Familiar Studies of Men and Books
by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #425 · 563,914 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Familiar Studies of Men and Books
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release date: February 1, 1996 [eBook #425]
Most recently updated: February 12, 2013
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/425
Credits: Transcribed from the 1896 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS ***
Transcribed from the 1896 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
FAMILIAR STUDIES
OF
MEN AND BOOKS
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
_ELEVENTH EDITION_
* * * * *
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICADILLY
1896
* * * * *
TO
THOMAS STEVENSON
CIVIL ENGINEER
BY WHOSE DEVICES THE GREAT SEA LIGHTS IN EVERY QUARTER
OF THE WORLD NOW SHINE MORE BRIGHTLY
THIS VOLUME IS IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE
DEDICATED BY HIS SON
THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
BY WAY OF CRITICISM.
THESE studies are collected from the monthly press. One appeared in the
_New Quarterly_, one in _Macmillan’s_, and the rest in the _Cornhill
Magazine_. To the _Cornhill_ I owe a double debt of thanks; first, that
I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the
very best of editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me to
republish so considerable an amount of copy.
These nine worthies have been brought together from many different ages
and countries. Not the most erudite of men could be perfectly prepared
to deal with so many and such various sides of human life and manners.
To pass a true judgment upon Knox and Burns implies a grasp upon the very
deepest strain of thought in Scotland,—a country far more essentially
different from England than many parts of America; for, in a sense, the
first of these men re-created Scotland, and the second is its most
essentially national production. To treat fitly of Hugo and Villon would
involve yet wider knowledge, not only of a country foreign to the author
by race, history, and religion, but of the growth and liberties of art.
Of the two Americans, Whitman and Thoreau, each is the type of something
not so much realised as widely sought after among the late generations of
their countrymen; and to see them clearly in a nice relation to the
society that brought them forth, an author would require a large habit of
life among modern Americans. As for Yoshida, I have already disclaimed
responsibility; it was but my hand that held the pen.
In truth, these are but the readings of a literary vagrant. One book led
to another, one study to another. The first was published with
trepidation. Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with
greater confidence. So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our
generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial
commission through the ages; and, having once escaped the perils of the
Freemans and the Furnivalls, sets himself up to right the wrongs of
universal history and criticism. Now, it is one thing to write with
enjoyment on a subject while the story is hot in your mind from recent
reading, coloured with recent prejudice; and it is quite another business
to put these writings coldly forth again in a bound volume. We are most
of us attached to our opinions; that is one of the “natural affections”
of which we hear so much in youth; but few of us are altogether free from
paralysing doubts and scruples. For my part, I have a small idea of the
degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem
with error. One and all were written with genuine interest in the
subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished with imperfect
knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the
disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.
Of these disadvantages a word must here be said. The writer of short
studies, having to condense in a few pages the events of a whole
lifetime, and the effect on his own mind of many various volumes, is
bound, above all things, to make that condensation logical and striking.
For the only justification of his writing at all is that he shall present
a brief, reasoned, and memorable view. By the necessity of the case, all
the more neutral circumstances are omitted from his narrative; and that
of itself, by the negative exaggeration of which I have spoken in the
text, lends to the matter in hand a certain false and specious glitter.
By the necessity of the case, again, he is forced to view his subject
throughout in a particular illumination, like a studio artifice. Like
Hales with Pepys, he must nearly break his sitter’s neck to get the
proper shadows on the portrait. It is from one side only that he has
time to represent his subject. The side selected will either be the one
most striking to himself, or the one most obscured by controversy; and in
both cases that will be the one most liable to strained and sophisticated
reading. In a biography, this and that is displayed; the hero is seen at
home, playing the flute; the different tendencies of his work come, one
after another, into notice; and thus something like a true, general
impression of the subject may at last be struck. But in the short study,
the writer, having seized his “point of view,” must keep his eye steadily
to that. He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate than truly to
characterise. The proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the
proportions of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the shadows
overcharged; the chosen expression, continually forced, may degenerate at
length into a grimace; and we have at best something of a caricature, at
worst a calumny. Hence, if they be readable at all, and hang together by
their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these brief
representations. They take so little a while to read, and yet in that
little while the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the same light
and with the same expression, that, by sheer force of repetition, that
view is imposed upon the reader. The two English masters of the style,
Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed,
had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his portraits of
mankind are felt and rendered with so much more poetic comprehension, and
he, like his favourite Ram Dass, had a fire in his belly so much more
hotly burning than the patent reading lamp by which Macaulay studied,
that it seems at first sight hardly fair to bracket them together. But
the “point of view” was imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in his
writings with an austerity not only cruel but almost stupid. They are
too often broken outright on the Procrustean bed; they are probably
always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of Macaulay is easily spied;
it will take longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle. So with all
writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that comes
before them; and the writer of short studies is bound, by the necessity
of the case, to write entirely in that spirit. What he cannot vivify he
should omit.
Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers, I hope I should
have had the courage to attempt it. But it is not possible. Short
studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is
impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for
ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been
presented. It is only possible to write another study, and then, with a
new “point of view,” would follow new perversions and perhaps a fresh
caricature. Hence, it will be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of
salt to be taken with the text; and as some words of apology, addition,
correction, or amplification fall to be said on almost every study in the
volume, it will be most simple to run them over in their order. But this
must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of shipwreck; I
trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea; and do not, by
criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and less partial
critics.
_Hugo’s Romances_.—This is an instance of the “point of view.” The five
romances studied with a different purpose might have given different
results, even with a critic so warmly interested in their favour. The
great contemporary master of wordmanship, and indeed of all literary arts
and technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner. But it is
best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often overlooked.
_Burns_.—I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp,
partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to his
amiable but imperfect book, partly because that book appears to me truly
misleading both as to the character and the genius of Burns. This seems
ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame; so good a Wordsworthian
was out of character upon that stage.
This half apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except upon a
remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary Review. The
exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I cannot now recall;
but they were to this effect—that Burns was a bad man, the impure vehicle
of fine verses; and that this was the view to which all criticism tended.
Now I knew, for my own part, that it was with the profoundest pity, but
with a growing esteem, that I studied the man’s desperate efforts to do
right; and the more I reflected, the stranger it appeared to me that any
thinking being should feel otherwise. The complete letters shed, indeed,
a light on the depths to which Burns had sunk in his character of Don
Juan, but they enhance in the same proportion the hopeless nobility of
his marrying Jean. That I ought to have stated this more noisily I now
see; but that any one should fail to see it for himself, is to me a thing
both incomprehensible and worthy of open scorn. If Burns, on the facts
dealt with in this study, is to be called a bad man, I question very much
whether either I or the writer in the Review have ever encountered what
it would be fair to call a good one. All have some fault. The fault of
each grinds down the hearts of those about him, and—let us not blink the
truth—hurries both him and them into the grave. And when we find a man
persevering indeed, in his fault, as all of us do, and openly overtaken,
as not all of us are, by its consequences, to gloss the matter over, with
too polite biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring
beacons on a perilous seaboard; but to call him bad, with a
self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one’s sleep with Heedless and
Too-bold in the arbour.
Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in many
quarters by the least attempt to state plainly, what every one well
knows, of Burns’s profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of his
marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary reasons. For,
first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privilege extended to
drunkenness. In Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above
all when compared with any “irregularity between the sexes.” The
selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so much less
immediately conspicuous in its results that our demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy
smiles apologetically on its victims. It is often said—I have heard it
with these ears—that drunkenness “may lead to vice.” Now I did not think
it at all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard; and I was
obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too frequent
vanity and meanness of his relations to women. Hence, in the eyes of
many, my study was a step towards the demonstration of Burns’s radical
badness.
But second, there is a certain class, professors of that low morality so
greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you must
never represent an act that was virtuous in itself, as attended by any
other consequences than a large family and fortune. To hint that Burns’s
marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny the moral
law. Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done; but he had presumed too
far on his strength. One after another the lights of his life went out,
and he fell from circle to circle to the dishonoured sickbed of the end.
And surely for any one that has a thing to call a soul he shines out
tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic effort to do right,
than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly Wiseman, married a
congenial spouse, and lived orderly and died reputably an old man. It is
his chief title that he refrained from “the wrong that amendeth wrong.”
But the common, trashy mind of our generation is still aghast, like the
Jews of old, at any word of an unsuccessful virtue. Job has been written
and read; the tower of Siloam fell nineteen hundred years ago; yet we
have still to desire a little Christianity, or, failing that, a little
even of that rude, old, Norse nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice
alike go unrewarded, and was yet not shaken in its faith.
_Walt Whitman_.—This is a case of a second difficulty which lies
continually before the writer of critical studies: that he has to mediate
between the author whom he loves and the public who are certainly
indifferent and frequently averse. Many articles had been written on
this notable man. One after another had leaned, in my eyes, either to
praise or blame unduly. In the last case, they helped to blindfold our
fastidious public to an inspiring writer; in the other, by an excess of
unadulterated praise, they moved the more candid to revolt. I was here
on the horns of a dilemma; and between these horns I squeezed myself with
perhaps some loss to the substance of the paper. Seeing so much in
Whitman that was merely ridiculous, as well as so much more that was
unsurpassed in force and fitness,—seeing the true prophet doubled, as I
thought, in places with the Bull in a China Shop,—it appeared best to
steer a middle course, and to laugh with the scorners when I thought they
had any excuse, while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers over
what is imperishably good, lovely, human, or divine, in his extraordinary
poems. That was perhaps the right road; yet I cannot help feeling that
in this attempt to trim my sails between an author whom I love and honour
and a public too averse to recognise his merit, I have been led into a
tone unbecoming from one of my stature to one of Whitman’s. But the good
and the great man will go on his way not vexed with my little shafts of
merriment. He, first of any one, will understand how, in the attempt to
explain him credibly to Mrs. Grundy, I have been led into certain airs of
the man of the world, which are merely ridiculous in me, and were not
intentionally discourteous to himself. But there is a worse side to the
question; for in my eagerness to be all things to all men, I am afraid I
may have sinned against proportion. It will be enough to say here that
Whitman’s faults are few and unimportant when they are set beside his
surprising merits. I had written another paper full of gratitude for the
help that had been given me in my life, full of enthusiasm for the
intrinsic merit of the poems, and conceived in the noisiest extreme of
youthful eloquence. The present study was a rifacimento. From it, with
the design already mentioned, and in a fit of horror at my old excess,
the big words and emphatic passages were ruthlessly excised. But this
sort of prudence is frequently its own punishment; along with the
exaggeration, some of the truth is sacrificed; and the result is cold,
constrained, and grudging. In short, I might almost everywhere have
spoken more strongly than I did.
_Thoreau_.—Here is an admirable instance of the “point of view” forced
throughout, and of too earnest reflection on imperfect facts. Upon me
this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm.
I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but
his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer. Still it
was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance; I took him on his own
explicit terms; and when I learned details of his life, they were, by the
nature of the case and my own _parti-pris_, read even with a certain
violence in terms of his writings. There could scarce be a perversion
more justifiable than that; yet it was still a perversion. The study
indeed, raised so much ire in the breast of Dr. Japp (H. A. Page),
Thoreau’s sincere and learned disciple, that had either of us been men, I
please myself with thinking, of less temper and justice, the difference
might have made us enemies instead of making us friends. To him who knew
the man from the inside, many of my statements sounded like inversions
made on purpose; and yet when we came to talk of them together, and he
had understood how I was looking at the man through the books, while he
had long since learned to read the books through the man, I believe he
understood the spirit in which I had been led astray.
On two most important points, Dr. Japp added to my knowledge, and with
the same blow fairly demolished that part of my criticism. First, if
Thoreau were content to dwell by Walden Pond, it was not merely with
designs of self-improvement, but to serve mankind in the highest sense.
Hither came the fleeing slave; thence was he despatched along the road to
freedom. That shanty in the woods was a station in the great Underground
Railroad; that adroit and philosophic solitary was an ardent worker, soul
and body, in that so much more than honourable movement, which, if
atonement were possible for nations, should have gone far to wipe away
the guilt of slavery. But in history sin always meets with condign
punishment; the generation passes, the offence remains, and the innocent
must suffer. No underground railroad could atone for slavery, even as no
bills in Parliament can redeem the ancient wrongs of Ireland. But here
at least is a new light shed on the Walden episode.
Second, it appears, and the point is capital, that Thoreau was once
fairly and manfully in love, and, with perhaps too much aping of the
angel, relinquished the woman to his brother. Even though the brother
were like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the
woman. But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the
“rarefied and freezing air” in which I complained that he had taught
himself to breathe. Reading the man through the books, I took his
professions in good faith. He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking
to make a dupe of himself, wresting philosophy to the needs of his own
sorrow. But in the light of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so
cold, are seen to be alive with feeling. What appeared to be a lack of
interest in the philosopher turns out to have been a touching insincerity
of the man to his own heart; and that fine-spun airy theory of
friendship, so devoid, as I complained, of any quality of flesh and
blood, a mere anodyne to lull his pains. The most temperate of living
critics once marked a passage of my own with a cross and the words, “This
seems nonsense.” It not only seemed; it was so. It was a private
bravado of my own, which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits,
that I had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting
it down as a contribution to the theory of life. So with the more icy
parts of this philosophy of Thoreau’s. He was affecting the Spartanism
he had not; and the old sentimental wound still bled afresh, while he
deceived himself with reasons.
Thoreau’s theory, in short, was one thing and himself another: of the
first, the reader will find what I believe to be a pretty faithful
statement and a fairly just criticism in the study; of the second he will
find but a contorted shadow. So much of the man as fitted nicely with
his doctrines, in the photographer’s phrase, came out. But that large
part which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or sought no
formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even looked askance, is wanting
in my study, as it was wanting in the guide I followed. In some ways a
less serious writer, in all ways a nobler man, the true Thoreau still
remains to be depicted.
_Villon_.—I am tempted to regret that I ever wrote on this subject, not
merely because the paper strikes me as too picturesque by half, but
because I regarded Villon as a bad fellow. Others still think well of
him, and can find beautiful and human traits where I saw nothing but
artistic evil; and by the principle of the art, those should have written
of the man, and not I. Where you see no good, silence is the best.
Though this penitence comes too late, it may be well, at least, to give
it expression.
The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of France. Fat
Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the
infinitely greater Flaubert; and, while similar in ugliness, still
surpasses them in native power. The old author, breaking with an _éclat
de voix_, out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched on his
own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking impression of
reality. Even if that were not worth doing at all, it would be worth
doing as well as he has done it; for the pleasure we take in the author’s
skill repays us, or at least reconciles us to the baseness of his
attitude. Fat Peg (_La Grosse Margot_) is typical of much; it is a piece
of experience that has nowhere else been rendered into literature; and a
kind of gratitude for the author’s plainness mingles, as we read, with
the nausea proper to the business. I shall quote here a verse of an old
students’ song, worth laying side by side with Villon’s startling
ballade. This singer, also, had an unworthy mistress, but he did not
choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it is thus, with both wit and
pathos, that he laments her fall:—
Nunc plango florem
Ætatis teneræ
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes
Removes ostio,
Munera dantes
Foves cubiculo,
Illos abire præcipis
A quibus nihil accipis,
Cæcos claudosque recipis,
Viros illustres decipis
Cum melle venenosa. {0}
But our illustrious writer of ballades it was unnecessary to deceive; it
was the flight of beauty alone, not that of honesty or honour, that he
lamented in his song; and the nameless mediæval vagabond has the best of
the comparison.
There is now a Villon Society in England; and Mr. John Payne has
translated him entirely into English, a task of unusual difficulty. I
regret to find that Mr. Payne and I are not always at one as to the
author’s meaning; in such cases I am bound to suppose that he is in the
right, although the weakness of the flesh withholds me from anything
beyond a formal submission. He is now upon a larger venture, promising
us at last that complete Arabian Nights to which we have all so long
looked forward.
_Charles of Orleans_.—Perhaps I have done scanty justice to the charm of
the old Duke’s verses, and certainly he is too much treated as a fool.
The period is not sufficiently remembered. What that period was, to what
a blank of imbecility the human mind had fallen, can only be known to
those who have waded in the chronicles. Excepting Comines and La Salle
and Villon, I have read no author who did not appal me by his torpor; and
even the trial of Joan of Arc, conducted as it was by chosen clerks,
bears witness to a dreary, sterile folly,—a twilight of the mind peopled
with childish phantoms. In relation to his contemporaries, Charles seems
quite a lively character.
It remains for me to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Henry Pyne, who,
immediately on the appearance of the study, sent me his edition of the
Debate between the Heralds: a courtesy from the expert to the amateur
only too uncommon in these days.
_Knox_.—Knox, the second in order of interest among the reformers, lies
dead and buried in the works of the learned and unreadable M‘Crie. It
remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again
and breathing, in a human book. With the best intentions in the world, I
have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors,
to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer from the world; I
have touched him in my turn with that “mace of death,” which Carlyle has
attributed to Dryasdust; and my two dull papers are, in the matter of
dulness, worthy additions to the labours of M‘Crie. Yet I believe they
are worth reprinting in the interest of the next biographer of Knox. I
trust his book may be a masterpiece; and I indulge the hope that my two
studies may lend him a hint or perhaps spare him a delay in its
composition.
Of the _Pepys_ I can say nothing; for it has been too recently through my
hands; and I still retain some of the heat of composition. Yet it may
serve as a text for the last remark I have to offer. To Pepys I think I
have been amply just; to the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles
of Orleans, even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too
grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner. It is not easy to
see why I should have been most liberal to the man of least pretensions.
Perhaps some cowardice withheld me from the proper warmth of tone;
perhaps it is easier to be just to those nearer us in rank of mind. Such
at least is the fact, which other critics may explain. For these were
all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I did not love
the men, my love was the greater to their books. I had read them and
lived with them; for months they were continually in my thoughts; I
seemed to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them in their griefs;
and behold, when I came to write of them, my tone was sometimes hardly
courteous and seldom wholly just.
R. L. S.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
VICTOR HUGO’S ROMANCES 1
SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS 38
WALT WHITMAN 91
HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 129
YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO 172
FRANÇOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSE-BREAKER 192
CHARLES OF ORLEANS 236
SAMUEL PEPYS 290
JOHN KNOX AND WOMEN 328
VICTOR HUGO’S ROMANCES.
Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera
un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous.
C’est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique,
réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans
Homère.—Victor Hugo on _Quentin Durward_.
VICTOR HUGO’S romances occupy an important position in the history of
literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been
carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite
in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things
have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it is
only in the last romance of all, _Quatre Vingt Treize_, that this
culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who
are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more justly
to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to advance as it
indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only the measure of
what is past. The movement is not arrested. That significant something
by which the work of such a man differs from that of his predecessors,
goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and more articulate and
cognisable. The same principle of growth that carried his first book
beyond the books of previous writers, carries his last book beyond his
first. And just as the most imbecile production of any literary age
gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we have sought long and
vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be the very weakest of an
author’s books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at
last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them—of that spinal
marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something
organic and rational. This is what has been done by _Quatre Vingt
Treize_ for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and, through them, for a
whole division of modern literature. We have here the legitimate
continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and hence, so far,
its explanation. When many lines diverge from each other in direction so
slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have only to produce them
to make the chaos plain: this is continually so in literary history; and
we shall best understand the importance of Victor Hugo’s romances if we
think of them as some such prolongation of one of the main lines of
literary tendency.
* * * * *
When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of
genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honour as a master in
the art—I mean Henry Fielding—we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the first
moment, to state the difference that there is between these two.
Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the tiller
of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and Scott
often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and
finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the great
Scotchman. With all these points of resemblance between the men, it is
astonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, that
the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in
the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly
in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it
could utilise. The difference between these two men marks a great
enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an
extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is a
trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely
comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the
technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps
been explained with any clearness.
To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of
conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based. The
purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with
the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the
fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental
opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure
by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real
things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sort
of realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of
which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes;
this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We
have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted to
paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, and
plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done
in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real
sand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices;
what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we do actually see a
woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval,
we do actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all these
things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into any
artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal with;
and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations in time
and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards those of
painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a moment, but
to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the stage, almost
as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great restriction
is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his
actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain significant
dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of emotion, these
are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that,
with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier and the conductor
of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of
sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark,
and do not come under the vivifying touch of his genius. When we turn to
romance, we find this no longer. Here nothing is reproduced to our
senses directly. Not only the main conception of the work, but the
scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is
brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man’s
mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words.
With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have described, there
is for art a clear gain of liberty and largeness of competence. Thus,
painting, in which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a flat
board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their solidity is
preserved. It is by giving up these identities that art gains true
strength. And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage.
Continuous narration is the flat board on to which the novelist throws
everything. And from this there results for him a great loss of
vividness, but a great compensating gain in his power over the subject;
so that he can now subordinate one thing to another in importance, and
introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before
impossible. He can render just as easily the flourish of trumpets before
a victorious emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual
decay of forty years of a man’s life and the gesture of a passionate
moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he looks at it from one
point of view—equally able, if he looks at it from another point of
view—to reproduce a colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a
physical action. He can show his readers, behind and around the
personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the
continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will
turn with it men’s lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon;
the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the
salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat
board—all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the texture of
continuous intelligent narration.
This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of
the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become
suddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand,
although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic
in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is
not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a
regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with
regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard
the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, that
Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel
possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develop
them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them.
The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself and
sought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively
human interest. As for landscape, he was content to underline stage
directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire into
a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is
curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five,
and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of
soldiers into his hero’s way. It is most really important, however, to
remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of
character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent
introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding
tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of
his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed
on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force
in a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown
to him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the
spirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally
and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott’s instinct, the
instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him otherwise;
and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a
comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manœuvre,
and great hills pile themselves upon each other’s shoulders. Fielding’s
characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary
will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense of the subtle influences
that moderate and qualify a man’s personality; that personality is no
longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place
in the constitution of things.
It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions first
exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history. For
art precedes philosophy and even science. People must have noticed
things and interested themselves in them before they begin to debate upon
their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is the pioneer
of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those
irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that
we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner; and after the
facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have had time to
settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day there will be found
the man of science to stand up and give the explanation. Scott took an
interest in many things in which Fielding took none; and for this reason,
and no other, he introduced them into his romances. If he had been told
what would be the nature of the movement that he was so lightly
initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a little
scandalised. At the time when he wrote, the real drift of this new
manner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent; and, even now,
it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we are enabled
to form any proper judgment in the matter. These books are not only
descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley novels, but it is in
them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition of Scott
carried farther that we shall find Scott himself, in so far as regards
his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in his own
spirit, instead of tamely followed. We have here, as I said before, a
line of literary tendency produced, and by this production definitely
separated from others. When we come to Hugo, we see that the deviation,
which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott and
Fielding, is indeed such a great gulph in thought and sentiment as only
successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural that one of
the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in
self-consciousness. Both men follow the same road; but where the one
went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation and
forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious than Scott;
and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. The passage at
the head of these pages shows how organically he had understood the
nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of the five great
romances (which alone I purpose here to examine), two deliberate designs:
one artistic, the other consciously ethical and intellectual. This is a
man living in a different world from Scott, who professes sturdily (in
one of his introductions) that he does not believe in novels having any
moral influence at all; but still Hugo is too much of an artist to let
himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the truth is that the artistic
result seems, in at least one great instance, to have very little
connection with the other, or directly ethical result.
The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by any
really powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and
refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it and yet something as
simple as nature. These two propositions may seem mutually destructive,
but they are so only in appearance. The fact is that art is working far
ahead of language as well as of science, realising for us, by all manner
of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no
direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for
the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the
necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that
often hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us in
thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able
to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been
sufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the case
of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it has left
with us; and it is only because language is the medium of romance, that
we are prevented from seeing that the two cases are the same. It is not
that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression left with
us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after its own
kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions of our
philosophical speech.
It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this something
which it is the function of that form of art to create, this epical
value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to throw
into relief, in the present study. It is thus, I believe, that we shall
see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his
predecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task of
realising, in the language of romance, much of the involution of our
complicated lives.
This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in every
so-called novel. The great majority are not works of art in anything but
a very secondary signification. One might almost number on one’s fingers
the works in which such a supreme artistic intention has been in any way
superior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of prose
romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount. At
the present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works it would
have been equally possible to accomplish our present design: and that man
is Hawthorne. There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose, about
some at least of Hawthorne’s romances, that impresses itself on the most
indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and weaknesses of the man
served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression of his
works. There is nothing of this kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains to
it, is indeed unity out of multitude; and it is the wonderful power of
subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure of
his talent. No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this,
could give a just conception of the greatness of this power. It must be
felt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the present
essay is to recall to the reader the more general features of each of the
five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will permit, and
rather as a suggestion than anything more complete.
* * * * *
The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of _Notre
Dame de Paris_ was (he tells us) to “denounce” the external fatality that
hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition. To
speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do with
the artistic conception; moreover it is very questionably handled, while
the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate success.
Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever before our eyes
the city cut into three by the two arms of the river, the boat-shaped
island “moored” by five bridges to the different shores, and the two
unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration of palaces
and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of admirable
description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to conclude
from this, that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so: we
forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different
layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been
accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the “Gothic profile”
of the city, of the “surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and
belfries,” and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And
throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far
greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us from
the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and already
in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to that
central building by character after character. It is purely an effect of
mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and stand out
above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit of the
Scott-tourists to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost offended at
finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a corner. It
is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect that
permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency and
strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above all,
this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic than
their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen them
clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over the
church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there is
that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the grotesque,
and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionate contortion and
horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art. Esmeralda is somewhat
an exception; she and the goat traverse the story like two children who
have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the book is when these
two share with the two other leading characters, Dom Claude and
Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here that we
touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the romance: are
they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding, illustrative of the
Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven deadly sins? What is
Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the whole book but the
reanimation of Gothic art?
It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances,
there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we have come
almost to identify with the author’s manner. Yet even here we are
distressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief and
alienate the sympathies. The scene of the _in pace_, for example, in
spite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny
novelist. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I should
as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. And again the following
two sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpass what
it has ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine (vol. ii.
p. 180): “Il souffrait tant que par instants il s’arrachait des poignées
de cheveux, _pour voir s’ils ne blanchissaient pas_.” And, p. 181: “Ses
pensées étaient si insupportables qu’il prenait sa tête à deux mains et
tâchait de l’arracher de ses épaules _pour la briser sur le pavé_.”
One other fault, before we pass on. In spite of the horror and misery
that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual
melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of
brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is
the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in _Notre
Dame_, the whole story of Esmeralda’s passion for the worthless archer is
unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her last hiding-place,
herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this sordid hero who
has long since forgotten her—well, that is just one of those things that
readers will not forgive; they do not like it, and they are quite right;
life is hard enough for poor mortals, without having it indefinitely
embittered for them by bad art.
* * * * *
We look in vain for any similar blemish in _Les Misérables_. Here, on
the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary
restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest and
most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of this
great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be—for such awakenings are
unpleasant—to the great cost of this society that we enjoy and profit by,
to the labour and sweat of those who support the litter, civilisation, in
which we ourselves are so smoothly carried forward. People are all glad
to shut their eyes; and it gives them a very simple pleasure when they
can forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices, to be
once roughly just in the general; that the bread that we eat, and the
quiet of the family, and all that embellishes life and makes it worth
having, have to be purchased by death—by the deaths of animals, and the
deaths of men wearied out with labour, and the deaths of those criminals
called tyrants and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those
revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something of all this that
Victor Hugo wishes to open men’s eyes in _Les Misérables_; and this moral
lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the artistic effect.
The deadly weight of civilisation to those who are below presses sensibly
on our shoulders as we read. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us
as we find Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most
serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting Galileo into
prison, even crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense
of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for
the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad
between its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all machinery,
human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps
horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean
Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognises the face of the
detective; as when the lantern of the patrol flashes suddenly through the
darkness of the sewer; or as when the fugitive comes forth at last at
evening, by the quiet riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting
stolidly for vice and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The
whole book is full of oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the
great cause of oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand,
the prejudices of Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the
barricade, and the throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then
we have the admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who
had made a religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when
he learned that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just
creation, over which the reader will do well to ponder.
With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light
and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable
things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of
the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can
forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water, stands
in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster behind “lui
faisait un peu l’effet d’être le Père éternel?” The pathos of the
forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of the Santa
Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is nothing in
Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of Cosette and
Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to
Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our profound
disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are few books
in the world that can be compared with it. There is as much calm and
serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic coarsenesses that
disfigured _Notre Dame_ are no longer present. There is certainly much
that is painfully improbable; and again, the story itself is a little too
well constructed; it produces on us the effect of a puzzle, and we grow
incredulous as we find that every character fits again and again into the
plot, and is, like the child’s cube, serviceable on six faces; things are
not so well arranged in life as all that comes to. Some of the
digressions, also, seem out of place, and do nothing but interrupt and
irritate. But when all is said, the book remains of masterly conception
and of masterly development, full of pathos, full of truth, full of a
high eloquence.
* * * * *
Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in the first
two members of the series, it remained for _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_
to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of external
force that is brought against him. And here once more the artistic
effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are, indeed,
one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers a type
of human industry in the midst of the vague “diffusion of forces into the
illimitable,” and the visionary development of “wasted labour” in the
sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever thrown into
such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds that come
wanderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at once the
note of his pre-eminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef with his
indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the
clamour of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out sharply
against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolation is not to
be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for example; indeed,
no two books could be more instructive to set side by side than _Les
Travailleurs_ and this other of the old days before art had learnt to
occupy itself with what lies outside of human will. Crusoe was one sole
centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead and utterly
unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel with Gilliat; we
feel that he is opposed by a “dark coalition of forces,” that an “immense
animosity” surrounds him; we are the witnesses of the terrible warfare
that he wages with “the silent inclemency of phenomena going their own
way, and the great general law, implacable and passive:” “a conspiracy of
the indifferency of things” is against him. There is not one interest on
the reef, but two. Just as we recognise Gilliat for the hero, we
recognise, as implied by this indifferency of things, this direction of
forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet another character who
may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and the two face up to
one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the storm, they
fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor;—a victor, however,
who has still to encounter the octopus. I need say nothing of the
gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; it will be enough to
remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab when he is himself
assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its way, is the last touch
to the inner significance of the book; here, indeed, is the true position
of man in the universe.
But in _Les Travailleurs_, with all its strength, with all its eloquence,
with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, we cannot conceal
from ourselves that there is a thread of something that will not bear
calm scrutiny. There is much that is disquieting about the storm,
admirably as it begins. I am very doubtful whether it would be possible
to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any amount of
breakwater and broken rock. I do not understand the way in which the
waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose way of
speaking, and pass on. And lastly, how does it happen that the sea was
quite calm next day? Is this great hurricane a piece of scene-painting
after all? And when we have forgiven Gilliat’s prodigies of strength
(although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in the Vicomte de
Bragelonne than is quite desirable), what is to be said to his suicide,
and how are we to condemn in adequate terms that unprincipled avidity
after effect, which tells us that the sloop disappeared over the horizon,
and the head under the water, at one and the same moment? Monsieur Hugo
may say what he will, but we know better; we know very well that they did
not; a thing like that raises up a despairing spirit of opposition in a
man’s readers; they give him the lie fiercely, as they read. Lastly, we
have here already some beginning of that curious series of English
blunders, that makes us wonder if there are neither proof-sheets nor
judicious friends in the whole of France, and affects us sometimes with a
sickening uneasiness as to what may be our own exploits when we touch
upon foreign countries and foreign tongues. It is here that we shall
find the famous “first of the fourth,” and many English words that may be
comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It is here that we learn that “laird”
in Scotland is the same title as “lord” in England. Here, also, is an
account of a Highland soldier’s equipment, which we recommend to the
lovers of genuine fun.
* * * * *
In_ L’Homme qui Rit_, it was Hugo’s object to ‘denounce’ (as he would say
himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England; and
this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the two
last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. The
repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at
the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as it
deserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that,
here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The
constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing
could be more happily imagined, as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant
mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and
installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a
great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which
all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and
tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of the
pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible
laughter, stamped for ever “by order of the king” upon the face of this
strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to
the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: “If I am
vile, is it not your system that has made me so?” This ghastly laughter
gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running
through the web of this unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl Dea,
for the monster. It is a most benignant providence that thus
harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one of those
compensations, one of those afterthoughts of a relenting destiny, that
reconcile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world; the
atmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this pathetic love;
it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full moon
over the night of some foul and feverish city.
There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and particular
than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that
the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and
his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as much
an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an abuse
of conventional conversation, such as may be quite pardonable in the
drama where needs must, but is without excuse in the romance. Lastly, I
suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points of this not
immaculate novel; and if so, it will be best to distinguish at once. The
large family of English blunders, to which we have alluded already in
speaking of _Les Travailleurs_, are of a sort that is really indifferent
in art. If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some seaport of
Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Tim-Jack to be a likely nickname for an
English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or Scott, for that
matter, be guilty of “figments enough to confuse the march of a whole
history—anachronisms enough to overset all, chronology,” {27} the life of
their creations, the artistic truth and accuracy of their work, is not so
much as compromised. But when we come upon a passage like the sinking of
the “Ourque” in this romance, we can do nothing but cover our face with
our hands: the conscientious reader feels a sort of disgrace in the very
reading. For such artistic falsehoods, springing from what I have called
already an unprincipled avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be
exaggerated; and above all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor
Hugo. We cannot forgive in him what we might have passed over in a
third-rate sensation novelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and
nautical affairs, he must have known very well that vessels do not go
down as he makes the “Ourque” go down; he must have known that such a
liberty with fact was against the laws of the game, and incompatible with
all appearance of sincerity in conception or workmanship.
* * * * *
In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure
from the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, one
would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any
theory upon what was perhaps purely accidental. The appearance of
_Quatre Vingt Treize_ has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like a
doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady,
we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is
at an end. It is a novel built upon “a sort of enigma,” which was at
that date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented by
Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to
Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement
or stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this:
“Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill
the sheep?” This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the
end. And something in the same way, although one character, or one set
of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our
attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of
these temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn. We soon
come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what we
really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us.
We know how history continues through century after century; how this
king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole generation,
and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if we had reached
any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in the men, but in
the country that they loved or hated, benefited or injured. And so it is
here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we regard them no more than
the lost armies of which we find the cold statistics in military annals;
what we regard is what remains behind; it is the principle that put these
men where they were, that filled them for a while with heroic
inspiration, and has the power, now that they are fallen, to inspire
others with the same courage. The interest of the novel centres about
revolutionary France: just as the plot is an abstract judicial
difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force. And this has been
done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold and cumbersome
machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward realism, dealing
only with the objective materials of art, and dealing with them so
masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come before us, and
move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men and maidens of
customary romance.
The episode of the mother and children in _Quatre Vingt Treize_ is equal
to anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in the
second volume, for instance, called “_Sein guéri_, _cœur saignant_,” that
is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be more
delightful than the humours of the three children on the day before the
assault. The passage on La Vendée is really great, and the scenes in
Paris have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, of
pregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way of
praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also,
somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over-employment of
conventional dialogue than in _L’Homme qui Rit_; and much that should
have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he
has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his
characters. We should like to know what becomes of the main body of the
troop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in which
the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a woman
and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at one
place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we can summon up
to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they ceased to
steer the corvette while the gun was loose? Of the chapter in which
Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less said the
better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have been
swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac’s harangue.
Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable
workmanship that suggest the epithet “statuesque” by their clear and
trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin
unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears
with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to the
place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he is going
to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the stage
mechanism. I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot conceive any
disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated.
* * * * *
Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the five
great novels.
Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a certain
appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it to any
practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves in it. It
has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that Victor Hugo
occupies a high place among those few. He has always a perfect command
over his stories; and we see that they are constructed with a high regard
to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation is informed with moral
significance and grandeur. Of no other man can the same thing be said in
the same degree. His romances are not to be confused with “the novel
with a purpose” as familiar to the English reader: this is generally the
model of incompetence; and we see the moral clumsily forced into every
hole and corner of the story, or thrown externally over it like a carpet
over a railing. Now the moral significance, with Hugo, is of the essence
of the romance; it is the organising principle. If you could somehow
despoil _Les Misérables or Les Travailleurs_ of their distinctive lesson,
you would find that the story had lost its interest and the book was
dead.
Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art
speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. If
you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken,
you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes of
story-telling have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now the two
lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley novels, and
all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake? Sometimes they
are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man against the
sea and sky, as in _Les Travailleurs_; sometimes, as in _Les Misérables_,
they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in the epic of
oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in _Quatre Vingt
Treize_. There is no hero in _Notre Dame_: in _Les Misérables_ it is an
old man: in _L’Homme qui Rit_ it is a monster: in _Quatre Vingt Treize_
it is the Revolution. Those elements that only began to show themselves
timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Walter Scott, have usurped ever
more and more of the canvas; until we find the whole interest of one of
Hugo’s romances centring around matter that Fielding would have banished
from his altogether, as being out of the field of fiction. So we have
elemental forces occupying nearly as large a place, playing (so to speak)
nearly as important a _rôle_, as the man, Gilliat, who opposes and
overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of a nation put upon the stage
with as much vividness as ever before the fortunes of a village maiden or
a lost heir; and the forces that oppose and corrupt a principle holding
the attention quite as strongly as the wicked barons or dishonest
attorneys of the past. Hence those individual interests that were
supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott, stood out over everything else
and formed as it were the spine of the story, figure here only as one set
of interests among many sets, one force among many forces, one thing to
be treated out of a whole world of things equally vivid and important.
So that, for Hugo, man is no longer an isolated spirit without antecedent
or relation here below, but a being involved in the action and reaction
of natural forces, himself a centre of such action and reaction or an
unit in a great multitude, chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors
and aspirations, and, in all seriousness, blown about by every wind of
doctrine. This is a long way that we have travelled: between such work
and the work of Fielding is there not, indeed, a great gulph in thought
and sentiment?
Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of life, and that
portion one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided; and,
besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personal
interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness
of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the
average man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his place in
nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligently the
responsibilities of his place in society. And in all this generalisation
of interest, we never miss those small humanities that are at the
opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the intellect
that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another sentiment
for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into Cosette’s sabot,
that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her dress in the spring
wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of the laughing man.
This, then, is the last praise that we can award to these romances. The
author has shown a power of just subordination hitherto unequalled; and
as, in reaching forward to one class of effects, he has not been
forgetful or careless of the other, his work is more nearly complete
work, and his art, with all its imperfections, deals more comprehensively
with the materials of life than that of any of his otherwise more sure
and masterly predecessors.
These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and
yet they are but one façade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected
to his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat
the same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the same
unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the
romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery
iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions—an emphasis that is
somehow akin to weaknesses—strength that is a little epileptic. He
stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels
them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost
feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more heavily than
others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profit by the
privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, something that
is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them, and see
them always on the platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily,
cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat
deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have the
wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also to
recognise in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and, in
many ways, one of the greatest artists of time. If we look back, yet
once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to
the charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to what other
man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and
significant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merely
think of the amount, of equally consummate performance?
SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS
TO write with authority about another man, we must have fellow-feeling
and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise or
blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be
his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand
enter for us into the tissue of the man’s character; those to which we
are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that we
respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass a
sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume. Now,
Principal Shairp’s recent volume, although I believe no one will read it
without respect and interest, has this one capital defect—that there is
imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the critic
and the personality under criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not an
incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man. Of _Holy
Willie’s Prayer_, Principal Shairp remarks that “those who have loved
most what was best in Burns’s poetry must have regretted that it was ever
written.” To the _Jolly Beggars_, so far as my memory serves me, he
refers but once; and then only to remark on the “strange, not to say
painful,” circumstance that the same hand which wrote the _Cotter’s
Saturday Night_ should have stooped to write the _Jolly Beggars_. The
_Saturday Night_ may or may not be an admirable poem; but its
significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first
appears, when it is set beside the _Jolly Beggars_. To take a man’s work
piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to
avoid, and not to perform, the critic’s duty. The same defect is
displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken,
apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that
Burns, _teres atque rotundus_—a burly figure in literature, as, from our
present vantage of time, we have begun to see him. This, on the other
hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary clergyman, whom
we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but orderly and
orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt and
disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot _protégé_, and solacing
himself with the explanation that the poet was “the most inconsistent of
men.” If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject,
and so paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an
excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer. Indeed, we
can only be sorry and surprised that Principal Shairp should have chosen
a theme so uncongenial. When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes
neither _Holy Willie_, nor the _Beggars_, nor the _Ordination_, nothing
is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Géronte: “Que diable
allait-il faire dans cette galère?” And every merit we find in the book,
which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with biographies of Burns,
only leads us to regret more heartily that good work should be so greatly
thrown away.
It is far from my intention to tell over again a story that has been so
often told; but there are certainly some points in the character of Burns
that will bear to be brought out, and some chapters in his life that
demand a brief rehearsal. The unity of the man’s nature, for all its
richness, has fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new
information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers. Mr. Carlyle
made an inimitable bust of the poet’s head of gold; may I not be forgiven
if my business should have more to do with the feet, which were of clay?
YOUTH.
Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in silence the
influences of his home and his father. That father, William Burnes,
after having been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, and,
like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own
hands. Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near
prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life. Chill,
backward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family,
he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature. On
his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more
result in theory than practice; and he had reflected upon many subjects
as he delved the garden. His great delight was in solid conversation; he
would leave his work to talk with the schoolmaster Murdoch; and Robert,
when he came home late at night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept
his father two hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and
vigorous talk. Nothing is more characteristic of the class in general,
and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he took to get proper
schooling for his boys, and, when that was no longer possible, the sense
and resolution with which he set himself to supply the deficiency by his
own influence. For many years he was their chief companion; he spoke
with them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men; at
night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic; he borrowed books
for them on history, science, and theology; and he felt it his duty to
supplement this last—the trait is laughably Scottish—by a dialogue of his
own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was exactly
represented. He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield herding
cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild flowers, or to sit by
her side when it thundered. Distance to strangers, deep family
tenderness, love of knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of
theology—everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds up a
popular Scotch type. If I mention the name of Andrew Fairservice, it is
only as I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with old Marshal
Loudon, to help out the reader’s comprehension by a popular but unworthy
instance of a class. Such was the influence of this good and wise man
that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours who came
into the farm at meal-time would find the whole family, father, brothers,
and sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding a book in the
other. We are surprised at the prose style of Robert; that of Gilbert
need surprise us no less; even William writes a remarkable letter for a
young man of such slender opportunities. One anecdote marks the taste of
the family. Murdoch brought _Titus Andronicus_, and, with such dominie
elocution as we may suppose, began to read it aloud before this rustic
audience; but when he had reached the passage where Tamora insults
Lavinia, with one voice and “in an agony of distress” they refused to
hear it to an end. In such a father and with such a home, Robert had
already the making of an excellent education; and what Murdoch added,
although it may not have been much in amount, was in character the very
essence of a literary training. Schools and colleges, for one great man
whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen; the strong spirit can do well
upon more scanty fare.
Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete
character—a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy
of notice; in his own phrase “panting after distinction,” and in his
brother’s “cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were richer or
of more consequence than himself:” with all this, he was emphatically of
the artist nature. Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton
church, with the only tied hair in the parish, “and his plaid, which was
of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner round his
shoulders.” Ten years later, when a married man, the father of a family,
a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in
masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great Highland
broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake. This is
the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter
students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter;
and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a
man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention and
remark. His father wrote the family name _Burnes_; Robert early adopted
the orthography _Burness_ from his cousin in the Mearns; and in his
twenty-eighth year changed it once more to _Burns_. It is plain that the
last transformation was not made without some qualm; for in addressing
his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to spelling number
two. And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the manner of his
appearance even down to the name, and little willing to follow custom.
Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in conversation. To
no other man’s have we the same conclusive testimony from different
sources and from every rank of life. It is almost a commonplace that the
best of his works was what he said in talk. Robertson the historian
“scarcely ever met any man whose conversation displayed greater vigour;”
the Duchess of Gordon declared that he “carried her off her feet;” and,
when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear
him talk. But, in these early days at least, he was determined to shine
by any means. He made himself feared in the village for his tongue. He
would crush weaker men to their faces, or even perhaps—for the statement
of Sillar is not absolute—say cutting things of his acquaintances behind
their back. At the church door, between sermons, he would parade his
religious views amid hisses. These details stamp the man. He had no
genteel timidities in the conduct of his life. He loved to force his
personality upon the world. He would please himself, and shine. Had he
lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot with the Romantics, we can
conceive him writing _Jehan_ for _Jean_, swaggering in Gautier’s red
waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public café with paradox and
gasconnade.
A leading trait throughout his whole career was his desire to be in love.
_Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut_. His affections were often enough
touched, but perhaps never engaged. He was all his life on a voyage of
discovery, but it does not appear conclusively that he ever touched the
happy isle. A man brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and
even from childhood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital
malady. Burns was formed for love; he had passion, tenderness, and a
singular bent in the direction; he could foresee, with the intuition of
an artist, what love ought to be; and he could not conceive a worthy life
without it. But he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after
every shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a strong
temperament, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and his heart had lost
the power of self-devotion before an opportunity occurred. The
circumstances of his youth doubtless counted for something in the result.
For the lads of Ayrshire, as soon as the day’s work was over and the
beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a winter
tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland to spend an hour
or two in courtship. Rule 10 of the Bachelors’ Club at Tarbolton
provides that “every man proper for a member of this Society must be a
professed lover of _one or more_ of the female sex.” The rich, as Burns
himself points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupations, but
these lads had nothing but their “cannie hour at e’en.” It was upon love
and flirtation that this rustic society was built; gallantry was the
essence of life among the Ayrshire hills as well as in the Court of
Versailles; and the days were distinguished from each other by
love-letters, meetings, tiffs, reconciliations, and expansions to the
chosen confidant, as in a comedy of Marivaux. Here was a field for a man
of Burns’s indiscriminate personal ambition, where he might pursue his
voyage of discovery in quest of true love, and enjoy temporary triumphs
by the way. He was “constantly the victim of some fair enslaver”—at
least, when it was not the other way about; and there were often
underplots and secondary fair enslavers in the background. Many—or may
we not say most?—of these affairs were entirely artificial. One, he
tells us, he began out of “a vanity of showing his parts in courtship,”
for he piqued himself on his ability at a love-letter. But, however they
began, these flames of his were fanned into a passion ere the end; and he
stands unsurpassed in his power of self-deception, and positively without
a competitor in the art, to use his own words, of “battering himself into
a warm affection,”—a debilitating and futile exercise. Once he had
worked himself into the vein, “the agitations of his mind and body” were
an astonishment to all who knew him. Such a course as this, however
pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature. He sank more
and more towards the professional Don Juan. With a leer of what the
French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of his
seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent
when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first bastard.
We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking up an
acquaintance with women: he would have conquering manners; he would bear
down upon his rustic game with the grace that comes of absolute
assurance—the Richelieu of Lochlea or Mossgiel. In yet another manner
did these quaint ways of courtship help him into fame. If he were great
as principal, he was unrivalled as confidant. He could enter into a
passion; he could counsel wary moves, being, in his own phrase, so old a
hawk; nay, he could turn a letter for some unlucky swain, or even string
a few lines of verse that should clinch the business and fetch the
hesitating fair one to the ground. Nor, perhaps, was it only his
“curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity” that recommended him for a
second in such affairs; it must have been a distinction to have the
assistance and advice of _Rab the Ranter_; and one who was in no way
formidable by himself might grow dangerous and attractive through the
fame of his associate.
I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in that rough moorland
country, poor among the poor with his seven pounds a year, looked upon
with doubt by respectable elders, but for all that the best talker, the
best letter-writer, the most famous lover and confidant, the laureate
poet, and the only man who wore his hair tied in the parish. He says he
had then as high a notion of himself as ever after; and I can well
believe it. Among the youth he walked _facile princeps_, an apparent
god; and even if, from time to time, the Reverend Mr. Auld should swoop
upon him with the thunders of the Church, and, in company with seven
others, Rab the Ranter must figure some fine Sunday on the stool of
repentance, would there not be a sort of glory, an infernal apotheosis,
in so conspicuous a shame? Was not Richelieu in disgrace more idolised
than ever by the dames of Paris? and when was the highwayman most
acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn? Or, to take a simile from nearer
home, and still more exactly to the point, what could even corporal
punishment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly
school-master, against the influence and fame of the school’s hero?
And now we come to the culminating point of Burns’s early period. He
began to be received into the unknown upper world. His fame soon spread
from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and began to reach the
ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy. This arose in part
from his lax views about religion; for at this time that old war of the
creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our
poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent
skirmish; and Burns found himself identified with the opposition party,—a
clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines, with wit enough to
appreciate the value of the poet’s help, and not sufficient taste to
moderate his grossness and personality. We may judge of their surprise
when _Holy Willie_ was put into their hand; like the amorous lads of
Tarbolton, they recognised in him the best of seconds. His satires began
to go the round in manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the lawyers, “read him
into fame;” he himself was soon welcome in many houses of a better sort,
where his admirable talk, and his manners, which he had direct from his
Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a country dancing school,
completed what his poems had begun. We have a sight of him at his first
visit to Adamhill, in his ploughman’s shoes, coasting around the carpet
as though that were sacred ground. But he soon grew used to carpets and
their owners; and he was still the superior of all whom he encountered,
and ruled the roost in conversation. Such was the impression made, that
a young clergyman, himself a man of ability, trembled and became confused
when he saw Robert enter the church in which he was to preach. It is not
surprising that the poet determined to publish: he had now stood the test
of some publicity, and under this hopeful impulse he composed in six
winter months the bulk of his more important poems. Here was a young man
who, from a very humble place, was mounting rapidly; from the cynosure of
a parish, he had become the talk of a county; once the bard of rural
courtships, he was now about to appear as a bound and printed poet in the
world’s bookshops.
A few more intimate strokes are necessary to complete the sketch. This
strong young plough-man, who feared no competitor with the flail,
suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapours; he would fall
into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past
and terror for the future. He was still not perhaps devoted to religion,
but haunted by it; and at a touch of sickness prostrated himself before
God in what I can only call unmanly penitence. As he had aspirations
beyond his place in the world, so he had tastes, thoughts, and weaknesses
to match. He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a winter
tempest; he had a singular tenderness for animals; he carried a book with
him in his pocket when he went abroad, and wore out in this service two
copies of the _Man of Feeling_. With young people in the field at work
he was very long-suffering; and when his brother Gilbert spoke sharply to
them—“O man, ye are no for young folk,” he would say, and give the
defaulter a helping hand and a smile. In the hearts of the men whom he
met, he read as in a book; and, what is yet more rare, his knowledge of
himself equalled his knowledge of others. There are no truer things said
of Burns than what is to be found in his own letters. Country Don Juan
as he was, he had none of that blind vanity which values itself on what
it is not; he knew his own strength and weakness to a hair: he took
himself boldly for what he was, and, except in moments of hypochondria,
declared himself content.
THE LOVE STORIES.
On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and women of the
place joined in a penny ball, according to their custom. In the same set
danced Jean Armour, the master-mason’s daughter, and our dark-eyed Don
Juan. His dog (not the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame,
_caret quia vate sacro_), apparently sensible of some neglect, followed
his master to and fro, to the confusion of the dancers. Some mirthful
comments followed; and Jean heard the poet say to his partner—or, as I
should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the company at large—that
“he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as well as his
dog.” Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on Mauchline
green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied by his dog; and the
dog, “scouring in long excursion,” scampered with four black paws across
the linen. This brought the two into conversation; when Jean, with a
somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if “he had yet got any of the lasses
to like him as well as his dog?”
It is one of the misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honour
forbids him to refuse battle; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon
duty, or like the sworn physician who must attend on all diseases. Burns
accepted the provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a
girl—pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not
averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might
here be waiting him. Had he but known the truth! for this facile and
empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her
heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by
another man. Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of
“battering himself into a warm affection;” and the proofs of his success
are to be found in many verses of the period. Nor did he succeed with
himself only; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his
fascination, and early in the next year the natural consequence became
manifest. It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple. They had
trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life’s serious issues.
Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the best she had now to expect was
marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest thoughts; she might
now be glad if she could get what she would never have chosen. As for
Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised that his voyage of
discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere—that he was not, and never
had been, really in love with Jean. Hear him in the pressure of the
hour. “Against two things,” he writes, “I am as fixed as fate—staying at
home, and owning her conjugally. The first, by heaven, I will not
do!—the last, by hell, I will never do!” And then he adds, perhaps
already in a more relenting temper: “If you see Jean, tell her I will
meet her, so God help me in my hour of need.” They met accordingly; and
Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these heights of
independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment of marriage. It is
the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually false
positions—relations in life which are wrong in themselves, and which it
is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a case.
Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way; let us be glad that
Burns was better counselled by his heart. When we discover that we can
be no longer true, the next best is to be kind. I daresay he came away
from that interview not very content, but with a glorious conscience; and
as he went homeward, he would sing his favourite, “How are Thy servants
blest, O Lord!” Jean, on the other hand, armed with her “lines,”
confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his wife.
Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves in their
farm; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do country lass;
and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous attachment on his
daughter’s part. At least, he was not so much incensed by her slip from
virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to cover it. Of this
he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the acknowledgment only
to appease her parents, and not at all from any violent inclination to
the poet, readily gave up the paper for destruction; and all parties
imagined, although wrongly, that the marriage was thus dissolved. To a
proud man like Burns here was a crushing blow. The concession which had
been wrung from his pity was now publicly thrown back in his teeth. The
Armour family preferred disgrace to his connection. Since the promise,
besides, he had doubtless been busy “battering himself” back again into
his affection for the girl; and the blow would not only take him in his
vanity, but wound him at the heart.
He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront manuscript
poetry was insufficient to console him. He must find a more powerful
remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth
again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love. It is
perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a
commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or
confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon
another. The universe could not be yet exhausted; there must be hope and
love waiting for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this poor,
insulted poet ran once more upon his fate. There was an innocent and
gentle Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family; and he
had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret
engagement. Jean’s marriage lines had not been destroyed till March 13,
1786; yet all was settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May
14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic
solemnities upon the banks of Ayr. They each wet their hands in a
stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as
they vowed eternal faith. Then they exchanged Bibles, on one of which
Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding nature
of an oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the wandering
affections, here were two people united for life. Mary came of a
superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but
they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for
nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his
tottering constancy.
Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet’s life. His book
was announced; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the aliment of
the child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets; he was
under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his wife;
now, he had “orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard the
_Nancy_, Captain Smith;” now his chest was already on the road to
Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he
measures verses of farewell:—
“The bursting tears my heart declare;
Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!”
But the great master dramatist had secretly another intention for the
piece; by the most violent and complicated solution, in which death and
birth and sudden fame all play a part as interposing deities, the
act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation. Jean was brought to bed of
twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to bring
up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother. The success of the
book was immediate and emphatic; it put £20 at once into the author’s
purse; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh and push
his success in a second and larger edition. Third and last in these
series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm for
Robert. He went to the window to read it; a sudden change came over his
face, and he left the room without a word. Years afterwards, when the
story began to leak out, his family understood that he had then learned
the death of Highland Mary. Except in a few poems and a few dry
indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself made no
reference to this passage of his life; it was an adventure of which, for
I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury the details. Of one thing
we may be glad: in after years he visited the poor girl’s mother, and
left her with the impression that he was “a real warm-hearted chield.”
Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set out for
Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend. The town that winter
was “agog with the ploughman poet.” Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair,
“Duchess Gordon and all the gay world,” were of his acquaintance. Such a
revolution is not to be found in literary history. He was now, it must
be remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since his early
boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement
seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the furrow
wielding “the thresher’s weary flingin’-tree;” and his education, his
diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scotch countryman. Now he
stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned. We can see him as
he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat and waistcoat
striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday best; the heavy
ploughman’s figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his face full of
sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of thought, and
his large dark eye “literally glowing” as he spoke. “I never saw such
another eye in a human head,” says Walter Scott, “though I have seen the
most distinguished men of my time.” With men, whether they were lords or
omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified, and free from
bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had the social courage
to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not embarrassed in this
society, because he read and judged the men; he could spy snobbery in a
titled lord; and, as for the critics, he dismissed their system in an
epigram. “These gentlemen,” said he, “remind me of some spinsters in my
country who spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor
woof.” Ladies, on the other hand, surprised him; he was scarce commander
of himself in their society; he was disqualified by his acquired nature
as a Don Juan; and he, who had been so much at his ease with country
lasses, treated the town dames to an extreme of deference. One lady, who
met him at a ball, gave Chambers a speaking sketch of his demeanour.
“His manner was not prepossessing—scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural.
It seemed as if he affected a rusticity or _landertness_, so that when he
said the music was ‘bonnie, bonnie,’ it was like the expression of a
child.” These would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree
of intimacy the affectation would grow less. And his talk to women had
always “a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the
attention particularly.”
The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once) behaved well to
Burns from first to last. Were heaven-born genius to revisit us in
similar guise, I am not venturing too far when I say that he need expect
neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help. Although Burns was only a
peasant, and one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made
welcome to their homes. They gave him a great deal of good advice,
helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready money, and got him, as
soon as he asked it, a place in the Excise. Burns, on his part, bore the
elevation with perfect dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when
the time had come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense
never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh
popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day. He wrote a few
letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he
suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect. On the other hand, he
never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he
was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the
acquaintance were a duke. He would be a bold man who should promise
similar conduct in equally exacting circumstances. It was, in short, an
admirable appearance on the stage of life—socially successful, intimately
self-respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.
In the present study, this must only be taken by the way, while we return
to Burns’s love affairs. Even on the road to Edinburgh he had seized
upon the opportunity of a flirtation, and had carried the “battering” so
far that when next he moved from town, it was to steal two days with this
anonymous fair one. The exact importance to Burns of this affair may be
gathered from the song in which he commemorated its occurrence. “I love
the dear lassie,” he sings, “because she loves me;” or, in the tongue of
prose: “Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate to profit by it, and
even now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to profit by it again.”
A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man. Meantime, early in
the winter, and only once, we find him regretting Jean in his
correspondence. “Because”—such is his reason—“because he does not think
he will ever meet so delicious an armful again;” and then, after a brief
excursion into verse, he goes straight on to describe a new episode in
the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a Lothian farmer for a
heroine. I must ask the reader to follow all these references to his
future wife; they are essential to the comprehension of Burns’s character
and fate. In June, we find him back at Mauchline, a famous man. There,
the Armour family greeted him with a “mean, servile compliance,” which
increased his former disgust. Jean was not less compliant; a second time
the poor girl submitted to the fascination of the man whom she did not
love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted little more than a year ago;
and, though Burns took advantage of her weakness, it was in the ugliest
and most cynical spirit, and with a heart absolutely indifferent. Judge
of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return—a letter to
my mind among the most degrading in the whole collection—a letter which
seems to have been inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. “I am
afraid,” it goes, “I have almost ruined one source, the principal one,
indeed, of my former happiness—the eternal propensity I always had to
fall in love. My heart no more glows with feverish rapture; I have no
paradisiacal evening interviews.” Even the process of “battering” has
failed him, you perceive. Still he had some one in his eye—a lady, if
you please, with a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had “seen the
politest quarters in Europe.” “I frequently visited her,” he writes,
“and after passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant
formal bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my
careless way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after
her return to —, I wrote her in the same terms. Miss, construing my
remarks further than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female
dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote
me an answer which measured out very completely what an immense way I had
to travel before I could reach the climate of her favours. But I am an
old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent
reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop, down to my
foot, like Corporal Trim’s hat.” I avow a carnal longing, after this
transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk about the ears. There is little
question that to this lady he must have repeated his addresses, and that
he was by her (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly,
rejected. One more detail to characterise the period. Six months after
the date of this letter, Burns, back in Edinburgh, is served with a writ
_in meditatione fugæ_, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of
humble rank, who declared an intention of adding to his family.
About the beginning of December (1787), a new period opens in the story
of the poet’s random affections. He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes
M’Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, who, with her two
children, had been deserted by an unworthy husband. She had wit, could
use her pen, and had read _Werther_ with attention. Sociable, and even
somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a
warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a considerable,
but not authoritative, sense of the proprieties. Of what biographers
refer to daintily as “her somewhat voluptuous style of beauty,” judging
from the silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas’s invaluable edition, the reader
will be fastidious if he does not approve. Take her for all in all, I
believe she was the best woman Burns encountered. The pair took a fancy
for each other on the spot; Mrs. M’Lehose, in her turn, invited him to
tea; but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a
_tête-à-tête_, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
instead. An accident confined him to his room for nearly a month, and
this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspondence. It was
begun in simple sport; they are already at their fifth or sixth exchange,
when Clarinda writes: “It is really curious so much _fun_ passing between
two persons who saw each other only _once_;” but it is hardly safe for a
man and woman in the flower of their years to write almost daily, and
sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes in terms too plain, and
generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance. The exercise
partakes a little of the nature of battering, and danger may be
apprehended when next they meet. It is difficult to give any account of
this remarkable correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps,
not yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination is
baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura
passages, into downright truculent nonsense. Clarinda has one famous
sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress
with the changing phases of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by
the swain, but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.
“Oh, Clarinda,” writes Burns, “shall we not meet in a state—some yet
unknown state—of being, where the lavish hand of Plenty shall minister to
the highest wish of Benevolence, and where the chill north wind of
Prudence shall never blow over the flowery field of Enjoyment?” The
design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a
Bird of Paradise. It is sometimes hard to fancy they are not gravely
making fun of each other as they write. Religion, poetry, love, and
charming sensibility, are the current topics. “I am delighted, charming
Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion,” writes Burns; and
the pair entertained a fiction that this was their “favourite subject.”
“This is Sunday,” writes the lady, “and not a word on our favourite
subject. O fy ‘divine Clarinda!’” I suspect, although quite
unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on his redemption,
they but used the favourite subject as a stalking-horse. In the
meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening steadily into a genuine
passion. Visits took place, and then became frequent. Clarinda’s
friends were hurt and suspicious; her clergyman interfered; she herself
had smart attacks of conscience, but her heart had gone from her control;
it was altogether his, and she “counted all things but loss—heaven
excepted—that she might win and keep him.” Burns himself was transported
while in her neighbourhood, but his transports somewhat rapidly declined
during an absence. I am tempted to imagine that, womanlike, he took on
the colour of his mistress’s feeling; that he could not but heat himself
at the fire of her unaffected passion; but that, like one who should
leave the hearth upon a winter’s night, his temperature soon fell when he
was out of sight, and in a word, though he could share the symptoms, that
he had never shared the disease. At the same time, amid the fustian of
the letters there are forcible and true expressions, and the love verses
that he wrote upon Clarinda are among the most moving in the language.
We are approaching the solution. In mid-winter, Jean, once more in the
family way, was turned out of doors by her family; and Burns had her
received and cared for in the house of a friend. For he remained to the
last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister
courage to desert his victim. About the middle of February (1788), he
had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into the
south-west on business. Clarinda gave him two shirts for his little son.
They were daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour. Burns, too late
for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not
have to wait. Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful
simplicity: “I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday; and
there’s a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a
little. Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday. She once named you, which
kept me from falling asleep. I drank your health in a glass of ale—as
the lasses do at Hallowe’en—‘in to mysel’.’” Arrived at Mauchline, Burns
installed Jean Armour in a lodging, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour to
promise her help and countenance in the approaching confinement. This
was kind at least; but hear his expressions: “I have taken her a room; I
have taken her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given
her a guinea. . . . I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt
any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she
had such a claim—which she has not, neither during my life nor after my
death. She did all this like a good girl.” And then he took advantage
of the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: “I this morning called for a
certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her;” and he
accused her of “tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
fawning.” This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he
was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: “Your hopes,
your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don’t mind them. I will
take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare
away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you.” Again, on the
21st: “Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man
who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death,
through death, and for ever. . . . How rich am I to have such a treasure
as you! . . . ‘The Lord God knoweth,’ and, perhaps, ‘Israel he shall
know,’ my love and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to remember
you in my prayers.” By the 7th of April, seventeen days later he had
already decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife.
A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. And yet his conduct
is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be grounded both in reason and in
kindness. He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career; he had
taken a farm; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart,
was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns, to
whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and self-respect.
This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect; but there is no
doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a sincere
determination to do right. He had just helped his brother with a loan of
a hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor girl whom
he had ruined? It was true he could not do as he did without brutally
wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment of his bygone fault; he was,
as he truly says, “damned with a choice only of different species of
error and misconduct.” To be professional Don Juan, to accept the
provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead a
man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at
last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been
strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had
only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had
been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; but a
man, alas! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts,
stands among changing events without foundation or resource. {71}
DOWNWARD COURSE.
It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns; but
it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he
contracted. He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it was, as
I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to
break or to perpetuate. He neither loved nor respected his wife. “God
knows,” he writes, “my choice was as random as blind man’s buff.” He
consoles himself by the thought that he has acted kindly to her; that she
“has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to him;” that she has a
good figure; that she has a “wood-note wild,” “her voice rising with ease
to B natural,” no less. The effect on the reader is one of unmingled
pity for both parties concerned. This was not the wife who (in his own
words) could “enter into his favourite studies or relish his favourite
authors;” this was not even a wife, after the affair of the marriage
lines, in whom a husband could joy to place his trust. Let her manage a
farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long, she would
still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object of pity rather
than of equal affection. She could now be faithful, she could now be
forgiving, she could now be generous even to a pathetic and touching
degree; but coming from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown
herself worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away,
which could neither change her husband’s heart nor affect the inherent
destiny of their relation. From the outset, it was a marriage that had
no root in nature; and we find him, ere long, lyrically regretting
Highland Mary, renewing correspondence with Clarinda in the warmest
language, on doubtful terms with Mrs. Riddel, and on terms unfortunately
beyond any question with Anne Park.
Alas! this was not the only ill circumstance in his future. He had been
idle for some eighteen months, superintending his new edition, hanging on
to settle with the publisher, travelling in the Highlands with Willie
Nichol, or philandering with Mrs. M’Lehose; and in this period the
radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt. He had lost his
habits of industry, and formed the habit of pleasure. Apologetical
biographers assure us of the contrary; but from the first, he saw and
recognised the danger for himself; his mind, he writes, is “enervated to
an alarming degree” by idleness and dissipation; and again, “my mind has
been vitiated with idleness.” It never fairly recovered. To business he
could bring the required diligence and attention without difficulty; but
he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of that
superior effort of concentration which is required for serious literary
work. He may be said, indeed, to have worked no more, and only amused
himself with letters. The man who had written a volume of masterpieces
in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for
any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is
itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as
polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong, and
colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is, for
a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The
change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he
had written the _Address to a Louse_, which may be taken as an extreme
instance of the first manner; and already, in 1787, we come upon the
rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are extreme examples of the
second. The change was, therefore, the direct and very natural
consequence of his great change in life; but it is not the less typical
of his loss of moral courage that he should have given up all larger
ventures, nor the less melancholy that a man who first attacked
literature with a hand that seemed capable of moving mountains, should
have spent his later years in whittling cherry-stones.
Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper; he had to join to it the salary of
an exciseman; at last he had to give it up, and rely altogether on the
latter resource. He was an active officer; and, though he sometimes
tempered severity with mercy, we have local testimony oddly representing
the public feeling of the period, that, while “in everything else he was
a perfect gentleman, when he met with anything seizable he was no better
than any other gauger.”
There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years which need
delay us: and that was the sudden interest in politics which arose from
his sympathy with the great French Revolution. His only political
feeling had been hitherto a sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less
respectable than that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George
Borrow has nicknamed the “Charlie over the water” Scotchmen. It was a
sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its origin, built
on ballads and the adventures of the Young Chevalier; and in Burns it is
the more excusable, because he lay out of the way of active politics in
his youth. With the great French Revolution, something living,
practical, and feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm
of human action. The young ploughman who had desired so earnestly to
rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole nation animated with the
same desire. Already in 1788 we find the old Jacobitism hand in hand
with the new popular doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against
the zeal of a Whig clergyman, he writes: “I daresay the American Congress
in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the English
Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity will celebrate the
centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we do
ours from the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of Stuart.”
As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even violent;
but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling to his hottest
excess. What he asked was a fair chance for the individual in life; an
open road to success and distinction for all classes of men. It was in
the same spirit that he had helped to found a public library in the
parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his fervent snatches
against tyranny and tyrants. Witness, were it alone, this verse:—
“Here’s freedom to him that wad read,
Here’s freedom to him that wad write;
There’s nane ever feared that the truth should be heard
But them wham the truth wad indite.”
Yet his enthusiasm for the cause was scarce guided by wisdom. Many
stories are preserved of the bitter and unwise words he used in country
coteries; how he proposed Washington’s health as an amendment to Pitt’s,
gave as a toast “the last verse of the last chapter of Kings,” and
celebrated Dumouriez in a doggrel impromptu full of ridicule and hate.
Now his sympathies would inspire him with _Scots_, _wha hae_; now involve
him in a drunken broil with a loyal officer, and consequent apologies and
explanations, hard to offer for a man of Burns’s stomach. Nor was this
the front of his offending. On February 27, 1792, he took part in the
capture of an armed smuggler, bought at the subsequent sale four
carronades, and despatched them with a letter to the French Assembly.
Letter and guns were stopped at Dover by the English officials; there was
trouble for Burns with his superiors; he was reminded firmly, however
delicately, that, as a paid official, it was his duty to obey and to be
silent; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man must have
rushed to his head at the humiliation. His letter to Mr. Erskine,
subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent phrases, to
a perfect passion of alarmed self-respect and vanity. He had been
muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, by his paltry salary as an
exciseman; alas! had he not a family to keep? Already, he wrote, he
looked forward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler as this:
“Burns, notwithstanding the _fanfaronnade_ of independence to be found in
his works, and after having been held forth to view and to public
estimation as a man of some genius, yet, quite destitute of resources
within himself to support his borrowed dignity, he dwindled into a paltry
exciseman, and shrunk out the rest of his insignificant existence in the
meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of mankind.” And then on he
goes, in a style of rhodomontade, but filled with living indignation, to
declare his right to a political opinion, and his willingness to shed his
blood for the political birthright of his sons. Poor, perturbed spirit!
he was indeed exercised in vain; those who share and those who differ
from his sentiments about the Revolution, alike understand and sympathise
with him in this painful strait; for poetry and human manhood are lasting
like the race, and politics, which are but a wrongful striving after
right, pass and change from year to year and age to age. The _Twa Dogs_
has already outlasted the constitution of Siéyès and the policy of the
Whigs; and Burns is better known among English-speaking races than either
Pitt or Fox.
Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, his steps led
downward. He knew, knew bitterly, that the best was out of him; he
refused to make another volume, for he felt that it would be a
disappointment; he grew petulantly alive to criticism, unless he was sure
it reached him from a friend. For his songs, he would take nothing; they
were all that he could do; the proposed Scotch play, the proposed series
of Scotch tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a fling of pain
and disappointment, which is surely noble with the nobility of a viking,
he would rather stoop to borrow than to accept money for these last and
inadequate efforts of his muse. And this desperate abnegation rises at
times near to the height of madness; as when he pretended that he had not
written, but only found and published, his immortal _Auld Lang Syne_. In
the same spirit he became more scrupulous as an artist; he was doing so
little, he would fain do that little well; and about two months before
his death, he asked Thomson to send back all his manuscripts for revisal,
saying that he would rather write five songs to his taste than twice that
number otherwise. The battle of his life was lost; in forlorn efforts to
do well, in desperate submissions to evil, the last years flew by. His
temper is dark and explosive, launching epigrams, quarrelling with his
friends, jealous of young puppy officers. He tries to be a good father;
he boasts himself a libertine. Sick, sad, and jaded, he can refuse no
occasion of temporary pleasure, no opportunity to shine; and he who had
once refused the invitations of lords and ladies is now whistled to the
inn by any curious stranger. His death (July 21, 1796), in his
thirty-seventh year, was indeed a kindly dispensation. It is the fashion
to say he died of drink; many a man has drunk more and yet lived with
reputation, and reached a good age. That drink and debauchery helped to
destroy his constitution, and were the means of his unconscious suicide,
is doubtless true; but he had failed in life, had lost his power of work,
and was already married to the poor, unworthy, patient Jean, before he
had shown his inclination to convivial nights, or at least before that
inclination had become dangerous either to his health or his
self-respect. He had trifled with life, and must pay the penalty. He
had chosen to be Don Juan, he had grasped at temporary pleasures, and
substantial happiness and solid industry had passed him by. He died of
being Robert Burns, and there is no levity in such a statement of the
case; for shall we not, one and all, deserve a similar epitaph?
WORKS.
The somewhat cruel necessity which has lain upon me throughout this paper
only to touch upon those points in the life of Burns where correction or
amplification seemed desirable, leaves me little opportunity to speak of
the works which have made his name so famous. Yet, even here, a few
observations seem necessary.
At the time when the poet made his appearance and great first success,
his work was remarkable in two ways. For, first, in an age when poetry
had become abstract and conventional, instead of continuing to deal with
shepherds, thunderstorms, and personifications, he dealt with the actual
circumstances of his life, however matter-of-fact and sordid these might
be. And, second, in a time when English versification was particularly
stiff, lame, and feeble, and words were used with ultra-academical
timidity, he wrote verses that were easy, racy, graphic, and forcible,
and used language with absolute tact and courage as it seemed most fit to
give a clear impression. If you take even those English authors whom we
know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will see at once that he
owed them nothing but a warning. Take Shenstone, for instance, and watch
that elegant author as he tries to grapple with the facts of life. He
has a description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in sliding or
walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of incompetence. You see
my memory fails me, and I positively cannot recollect whether his hero
was sliding or walking; as though a writer should describe a skirmish,
and the reader, at the end, be still uncertain whether it were a charge
of cavalry or a slow and stubborn advance of foot. There could be no
such ambiguity in Burns; his work is at the opposite pole from such
indefinite and stammering performances; and a whole lifetime passed in
the study of Shenstone would only lead a man further and further from
writing the _Address to a Louse_. Yet Burns, like most great artists,
proceeded from a school and continued a tradition; only the school and
tradition were Scotch, and not English. While the English language was
becoming daily more pedantic and inflexible, and English letters more
colourless and slack, there was another dialect in the sister country,
and a different school of poetry tracing its descent, through King James
I., from Chaucer. The dialect alone accounts for much; for it was then
written colloquially, which kept it fresh and supple; and, although not
shaped for heroic flights, it was a direct and vivid medium for all that
had to do with social life. Hence, whenever Scotch poets left their
laborious imitations of bad English verses, and fell back on their own
dialect, their style would kindle, and they would write of their
convivial and somewhat gross existences with pith and point. In Ramsay,
and far more in the poor lad Fergusson, there was mettle, humour,
literary courage, and a power of saying what they wished to say
definitely and brightly, which in the latter case should have justified
great anticipations. Had Burns died at the same age as Fergusson, he
would have left us literally nothing worth remark. To Ramsay and to
Fergusson, then, he was indebted in a very uncommon degree, not only
following their tradition and using their measures, but directly and
avowedly imitating their pieces. The same tendency to borrow a hint, to
work on some one else’s foundation, is notable in Burns from first to
last, in the period of song-writing as well as in that of the early
poems; and strikes one oddly in a man of such deep originality, who left
so strong a print on all he touched, and whose work is so greatly
distinguished by that character of “inevitability” which Wordsworth
denied to Goethe.
When we remember Burns’s obligations to his predecessors, we must never
forget his immense advances on them. They had already “discovered”
nature; but Burns discovered poetry—a higher and more intense way of
thinking of the things that go to make up nature, a higher and more ideal
key of words in which to speak of them. Ramsay and Fergusson excelled at
making a popular—or shall we say vulgar?—sort of society verses, comical
and prosaic, written, you would say, in taverns while a supper party
waited for its laureate’s word; but on the appearance of Burns, this
coarse and laughing literature was touched to finer issues, and learned
gravity of thought and natural pathos.
What he had gained from his predecessors was a direct, speaking style,
and to walk on his own feet instead of on academical stilts. There was
never a man of letters with more absolute command of his means; and we
may say of him, without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that
energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner is tempted to
explain it by some special richness or aptitude in the dialect he wrote.
Hence that Homeric justice and completeness of description which gives us
the very physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature is. Hence,
too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces, which keeps him
from any slip into the weariful trade of word-painting, and presents
everything, as everything should be presented by the art of words, in a
clear, continuous medium of thought. Principal Shairp, for instance,
gives us a paraphrase of one tough verse of the original; and for those
who know the Greek poets only by paraphrase, this has the very quality
they are accustomed to look for and admire in Greek. The contemporaries
of Burns were surprised that he should visit so many celebrated mountains
and waterfalls, and not seize the opportunity to make a poem. Indeed, it
is not for those who have a true command of the art of words, but for
peddling, professional amateurs, that these pointed occasions are most
useful and inspiring. As those who speak French imperfectly are glad to
dwell on any topic they may have talked upon or heard others talk upon
before, because they know appropriate words for it in French, so the
dabbler in verse rejoices to behold a waterfall, because he has learned
the sentiment and knows appropriate words for it in poetry. But the
dialect of Burns was fitted to deal with any subject; and whether it was
a stormy night, a shepherd’s collie, a sheep struggling in the snow, the
conduct of cowardly soldiers in the field, the gait and cogitations of a
drunken man, or only a village cockcrow in the morning, he could find
language to give it freshness, body, and relief. He was always ready to
borrow the hint of a design, as though he had a difficulty in
commencing—a difficulty, let us say, in choosing a subject out of a world
which seemed all equally living and significant to him; but once he had
the subject chosen, he could cope with nature single-handed, and make
every stroke a triumph. Again, his absolute mastery in his art enabled
him to express each and all of his different humours, and to pass
smoothly and congruously from one to another. Many men invent a dialect
for only one side of their nature—perhaps their pathos or their humour,
or the delicacy of their senses—and, for lack of a medium, leave all the
others unexpressed. You meet such an one, and find him in conversation
full of thought, feeling, and experience, which he has lacked the art to
employ in his writings. But Burns was not thus hampered in the practice
of the literary art; he could throw the whole weight of his nature into
his work, and impregnate it from end to end. If Doctor Johnson, that
stilted and accomplished stylist, had lacked the sacred Boswell, what
should we have known of him? and how should we have delighted in his
acquaintance as we do? Those who spoke with Burns tell us how much we
have lost who did not. But I think they exaggerate their privilege: I
think we have the whole Burns in our possession set forth in his
consummate verses.
It was by his style, and not by his matter, that he affected Wordsworth
and the world. There is, indeed, only one merit worth considering in a
man of letters—that he should write well; and only one damning fault—that
he should write ill. We are little the better for the reflections of the
sailor’s parrot in the story. And so, if Burns helped to change the
course of literary history, it was by his frank, direct, and masterly
utterance, and not by his homely choice of subjects. That was imposed
upon him, not chosen upon a principle. He wrote from his own experience,
because it was his nature so to do, and the tradition of the school from
which he proceeded was fortunately not opposed to homely subjects. But
to these homely subjects he communicated the rich commentary of his
nature; they were all steeped in Burns; and they interest us not in
themselves, but because they have been passed through the spirit of so
genuine and vigorous a man. Such is the stamp of living literature; and
there was never any more alive than that of Burns.
What a gust of sympathy there is in him sometimes flowing out in byways
hitherto unused, upon mice, and flowers, and the devil himself; sometimes
speaking plainly between human hearts; sometimes ringing out in
exultation like a peal of bells! When we compare the _Farmer’s
Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie_, with the clever and inhumane
production of half a century earlier, _The Auld Man’s Mare’s dead_, we
see in a nutshell the spirit of the change introduced by Burns. And as
to its manner, who that has read it can forget how the collie, Luath, in
the _Twa Dogs_, describes and enters into the merry-making in the
cottage?
“The luntin’ pipe an’ sneeshin’ mill,
Are handed round wi’ richt guid will;
The canty auld folks crackin’ crouse,
The young anes rantin’ through the house—
My heart has been sae fain to see them
That I for joy hae barkit wi’ them.”
It was this ardent power of sympathy that was fatal to so many women,
and, through Jean Armour, to himself at last. His humour comes from him
in a stream so deep and easy that I will venture to call him the best of
humorous poets. He turns about in the midst to utter a noble sentiment
or a trenchant remark on human life, and the style changes and rises to
the occasion. I think it is Principal Shairp who says, happily, that
Burns would have been no Scotchman if he had not loved to moralise;
neither, may we add, would he have been his father’s son; but (what is
worthy of note) his moralisings are to a large extent the moral of his
own career. He was among the least impersonal of artists. Except in the
_Jolly Beggars_, he shows no gleam of dramatic instinct. Mr. Carlyle has
complained that _Tam o’ Shanter_ is, from the absence of this quality,
only a picturesque and external piece of work; and I may add that in the
_Twa Dogs_ it is precisely in the infringement of dramatic propriety that
a great deal of the humour of the speeches depends for its existence and
effect. Indeed, Burns was so full of his identity that it breaks forth
on every page; and there is scarce an appropriate remark either in praise
or blame of his own conduct, but he has put it himself into verse. Alas!
for the tenor of these remarks! They are, indeed, his own pitiful
apology for such a marred existence and talents so misused and stunted;
and they seem to prove for ever how small a part is played by reason in
the conduct of man’s affairs. Here was one, at least, who with unfailing
judgment predicted his own fate; yet his knowledge could not avail him,
and with open eyes he must fulfil his tragic destiny. Ten years before
the end he had written his epitaph; and neither subsequent events, nor
the critical eyes of posterity, have shown us a word in it to alter.
And, lastly, has he not put in for himself the last unanswerable plea?—
“Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Though they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark—”
One? Alas! I fear every man and woman of us is “greatly dark” to all
their neighbours, from the day of birth until death removes them, in
their greatest virtues as well as in their saddest faults; and we, who
have been trying to read the character of Burns, may take home the lesson
and be gentle in our thoughts.
WALT WHITMAN.
OF late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandied about
in books and magazines. It has become familiar both in good and ill
repute. His works have been largely bespattered with praise by his
admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by irreverent enemies. Now,
whether his poetry is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit
of a difference of opinion without alienating those who differ. We could
not keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and
yet depreciate the choruses in _Samson Agonistes_; but, I think, we may
shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman’s volume, from a
literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong
direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that,
when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether
devoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry here
and there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt
Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works is
not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit a son
upon the question, nor even think much the worse of a critic, for I
should always have an idea what he meant.
What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it. It is not
possible to acquit any one of defective intelligence, or else stiff
prejudice, who is not interested by Whitman’s matter and the spirit it
represents. Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more
exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent
position. Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a
notable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard
to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that
he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet where,
in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more incongruous
contemporaries? Mr. Spencer so decorous—I had almost said, so dandy—in
dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring
the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And when was an echo
more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his Synthetic
Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the Atlantic in the
“barbaric yawp” of Whitman?
I.
Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system. He was
a theoriser about society before he was a poet. He first perceived
something wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the want. The
reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much
pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making
poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous
village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although
sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of
Whitman’s work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society
comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not
fail, if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendencies
around him. He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet settled down
into some more or less unjust compromise as in older nations, but still
in the act of settlement. And he could not but wonder what it would turn
out; whether the compromise would be very just or very much the reverse,
and give great or little scope for healthy human energies. From idle
wonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems to have been
early struck with the inefficacy of literature and its extreme
unsuitability to the conditions. What he calls “Feudal Literature” could
have little living action on the tumult of American democracy; what he
calls the “Literature of Wo,” meaning the whole tribe of Werther and
Byron, could have no action for good in any time or place. Both
propositions, if art had none but a direct moral influence, would be true
enough; and as this seems to be Whitman’s view, they were true enough for
him. He conceived the idea of a Literature which was to inhere in the
life of the present; which was to be, first, human, and next, American;
which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; to give culture in a
popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing, catch and stereotype
some democratic ideal of humanity which should be equally natural to all
grades of wealth and education, and suited, in one of his favourite
phrases, to “the average man.” To the formation of some such literature
as this his poems are to be regarded as so many contributions, one
sometimes explaining, sometimes superseding, the other: and the whole
together not so much a finished work as a body of suggestive hints. He
does not profess to have built the castle, but he pretends he has traced
the lines of the foundation. He has not made the poetry, but he flatters
himself he has done something towards making the poets.
His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly
with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the
metaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order,
the materials of their existence. He is “The Answerer;” he is to find
some way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for the
moment, man’s enduring astonishment at his own position. And besides
having an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the question. He must
shake people out of their indifference, and force them to make some
election in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream.
Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly
from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments
by the inanities of custom. We should despise a man who gave as little
activity and forethought to the conduct of any other business. But in
this, which is the one thing of all others, since it contains them all,
we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief impression obliterates
another. There is something stupefying in the recurrence of unimportant
things. And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take an
outlook beyond daily concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits and great
possibilities of our existence. It is the duty of the poet to induce
such moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all living by
reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking, of all the
pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we coin away our
hearts and fritter invaluable years. He has to electrify his readers
into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide and eager
observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by a superior
prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the maxims of the
copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they would heartily disown
after two hours’ serious reflection on the subject is, I am afraid, a
true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought. The Enchanted Ground of
dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah of
considerate virtue. But there they all slumber and take their rest in
the middle of God’s beautiful and wonderful universe; the drowsy heads
have nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fell
asleep; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a
single active thought.
The poet has a hard task before him to stir up such fellows to a sense of
their own and other people’s principles in life.
And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent means
to such an end. Language is but a poor bull’s-eye lantern wherewith to
show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a particular thing once
said in words is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the
absence of the many which remain unexpressed; like a bright window in a
distant view, which dazzles and confuses our sight of its surroundings.
There are not words enough in all Shakespeare to express the merest
fraction of a man’s experience in an hour. The speed of the eyesight and
the hearing, and the continual industry of the mind, produce, in ten
minutes, what it would require a laborious volume to shadow forth by
comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verbal logic were sufficient,
life would be as plain sailing as a piece of Euclid. But, as a matter of
fact, we make a travesty of the simplest process of thought when we put
it into words for the words are all coloured and forsworn, apply
inaccurately, and bring with them, from former uses ideas of praise and
blame that have nothing to do with the question in hand. So we must
always see to it nearly, that we judge by the realities of life and not
by the partial terms that represent them in man’s speech; and at times of
choice, we must leave words upon one side, and act upon those brute
convictions, unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, which cannot be
flourished in an argument, but which are truly the sum and fruit of our
experience. Words are for communication, not for judgment. This is what
every thoughtful man knows for himself, for only fools and silly
schoolmasters push definitions over far into the domain of conduct; and
the majority of women, not learned in these scholastic refinements, live
all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring to put
a name upon their acts or motives. Hence, a new difficulty for Whitman’s
scrupulous and argumentative poet; he must do more than waken up the
sleepers to his words; he must persuade them to look over the book and at
life with their own eyes.
This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this that he means
when he tells us that “To glance with an eye confounds the learning of
all times.” But he is not unready. He is never weary of descanting on
the undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds by the presence
of other men, of animals, or of inanimate things. To glance with an eye,
were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasive
process, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion, than to read the
works of all the logicians extant. If both, by a large allowance, may be
said to end in certainty, the certainty in the one case transcends the
other to an incalculable degree. If people see a lion, they run away; if
they only apprehend a deduction, they keep wandering around in an
experimental humour. Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, and
not like books? Is there no actual piece of nature that he can show the
man to his face, as he might show him a tree if they were walking
together? Yes, there is one: the man’s own thoughts. In fact, if the
poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his
hearer’s mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he
will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any
conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass
into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully
operative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but
they cannot rule behaviour. Our faith is not the highest truth that we
perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the
very texture and method of our thinking. It is not, therefore, by
flashing before a man’s eyes the weapons of dialectic; it is not by
induction, deduction, or construction; it is not by forcing him on from
one stage of reasoning to another, that the man will be effectually
renewed. He cannot be made to believe anything; but he can be made to
see that he has always believed it. And this is the practical canon. It
is when the reader cries, “Oh, I know!” and is, perhaps, half irritated
to see how nearly the author has forestalled his own thoughts, that he is
on the way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith.
Here we have the key to Whitman’s attitude. To give a certain unity of
ideal to the average population of America—to gather their activities
about some conception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if
only for the moment—the poet must portray that population as it is. Like
human law, human poetry is simply declaratory. If any ideal is possible,
it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by the same
reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And hence
Whitman’s own formula: “The poet is individual—he is complete in himself:
the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not.” To show
them how good they are, the poet must study his fellow-countrymen and
himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for his book of travels.
There is a sense, of course, in which all true books are books of travel;
and all genuine poets must run their risk of being charged with the
traveller’s exaggeration; for to whom are such books more surprising than
to those whose own life is faithfully and smartly pictured? But this
danger is all upon one side; and you may judiciously flatter the portrait
without any likelihood of the sitter’s disowning it for a faithful
likeness. And so Whitman has reasoned: that by drawing at first hand
from himself and his neighbours, accepting without shame the
inconsistencies and brutalities that go to make up man, and yet treating
the whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would make sure of belief,
and at the same time encourage people forward by the means of praise.
II.
We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many
poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling
and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable
length. The bold and awful poetry of Job’s complaint produces too many
flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur,
but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This
literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this _Maladie de René_, as we
like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly
phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private
means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown
and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the
beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques,
and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires.
It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result,
among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our
little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom,
we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in not
the best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale
and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and
unremunerative labour; where a man in this predicament can afford a
lesson by the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, there is
plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by
teaching him to think differently. It is better to leave him as he is
than to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without the
cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing
sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight
against that hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of
consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and they
will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it, above all,
that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the man
up in courage while we demolish its substitute, indifference.
Whitman is alive to all this. He sees that, if the poet is to be of any
help, he must testify to the livableness of life. His poems, he tells
us, are to be “hymns of the praise of things.” They are to make for a
certain high joy in living, or what he calls himself “a brave delight fit
for freedom’s athletes.” And he has had no difficulty in introducing his
optimism: it fitted readily enough with his system; for the average man
is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living. One of Whitman’s
remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is there perfectly
successful, and does precisely what he designs to do throughout: Takes
ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throws them out, by a happy
turn of thinking, into significance and something like beauty; and tacks
a hopeful moral lesson to the end.
“The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers,
cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the love of
healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of
horses, the passion for light and the open air,—all is an old
unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a
residence of the poetic in outdoor people.”
There seems to me something truly original in this choice of trite
examples. You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins, hunters and
woodmen being confessedly romantic. And one thing more. If he had said
“the love of healthy men for the female form,” he would have said almost
a silliness; for the thing has never been dissembled out of delicacy, and
is so obvious as to be a public nuisance. But by reversing it, he tells
us something not unlike news; something that sounds quite freshly in
words; and, if the reader be a man, gives him a moment of great
self-satisfaction and spiritual aggrandisement. In many different
authors you may find passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a
more ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in our
connection. The tenacity of many ordinary people in ordinary pursuits is
a sort of standing challenge to everybody else. If one man can grow
absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over
something else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener, is
to be very meanly organised. A man should be ashamed to take his food if
he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intense
and enjoyable occupation.
Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keeping up a sort of
outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells us, should be read
“among the cooling influences of external nature;” and this
recommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed to
his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one who
has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with
the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and
quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think in a
plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and great things
no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it is. This
is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks very ill of
the atmosphere of parlours or libraries. Wisdom keeps school outdoors.
And he has the art to recommend this attitude of mind by simply pluming
himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader, to keep the advantage
over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into professing the
same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest
charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and emphatic key of
expression, something trenchant and straightforward, something simple and
surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayings that come home to
one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the works of so many men
who write better, with a sense of relief from strain, with a sense of
touching nature, as when one passes out of the flaring, noisy
thoroughfares of a great city into what he himself has called, with
unexcelled imaginative justice of language, “the huge and thoughtful
night.” And his book in consequence, whatever may be the final judgment
of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the future, should be in
the hands of all parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing
malady of being seventeen years old. Green-sickness yields to his
treatment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, after a short course of
reading, ceases to carry the universe upon his shoulders.
III.
Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity. He
considers it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars, as that
one man should rise from the dead. He declares “a hair on the back of
his hand just as curious as any special revelation.” His whole life is
to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne, one perpetual miracle.
Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful;
from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for
food. He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for the
first time, and professes astonishment on principle. But he has no
leaning towards mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls
“unregenerate poetry;” and does not mean by nature
“The smooth walks, trimmed hedges, butterflies, posies, and
nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its
geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls
through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing
billions of tons.”
Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist all impressions,
all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy, history, and
religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the universe. He is
not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion. He wishes to
drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive synthesis, than any
or than all of them put together. In feeling after the central type of
man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his cosmology must subsume all
cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth to them; his statement of
facts must include all religion and all irreligion, Christ and Boodha,
God and the devil. The world as it is, and the whole world as it is,
physical, and spiritual, and historical, with its good and bad, with its
manifold inconsistencies, is what he wishes to set forth, in strong,
picturesque, and popular lineaments, for the understanding of the average
man. One of his favourite endeavours is to get the whole matter into a
nutshell; to knock the four corners of the universe, one after another,
about his readers’ ears; to hurry him, in breathless phrases, hither and
thither, back and forward, in time and space; to focus all this about his
own momentary personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his
feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the
unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the
inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heavenly
bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that
disproportion of things which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical
flash of these eight words: The desire of the moth for the star.
The same truth, but to what a different purpose! Whitman’s moth is
mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot think
too highly of our sublunary tapers. The universe is so large that
imagination flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in the
meantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and habitable corner.
“The earth, that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any
nearer,” he remarks. And again: “Let your soul stand cool and composed,”
says he, “before a million universes.” It is the language of a
transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered.
But Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk and
the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints; he
must put the dots upon his i’s; he must corroborate the songs of Apollo
by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He tells his disciples
that they must be ready “to confront the growing arrogance of Realism.”
Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of this
universal edifice. “Nothing, not God,” he says, “is greater to one than
oneself is;” a statement with an irreligious smack at the first sight;
but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second. He will
give effect to his own character without apology; he sees “that the
elementary laws never apologise.” “I reckon,” he adds, with quaint
colloquial arrogance, “I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I
plant my house by, after all.” The level follows the law of its being;
so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in his own
place and way; God is the maker of all and all are in one design. For he
believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security. “No array
of terms,” quoth he, “no array of terms can say how much at peace I am
about God and about death.” There certainly never was a prophet who
carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas than
a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and language, you will
observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands above the
highest human doubts and trepidations.
But next in order of truths to a person’s sublime conviction of himself,
comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we mean by
the word love:—
“The dear love of man for his comrade—the attraction of friend for
friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land.”
The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon by other
people’s faces; he sees a look in their eyes that corresponds to
something in his own heart; there comes a tone in their voices which
convicts him of a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures. While he
is hymning the _ego_ and commercing with God and the universe, a woman
goes below his window; and at the turn of her skirt, or the colour of her
eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run. Love is so startlingly
real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality with the
consciousness of personal existence. We are as heartily persuaded of the
identity of those we love as of our own identity. And so sympathy pairs
with self-assertion, the two gerents of human life on earth; and
Whitman’s ideal man must not only be strong, free, and self-reliant in
himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his strength perfected by
the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering love for others. To some
extent this is taking away with the left hand what has been so generously
given with the right. Morality has been ceremoniously extruded from the
door only to be brought in again by the window. We are told, on one
page, to do as we please; and on the next we are sharply upbraided for
not having done as the author pleases. We are first assured that we are
the finest fellows in the world in our own right; and then it appears
that we are only fine fellows in so far as we practise a most quixotic
code of morals. The disciple who saw himself in clear ether a moment
before is plunged down again among the fogs and complications of duty.
And this is all the more overwhelming because Whitman insists not only on
love between sex and sex, and between friends of the same sex, but in the
field of the less intense political sympathies; and his ideal man must
not only be a generous friend but a conscientious voter into the bargain.
His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the reader will
remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how good
we are. He is to encourage us to be free and kind, by proving that we
are free and kind already. He passes our corporate life under review, to
show that it is upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the
advocate. “There is no object so soft,” he says somewhere in his big,
plain way, “there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d
universe.” Rightly understood, it is on the softest of all objects, the
sympathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easily and securely as
on a perfect axle. There is no room, of course, for doubt or discussion,
about conduct, where every one is to follow the law of his being with
exact compliance. Whitman hates doubt, deprecates discussion, and
discourages to his utmost the craving, carping sensibilities of the
conscience. We are to imitate, to use one of his absurd and happy
phrases, “the satisfaction and aplomb of animals.” If he preaches a sort
of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent to the ranting
optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares it to be the
original deliverance of the human heart; or at least, for he would be
honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at present
Christianised. His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy is
one of encouragement all round. A man must be a born hero to come up to
Whitman’s standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues; but of
a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has so little to
say, that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word or two upon
the other side. He would lay down nothing that would be a clog; he would
prescribe nothing that cannot be done ruddily, in a heat. The great
point is to get people under way. To the faithful Whitmanite this would
be justified by the belief that God made all, and that all was good; the
prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry “Tally-ho,” and mankind will
break into a gallop on the road to El Dorado. Perhaps, to another class
of minds, it may look like the result of the somewhat cynical reflection
that you will not make a kind man out of one who is unkind by any
precepts under heaven; tempered by the belief that, in natural
circumstances, the large majority is well disposed. Thence it would
follow, that if you can only get every one to feel more warmly and act
more courageously, the balance of results will be for good.
So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine; as a
picture of man’s life it is incomplete and misleading, although eminently
cheerful. This he is himself the first to acknowledge; for if he is
prophetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of consistency. “Do
I contradict myself?” he asks somewhere; and then pat comes the answer,
the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage, or rather of a
woman: “Very well, then, I contradict myself!” with this addition, not so
feminine and perhaps not altogether so satisfactory: “I am large—I
contain multitudes.” Life, as a matter of fact, partakes largely of the
nature of tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even if it be not so
logical, has this advantage over the gospel according to Pangloss, that
it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal evil. Whitman
accepts the fact of disease and wretchedness like an honest man; and
instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism, sets
himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses a conviction,
indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end; that “what is
untried and afterward” will fail no one, not even “the old man who has
lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worse than gall.” But
this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard or melancholy in the
present. Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst things that ever was
supposed to come from America, consoled himself with the reflection that
it was the price we have to pay for cochineal. And with that murderous
parody, logical optimism and the praises of the best of possible words
went irrevocably out of season, and have been no more heard of in the
mouths of reasonable men. Whitman spares us all allusions to the
cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost as of welcome; as
an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the enemy’s topsails off
the Spanish Main. There, at least, he seems to say, is something obvious
to be done. I do not know many better things in literature than the
brief pictures,—brief and vivid like things seen by lightning,—with which
he tries to stir up the world’s heart upon the side of mercy. He braces
us, on the one hand, with examples of heroic duty and helpfulness; on the
other, he touches us with pitiful instances of people needing help. He
knows how to make the heart beat at a brave story; to inflame us with
just resentment over the hunted slave; to stop our mouths for shame when
he tells of the drunken prostitute. For all the afflicted, all the weak,
all the wicked, a good word is said in a spirit which I can only call one
of ultra-Christianity; and however wild, however contradictory, it may be
in parts, this at least may be said for his book, as it may be said of
the Christian Gospels, that no one will read it, however respectable, but
he gets a knock upon his conscience; no one however fallen, but he finds
a kindly and supporting welcome.
IV.
Nor has he been content with merely blowing the trumpet for the battle of
well-doing; he has given to his precepts the authority of his own brave
example. Naturally a grave, believing man, with little or no sense of
humour, he has succeeded as well in life as in his printed performances.
The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquently in his actions.
Many who have only read his poetry have been tempted to set him down as
an ass, or even as a charlatan; but I never met any one who had known him
personally who did not profess a solid affection and respect for the
man’s character. He practises as he professes; he feels deeply that
Christian love for all men, that toleration, that cheerful delight in
serving others, which he often celebrates in literature with a doubtful
measure of success. And perhaps, out of all his writings, the best and
the most human and convincing passages are to be found in “these soil’d
and creas’d little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper,
folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a pin,” which he
scribbled during the war by the bedsides of the wounded or in the
excitement of great events. They are hardly literature in the formal
meaning of the word; he has left his jottings for the most part as he
made them; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a dying soldier, a
business memorandum, the copy of a letter-short, straightforward to the
point, with none of the trappings of composition; but they breathe a
profound sentiment, they give us a vivid look at one of the sides of
life, and they make us acquainted with a man whom it is an honour to
love.
Whitman’s intense Americanism, his unlimited belief in the future of
These States (as, with reverential capitals, he loves to call them), made
the war a period of great trial to his soul. The new virtue, Unionism,
of which he is the sole inventor, seemed to have fallen into premature
unpopularity. All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in the balance.
And the game of war was not only momentous to him in its issues; it
sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured him intimately
by the spectacle of its horrors. It was a theatre, it was a place of
education, it was like a season of religious revival. He watched Lincoln
going daily to his work; he studied and fraternised with young soldiery
passing to the front; above all, he walked the hospitals, reading the
Bible, distributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco; a patient,
helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches.
His memoranda of this period are almost bewildering to read. From one
point of view they seem those of a district visitor; from another, they
look like the formless jottings of an artist in the picturesque. More
than one woman, on whom I tried the experiment, immediately claimed the
writer for a fellow-woman. More than one literary purist might identify
him as a shoddy newspaper correspondent without the necessary faculty of
style. And yet the story touches home; and if you are of the weeping
order of mankind, you will certainly find your eyes fill with tears, of
which you have no reason to be ashamed. There is only one way to
characterise a work of this order, and that is to quote. Here is a
passage from a letter to a mother, unknown to Whitman, whose son died in
hospital:—
“Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical
treatment, nursing, etc. He had watches much of the time. He was so
good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself liked him very
much. I was in the habit of coming in afternoons and sitting by him,
and he liked to have me—liked to put out his arm and lay his hand on
my knee—would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more
restless and flighty at night—often fancied himself with his
regiment—by his talk sometimes seem’d as if his feelings were hurt by
being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent
of—said ‘I never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and
never was.’ At other times he would fancy himself talking as it
seem’d to children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and giving
them good advice; would talk to them a long while. All the time he
was out of his head not one single bad word, or thought, or idea
escaped him. It was remark’d that many a man’s conversation in his
senses was not half so good as Frank’s delirium.
“He was perfectly willing to die—he had become very weak, and had
suffer’d a good deal, and was perfectly resign’d, poor boy. I do not
know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any
rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances,
with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved
so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be
surpassed. And now, like many other noble and good men, after
serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at
the very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy—yet there is
a text, ‘God doeth all things well,’ the meaning of which, after due
time, appears to the soul.
“I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your
son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while, for
I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him.”
It is easy enough to pick holes in the grammar of this letter, but what
are we to say of its profound goodness and tenderness? It is written as
though he had the mother’s face before his eyes, and saw her wincing in
the flesh at every word. And what, again, are we to say of its sober
truthfulness, not exaggerating, not running to phrases, not seeking to
make a hero out of what was only an ordinary but good and brave young
man? Literary reticence is not Whitman’s stronghold; and this reticence
is not literary, but humane; it is not that of a good artist but that of
a good man. He knew that what the mother wished to hear about was Frank;
and he told her about her Frank as he was.
V.
Something should be said of Whitman’s style, for style is of the essence
of thinking. And where a man is so critically deliberate as our author,
and goes solemnly about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indication
is worth notice. He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse;
sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged and
careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken
the trouble to write prose. I believe myself that it was selected
principally because it was easy to write, although not without
recollections of the marching measures of some of the prose in our
English Old Testament. According to Whitman, on the other hand, “the
time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between
Prose and Poetry . . . for the most cogent purposes of those great inland
states, and for Texas, and California, and Oregon;”—a statement which is
among the happiest achievements of American humour. He calls his verses
“recitatives,” in easily followed allusion to a musical form.
“Easily-written, loose-fingered chords,” he cries, “I feel the thrum of
your climax and close.” Too often, I fear, he is the only one who can
perceive the rhythm; and in spite of Mr. Swinburne, a great part of his
work considered as verses is poor bald stuff. Considered, not as verse,
but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admirable
merits. The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and trenchant,
is thrust into its place. Whitman has small regard to literary
decencies, and is totally free from literary timidities. He is neither
afraid of being slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being
ridiculous. The result is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur,
sentimental affectation, and downright nonsense. It would be useless to
follow his detractors and give instances of how bad he can be at his
worst; and perhaps it would be not much wiser to give extracted specimens
of how happily he can write when he is at his best. These come in to
most advantage in their own place; owing something, it may be, to the
offset of their curious surroundings. And one thing is certain, that no
one can appreciate Whitman’s excellences until he has grown accustomed to
his faults. Until you are content to pick poetry out of his pages almost
as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn’s translation, your
gravity will be continually upset, your ears perpetually disappointed,
and the whole book will be no more to you than a particularly flagrant
production by the Poet Close.
A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, unfortunate in taking
for thesis the beauty of the world as it now is, not only on the
hill-tops but in the factory; not only by the harbour full of stately
ships, but in the magazine of the hopelessly prosaic hatter. To show
beauty in common things is the work of the rarest tact. It is not to be
done by the wishing. It is easy to posit as a theory, but to bring it
home to men’s minds is the problem of literature, and is only
accomplished by rare talent, and in comparatively rare instances. To bid
the whole world stand and deliver, with a dogma in one’s right hand by
way of pistol; to cover reams of paper in a galloping, headstrong vein;
to cry louder and louder over everything as it comes up, and make no
distinction in one’s enthusiasm over the most incomparable matters; to
prove one’s entire want of sympathy for the jaded, literary palate, by
calling, not a spade a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical
apostrophe;—this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not the way
to do it. It may be very wrong, and very wounding to a respectable
branch of industry, but the word “hatter” cannot be used seriously in
emotional verse; not to understand this, is to have no literary tact; and
I would, for his own sake, that this were the only inadmissible
expression with which Whitman had bedecked his pages. The book teems
with similar comicalities; and, to a reader who is determined to take it
from that side only, presents a perfect carnival of fun.
A good deal of this is the result of theory playing its usual vile trick
upon the artist. It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must have
in the hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say
Hatter? One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the
“great poet” to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other.
A most incontrovertible sentiment surely, and one which nobody would
think of controverting, where—and here is the point—where any beauty has
been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is
simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled
him, at the crisis of a high-flown rhapsody? And what are we to say,
where a man of Whitman’s notable capacity for putting things in a bright,
picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges,
with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades or implements, with
no more colour or coherence than so many index-words out of a dictionary?
I do not know that we can say anything, but that it is a prodigiously
amusing exhibition for a line or so. The worst of it is, that Whitman
must have known better. The man is a great critic, and, so far as I can
make out, a good one; and how much criticism does it require to know that
capitulation is not description, or that fingering on a dumb keyboard,
with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is not at all the same
thing as discoursing music? I wish I could believe he was quite honest
with us; but, indeed, who was ever quite honest who wrote a book for a
purpose? It is a flight beyond the reach of human magnanimity.
One other point, where his means failed him, must be touched upon,
however shortly. In his desire to accept all facts loyally and simply,
it fell within his programme to speak at some length and with some
plainness on what is, for I really do not know what reason, the most
delicate of subjects. Seeing in that one of the most serious and
interesting parts of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked upon
as ridiculous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity with his tongue in
his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity of fatherhood
beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also among the
things that can be spoken of without either a blush or a wink. But the
Philistines have been too strong; and, to say truth, Whitman has rather
played the fool. We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is
improving; that it would be a good thing if a window were opened on these
close privacies of life; that on this subject, as on all others, he now
and then lets fall a pregnant saying. But we are not satisfied. We feel
that he was not the man for so difficult an enterprise. He loses our
sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our
attention in that of a Bull in a China Shop. And where, by a little more
art, we might have been solemnised ourselves, it is too often Whitman
alone who is solemn in the face of an audience somewhat indecorously
amused.
VI.
Lastly, as most important, after all, to human beings in our disputable
state, what is that higher prudence which was to be the aim and issue of
these deliberate productions?
Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct formula. If he could have
adequately said his say in a single proverb, it is to be presumed he
would not have put himself to the trouble of writing several volumes. It
was his programme to state as much as he could of the world with all its
contradictions, and leave the upshot with God who planned it. What he
has made of the world and the world’s meanings is to be found at large in
his poems. These altogether give his answers to the problems of belief
and conduct; in many ways righteous and high-spirited, in some ways loose
and contradictory. And yet there are two passages from the preface to
the _Leaves of Grass_ which do pretty well condense his teaching on all
essential points, and yet preserve a measure of his spirit.
“This is what you shall do,” he says in the one, “love the earth, and
sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to
others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and
indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or
unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with powerful
uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families, read
these leaves (his own works) in the open air every season of every
year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or
church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”
“The prudence of the greatest poet,” he adds in the other—and the
greatest poet is, of course, himself—“knows that the young man who
composedly perilled his life and lost it, has done exceeding well for
himself; while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it
to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for
himself worth mentioning; and that only that person has no great
prudence to learn, who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things,
and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely
following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward
and waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any
emergency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death.”
There is much that is Christian in these extracts, startlingly Christian.
Any reader who bears in mind Whitman’s own advice and “dismisses whatever
insults his own soul” will find plenty that is bracing, brightening, and
chastening to reward him for a little patience at first. It seems hardly
possible that any being should get evil from so healthy a book as the
_Leaves of Grass_, which is simply comical wherever it falls short of
nobility; but if there be any such, who cannot both take and leave, who
cannot let a single opportunity pass by without some unworthy and unmanly
thought, I should have as great difficulty, and neither more nor less, in
recommending the works of Whitman as in lending them Shakespeare, or
letting them go abroad outside of the grounds of a private asylum.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU:
HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS.
I.
THOREAU’S thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut,
conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his
almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in
act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world’s
heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his
enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be
convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but
was all improved and sharpened to a point. “He was bred to no
profession,” says Emerson; “he never married; he lived alone; he never
went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he
ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and,
though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner
what dish he preferred, he answered, ‘the nearest.’” So many negative
superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later works
he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under the
impression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and
there we see the prig stand public and confessed. It was “much easier,”
says Emerson acutely, much easier for Thoreau to say _no_ than _yes_; and
that is a characteristic which depicts the man. It is a useful
accomplishment to be able to say _no_, but surely it is the essence of
amiability to prefer to say _yes_ where it is possible. There is
something wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he is
constrained to say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this born
dissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not
enough of them to be truly polar with humanity; whether you call him
demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for he
was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities. The world’s heroes
have room for all positive qualities, even those which are disreputable,
in the capacious theatre of their dispositions. Such can live many
lives; while a Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetual
foresight.
He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort; and he had
this one great merit, that he succeeded so far as to be happy. “I love
my fate to the core and rind,” he wrote once; and even while he lay
dying, here is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too feeble
to control the pen): “You ask particularly after my health. I _suppose_
that I have not many months to live, but of course know nothing about it.
I may say that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret
nothing.” It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to the
sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for this
world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and
lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from
within. Now Thoreau’s content and ecstasy in living was, we may say,
like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for
there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a
life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing
contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not
wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a
corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain
virtuous self-indulgences. It is true that his tastes were noble; that
his ruling passion was to keep himself unspotted from the world; and that
his luxuries were all of the same healthy order as cold tubs and early
rising. But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit of goodness,
and morbid even in the pursuit of health. I cannot lay my hands on the
passage in which he explains his abstinence from tea and coffee, but I am
sure I have the meaning correctly. It is this; He thought it bad economy
and worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil the natural rapture of the
morning with such muddy stimulants; let him but see the sun rise, and he
was already sufficiently inspirited for the labours of the day. That may
be reason good enough to abstain from tea; but when we go on to find the
same man, on the same or similar grounds, abstain from nearly everything
that his neighbours innocently and pleasurably use, and from the rubs and
trials of human society itself into the bargain, we recognise that
valetudinarian healthfulness which is more delicate than sickness itself.
We need have no respect for a state of artificial training. True health
is to be able to do without it. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin
the day upon a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as
much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses.
A man who must separate himself from his neighbours’ habits in order to
be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium
for the same purpose. What we want to see is one who can breast into the
world, do a man’s work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment
of existence.
Thoreau’s faculties were of a piece with his moral shyness; for they were
all d
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