of most
writers careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire,
and you will find that the aim of these writers has been to construct a
style which shall be adaptable to every occasion, but without structural
change; the cadence is always the same. The most exquisite word-painting
of Gautier can be translated rhythm for rhythm into English, without
difficulty; once you have mastered the tune, you have merely to go on;
every verse will be the same. But Flaubert is so difficult to translate
because he has no fixed rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regular
march-music. He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his
cadence with every mood or for the convenience of every fact. He has no
theory of beauty in form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a
living thing, the physical body of thought, which it clothes and
interprets. 'If I call stones blue, it is because blue is the precise
word, believe me,' he replies to Sainte-Beuve's criticism. Beauty comes
into his words from the precision with which they express definite
things, definite ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where the
material is so hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheer
exactitude which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure and
order, seen equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage, at the
time of their flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on the
corpses of the Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains.
1901.
GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET
Meredith has always suffered from the curse of too much ability. He has
both genius and talent, but the talent, instead of acting as a
counterpoise to the genius, blows it yet more windily about the air. He
has almost all the qualities of a great writer, but some perverse spirit
in his blood has mixed them to their mutual undoing. When he writes
prose, the prose seems always about to burst into poetry; when he writes
verse, the verse seems always about to sink into prose. He thinks in
flashes, and writes in shorthand. He has an intellectual passion for
words, but he has never been able to accustom his mind to the slowness
of their service; he tosses them about the page in his anger, tearing
them open and gutting them with a savage pleasure. He has so fastidious
a fear of dirtying his hands with what other hands have touched that he
makes the language over again, so as to avoid writing a sentence or a
line as any one else could have written it. His hatred of the
commonplace becomes a mania, and it is by his head-long hunt after the
best that he has lost by the way its useful enemy, good. In prose he
would have every sentence shine, in verse he would have every line
sparkle; like a lady who puts on all her jewellery at once, immediately
after breakfast. As his own brain never rests, he does not realise that
there are other brains which feel fatigue; and as his own taste is for
what is hard, ringing, showy, drenched with light, he does not leave any
cool shadows to be a home for gentle sounds, in the whole of his work.
His books are like picture galleries, in which every inch of wall is
covered, and picture screams at picture across its narrow division of
frame. Almost every picture is good, but each suffers from its context.
As time goes on, Meredith's mannerisms have grown rigid, like old bones.
Exceptions have become rules, experiments have been accepted for
solutions.
In Meredith's earliest verse there is a certain harshness, which seems
to come from a too urgent desire to be at once concise and explicit.
_Modern Love_, published in 1862, remains Meredith's masterpiece in
poetry, and it will always remain, beside certain things of Donne and of
Browning, an astonishing feat in the vivisection of the heart in verse.
It is packed with imagination, but with imagination of so nakedly human
a kind that there is hardly an ornament, hardly an image, in the verse:
it is like scraps of broken, of heart-broken, talk, overheard and jotted
down at random, hardly suggesting a story, but burning into one like the
touch of a corroding acid. These cruel and self-torturing lovers have no
illusions, and their 'tragic hints' are like a fine, pained mockery of
love itself, as they struggle open-eyed against the blindness of
passion. The poem laughs while it cries, with a double-mindedness more
constant than that of Heine; with, at times, an acuteness of sensation
carried to the point of agony at which Othello sweats words like these:
O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!
Meredith has written nothing more like _Modern Love_, and for twenty
years after the publication of the volume containing it he published no
other volume of verse. In 1883 appeared _Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of
Earth_; in 1887 _Poems and Ballads of Tragic Life_; and, in 1888, _A
Reading of Earth_, to which _A Reading of Life_ is a sort of companion
volume. The main part of this work is a kind of nature-poetry unlike any
other nature-poetry; but there are several groups which must be
distinguished from it. One group contains _Cassandra_, from the volume
of 1862, _The Nuptials of Attila, The Song of Theodolinda_, from the
volume of 1887. There is something fierce, savage, convulsive, in the
passion which informs these poems; a note sounded in our days by no
other poet. The words rush rattling on one another, like the clashing of
spears or the ring of iron on iron in a day of old-world battle. The
lines are javelins, consonanted lines full of force and fury, as if sung
or played by a northern skald harping on a field of slain. There is
another group of romantic ballads, containing the early _Margaret's
Bridal Eve_, and the later _Arch-duchess Anne_ and _The Young
Princess_. There are also the humorous and pathetic studies in _Roadside
Philosophers_ and the like, in which, forty years ago, Meredith
anticipated, with the dignity of a poet, the vernacular studies of
others. And, finally, there is a section containing poems of impassioned
meditation, beginning with the lofty and sustained ode to _France,
December_ 1870, and ending with the volcanic volume of _Odes in
Contribution to the Song of French History_, published in 1900.
But it is in the poems of nature that Meredith is most consistent to an
attitude, most himself as he would have himself. There is in them an
almost pagan sense of the nearness and intimacy of the awful and
benignant powers of nature; but this sense, once sufficient for the
making of poetry, is interpenetrated, in this modern poet, by an almost
scientific consciousness of the processes of evolution. Earth seen
through a brain, not a temperament, it might be defined; and it would be
possible to gather a complete philosophy of life from these poems, in
which, though 'the joy of earth' is sung, it is sung with the wise,
collected ecstasy of Melampus, not with the irresponsible ecstasy of
the Mænads. It is not what Browning calls 'the wild joy of living,' but
the strenuous joy of living in perfect accordance with nature, with the
sanity of animals who have climbed to reason, and are content to be
guided by it. It is a philosophy which may well be contrasted with the
transcendental theories of one with whom Meredith may otherwise be
compared, Emerson. Both, in different ways, have tried to make poetry
out of the brain, forgetting that poetry draws nourishment from other
soil, and dies in the brain as in a vacuum. Both have taken the
abstract, not the concrete, for their province; both have tortured words
in the cause of ideas, both have had so much to say that they have had
little time left over for singing.
Meredith has never been a clear writer in verse; _Modern Love_ requires
reading and re-reading; but at one time he had a somewhat exasperating
semblance of lucidity, which still lurks mockingly about his work. A
freshman who heard Mallarmé lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I
understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is sometimes
equally tantalising. The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one,
clearly visible on the other side of some hard transparency through
which there is no passage. Have you ever seen a cat pawing at the glass
from the other side of a window? It paws and paws, turns its head to the
right, turns its head to the left, walks to and fro, sniffing at the
corner of every pane; its claws screech on the glass, in a helpless
endeavour to get through to what it sees before it; it gives up at last,
in an evident bewilderment. That is how one figures the reader of
Meredith's later verse. It is not merely that Meredith's meaning is not
obvious at a glance, it is, when obscure, ugly in its obscurity, not
beautiful. There is not an uglier line in the English language than:
Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate.
It is almost impossible to say it at all. Often Meredith wishes to be
too concise, and squeezes his thoughts together like this:
and the totterer Earth detests,
Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
In his desire to cram a separate sentence into every line, he writes
such lines as:
Look I once back, a broken pinion I,
He thinks differently from other people, and not only more quickly; and
his mind works in a kind of double process. Take, for instance, this
phrase:
Ravenous all the line for speed.
An image occurs to him, the image of a runner, who, as we say, 'devours'
the ground. Thereupon he translates this image into his own dialect,
where it becomes intensely vivid if it can be caught in passing; only,
to catch it in passing, you must go through two mental processes at
once. That is why he cannot be read aloud. In a poem where every line is
on the pattern of the line I have quoted, every line has to be
unriddled; and no brain works fast enough to catch so many separate
meanings, and to translate as it goes.
Meredith has half the making of a great artist in verse. He has harmony
without melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations upon
verse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the
swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to
astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical
skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical
skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has
written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud
of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping
as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the
building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the
delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his
poems, the _Hymn to Colour_, he can begin one stanza with this ample
magnificence:
Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes
The house of heaven splendid for the bride;
and can end another stanza thus lumpishly:
With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,
Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged
Shall on through brave wars waged.
Meredith is not satisfied with English verse as it is; he persists in
trying to make it into something wholly different, and these
eccentricities come partly from certain theories. He speaks in one place
of
A soft compulsion on terrene
By heavenly,
which is not English, but a misapplication of the jargon of science. In
another place he speaks of
The posts that named the swallowed mile,
which is a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference,
liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and
'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two
lines from _The Woods of Westermain_, published in 1883 in the _Poems
and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth_, sum up in themselves the whole theory:
Life, the small self-dragon ramped,
Thrill for service to be stamped.
Here every word is harsh, prickly, hard of sense; the rhymes come like
buffets in the face. It is possible that Meredith has more or less
consciously imitated the French practice in the matter of rhymes, for in
France rarity of rhyme is sought as eagerly as in England it is avoided.
Rhyme in French poetry is an important part of the art of verse; in
English poetry, except to some extent at the time of Pope, it has been
accepted as a thing rather to be disguised than accentuated. There is
something a little barbarous in rhyme itself, with its mnemonic click
of emphasis, and the skill of the most skilful English poets has always
been shown in the softening of that click, in reducing it to the
inarticulate answer of an echo. Meredith hammers out his rhymes on the
anvil on which he has forged his clanging and rigid-jointed words. His
verse moves in plate-armour, 'terrible as an army with banners.'
To Meredith poetry has come to be a kind of imaginative logic, and
almost the whole of his later work is a reasoning in verse. He reasons,
not always clearly to the eye, and never satisfyingly to the ear, but
with a fiery intelligence which has more passion than most other poets
put into frankly emotional verse. He reasons in pictures, every line
having its imagery, and he uses pictorial words to express abstract
ideas. Disdaining the common subjects of poetry, as he disdains common
rhythms, common rhymes, and common language, he does much by his
enormous vitality to give human warmth to arguments concerning humanity.
He does much, though he attempts the impossible. His poetry is always
what Rossetti called 'amusing'; it has, in other words, what Baudelaire
called 'the supreme literary grace, energy'; but with what relief does
one not lay down this _Reading of Life_ and take up the _Modern Love_ of
forty years ago, in which life speaks! Meredith has always been in
wholesome revolt against convention, against every deadening limitation
of art, but he sometimes carries revolt to the point of anarchy. In
finding new subjects and new forms for verse he is often throwing away
the gold and gathering up the ore. In taking for his foundation the
stone which the builders rejected he is sometimes only giving a proof of
their wisdom in rejecting it.
1901.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
I
It is forty-four years since the publication of Swinburne's first
volume, and it is scarcely to the credit of the English public that we
should have had to wait so long for a collected edition of the poems of
one of the greatest poets of this or any country. 'It is nothing to me,'
Swinburne tells us, with a delicate precision in his pride, 'that what I
write should find immediate or general acceptance.' And indeed
'immediate' it can scarcely be said to have been; 'general' it is hardly
likely ever to be. Swinburne has always been a poet writing for poets,
or for those rare lovers of poetry who ask for poetry, and nothing more
or less, in a poet. Such writers can never be really popular, any more
than gold without alloy can ever really be turned to practical uses.
Think of how extremely little the poetical merit of his poetry had to
do with the immense success of Byron; think how very much besides
poetical merit contributed to the surprising reputation of Tennyson.
There was a time when the first series of _Poems and Ballads_ was read
for what seemed startling in its subject-matter; but that time has long
since passed, and it is not probable that any reviewer of the new
edition now reprinted verbatim from the edition of 1866 will so much as
allude to the timid shrieks which went up from the reviewers of that
year, except perhaps as one of the curiosities of literature.
A poet is always interesting and instructive when he talks about
himself, and Swinburne, in his dedicatory epistle to his 'best and
dearest friend,' Mr. Watts-Dunton, who has been the finest, the surest,
and the subtlest critic of poetry now living, talks about himself, or
rather about his work, with a proud and simple frankness. It is not only
interesting, but of considerable critical significance, to know that,
among his plays, Swinburne prefers _Mary Stuart_, and, among his lyrical
poems, the ode on Athens and the ode on the Armada. 'By the test of
these two poems,' he tells us, 'I am content that my claims should be
decided and my station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of
the term; a craftsman in the most ambitious line of his art that ever
aroused or can arouse the emulous aspiration of his kind.'
In one sense a poet is always the most valuable critic of his own work;
in another sense his opinion is almost valueless. He knows, better than
any one else, what he wanted to do, and he knows, better than any one
else, how nearly he has done it. In judging his own technical skill in
the accomplishment of his aim, it is easy for him to be absolutely
unbiased, technique being a thing wholly apart from one's self, an
acquirement. But, in a poem, the way it is done is by no means
everything; something else, the vital element in it, the quality of
inspiration, as we rightly call it, has to be determined. Of this the
poet is rarely a judge. To him it is a part of himself, and he is
scarcely more capable of questioning its validity than he is of
questioning his own intentions. To him it is enough that it is his.
Conscious, as he may rightly be, of genius, how can he discriminate, in
his own work, between the presence or the absence of that genius, which,
though it means everything, may be absent in a production technically
faultless, or present in a production less strictly achieved according
to rule? Swinburne, it is evident, grudges some of the fame which has
set _Atalanta in Calydon_ higher in general favour than _Erechtheus_,
and, though he is perfectly right in every reason which he gives for
setting _Erechtheus_ above _Atalanta in Calydon_, the fact remains that
there is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the same
degree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth of
inspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and the
ode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is no
more likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer of
those two splendid poems than there is of Coleridge, to take Swinburne's
own instance, being remembered as the writer of the ode to France rather
than as the writer of the ode on Dejection. The ode to France is a
product of the finest poetical rhetoric; the ode on Dejection is a
growth of the profoundest poetical genius.
Another point on which Swinburne takes for granted what is perhaps his
highest endowment as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the
'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the
sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that
marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English
or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural
command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne,
'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or
instinct as the greatest writer and the greatest versifier of our age
must have felt at its highest possible degree when composing a musical
exercise of such incomparable scope and fulness as _Les Djinns_.' In
metrical inventiveness Swinburne is as much Victor Hugo's superior as
the English language is superior to the French in metrical capability.
His music has never the sudden bird's flight, the thrill, pause, and
unaccountable ecstasy of the very finest lyrics of Blake or of
Coleridge; one never wholly forgets the artist in the utterance. But
where he is incomparable is in an 'arduous fulness' of intricate
harmony, around which the waves of melody flow, foam and scatter like
the waves of the sea about a rock. No poet has ever loved or praised the
sea as Swinburne has loved and praised it; and to no poet has it been
given to create music with words in so literal an analogy with the
inflexible and vital rhythmical science of the sea.
In his reference to the 'clatter aroused' by the first publication of
the wonderful volume now reprinted, the first series of _Poems and
Ballads_, Swinburne has said with tact, precision, and finality all that
need ever be said on the subject. He records, with a touch of not
unkindly humour, his own 'deep diversion of collating and comparing the
variously inaccurate verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who
insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted
or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions
of absolute fancy.' And, admitting that there was work in it of both
kinds, he claims, with perfect justice, that 'if the two kinds cannot be
distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an
artist whose medium or material has more in common with a musician's
than with a sculptor's.' Rarely has the prying ignorance of ordinary
criticism been more absurdly evident than in the criticisms on _Poems
and Ballads_, in which the question as to whether these poems were or
were not the record of personal experience was debated with as much
solemn fury as if it really mattered in the very least. When a poem has
once been written, of what consequence is it to anybody whether it was
inspired by a line of Sappho or by a lady living round the corner? There
may be theoretical preferences, and these may be rationally enough
argued, as to whether one should work from life or from memory or from
imagination. But, the poem once written, only one question remains: is
it a good or a bad poem? A poem of Coleridge or of Wordsworth is neither
better nor worse because it came to the one in a dream and to the other
in 'a storm, worse if possible, in which the pony could (or would) only
make his way slantwise.' The knowledge of the circumstances or the
antecedents of composition is, no doubt, as gratifying to human
curiosity as the personal paragraphs in the newspapers; it can hardly
be of much greater importance.
A passage in Swinburne's dedicatory epistle which was well worth saying,
a passage which comes with doubled force from a poet who is also a
scholar, is that on books which are living things: 'Marlowe and
Shakespeare, Æschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty
shelves of libraries.' To Swinburne, as he says, the distinction between
books and life is but a 'dullard's distinction,' and it may justly be
said of him that it is with an equal instinct and an equal enthusiasm
that he is drawn to whatever in nature, in men, in books, or in ideas is
great, noble, and heroic. The old name of _Laudi_, which has lately been
revived by d'Annunzio, might be given to the larger part of Swinburne's
lyric verse: it is filled by a great praising of the universe. To the
prose-minded reader who reads verse in the intervals of newspaper and
business there must be an actual fatigue in merely listening to so
unintermittent a hymn of thanksgiving. Here is a poet, he must say, who
is without any moderation at all; birds at dawn, praising light, are not
more troublesome to a sleeper.
Reading the earlier and the later Swinburne on a high rock around which
the sea is washing, one is struck by the way in which these cadences, in
their unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm of
the sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, a
rhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebuked
by the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked by the stars.
'We are what suns and winds and waters make us,' as Landor knew: the
whole essence of Swinburne seems to be made by the rush and soft flowing
impetus of the sea. The sea has passed into his blood like a passion and
into his verse like a transfiguring element. It is actually the last
word of many of his poems, and it is the first and last word of his
poetry.
He does not make pictures, for he does not see the visible world without
an emotion which troubles his sight. He sees as through a cloud of
rapture. Sight is to him a transfiguring thrill, and his record of
things seen is clouded over with shining words and broken into little
separate shafts and splinters of light. He has still, undimmed, the
child's awakenings to wonder, love, reverence, the sense of beauty in
every sensation. He has the essentially lyric quality, joy, in almost
unparalleled abundance. There is for him no tedium in things, because,
to his sense, books catch up and continue the delights of nature, and
with books and nature he has all that he needs for a continual inner
communing.
In this new book there are poems of nature, poems of the sea, the lake,
the high oaks, the hawthorn, a rosary, Northumberland; and there are
poems of books, poems about Burns, Christina Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas,
and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in
this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism,
and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater
Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist,
the poet of strenuous laughter.
But love and wine were moon and sun
For many a fame long since undone,
And sorrow and joy have lost and won
By stormy turns
As many a singer's soul, if none
More bright than Burns.
And sweeter far in grief and mirth
Have songs as glad and sad of birth
Found voice to speak of wealth or dearth
In joy of life:
But never song took fire from earth
More strong for strife.
* * * * *
Above the storms of praise and blame
That blur with mist his lustrous name,
His thunderous laughter went and came,
And lives and flies;
The war that follows on the flame
When lightning dies.
Here the homage is given with splendid energy, but with fine justice.
There are other poems of homage in this book, along with denunciations,
as there are on so many pages of the _Songs before Sunrise_ and the
_Songs of Two Nations_, in which the effect is far less convincing, as
it is far less clear. Whether Mazzini or Nelson be praised, Napoleon
III. or Gladstone be buffeted, little distinction, save of degree, can
be discerned between the one and the other. The hate poems, it must be
admitted, are more interesting, partly because they are more
distinguishable, than the poems of adoration; for hate seizes upon the
lineaments which love glorifies willingly out of recognition. There was
a finely ferocious energy in the _Dirae_ ending with _The Descent into
Hell_ of 9th January 1873, and there is a good swinging and slashing
vigour in _The Commonweal_ of 1886. Why is it that this deeply felt
political verse, like so much of the political verse of the _Songs
before Sunrise_, does not satisfy the ear or the mind like the early
love poetry or the later nature poetry? Is it not that one distinguishes
only a voice, not a personality behind the voice? Speech needs weight,
though song only needs wings.
I set the trumpet to my lips and blow,
said Swinburne in the _Songs before Sunrise,_ when he was the trumpeter
of Mazzini.
And yet, it must be remembered, Swinburne has always meant exactly what
he has said, and this fact points an amusing contrast between the
attitude of the critics thirty years ago towards work which was then new
and their attitude now towards the same work when it is thirty years
old. There is, in the _Songs before Sunrise_, an arraignment of
Christianity as deliberate as Leconte de Lisle's, as wholesale as
Nietzsche's; in the _Poems and Ballads_, a learned sensuality without
parallel in English poetry; and the critics, or the descendants of the
critics, who, when these poems first appeared, could see nothing but
these accidental qualities of substance, are now, thanks merely to the
triumph of time, to the ease with which time forgets and forgives, able
to take all such things for granted, and to acknowledge the genuine and
essential qualities of lyric exaltation and generous love of liberty by
which the poems exist, and have a right to exist, as poems. But when we
are told that _Before a Crucifix_ is a poem fundamentally reverent
towards Christianity, and that _Anactoria_ is an ascetic experiment in
scholarship, a learned attempt at the reconstruction of the order of
Sappho, it is difficult not to wonder with what kind of smile the writer
of these poems reflects anew over the curiosities of criticism. I have
taken the new book and the old book together, because there is
surprisingly little difference between the form and manner of the old
poems and the new. The contents of _A Channel Passage_ are unusually
varied in subject, and the longest poem, _The Altar of Righteousness_, a
marvellous piece of rhythmical architecture, is unusually varied in
form. Technically the whole book shows Swinburne at his best; if,
indeed, he may ever be said not to be at his best, technically. Is there
any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so
unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often
foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is
apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to
me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the
imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us
and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poets
present us with their best effects deliberately, giving them as weighty
an accent as they can; Swinburne scatters them by the way. Take, for
instance, the line:
The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness
fell.
The line comes rearing like a wave, and has fallen and raced past us
before we have properly grasped what is imaginatively fine in the
latter clause. Presented to us in the manner of slower poets, thus:
The tyranny
Kindled in darkness fell,
how much more easily do we realise the quality of the speech which goes
to make this song.
And yet there is no doubt that Swinburne has made his own moulds of
language, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt,
when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs to
him, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead of
creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in
the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in
translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated,
he misses the naïve quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version
not in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtle
way, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will not
stop to think that 'wife,' though a good word for his rhyme scheme, is
not a word that Villon could have used, and that
Deux estions et n'avions qu'ung cueur,
though it is perfectly rendered by Rossetti in
Two we were and the heart was one,
is turned into a wholly different, a Swinburnian thing, by
Twain we were, and our hearts one song,
One heart.
Nor is 'Dead as the carver's figured throng' (for 'Comme les images, par
cueur') either clear in meaning, or characteristic of Villon in form. Is
it not one of the penalties of extreme technical ability that the hand
at times works, as it were, blindly, without the delicate vigilance or
direction of the brain?
Of the poems contained in this new volume, the title-poem, _A Channel
Passage_, is perhaps the finest. It is the record of a memory, fifty
years old, and it is filled with a passionate ecstasy in the
recollection of
Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal
joy,
Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's
heart in a boy.
It may be that Swinburne has praised the sea more eloquently, or sung
of it more melodiously, but not in the whole of his works is there a
poem fuller of personal rapture in the communion of body and soul with
the very soul of the sea in storm. _The Lake of Gaube_ is remarkable for
an exultant and very definite and direct rendering of the sensation of a
dive through deep water. There are other sea-poems in the two brief and
concentrated poems in honour of Nelson; the most delicate of the poems
of flowers in _A Rosary_; the most passionate and memorable of the
political poems in _Russia: an Ode_; the Elizabethan prologues. These
poems, so varied in subject and manner, are the work of many years; to
those who love Swinburne most as a lyric poet they will come with
special delight, for they represent, in almost absolute equality, almost
every side of his dazzling and unique lyric genius.
The final volume of the greatest lyrical poet since Shelley contains
three books, each published at an interval of ten years: the _Midsummer
Holiday_ of 1884, the _Astrophel_ of 1894, and the _Channel Passage_ of
1904. Choice among them is as difficult as it is unnecessary. They are
alike in their ecstatic singing of the sea, of great poets and great
men, of England and liberty, and of children. One contains the finest
poems about the sea from on shore, another the finest poem about the sea
from at sea, and the other the finest poem about the earth from the
heart of the woods. Even in Swinburne's work the series of nine ballades
in long lines which bears the name of _A Midsummer Holiday_ stands out
as a masterpiece of its kind, and of a unique kind. A form of French
verse, which up to then had been used, since the time when Villon used
it as no man has used it before or since, and almost exclusively in
iambic measures, is suddenly transported from the hothouse into the open
air, is stretched and moulded beyond all known limits, and becomes, it
may almost be said, a new lyric form. After _A Midsummer Holiday_ no one
can contend any longer that the ballade is a structure necessarily any
more artificial than the sonnet. But then in the hands of Swinburne an
acrostic would cease to be artificial.
In this last volume the technique which is seen apparently perfected in
the _Poems and Ballads_ of 1866 has reached a point from which that
relative perfection looks easy and almost accidental. Something is lost,
no doubt, and much has changed. But to compare the metrical qualities of
_Dolores_ or even of _The Triumph of Time_ with the metrical qualities
of _On the Verge_ is almost like comparing the art of Thomas Moore with
the art of Coleridge. In Swinburne's development as a poet the metrical
development is significant of every change through which the poet has
passed. Subtlety and nobility, the appeal of ever homelier and loftier
things, are seen more and more clearly in his work, as the metrical
qualities of it become purified and intensified, with always more of
subtlety and distinction, an energy at last tamed to the needs and paces
of every kind of beauty.
II
'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his
dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for
antiquity: nor need you be assured that when I write plays it is with a
view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black
Friars.' In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if not
my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly
unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the
pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had
left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my
first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore
evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn
four pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so close
as this:
We are so more than poor,
The dear'st of all our spoil would profit you
Less than mere losing; so most more than weak
It were but shame for one to smite us, who
Could but weep louder.
A Shakespearean trick is copied in such lines as:
All other women's praise
Makes part of my blame, and things of least account
In them are all my praises.
And there is a jester who talks in a metre that might have come
straight out of Beaumont and Fletcher, as here:
I am considering of that apple still;
It hangs in the mouth yet sorely; I would fain know too
Why nettles are not good to eat raw. Come, children,
Come, my sweet scraps; come, painted pieces; come.
Touches of the early Browning come into this Elizabethan work, come and
go there, as in these lines:
What are you made God's friend for but to have
His hand over your head to keep it well
And warm the rainy weather through, when snow
Spoils half the world's work?
And does one not hear Beddoes in the grim line, spoken of the earth:
Naked as brown feet of unburied men?
An influence still more closely contemporary seems to be felt in _Fair
Rosamond_, the influence of that extraordinarily individual blank verse
which William Morris had made his first and last experiment in, two
years earlier, in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_.
So many influences, then, are seen at work on the form at least of these
two plays, published at the age of twenty-three. _Fair Rosamond_,
though it has beautiful lines here and there, and shows some
anticipation of that luxurious heat and subtle rendering of physical
sensation which was to be so evident in the _Poems and Ballads_, is
altogether a less mature piece of work, less satisfactory in every way,
than the longer and more regular drama of _The Queen-Mother_. Swinburne
speaks of the two pieces without distinction, and finds all that there
is in them of promise or of merit 'in the language and the style of such
better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches
of Catherine and of Rosamond.' But the difference between these speeches
is very considerable. Those of Rosamond are wholly elegiac, lamentations
and meditations recited, without or against occasion. In the best
speeches of Catherine there is not only a more masculine splendour of
language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power
to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive'
which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic,
reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardly
possible to make the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however they
were presented. Swinburne, however, has done so.' It seems to me, on the
contrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict sense
of the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The two great speeches of
the play, the one beginning 'That God that made high things,' and the
one beginning 'I would fain see rain,' are indeed more splendid in
execution than significant as drama, but they have their dramatic
significance, none the less. There is a Shakespearean echo, but is there
not also a preparation of the finest Swinburnian harmonies, in such
lines as these?
I should be mad,
I talk as one filled through with wine; thou God,
Whose thunder is confusion of the hills,
And with wrath sown abolishes the fields,
I pray thee if thy hand would ruin us,
Make witness of it even this night that is
The last for many cradles, and the grave
Of many reverend seats; even at this turn,
This edge of season, this keen joint of time,
Finish and spare not.
The verse is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurative
meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less fluid,
less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in
reference to the verse of _Atalanta in Calydon_). He is ready to be
harsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; he holds
out against the enervating allurements of alliteration; he can stop when
he has said the essential thing.
In the first book of most poets there is something which will be found
in no other book; some virginity of youth, lost with the first
intercourse with print. In _The Queen-Mother_ and _Rosamond_ Swinburne
is certainly not yet himself, he has not yet settled down within his own
limits. But what happy strayings beyond those limits! What foreign
fruits and flowers, brought back from far countries! In these two plays
there is no evidence, certainly, of a playwright; but there is no
evidence that their writer could never become one. And there is evidence
already of a poet of original genius and immense accomplishment, a poet
with an incomparable gift of speech. That this technical quality, at
least, the sound of these new harmonies in English verse, awakened no
ears to attention, would be more surprising if one did not remember
that two years earlier the first and best of William Morris's books was
saluted as 'a Manchester mystery, not a real vision,' and that two years
later the best though not the first of George Meredith's books of verse,
_Modern Love_, was noticed only to be hooted at. Rossetti waited, and
was wise.
The plays of Swinburne, full as they are of splendid poetry, and even of
splendid dramatic poetry, suffer from a lack of that 'continual slight
novelty' which great drama, more than any other poetical form, requires.
There is, in the writing, a monotony of excellence, which becomes an
actual burden upon the reader. Here is a poet who touches nothing that
he does not transform, who can, as in _Mary Stuart_, fill scores of
pages with talk of lawyers, conspirators, and statesmen, versifying
history as closely as Shakespeare versified it, and leaving in the
result less prose deposit than Shakespeare left. It is perhaps because
in this play he has done a more difficult thing than in any other that
the writer has come to prefer this to any other of his plays; as men in
general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similar
satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties,
leads him to say of the modern play, _The Sisters_, that it is the only
modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural
dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse
between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or
made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse.' This
may be as true as that, in the astounding experiment of _Locrine_, none
of 'the life of human character or the life-likeness of dramatic
dialogue has suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificed
to the exigences of metre.' But when all is said, when an unparalleled
skill in language, versification, and everything that is verbal in form,
has been admitted, and with unqualified admiration; when, in addition,
one has admitted, with not less admiration, noble qualities of
substance, superb qualities of poetic imagination, there still remains
the question: is either substance or form consistently dramatic? and the
further question: can work professedly dramatic which is not
consistently dramatic in substance and form be accepted as wholly
satisfactory from any other point of view?
The trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots must remain the largest and most
ambitious attempt which Swinburne has made. The first part,
_Chastelard_, was published in 1865; the last, _Mary Stuart_, in 1881.
And what Swinburne says in speaking of the intermediate play,
_Bothwell_, may be said of them all: 'I will add that I took as much
care and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history of
the period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came
within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of _Bothwell_, the
longest of the three plays--indeed, the longest play in existence,
Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece
of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the
old Shakespearean term of a chronicle history.' Definition is not
defence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is in
itself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use of
it proves only that he found his way through chronicle to drama, and to
take his work in the chronicle play as a model is hardly more
reasonable than to take _Venus and Adonis_ as a model for narrative
poetry. But, further, there is no play of Shakespeare's, chronicle or
other, which might not at least be conceived of, if not on the stage of
our time, at least on that of his, or on that of any time when drama was
allowed to live its own life according to its own nature. Can we
conceive of _Bothwell_ even on the stage which has seen _Les Burgraves_?
The Chinese theatre, which goes on from morning to night without a
pause, might perhaps grapple with it; but no other. Nor would cutting be
of any use, for what the stage-manager would cut away would be largely
just such parts as are finest in the printed play.
There is, in most of Swinburne's plays, some scene or passage of vital
dramatic quality, and in _Bothwell_ there is one scene, the scene
leading to the death of Darnley, which is among the great single scenes
in drama. But there is not even any such scene in the whole of the
lovely and luxurious song of _Chastelard_ or in the severe and strenuous
study of _Mary Stuart_. There are moments, in all, where speech is as
simple, as explicit, as expressive as speech in verse can be; and no
one will ever speak in verse more naturally than this:
Well, all is one to me: and for my part
I thank God I shall die without regret
Of anything that I have done alive.
These simple beginnings are apt indeed to lead to their end by ways as
tortuous as this:
Indeed I have done all this if aught I have,
And loved at all or loathed, save what mine eye
Hath ever loathed or loved since first it saw
That face which taught it faith and made it first
Think scorn to turn and look on change, or see
How hateful in my love's sight are their eyes
That give love's light to others.
But, even when speech is undiluted, and expresses with due fire or
calmness
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