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Pot-Boilers

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Title: Pot-Boilers

Author: Clive Bell


        
Release date: February 8, 2010 [eBook #31229]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31229

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


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E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg
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POT-BOILERS

by

CLIVE BELL







London
Chatto & Windus
MCMXVIII

Printed at the Complete Press
West Norwood
London




CONTENTS

                                                                 PAGE
FOREWORD                                                            1

MONTAIGNE IN FACSIMILE                                             17

IBSEN                                                              28

MISS COLERIDGE                                                     41

PEACOCK                                                            50

BOSWELL'S LETTERS                                                  74

CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LOVE-LETTERS                                   82

THE LYSISTRATA                                                     99

TRELAWNY'S LETTERS                                                115

SOPHOCLES IN LONDON                                               126

THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGON                                          135

WILLIAM MORRIS                                                    146

PERSIAN MINIATURES                                                156

COUNTERCHECK QUARRELSOME                                          165

PICTURE SHOWS:
  I. THE LONDON SALON                                             174
  II. ENGLISH POST-IMPRESSIONISTS                                 179
  III. AN EXPENSIVE "MASTERPIECE"                                 188
  IV. MARCHAND                                                    194
  V. THE MANSARD GALLERY                                          199

CONTEMPORARY ART IN ENGLAND                                       209

ART AND WAR                                                       231

BEFORE THE WAR                                                    247




FOREWORD


DEAR GEOFFREY WHITWORTH,--Considering for how many ages how many clever
people have been complaining of their publishers, you might have
supposed that no device for getting one of them into a scrape could have
been left untried. Yet, so far as I can remember, no author has had the
bright idea of denouncing his publisher, particularly, and by name, as
accessory before the fact. I am willing to suspect my memory rather than
my profession of being at fault in this matter; but that the practice is
uncommon is most certain and that, surely, is very strange. No author
thinks twice of saddling his friend, his wife, his mother, or even his
mistress with the responsibility of having been the onlie begetter of
some feckless cub or monstrous abortion; but on his publisher, the very
man he should wish to injure, who ever thought of fastening the offence?
Yet you cannot deny, my dear Whitworth, that this book is your fault. I
was all for abandoning the project after I had read Mr. Arnold Bennett's
volume and recognized how much more readable his journalism was than
mine: your reader, I suspect, was of like mind: it was you, and you
alone, who, by enlisting my vanity, conquered my pride.

Of course in the end my vanity might have triumphed without you: it is
not often or easily beaten.


     "Obliged by hunger and request of friends,"


I can imagine myself printing under that classic excuse, which has the
merit of being in the grand literary tradition and as disingenuous as
another; for in these days an author is not more hungry than every one
else, and my friends would have been the first to pardon my silence. You
may take it for certain, by the way, that when a man says he is
publishing at the instance of two or three friends he means that he is
offering the public what he knows that the public could have done
perfectly well without. He means that he is printing neither to persuade
nor to inform nor yet to express the truth that is in him, but simply to
gratify an itch for such notoriety as the careless attention of a few
thousand readers may be supposed to give. If I now contrive to escape
the consequences of my own axiom it is thanks to you, My Publisher--or
Publisher's representative must I say? (You are so very modest, my dear
Whitworth, and so exact.) Naturally, by so obliging me you have made me
your friend for life. But that was _ex post facto_.

I said just now that when I read Mr. Bennett's "Books and Persons," I
was for abandoning a project about which, you will do me the justice of
remembering, I was lukewarm from the first. I enjoyed immensely his
lively papers and I felt pretty sure that no one would so enjoy mine.
Your reader was good enough to point out some reasons, besides the
obvious one, why this must be so; and in self-defence I am going to
remind you of them. When Mr. Bennett wrote for the _New Age_ he was a
famous and full-grown author, very much at his ease, very much at his
liberty, well aware that if he said what he pleased as he pleased his
editor would be only too happy to print it. When I wrote most of the
reviews reprinted in this volume I was commencing journalism, and I
wrote them for the _Athenæum_.

The _Athenæum_, the editor of which I take this opportunity of thanking
for permission to reprint my articles, is a paper, was, at any rate, a
paper with ancient and peculiar customs; and of these customs perhaps
the most peculiar was that, while allowing its contributors
extraordinary liberty in some matters, it sustained what may perhaps be
described as a literary policy. Like other venerable institutions, the
_Athenæum_ had a taste for unwritten law; its policy was adumbrated
rather than defined, but few contributors, I believe, were unconscious
of its existence. Not one of us, I am sure, would have expressed
anything but what he thought and felt, but we all hoped that our
thoughts and feelings would not be too dissimilar from those of our
presiding genius, Athene the wise, our eponymous goddess; because, if
they were, her high-priest, albeit one of the most charming and
accomplished people in Fleet Street or thereabouts, stood ready with the
inexorable blue pencil to smite once and smite no more. In the matter of
expression, too, Her Omniscience was, to my mind, something
over-exacting. Concision is an excellent quality in a writer. We all
know what Ben Jonson said about Shakespeare and we all agree with him.
Still, when, by the shape of one's paragraphs, the balance of one's
sentences, and the internal rhythm of one's clauses, one fancies that an
article has been raised almost to the perfection of a work of art, it is
disappointing to find a line cut out here, two more there, half a dozen
missing from the second galley, and from the third a whole paragraph
gone for no better reason than that they are not essential to the
argument--especially when one is persuaded that they are.

I have said that the editor of the _Athenæum_, in my time, was a
charming and accomplished writer; he is also my very good friend and too
generous critic, and I should be a wretch if I did not love him. But on
the evening when a weekly paper goes to press, when the pages are
pouring in, and some one, as likely as not, is waiting at the Café
Royal, even the most cultivated and considerate of editors will be an
editor. Wherefore I must now plague you and my readers with a word or
two in explanation of my method of correction and revision. Re-reading
these articles--some of which were written nine or ten years ago--I come
on such phrases as "this is a notable achievement," "his equipment is
not really strong," and I wonder, of course, what the devil I did say.
No doubt it was something definite and particular, for in those days I
was a most conscientious writer; but what subtle limitation, what
delicately suggested reference, what finely qualifying phrase, what
treasure of my critical nonage lies buried beneath this "getting out"
formula I cannot now remember. I read the article again and again but I
want the courage and energy to read again the book about which it was
written. And, if I did, should I recapture precisely what I thought or
felt and tried, by means of that lost clause or sentence, not to leave
quite unexpressed? The idea is gone, and with it, no doubt, the
complete significance of the article. I have botched and cobbled, but at
best I have but patched a rent. I hope, however, that I have not spared
many of those trusty veterans who, occasionally even in our best weekly
and regularly in our morning and evening papers, are expected to do duty
for sense.

Wherever the blue pencil or standardized phrase has left too deep a
wound or gross a blemish I have had to rewrite. And, as I have rarely
succeeded in recovering the original idea, I have had to borrow from my
later thought. Of such patching I have been as thrifty as possible:
also, I have not attempted to square the opinions and sentiments of
early days with my later pronouncements, so, I make no doubt, some very
clever readers will have the pleasure of catching me in inconsistency.
If they are really clever they will catch me in worse things than that,
in puerility for instance, and affectation, to say nothing of blasphemy
and sedition. As for consistency, I seem consistently to have cared much
for four things--Art, Truth, Liberty and Peace. I was never much in
sympathy with my age.

With my youthful style I should not venture to tamper even were I
conscious of any important change in my theory of composition or power
of expression. And I am not. I write more fluently nowadays and
therefore, probably, worse. It cannot be helped. It charms me to notice
as I read these essays with what care and conscience they are done.
_Magna cum cura atque diligentia scripsit_--they are not far from Latin
Grammar days. Precisely on account of these qualities they have suffered
much from editorial amendment, and on their account I have been
conservative in a matter where another policy would, I dare say, have
been more to the taste of some connoisseurs. The matter in question is
that of the grand editorial "We." That, as you may suppose, was the
person in which Pallas habitually addressed her attentive suppliants;
that was the person in which these articles were written; and experiment
has shown that to substitute "I," "my," and "mine" for "we," "our," and
"ours," destroys invariably the texture of the prose. Whether this early
prose of mine was good is not for me to decide; but that it was closely
knit is indisputable, and a sensitive critic who cared to tease himself
with trifles could discover, I fancy, from stylistic evidence, just
which passages have been interpolated.

The articles borrowed from the _Burlington Magazine_, the _Nation_, the
_New Statesman_, the _International Journal of Ethics_, and the
_Cambridge Magazine_--to the editors of which I herewith tender
customary thanks for customary favours--all having appeared over my
signature were, of course, all written in the first person singular. Any
one who did me the honour of reading my book, "Art," so attentively as
now to notice that to its making went certain quarryings from these
articles, will have enjoyed it enough, I hope, not to resent being
occasionally reminded of it.

And here I might end a tedious letter: but first, if you will bear with
me, I should like to say a word on a subject in which both you and I are
interested. I have shown so much humility in contrasting these reviews
with those of Mr. Bennett that I will permit myself one comment, by no
means in disparagement of "Books and Persons," but in the hope that he,
or indeed any one who concerns himself with literary criticism, may
profit by it. In one respect I do fancy myself a better critic than Mr.
Bennett; for though, doubtless, I lack most of those qualities that make
his book a positive pleasure to read, I lack also his indiscrimination.
Partly, this comes of my not being what he calls himself--"a creative
artist," just as it results in my not using that term when I mean "an
intelligent person"; but chiefly it is that I am, I believe, almost free
from that "provincialism in time"--if I may coin a phrase--which is what
is most amiss with Mr. Bennett's critical apparatus. It is a great pity
Mr. Bennett should be provincial in any sense, for in the common he is
not; on the contrary, he is one who has lived in France, even as
Frenchmen live there, without being more than a little shocked. He has
read a good many books, both old and new; he is one who cares for
literature manifestly: then why does he call Mr. H. G. Wells a great
imaginative artist? I will not swear to the epithets--I have not his
book by me--but I am sure he is too candid to deny that if he has not
used them he has used their equivalents. This much I know he has
said--for I made a note when I read the essay--"astounding width of
observation, a marvellously true perspective, an extraordinary grasp of
the real significance of innumerable phenomena utterly diverse, profound
emotional power, dazzling verbal skill." Now, my dear Whitworth, if I
were to say that sort of thing about Marivaux you would raise your
eyebrows--you know you would. Yet I suppose no competent judge of
literature will pretend that the novels of Marivaux--to say nothing of
the comedies--are inferior to those of Mr. Wells. Pray read again "Le
Paysan Parvenu"--all except the eighth and last part, about which I
can't help thinking there is some mystery--and then try "Mr. Britling."
But if by Mr. Bennett's standards we are to give Marivaux his due, what
is there left to say about Shakespeare?

Provincialism in time is as fatal to judgment as the more notorious
sort, and a defective sense of proportion is at the root of both.
Consider English novelists of the last hundred years. Who but a fool
dare predict confidently for any living Englishman, save Hardy, so much
immortality as belongs to Galt's "Annals of the Parish," or Mrs.
Oliphant's "Beleagured City"? Now what figure, think you, would a critic
cut who besprinkled these writers with such compliments as Mr. Bennett
peppers his contemporaries withal? You need not answer. Mr. Bennett is a
friend of the firm.

Had Mr. Bennett lost his head about contemporaries who were attempting
to solve new artistic problems I could understand it. Young writers wax
over-enthusiastic about Laforgue and Charles-Louis Philippe--both of
whom, by the way, died some years ago--and are not much to blame on that
account; neither should I have the least difficulty in forgiving myself
were it to turn out--as it will not--that I had said too much in praise
of Matisse or Picasso. The artist who even appears to have discovered or
rediscovered an instrument of expression or to have extended by one
semitone the gamut of æsthetic experience is bound to turn the best
heads of his age. Were it possible to overrate Cézanne, not to do so
would be a mark of insensibility. I was never much impressed by those
superior persons of an earlier age who from the first saw through
Wagner; there was a time when to dislike Wagner was, in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred, a sign not of superiority but of stupidity. The
artists, however, whom Mr. Bennett belauds so uncritically, are not of
this sort. In my judgment, Mr. Wells, Mr. George Moore, and the late Sir
John Galsworthy are not artists at all: be that as it may, past question
they are artistically conventional and thoroughly in the tradition of
British fiction. Of course they write of motor-cars and telephones where
an older generation wrote of railway-trains and telegrams, and of the
_deuxièmes_, _troisièmes_ or _quatre-vingt-dixièmes_ where their
grandmothers wrote of _les premiers amours_; also, they can refer to the
Almighty in the third person without bursting into capitals. But in this
there is no more artistic novelty than there would be in a picture of an
aeroplane painted in the manner of Ingres. Neither is there any
discredit; very much the same might be said of our three best living
novelists--Hardy, Conrad, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom are more or
less traditional, as is Anatole France, perhaps the best novelist
alive. A first-rate unconventional work of art is not a straw better
than a conventional one, and to become slightly light-headed about
either is not only permissible but seemly. Nevertheless, to go silly
over a mediocre innovation is far more excusable than to be taken in by
its equivalent in a familiar style. While to rave about Messrs. Wells,
Moore and Galsworthy seems to me shocking. Surely there can be no
difficulty about treating these writers as ordinary citizens of the
Republic of Letters--a state, let us try to remember, that not only
extends in space beyond the horizons of Tooting but in time beyond the
Edwardian and even the Victorian era.

A critic, I submit, should judge a work of art, not in relation to the
age and circumstances in which it was produced, but by an absolute
standard based on the whole _corpus_ of that art to which the particular
work belongs. We do not want to hear how good "Tono-Bungay" seems by
comparison with Mrs. Ward's last production. Marvellous, no doubt: so,
no doubt, are Mrs. Ward's intellectual gifts by comparison with those of
a walrus. But we want to have Mrs. Ward judged as a specimen of Humanity
and "Tono-Bungay" as a specimen of Literature. It must be tried by the
standards we try "Tristram Shandy" and "La Princesse de Clèves" by.
How, then, does it stand? With "Liaisons Dangereuses"? Hardly. Well, is
it of the class of "Evelina" or of "Adolphe," or of "Consuelo" even? Mr.
Bennett can be as sharp as a special constable with Thackeray: is it as
good as "Pendennis"? And, unless it be infinitely better, what sense is
there in despising Thackeray and extolling Mr. Wells? Pray, Mr. Bennett,
how good is this book? Let us see; I think I have a note on the subject:
"his scientific romances" are "on the plane of epic poetry" and "in
'Tono-Bungay' he has achieved the same feat, magnified by ten--or a
hundred"; "there are passages toward the close of the book which may
fitly be compared with the lyrical freedoms of no matter what epic, and
which display an unsurpassable dexterity of hand." And now what are we
to say of "Manon Lescaut"? That it is a million times better than Milton
and knocks spots off Homer? But all this though distressing is not
conclusive; it proves provinciality but it proves nothing worse. Mr.
Bennett may really have been thinking all the time of "Robert Elsmere"
and "The Epic of Hades." About another of his favourites, however, he is
more precise: "I re-read 'A Man of Property,'" he says, "immediately
after re-reading Dostoievsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and immediately
before re-reading Björnson's 'Arne.' It ranks well with these European
masterpieces." I repeat that in one respect I am a better critic than
Mr. Bennett.

This question of criticism fascinates me. It interests Mr. Bennett, too,
and he has written several competent and surprisingly confident articles
on the subject. I could almost wish to discuss one of them with him. I
would help him to understand Coleridge and tell him about Dryden's
essays and Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," and I would assure him, too,
it was not I who wrote that unfortunate review of Conrad that gets such
an exemplary drubbing at his hands for its self-complacent imbecility.
He ought to know that, or he will think that I speak out of malice. He
says that England has need of a literary critic. I agree. And I agree
that this critic must not be of that professorial breed with which he
deals so faithfully, not one who will date you every line in Shakespeare
on internal evidence and then obligingly pronounce Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle our greatest living writer. He will need the intelligence, the
first-hand views, the open mind, the genuine taste for books, the
respect for art and irreverence for persons of Mr. Bennett himself; and,
as I have hinted, he will need one or two qualities for which Mr.
Bennett is not so well off. He must be a resolute critic of literature
and not an authority on current reputations; he must have enough natural
taste to recognize a work of art in odd company, new clothes, or fancy
dress; he must be the sort of person who would have seen at a glance
that Kipling or Paul Bourget was not the real thing; he must be a
scholar and a man of the intellectual world: and he must be as incapable
of calling Mr. George Moore "a great artist" or speaking of "a
first-rate beautiful thing" by that gentleman as Mr. Bennett is of
eating peas with his knife.

The critic of our dreams--Mr. Bennett's and mine--has yet to be found.
You will not imagine, surely, that I am putting myself forward as a
candidate? Here you will find very few of the virtues and some, I
suspect, of the critical vices to which I have alluded in this letter.
But you need not fear, my dear Whitworth, that I am now going to tax
your good nature by an elaborate defence of these essentially
insignificant papers. They are an odd lot, and I think there are but
two--the two last--that I am not a little ashamed of reprinting.
Clearly, were I now to write on the same themes I should have something
very different to say and should say it differently. Honestly, I believe
these things are worth reading; I can say no more for them and I shall
hold him generous who says as much. But the pleasure I shall derive from
seeing them printed and off my hands will be as great almost as that
which I felt when, four years ago, you, or your firm rather, did me the
honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach,
a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that
deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner
must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be
ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach
life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far,
that is, as the European situation permits.

C. B.
_February 1918._




MONTAIGNE IN FACSIMILE[1]


[Sidenote: _Athenæum Jan. 1913_]

Let it be understood at once that the appearance of this magnificent
work is a bibliophilic rather than a literary event. The literary event
was the publication by M. Fortunat Strowski, in 1909, of "L'Edition
Municipale," an exact transcription of that annotated copy of the 1588
quarto known to fame as "L'Exemplaire de Bordeaux." What the same
eminent scholar gives us now is a reproduction in phototype of
"L'Exemplaire." Any one, therefore, who goes to these volumes in search
of literary discoveries is foredoomed to disappointment. Indeed, the
same might have been said of "L'Edition Municipale"; for the "Motheau et
Jouaust" edition, reprinted by MM. Flammarion in their "Bibliothèque
classique," was complete enough to satisfy all but the most meticulous
scholars, while for general literary purposes the edition published in
1595, three years after the author's death, by his niece, Mlle. de
Gournay, is sufficient and adequate.

Though five editions of the "Essais" were printed during their author's
life--1580 and 1582 at Bordeaux, 1584 (probably) and 1587 at Paris, 1588
at Bordeaux--to critics in search of dramatic spiritual changes a
comparative study will afford but meagre sport. To be sure, the editions
of '84 and '87 were nothing more than what we should now call reprints;
but the edition of 1588, of which "L'Exemplaire de Bordeaux" is a copy,
represents so thorough an overhauling and so generous an enlarging of
the old book that some have been tempted to reckon it a new one. Yet,
though it garners the fruit of eight fertile years of travel and public
service, it reveals no startling change in the outlook, nor in what is
more important, the insight, of its author. We need feel no surprise.
Had Montaigne been the sort of man whose views and sentiments are
profoundly affected by travel or office, he would not have been the
object of that cult of which the three volumes before us are the latest,
and perhaps the most significant, monument. That is a peculiar man whose
crossings and dottings and deletions are judged worthy of photographic
record by the authorities of a great industrial city.

Montaigne was thoroughly normal, not to say commonplace, in his ability
to pass through foreign countries without suffering anything so alarming
as a conversion. He left home on his travels in Germany, Switzerland,
and Italy, a learned and extremely intelligent man of affairs, who had
taken, rather late in life perhaps, to playing the part of a French
country gentleman; he returned with a store of acute observations and
pleasant anecdotes, a little older, a little mellower, otherwise
unchanged. Of those magically expanded views, those sudden yawnings of
sympathetic depths, that nowadays every one may count on winning, if not
by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find
scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was
unusual. Even in those days there were people of extraordinary
sensibility for whom life was a succession of miracles, who with
difficulty recognized themselves from year to year, to whom going abroad
was an emotional adventure, a supreme revelation: but of these Montaigne
was not one. Him, like some others, change seems merely to have
confirmed in his native predispositions and prejudices. As he grew older
he grew vainer, rather more garrulous, fonder of his favourite authors,
and a little less open-minded; and his travels were nothing more than a
long and agreeable stage on the longest journey. There are people for
whom travel provides nothing but supplementary evidence in a cause that
has already been judged. Those who can find nothing good at home will
smack their lips over the sourest wines abroad; and "Old Meynell" need
not have left his garden to arrive at that conclusion commended by Dr.
Johnson: "For anything I see, foreigners are fools." Montaigne was not
of these, either; too normal to be above patriotism, he was too proud
and too intelligent to be blindly patriotic.

Montaigne was the ideal man-in-the-street. We do not mean that he was
typical; but if there are men-in-the-street in heaven, they will
resemble Montaigne. And though we rank a third-rate saint or artist a
great deal higher than a first-rate good fellow, we recognize that there
is something about any kind of perfection that dazzles even those who
are most alive to its essential inferiority. Montaigne is the exemplar
of good feeling and good sense; in him we see those qualities chatting
on terms of familiarity with genius and inspiration. He held the views
that all sensible people would hold if only all were as intelligent and
benevolent as they honestly believe themselves to be; he expressed them
in a form appropriate to, and therefore limited by, his subject, but,
within those limits, perfect.

The form in which Montaigne expressed himself was new to French
literature. In the sixteenth century there was a recognized literary
style based on the Latin period. Sentences were long, sonorous, and
circuitous. It was a language well suited to those who followed the
profession of letters, but unserviceable to one who would communicate
his thoughts and feelings to others. Montaigne was not a professional
author; he was a country gentleman with something of his own to say. The
literature of the professionals was an ingenious and abstract
superstructure built up over an idea or an emotion. Montaigne wished to
set down the original thought or feeling as it sprang, hot, from the
mind; and, as original thoughts and feelings present themselves always
with the force of sensations, he gave them the forms of sensations--that
is to say, he wrote in images. He expressed his philosophy of good sense
in short, hard, coloured sentences, keeping them as close as possible to
the naked thoughts they conveyed. That in print they appear as long as
those of his contemporaries is a mere accident of typography; for almost
every semicolon in the "Essais" one may substitute a full stop: very
rarely is the long sentence in Montaigne a period.

Like most sensible men, Montaigne had an unreasonable fondness for
reason; unlike most, he possessed an intellect that showed him the final
consequences of his fancy. Not only have we no sufficient reason for
believing that we know anything, we have none for affirming that we know
nothing. By sheer reasonableness we are reduced to a state of pure
Pyrrhonism, where, like the poor donkey, we must die of starvation
midway between two equally large and equally appetizing bundles of hay.
An affectation of superior ignorance has been a favourite literary
device from the days of the Preacher to those of Anatole France.
Montaigne loves to tease and confound us with a "Que sçay-ie," he has
the common literary taste for humiliating unsympathetic readers; but he
has also a taste for honesty not so common, even in literature. Doubt is
a mark of good sense: honest doubt is a mark of genius almost. In his
reflective moments the reasonable man inclines to believe that reason
can prove nothing--except what he believes. How fearlessly did those
nineteenth-century apostles of Reason make havoc in the parlours of meek
curates and spinsters, thundering against the altogether insufficient
grounds on which were accepted the surprising adventures of Noah and his
Ark! But when they were told that Reason was as unfriendly to their
moral code and the methods of science as to the Book of Genesis, they
clapped her in jail without more ado. Reason affords no solid grounds
for holding a good world better than a bad, and the sacred law of cause
and effect itself admits of no logical demonstration. "Prison or the Mad
House," cried the men of good sense; Montaigne was more
thorough--"Tolerance," said he.

Like the man-in-the-street, Montaigne found refuge from reason in
conviction. Until we have formulated a proposition reason has no excuse
for interference; and emotional convictions precede intellectual
propositions. Only, as we have no means of judging between convictions,
we must remember that the firm and disinterested convictions of others
are as respectable as our own: again we must tolerate. To credit
Montaigne with that sublime liberality which is summed up in the most
sublime of all Christian aphorisms--"Judge not, and thou shalt not be
judged"--would be absurd. Montaigne was a Pagan, and his high conception
of tolerance and humanity was derived entirely from the great pagan
philosophers. Of them he was a profound and sincere disciple, so it is
not surprising that his ideas were far in advance of those of his age,
and of ours. For instance, he hated brutality. Both his own nature and
that fine Athenian humanity which by study he had made his own were
revolted by barbarous punishments. That there may be men too vile to
live seemed to him, doubtless, a tenable opinion--he could forget all
about the fallibility of human judgments--but "Quant à moy," he says,
"en la iustice mesme, tout ce qui est au delà de la mort simple, me
semble pure cruauté." To hurt others for our own good is not, he dimly
perceived, to cut a very magnanimous figure. To call it hurting them for
their own, he would have thought damnable; but that piece of hypocrisy
is the invention of a more enlightened age. Torture he abhorred.
Assuredly Montaigne would have been more at home in the streets of
Periclean Athens than in those of sixteenth-century Bordeaux or
twentieth-century London.

Nothing illustrates better Montaigne's essential paganism than his
passionate admiration for magnanimity. That was the virtue he loved.
High courage and fortitude, dignity, patience, and generosity--these are
qualities, examples of which never fail to strike a spark of enthusiasm
from his calm nature. He is never tired of extolling the constancy of
Socrates and Cato, the courage of Cæsar, the generosity of Alexander,
the great and grandiose actions of the heroes of antiquity. Indeed,
this admiration for courage and dignity so transports him that once, at
any rate, he surpasses most pagan philosophers, and joins hands with the
latest and most Christian of Christian moralists:


     "A quoy faire nous allons nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la
     science? Regardons à terre, les pauvres gens que nous y voyons
     espandus, la teste panchante apres leur besongne: qui ne sçavent ny
     Aristote ny Caton, ny exemple ny precepte. De ceux-là, tire Nature
     tous les iours, des effects de constance et de patience, plus purs
     et plus roides, que ne sont ceux que nous estudions si curieusement
     en l'escole. Combien en vois ie ordinairement, qui mescognoissent
     la pauvreté: combien qui desirent la mort, ou qui la passent sans
     alarme et sans affliction? Celui là qui fouit mon iardin, il a ce
     matin enterré son pere ou son fils. Les noms mesme, dequoy ils
     appellent les maladies, en addoucissent et amollissent l'aspreté.
     La phthysie, c'est la toux pour eux: la dysenterie, devoyment
     d'estomach: un pleuresis, c'est un morfondement: et selon qu'ils
     les nomment doucement, ils les supportent aussi. Elles sont bien
     griefves, quand elles rompent leur travail ordinaire: ils ne
     s'allitent que pour mourir."


This passage is exceptional; it is not the less sincere. Of its
sincerity no one who reads and feels can doubt. But generally the
instances of eximious virtue are what Montaigne delights to honour.
Nothing in him is more lovable than this passionate hero-worship; and
what quality is more lovable or more common in the ordinary man?

"Le plus sage des Français," Sainte-Beuve called him; the judgment is
typical of the critic and his age. We need not stay to quarrel with it.
We can hold that there is a higher wisdom than the quest of golden
mediocrity without disparaging either Horace or his disciple. If the
man-in-the-street be one who approaches the obvious in the spirit of a
pioneer, we must admit that Montaigne rises superior to his class, for
he not only explored that country, but possessed and cultivated it too,
and forced it to yield an ampler harvest of good sense and humanity than
any other husbandman before or since. France has ever been rich, and is
as rich as ever, in men who have known how to sacrifice the shadow to
the substance; in fanatics who have pursued without pause or divagation
dreams of impossible Utopias and unattainable good; in idealists who
have joyfully given all to love, to art, to religion, and to logic. It
is not inappropriate, therefore, that France should have produced in an
age of turmoil and terrible madness the man who exalted the cult of
moderation to the heights of sublime philosophy.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] "Reproduction en Phototypie de l'Exemplaire, avec Notes manuscrites
marginales, des Essais de Montaigne appartenant à la Ville de Bordeaux."
Publiée, avec une Introduction, par Fortunat Strowski. 3 vols. (Paris,
Hachette.)




IBSEN[2]


[Sidenote: _Athenæum June 1912_]

Was it chance made Mr. Ellis Roberts mention Cézanne on the fourth page
of a book about Ibsen? One cannot think so. Similarities in the work and
circumstances of the two men can hardly have escaped him. Born within a
dozen years of each other (Ibsen was born in 1828), both matured in a
period when the professions of writing and painting were laboriously
cultivated at the expense of art. Each, unguided except by his own sense
of dissatisfaction with his surroundings, found a way through the
sloughs of romance and the deserts of realism, to the high country
beyond them. Both sought and both found the same thing--the thing above
literature and painting, the stuff out of which great literature and
painting are made.

The Romantics and Realists were like people coming to cuffs about which
is the more important thing in an orange, the history of Spain or the
number of pips. The instinct of the romantic, invited to say what he
felt about anything, was to recall its associations. A rose made him
think of quaint gardens and gracious ladies and Edmund Waller and
sundials, and a thousand pleasant things that, at one time or another,
had befallen him or some one else. A rose touched life at a hundred
pretty points. A rose was interesting because it had a past. On this the
realist's comment was "Mush!" or words to that effect. In like
predicament, he would give a detailed account of the properties of _Rosa
setigera_, not forgetting to mention the urn-shaped calyx-tube, the five
imbricated lobes, or the open corolla of five obovate petals. To an
Ibsen or a Cézanne one account would appear as irrelevant as the other,
since both omitted the thing that mattered, what philosophers used to
call "the thing in itself," what now they would call "the essential
reality":


     SOLNESS. ... Do you read much?

     HILDA. No, never! I have given it up. For it all seems so
     irrelevant.

     SOLNESS. That is just my feeling.


It was just what the books left out that Ibsen wanted to express.

He soon worked through the romantic tradition. It hampered him long
enough to prevent _Peer Gynt_ from becoming a great poem; after that he
found himself on the threshold of a world where everything mattered too
much in itself for its associations to be of consequence. Attempting to
analyse Ibsen's characters used to be a pastime for fools; to-day, we
all know that they come from that world where everything has been
reduced to an essence that defies analysis. There Ibsen was never so
completely at home as Cézanne; he lacked the imagination by which alone
one arrives and remains in the world of reality. His vision was more
uncertain and so his faith was weaker. He was a less ferociously sincere
artist. When vision began to fail he took refuge in a catalogue of facts
or in unconvincing symbolism: Cézanne tossed his picture into a bush.
Perhaps that is why a new generation, hungry for great contemporary art,
turns more hopefully to painting than to literature.

Thirty years ago it would have been misleading to say, what is
undoubtedly true, that it is as an artist that Ibsen is great. To call a
man a good artist came to much the same thing as calling him a good
ping-pong player: it implied that he was proficient in his own business;
it did not imply that he was a great man who affected life greatly.
Therefore many people who understood Ibsen and were moved by his plays
preferred to call him a political thinker or a social reformer; while
their enemies, the æsthetes, were very willing to call him a great
artist, since by doing so they excused themselves from paying the least
attention to anything that he said. Ibsen was a reformer in the sense
that all great artists are reformers; it is impossible to speak of
reality without criticizing civilization. In the same way he was a
politician; it is impossible to care passionately about art without
caring about the fate of mankind. But Mr. Roberts is certainly right in
holding that to appreciate Ibsen we must consider him as an artist.

Ibsen approached humanity in the spirit of an artist. He sought that
essential thing in men and women by which we should know them if the
devil came one night and stole away their bodies; we may call it
character if we choose. He imagined situations in which character would
be revealed clearly. The subjects of his plays are often "problems,"
because he was interested in people who only when "problems" arise are
seen to be essentially different from one another, or, indeed, from the
furniture with which they live. There is no reason to suppose that Ibsen
had any love for "problems" as such; and we are tempted to believe that
some modern "problems" are nothing more than situations from Ibsen's
plays. Ibsen's method is the true artist's method. The realist writing
about people tends to give an inventory of personal peculiarities, and a
faithful report of all that is said and done. The romantic hopes,
somehow, to "create an atmosphere" by suggesting what he once felt for
something not altogether unlike the matter in hand. Ibsen sets himself
to discover the halfpennyworth of significance in all this intolerable
deal of irrelevance. Which is the word, which the gesture, that,
springing directly from the depths of one character, penetrates to the
depths of another? What is the true cause of this hubbub of inconsequent
words and contradictory actions? Nothing less remote than the true cause
will serve, nothing else is firmly rooted in reality. Is that man
expressing what he feels or is he paying out what he thinks he is
expected to feel? Have I pushed simplification as far as it will go? Are
there no trappings, no overtones, nothing but what is essential to
express my vision of reality? And, above all, is my vision absolutely
sharp and sure? These were the questions Ibsen had to answer. When he
succeeded he was a great artist, not, as Mr. Roberts suggests, in the
manner of Shakespeare, but in the manner of Æschylus.

There is no more obvious proof of the greatness of Ibsen's art than the
perfection of its form. To assert that fine form always enfolds fine
thought and feeling would imply a knowledge of literature to which it
would be effrontery in a critic to pretend. He may be allowed, however,
to advise any one who is ready with an instance of great form enclosing
a void to verify his impressions: it was thus that one critic at any
rate came to appreciate Goldoni and Alfieri. Be that as it may, this is
certain: a perfectly conceived idea never fails to express itself in
perfect form. Ibsen did not shirk the labour of making his conceptions
as hard, and definite, and self-supporting as possible. No matter how
autobiographical some of his best plays may be, he is too good an artist
to allow them to lean on his personal experience; they have to stand
firmly on their own feet. Ibsen, therefore, worked his conceptions to
such a degree of hardness and self-consistency that he could detach them
from himself and study them impersonally. That is why his plays are
models of form. And if there be an Academy of Letters that takes its
duties seriously, _Rosmersholm_ and _Ghosts_ are, we presume, in the
hands of every young person within its sphere of influence. The students
are shown, we hope, that Ibsen's form is superb, not because Ibsen paid
any particular attention to the precepts of Aristotle, but because,
like Sophocles, who had the misfortune to predecease the Stagirite, he
knew precisely what he wanted to say, and addressed himself exclusively
to the task of saying it. To achieve great form is needed neither
science nor tradition, but intense feeling, vigorous thinking, and
imagination. Formlessness is not a sign of spirited revolt against
superstition; it is a mere indication of muddleheadedness.

The subject-matter of Ibsen's plays is reality; unfortunately, his
imagination was not always strong enough to keep a sure hold on it. When
the vision faded he took refuge in symbolism or literality. There was a
commonplace background to his mind, of which we see too much in such
plays as _An Enemy of the People_ and _Pillars of Society_. It is this
commonplace and rather suburban quality that tempts us occasionally to
explain Ibsen's popularity by the fact that he represented the revolt of
the supremely unimportant, of whom there happen to be quite a number in
the world. With the symbolism of _The Master-Builder_ no fault can be
found. It is a legitimate and effective means of expressing a sense of
reality. The theme is never lost. The artist who sacrifices his human
relations, but dare not give all, dare not give his vanity or his life
to the ideal, moves steadily to his inevitable doom. Whether he move in
the form of Halvard Solness, the cowardly architect of genius, fearless
of ideas but fearful of action, or in the form of the symbolical
master-builder, the artist who tries to have the best of both worlds,
matters not a straw. The medium of expression changes, but the theme is
constant: the conception is whole. That is more than can be said of _The
Lady from the Sea_, where the symbolism comes perilously near padding;
or of _When We Dead Awaken_, where it often expresses nothing relevant,
merely standing picturesquely for commonplaces, and filling gaps.

To read one of Ibsen's great plays is always thrilling; to read one for
the first time is an event. If a savage who took locomotives and
motor-cars for granted, as inexplicable creatures of whim and fancy,
suddenly were shown, not by vague adumbration, but by straightforward
exposition, that they were expressions of intelligible laws controlled
by comprehensible machinery, he could not be more amazed than was the
nineteenth century by Ibsen. For Ibsen took nothing for granted. He saw
little on the surface of life that corresponded with reality; but he did
not cease to believe in reality. That was where he differed both from
the Philistines and from the elect. He saw that the universe was
something very different from what it was generally supposed to be: he
saw the futility of popular morals and popular metaphysics; but he
neither swallowed the conventions nor threw up his hands in despair,
declaring the whole thing to be an idiotic farce. He knew that truth and
goodness had nothing to do with law and custom; but he never doubted
that there were such things; and he went beneath the surface to find
them. It was Ibsen's revelation of a new world, in which moral values
were real and convincing, that thrilled the nineteenth century, and
thrills us yet. Can any one read sedately that scene in _Ghosts_ in
which Mrs. Alving shows with bewildering simplicity that, however
respectable the Pastor's morality may be, it is pure wickedness?


     PASTOR MANDERS. You call it "cowardice" to do your plain duty? Have
     you forgotten that a son ought to love and honour his father and
     mother?

     MRS. ALVING. Do not let us talk in such general terms. Let us ask:
     Ought Oswald to love and honour Chamberlain Alving?

     MANDERS. Is there no voice in your mother's heart that forbids you
     to destroy your son's ideals?

     MRS. ALVING. But what about the truth?

     MANDERS. But what about the ideals?

     MRS. ALVING. Oh--ideals, ideals! If only I were not such a coward!


Ibsen's social and political ideas follow necessarily from the nature
of his art. He knew too much about the depths of character to suppose
that people could be improved from without. He agreed with our
grandmothers that what men need are new hearts. It is good feeling that
makes good men, and the sole check on bad feeling is conscience. Laws,
customs, and social conventions he regarded as ineffectual means to
good. There is no virtue in one who is restrained from evil by fear. He
went further: he regarded external restraints as means to bad, since
they come between a man and his conscience and blunt the moral sense.
"So long as I keep to the rules," says the smug citizen, "I am of the
righteous." Ibsen loathed the State, with its negative virtues, its mean
standards, its mediocrity, and its spiritual squalor. He was a
passionate individualist.

Perhaps no one has seen more clearly that the State, at its best, stands
for nothing better than the lowest common factor of the human mind. What
else can it stand for? State ideals must be ideals that are not beyond
the intellect and imagination of "the average citizen"; also, since
average minds are not pervious to reason, the reasoning of statesmen
must be rhetoric. State morals--law and custom that is to say--are
nothing more than excuses for not bothering about conscience. But
Ibsen, being an artist, knew that he who would save his soul must do
what he feels to be right, not what is said to be so. Feeling is the
only guide, and the man who does what he feels to be wrong does wrong,
whatever the State may say.

The plain, though by no means frank, determination of society to
suppress the individual conscience lest it should clash with the
interests of the community seems positively to have shocked him. To be
fine, he believed, men must think and feel for themselves and live by
their own sense of truth and beauty, not by collective wisdom or
reach-me-down ideals.


     "What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths so
     stricken in years that they are sinking into decrepitude. When a
     truth is so old as that, gentlemen, it's in a fair way to become a
     lie (_Laughter and jeers_)."


How could Ibsen help being something of a politician? He seems really to
have wished his fellow-creatures to be fine, and to have been angry with
them because they wished to be nothing of the sort. He did not
understand that this passionate individualism, this sense of personal
responsibility, this claim to private judgment, is what no modern State,
be it democratic, bureaucratic or autocratic, can tolerate. Men long
for the ease and assurance of conformity and so soon as they are
sufficiently organized enforce it. Truth is the enemy--_écrasez
l'infâme!_ Poor, silly old Stockmann in _An Enemy of the People_ blurts
it out, blurts out that the water-supply is contaminated and his native
health-resort no better than a death-trap, for no better reason than
that he feels it is what he ought to do. He fails to consider the
feelings and, what is even more important, the financial interests of
his neighbours, and the neighbours make short work of him, as they
generally do of people who think and feel and act for themselves--of
saints and artists in fact. Thus it comes about that the prophets are
stoned and the best plays censored, while people such as Ibsen loathe
the State with its herd-instincts, now decently baptized however, and
known as Morality and Idealism.

Whether Ibsen was in the right is not for a reviewer to decide. Mr.
Roberts has strong views on the subject, which he is at no pains to
conceal. For this we are far from blaming him. Indeed, we feel that the
personal note imported by the author's intellectual bias gives some
flavour to a book which, owing to the complete absence of charm or
distinction, would be otherwise insipid. It is a competent, but woefully
uninspiring, piece of work. Above all things, Mr. Roberts lacks
humour--a quality indispensable in a writer on Ibsen. For Ibsen, like
other men of genius, is slightly ridiculous. Undeniably, there is
something comic about the picture of the Norwegian dramatist, spectacled
and frock-coated, "looking," Mr. Archer tells us, "like a distinguished
diplomat," at work amongst the orange-groves of Sorrento on _Ghosts_.


     "Ibsen was keenly sensitive to place, and if we would get the
     utmost feeling out of his plays we must remember how large a part
     was played by fortunate or unfortunate position and circumstances
     in contributing to the wonderful 'atmosphere' of the dramas."


That is what Mr. Roberts thinks. A sense of humour would also have saved
him from the one black note of sentimentality in the book:


     "Ellida might be Solveig analysed--but analysed with how loving a
     touch, how unerring a kindness; it is as if a great surgeon were
     operating on a woman he loved."


Such things, we had imagined, could only be written by members of the
Académie française.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] "Henrik Ibsen: a Critical Study." By R. Ellis Roberts. (Secker.)




MISS COLERIDGE[3]


[Sidenote: _Athenæum July 1910_]

The greatest art is, in a sense, impersonal. We have no biographies of
Homer and Sophocles, nor do we need them. Of Milton and Keats we know
something; yet, knowing nothing, should we enjoy their work the less? It
is not for what it reveals of Milton that we prize "Paradise Lost"; the
"Grecian Urn" lives independent of its author and his circumstances, a
work of art, complete in itself.

Precisely opposite is the case of Miss Mary Coleridge's poems: they,
when in 1908 Mr. Elkin Mathews produced a more or less complete
edition, excited us, not because, as verse, they were particularly good,
but because they discovered, or seemed to discover, an attractive
character. Indeed, Miss Coleridge's art was anything but exciting: her
diction was not beautiful, her rhythms pleased the ear but moderately,
one looked in vain for that magic of expression which transmutes thought
and feeling into poetry. But if the expression wanted magic, that which
was expressed seemed an enchantment almost. The gentle spirit, with its
vein of tender pessimism, in puzzled revolt against the wrongness and
cruelty of a shadowy world, the brooding thought too whimsical to be
bitter, the fancy too refined to be boisterously merry--all these
conspired to fascinate us as we came to perceive and appreciate them
beneath the rather stiff little verses. To read Miss Coleridge's poems
was to make acquaintance with a charming and delicate soul that wished
to be understood and was willing to be intimate. Life astonished her,
and her comments on life are her poems. They are often mystical, not to
say obscure; and the obscurity, as a rule, is caused by vagueness rather
than profundity, by the fact that she hardly knows herself what she
feels, or thinks, or believes. But from so gracious a spirit one
accepts without demur that which from another would not have passed
unchallenged. Miss Coleridge bewitched us with her personality; we knew
that her poems were slight, we felt that they revealed a part of her
only, we had suspicions, but we held our peace. Had we turned to her
novels, in spite of the brilliancy of one of them--"The King with Two
Faces"--our suspicions would have been strengthened. But we did not
turn; or if we did, they forced us into no questioning mood. It was left
for this tell-tale volume of "Gathered Leaves" to press the question
insistently, and to answer it. The spell is broken. We know now both why
the poems are good and why they are not better.

No one will blame Miss Sichel for setting the truth before all things:
clearly, by publishing these stories and essays she supplies an
opportunity of correcting a too flattering estimate; but, foreseeing, no
doubt, that we shall avail ourselves of it, she supplies also a memoir
of fifty pages on which our final estimate is to be based. That this
memoir is a competent piece of work need hardly be said. Miss Sichel's
competence is notorious; as an efficient biographer her reputation is
secure. Not every subject, however, is suited to her pen. Miss Coleridge
did not develop along conventional lines; in fact, she differed so
disconcertingly from the type with which we have grown agreeably
familiar in the "English Men of Letters" series, that, without violence,
she could never have been fitted into the traditional mould. Her
biographer has done the work thoroughly, but she is a thought heavy in
the hand; she is too literary, not to say professional; she is definite
at all costs. She has "restored" Miss Coleridge as a German archæologist
might restore a Tanagra figure. Indeterminate lines have been ruthlessly
rectified and asymmetry has grown symmetrical. Though we do not suggest
that she misunderstood her friend, we are sure that the lady exhibited
in the memoir is not the lady who reveals herself in the poems.

Of the author of the poems we catch a glimpse in the fragments of
letters and diaries which form the penultimate section of the volume.
But here, again, we find cause for discontent. If private reasons
forbade fullness, was it wise to print scraps? Why tantalize us? In the
letters we should, perhaps, have recaptured the lady we have lost in the
essays and stories; but these fragments, though suggestive, are too
slight to be consolatory: besides, Miss Coleridge was no coiner of
aphorisms and epigrams who could give her meaning in a handful of
sentences. Here is the first "detached thought" in the book:


     "'Whom the gods love die young' and whom they hate die old, but
     whom they honour, these they take up to their eternal habitations
     in the ripe summer time of existence."


One wonders how it came there.

The suspicions which this volume helps to confirm, the melancholy
guesses it answers, are that Miss Coleridge, with all her imagination,
had not the constructive imagination of an artist, and that, in spite of
her gaiety and spirits, fundamentally she was feeble. The imagination of
an artist, if we may be allowed a seeming paradox, works logically. Not
fortuitously, but by some mysterious necessity, does one vision follow
another. There is a rational, if unconscious, order in the pageantry of
images; there is an inevitableness in their succession closely allied to
the logical necessity by which one idea follows another in a
well-reasoned argument. In Miss Coleridge's mind images arranged
themselves in no progressive order; one bears no particular relationship
to another; they are disconnected, sporadic. Great imagination is
architectural; it sets fancy upon fancy until it has composed a splendid
and intelligible whole--a valid castle in the air. Miss Coleridge could
not build; ideas broke in her mind in showers of whims, and lay where
they fell at haphazard; she has bequeathed no castles, but a garden
strewn with quaint figures, where every thought is tagged with gay
conceits. Her short poems are often successful because she could pick at
choice a thought or fancy and twist it into a stanza; but when she
attempted a tale or an essay she gathered a handful of incongruous
oddments and made of them a patchwork.

This first defect was, we conjecture, a consequence of that other and
more fundamental flaw to which we have already drawn attention. If Miss
Coleridge's artificers played truant, it was because she lacked strength
to keep them at their task. For an indolent and lawless imagination
force of character is the only whip, force of intellect the only guide.
Miss Coleridge was deficient in both respects, and so her fancy sat
playing with chips and pebbles, making mud-pies when it should have been
making palaces.

Miss Coleridge never created a real work of art because she could not
grasp emotions, or, if she grasped, failed to hold them. Perhaps she was
too much of a Victorian lady to do more than express the culture of an
imperfect age imperfectly. At any rate, it is clear that a shrinking
fastidiousness excluded from her world much of the raw material from
which great art is made. Stray reflections on Greek life and thought,
though in themselves trivial, are interesting for what they betray of a
state of mind familiar and always slightly distressing to people who
take art seriously. She was a fair scholar Miss Sichel tells us;
certainly she studied under an excellent master--the author of "Ionica";
yet she could say of the "Bacchæ": "The Hallelujah Lasses get drunk on
the wine of the spirit, not the wine of the grape"; and of the "Medea":


     "Medea is thoroughly _fin de siècle_; says she would rather go into
     battle three times than have a baby once, pitches into men like
     anything. But there's too much Whitechapel about her. How are you
     to be seriously interested in a woman who has murdered her mother
     and boiled her father-in-law before the play begins?"


What is this but the shy jauntiness, the elaborate understatement, of
something small in the presence of something great? That uneasy titter,
caught from time to time as one turns Miss Coleridge's pages, we seem to
have heard before in the Arena chapel or at the end of a Bach fugue. It
is the comment of sophisticated refinement that can neither sit still
nor launch out into rapturous, but ill-bred, ecstasies, of the weakling
who takes refuge in slang or jocularity for fear of becoming natural and
being thought ridiculous. Miss Coleridge stood for Kensington and
Culture, so she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at Medea, and called
the Bacchæ "Hallelujah Lasses." She and Kensington admired Greek
literature and art, of course, with enthusiasm tempered by taste; but
the "glory that was Greece," the merciless honesty and riotous passions,
the adventurous thought and feeling, were meat too strong for a society
whose happiness depended on gazing at one half of life with closed eyes
and swallowing the other in sugar-coated pills.

So we shall not turn again to "Gathered Leaves," though we shall
sometimes read the poems. Henceforth, they will conjure up a less
elusive figure. They will show us a pensive lady, rather well dressed in
the fashion of five-and-twenty years ago, who sits in a Morris
drawing-room, the white walls of which are spotted with Pre-Raphaelite
pictures, and muses on what her surroundings represent. She is
intelligent and graceful; witty in season, fantastic in measure. Her
mind is ruffled by the perplexities appropriate to her age and state;
she searches Canon Dixon's latest poem for light on Holman Hunt's last
picture. Her life is an exquisite preoccupation with the surface of
truth and the heart of unreality. Her poems suggest once more the
atmosphere of an age already dead and half-forgotten; of Sunday
afternoons in large rooms with long blinds, behind which men yawn and
cultivated women are earnest and playful; of a world in which people
must pretend courageously that life is very important for fear of
discovering that it hardly signifies. It is a strange world, faded,
friendly, urbane, and, we are happy to think, already infinitely remote.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] "Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge." With a Memoir
by Edith Sichel. (Constable and Co.)

This review, when first published, gave pain, I know; it gave pain to
friends of Miss Coleridge and to friends of Miss Sichel and to many of
the charming people who were friends of both. The pain, of course, I
regret; but I cannot say that I regret the article. The criticism still
seems to me fair, and I know that it was honest: nevertheless, were Miss
Sichel alive, I should not care to reprint it. But that able and
friendly lady is now dead, and her eulogy has been pronounced by those
who knew her best and could best appreciate her. I, of course, have
criticized her only in her public character, as a writer, and in so
doing have transgressed no law that I, at any rate, can respect. As
Voltaire says, "On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que
la vérité." To the living, perhaps, I have not always been as civil as
could have been desired; but of the dead I have told no lies that I am
aware of.




PEACOCK[4]


I

[Sidenote: _Athenæum Feb. 1911_]

In the first place, were these plays worth publishing? With some
hesitation we will admit that they were. Presumably the possessors of
Messrs. Dent's pretty edition, or of any edition for that matter, will
be glad to set this small volume beside the others and thus become
owners of the complete prose works of an English classic. For Peacock is
a classic; otherwise they might well have been allowed to acquire that
portentous dignity which grows like moss on ancient and unprinted MSS.
in the British Museum. Here and there, in the farces, one may discover
examples of truly "Peacockian" wit and style, but these rare gems have
mostly been worked into the novels; while the residue, which includes a
drama in blank verse, has little if any intrinsic value. The earliest
works of Peacock--a brilliant amateur to the last--are as amateurish as
the earliest works of his friend Shelley and as thin and conventional as
the worst of Goldoni. Nevertheless they are readable; so we need not
stay to quarrel with the enthusiastic editor who claims that they are
"replete with fun, written in a flexible style, and bearing the imprint
of a scholarly discrimination."

English prose and humour are certainly the richer for one or two
speeches in this little book, but the service it performs, or can be
made to perform, is greater than that of rescuing a few fragments of
humorous prose or even of filling a gap on our shelves. It sends us back
to perhaps the least known of the great English, writers. The "Life" of
Peacock has yet to be written: an ineffectual memoir by Sir Henry Cole,
some personal recollections by the author's granddaughter Mrs. Clarke, a
critical essay from the versatile but vapid pen of Lord Houghton, the
gossip of Robert Buchanan, and editorial notices by Prof. Saintsbury and
the late Richard Garnett, together afford nothing more than a
perfunctory appreciation. Two writers, indeed, have attempted a more
elaborate estimate: James Spedding, an able prig,[5] reviewed Peacock's
novels in the _Edinburgh_ of January 1839, and more than half a century
later Mr. Herbert Paul contributed to the _Nineteenth Century_ a paper
on the same subject. Unluckily, the judgment of both is vitiated by a
common defect. Both are good journalists, but both are better party men;
consequently, neither can appreciate the attitude of one to whom
collective wisdom was folly, who judged every question in politics,
philosophy, literature, and art on its merits, and whose scorn for those
who judged otherwise was expressed without any of those obliging
circumlocutions that are prized so highly in political life. With the
possible exception of Prof. Saintsbury, not one of Peacock's
interpreters has understood his position or shared his point of view;
did not Dr. Arthur Button Young, the editor of these plays, himself
affirm that

     "his stories deal with tangible realities, and not with obscure or
     absurd situations, as is the case with those of many novelists....
     For this reason alone they deserve to be widely known, as also
     their author, for having helped to raise the tone of novel-writing
     at a critical juncture in its development, by introducing into his
     tales instruction and information"?

     It is only fair to add that this bit of criticism occurs in his
     "Inaugural Dissertation presented to the Philosophical Faculty of
     the University of Freiburg im Breisgau for the Asquisition of the
     Degree of Doctor of Philosophy."


In calling Peacock a great writer we have raised a claim that needs some
support. His exquisite style with its Tacitean flavour, the perfection
of his lyrics, his wit, and that intellectual brilliancy which sparkles
from all the facets of his satire, parody, and epigram, suffice to
endear him to the small, fastidious world whose approval is best worth
having, and also, perhaps, to justify our opinion. But, unless we
mistake, the appeal of his novels goes farther than the frontiers of
good taste. Peacock's mind was original; he thought about many things
and he did his own thinking. He is the other side to every question; his
way of looking at life is a perpetual challenge; and a man without a
vestige of humour or taste may read him with profit for his point of
view.

Peacock belongs to no school or age. He has been called a man of the
eighteenth century living in the nineteenth; nothing could be farther
from the truth. He loved the sense and dignity of the Augustans, just as
he loved the fire and romance of the Renaissance, and the mysterious
gaiety of the Middle Ages; but he could have criticized any of them with
as good a will as he criticized the age of machinery and "the march
of mind," and, had he been born in any one of them, would doubtless
have done so. He was a student of bardic poetry who yet admired
Ariosto; his passion for classical literature was uncommonly wise and
sincere; he read Sophocles for pleasure. So remote was he from the
eighteenth-century Grecians that he could perceive and enjoy the
romantic element in Greek life and art; yet it is a mistake to call him
a Greek. An Athenian of the time of Pericles was, he thought, the
noblest specimen of humanity that history had to show, and of that
nobility he assimilated what he could. He acquired a distaste for cant,
prudery, facile emotion, and philanthropy; he learnt to enjoy the good
things of life without fear or shame; to love strength and beauty, and
to respect the truth. For all that, he was a modern too; sharp eyes can
see it in his verse. A touch of gloating and uninquisitive wonder, a
suspicion of sentiment for sentiment's sake, the ghost of an appeal
from the head to the heart, from the certainty of the present to the
mystery of the past and the future, betray the descendant of Shakespeare
and Sterne. The very culture that he inherited from a Græco-Roman
civilization, his bookishness, his archæology, his conscious Paganism,
would have looked queer in an Athenian of the fifth century B.C. The
author of "Love and Age" was no Greek; but he was Greek enough to stand
out above his fellows, from whom he is most honourably distinguished by
his Athenian open-mindedness.

That Peacock cultivated prejudices is not disputed; for instance, he
could not abide tobacco-smoke, Lord Brougham, or the Great Exhibition of
1851. But his prejudices were as peculiar to himself as were the
principles of Sir Thomas Browne. They were not the prejudices of his age
and state, neither were they of the kind that is fatal to free thinking
and plain speaking. Unlike the popular dogmas of the muscular Christians
and their rivals the muscular agnostics, his whims and fancies were
superficial and involved no intellectual confusion. He compelled no one
to build on unproved hypotheses, nor would he suffer himself to be
compelled. Though sceptical about progress and mistrustful of democracy,
to the end of his life he disliked the Conservative party; and perhaps
his finest flights of sarcasm occur in "The Misfortunes of Elphin,"
where he ridicules Canning's florid rhetoric in defence of the
Constitution.


     "'Reports have been brought to me [says Elphin], that the
     embankment, which has been so long entrusted to your care, is in a
     state of dangerous decay.'

     "'Decay,' said Seithenyn, 'is one thing, and danger is another.
     Everything that is old must decay. That the embankment is old, I am
     free to confess; that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I will not
     altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I do most
     sturdily gainsay. It does its business well: it works well: it
     keeps out the water from the land, and it lets in the wine upon the
     High Commission of Embankment. Cupbearer, fill. Our ancestors were
     wiser than we: they built it in their wisdom; and, if we should be
     so rash as to try to mend it, we should only mar it.'

     "'The stonework,' said Teithrin, 'is sapped and mined: the piles
     are rotten, broken, and dislocated: the floodgates and sluices are
     leaky and creaky.'

     "'That is the beauty of it,' said Seithenyn. 'Some parts of it are
     rotten, and some parts of it are sound.'

     "'It is well,' said Elphin, 'that some parts are sound: it were
     better that all were so.'

     "'So I have heard some people say before,' said Seithenyn;
     'perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity: that very unamiable
     sort of people, who are in the habit of indulging their reason. But
     I say, the parts that are rotten give elasticity to those that are
     sound: they give them elasticity, elasticity, elasticity. If it
     were all sound, it would break by its own obstinate stiffness: the
     soundness is checked by the rottenness, and the stiffness is
     balanced by the elasticity. There is nothing so dangerous as
     innovation. See the waves in the equinoctial storms, dashing and
     clashing, roaring and pouring, spattering and battering, rattling
     and battling against it. I would not be so presumptious as to say,
     I could build anything that would stand against them half an hour;
     and here this immortal old work, which God forbid the finger of
     modern mason should bring into jeopardy, this immortal work has
     stood for centuries, and will stand for centuries more, if we let
     it alone. It is well: it works well: let well alone. Cupbearer,
     fill. It was half rotten when I was born, and that is a conclusive
     reason why it should be three parts rotten when I die.'"


Peacock's attitude towards women affords an example of the liberality
of his views and of his isolation. It shocked Victorian sentimentalists,
and would probably infuriate the more austere feminists of to-day. His
heroines, like all his characters, are roughly and extravagantly
sketched; what makes them peculiar is that they are sometimes almost
alive. Stupidity, ignorance, and incompetence, craven submissiveness or
insipid resignation, he did not commend in women: on the contrary,
intellect, wit, gaiety, spirit, and even a first in the Classical Tripos
seemed or would have seemed desirable and ladylike attributes to the
creator of Anthelia Melincourt and Morgana Gryll. What was called
"womanliness" in the forties displeased him; but he liked women to be
feminine, and knew that distinguished women have ever been distinguished
as women.

The truth is, Peacock had standards tested by which the current ideas of
almost any age would be found wanting. Without being a profound thinker,
he was one of those people who "bother about ends" to the extent of
being unwilling to approve of means unless they are satisfied that the
end in view is good--or at least that there is some end in view. With a
self-complacent age, in which every one was shouting "Forward!" and no
one was expected to inquire "Whither?" he was necessarily out of
sympathy. To the shouters he seemed irrational and irrelevant. They
called him "immoral" when they were solemn, and "whimsical" when they
were merry; and "whimsical" is the epithet with which we are tempted to
label him, if labelled he must be. Genius makes strange bedfellows; and
Peacock's intellectual candour finds itself associated with the
emotional capriciousness of Sterne. Truly, he is always unexpected, and
as often as not superficially inconsequent. To state the three parts of
a syllogism is not in his way; and by implication he challenged half the
major premises in vogue. His scorn of rough-and-ready standards,
commonplaces, and what used to be called "the opinion of all sensible
men" made him disrespectful to common sense. It was common sense once to
believe that the sun went round the earth, and it is still the mark of a
sensible man to ignore, on occasions, the law of contradictions. To that
common sense which is compounded of mental sluggishness and a taste for
being in the majority Peacock's wit was a needle. He was intellectual
enough to enjoy pricking bladders, and so finished a performer that we
never tire of watching him at his play.

He was, in fact, an artist with intellectual curiosity; and just as he
lacked the depth of a philosopher so he wanted the vision of a poet.
That he possessed genius will not be denied; but his art is fanciful
rather than imaginative and of creative power he had next to none. His
life was neither a mission nor a miracle. But he was blessed with that
keen delight in his own sensations which makes a world full of beautiful
and amusing things, charming people, wine, and warm sunshine seem, on
the whole, a very tolerable place, and all metaphysical speculation and
political passion a little unnecessary. He made an art of living, and
his novels are a part of his life. He wrote them because he had a subtle
sense of the ludicrous, a turn for satire, and style. He wrote because
he enjoyed writing; and, with a disregard for the public inconceivable
in a man of sense, he wrote the sort of books that he himself would have
liked to read. They are the sort, we think, that will always be worth
reading.


II[6]

[Sidenote: _Athenæum_ _Oct. 1911_]


     "Between the publication of his [Peacock's] first and last poem
     sixty years had elapsed; but the records of his existence would, if
     placed in close juxtaposition, hardly fill out ten years."


Thus writes Mr. Freeman; and Mr. Van Doren's book is a failure just
because he has insisted on expanding those records into a volume of
three hundred pages. Of such a work a great part must consist in stating
trivial facts and drawing from them inferences which there is no reason
to accept, and which would be unimportant if accepted.


     "About the time of the publication of 'Palmyra,' the young poet
     went back to Chertsey to live. His grandfather, Thomas Love, died
     December 10, 1805, and Mrs. Love, thus left alone, probably desired
     the companionship of her daughter and grandson. A letter to
     Hookham, dated two years later, testifies that Peacock soon
     extended one of his walking tours much farther than he had hitherto
     gone, in an excursion to Scotland."


Here follows an extract from a rather gushing and quite unimportant
letter about the beauties of Scotch scenery, after which the paragraph
concludes as follows:


     "Nothing further is known of this Scottish tour, but from it
     probably dates Peacock's inveterate prejudice against the Scotch."


This is Mr. Van Doren at his worst and hack biography at normal. At his
best he gives a straightforward account of the little that industry can
unearth concerning a writer of first-rate importance who died but
fifty-five years ago and whose life is yet more obscure than that of
many a smaller man who has been dead twice or thrice as long. Industry
in quest of facts is, indeed, Mr. Van Doren's chief merit, which only
aggravates our surprise and regret at his having concluded his
researches without discovering that Old Sarum is not in Cornwall. Still,
he has written a readable book. His knowledge of English is superior to
that of the majority of his compatriots; and when he is not trying to
be caustic or facetious he is often quite sensible. We can say no more
for him however.

Mr. Freeman aims higher, and though he comes short of his mark his is a
valuable book. He can write well, and will write better; at present he
is set upon being witty and clever, which is the more to be regretted in
that he is both by nature. He has a view of life and letters which, if
it be literary and rather superficial, is, at all events, personal.
Perceiving the insufficiency of material for a biography, he has
attempted an appreciation of Peacock's art. As we set ourselves a
similar task so recently as February last, when reviewing Dr. Young's
edition of the plays, we feel no call to restate our estimate or pit it
against that of this new critic. It need only be said that he realizes,
as does Mr. Van Doren, the singularity of Peacock's genius; that, though
neither has succeeded in showing precisely why it is unique, the English
critic has brought forward some highly illuminating suggestions; and
that reduction by a half would be the greatest improvement that either
book could undergo.

In the circumstances, our interest tends to centre on the biographical
parts of both works. For both are biographical: only Mr. Freeman, who
claims attention for judgment rather than for learning, has been at less
pains to sift and record the minute evidence that contemporary
literature and journalism afford. Fresh evidence, in the shape of
letters and memoirs, may, of course, be brought forward; until then
these two volumes will be final. So far as external evidence goes, the
student is now in possession of all that is known about the author of
"Headlong Hall."

It is surprising that Mr. Freeman's tact did not rescue him from the
temptation into which Mr. Van Doren's industry led him inevitably--the
temptation of finding in Peacock's mature work definable traces of
childish memories and impressions. Still more surprising is it that,
when both have quoted much that is worthless, neither should have
printed the one significant document amongst the surviving fragments of
his boyhood. This is a letter in verse to his mother, which not only
gives promise of the songs that, above all else, have made their author
famous, but is also worth quoting for its peculiar charm and fancy.
Unless we mistake, it has only once been printed, and is hardly known to
the literary public, so here it is:


     Dear Mother,

       I attempt to write you a letter
     In verse, tho' in prose I could do it much better;
     The Muse, this cold weather, sleeps up at Parnassus,
     And leaves us poor poets as stupid as asses.
     She'll tarry still longer, if she has a warm chamber,
     A store of old massie, ambrosia, and amber.
     Dear mother, don't laugh, you may think she is tipsy
     And I, if a poet, must drink like a gipsy.
       Suppose I should borrow the horse of Jack Stenton--
     A finer ridden beast no muse ever went on--
     Pegasus' fleet wings perhaps now are frozen,
     I'll send her old Stenton's, I know I've well chosen;
     Be it frost, be it thaw, the horse can well canter;
     The sight of the beast cannot help to enchant her.
       All the boys at our school are well, tho' yet many
     Are suffered, at home, to suck eggs with their granny.
       "To-morrow," says daddy, "you must go, my dear Billy,
     To Englefield House; do not cry, you are silly."
     Says the mother, all dressed in silk and in satin,
     "Don't cram the poor boy with your Greek and your Latin,
     I'll have him a little longer before mine own eyes,
     To nurse him and feed him with tarts and mince-pies;
     We'll send him to school when the weather is warmer;
     Come kiss me, my pretty, my sweet little charmer!"
       But now I must banish all fun and all folly,
     So doleful's the news I am going to tell ye:
     Poor Wade, my schoolfellow, lies low in the gravel,
     One month ere fifteen put an end to his travel;
     Harmless and mild, and remark'd for good nature;
     The cause of his death was his overgrown stature:
     His epitaph I wrote, as inserted below;
     What tribute more friendly could I on him bestow?
       The bard craves one shilling of his own dear mother,
     And, if you think proper, add to it another.


That epitaph is better known, but deserves to be better still:


     Here lies interred, in silent shade,
     The frail remains of Hamlet Wade;
     A youth more promising ne'er took breath;
     But ere fifteen laid cold in death!
     Ye young, ye old, and ye of middle age,
     Act well your part, for quit the stage
     Of mortal life, one day you must,
     And, like him, crumble into dust.


Surely the boy of nine years old who wrote this was destined to be
something better than a minor poet. And did not the delightful mother
who encouraged him to express himself deserve something better for her
son? Indeed, he must have been an enchanting child, with his long,
flaxen curls, bright colouring, and fine, intelligent head. One fancies
him a happy creature, making light work of his Greek and Latin grammar
at Mr. Wicks's school on Englefield Green, at home spoilt and educated,
in the best and most literal sense of the word, by his pretty mother and
his gallant old grandfather. No wonder Queen Charlotte, driving in
Windsor Park, stopped her carriage and got down to kiss the winsome
little boy.

From Peacock's youth and early writings (he was born in 1785 and
published "Palmyra" in 1806) we can gather some idea of his character.
The obvious thing about him is his cleverness. The question is, What
will he make of it? He tries business for a short time; the sea for an
even shorter; and then he settles down in the country to a life of study
and composition: he will be a man of letters. His poems are what we
should expect a clever lad to write. Had they been written at the end of
the nineteenth century doubtless they would have been as fashionably
decadent as, written at the beginning, they are fashionably pompous. It
was clear from the first that Peacock would not be a poet; he lacked the
essential quality--the power of feeling deeply. Before he was twenty it
must have been clear that he possessed a remarkable head and an ordinary
heart. He had wits enough for anything and sufficient feeling and
imagination to write a good song; but in these early days his intellect
served chiefly to save him from sentimentality and the grosser kinds of
rhetoric. It gained him a friend too, and that friend was Shelley.

To think of Peacock's youth is to think of his relations with Shelley.
He seems to have given more than he received: his nature was not
receptive. He made the poet read Greek, and persuaded him that he was
not infected with elephantiasis by quoting Lucretius "to the effect that
the disease was known to exist on the banks of the Nile, _neque præterea
usquam_." These words were "the greatest comfort to Shelley." The two
young men did a vast amount of walking, arguing, and miscellaneous
reading together, in which Peacock, partly from conviction and partly
from affectation, seems to have been pretty consistent in performing the
office of a wet blanket. Testing his intellect on other people's
enthusiasms, falling sedately and whimsically in love with various
ladies, amongst them his future wife, but keeping such feelings as he
had for the most part to himself, Peacock slipped through all the
critical stages of youth till in 1816 he published "Headlong Hall."
Brains will not make a poet, but they made a superb satirist.

There is nothing to puzzle us in Peacock's accepting a post under the
East India Company. An unusually strong inclination toward Miss Jane
Gryffydh, his "milk-white Snowdonian Antelope" as Shelley calls her,
whom he had not seen for more than eight years, and to whom he became
engaged without further inspection, may possibly have counted for
something in his decision. But the obvious explanation is that a man who
lives by the head needs regular employment, and only he who lives by the
emotions has anything to lose by it. Peacock's feelings were not so fine
that routine could blunt them, nor so deep that an expression of them
could give a satisfactory purpose to life. He entered the Company's
service at the age of four-and-thirty; he found in it congenial friends,
congenial employment, and a salary that enabled him to indulge his
rather luxurious tastes. He kept chambers in London, a house on the
Thames, a good cellar we may be sure, and a wife. Of this part of his
life we know little beyond the fact that he was an able and industrious
official. Probably, we shall not be far wrong in supposing him to have
been much like other officials, only more intelligent, more witty, more
sceptical, more learned, and more "cranky": also he kept stored
somewhere at the back of his mind a spark of that mysterious thing
called genius. At any rate, his recorded opinion, "There has never been
anything perfect under the sun except the compositions of Mozart,"
smacks strongly of classical concerts and the Treasury.

Though during this period he wrote his most entertaining, and perhaps
his most brilliant novel, "Crotchet Castle," the years were heavy with
misfortune. His mother, the human being for whom he seems to have cared
most, died in 1833; before that date his wife had become a hopeless
invalid. Three of his four children were dead before he retired from
affairs. Already he had outlived many of his companions. Sorrow does not
seem to have embittered but neither did it sweeten greatly his temper.
His reticence stiffened, so did his prejudices. Only emotion enables a
man to make something noble and lovely of pain; but intellect teaches
him to bear it like a gentleman.

It is easy to draw a pleasant picture of Peacock's old age; deeply
considered, however, it is profoundly sad. He had stood for many great
causes but for none had he stood greatly. Good nature and benevolence
had done duty for love and pity. He had been more intimate with books
than with men. And so, at the end, he found himself alone. His tragedy
is not that he was lonely, but that he preferred to be so. He retired
with a handsome pension to a sheltered life at Halliford. The jolly old
pagan, the scholar, and the caustic satirist were still alive in him. He
wrote "Gryll Grange." He packed poor Robert Buchanan out of the house
for smoking in it. He terrified a meek curate, who came to persuade him
to leave his burning home, by shouting at him, "By the immortal gods I
will not move." He carried on a desultory correspondence with Lord
Broughton, full of literary humour and literary sentiment. He practised
small benevolences and small tyrannies, liked to see smiling faces about
him, and declined to believe seriously in the unhappiness of others. He
was a thoroughly good-natured, selfish old man.

In old age he had to pay the penalty that awaits those who live by the
head and not by the heart. He had kind acquaintances, but he had no real
friends. He had nothing to look back upon but a series of more or less
amusing events and a tale of successful achievements--no high
enterprises, no splendid failures, no passionate affections. Before him
lay nothing but his books, his dinner, and a literary reputation.
Capable biographers can make pretty pictures of the white-haired scholar
surrounded by his favourite authors. They can turn his petulant
limitations and querulous prejudices into exquisite foibles, his
despotisms into quaint impetuosity, his insensibility to human want and
misery into mellow wisdom. But we cannot forget that the last years of
those who have never passionately pursued impossible ideals or loved
imperfect human beings are probably more attractive to the biographers
who record than to the men and women who have to endure them.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] "The Plays of Thomas Love Peacock." Published for the first time.
Edited by A. B. Young. (David Nutt.)

[5] The week after this article appeared Sir Frederick Pollock wrote to
the _Athenæum_ complaining of my having called Spedding a prig. Well,
here is a sample of what Spedding has to say about "Melincourt":


    "Had the business ended here we should have thought that the
    author's better genius had prevailed. We might indeed have
    questioned many of his doctrines, both social and political; and
    shown cause to doubt whether in the faithful bosom of real nature
    they would yield so fair a harvest as in the more accommodating soil
    of fiction. But we should have met him with undivided sympathy, as
    no idle talker on no idle theme. This, however, his worst genius
    interferes to prevent. He has only a half faith in the cause he has
    espoused, and dares not let go his interest with the other party. It
    is as if, having, in sport or curiosity, raised the veil of truth,
    he had felt rebuked by the severity of her aspect, and turned for
    relief to more than usual levity and mockery. Hence the perpetual
    interruption of the serious and affecting, and sometimes even awful,
    interest which belongs to the main argument of the piece, by scenes
    of farcical and extravagant caricature which might be pleasant
    enough as varieties in that farce of unreason with which he usually
    entertains us, but which, coming upon the mind in a state of serious
    emotion, are offensive and disagreeable. The two styles appear two
    opposite and incompatible moods; and it is impossible so to govern
    the imagination or the sympathies as to be in the humour for both.
    If you are not disgusted with the lighter, you cannot but be wearied
    with the graver."


And again:


    "As it is, this affected contrast [the contrast which Spedding
    thinks Peacock may have intended between the beauty of Forester and
    Anthelia's view of life, and the "gross pictures of corruption,
    quackery, and worldliness" with which he surrounds them], instead of
    bringing the virtue of his hero into stronger relief, serves only to
    make more conspicuous his own want of constancy in his purpose and
    faith in his principles."


Spedding solemnly proceeds to give Peacock a little advice about the
construction of his novels, and recommends that "Melincourt" should be
divided into two stories: one to deal with the adventures of Sir Oran
Haut-ton and his election for the borough of Onevote; the other to treat
of "the graver questions concerning the realizations of the spirit of
chivalry under the forms of modern society ... with Forester and
Anthelia for the central figures."

    "If he would but set about this latter task in a faithful spirit, we
    do not fear to predict, from the specimen which the tale before us,
    even in its present state, exhibits, that he would produce a work of
    far higher and more enduring interest than any he has yet
    attempted."


Let the reader consider "Melincourt," what manner of work it is, and
then judge faithfully between me and Sir Fred.

[6] "The Life of Thomas Love Peacock," By Carl Van Doren. (Dent and
Sons.)

"Thomas Love Peacock." By A. Martin Freeman. (Martin Secker.)




BOSWELL'S LETTERS[7]


[Sidenote: _Athenæum Feb. 1909_]

Boswell's letters enjoy the advantage of a mysterious history. They were
written between 1758 and 1795, not without a view to publication, but
were lost for more than fifty years. At Boulogne in 1850 Major Stone, of
the East India Company, had the fortunate curiosity to examine a scrap
of paper in which was wrapped some small purchase; it turned out to be a
letter signed by James Boswell, and was traced to the store of an
itinerant paper-vendor, where the letters published in 1856 were
discovered. The anonymous editor of this issue is conjectured--with good
reason, as we think--by Mr. Seccombe, who introduces the volume, to have
been a Philip Francis of the Middle Temple who became later Sir Philip
of the Supreme Consular Court of the Levant; but this matter also is
obscure. The strangest mystery of all, however, is that these
interesting, entertaining, in fact delightful letters, though on their
first appearance they created a mild literary sensation, till last
December had never been reprinted.

The volume before us is a reprint from the first edition, the
introduction by Mr. Seccombe being substituted for that of the original
editor. We wish that Mr. Seccombe had been less modest--less
conservative at any rate. With his view that "the editing was admirably
done" we cannot agree entirely. Francis, who has intercalated blocks of
exegesis and comment between the letters, writes good, straightforward
prose, and appears to have been a good, sensible sort of man. He has
enlivened his editorial labours with irruptions of legal facetiousness
and sagacious reflections. He admires Carlyle. But his lack of subtlety
and his prodigious good sense make him incapable of appreciating the
character of Boswell. Passages in the letters which seemed to him
ridiculous he, in his solicitude for the reader's enjoyment, has been
careful to print in italics; for it is difficult to suppose that Boswell
underlined them himself. The originals are again lost; should the
passages in question really be underlined, it would follow that Boswell
was not unintentionally or unconsciously ridiculous; that all his life
he practised an elaborate mystification; that he succeeded in
hoodwinking the world; that he enlightened Temple alone, who
nevertheless appears to have treated him as though he were what the
world took him for; and that Francis, who saw these underlined
manuscripts, and yet persisted in the conventional view of Boswell, was
not a Mid-Victorian prig but a common imbecile. It is true that he has
been stupid enough to mangle and emasculate the letters that he was
employed to publish; an officious prude unquestionably he was, but no
fool, much less an idiot.

To discuss the character of Boswell has ever been a delicate, not to say
dangerous, undertaking; but at least we may affirm that those who,
judging him from the "Life of Johnson," are dissatisfied with the
ordinary, unfavourable view, will not be put out of countenance by these
letters. To be sure they will not be disappointed of the popular
"Bozzy," ridiculous, vain, and a little vulgar, something of a snob, of
a sycophant even, with an undignified zeal for notoriety and an
imperfect moral sense; but beside him they will find another Boswell,
the friend of Hume and Johnson, with his passion for excellence,
generous nature, good understanding, and genius for observation--a man
by no means to be despised. They will see how this man expresses
thoughts and feelings, often sufficiently commonplace, in words so
astonishingly appropriate that we are amazed by the sheer truth of the
self-revelation; and they may even conjecture that some of his
performances, which have been lightly attributed to dull
self-complacency or a defective sense of proportion, are more probably
the effects of a whimsical and fantastic mind through which ran possibly
a queer strain of madness. Be that as it may, we now select for
quotation a few characteristic passages, leaving the reader to decide
for himself when and how far Boswell is laughing at "Bozzy."

The correspondence with Temple, a fellow-student at Edinburgh, began in
1758, when Boswell was eighteen; for the first eight years, however, he
was too busy making acquaintance with Johnson, travelling on the
Continent, and conducting his famous Corsican adventure, to be a very
prolific letter-writer. In 1766 he settled down in Edinburgh to the law,
which he found intolerably dreary, and a love-affair, which he found too
exciting. "The dear infidel," as he called her, besides being another
man's wife, seems to have been an extravagant and disreputable young
woman:


     "In a former part of this letter I have talked a great deal of my
     sweet little mistress; I am, however, uneasy about her. Furnishing
     a house and maintaining her with a maid will cost me a great deal
     of money, and it is too like marriage, or too much a settled plan
     of licentiousness; but what can I do?

     "Besides, she is ill-bred, quite a rompish girl. She debases my
     dignity; she has no refinement, but she is very handsome and very
     lively."


What he did was to break with her; four weeks later he writes:


     "My life is one of the most romantic that I believe either you or I
     really know of; and yet I am a very sensible, good sort of man.
     What is the meaning of this, Temple? You may depend upon it that
     very soon my follies will be at an end, and I shall turn out an
     admirable member of society. Now that I have given my mind the
     turn, I am totally emancipated from my charmer, as much as from the
     gardener's daughter who now puts on my fire and performs menial
     offices like any other wench; and yet just this time twelve month I
     was so madly in love as to think of marrying her."


The frequency and solemnity of Boswell's resolutions to amend are
extraordinary, though the fact that his correspondent was a curate
suggests an explanation; in carrying them out he was perfectly normal.

Boswell tells us that he "looks with horror on adultery," and the
love-affairs with which his letters overflow appear, for the most part,
to have been sufficiently innocent; for an "Italian angel," Zelide (whom
he knew at Utrecht), Miss Bosville, and "La Belle Irlandaise" he
cherished at different times a chaste flame; while Miss Blair, a
neighbour and lady of fortune, very nearly caught him. But Boswell
decided that he would not have a "Scots lass." "You cannot say how fine
a woman I may marry; perhaps a Howard or some other of the noblest in
the kingdom." "Rouse me, my friend!" he cries; "Kate has not fire
enough; she does not know the value of her lover!" Nevertheless, he was
to have a "Scots lass" after all, for in the autumn of 1769 he married
Miss Margaret Montgomerie, "a true Montgomerie, whom I esteem, whom I
love, after fifteen years, as on the day when she gave me her hand"
("Letter to the People of Scotland").

After his marriage Boswell's life continued agitated and desultory: he
practised at the Scotch Bar, without much success, and was called to the
English; almost every year he visited London, where he cultivated
Johnson, enjoyed good company and fine, made the most of his social and
literary importance, and revelled in the genuine and flattering
friendship of Paoli, who seems to have made him free of his house: "I
felt more dignity when I had several servants at my devotion, a large
apartment, and the convenience and state of a coach."

It was absurd of him, no doubt, to say, "Am I not fortunate in having
something about me that interests most people at first sight in my
favour?" but it seems to have been near the truth. "I am really the
great man now. I have had David Hume in the forenoon, and Mr. Johnson in
the afternoon." These great men were interested somehow, and so, one
must suppose, was Miss Silverton:


     "There is a Miss Silverton in the Fly with me, an amiable creature,
     who has been in France. I can unite little fondnesses with perfect
     conjugal love."


There was, too, "an agreeable young widow" who, also in a fly, "nursed
me, and supported my lame foot on her knee."

Boswell's life in Edinburgh was not happy; he hated the rough society of
Scotch lawyers, and quarrelled with his father, the Laird of Auchinleck,
who seems to have been a tiresome, disagreeable old man. The Laird died
in 1782, and seven years later Boswell lost his "valuable wife." His
story becomes melancholy: money troubles and family perplexities beset
him (he was left with five children); and it may be that what once made
him odd, aggravated by his breaking health, now made him gloomy. After
his wife's death he came to London for good. Already he had taken a
house in Queen Anne Street, and here he worked hard at "The Life,"
comforted a little by his assurance that it would be a masterpiece:


     "I am absolutely certain that my mode of biography, which gives not
     only a _History_ of Johnson's _visible_ progress through the world,
     and of his publications, but a _view_ of his mind in his letters
     and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and
     will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet appeared."


With this bold but just prophecy we may leave him; he died in 1795.

FOOTNOTE:

[7] "Letters of James Boswell to the Rev. W. J. Temple." (Sidgwick and
Jackson.)




CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LOVE-LETTERS[8]


I

[Sidenote: _Athenæum May and Oct. 1909_]

Are people still interested in the Carlyles? Some are, we suppose. The
older generation is interested in Carlyle, at any rate; though the
younger, we believe, is not. For men and women under thirty the
redoubtable sage has apparently no message; but for many of their
fathers and mothers his least word still has a certain importance.

Such reverent curiosity, though it may excuse some bad books and much
futile research, will, we fear, hardly justify the volume before us--Mr.
Archibald's we mean, which tells us little about Carlyle and that little
by no means new. One chapter only can be manufactured out of his
sufficiently indefinite relations with Miss Gordon; though ten more
pages are filled out with a discussion of that wholly unimportant
question "Who was Blumine?" The reasonable conjecture is, of course,
that Carlyle's method resembled that of other writers; his heroine, no
doubt, was the child of his own imagination, and when a model was needed
he drew indiscriminately from the ladies with whom he was acquainted.

Should any one chance to be interested in Margaret Gordon, her
ancestors, her kindred, or her husband, he may glean a certain amount of
information from this book. Born at Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island)
in 1798, she was left fatherless at the age of four, and brought up in
Scotland by her aunt. Between 1818 and 1820 she may have had a
love-affair or flirtation with Carlyle; and in 1824 she married Mr.
Bannerman, a commonplace, good-humoured business-man from Aberdeen, who
became a Member of Parliament. Mr. Bannerman speculated, lost his
fortune, and was consoled with a colonial governorship and a knighthood.
Lady Bannerman was drawn into the Evangelical movement, devoted the last
years of her life to works of piety, and died (1878) in a little house
at Greenwich and the odour of sanctity. As to what manner of woman she
may have been we are left in ignorance; into her mode of thinking,
feeling, and seeing--into her character, that is--Mr. Archibald has
obtained no insight. The necessary changes in matters of history having
been made, his volume might do duty as the biographical memoir of
thousands of her contemporaries. But perhaps a couple of specimens of
the style and substance of Mr. Archibald's prose will best give the
measure of his understanding:


     "Lady Bannerman dispensed the hospitality of Government House with
     the dignity and grace which might be expected of one who for over
     thirty years had moved in the best society of England. She had the
     power of putting all at their ease, of identifying herself with
     their individual interests, and of entering with animation into the
     affairs of the hour. But while she was kind and gracious and frank,
     and would freely enter into conversation with any one, there was
     always a certain dignity which prevented any attempt at undue
     familiarity."


Again:


     "In St. John's she was exceedingly kind and charitable to the poor,
     and she and Lady Hoyles were active workers in the Dorcas Society.
     She worshipped at St. Thomas' (Episcopal) Church, and was
     especially interested in her Sunday-school class. As we have seen,
     her sympathies were more with the Presbyterian Church, but probably
     because of her husband's official position, she always chose in the
     Colonies to connect herself with the Church of England."


If this be a fair account of Lady Bannerman, we may be pardoned for
wondering why any one thought her biography worth writing. What it all
has to do with Carlyle is to us far from clear. The eyes of publishers,
however, are in these matters notoriously sharper than those of
reviewers.


II

Having disposed of Carlyle's first love, we can attend to his second--if
that is where Miss Welsh comes in order of seniority; for our text
mercifully obliges us to say nothing of Miss Aurora Kirkpatrick, another
claimant to the honour of having sat for Blumine, while on the glories
of Lady Ashburton, who, to be frank, interests us no more than the
simplest of these extremely simple "misses," the title of our essay
precludes us from expatiating. But can we? Does not the great man, who
was to give Jane the splendour of his name, seem rather to demand prompt
satisfaction for the insult paid him in our first paragraph? There we
said, or implied, that he was obsolescent; and it is, perhaps, worth
pausing to inquire how a man who seemed to his own age one of the great
teachers and spiritual masters of humanity--the peer of Pythagoras and
Buddha, of Plato, Epictetus, St. Francis and Rousseau--comes in this
generation to be held a little higher than Emerson, a good deal lower
than Matthew Arnold, immeasurably so than Renan. And is it not worth
pausing again to reflect that, contemporaneously with these men, and
almost unknown to Western Europe, lived one who bids fair to produce a
greater effect on the world than has been produced by any teacher since
the crucifixion?

It was primarily as a teacher, as a disseminator of ideas, that Carlyle
appeared venerable to his own age; in a less degree they admired him as
an historian and an artist. To-day, his ideas are as musty as those of
Godwin--a better exponent of deeper speculations: as an historian--in
spite of an undeniable gift for visualizing and describing scenes from
the past--he is hardly of more consequence than Creighton or Stanhope:
while, as an artist, he ranks with such faded rhetoricians as
Châteaubriand.

What is the meaning of this? Why simply that the Victorians made the
mistake about Carlyle that every age makes about its Carlyles. They took
a thoughtful journalist for a master; and this they did because the
journalist had the skill and conviction to persuade them, and himself,
that what is commonest and most vigorous in human nature is also most
sublime. Carlyle could, in perfect good faith, give tone to the vulgar
instincts and passions; he could make narrow-mindedness, brutality,
intolerance, obtuseness, and sentimentality seem noble; he knew, being
an unconscious hypocrite, how, without a glimmer of open cynicism, to
make the best of both worlds. For instance, Carlyle and his public
wished to believe in Eternal Justice regulating the affairs of men. They
believed in it as something emotionally congenial to them, not, you may
be sure, as a metaphysical truth discovered and confirmed by the
intellect. Intellectual processes were not in Carlyle's way: he was a
popular philosopher. From this belief in Eternal Justice he naturally
deduced the doctrine that Right is Might, which doctrine applied to
history bore fruit most grateful to hero-worshippers--a sect that
flourished uncommonly in those days. When, however, it was pointed out
by earthy and eristic rationalists that if in the past Right was Might
then it followed that Might was Right, Carlyle, who had ever the
shortest of ways with dissenters, drowned the argument in a flood of
invective. Of course if Right is Might it does follow that the good
cause has always been the successful one; and in that case it looks as
though the successful one must always have been the good. Might, in
fact, is Right. Carlyle knew better: and he who would be the prophet of
his age must know, as he did, to reject unwholesome conclusions without
invalidating the healthy premises from which they follow.

Each age has its Carlyles, but it never much respects the Carlyles of
other ages. We have our Ferrero and our H. G. Wells, to say nothing of
such small fry as Faguets, Marinetti, _e tutti quanti_. They are people
who have something for their own age and nothing for any other, and
their own age is pretty sure to prefer them to any great man it may
produce but fail to smother: they are adored and duly forgotten. They
must come forward as the critics and guides of society; whether they
declare their messages in prose or verse, in novels, histories,
speeches, essays, or philosophical treatises is of no consequence. It
must be possible to make prophets of them, that is all. A pure artist or
philosopher or man of science, one who is concerned with Beauty or Truth
but not with its application to contemporary life will not do. Darwin
and Swinburne, therefore, the greatest of the English Victorians, were
not eligible; but the age chose Carlyle for its select preacher when it
might have had Mill. Naturally it preferred his coloured rhetoric and
warm sentimentality to Mill's cold reason and white-hot emotion. It
chose him because he was what Mill was not--a Carlyle. Yet, though
Utilitarianism is discredited, Mill remains; the candour and subtlety of
his intellect impress us still, and his Autobiography will seem to
future generations one of the most moving documents of the nineteenth
century.

As for Carlyle, "nobody marks him"; we only wonder that he will still be
talking. The old controversy between those who wish to believe the truth
and those who insist that what they wish to believe is true raves on;
but neither side dreams of briefing the Chelsea sage. His vatic
eloquence carries no conviction. Men and women of the younger
generation, whatever their views, find no support in him, because he
appeals to axioms and postulates which to them seem unreal. It is not
that his arguments are old-fashioned, but that they are based on nothing
and apply to nothing. A modern emotionalist may call in Tolstoy or
Bergson or Berkley or Léon Bloy or Péguy or Plato himself to break
the head of Anatole France or Bertrand Russell, but he will not
trouble Carlyle. And besides finding him empty, the new age is quite
aware of his positive defects. It cannot away with his peasant
morality--moralizing rather--his provincialism, and the grossness of his
method. From the beginning to the end of his works there is neither pure
thought nor pure feeling--nothing but a point of view which is now
perceived to be ridiculously plebeian. Nevertheless, Carlyle had one
positive gift that the younger generation is perhaps not very well
qualified to appreciate, he was an extraordinarily capable man of
letters. His footnotes, for instance, might serve as models; he had a
prodigious talent for picking out just those bits of by-information that
will amuse and interest a reader and send him back to the text with
renewed attention. His editing of Mrs. Carlyle's letters--letters which
come not within our terms of reference and from which, therefore, we
cannot decently quote--is remarkable: only, even here, his intolerable
virtue and vanity, his callous self-content, his miserable, misplaced
self-pity and his nauseous sentimentality parade themselves on almost
every page. For all his "Oh heavenses," "courageous little souls," and
"ay de mis," he never once guessed the nature of his offence, never
realized the beastliness of that moral and religious humbug which to
himself seems always to have justified him in playing tyrant and vampire
to a woman of genius.


III

The volumes before us, as we have hinted, were expected, not without
excitement, by those people for whose benefit we are about to review
them. It must be confessed that they have not wholly escaped the fate
that is apt to befall the progeny of parturient mountains. Not that they
are precisely what Horace would have expected them to be: they are
anything but small; yet, about the contents there is something
mousey--the colour perhaps. The fact is, they are disappointing. The
letters they contain--a bare third of which are by Jane Welsh--were all
written between the middle of 1821 and the end of 1826--that is to say,
before either Jane or Carlyle had found themselves. At his best, Carlyle
was not a letter-writer; he was a clever man who wrote letters. These
have sometimes the personal quality of a good essay, never the charm of
familiar correspondence. In these early days his mind is as undeveloped
as his style; he is crude, awkward, over-emphatic; apter at catching the
faults than the excellences of the eighteenth-century prose writers.
That one should write to please rather than to improve one's
correspondent was an idea which seems hardly to have occurred to him:


     "When I sit down to write Letters to people I care anything for, I
     am too apt to get into a certain ebullient humour, and so to indite
     great quantities of nonsense, which even my own judgment
     condemns--when too late for being mended."


That is his own admission. Here is a specimen of his solemn admonitions
to his future wife:


     "I very much approve your resolution to exercise your powers in
     some sort of literary effort; and I shall think myself happy, if by
     any means I can aid you in putting it in practice. There is nothing
     more injurious to the faculties than to sit poring over books
     continually without attempting to exhibit any of our own
     conceptions. We amass ideas, it is true; but at the same time we
     proportionally weaken our powers of expressing them; a power
     equally valuable with that of conceiving them, and which, tho' in
     some degree like it the gift of Nature, is in a far higher degree
     the fruit of art, and so languishes more irretrievably by want of
     culture," etc.


Even when writing to a lady with whom one is on the most delicate terms
such austerity is excessive, especially when it runs into a dozen pages.
Carlyle is at his best when describing people, and it is to be regretted
that his editor, out of respect for the memory of Campbell's widow and
others long since deceased, has felt obliged to suppress more than one
passage in which contemporaries are freely handled. He is at his worst
when writing, and generally complaining, about himself; and, like the
majority of people who take themselves very seriously, most amusing when
unconsciously so. In the October of 1824 he visited Paris and told Miss
Welsh just what he thought of it:


     "[I am] daily growing more and more contemptuous of Paris, and the
     _manière d'être_ of its people. Poor fellows! I feel alternately
     titillated into laughter and shocked to the verge of horror at the
     hand they make of Life.... Their houses are not houses, but places
     where they sleep and dress; they live in _cafés_ and promenades and
     theatres; and ten thousand dice are set a-rattling every night in
     every quarter of their city. Every thing seems gilding and
     fillagree, addressed to the eye, not to the touch."


Mrs. Carlyle, on the other hand, had a genuine gift; her genius may be
small, but it is undeniable. She was never in the first flight of
letter-writers, a tiny band which consists, we take it, of Mérimée, Mme.
de Sévigné, Horace Walpole, Byron, and whom else? But in that larger
second class, the class of Gray and Julie de Lespinasse, Lady Mary
Montagu, Swift, Flaubert, Leopardi, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Fitzgerald,
Voltaire, Cicero we suppose, and a good many more, she is entitled to a
place. Jane Welsh, however, is by no means Mrs. Carlyle. She was but
twenty-five when she married. Here we find her rather too conscious of
her own superiority; not only was she the beauty, she was also the Muse
of the village; had she been less vain she must have been unnatural.
Yet, under all her pert provincialism, we can detect that mysterious
quality which distinguishes the good letter-writer. She writes to please
two people--her correspondent and herself; she has no need, therefore,
to canvass general truths, but can afford to be personal and charming.
Her artful wit gives pith and moment to the most trivial enterprises,
and turns domestic projects into adventures of high romance. She never
makes great things small by declamation; she prefers to make small
things great by insinuation. Her friend is assumed to be interested in
all that concerns herself, so she is not afraid to be intimate; and a
correspondent both clever and intimate is one of those things that make
life precious. In a word, her letters (which, to our dismay, besides
occupying a bare third of the two volumes, are towards the end
disastrously affected by the style of her lover) succeed in giving a
whimsical view of her ordinary and external life, viewed from
standpoints above and beyond the reach of externals--the head and the
heart. Her account of the affair with Mr. Dugald G---- is, in its way, a
little masterpiece, but too long for quotation. We select a shorter
specimen of her style:


    "Such a week I spent in Galloway! There was no amusement within
    doors, and the weather precluded the chance of finding any without.
    'Coelebs in Search of a Wife' was the only book in the house, and
    even that was monopolized by a young lady who came to my Uncle's (I
    strongly suspect) on Coeleb's errand. The rest of us had no weapon
    of any sort to combat time with, and for four whole days I sat
    counting the drops of rain that fell from the ceiling into a bowl
    beneath, or in burbling the chain of my watch for the pleasure of
    undoing it. 'Oh, Plato! what tasks for a philosopher!' At length in
    a frenzy of ennui I mounted a brute of a horse that could do nothing
    but trot, and rode till I was ready to drop from the saddle--just
    for diversion. I left my companions wondering when it would be fair;
    and when I returned they were still wondering. How very few people
    retain their faculties in rainy weather!"


We can hardly make evident by short quotations the difference between
the letters of a gifted person and of one who had a gift for
letter-writing; the reader, however, who will be at pains to take Lamb's
correspondence from the shelf and compare his letters with those of Mrs.
Carlyle will no doubt discover what it is that they both possess and
Carlyle lacks. We would say, if permitted once again to trot out the
weary and well-fired hack, that you may think of Carlyle writing his
"Frederick" in a tail-coat, or whatever costume you prefer, and feel
sure, if your mind be not too literal, that his letters were written in
the same full dress. Far pleasanter to imagine Jane Welsh, coming home
from a rout, slipping a gay dressing-gown over a satin petticoat, and
gossiping till the fire burnt low. What is more, before she had the
privilege of "doing for" a great man with a Scotch sense of economy and
a peasant's notion of wifely duties, she may often have so gossiped. The
fact is, Carlyle, in his most playful moments, kept one eye on "the
eternities," and Jane, in her most solemn, never lost sight of the comic
spirit.

The volumes before us are well printed on good paper, and without are
embellished by a device--two hearts, stamped in gold, linked with a
golden ring, and supported by a plump little cupid; the same device is
repeated on the title-page in mauve. Trifles may be significant; whether
this symbol was suggested by the editor, or whether the editor was
influenced by it, are questions deserving thought. Turning to matters
less subtle, we wish that Mr. Alexander Carlyle had not found it
necessary to rake up the ashes which reticence had allowed to grow cold.
Also, we wish that he had adopted some other policy towards Jane Welsh;
the pin, even between deft fingers, is an ignoble and unattractive
weapon. In his notes he contrives a small and unpleasant sensation (vol.
i, p. 319) which would be more effective were it supported by anything
better than a piece of gossip, for which no authority is given, and the
doubtful interpretation of one passage in a letter. We are grateful to
him, however, for translating all the Latin, French, German, Italian,
and Scotch words, and for several touches of unconscious humour, of
which the following is a pleasant example:


     "Pen (from Penfillan, home of Miss Welsh's paternal grandfather)
     was her pet name used to distinguish her from the Welshes of her
     maternal grandfather's household, especially from her mother's
     younger sister, whose name was also Jeannie Welsh. Conscious of
     procrastinating too long in writing, Miss Welsh here sportively
     enlarges Pen not into Penfillan, but into Penelope, the name of
     Ulysses' faithful wife, who put off so long the hateful task of
     choosing a husband from the wasteful and riotous horde of suitors
     assembled in her house during Ulysses' protracted absence. See
     Homer's 'Odyssey.'"


FOOTNOTE:

[8] "The Love-Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh." Edited by
Alexander Carlyle. 2 vols. Illustrated. (John Lane.)

"Carlyle's First Love, Margaret Gordon, Lady Bannerman." By Raymond
Clare Archibald. (John Lane.)




THE LYSISTRATA[9]

[Greek: Ahi Charites temenos ti labein hoper ouchi peseitai zêtousai
psuchên euron Aristophanous.]
PLATO.


[Sidenote: _Athenæum Jan. 1912_]

To Plato it seemed that the Graces, seeking an imperishable temple,
discovered the soul of Aristophanes. To the grocers and statesmen of
Queen Victoria it seemed otherwise. Their taste was a good deal nicer
than that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante,
Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of
St. Chrysostom (who could not sleep without an Aristophanes under his
pillow) or the author of "The Song of Solomon." They did not like
vulgarity and they put a stop to it: also in that age _Punch_ and the
_Times_ flourished. What is decent or indecent, vulgar or refined, is,
of course, a matter of taste; and each age has a taste of its own. The
taste of Athens in her prime, or of Rome in hers, of Italy in the days
of Dante or of Raphael, of the court of Elizabeth, or of
eighteenth-century France was not the taste of Victorian England. And
the strange thing is that, though not only in the arts, but in all the
delicacies of life--in personal relations, in sentiment and wit--the
great poets, artists and critics are admitted to have been more subtle
and fastidious than most curates or tradesmen, in the matter of morals
the curates and tradesmen are allowed to know better. In this one
respect their sensibilities are to be preferred; in all others they
modestly confess themselves inferior to the greatest minds of the ages.
Things that seemed beautiful or interesting or amusing to Shakespeare or
Plato, to Chaucer or Aristophanes, they know, for certain, to be evil.
And since they are evil they are not to be mentioned; discussion of them
even--since they are quite sure that they are evil--is a crime. Now the
prevention of crime is a duty of the state; so very few of the world's
great masterpieces could have been published for the first time in
modern England; and it has been impossible for Mr. Bickley Rogers to
give us even a translation of the _Lysistrata_.

Were Aristophanes alive and publishing now, not only would his plays be
vetoed by the Censor for indelicacy, and boycotted by the libraries, he
would be in personal danger on another account; for a judge of the High
Court could surely be found to sentence the author of _The Birds_ to six
months' hard labour for blasphemy. Mr. Rogers, therefore, who made this
translation, not in the Athens of Plato, but in the London of
Podsnap--in 1878, to be exact--is not much to be blamed for having
allowed it to bear the mark of its age. Nevertheless, though pardonable,
his compromise is deplorable, since it robs this translation of
precisely that quality which gives to most of the others their high
importance. For Mr. Rogers is one of those who during the last
five-and-twenty years have been busy awakening us to a new sense of the
possibilities of life. His share in that task has been to express and
restate, in a form appreciable by the modern mind, some of the
adventures and discoveries of the Hellenic genius. He is one of those
scholars who, consciously or unconsciously, have joined hands with the
boldest spirits of the age, and, by showing what the Greeks thought and
felt, have revealed to us new worlds of thought and feeling. Now, to
write like the sociologists, the subject of the _Lysistrata_ is the
fundamental nature and necessity of the interdependence of the sexes.
But what Aristophanes thought and felt about the matter is just what we
shall not find in this translation. For instance, the scene between
Cinesias and Myrrhina is essential to a perfect understanding of the
play, but the latter part of it (ll. 905-60) is not so much as
paraphrased here. And so the spirit languishes; it could flourish only
in the body created for it by the poet, and that body has been
mutilated.

This version, then, fails to bring out the profound, comic conception
that gives unity and significance to the original; nevertheless, it has
something more than such literary interest as may be supposed to belong
to any work by Mr. Rogers. The comic poet offers matter worthy the
consideration of politicians and political controversialists, and this
the translator has rendered fearlessly and well. For the _Lysistrata_ is
a political play, and cannot be discussed profitably apart from its
political ideas and arguments. It can no more be treated as pure
literature than the poetry of Keats can be treated as anything else.
Frankly "pacificist," and to some extent "feminist," hostile, at any
rate, to arrogant virility, it sounds in its ideas and arguments oddly
familiar to modern ears; and, in the interest of those ears, it may be
worth pausing a moment to consider the circumstances in which it was
produced.

Some eighteen months earlier--towards the end of 413 B.C.--had come news
of the most stunning disaster that was to befall Athens till the final
catastrophe at Aegospotami. The greatest armament ever assembled by a
Greek state had been annihilated, literally, before Syracuse: the city,
itself, was in danger. For that not the less was Aristophanes permitted
to produce in the state theatre at the public cost his fiercely
anti-militarist and anti-imperialist play. Was it the best, or one of
the two or three best, comedies of the year? That was what the Athenians
wanted to know. If it was, of course it ought to be presented.

During this long and horrible war (it lasted twenty-eight years), power,
as was to be expected, slipped into the hands of vile and violent
demagogues, of men who by rhetoric and intrigue induced the people more
than once to reject on fair occasions reasonable terms, who in 420,
guided by Alcibiades, contrived by an infamous stratagem to upset the
Peace of Nicias, and by a combination of evil motives--private interest,
public vanity, vindictiveness, greed, and sentimentality--prolonged the
war until it ended in the ruin of the city and the irreparable
debasement of ancient civilization. These men, as may be supposed, were
the butts of our poet's bitterest satire and most furious invective. Yet
even they, though incessantly attacked and exposed, never succeeded in
prohibiting, and perhaps never wished to prohibit, the performance of
his plays.

It has been said that Athens attempted to impose her civilization on the
Hellenic world and became barbarous in the attempt. There is, of course,
much truth in this. To wage war successfully a state must make itself to
some extent barbarous; and the Peloponnesian War ended the progressive
phase of Greek culture. The state conquered by Rome was something
unrecognizably inferior to the state that Pericles so recklessly
jeopardized; and it is interesting to note that the conquest of Greece
by Rome did far more for the spread of Greek civilization and culture
than any of those projects of aggrandizement and expansion so artfully
devised by Athenian imperialists. No reader of Thucydides can doubt that
as the struggle intensified Athenian civility diminished: yet, when we
remember that even in the throes of war the right of the individual to
live and speak freely was not lost, that, on the contrary, during the
war, came forth some of the finest and freest criticism with which the
world has ever been blest, we shall incline to suspect that even in her
decline Athens was decidedly more civilized than most states at their
apogee.

[Greek: ho de anexetastos bios ou biôtos], said Socrates--a life
unsifted is a life unspent. Because the Athenians really believed this,
because they saw dimly that good states of mind, not wealth nor comfort
nor power nor prestige--which are but means--but states of mind, which
alone are good in themselves, are the proper end of existence, they
refused to sacrifice individual liberty to any god of efficiency. It was
to the mind of the individual they looked for absolute good: the state
was but a means. Therefore at Athens, after twenty years of stultifying
war, the right of the individual to free expression and self-development
was scrupulously respected. In this truly liberal atmosphere vivid and
original characters grew and flourished, thought and felt, and of their
thoughts and feelings have left such record as still charms and
tantalizes less fortunate generations. This belief in personal liberty,
this respect for the individual mind as the sole source of truth and
beauty, made possible Athens, a small short-lived state in the distant
past, an ideal towards which the best minds are ever looking back, the
glory and grand achievement of the Western world.[11]

Our enthusiasm for that Athenian spirit, which respected art and gave
free rein to criticism even at the most desperate moment of the city's
history, has carried us a little, but only a little, away from the
matter in hand--the political ideas of the _Lysistrata_. Political
wisdom, like human folly, seems to obey a law known to men of science as
"the Conservation of Energy"--quantity and quality are permanent, form
alone changes. It is the Aristophanic method that differs so greatly
from that of most modern satirists. For Aristophanes does not confine
himself to driving the blade of his wit into the rotten parts of a bad
case; he does not score intellectual points only. His method is more
fundamental. A clever controversialist can always find joints in the
harness of his foe. When Mr. Shaw meets Mr. Belloc in public controversy
it is hard to say which makes the greater number of hits. Even harder is
it to say that the cause of truth has been much advanced. One may hold,
fairly enough, that both sides have been made ludicrous; but it is
still fairer to admit that neither has been utterly discredited. If
Aristophanes never succeeded in ruining a party, at least he succeeded
in discrediting some pestilent opinions. This he did, not so much by a
brisk display of intellectual handiness, as by showing that a pompous
superstructure was baseless. He makes us feel a position to be absurd,
instead of merely thinking certain things in it silly.

The superior, sneering official has not escaped shrewd knocks from the
wits of every age. There is a type of mind which, under every form of
government, pushes to the front by sheer lack of virtue. Wherever life
has become sufficiently mechanical to support a bureaucracy, there will
the Poloniuses and Shallows gather, and, wherever there is an official
caste, there will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the
self-complacent magistrate has been the butt of the ages, Aristophanes
and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, have alone revealed his essential
nullity, because they alone have looked for something essential beneath
the accidental. Nothing could be simpler than the character of Polonius;
nothing could be more subtle. A rap here, a stab there, and the soul of
a minister is exposed. We have come to see, we scarcely know how, that,
if he ever had one, he has lost it. Some idea of the simplicity and
subtlety of the Aristophanic method may be gathered from the following
scene, but to illustrate the extravagance and beauty of the form, or the
profundity of the conception, no quotation can suffice. Lysistrata has
unfolded her famous scheme for stopping the war: there is to be a
sympathetic strike; the women of all the combatant states, principals
and allies, are to withhold their services until the war has been
stopped:


     LYSISTRATA [_ending a speech_]. Then shall the people revere us and
                  honour us,
                  givers of Joy, and givers of Peace.

     MAGISTRATE. Tell us the mode and the means of your doing it.

     LYS.         First we will stop the disorderly crew,
                Soldiers in arms promenading and marketing.

     STRATYLLIS [_leader of the chorus of women_]. Yea, by divine
                Aphrodite, 'tis true.

     LYS.       Now in the market you see them like Corybants, jangling
                  about with their armour of mail.
                Fiercely they stalk in the midst of the crockery,
                  sternly parade by the cabbage and kail.

     MAG.       Right, for a soldier should always be soldierly!

     LYS.         Troth, 'tis a mighty ridiculous jest,
                Watching them haggle for shrimps in the market-place,
                  grimly accoutred with shield and with crest.

                      *       *       *       *       *

     STRAT.     Comes, like a Tereus, a Thracian irregular,
                  shaking his dart and his target to boot;
                Off runs a shopgirl, appalled at the sight of him,
                  down he sits soldierly, gobbles her fruit.

     MAG.       You, I presume, could adroitly and gingerly settle this
                  intricate, tangled concern:
                You in a trice could relieve our perplexities.

     LYS.         Certainly.

     MAG.                    How? permit me to learn.

     LYS.       Just as a woman, with nimble dexterity,
                  thus with her hands disentangles a skein.

                      *       *       *       *       *

     MAG.       Wonderful, marvellous feats, not a doubt of it,
                  you with your skeins and your spindles can show;
                Fools! do you really expect to unravel a
                  terrible war like a bundle of tow?

     LYS.       Ah, if you only could manage your politics
                  just in the way that we deal with a fleece!

                      *       *       *       *       *

     MAG.       Heard any ever the like of their impudence,
                  these who have nothing to do with the war,
                Preaching of bobbins, and beatings, and washing-tubs?

     LYS.         _Nothing to do with it_, wretch that you are?


The women conclude that one who talks thus is no better than a dead
man; and when he sets out on some trusty platitude concerning women's
sphere and the married state with


     Truly whoever is able to wed--


Lysistrata takes him up sharply with


     Truly, old fellow,'tis time you were dead.


Accordingly they prepare with sacrificial pigs, funeral cakes, fillets
and chaplets to give the walking corpse a decent burial. The magistrate
stumps off, taking Heaven to witness he never was so insulted in his
life, which, as Lysistrata observes, amounts to nothing more than
grumbling because they have not laid him out.

Twenty-three centuries are gone since Aristophanes wrote the
_Lysistrata_, but the safe official who dismisses with a traditional
sneer or a smile the notion that any can manage, save those who have
been trained to mismanage, is still with us. Perhaps he has outlived the
class whose prejudices and limitations he formerly expressed; but in the
days of Aristophanes such a class existed, and it is represented here by
the chorus of old gentlemen. In those days the men were not the only
fools. Aristophanes had no intention of making out that they were. He
was a better artist than party man. He was a comic poet who revealed
the essential comedy of all things. The chorus of women, Lysistrata
herself, and the other leading ladies, all have their foibles and
absurdities; only the chorus of men, who are so keenly alive to them,
seem never to guess that there are smuts on the pot. To seek in this age
and country a companion for these old fellows would be to insult our
Western civilization. Let us invent a purely fantastic character; one
who could not sleep at night for fear of Prussians and Social Democrats,
who clamoured daily for a dozen Dreadnoughts, conscription, and the head
of Mr. Keir Hardie on a charger, and yet spent his leisure warning
readers of the daily papers against the danger of admitting to any share
of power a sex notorious for its panic-fearfulness, intolerance, and
lack of humour; such a one would indeed merit admission to the [Greek:
choros gerontôn], would be a proper fellow to take his stand [Greek:
hexês Aristogeitoni], beside the brave Aristogiton, and [Greek: pataxai
têsde graos tên gnathon], beat down this "monstrous regiment of women."

Aristophanes was a staunch Conservative, but he disliked a stupid
argument wherever he found it. He cared intensely about politics, but he
could not easily forget that he was an artist. Neither the men nor the
women are tied up and peppered with the small shot of his wit; they are
allowed to betray themselves. The art consists in selecting from the
mass of their opinions and sentiments what is most significant, and
making the magistrate, who speaks for the party, deliver himself of
judicious commonplaces. The chorus of wiseacres, the bar-parlour
politicians, whom chance or misfortune has led to favour one side rather
than the other, are less cautious without being less platitudinous.
Their talk is all of "inevitable war" and "stripping for the fray,"
"vindicating rights," "tyranny" and "traitors," "spoliation,"
"innovation," and "striking good blows for the cause"; at least it was
twenty-three hundred years ago.


               _Men Chorus._

     This is not a time for slumber;
         now let all be bold and free,
     Strip to meet the great occasion,
         vindicate our rights with me.
     I can smell a deep, surprising
     Tide of Revolution rising,
     Odour as of folk devising
         Hippias's tyranny.
     And I feel a dire misgiving,
     Lest some false Laconians, meeting
         in the house of Cleisthenes,
     Have inspired these wretched women
         all our wealth and pay to seize.
     Pay from whence I get my living.
     Gods! to hear these shallow wenches
         taking citizens to task,
     Prattling of a brassy buckler,
         jabbering of a martial casque!
     Gods! to think that they have ventured
         with Laconian men to deal,
     Men of just the faith and honour
         that a ravening wolf might feel!
     Plots they're hatching, plots contriving,
         plots of rampant Tyranny;
     But o'er US they shan't be Tyrants,
         no, for on my guard I'll be,
     And I'll dress my sword in myrtle,
         and with firm and dauntless hand,
     Here beside Aristogeiton
         resolutely take my stand,
     Marketing in arms beside him.
         This the time and this the place
     When my patriot arm must deal a
         --blow upon that woman's face.


One is tempted to quote Mr. Rogers indefinitely; indeed, there are a
score of good things to which we would gladly call attention. Having
warned readers that this version is not a translation in the sense that
the versions of _The Frogs_ and _The Birds_ are, we can, with a clear
conscience, urge all to read it who care for good literature or are
interested in political ideas. They will not be disappointed; only, we
would suggest to those whose Greek has grown a little rusty that a
literal translation in French or German would be a suitable companion
for the English paraphrase. Without it, they will hardly understand what
provoked Plato's splendid compliment and would bring down upon the
author, were he alive, the rigours of our English law.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] "The Lysistrata of Aristophanes, acted at Athens in the year B.C.
411." The Greek Text Revised, with a Translation into Corresponding
Metres, Introduction, and Commentary, by Benjamin Bickley Rogers. (Bell
and Sons.)

[10] Voltaire, by the way, was no admirer of Aristophanes. "Ce poète
comique," said he, "qui n'est ni comique ni poète, n'aurait pas été
admis parmi nous à donner ses farces à la foire Saint-Laurent." But that
was not because he was indecent, but because to Voltaire, who said much
the same of Shakespeare, he seemed extravagantly incorrect.

[11] Of course this panegyric needs qualification. What panegyric does
not? The Athenians condemned Socrates. Yes ... yes. But, as a statement
of the general belief and, what is more, the practice of Athens, these
rather excited paragraphs may stand.

[12] _Note_: 1918. Though assuredly our satirists hide their light under
a bushel, the tiny flickers do not escape the eyes of our officials. Let
them beware. In 415, after the mutilation of the Hermae, there was a
panic at Athens and a reign of terror instigated by some of the
demagogues. Torture, though contrary to the laws of Athens and to all
Athenian sentiment, was proposed. The proposal was accepted; but when
the moment for execution came the _ecclesia_--the mass meeting of
citizens, that is to say--refused to allow it. Now Pericles would never
have proposed such a thing; neither would Mr. Asquith: but suppose in
these days some more popular and less responsible leader were to back
the project, I wonder whether the English people would decline to follow
him.




TRELAWNY'S LETTERS[13]


[Sidenote: _Athenæum Jan. 1911_]

Any one who has read Trelawny's recollections of Shelley and Byron must
know that their author was something much more considerable than a
friend of the great. Any one who, lured by that enchanting book, has
gone on to the "Adventures of a Younger Son" may be pardoned for
supposing, if we are really to take it for autobiography, that its
author was a stupendous liar. Just what he was--the man who wrote those
enthralling memoirs and that excellent romance--may now be pretty well
made out from this collection of old and new letters put together by Mr.
Buxton Forman.

"Vigour and directness," "transparent honesty and complete
fearlessness," are the qualities that impress this able editor as he
reads the letters of the man who, in his opinion, "was less tainted with
the sordid commercialism and ever-increasing snobbery of that century
[the nineteenth] than almost any man one could name as having lived
through so large a part of it." We agree heartily; but, of course, there
is more to be said--for instance, that Trelawny sometimes reminds us of
an extraordinarily intelligent schoolboy, at others of a rather morbid
minor poet. Only, the vitality of few schoolboys amounts almost to
genius, and minor poets are not always blest with feelings fundamentally
sound. Most of his vices were the defects of good qualities. A powerful
imagination may be fairly held accountable for his habit of romancing,
and a brave vocabulary for some of his exaggeration. His vanity and
violence--as childish as his love of mystery, and often as childishly
displayed--were forms in which his high spirits and passionate nature
expressed themselves. Art, in the shape of a bad education, aggravated
his faults; but his honesty and imagination, his generosity and
childlike capacity for admiration and affection were from nature alone.
He was a schoolboy who never grew up; cultivating his cabbages at
Worthing in 1875, he is essentially the same shrewd, passionate,
romantic scapegrace who deserted his ship in Bombay harbour soon after
the battle of Trafalgar, and burnt Shelley's body on the foreshore at
Via Reggio.

Like all boys, Trelawny was exceedingly impressionable, and at the
beginning of this book we find him under the influence of the learned
ladies of Pisa. Left to himself, he wrote with point and vigour prose as
rich in colour and spirit as it is poor in grammar and spelling. His
letter to the _Literary Gazette_, published in this volume, is a good
example of his narrative style. But even his style could be perverted:


     "I must give you the consolation of knowing--that you have
     inflicted on me indiscribable tortures--that your letter has
     inflicted an incurable wound which is festering and inflaming my
     blood--and my pride and passion, warring against my ungovernable
     love, has in vain essayed to hide my wounded feelings--by silently
     submitting to my evil destiny."


So he wrote to Claire Clairmont in December 1822; but under the language
of the minor romantic throbs the lusty passion of a man.

Shelley's influence was great; with him Trelawny was always natural and
always at his best; but Shelley was a wizard who drew the pure metal
from every ore. With Byron it was different. Trelawny was almost as vain
as "the Pilgrim of Eternity," as sensitive, and, when hurt, as
vindictive. He was jealous of Byron's success with women--they were two
of a trade--and especially of his relations with Claire. When Byron
posed Trelawny posed, and when the one sulked the other sulked; but was
any man except Shelley big enough to brook his lordship's moods? That
Byron valued Trelawny is certain; he invited him to Greece because he
knew his worth. Once arrived, Byron had the wit to perceive that
Mavrocordato, albeit the meanest of masters, was the best and most
serviceable to be had at the moment. Trelawny, as was to be expected,
fell under the spell of Odysseus, at that time in more or less open
revolt against the provisional government, but an adventurer of fierce
and reckless spirit, in manner and appearance a romantic outlaw, a man
after his own heart. Henceforth Byron is reckoned at best a dupe, and at
worst a sluggish poltroon; while Trelawny, it is said, imitated his hero
so loyally that "he ate, dressed, and even spat in his manner." When the
poet died Trelawny spoke with characteristic feeling:


     "With all his faults I loved him truly.... If it gave me pain
     witnessing his frailties, he only wanted a little excitement to
     awaken and put forth _virtues_ that redeemed them all."


But the iron had entered into his soul, old sores rankled, he could not
forgive; to the last he was willing to pay back his rival in his own
coin--sneers and abuse.

As Trelawny could scarcely write to a woman without making love to her,
and as his relations with Mary Shelley were necessarily emotional and
intimate, an ambiguous proposal and a handful of affectionate letters
will not persuade us that he ever cared more seriously for her than for
scores of others. Though some letters must have been written when he was
courting the sister of Odysseus or keeping a harem at Athens, and others
when his heart was disengaged, can any one decide which are sincere and
which are not? Or, rather, are they not all equally sincere? The
following extract may help us to a conclusion:


     "I say! the poet [Shelley] was a thorough mormon--why did he not
     declare himself and anticipate the sect? I would have joined him
     and found him a settlement--it would not hold together without a
     superstition--for man all over the world are [_sic_]
     superstitious--it's the nature of the animal--your mother was a
     simpleton to have never heard of a man being in love with two
     women; when we are young we are in love with all women--the bible
     would call it by its proper name, lust."


So wrote Trelawny in 1869 (he had recovered his style) to Claire
Clairmont. His letters to her, now published for the first time, compose
the largest and liveliest part of the volume. If he cared for one woman
more than another, we believe that woman was Claire. She was not good,
but she has been more than sufficiently reviled. For Trelawny that she
was beautiful sufficed; let it satisfy the vindictiveness of virtue that
she suffered horribly. What precisely was the degree of their intimacy
is not clear; but, in view of Claire's reputation and certain passages
in these letters, it is perhaps not unfair to suppose that at any rate
for a short time in the year 1822 she was his mistress. Be that as it
may, after Shelley's death they parted, and doubtless it will be said
she treated her lover ill. To us it appears that he gave as good as he
got. She was mercenary, and he was inconstant. If we read Letter XX
aright, when she did offer, after some months of prudent dalliance, to
live with him at Florence, he replied that he had but £500 a year, which
was not enough for two. An establishment on the confines of
respectability was the last thing he desired. Neither ever loved truly;
but Trelawny, for a time, felt violent physical passion for the woman
whose head and shoulders remind us of what dealers call a Giorgione.
Such is the story, so far as we can deduce it from these letters; each,
if our conjecture serve, was partially satisfied, for in money matters
Trelawny always treated his lady handsomely, though he could not or
would not give her what most she wanted--material security.

He never lost his taste for Claire; and on the ruins of their bitter and
agitated relations was built a kind of friendship, in which expansion
and intimacy and malice were all possible, and which is aptly
commemorated by these vivid and entertaining letters. As for Mary, her
character deteriorated and Trelawny's judgment grew more acute. Her
corners grew more brutally protuberant beneath the tissue of glamour
cast over them by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse was open; but
long before the quarrel over "Queen Mab" his generous spirit had begun
to groan under her prim banality, and to express itself in ungenerous
backbitings. His final estimate he imparted to Claire when he was
seventy-eight years old, and it remains for those who dislike to
disprove it:


     "Mary Shelley's jealousy must have sorely vexed Shelley--indeed she
     was not a suitable companion for the poet--his first wife Harriett
     must have been more suitable--Mary was the most conventional slave
     I ever met--she even affected the pious dodge, such was her
     yearning for society--she was devoid of imagination and Poetry--she
     felt compunction when she had lost him--she did not understand or
     appreciate him."


There are two big gaps in the correspondence with Claire: one from 1838
to 1857, the other from 1857 to 1869. At the age of seventy-seven we
find Trelawny still unchanged: "All my early convictions and feelings
harden with my bones--age has not tamed or altered me." He had lived
through the wildest adventures: in a cave on Mount Parnassus he had been
shot through the body and had pardoned one of his assailants; he had
swum the rapids below Niagara; he had played the pirate in the South
Seas and flirted with Mrs. Norton in Downing Street; and now, a veteran
and something of a lion, he astonished London parties with his gasconade
and the Sussex fisher-folk with his bathing exploits. We can believe
that his conversation was "brilliant," but "most censorious"; his
letters to Claire give some idea of it: "Women have taken to gin--men
have always done so, now it's women's turn"; "---- is as gross and fat
as ---- and from the same cause--gluttony and sotting--it's all the
fashion."

And here we would interpose a query--Was it really necessary to suppress
the names? This elaborate and unscholarly tenderness for the feelings of
the friends and relations of the dead, and for those of their
descendants even, is becoming, in our judgment, a nuisance. Had people
been so fussy and timid always we should have no history worth reading.
After all, men, and women too for that matter, have got to stand on
their own feet. We are not our grandmothers' keepers. No one will think
at all the worse of Mr. Smith because some lively diarist has hinted
that his great maiden aunt was no such thing: neither will any one think
much the worse of the old lady. Besides, it is easy for Mr. Smith to say
that the diarist was a liar who couldn't possibly have known anything
about it. The past belongs to the present, and the dead are in some sort
public property. It is not well, we think, that history should be
impoverished, and an instrument of culture blunted, out of regard for
the feelings of stray nephews and nieces, and we commend to editors and
biographers the saying of that undergraduate who to his friend's
complaint--"Hi, Johnnie, you've shot my father," replied, with a truly
British sense of give and take--"Never mind, have a shot at mine."

Poor Claire became devout in old age and provoked a comprehensive growl
from Shelley's untamed friend: "I am not one of that great sect whose
vanity, credulity, and superstition makes them believe in God--the
devil--souls and immortality." Yet with what cheerful wisdom he laughs
away the fancy, which threatened to become an obsession, that Allegra
was still alive in 1869: "My dear Clare, you may be well in body; but
you have a bee in your bonnet." He suggests raking up "some plausible
cranky old dried-up hanger-on" of fifty-two or so, who "should follow
you about like a feminine Frankenstein," as he carelessly puts it. He
tried to mitigate the crazy malevolence she cherished for her earliest
lover: "Your relentless vindictiveness against Byron is not tolerated by
any religion that I know of"; while through the rack of jibes, malisons,
and ebullitions of wilfulness shines steadily his veneration for the
great poet he loved:


     "You say he [Shelley] was womanly in some things--so he was, and we
     men should all be much better if we had a touch of their feeling,
     sentiment, earnestness, and constancy; but in all the best
     qualities of man he excelled."


Through these letters--through all Trelawny's writings--runs a wonderful
sense of power. He was not one to seek out the right word or prune a
sentence; his strength is manifest in his laxities. He believed that no
task, intellectual or physical, was beyond him; so he wrote as he swam,
taking his ease, glorying in his vitality, secure in a reserve of
strength equal to anything. A sense of power and a disregard for
syntax--these are his literary characteristics. He read Shakespeare and
Shelley, and it is not clear that he cared greatly for much besides; he
liked Swinburne, and was profoundly interested in Darwin. Late in life
he discovered Blake and was fascinated. What Trelawny cared for in
literature was Imagination, the more sublime the better, while in life
he had a taste for Truth and Freedom. He was always something of an
oddity. He loathed superstition, cant and snobbery and said so in a way
that gave much pain to the nicest people. He was of that disconcerting
sort which, excelling in all that ordinary people admire, admires, for
its part, what they hate--the abnormal and distinguished. He was a man
of action who mistrusted common sense, a good fellow on the side of
cranks: the race has never been common and is now almost extinct.

FOOTNOTE:

[13] "Letters of Edward John Trelawny." Edited, with a brief
Introduction and Notes, by H. Buxton Forman. (Frowde.)




SOPHOCLES IN LONDON


I

[Sidenote: _"OEdipus" at Covent Garden_]

[Sidenote: _Athenæum Jan. 1912_]

There need be nothing anachronous or archæological about a performance
of _OEdipus_ at Covent Garden. There is no reason why the plays of
Sophocles should move us less than they moved the Athenians twenty-three
hundred years ago, and there is some for supposing that we, who live in
the twentieth, are more likely to appreciate them than those who lived
in any intervening century. For everywhere to-day is a cry for
simplicity and significance, and art more simple and significant than
the Attic drama does not exist. In less than ten thousand words
Sophocles tells all that can be told about a terrible and complex
tragedy. Zola or Meredith in ten times the space would have added
nothing. They would only have put flesh on bone and muscle; they would
have given us trappings and ornament where Sophocles gives nothing but
bare springs and forces.

Yet in this flat, lean, Attic drama all Latin realism and Celtic
romance, all details and suggestions, are implicit. It states just those
fundamental things of which all the rest are but manifestations or
consequences. There is as much psychology in the scene between OEdipus
and Jocasta, a matter of some seventy lines, as could be forced into
seventy pages by a modern novelist. A change of feeling that it would
take Mr. Henry James a chapter to elaborate is indicated by a statement,
a question, and a reply. Sophocles could never be satisfied with
anything short of the essential: that he stated; the rest he left out.

Though Prof. Gilbert Murray is, as every one knows, a charming and
sensitive scholar, he is not the ideal translator of Sophocles. Perhaps
the Zolas and Merediths--especially the Merediths--impress him too
easily; perhaps he loves too well the literary tradition, the European
tradition of five hundred years, to understand that the greatest poetry
is rarely poetical:


    A Voice, a Voice, that is borne on the Holy Way!
    What art thou, O Heavenly One, O Word of the Houses of Gold?
    Thebes is bright with thee, and my heart it leapeth; yet is it cold,
                And my spirit faints as I pray.
                        I--ê! I--ê!

    What task, O Affrighter of Evil, what task shall thy people essay?
    One new as our new-come affliction,
      Or an old toil returned with the years?
    Unveil thee, thou dread benediction,
      Hope's daughter and Fear's.


This is very pretty, but is it Sophocles?--or Swinburne? Still, grace
there is, and distinction, in all that Prof. Murray writes--qualities
that are not accentuated by the mouthings of the protagonist, Mr. Martin
Harvey, the uninspired drone of the chorus, or the intermittent
shrieking and bawling of the crowd. In the translation of the Professor
the simple profundities of the poet become delicate verse, which in the
mouth of the histrion is turned into rhythmless rhetoric.

But, after all, in performances of this sort it is not the play, but the
production, that is the thing--though that is less true of this than of
any other Reinhardt entertainment we have yet seen. Still, deeds not
words: it is by theatrical effects and stage decoration, if by any
means, that the message of Sophocles is to be conveyed to the people of
London. That both are remarkable cannot be denied. _OEdipus_ is a fine
show. It is erudite, striking, and ingenious; but it is not a work of
art. What is it, then? To borrow an expressive, though unnecessarily
insulting term from our neighbours, it is "Le faux bon."

And what is "Le faux bon"? It is something exceedingly difficult to
produce. We do not wish to belittle it; we wish to make plain its
nature. If we succeed, we shall show also how choice and rare a thing
this _OEdipus_ is. At any rate, it keeps good company. The plays of Mr.
Stephen Phillips are classical examples of the "faux bon," and, to
remove a suspicion of disparagement, we hasten to add that the plays of
M. Rostand and FitzGerald's paraphrase of Omar are examples too. The
brilliant and entertaining pictures of Mr. Nicholson and Mr. Orpen serve
our purpose even better, so closely do they resemble the first-rate. And
now in this, the latest art, the new art of the theatre, come M. Bakst
with his _Scheherazade_, and Prof. Reinhardt with _Sumurun_ and _The
Miracle_, levying contribution on all the others, culling from them all
those features that people of taste expect and recognize in a work of
art.

For "le faux bon" is produced to meet the demands of a tasteful and
cultivated society--a society that knows as much about art as can be
taught. People who have been brought up on terms of familiarity with the
arts learn to recognize all those features that a work of art ought to
possess; they know the effects that it ought to produce; but, unless
born with the power of reacting emotionally and directly to what they
see and hear, they cannot understand what a work of art is. Such people
are numerous in these days. Far too intelligent to be duped by
imitations of particular plays, or poems, or pictures, what they require
is imitation art. And that is what they get. In Prof. Reinhardt's
productions there are dramatic pauses and suspensions, effects of light
and sound, combinations of movement and mass, line and colour, which
recall, not particular works, but general ideas based on the study of
hundreds of works, and provoke, in the right kind of spectator,
precisely those trains of thought and feeling that are provoked by real
works of art. True, they express no first-hand emotion, neither does the
real thing to lovers of the "faux bon," but they cause physical
reactions (as when Jocasta's women rush screaming on to the stage)
subtle enough to do duty for æsthetic emotions. It is hard to believe
that these refined stimulants are precisely the same in kind as the
collisions and avalanches of melodrama; but they are.

_OEdipus_ is a good "show." To appreciate it properly we must realize
that it is nothing else. We must compare it with pageants and ballets;
and if, so comparing it, we like it less than some that we have seen at
the Empire and the Alhambra, the generous will attribute our
eccentricity to an overdeveloped moral sense. To be frank, we do not
believe that Prof. Reinhardt or M. Bakst has more to say than the
creators of our best musical ballets. But, while the latter modestly
pretend to nothing more than the flattery of our senses by means of form
and sound and colour, the wizards of "the new art" claim to express the
most profound and subtle emotions. We prefer "1830" to _The Miracle_,
because it is unpretentious and sincere. We prefer _OEdipus_ to the
pantomime because it is prettier and shorter. As works of art they all
seem to us about equal.


II

[Sidenote: _The "Trachiniæ" at "The Court."_]

[Sidenote: _Athenæum July 1911_]

The players of Bedford College are winning for themselves a place of
honour amongst those who help the modern world to understand Greek
drama. The traditional opinion that the Athenians were a race of fools
with a sense of form, who wrote tedious verse to perfection, has been
ousted by a new doctrine, less false, but even more dangerous. A race of
scholars arose who assumed, reasonably enough, that plays written by
intelligent men for an intelligent public could not be quite so dull as
tradition proclaimed; and though to rob the classics of their terrors
needed much audacity and some irreverence, the new ideas won ground by
sheer force of plausibility. Unfortunately, to the modern scholar an
intelligent public meant a public of modern scholars. He peopled the
Attic theatre with an audience of cultivated liberals, and by "a good
play" meant the sort of play such a public would relish. Whence it
followed that the Athenian dramatists must have concerned themselves
with those problems which have been so acutely discussed in the plays of
Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Shaw.

As a fact, Athenian tragedy is never, or hardly ever, concerned with
intellectual matters of any sort; its business is to express emotion,
and this it has done in the most perfect literary form ever devised by
man. The great merit of Miss E. B. Abraham's performance is that she
plays the part of Deianeira neither as if that lady were a relic of the
most insipid period of classical sculpture, nor yet as though she were
cousin-german to Hedda Gabler. When she errs, she errs on the side of
modernity; and that is as it should be. Certainly she puts too much
"psychology" into the character of the fond, gentle lady, whose simple
humanity at pathetic odds with Fate wins sympathy from the audience
without effort or emphasis; while a hankering after the latest
subtleties has led her to misunderstand completely the passage (580-95
in the acting edition) in which she supposes the queen to be justifying
herself to a reluctant chorus, whereas, in fact, she is justifying
herself to the Universe, and giving the audience a hint. The meek chorus
is only too willing to agree.

Poor is the triumph of Fate over a timid woman. Heracles is a more
splendid but not less helpless victim. Mr. G. Edwards understands the
part well. Very fine was the passionate indignation, surging up through
physical agony, in the first great speech; and this mood is made to
prevail until in the name "[Greek: Nessos]" the hero recognizes the
finger of God. From that point, though violent and dictatorial still to
his son and the respectful mortals about him, the tyrant submits
sullenly to those he can neither vanquish nor appease.

Mr. Garrod, who played the part of Hyllus, spoke his lines exceedingly
well. Perhaps the chorus was a little too classical--that is to say, too
stiff and lackadaisical; but the phrasing was always pretty and
sometimes unexpected, and the lovely strophe beginning,


     [Greek: hon aiola nux enarizomena;]


seemed to gain a new enchantment from the delicately concerted voices.

Scholars will have to bring strong arguments to justify what is an
obvious literary blemish in the distribution of the concluding lines.
Somehow or other, between Hyllus and the chorus, the sombre intensity of
the complaint was allowed to evaporate. The words,


     [Greek: ta de nun hestôt' oiktra men hêmin, aischra]


and


     [Greek: kouden toutôn o ti mê Zeus]


should come from the same lips, surely.


     O Providence, I will not praise,
     Neither for fear, nor joy of gain,
     Your blundering and cruel ways.

       *       *       *       *       *

     And all men's miserable days,
     And all the ugliness and pain,
     O Providence, I will not praise.




THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGON[14]


[Sidenote: _Athenæum Oct. 1911_]

No one will be surprised to learn that fourteen hundred years ago the
Chinese laid down six canons of art. Nothing is more natural than that
some great artist, reviewing in old age his life and work, should deduce
from the mass of experience and achievement certain propositions, and
that these, in time, should become rules, to be preached by pedants,
practised by dilettanti, and ignored by every artist worthy of the name.
What does surprise us is that the first of these Chinese canons should
be nothing less than a definition of that which is essential in all
great art. "Rhythmic vitality," Prof. Giles calls it; Mr. Okakura, "the
Life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of things"; Mr. Binyon
suggests "the fusion of the rhythm of the spirit with the movement of
living things."


     "At any rate," he says, "what is certainly meant is that the artist
     must pierce beneath the mere aspect of the world to seize and
     himself to be possessed by that great cosmic rhythm of the spirit
     which sets the currents of life in motion. We should say in Europe
     that he must seize the universal in the particular."


"The universal in the particular," that is perhaps what the greatest art
expresses. Perhaps it is a widespread consciousness of this that
produces all great movements; and perhaps the history of their decline
and fall is nothing more than a history of its gradual decay and
disappearance. Great movements seem to arise when men become aware
suddenly that the universe has a soul: the first artists of a movement
are the men who perceive most clearly this soul in every part of the
universe; they are called Primitives. They are men driven to art by the
intolerable necessity of expressing what they feel; they break silence
only because they have something to say; and their one object is to say
it as completely and intelligibly as possible. Primitives stand in a
class by themselves because they have perceived more clearly than others
the reality that lies beneath the superficial, and because, having no
other end in view, they have expressed it more completely.

Great movements are alike in their beginnings; whether they are
Buddhist or Byzantine, Greek or Egyptian, Assyrian or Mexican, their
primitives have two qualities in common, profundity and directness. And
in their histories, so far as we may judge from the scanty records of
ancient civilizations, all have a general resemblance. Always, as the
sense of reality decays, the artist labours to conceal under technical
proficiency the poverty of his emotional experience. For the inspired
artist technique was nothing but a means; for his hungry successors it
becomes an end. For the man who has little to say the manner of saying
it gains consequence, and in a manner which has been elaborated into an
intricate craft the greatest emotions cannot be expressed. The circle is
vicious. With the exaltation and elaboration of craftsmanship expression
first falls into neglect and then becomes impossible. Those who are not
content to marvel at cleverness, but still ask emotion of art, must be
satisfied with such as craftsmen can supply. If pictures no longer
express feeling they may at least provoke it. If painting is to be a
mere question of pattern-making, at least let the patterns be pretty.
Sensuous beauty and cunning delineation become rivals for the throne
whence expression has been ousted. So, with occasional irregularities,
the path winds down the hill. Skill itself declines, and the sense of
beauty runs thin. At the bottom, for what once was art--the expression
of man's most holy emotions--smart tradesmen offer, at fancy prices,
mechanical prettiness, cheap sentiment, and accurate representation.

Comparisons between the history of Asiatic and of European art are
admittedly possible; but as yet we believe the precise nature of the
similarity has not been stated. It lies in the fact that both conform to
the general laws of decay. The Asiatic movement with which we are
familiar is essentially Buddhist; it expresses that sense of the
universe that is expressed in another form by Buddhist doctrine and its
later developments along the lines of Taoist idealism. How far the
spread of Buddhism in China represents a spiritual reaction from the dry
materialism of Confucianism is no matter for brief and dogmatic
discussion. We need only say that the fourth-century painting in the
British Museum by Ku K'ai-chih, though the artist himself is said to
have been a Buddhist, belongs clearly to an earlier movement than that
of which the T'ang and just pre-T'ang masterpieces are the primitives.
By comparison with early Buddhist art this exquisite picture is
sufficiently lacking in emotional significance to tempt one to suppose
that it represents the ripe and highly cultivated decadence of a
movement that the growing religious spirit was soon to displace. Slight
as his acquaintance with this early art must be, an Englishman who
visited regularly the exhibition at Shepherd's Bush was able to gather
from eight or ten pictures, a couple of large wooden Bodhisattvas, and a
few small figures in bronze, some idea of the way in which Japanese
primitives could enter and express the world of reality. That same power
he will find in the Byzantine mosaics of the sixth century, which
express the earliest triumphs of another spiritual revolution over the
cultured materialism of a moribund civilization.

That new movement spread slowly across Europe, and till the middle of
the twelfth century there was no general decline. But the best was over
in France before the twelfth century was out. Gothic architecture is
juggling in stone and glass. In Italy Giotto followed Cimabue; and
Giotto could not always resist the temptation to state the particular
and leave the universal out. He sometimes tells us facts instead of
expressing emotions. In the full Renaissance the coarsest feeling
sufficed to flavour a handsome, well-made picture.

Meanwhile, under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) Asiatic art had reached
much the same stage. The Ming picture in the British Museum known as
_The Earthly Paradise_ is inferior to the best work of Botticelli, with
which it is commonly compared, but reminds us, in its finished grace and
gaiety, of a painting by Watteau. Korin, towards the end of the Ming
period, is about as empty as Velasquez and more brilliant than Frans
Hals. The eighteenth century, one inclines to believe, was the same
everywhere. Stylistic obsession and the taste for material beauty ended
in mechanical prettiness, altogether inexpressive or sentimental. In
both hemispheres painting was reduced to a formula--a formula for
producing elegant furniture.

But even in the age of decay Oriental art retained traces of primitive
splendour. It never sank into mere representation. The men who turned
out the popular Japanese colour-prints, though they chose the same
subjects as the Dutch genre painters, were artists enough to treat them
differently and to look for something significant beneath the mass of
irrelevant accidents. Also they preserved a nicer sensibility to
material beauty. A cheap Japanese print has sometimes the quality of a
painting by Whistler. Indeed, the superiority of the Orientals is
discreetly insinuated from beginning to end of Mr. Binyon's essay.
Equal, if not superior, to the Greek or Christian in the primitive
stage, the Asiatic movement clung to the heights longer, sank more
gradually, and never sank so low. These facts are painful, but patent;
they require explanation.

Why is Oriental art generally superior to European? Bearing in mind what
has been said about the nature of the greatest art, we shall expect it
to be because in the East they have kept in closer touch with reality.
That is precisely what has happened. The emotional life has never been
in the East what it has become in the West, the rare possession of a
fortunate few. There the practical life has been kept subordinate, a
means to supporting the emotional. In China men still go about their
business that they may purchase leisure in which to contemplate reality.
In Europe we are practical; and reality is banished from the life of the
practical man who regards all things as means instead of contemplating
them as ends. He sees just what is of use to him, and no more. He sees
enough for identification and recognition; in fact, he reads the labels
on things. The labels are all he requires. In the emotional life things
are valued for their significance--for what they are, not for what they
can be made to do; they are seen whole because they are seen as ends.
The practical man sees only a part--the part that serves his purpose.
The camera sees more than that, it sees all the details; but it cannot
see the spirit--that has to be felt.

Most Europeans think of boats as means of locomotion, of apples as
eatables. They recognize such things by their serviceable qualities;
their individuality, the universal in these particulars, escapes them.
In a picture of a boat or an apple they look for those unessential
qualities which minister to their pleasure, and of which alone they are
aware. The cleverness of a man who can paint fruit that tempts urchins
impresses them; but the artist who feels, and tries to express, the soul
of fruit and flowers they take for an incompetent dunce or a charlatan.


     "One might say that man has been a monarch, looking to his
     subject-world only for service and for flattery, and just because
     of this lordly attitude he has failed to understand that
     subject-world, and, even more, has failed to understand himself."


In the East men have ever set the spiritual life above the practical,
and artists have excelled in expressing the very essence of material
things because they expressed what they felt, instead of representing
what the ordinary man sees. They have felt that if the spirit informs
all, then all must have individual significance. To see things as means
is to see what is most useful and least important about them. To see
things as ends is to be shockingly unpractical; it is to see God in
everything; it is to exalt the spirit above the flesh; it is not the way
to "get on"; but it is the only way to produce significant art, and,
indeed, it is only on such terms that life itself signifies.

So far we have admitted the superiority of the East: the last word has
yet to be said. Few observant people will deny that there are signs of
an awakening in Europe. The times are great with the birth of some new
thing. A spiritual renaissance may be at hand. Meanwhile, we are not
suffered to ignore the huge strides in material progress that are the
chief glory of modern Japan; nor have we failed to remark that the
latest art to reach us from that country proved, when displayed with
some ostentation at Shepherd's Bush, equal in vulgarity of sentiment,
flashiness of execution, and apelike imitation to the worst that can be
seen at Burlington House. Philistinism, it seems, finds ready converts
on the other side of the globe. Let the spokesmen of the young and
bustling empire be heard. Shiba Kokan, the pupil of Harunobu, says in
his "Confessions":


     "In Occidental art objects are copied directly from nature; hence
     before a landscape one feels as if one were placed in the midst of
     nature. There is a wonderful apparatus called the photograph, which
     gives a facsimile copy of the object, whatever it is, to which it
     is directed. Nothing which has not actually been seen is sketched,
     nor is a nameless landscape reproduced, as we often see done in
     Chinese productions.... A painting which is not a faithful copy of
     nature has neither beauty nor is worthy of the name."


And this is the considered judgment of that popular modern painter Okio:


     "The use of art is to produce copies of things, and if an artist
     has a thorough knowledge of the properties of the thing he paints,
     he can assuredly make a name.... Without the true depiction of
     objects there can be no pictorial art. Nobility of sentiment and
     suchlike only come after a successful delineation of the external
     form of an object."


Such men would be very much at home at an Academy banquet or in the
parlour of a suburban stockbroker and less so in the world of art than a
saint would be in Wall Street. For whereas the saint would perceive the
spark of the universal in the particular stockjobber, the stockjobber
and his friends, Mr. Okio, the delineator, and the philophotographic Mr.
Kokan, are blind to anything that is not on the surface. Japan, we are
told, is to shape the future of the Eastern hemisphere. Japan is
"forging ahead." Already she has set her hand to the task of civilizing,
that is to say Europeanizing, China--just at the moment when Europe is
coming to loathe her own grossness. Time is the master of paradox. Who
shall say what surprises are too fantastic for his contriving? Can the
classic distinction between East and West, that venerable mother of
trite reflections and bad arguments, be, after all, mutable? Is the
unchanging East changeable? Is Mr. Kipling's thrilling line no more than
the statement of a geographical truism? England they tell us was once a
tropical forest; London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world,
while Asia--rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of
lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police
regulations, glorious in all material glories--postures, complacent and
obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters.

FOOTNOTE:

[14] "The Flight of the Dragon: an Essay on the Theory and Practice of
Art in China and Japan." By Laurence Binyon. (John Murray.)




WILLIAM MORRIS[15]


[Sidenote: _New Statesman Oct. 1914_]

Here is a book that starts a dozen hares, any one of which would be
worth catching or hunting, at any rate, through a couple of large-type
columns. For a really good book about William Morris is bound to raise
those questions that Morris made interesting and his disciples
fashionable, and that our children, we may hope, will one day make
vital. "How far can society affect art, or art society?" "What might we
have made of machinery and what has machinery made of us?" "Was the
nineteenth century a disaster or only a failure?" These are the
questions that it seems right and natural for a writer who has made
William Morris his peg to discuss; and if I discuss something quite
different it may look as though, forsaking profitable hares, I were
after a herring of my own trailing. Yet, reading this book, I find that
the question that interests me most is: "Why does Clutton Brock tend to
overrate William Morris?" To answer it I have had to discover what sort
of person I suppose Clutton Brock to be, and William Morris to have
been.

Clutton Brock is one of our best critics. When I say this, of course I
take into consideration his unsigned writings, the anonymity of which is
not so strict as to make my judgment indiscreet. Without the subtlety of
a philosopher or a trained dialectician, he has been blest with a
powerful intellect which enables him, unlike most of our critics, not
only to distinguish between sense and nonsense, but himself to refrain
from saying what is utterly absurd. Mr. Brock does not like nonsense,
and he never talks it. Both the form and the content of his criticism
are intellectual. He is in the great English tradition--the tradition of
Dryden and Johnson and Macaulay and Leslie Stephen; he has an
argumentative prose-style and a distaste for highfalutin, and, where the
unenlightened intellectualism of Macaulay and Leslie Stephen, and the
incorrigible common sense of Johnson, might have pitched these eminent
men into the slough of desperate absurdity, it often happens that Mr.
Brock, whose less powerful mind is sweetened by a sense of art,
contrives to escape.

No man who has ever done anything worth doing has done less highfalutin
than Morris. He was always the craftsman who kept close to his
material, and thought more about the block and the chisel than about
æsthetic ecstasy. The thrills and ecstasies of life, he seems to have
felt, must come as by-products out of doing one's job as well as one
could: they were not things, he thought, to aim at, or even talk about
overmuch. I do not agree with Morris, but that is beside the point. The
point is that Clutton Brock is unwilling to disagree with him violently.
He has a peculiar kindness for Morris that does not surprise me. He is a
man who works for his living, and does his work so well that we may be
sure he wins from it delight. The greater part of what he writes he does
not sign; and there are thousands of people in England who, though they
hardly know his name, have yet been affected by his mind. As he sits
quietly producing a surprising quantity of good literature, he must
sometimes feel very near those anonymous craftsmen of the Middle Ages
who, lost in the scaffolding, struck out forms that would to-day make
only too familiar the names of their creators. At such moments, can he
be less than partial to the man who understood so well the greatness and
the dignity of those nameless artists?

Morris was amongst the first to perceive that much of the greatest art
has been produced anonymously and collectively; and we may be sure that
Clutton Brock shares his dislike for that worship of names, that
interest in catalogues and biographies, which amongst the collecting
classes still does duty for æsthetic sensibility. Morris was indignant,
as well he might be, when he heard the pictures of some famous
artist--famous because he signed his name and left some record of his
life--exalted above the sculpture and windows of Chartres--the work of
obscure stone-cutters and verriers. He loved the mediæval craftsmen for
the fineness of their work and for their personal modesty. He liked to
think of men who could take their orders from a _contre-maître_ and
execute them superbly, partly, I think, because he saw that these were
men who could be fitted into his ideal State. And Mr. Clutton Brock,
good Socialist that he is, must, I suppose, himself have been perplexed
by that problem which confronts every modern State-projector: What is to
be done about the artists? How are these strange, turbulent,
individualistic creatures to be fitted into any rational collectivism?
What place can be found in Utopia for people who do not work to live,
but live to do what they consider their own peculiar piece of work? Now,
if only they were craftsmen, they would make what was wanted; they
would do what they were told.

Some feeling of this sort may, I think, be at the back of Mr. Clutton
Brock's peculiar sympathy with Morris; it would explain, too, why he did
less than justice to Shelley in that remarkable study he published some
years ago. He could not quite forgive the poet for being so hopelessly
anti-Social. Perhaps, in his heart, Mr. Brock would hardly admit the
absolute value of æsthetic rapture; he wants art to do something for
life, and he loses patience with people who simply add to its confusion.
Shelley, he thought, made a mess of his own life and of Harriet's, and,
for all one knows, of Miss Hitchener's, and of a score of others; and
his poetry you must read for its own sake or not at all. The poetry of
Morris has value for people who have never known what it is to feel an
æsthetic emotion, and his life was superbly useful to his fellow-men.
The great State of the future will be glad of as many William Morrises
as it can get.

But it is I who am being less than just now. From what I have said any
one might infer that I had not read, or had not appreciated, that volume
called "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," in which are to be
found things of pure beauty, "Summer Dawn," "In Prison," "The Wind,"
"The Haystack in the Floods"; any one might suppose that I did not know
"Love is Enough." These are the poems which, with "Sigurd," give William
Morris his place amongst the poets. Mr. Clutton Brock feels this surely
enough, because he possesses, besides intellect, that other and rarer
critical faculty, that spiritual tuning-fork by which a fine critic
distinguishes between emotion and sentimentality, between rhetoric and
rant. It is because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility--part
æsthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems--that he can be
trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that
quality which most distinguishes Tennyson from Morris, Kipling from Walt
Whitman, and the Bishop of London from the Vicar of Wakefield. That is
why I suppose Mr. Brock to be one of our best critics.

If there were anything fundamentally nasty about Morris Mr. Brock would
not be inclined to overrate him. Mr. Brock pardons no unpardonable
horrors: there are none here to pardon. But he overrates, or rather
overmarks, William Morris as a scrupulous but soft-hearted examiner
might overmark a sympathetic pupil. He never gives marks when the answer
is wrong, but he gives a great many when it is right: and he is a little
blind to deficiencies. He does not make it clear that Morris, as an
artist, was cursed with two of the three modern English vices, that he
was provincial and amateurish. But he gives him full credit for not
being goaded to futility by a sense of his own genius.

Morris was provincial as the Pre-Raphaelites and Tennyson and Carlyle
were provincial, as Swinburne and Whistler were not; his mind could
rarely escape from the place and age in which it was formed. He looked
at art and life, and at the future even, from the point of view of an
Englishman and a Victorian; and when he tries to change his position we
feel the Victorian labouring, more or less unsuccessfully, to get out of
himself. When I accuse him of being "amateurish" I do not use that vile
word in contradistinction to "professional." In a sense all true artists
must be amateurs; the professional view, the view that art is a hopeful
and genteel way of earning one's living, is possible only to official
portrait-painters and contractors for public monuments. When I say that
Morris, like almost all our visual artists and too many of our modern
writers, was amateurish, I mean that he was not serious enough about his
art. He tended to regard art as a part of life instead of regarding life
as a means to art. A long morning's work, an afternoon of fresh air, a
quiet evening, and so to bed and fit next morning for another good
spell of production; something of that sort, one fancies, was not unlike
the ideal of William Morris. It is a craftsman's ideal; it is a good
life for any one but an artist; and it would be a good attitude towards
art if art were not something altogether different from work. Alas! it
is the English attitude. I never look at those Saxon manuscripts in the
British Museum but I say to myself: "And didn't they go out and have a
game of cricket after hours and work all the harder next day for their
wholesome exercise!"

But from the fatal curse Morris was free; no man of great ability was
ever less conceited. You will not find in his work a trace of that tired
pomposity which tells us that the great man is showing off, or of that
empty pretentious singularity which betrays the vanity of the lonely
British artist. Morris was never the self-conscious master calling on
sun and moon to stand and watch him sign his name, neither was he the
shy genius of the English hedgerows sheltering his little talent from
contemporary infection and the chill winds of criticism.

Morris was neither a great artist nor a great thinker, but he was a
great man, and that, I suspect, is the chief reason why Mr. Brock loves
him, and why none of the better sort can help liking him. He had that
magnanimity which makes people take instinctively the right side. His
reasons might be wrong, but he was in the right. There are people in
history, and Morris is one of them, about whom we feel that if they were
alive they would sympathize with whatever were the best and most
pressing aspirations of the age. Morris would, of course, be as firm
to-day as ever against plutocracy, but one feels sure that he would take
his stand with those who are trying to win for themselves some kind of
moral and intellectual as well as economic freedom. One feels sure he
would be of that forlorn hope of civilization that carries on a sporadic
and ineffective war against officialism and militarism on the one hand,
and puritanism and superstition on the other. One feels sure that,
however little he might like new developments in art or thought, he
would be against the people who tried to suppress them. One feels quite
sure that he would never cease to believe that so long as society is
imperfect it is the right and duty of individuals to experiment. The
fact is, Morris was at once a practical craftsman and an idealist. In
practical affairs and private prejudices he could be as truculent and
wrong-headed as the rest of us; but he was always conscious of something
much more important than practical affairs and private prejudices. He
cared nothing for his own reputation and little for immediate success
because he cared for something greater. For that he cared so much that
he was able to forgive the quarrels and absurdities of the Hammersmith
Socialists and to laugh even at his own vehemence.

FOOTNOTE:

[15] "William Morris." By A. Clutton Brock. (Williams and Norgate: Home
University Library, 1s. net.)




PERSIAN MINIATURES[16]


[Sidenote: _Burlington Magazine May 1914_]

Very slowly it is becoming possible to construct a history of Persian
painting. Until quite lately all attempts were frustrated by what is
sure to frustrate the attempts of the first historians of any "school"
or "slope," or, for that matter, of any subject whatever--a false point
of departure. So long as it was supposed that Behzad was the first
mature master of Persian painting, Persian art-historians were as
inevitably out in their conjectures as were the people who used to
believe that Raphael was what they would have called "the _fons et
origo_" of European painting.

We are now acquainted, if not familiar, with Persian paintings of the
thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, with the Mongol and with a
pre-Mongol school--for it seems imprudent to give the name Mongol to
works that can be assigned to a date earlier than 1258 (the year of the
eponymous establishment), especially as they differ profoundly from the
recognized Mongol type. We know that the pre-Mongol school was the heir
of a great decorative tradition; and we have good reasons for believing
that this tradition was based on Sassanian, Sung, and Byzantine art. We
are therefore more or less in the position of people who should be
acquainted with the work of Cimabue, Giotto, and Duccio, though knowing
very little of Byzantine art and its primitive developments in the West.

Of this early period--Mongol and pre-Mongol--we do not yet possess many
examples; but the student who turns to the _Burlington Magazine_ for
July and August 1913 will see reproductions from a superb manuscript of
the late thirteenth century, Mr. Pierpont Morgan's "Manafi-i-Heiwan,"
and any one who has the good fortune to know M. Claude Anet or M.
Vignier can probably be put in the way of seeing some originals.
He will discover in the work of this early period two distinct
schools: one--of which the running ibexes in the "Manafi-i-Heiwan"
is an example--obviously related to Sung; the other--of which
the "Kalila and Dimna" miniatures[17] (dated 1236), and the
elephants from the "Manafi-i-Heiwan" (1295 _circa_) may be taken
as illustrations--reminding us rather of Sassanian art. Exquisite
perfection of line is the dominant characteristic of the first school;
in the second, we find a broader treatment, a more splendid disposition
of masses, and a more monumental design than in any other known school
of Persian painting. It is amongst the works of these thirteenth-century
painters that we must look for the discovered masterpieces of Persian
art.

In our present state of ignorance we may call this the great age. It is
the familiar age of fine Rhages pottery; and to compare the beautiful
drawing on the twelfth-and thirteenth-century pots with the miniatures
of this period is to let a flood of light on to the study of both. Mr.
Kevorkian has, or had, a wonderful painting from "The History of the
Kalifs" by Tabari (about 1200), the figures of which might have walked
straight out of a Rhages bowl into which they had walked some fifty
years earlier direct from Western China. Yet, admirable as this
thirteenth century is, I do not believe that it is in fact the supreme
age of Persian painting. Certainly it is not the primitive age. This is
an art that comes out of a long tradition. And just as we have already
discovered pottery earlier than and surpassing that of the thirteenth
century, so I hope and believe we shall yet see primitive Persian
paintings superior to anything that the late pre-Mongol and Mongol
period can show. For the present we can only say that the works of this
period are not much inferior to the greatest that the genius of any race
or age has created.

In 1335 begins what is known as the Timourid age--the age beloved above
all others by discerning connoisseurs--and it is tempting to assign to
this famous period the illustrations in a manuscript belonging to Mr.
Herramaneck, now in the possession of Mr. Arthur Ruck, from which are
drawn the paintings reproduced on Plate I. This temptation is
strengthened by the fact that the manuscript is said to be dated 1398;
yet it is a temptation to which I am unwilling to yield. Rather, I
incline to think that these are the work of an early contemporary of
Behzad, by whom they are not influenced, and that they belong,
therefore, to that interesting period of transition which lies between
the Timourids of the fifteenth and the Sefevaeans of the sixteenth
century. If we turn to the _Burlington Magazine_ for October 1912, we
can compare our Plate I, a, with two paintings, one in M. Claude Anet's
collection dating from the fourteenth century, the other from M.
Meyer-Riefstahl's belonging to the fifteenth. All have Mongol
affinities: but in M. Anet's picture, though the rather finicking and
academic drawing of the tree shows that already under the early
Timourids the full Persian style was developed, there are yet to be
found traces of a monumental design that had almost disappeared by the
end of the fifteenth century.

The work here illustrated is too "descriptive" and not sufficiently
"monumental" to be assigned to the Timourid age, and so I give it to the
late fifteenth century, to those delicious years when the old tradition,
though weakened, had not been smothered under the scenic delicacies
brought into fashion by Behzad. If the Timourid age is to be dubbed the
Persian _quattrocento_, Mr. Ruck's man will pass muster as the
counterpart of some artist older than Raphael, who worked independently
of the young prodigy unaffected by his ultimately disastrous inventions.

From an album, also in the possession of Mr. Arthur Ruck, comes a
drawing signed by Behzad and reproduced on Plate II, c. On the
genuineness of the signature I cannot pretend to an opinion, but there
seem to be no solid grounds for disputing it. The work itself is
characteristic enough. It is accomplished and tasteful; it is also thin
in quality and the forms are in

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