Books and authors

by Robert Lynd

3. FANNY BRAWNE

“My dear Brown,” wrote the dying Keats, with Fanny Brawne in his thoughts, in almost the last of his surviving letters, “for my sake, be her advocate for ever.” “You think she has many faults,” he had written a month earlier, when leaving England; “but, for my sake, think she has none.” Thus did Keats bequeath the perfect image of Fanny Brawne to his friend. And the bequest is not only to his friend but to posterity. We, too, must study her image in the eyes of Keats, and hang the portrait of the lady who had no faults in at least as good a position on the wall with those other portraits of the flawed lady—the minx, the flirt, the siren, the destroyer.

Sir Sidney Colvin, in his noble and monumental biography of Keats, found no room for this idealised portrait. He was scrupulously fair to Fanny Brawne as a woman, but he condemned her as the woman with whom Keats happened to fall in love. To Sir Sidney she was not Keats’s goddess, but Keats’s demon. Criticising the book on its first appearance, I pointed out that almost everything that is immortal in the poetry of Keats was written when he was under the influence of his passion for Fanny Brawne, and I urged that, had it not been for the ploughing and harrowing of love, we should probably never have had the rich harvest of his genius. Sir Sidney has now added a few pages to his preface, in which he replies to this criticism, and declares that to write of Fanny Brawne in such a manner is “to misunderstand Keats’s whole career.” He admits that “most of Keats’s best work was done after he had met Fanny Brawne,” but it was done, he insists, “not because of her, but in spite of her.” “At the hour when his genius was naturally and splendidly ripening of itself,” he writes, “she brought into his life an element of distracting unrest, of mingled pleasure and torment, to use his own words, but of torment far more than of pleasure.... In writing to her or about her he never for a moment suggests that he owed to her any of his inspiration as a poet.... In point of fact, from the hour when he passed under her spell he could never do any long or sustained work except in absence from her.” Now all this means little more than that Fanny Brawne made Keats suffer. On that point everybody is agreed. The only matter in dispute is whether this suffering was a source of energy or of destruction to Keats’s genius.

Keats has left us in one of his letters his own view of the part suffering plays in the making of a soul. Scoffing at the conception of the world as a “vale of tears,” he urges that we should regard it instead as “the vale of soul-making,” and asks: “Do you not see how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Thus, according to his own philosophy, there is no essential contradiction between a love that harrows and a love that enriches. As for his never having suggested that he owed any of his inspiration to his love for Fanny, he may not have done this in so many words, but he makes it clear enough that she stirred his nature to the depths for the first time and awakened in him that fiery energy which is one of the first conditions of genius in poetry. “I cannot think of you,” he wrote, “without some sort of energy—though mal à propos. Even as I leave off, it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of you would uncrystallise and dissolve me. I must not give way to it—but turn to my writing again—if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy—I must forget them.” Sir Sidney would read this letter as a confession that love and genius were at enmity in Keats. It seems to me a much more reasonable view that in the heat of conflict Keats’s genius became doubly intense, and that, had there been no struggle, there would have been no triumph. It is not necessary to believe that Fanny Brawne was the ideal woman for Keats to have loved: the point is that his love of her was the supreme event in his life. “I never,” he told her, “felt my mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment—upon no person but you.” “I have been astonished,” he wrote in another letter, “that men could die martyrs for religion—I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more—I could be martyr’d for my religion—love is my religion—I could die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet.” And still earlier he had written: “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks—your loveliness and the hour of my death. O, that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.... I will imagine you Venus to-night and pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen.” It is out of emotional travail such as we find in these letters that poetry is born. Is it possible to believe that, if Keats had never fallen in love—and he had never been in love till he met Fanny—he would have been the great poet we know?

I hold that it is not. Hence I still maintain the truth of the statement which Sir Sidney Colvin sets out to controvert, that, while Fanny “may have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man, she was his good fairy as a poet.”

Keats’s misfortune in love was a personal misfortune, not a misfortune to his genius. He was too poor to marry, and, in his own phrase, he “trembled at domestic cares.” He was ill and morbid: he had longed for the hour of his death before ever he set eyes on Fanny. Add to this that he was young and sensual and as jealous as Othello. His own nature had in it all the elements of tragic suffering, even if Fanny had been as perfect as St. Cecilia. And she was no St. Cecilia. He had called her “minx” shortly after their first meeting in the autumn of 1818, and described her as “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange.” Even then, however, he was in love with her. “The very first week I knew you,” he told her afterwards, “I wrote myself your vassal.... If you should ever feel for man at the first sight what I did for you, I am lost.” It is clear from this that his heart and his head quarrelled about Fanny. At the same time, after those first censures, he never spoke critically of her again, even to his most intimate friends. Some of his friends evidently disliked Fanny and wished to separate the lovers. He refers to this in a letter in which he speaks angrily of “these laughers who do not like you, who envy you for your beauty,” and writes of himself as “one who, if he never should see you again, would make you the saint of his memory.” But Keats himself could not be certain that she was a saint. “My greatest torment since I have known you,” he tells her, “has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid.” He is so jealous that, when he is ill, he tells her that she must not even go into town alone till he is well again, and says: “If you would really what is called enjoy yourself at a party—if you can smile in people’s faces, and wish them to admire you now—you never have nor ever will love me.” But he adds a postscript: “No, my sweet Fanny—I am wrong—I do not wish you to be unhappy—and yet I do, I must while there is so sweet a beauty—my loveliest, my darling! Good-bye! I kiss you—O the torments!” In a later letter he returns to his jealousy, and declares: “Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’” He tells this fragile little worldly creature that she should be prepared to suffer on the rack for him, accuses her of flirting with Brown, and, in one of the most painful of his letters, cries out:

I appeal to you by the blood of that Christ you believe in: Do not write to me if you have done anything this month which it would have pained me to have seen. You may have altered—if you have not—if you still believe in dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you—I do not want to live—if you have done so I wish the coming night may be my last. I cannot live without you, and not only you, but chaste you, virtuous you.... Be serious! Love is not a plaything—and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience.

Poor Keats! Poor Fanny! That Fanny loved Keats is obvious. In this at least she showed herself unworldly. She cannot have been dazzled by his fame, for at that time he was to all appearance merely a minor poet who had been laughed at. He was of humble birth, and he had not even the prospect of being able to earn a living. Add to this that he was an all but chronic invalid. Her love must, in the circumstances, have been a very real and unselfish affair, and there is no evidence to suggest that, for all her taste for dancing and for going into town, it was fickle. Keats asked too much of her. He wished to enslave her as she had enslaved him. He knew in his saner moments that he was unfair to her. “At times,” he wrote, “I feel bitterly sorry that ever I made you unhappy.” There was unhappiness on both sides—the unhappiness of an engagement that could come to nothing. “There are,” as Keats mournfully wrote, “impossibilities in the world.” It was Fate, not Fanny, that wrecked the life of Keats. “My dear Brown,” he wrote near the end, “I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well.” That is not the comment a man makes on a woman whom he regards as his destroying angel. Nor is it a destroying angel that Keats pictures when he writes to Fanny: “You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you passed my window home yesterday, I was filled with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time.” Love such as this is not the enemy of poetry. Without it there would be no poetry but that of patriots, saints and hermits. A biography of Keats should not be a biography without a heroine. That would be Hamlet without Ophelia. Sir Sidney Colvin’s is a masterly life which is likely to take a permanent place in English biographical literature. But it has one flaw. Sir Sidney did not see how vital a clue Keats left us to the interpretation of his life and genius in that last despairing appeal: “My dear Brown, for my sake be her advocate for ever.”

VI
CHARLES LAMB

Charles Lamb was a small, flat-footed man whose eyes were of different colours and who stammered. He nevertheless leaves on many of his readers the impression of personal beauty. De Quincey has told us that in the repose of sleep Lamb’s face “assumed an expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual beauty of outline, its childlike simplicity, and its benignity.” He added that the eyes “disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb’s waking face,” and gave a feeling of restlessness, “shifting, like Northern lights, through every mode of combination with fantastic playfulness.” This description, I think, suggests something of the quality of Lamb’s charm. There are in his best work depths of repose under a restless and prankish surface. He is at once the most restful and the most playful of essayists. Carlyle, whose soul could not find rest in such quietistic virtue as Lamb’s, noticed only the playfulness and was disgusted by it. “Charles Lamb,” he declared, “I do verily believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners.” He wrote this in his Diary in 1831 after paying a visit to Lamb at Enfield. “Poor Lamb!” he concluded. “Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius! He said: ‘There are just two things I regret in England’s history: first, that Guy Fawkes’ plot did not take effect (there would have been so glorious an explosion); second, that the Royalists did not hang Milton (then we might have laughed at them), etc., etc.’ Armer Teufel!”

Carlyle would have been astonished if he had foreseen that it would be he and not Lamb who would be the “poor devil” in the eyes of posterity. Lamb is a tragically lovable figure, but Carlyle is a tragically pitiable figure. Lamb, indeed, is in danger of being pedestalled among the saints of literature. He had most of the virtues that a man can have without his virtue becoming a reproach to his fellows. He had most of the vices that a man can have without ceasing to be virtuous. He had enthusiasm that made him at home among the poets, and prejudices that made him at home among common men. His prejudices, however, were for the most part humorous, as when, speaking of L. E. L., he said: “If she belonged to me I would lock her up and feed her on bread and water till she left off writing poetry. A female poet, a female author of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think.” He also denounced clever women as “impudent, forward, unfeminine, and unhealthy in their minds.” At the same time, the woman he loved most on earth and devoted his life to was the “female author” with whom he collaborated in the Tales from Shakespeare. But probably there did exist somewhere in his nature the seeds of most of those prejudices dear to the common Englishman—prejudices against Scotsmen, Jews, and clever women, against such writers as Voltaire and Shelley, and in favour of eating, drinking and tobacco. He held some of his prejudices comically, and some in sober earnest, but at least he had enough of them mixed up in his composition to keep him in touch with ordinary people. That is one of the first necessities of a writer—especially of a dramatist, novelist or essayist, whose subject-matter is human nature. A great writer may be indifferent to the philosophy of the hour or even to some extent to the politics of the hour, but he cannot safely be indifferent to such matters as his neighbour’s love of boiled ham or his fondness for a game of cards. Lamb sympathised with all the human appetites that will bear talking about. Many noble authors are hosts who talk gloriously, but never invite us to dinner or even ring for the decanter. Lamb remembers that a party should be a party.

It is not enough, however, that a writer should be friends with our appetites. Lamb would never have become the most beloved of English essayists if he had told us only such things as that Coleridge “holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings,” or that he himself, though having lost his taste for “the whole vegetable tribe,” sticks, nevertheless, to asparagus, “which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts.” He was human elsewhere than at the table or beside a bottle. His kindness was higher than gastric. His indulgences seem but a modest disguise for his virtues. His life was a life of industrious self-sacrifice. “I am wedded, Coleridge,” he cried, after the murder of his mother, “to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father”; and his life with his sister affords one of the supreme examples of fidelity in literary biography. Lamb is eminently the essayist of the affections. The best of his essays are made up of affectionate memories. He seems to steep his very words in some dye of memory and affection that no other writer has discovered. He is one of those rare sentimentalists who speak out of the heart. He has but to write, “Do you remember?” as in Old China, and our breasts feel a pang like a home-sick child thinking of the happiness of a distant fireside and a smiling mother that it will see no more. Lamb’s work is full of this sense of separation. He is the painter of “the old familiar faces.” He conjures up a Utopia of the past, in which aunts were kind and Coleridge, the “inspired charity-boy,” was his friend, and every neighbour was a figure as queer as a witch in a fairy-tale. “All, all are gone”—that is his theme.

He is the poet of town-bred boyhood. He is a true lover of antiquity, but antiquity means to him, not merely such things as Oxford and a library of old books: it means a small boy sitting in the gallery of the theatre, and the clerks (mostly bachelors) in the shut-up South-Sea House, and the dead pedagogue with uplifted rod in Christ’s Hospital, of whom he wrote: “Poor J. B.! May all his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities.” His essays are a jesting elegy on all that venerable and ruined world. He is at once Hamlet and Yorick in his melancholy and his mirth. He has obeyed the injunction: “Let us all praise famous men,” but he has interpreted it in terms of the men who were famous in his own small circle when he was a boy and a poor clerk.

Lamb not only made all that world of school and holiday and office a part of antiquity; he also made himself a part of antiquity. He is himself his completest character—the only character, indeed, whom he did not paint in miniature. We know him, as a result of his letters, his essays, and the anecdotes of his friends, more intimately even than we know Dr. Johnson. He has confessed everything except his goodness, and, indeed, did his reputation some harm with his contemporaries by being so public with his shortcomings. He was the enemy of dull priggishness, and would even set up as a buffoon in contrast. He earned the reputation of a drunkard, not entirely deserved, partly by his Confessions of a Drunkard, but partly by his habit of bursting into singing “Diddle, diddle, dumpling,” under the influence of liquor, whatever the company. His life, however, was a long, half-comic battle against those three friendly enemies of man—liquor, snuff and tobacco. His path was strewn with good resolutions. “This very night,” he wrote on one occasion, “I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.” The perfect anecdote of Lamb’s vices is surely that which Hone tells of his abandonment of snuff:

One summer’s evening I was walking on Hampstead Heath with Charles Lamb, and we talked ourselves into a philosophic contempt of our slavery to the habit of snuff-taking, and with the firm resolution of never again taking a single pinch, we threw our snuff-boxes away from the hill on which we stood, far among the furze and the brambles below, and went home in triumph. I began to be very miserable, and was wretched all night. In the morning I was walking on the same hill. I saw Charles Lamb below, searching among the bushes. He looked up laughing, and saying, “What, you are come to look for your snuff-box too!” “Oh, no,” said I, taking a pinch out of a paper in my waistcoat pocket, “I went for a halfpennyworth to the first shop that was open.”

Lamb’s life is an epic of such things as this, and Mr. Lucas is its rhapsodist. He has written an anthological biography that will have a permanent place on the shelves beside the works of Lamb himself.

VII
BYRON ONCE MORE

It will always be easy to take an interest in Byron because he was not only a scamp but a hero—or, alternatively, because he was not only a hero but a scamp. As a hero he can be taken seriously: as a villain he can be taken comically. His letters, like Don Juan, reveal him at their best chiefly on the comic side. He was not only a wit, but an audacious wit, and there is a kind of audacity that amuses us, whether in a guttersnipe or in a peer. Byron was a guttersnipe in scarlet and ermine. He enjoyed all the more playing the part of a guttersnipe, because he could play it in a peer’s robe. He was obviously the sort of person who, if brought up in the gutter, would be sent to a reformatory. Imagine a reformatory boy, unreformed and possessed of genius, loosed on respectable society, and you will have a picture of Byron. Not that Byron did not share the point of view of respectable society on the most important matters. He had no sympathy with the heresies of Shelley, whom he thought “crazy against religion and morality.” He did not want a new morality, as Shelley did: he was quite content with the old morality and the old immorality. He never could have run away with a woman on principle. Love with him was not a principle, but an appetite. He was a glutton who did not know where to stop. He himself never pretended that it was the desire of the moth for the star that was the cause of his troubles. He was an orthodox materialist, as we may gather from one of his unusually frank letters to Lady Melbourne, a lady in her sixties, to whom he ran with the tale of every fresh amour, like a newsboy with the stop-press edition of an evening paper. We find him at the age of twenty-five or so writing to explain that he was sure to die fairly young. “I began very early and very violently,” he wrote, “and alternate extremes of excess and abstinence have utterly destroyed—oh, unsentimental word!—my stomach, and, as Lady Oxford used seriously to say, a broken heart means nothing but a bad digestion.” Byron, no doubt, enjoyed posturing, whether he exposed a broken heart or a weak stomach. But, for a poet, he undoubtedly lived and thought on the material plane out of all proportion to his life and thought on the spiritual plane. He felt much the same dread of a respectable woman as did the wicked young æsthete of the ’nineties. When he was thinking of getting married, and had his eye on Miss Milbanke, he wrote doubtingly to Lady Melbourne: “I admired your niece, but she is engaged to Eden; besides, she deserves a better heart than mine. What shall I do—shall I advertise?” About the same time he was writing concerning women in general:

I am sadly out of practice lately; except a few sighs to a gentlewoman at supper, who was too much occupied with ye fourth wing of her second chicken to mind anything that was not material.

If the wing of a chicken was not at least as immaterial as Byron’s sighs, there must have been something amiss with the cooking. Byron’s sighs to women were material enough, one fancies, to have been visible, like a drayman’s breath on a frosty day.

The letters to Lady Melbourne reveal him in an extraordinary light, even for an amorist. While attempting to arrange a match with Lady Melbourne’s niece he fills the greater part of his letter to her with the backwash of his intrigue with her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb, and with stories of intrigues with various other ladies. Byron, like many amorists, seems never to have realised that adventures are to the adventurous in love as in other matters, but to have looked on himself as a man pestered by women when he was only a man pestered by ordinary greed and extraordinary opportunity. If he could not shift the blame for his sins on to the woman, he would even shift it on to her husband. “He literally provoked and goaded me into it,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne, about the husband of Lady Frances Webster, at a time when he seemed to be falling almost seriously in love with Lady Frances. No one who cares for scandalous literature should miss these letters in which Byron writes off to Lady Melbourne rapturous accounts of every step in the wooing of the wife of his host. “I am glad they amaze you,” he wrote to Lady Melbourne concerning the Websters; “anything that confirms and extends one’s observations on life and character delights me.” It does not appear to have occurred to him that, amazing though the Websters were, they were but as copper to gold compared to his own amazing self. Lady Frances, at least, would have been considerably amazed if she had known that, every time she sighed, the fat young poet who adored her heliographed the fact from Yorkshire to London. In one of his letters he tells of a game of billiards with his hostess, in the course of which he slipped a love-letter to her. Just at that moment, “who should enter the room but the person who ought at the moment to have been in the Red Sea, if Satan had any civility”—in other words, Webster, his host and her husband. Even as he is writing the description of the incident to Lady Melbourne, Byron makes a parenthesis to tell her that Webster has again come into the room (“I am this moment interrupted by the Marito, and write this before him. He has brought me a political pamphlet in MS. to decipher and applaud; I shall content myself with the last; oh, he is gone again”). Ultimately, however, Byron spared Lady Frances—at least, that is how he put it. He protested to Lady Melbourne that he loved the lady and would have sacrificed everything for her, and that Lady Melbourne wronged him to think otherwise. “I hate sentiment,” he told her, “and, in consequence, my epistolary levity makes you believe me as hollow and heartless as my letters are light.” The truth is, Byron was, in many of his relations, heartless. He kissed and told, and he enjoyed telling, at least, as much as he enjoyed kissing. He tells Lady Melbourne, for instance, about the “exquisite oddity” of Lady Frances’s letters—“the simplicity of her cunning and her exquisite reasons”:

She vindicates her treachery to [Webster] thus: after condemning deceit in general, and hers in particular, she says: “But then remember it is to deceive un marito, and to prevent all the unpleasant consequences, etc., etc.”

It is clear that Lady Frances, though pure, shocked Byron, just as Byron, though impure, shocks the average reader. She even besought him to go on writing to her husband:

Again, she desires me to write to him kindly, for she believes he cares for nobody but me!

Byron could never understand unconventional behaviour. “Is not all this a comedy?” he asks Lady Melbourne.

Byron, as we read his letters and poems together, seems to lead the double life of an actor. There is the Byron who stands in the middle of the stage in the fierce light that beats upon a poet, and who declaims—how gloriously!—:

The mountains look on Marathon—

And Marathon looks on the sea;

And musing there an hour alone,

I dreamed that Greece might still be free;

For standing on the Persians’ grave,

I could not deem myself a slave.

And there is Byron behind the scenes—the Byron who might have been invented by Mr. Shaw as an example of the moral irresponsibility of the artistic temperament. It may be doubted whether any artist of the first rank could have written such a letter as Byron wrote to Hobhouse in 1818, announcing that his illegitimate daughter, Allegra, had been brought out to Italy from England by Shelley. His reference to the child runs:

Shelley has got to Milan with the bastard, and its mother; but won’t send the shild, unless I will go and see the mother. I have sent a messenger for the shild but I can’t leave my quarters, and have “sworn an oath.” Between attorneys, clerks, and wives, and children, and friends, my life is made a burthen.

Shelley, for his part, when he is writing to Byron to ask what he is to do with the child (which has been left on his hands month after month), never mentions it but with a delight at least equal to his anxiety to get rid of it. “I think,” he tells Byron, “she is the most lovely and engaging child I ever beheld.” Shelley’s letters to Byron are the letters of a good man, but they are not good letters. They are the formal utterances of an angel. Byron’s letters, on the other hand, are good letters, though they are not the letters of a good man. They are the informal utterances of a man possessed by a devil. But whether he was as black as he painted himself it is impossible to be sure. When little Allegra died at the age of five, he prepared an inscription for her tomb ending with the verse: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.” If he had been all heartless, he could never have written his greatest lyrics. His letters, for the most part, take us into the comic recesses of his mind: perhaps this comic Byron is the immortal Byron. But in the letters, as in the legend of his death and in his poems, there are hints of that greater Byron whom Shelley tried to summon into being—a Byron who would have been Byron with a touch of Shelley—a nobler being a little more remote from the splendour of Hell, a candidate for Paradise.

VIII
SHELLEY

Matthew Arnold has had a bad time of it during the Shelley centenary celebrations. He has been denounced in nearly every paper in England, as though, in his attitude to Shelley, he had shown himself to be a malicious old nincompoop. As a matter of fact, Matthew Arnold talked a great deal of common sense about Shelley, and, though he underestimated his genius, how many of the overestimators of Shelley have even praised him so nobly as he is praised in that unforgettable image—“a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”? Yet these are the words with which Matthew Arnold’s critics quarrel most angrily. It is not enough for them that he called Shelley a beautiful angel. It is a compliment that few poets, few saints even, have deserved. The partisans demand, however, it seems, that he shall also be proclaimed an effectual angel. In one sense, of course, no great poet is ineffectual. We might as well call a star ineffectual. In a more limited sense, however, a great poet who is also a theorist may be ineffectual, and Shelley, in whom the poet and the theorist are all but inseparable, was undoubtedly ineffectual in this meaning of the word.

He sang a philosophy of love, and one effect of his philosophy was the suicide of Harriet Westbrook. He was, in this instance, ineffectual in not being able to translate his theory into experience in such a way that what was beautiful in theory would also be beautiful in experience. Where a theory was concerned, he did not recognise facts; he recognised only the theory. Thus, his theory that love is “the sole law which should govern the moral world” led him in Laon and Cythna (later transformed into The Revolt of Islam) to make the lovers brother and sister. This circumstance was, he declared, “intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life.” It was introduced “merely to accustom men to that charity and toleration which the exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own has a tendency to promote.” Who but an ineffectual angel would have thought of dragging idealised incest into a work of art solely with a view to the improvement of his readers’ morals? He did not wish his readers to practise incest: he merely wished to make them practise charity.

Shelley, indeed, was a man always hastening towards an ideal world which at the touch of experience turned into a mirage. His political, like his ethical, theories had something mirage-like about them. He was a prophet who was so absorbed in the vision of the Promised Land that he had little thought to spare for the human nature that he was trying to incite to make the journey. His own imagination travelled fast as a ray of light, but he could not take human beings with him on so swift a journey. Hence, if he has been effectual, he has been so as an inspiration to the few. He has been ineffectual as regards achieving the earthly paradise he foretold in The Mask of Anarchy and Prometheus Unbound.

It ought, then, to be possible to appreciate Shelley without abusing Matthew Arnold. Every genius is limited, and we shall not admire the genius the less but the more if we recognise its limitations so clearly that we come to take them for granted. Thus, if we attempt to define Shelley’s genius as a poet, we have to start by recognising that there is a formless quality in most of his work when it is compared to the work of Keats or Wordsworth. His poems do not seem to be quite vertebrate—to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Their path is as indeterminate as the path of the lark fluttering in the air. With Keats we stand still to survey the earth. With Wordsworth we walk. But Shelley, like his skylark, is a “scorner of the ground,” and our feet do not always touch the earth when we are in his company. Even when he journeys by land or water, he rushes us along as though the air were the only element, and we are dizzied by the speed with which we are carried from landscape to landscape. In Alastor, scene succeeds scene faster than the eye can seize it.

Shelley, indeed, is the poet of metamorphosis. He loves the miraculous change from shape to shape almost more than he loves any settled shape. This aspect of his genius reveals itself most richly in “The Cloud.” Here is the very music of the changing shape. “I change, but I cannot die,” is the cloud’s boast:

For after the rain, when with never a stain,

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams,

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I arise and unbuild it again.

Shelley, too, could create these beautiful and unsubstantial shapes from hour to hour, feeling that each was but a new metamorphosis of universal beauty. “The Cloud” is the divine comedy of metamorphosis. The “Hymn of Pan” is its tragedy:

I sang of the dancing stars,

I sang of the dædal Earth,

And of Heaven—and the giant wars,

And Love, and Death, and Birth—

And then I changed my pipings—

Singing how down the vale of Menalus

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:

All wept, as I think both ye now would,

If envy or age had not frozen your blood,

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

Here Shelley is aware of the human dissatisfaction—a dissatisfaction that many people feel when reading his poetry—with a life that is too full of mirages and metamorphoses.

I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed:

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!

It is the confession of the ineffectual angel, who had sung:

Poets are on this cold earth,

As chameleons might be,

Hidden from their early birth

In a cave beneath the sea.

Where light is, chameleons change!

Where love is not, poets do:

Fame is love disguised: if few

Find either, never think it strange

That poets range.

For this, too, had been a song of metamorphosis.

This love of metamorphosis may, from one point of view, be thought to have limited Shelley’s genius, but it limited only to intensify. It was this that enabled him to pass from wonderful image to wonderful image without a pause in that immortal procession of similes in “The Skylark.” Every poet has this gift to some extent—the gift by which the metamorphosis of the thing into the image takes place—but Shelley had it in disproportionate abundance because the world of images meant so much more to him than did the world of experience. Not that he was blind to the real world, as we see from his observation of rooks in the morning sun in “The Euganean Hills”:

So their plumes of purple grain,

Starred with drops of golden rain,

Gleam above the sunlight woods,

As in silent multitudes

On the morning’s fitful gale

Through the broken mist they sail.

No naturalist could have been more accurate in his description than this. Shelley, indeed, claimed for himself in the preface to Laon and Cythna that, in his imagery, he was essentially and supremely a poet of experience:

I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, and cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds. I have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the imagery of my Poem have been drawn.

All this was true, but Shelley was too impatient of experience to rely on it when there was a richer world of images at hand. Images—images passing into each other—meant more to him than experience as he wrote such lines as

My soul is an enchanted boat

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.

He said himself of the poet that

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aërial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.

There was never another poet of whom this was so true as of himself. Even when he writes

A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread,

or,

I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown,

he seems to shed upon things a light brought from that haunted world. There is more colour in Keats than in Shelley, but there is more light in Shelley than in Keats. Did he not speak of the poet as “hidden in the light of thought”? His radiance is different in kind from that of any other poet. For it is the radiance of a world in which things are not made of substances but of dreams—a world in which we walk over rainbows instead of bridges and ride not upon horses but upon clouds.

IX
PLUTARCH’S ANECDOTES

Anecdotes, like most other forms of literary entertainment, have been spoken ill of by grave persons, but seldom by the wise. “How superficial,” wrote Isaac Disraeli, “is that cry of some impertinent pretended geniuses of these times who affect to exclaim, ‘Give me no anecdotes of an author, but give me his works!’ I have often found the anecdotes more interesting than the works.” And he pointed out that “Dr. Johnson devoted one of his periodical papers to a defence of anecdotes.” The defence was hardly needed. The imagination of mankind has by universal consent paid honour to the anecdote, and Montaigne is supreme among essayists, and Plutarch among biographers, by virtue of anecdotes as well as of wisdom. Plutarch himself has given the anecdote its just praise in the opening paragraph of his life of Alexander, when he explains: “It is not Histories I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice—nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fell, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.” Hence the general appetite for trifling facts about great men is not a mere vice of gossips. It may help to preserve a detail which will give a later man of genius a clue to a character—the character of a man or the character of a book. The theory that we can criticise a poet more profoundly by leaving aside the ordinary facts of his life as though he had never existed in the flesh is an absurd piece of pedantry. The life of Shelley throws a flood of light on the poetry of Shelley. It contains in itself a profound criticism of the genius of Shelley—a genius that was of the air rather than of the earth—a genius at once noble and incongruous with the world in which men live.

Writers, however, may make a dozen different uses of anecdotes. The anecdote may be anything from a jest to an awakening touch of portraiture, and from that to a fable that reveals a piece of new or old truth to the imagination. It is not open to dispute that the great writers of anecdotes are not those who believe in anecdotes for anecdotes’ sake. They are those who everywhere see signs and connections, and for whom an anecdote is a pattern in little suggesting a pattern of life itself. Plutarch speaks of himself as looking for “the signs of the soul in men,” and the phrase gives some notion of the moral and spiritual pattern into which his anecdotes are woven.

I doubt if a more virtuous imagination ever applied itself to literature. Plutarch’s unending quest was virtue, and no illustrious man ever sat to him for a portrait without discovering to him virtues that he would never have revealed to a scandalmonger such as Suetonius. It was as though moral dignity were the chief of the colours on Plutarch’s palette. He was fond of contrasting his heroes with one another, but, even when he took for heroes men who were mortal enemies, he would penetrate deep into the heart of each in search of some hidden or imprisoned nobleness. He cannot paint an Alcibiades or a Sulla as a model for children, but even in them he seems to perceive and reverence a greatness of spirit in ruins—some brightness of charm or courage beyond the scope of little men. No other writer except Shakespeare has had the same power of setting before the imagination characters that remain noble though undone by great vices. To do this is, to some extent, in the common tradition of tragedy, but there is in Shakespeare and Plutarch a certain sweetness and warmth of understanding—something even more than an enthusiasm for the best in full view and admission of the worst—unlike anything else in literature. It was not an accident that Shakespeare drew so freely and so confidently on Plutarch. The geniuses of the two men were akin.

Plutarch, no doubt, was more consciously ethical than Shakespeare, but he was ethical not after the manner of the narrow propagandist, but after the manner of the imaginative artist. He does not write of model characters. He knows that there are no perfect human beings. He recognises the goodness in bad men, and the badness in good men. No biographer has been more keenly aware of the corruptibility of human nature. Hence the characters in his Lives are real men, with not a fault (and hardly the rumour of a fault) hidden. He will not bear false witness for the sake of making great men appear better than they are. He achieves the difficult feat of praising virtue without either canting or lying. He is not afraid to hold the mirror up to nature and to show us virtue fighting a doubtful battle in a corrupt and tragic scene. He does not believe that the virtuous man is necessarily secure either from corruption or defeat, but he believes that virtue itself is secure from defeat. His recurrent theme is the Christian theme: “Fear not them that kill the body.” He is the painter, not only of illustrious lives, but of illustrious deaths. He feels a spectator’s elation as he watches a noble fifth act. He obtains from the spectacle of virtue impavid amid the ruins an æsthetic as well as an ethical pleasure. If any man wishes to make a study of the æsthetics of virtue, he will find abundant material in Plutarch. Plutarch writes of the tragic hero as of a man playing a fine part finely. He delights in the moving speeches, in the very gestures. He makes us conscious of a rhythm of nobleness running through human life, as when he describes the conduct of the Spartan women who fled with Cleomenes (the quasi-Socialist king) to Egypt, and who were murdered by their cruel hosts. He first wins our sympathies for the wife of Panteus, “most noble and beautiful to look upon,” and tells us how she was but lately married to Panteus, so that “their misfortunes came to them in the heyday of their love.” He then describes how this great lady behaved when she was overtaken by death in company with the mother and children of the king:

She it was who now took the hand of Cratesicleia as she was led forth by the soldiers, held up her robe for her, and bade her be of good courage. And Cratesicleia herself was not one whit dismayed at death, but asked one favour only, that she might die before the children died. However, when they were come to the place of execution, first the children were slain before her eyes, and then Cratesicleia herself was slain, making but one cry at sorrows so great: “O children, whither are ye gone?” Then the wife of Panteus, girding up her robe, vigorous and stately woman that she was, ministered to each of the dying women calmly and without a word, and laid them out for burial as well as she could. And, finally, after all were cared for, she arrayed herself, let down her robe from about her neck, and suffering no one besides the executioner to come near or look on her, bravely met her end, and had no need of any one to array or cover up her body after death. Thus her decorum of spirit attended her in death, and she maintained to the end that watchful care of her body which she had set over it in life.

That “decorum of spirit” is, for Plutarch, the finishing grace of the noble life. And he summarises his creed in the triumphant comment on the Spartan women: “So then, Sparta, bringing her women’s tragedy into emulous competition with that of her men, showed the world that in the last extremity Virtue cannot be outraged by Fortune.”

Catholic though Plutarch is, however, in his appreciation of virtue, and gently though he scans his brother man—does he not forgive the baseness of Aratus in the sentence: “I write this, however, not with any desire to denounce Aratus, for in many ways he was a true Greek and a great one, but out of pity for the weakness of human nature, which, even in characters so notably disposed towards excellence, cannot produce a nobility that is free from blame”?—in spite of this imaginative understanding and sympathy, he has himself a rigid and almost Puritanical standard of virtue. His ideal is an ideal of temperance—of temperance in the pleasures of the body as well as in the love of money and the love of glory. His Alexander the Great is a figure of mixed passions, but he commends him most warmly on those points on which he was temperate, as when the beautiful wife of Dareius and her companions fell into his hands. “But Alexander, as it would seem,” writes Plutarch, “considering the mastery of himself a more kingly thing than the conquest of his enemies, neither laid hands upon these women, nor did he know any other before marriage, except Bersine.” As for the other women, “displaying in rivalry with their fair looks the beauty of his own sobriety and self-control, he passed them by as though they were lifeless images for display.” Again, when Plutarch writes of the Gracchi, he praises them as men who “scorned wealth and were superior to money,” and, if he loves Tiberius the better of the two, it is because he was the more temperate and austere and could never have been charged, as Caius was, with the innocent extravagance of buying silver dolphins at twelve hundred and fifty drachmas the pound. Agis, the youthful king of Sparta, who (though brought up amid luxury) “at once set his face against pleasures” and attempted to banish luxury from the State by restoring equality of possessions, brings together in his person the virtues that inevitably charm Plutarch. Like so many of the old moralists, Plutarch cries out upon riches and pleasures as the great corrupters, and Agis, the censor of these things, comes into a Sparta ruined by gold and silver as a beautiful young redeemer. He dies, a blessed martyr, and his mother, when she stands over his murdered body, kisses his face and cries: “My son, it was thy too great regard for others, and thy gentleness and humanity, which have brought thee to ruin, and us as well.” But, even here, Plutarch does not surrender himself wholly to Agis. He will not admit that Agis, any more than the Gracchi, was a perfect man. “Agis,” he says, “would seem to have taken hold of things with too little spirit.” He “abandoned and left unfinished the designs which he had deliberately formed and announced owing to a lack of courage due to his youth.” Plutarch’s heroes are men in whom a god dwells at strife with a devil—the devil of sin and imperfection. He loves them in their inspired hour: he pities them in the hour of their ruin. Thus he does not love men at the expense of truth, as some preachers do, or tell the truth about men at the expense of love, as some cynics do. His imagination holds the reins both of the heart and of the mind. That is the secret of his genius as a biographer.

X
HANS ANDERSEN

Almost the last story Hans Andersen wrote was a sentimental fable, called “The Cripple,” which he intended as an apologia for his career as a teller of fairy-tales. It is the story of a bed-ridden boy, the son of a poor gardener and his wife, who receives a story-book as a Christmas present from his father’s master and mistress. “He won’t get fat on that,” says the father when he hears of so useless a gift. In the result, as was to be expected, the book turns out to have a talismanic effect on the fortunes of the family. It converts the father and mother from grumblers into figures of contentment and benevolence, so that they look as though they had won a prize in the lottery. It is also indirectly the cause of little Hans recovering the use of his legs. For, while he is lying in bed one day, he throws the book at the cat in order to scare it away from his bird, and, having missed his shot, he makes a miraculous effort and leaps out of bed to prevent disaster. Though the bird is dead, Hans is saved, and we leave him to live happily ever afterwards as a prospective schoolmaster. This, it must be confessed, sounds rather like the sort of literature that is given away as Sunday-school prizes. One could conceive a story of the same kind being written by the author of No Gains Without Pains or Jessica’s First Prayer. Hans Andersen, indeed, was in many respects more nearly akin to the writers of tracts and moral tales than to the folklorists. He was a teller of fairy-tales. But he domesticated the fairy-tale and gave it a townsman’s home. In his hands it was no longer a courtier, as it had been in the time of Louis XIV, or a wanderer among cottages, as it has been at all times. There was never a teller of fairy-tales to whom kings and queens mattered less. He could make use of royal families in the most charming way, as in those little satires, “The Princess and the Pea” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But his imagination hankered after the lives of children such as he himself had been. He loved the poor, the ill-treated, and the miserable, and to illuminate their lives with all sorts of fancies. His miracles happen preferably to those who live in poor men’s houses. His cinder-girl seldom marries a prince: if she marries at all, it is usually some honest fellow who will have to work for his living. In Hans Andersen, however, it is the exception rather than the rule to marry and live happily ever afterwards. The best that even Hans the cripple has to look forward to is being a schoolmaster. There was never an author who took fewer pains to give happy endings to his stories.

His own life was a mixture of sadness and the vanity of success. “The Ugly Duckling” is manifestly the fable of his autobiography. Born into the house of a poor cobbler, he was at once shy and ugly, and he appears to have been treated by other children like the duckling which “was bitten and pushed and jeered at” in the farmyard, and upon which “the turkey-cock, who had been born with spurs, and therefore thought himself an emperor, blew himself up like a ship in full sail and bore straight down.” His father died early, and at the age of eleven Hans ceased to go to school and was allowed to run wild. He amused himself by devouring plays and acting them with puppets in a toy theatre which he had built, till at the age of eighteen he realised that he must do something to make a living. As he did not wish to dwindle into a tailor, he left his home, confident that he had the genius to succeed in Copenhagen. There his passion for the theatre led him to try all sorts of occupations. He tried to write; he tried to act; he tried to sing; he tried to dance. “He danced figure dances,” wrote Nisbet Bain, “before the most famous danseuse of the century, who not unnaturally regarded the queer creature as an escaped lunatic.”

By his persistence and his ugliness, perhaps, as much as by the first suggestions of his genius, he contrived at last to interest the manager of the Royal Theatre, and, through him, the King; and the latter had him sent off to school with a pension to begin his education all over again in a class of small boys. Here, one can imagine, the “ugly duckling” had a bad time of it, and the head master, a man with a satirical tongue, seems to have been as merciless as the turkey-cock in the story. Hans’s education and his unhappiness went on till he was in his twenties, when he escaped and tried his hand at poetry, farce, fantasy, travel-books and fiction. We hear very little of his novels nowadays—in England at any rate; but we know how they were appreciated at the time from some references in the Browning love-letters, within a few years of their being published. The first of them appeared in 1835, when the author was thirty, and a few months later an instalment of the first volume of the fairy-tales was published. Andersen described the latter as “fairy-tales which used to please me when I was little and which are not known, I think.” The book (which began with “The Tinder-Box” and “Little Claus and Big Claus”) was, apart from one critic, reviewed unfavourably where it was reviewed at all. Andersen himself appears to have been on the side of those who thought little of it. His ambition was to write plays and novels and epics for serious people, and all his life he was rather rebellious against the fame which he gradually won all over Europe as a story-teller for children. He longed for appreciation for works like Ashuerus, described by Nisbet Bain as “an aphoristic series of historical tableaux from the birth of Christ to the discovery of America,” and To Be or Not to Be, the last of his novels, in which he sought to “reconcile Nature and the Bible.”

We are told of his vexation when a statue was put up in Copenhagen, representing him as surrounded by a group of children. “Not one of the sculptors,” he declared, “seems to know that I never could tell tales whenever anyone is sitting behind me, or close up to me, still less when I have children in my lap, or on my back, or young Copenhageners leaning right against me. To call me the children’s poet is a mere figure of speech. My aim has always been to be the poet of older people of all sorts: children alone cannot represent me.” It is possible, however, that Andersen rather enjoyed taking up a grumpy pose in regard to his stories for children. In any case he continued to publish fresh series of them until 1872, three years before his death. He also enjoyed the enthusiastic reception their popularity brought him during his frequent travels in most of the countries of Europe between England and Turkey. Nor did he object to turning himself into a story-teller at a children’s party. There is a description in one of Henry James’s books of such a party at Rome, at which Hans Andersen read “The Ugly Duckling” and Browning “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” followed by “a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment, with [W. W.] Story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes.” Nor does Andersen seem to have thought too disrespectfully of his fairy-tales when he wrote “The Cripple.”

Probably, however, even in his fairy-tales Hans Andersen has always appealed to men and women as strongly as to children. We hear occasionally of children who cannot be reconciled to him because of his incurable habit of pathos. A child can read a fairy-tale like “The Sleeping Beauty” as if it were playing among toys, but it cannot read “The Marsh King’s Daughter” without enacting in its own soul the pathetic adventures of the frog-girl; it cannot read “The Snow Queen” without enduring all the sorrows of Gerda as she travels in search of her lost friend; it cannot read “The Little Mermaid” without feeling as if the knives were piercing its feet just as the mermaid felt when she got her wish to become a human being so that she might possess a soul. Even in “The Wild Swans,” though Lisa’s eleven brothers are all restored to humanity from the shapes into which their wicked step-mother had put them, it is only after a series of harrowing incidents; and Lisa herself has to be rescued from being burned as a witch. Hans Andersen is surely the least gay of all writers for children. He does not invent exquisite confectionery for the nursery such as Charles Perrault, having heard a nurse telling the stories to his little son, gave the world in “Cinderella” and “Bluebeard.” To read stories like these is to enter into a game of make-believe, no more to be taken seriously than a charade. The Chinese lanterns of a happy ending seem to illuminate them all the way through. But Hans Andersen does not invite you to a charade. He invites you to put yourself in the place of the little match-girl who is frozen to death in the snow on New Year’s Eve after burning her matches and pretending that she is enjoying all the delights of Christmas. He is more like a child’s Dickens than a successor of the ladies and gentlemen who wrote fairy-tales in the age of Louis XIV and Louis XV. He is like Dickens, indeed, not only in his genius for compassion, but in his abounding inventiveness, his grotesque detail, and his humour. He is never so recklessly cheerful as Dickens with the cheerfulness that suggests eating and drinking. He makes us smile rather than laugh aloud with his comedy. But how delightful is the fun at the end of “Soup on a Sausage Peg” when the Mouse King learns that the only way in which the soup can be made is by stirring a pot of boiling water with his own tail! And what child does not love in all its bones the cunning in “Little Claus and Big Claus,” when Big Claus is tricked into killing his horses, murdering his grandmother, and finally allowing himself to be tied in a sack and thrown into the river?

But Hans Andersen was too urgent a moralist to be content to write stories so immorally amusing as this. He was as anxious as a preacher or a parent or Dickens to see children Christians of sorts, and he used the fairy-tale continually as a means of teaching and warning them. In one story he makes the storks decide to punish an ugly boy who had been cruel to them. “There is a little dead child in the pond, one that has dreamed itself to death; we will bring that for him. Then he will cry because we have brought him a little dead brother.” That is certainly rather harsh. “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” is equally severe. As a result of her cruelty in tearing flies’ wings off and her wastefulness in using a good loaf as a stepping-stone, she sinks down through the mud into Hell, where she is tormented with flies that crawl over her eyes, and having had their wings pulled out, cannot fly away. Hans Andersen, however, like Ibsen in Peer Gynt, believes in redemption through the love of others, and even the girl who trod on the loaf is ultimately saved. “Love begets life” runs like a text through “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” His stories as a whole are an imaginative representation of that gospel—a gospel that so easily becomes mush and platitude in ordinary hands. But Andersen’s genius as a narrator, as a grotesque inventor of incident and comic detail, saves his gospel from commonness. He may write a parable about a darning-needle, but he succeeds in making his darning-needle alive, like a dog or a schoolboy. He endows everything he sees—china shepherdesses, tin soldiers, mice and flowers—with the similitude of life, action and conversation. He can make the inhabitants of one’s mantelpiece capable of epic adventures, and has a greater sense of possibilities in a pair of tongs or a door-knocker than most of us have in men and women. He is a creator of a thousand fancies. He loves imagining elves no higher than a mouse’s knee, and mice going on their travels leaning on sausage-skewers as pilgrims’ staves, and little Thumbelina, whose cradle was “a neat polished walnut-shell ... blue violet-leaves were her mattresses, with a rose-leaf for a coverlet.” His fancy never becomes lyrical or sweeps us off our feet, like Shakespeare’s in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But there was nothing else like it in the fairy-tale literature of the nineteenth century. And his pages are full of the poetry of flights of birds. More than anything else one thinks of Hans Andersen as a lonely child watching a flight of swans or storks till it is lost to view, silent and full of wonder and sadness. Mr. Edmund Gosse, in Two Visits to Denmark, a book in which everything is interesting except the title, describes a visit which he paid to Hans Andersen at Copenhagen in his old age, when “he took me out into the balcony and bade me notice the long caravan of ships going by in the Sound below—‘they are like a flock of wild swans’ he said.” The image might have occurred to anyone, but it is specially interesting as coming from the mouth of Hans Andersen, because it seems to express so much of his vision of the world. He was, above all men of his century, the magician of the flock of wild swans.

XI
JOHN CLARE

Mr. Arthur Symons edited a good selection of the poems of John Clare a few years ago, and Edward Thomas was always faithful in his praise. Yet Messrs. Blunden & Porter’s new edition of Clare’s work has meant for most of its readers the rediscovery of a lost man of genius. For Clare, though he enjoyed a “boom” in London almost exactly a hundred years ago, has never been fully appreciated: he has never even been fully printed. In 1820 he was more famous than Keats, who had the same publisher. Keats’s 1820 volume was one of the great books of English literature, but the public preferred John Clare, and three editions of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery were sold between January 16 and the end of March. It was not that the public had discovered a poet: it was merely that they had discovered an agricultural labourer who was a poet. At the same time, to have been over-boomed was bound to do Clare’s reputation harm. It raised hopes that his verse did not satisfy, and readers who come to an author expecting too much are apt in their disappointment to blame him for even more faults than he possesses. It is obvious that if we are asked to appreciate Clare as a poet of the same company as Keats and Shelley, our minds will be preoccupied with the feeling that he is an intruder, and we shall be able to listen to him with all our attention only when he has ceased to challenge such ruinous comparisons. I do not know whether the critics of 1820 gave more praise to Clare than to Keats. But the public did. The public blew a bubble, and the bubble burst. Had Clare, instead of making a sensation, merely made the quiet reputation he deserved, he would not have collapsed so soon into one of the most unjustly neglected poets of the nineteenth century.

In order to appreciate Clare, we have to begin by admitting that he never wrote either a great or a perfect poem. He never wrote a “Tintern Abbey” or a “Skylark” or a “Grecian Urn” or a “Tiger” or a “Red, Red Rose” or an “Ode to Evening.” He was not a great artist uttering the final rhythms and the final sentences—rhythms and sentences so perfect that they seem like existences that have escaped out of eternity. His place in literature is nearer that of Gilbert White or Mr. W. H. Hudson than that of Shelley. His poetry is a mirror of things rather than a window of the imagination. It belongs to a borderland where naturalism and literature meet. He brings things seen before our eyes: the record of his senses is more important than the record of his imagination or his thoughts. He was an observer whose consuming delight was to watch—to watch a grasshopper or a snail, a thistle or a yellow-hammer. The things that a Wordsworth or a Shelley sees or hears open the door, as it were, to still more wonderful things that the poet has not seen or heard. Shelley hears a skylark, and it becomes not only a skylark, but a flight of images, illumining the mysteries of life as they pass. Wordsworth hears a Highland girl singing, and her song becomes not only a girl’s song, but the secret music of far times and far places, brimming over and filling the world. To Clare the skylark was most wonderful as a thing seen and noticed: it was the end, not the beginning, of wonders. He may be led by real things to a train of reflections: he is never at his best led to a train of images. His realism, however, is often steeped in the pathos of memory, and it is largely this that changes his naturalism into poetry. One of the most beautiful of his poems is called “Remembrances,” and who that has read it can ever forget the moving verse in which Clare calls up the playtime of his boyhood and compares it with a world in which men have begun to hang dead moles on trees?

When from school o’er Little Field with its brook and wooden brig,

Where I swaggered like a man though I was not half so big,

While I held my little plough though ’twas but a willow twig,

And drove my team along made of nothing but a name,

“Gee hep” and “hoit” and “woi”—O I never call to mind

These pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind,

While I see little mouldiwarps hang sweeing to the wind

On the only aged willow that in all the field remains,

And nature hides her face while they’re sweeing in their chains

And in a silent murmuring complains.

The pity that we find in this poem is, perhaps, the dominant emotion in Clare’s work. Helpless living things made the strongest appeal to him, and he honoured the spear-thistle, as it had never been honoured in poetry before, chiefly because of the protection it gave to the nesting partridge and the lark. In “Spear Thistle,” after describing the partridge, which will lie down in a thistle-clump,

and dust

And prune its horse-shoe circled breast,

he continues:

The sheep when hunger presses sore

May nip the clover round its nest;

But soon the thistle wounding sore

Relieves it from each brushing guest

That leaves a bit of wool behind,

The yellow-hammer loves to find.

The horse will set his foot and bite

Close to the ground lark’s guarded nest

And snort to meet the prickly sight;

He fans the feathers of her breast—

Yet thistles prick so deep that he

Turns back and leaves her dwelling free.

We have only to compare the detail of Clare’s work with the sonorous generalisations in, say, Thomson’s Seasons—which he admired—to realise the immense gulf that divides Clare from his eighteenth-century predecessors. Clare, indeed, is more like a twentieth-century than an eighteenth-century poet. He is almost more like a twentieth-century than a nineteenth-century poet. He is “neo-Georgian” in his preference for the fact in itself above the image or the phrase. The thing itself is all the image he asks, and Mr. W. H. Davies in his simplest mood might have made the same confession of faith as Clare:

I love the verse that mild and bland

Breathes of green fields and open sky,

I love the muse that in her hand

Bears flowers of native poesy;

Who walks nor skips the pasture brook

In scorn, but by the drinking horse

Leans o’er its little brig to look

How far the sallows lean across.

There is no poet, I fancy, in whose work the phrase, “I love,” recurs oftener. His poetry is largely a list of the things he loves:

I love at early morn, from new-mown swath

To see the startled frog his route pursue;

To mark while, leaping o’er the dripping path,

His bright sides scatter dew,

The early lark that from its bustle flies

To hail his matin new;

And watch him to the skies:

To note on hedgerow baulks, in moisture sprent,

The jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn,

With earnest heed and tremulous intent,

Frail brother of the morn,

That from the tiny bents and misted leaves

Withdraws his timid horn,

And fearful visions weaves.

As we read Clare we discover that it is almost always the little things that catch his eye:

Grasshoppers go in many a thrumming spring,

And now to stalks of tasselled sow-grass cling,

That shakes and swees awhile, but still keeps straight;

While arching ox-eye doubles with his weight.

Next on the cat-tail grass with farther bound

He springs, that bends until they touch the ground.

He is never weary of describing the bees. He praises the ants. Of the birds, he seems to love the small ones best. How beautifully he writes of the hedge-sparrow’s little song!:

While in a quiet mood hedge-sparrows try

An inward stir of shadowed melody.

There is the genius of a lover in this description. Here is something finally said. Clare continually labours to make the report of his eye and ear accurate. He even begins one of his Asylum Poems with the line:

Sweet chestnuts brown like soling leather turn;

and, in another, pursues realism in describing an April evening to the point of writing:

Sheep ointment seems to daub the dead-hued sky.

His attempt at giving an exact echo of the blue-tit’s song—his very feeble attempt—makes the success of one of his good poems tremble for a moment in the balance:

Dreamers, mark the honey bee;

Mark the tree

Where the blue cap “tootle tee”

Sings a glee,

Sung to Adam and to Eve—

Here they be.

When floods covered every bough,

Noah’s ark

Heard that ballad singing now;

Hark, hark.

“Tootle, tootle, tootle tee”—

Can it be

Pride and fame must shadows be?

Come and see—

Every season owns her own;

Bird and bee

Sing creation’s music on;

Nature’s glee

Is in every mood and tone

Eternity.

Clare comes nearer an imaginative vision of life in this than in most of his poems. But, where Shelley would have given us an image, Clare is content to set down “Tootle, tootle, tootle tee.”

His poems of human life are of less account than his poems of bird and insect life; but one of the most beautiful of all his poems, “The Dying Child,” introduces a human figure among the bees and flowers. How moving are the first three verses!:

He could not die when trees were green,

For he loved the time too well.

His little hands, when flowers were seen,

Were held for the bluebell,

As he was carried o’er the green.

His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee,

He knew those children of the spring:

When he was well and on the lea,

He held one in his hands to sing,

Which filled his heart with glee.

Infants, the children of the spring!

How can an infant die

When butterflies are on the wing,

Green grass, and such a sky?

How can they die at spring?

The writer of these lines was a poet worth rediscovering, and Messrs. Blunden and Porter have given us a book in which we can wander at will, peering into hedges and at the traffic of the grass, as in few even of the great poets. Mr. Blunden has also written an admirable, though needlessly pugnacious account of the life of The Green Man, as Clare was called in Lamb’s circle because of his clothes. It is a story of struggle, poverty, drink, a moment’s fame without money to correspond, a long family, and the madness of a man who, escaping from the asylum, ate “the grass on the roadside which seemed to taste something like bread.” Knowing the events of his life, we read Clare’s poetry with all the more intense curiosity. And, if we do not expect to find a Blake or a Wordsworth, we shall not be disappointed. Certainly this is a book that must go on the shelf near the works of Mr. Hudson.

XII
HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS

Herodotus is one of the oldest illustrations of the fact that a test of good literature is its capacity to entertain us. There are two sorts of writing—the entertaining and the dull—and the dull is outside literature. This is a fact which, though it is perfectly obvious, tends to be forgotten by many writers, even by many able writers, in every century. Authors fall in love with their own ponderosity, forgetting that a huge tome is too often a huge tomb. That is the explanation of the long lives and the still longer histories that the publishers and the authors of the nineteenth century loved. Biographies became life-size, and histories rivalled in length the wars they chronicled. A Victorian biographer appeared to think that he was performing more ambitious work in writing a life of Milton in six volumes than if he were to write it in one. Similarly, a historian instead of giving us a Cromwell that the eye could take in as one absorbing figure, would devote one volume to this bit of him and another to that, and would leave us with a mass of information about his disjecta membra, which we might or might not piece together, just as we pleased. This was called scientific history. Its disciples forgot that history is an art and that, like all other arts, whatever its ultimate object, it should be subject to the law of entertainment. Nothing else will keep history alive, except as a schoolbook or a source-book. An inaccurate history that entertains will outlive an accurate history that wearies. Herodotus did not cease to be read, even when he was generally regarded as the father of lies. It is true that scholars no longer regard him as a liar, and that Mr. Godley, in the preface to his admirable translation in the Loeb Library, claims with Dr. Macan that “the most stringent application of historical and critical methods to the text of Herodotus leaves the work irrevocably and irreplaceably at the head of European prose literature, whether in its scientific or in its artistic character.” At the same time, even if we did not know about the scientific value of Herodotus, his artistic value would be indisputable. He was as indefatigably interested in the world as Mr. Pepys was in himself, and he can infect us with the thrill of his delightful curiosity.

Curiosity, on the other hand, implies interest in some sort of truth, and the pursuit of some sort of truth seems to be an essential in a book that is to entertain us permanently. The artist is moralist as well as entertainer, and the truth that lies in him shapes his work, whether he is Æschylus or Plato, Herodotus or Sallust. Sallust’s Jugurtha, Professor Rolfe warns us in a preface to the Loeb translation, “is rather like a historical novel of the better class than like sober history” and the Cataline, we are told, “is inaccurate in many of its details ... with inevitable distortion of the facts.” Even so, both works are entertaining statements of a great moral idea—the idea of the corruption of human nature by success. Sallust, it may be argued, had the propagandist purpose of attacking the corruption of the nobles rather than the moral purpose of exhibiting the corruption of human nature, but he writes his history with an amazing dramatic sense of the catastrophe that occurs even in great souls. It occurred in the soul of Jugurtha, and in the soul of Rome. “When Carthage, the rival of Rome’s sway, had perished root and branch, and all seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs. Those who had found it easy to bear hardship and dangers, anxiety and adversity, found leisure and wealth, desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a curse. Hence the lust for power, then for money, grew upon them; these were, I may say, the root of all evils.” What is all literature but the fable of such things? It may be an inspiring fable or a derisive fable, a tragic fable or a comic fable, but in any event it cannot be good literature unless it is an entertaining fable.

Herodotus, certainly, never forgets for long that history is a fable. That wonderful anecdote of Gyges and the infatuated King who compelled him to hide behind the door and to look on the Queen when she was naked, with the result that the Queen on discovering him, ordered him to kill the King and marry her or die himself, is not a mere unrelated scene as from a ballet, but has its tragic signature five generations later, when the power of Crœsus, the descendant of Gyges, is destroyed and he is a prisoner in the camp of Cyrus. Crœsus, being unable to understand how the disaster had happened, obtained permission from Cyrus to send messengers to Delphi to enquire of the Oracle why it had deceived him. And the priestess replied: “None may escape his destined lot, not even a god. Crœsus hath paid for the sin of his ancestor of the fifth generation: who, being of the guard of the Heraclidæ, was led by the guile of a woman to slay his master, and took to himself the royal state of that master, whereto he had no right.” We find in pagan literature a sense of the divine government of the world that is missing from the greater part of modern Christian literature. The pagan historians, I think, have a profounder sense of sin and of the sufferings that result from sin than most of the Christian historians. Nowadays, we hesitate before allowing even Richard III or Judge Jeffreys to have been a sinner. And, as we have found no substitute for those ancient colours of vice and virtue, much of our history is colourless and uninteresting. The sense of sin is of infinite value to an artist, if only because it enables him to see how striking are the contrasts that exist in every human being. He sees the great man as a miserable sinner, and he sees him all the more truthfully for this. He sees the beautiful woman as a miserable sinner, and he sees her all the more truthfully for this. Aristotle, indeed, thought that it was impossible to write great tragic literature except about a noble character who was seen to be a sinner. It was probably never done till the appearance of the Gospels, and I am not sure whether it has been done since. Shakespeare had as compassionate a sense of the flaw in human nature even at its greatest as the Greek dramatists and the supreme Greek biographer.

There is, no doubt, a school of writers who have so keen a sense of the flaws that they can see scarcely anything else. This is inimical to art. Suetonius provides us with a feast of flaws, from which we rise with the feeling that we have been dining on spiced and putrid dishes. His was not a disinterested observation of human character. He was a specialist in the vices. It is appalling to think what he would have made of Sempronia, one of the many Roman ladies whom Catiline enticed into his conspiracy. Sallust’s portrait of her is a masterpiece:

Now among these women was Sempronia, who had often committed many crimes of masculine daring. In birth and beauty, in her husband and children, she was abundantly favoured by fortune; well read in the literature of Greece and Rome, able to play the lyre and dance more skilfully than an honest woman need, and having many other accomplishments which minister to voluptuousness. But there was nothing which she held so cheap as modesty and chastity; you could not easily say whether she was less sparing of her money or her honour; her desires were so ardent that she sought men more often than she was sought by them. Even before the time of the conspiracy, she had often broken her word, repudiated her debts, been privy to murder; poverty and extravagance combined had driven her headlong. Nevertheless, she was a woman of no mean endowments; she could write verses, bandy jests, and use language which was modest, or tender, or wanton; in fine, she possessed a high degree of wit and charm.

A miserable sinner, undoubtedly. How odious and how interesting!

But, even as gossips, how these ancient historians still keep their hold on us! Herodotus is the father of nursery tales as well as of moral tales. His account of Egypt in the second book of his history may appeal to the anthropologist in some of us; it also appeals to the child in all of us. He must have omitted thousands of the stories that he heard on his travels, but he had a genius for finding room for the interesting story. His pages are rich in attractive stories like that which tells how Psammetichus decided whether the Egyptians or the Phrygians were the oldest nation:

Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians deemed themselves to be the oldest nation on earth.... Psammetichus, being nowise able to discover by enquiry what men had first come into being, devised a plan whereby he took two new-born children of common men and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flock. He gave charge that none should speak any word in their hearing; they were to lie by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due season the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do all else needful. Psammetichus did this, and gave this charge, because he desired to hear what speech would first break from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for, when the shepherd had done as he was bidden for two years, one day as he opened the door and entered, both the children ran to him, stretching out their hands and calling “Bekos.” When he first heard this he said nothing of it; but coming often and taking careful note, he was ever hearing this same word, till at last he told the matter to his master, and on command brought the children into the King’s presence. Psammetichus heard them himself, and enquired to what language this word “Bekos” might belong; he found it to be a Phrygian word signifying bread. Reasoning from this fact the Egyptians confessed that the Phrygians were older than they.

Scientific? Perhaps not. And yet science and art may embrace in the recording of such stories as this. But it is in the museum of the arts, not in that of the sciences, that Herodotus holds his immortal place. He may not be the first of the scientific historians: he is certainly the first of the European masters of the art of entertaining prose.

XIII
A WORDSWORTH DISCOVERY

A good many people were pleased—not without malice—when Professor Harper discovered a few years ago that Wordsworth had an illegitimate daughter. It was like hearing a piece of scandal about an archbishop. As a matter of fact, the story, as Professor Harper tells it, is not a scandal; it is merely a puzzle. The figures in the episode are names and shadows: we know almost nothing as regards their feelings for each other or what it was that prevented the lovers from marrying. Professor Harper believes that Wordsworth has left a disguised version of the story in Vaudracour and Julia. Wordsworth himself says of Vaudracour and Julia that “the facts are true,” and the main “facts” in the poem are that the lovers wish to marry, cannot gain their parent’s consent, and give way to passion, and that after this their parents, instead of softening in their attitude, insist more harshly than ever on keeping them apart. Wordsworth is vehement in his contention that Vaudracour was no common seducer yielding to the lusts of the flesh, and the suggestion is fairly clear that the youth thought he was taking the only way to make marriage inevitable. Consider these lines, which impute honourable motives, if not honourable conduct, to the lover:

So passed the time, till whether through effect

Of some unguarded moment that dissolved

Virtuous restraint—ah, speak it, think it, not!

Deem rather that the fervent youth, who saw

So many bars between his present state

And the dear haven where he wished to be

In honourable wedlock with his love,

Was in his judgment tempted to decline

To perilous weakness, and entrust his cause

To nature for a happy end of all;

Deem that by such fond hope the youth was swayed

And bear with their transgression, when I add

That Julia, wanting yet the name of wife,

Carried about her for a secret grief,

The promise of a mother.

These lines have an ethical rather than a poetical interest. Whether Wordsworth, in writing them, was consciously or subconsciously attempting his own moral justification, we do not know. But Professor Harper has collected a number of facts that make it appear likely that he was. Certainly, the story of Wordsworth and Marie-Anne Vallon at Orleans in 1792, so far as we know it, might without violence be dramatised as the story of Vaudracour and Julia.

Bear in mind, for example, the “many bars” that stood in the way of Wordsworth’s marriage to Marie-Anne, or “Annette,” Vallon. They were not, as in the poem, barriers of class, but they were the equally insurmountable barriers of creed, both political and religious. Wordsworth was a young Englishman, full of the ardour of the Revolution, and a Protestant of so sceptical a cast that Coleridge described him as a “semi-atheist.” Annette, for her part, was the child of parents who were zealots in the cause of Royalism and Catholicism. They must have regarded the coming of such a suitor as Wordsworth with the same horror with which a reader of the Morning Post would learn that his daughter had fallen in love with a Catholic Sinn Feiner or a Jewish Bolshevist. The position was even more bitter than this suggests. The sectarian and political passions that raged in France were more comparable to the passions of Orange Belfast than to any that can be imagined in the atmosphere of modern England. Wordsworth may well have appeared to these orthodox parents a representative of Satan. He was the murder-gang personified. Nor, to make up for this, was he even a good match. He was an exceedingly poor young man who had just come of age. Add to this the fact that it was almost impossible at the time for an orthodox Catholic and Royalist to marry a Revolutionary sceptic. Marriage had become a State affair under the Revolution, and no Catholic could permit his daughter to go through a marriage ceremony that seemed to deny that marriage was a sacrament. It is true that marriages could still be performed by the clergy, but only by such clergy as accepted their position under the new constitution as functionaries of the State. Republican clergy of this kind would be regarded by the Vallon family as traitors and scarcely better than atheists. Marriages celebrated by them would be looked on as invalid—as mere licences to live in sin. Had Wordsworth become a Catholic, or had he been of a compromising disposition, it would have been easy enough to find a non-juring priest to perform the ceremony. But it is unlikely that a priest, who was zealous enough to face persecution rather than recognise the Republic, would have been willing to marry one of his flock to a free-thinking revolutionary. Respectability might urge that, when the lovers had already gone so far, nothing remained but to make the best of it and permit them to marry. Fanaticism, however, might well regard such a marriage as but the adding of one sin to another. The Church itself, by marrying the sinners, would make itself a partner in the sin. We have to reflect how adamantine is the faith of the orthodox in order to understand the “many bars” that hindered the marriage of Wordsworth and Annette. Remembering this, we cannot dismiss as improbable Professor Harper’s theory that Wordsworth abandoned Marie-Anne reluctantly, and that when he settled in Blois, he did so because he had been driven away by her relatives and yet desired to remain near her.

All we know of Wordsworth, and all the facts in Professor Harper’s story, make it impossible to believe that he would willingly have deserted Marie-Anne and his daughter. The baptism of the child was entered in the registry of baptisms in the parish of Sainte-Croix, “Williams Wordsodsth” in his absence being represented by a local official. She was baptised Anne Caroline, and it was as Anne Caroline Wordsworth, daughter of “Williams Wordsworth, landowner,” that she was married in Paris about twenty-four years later. Wordsworth appears to have kept constantly in touch with her and her mother in the meantime, and, when peace was in sight in 1802, he and his sister Dorothy determined to cross to France and see them. A meeting took place in Calais. It was the preliminary to a marriage, but not to marriage with Annette, who, indeed, never married, but went through life as Madame Vallon. Two months after the Calais meeting Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. That he had been deeply moved by the meeting with his child rather than with her mother is suggested by the mood of the sonnet he wrote at the time: “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.”

Professor Harper is of opinion that Wordsworth’s love for Marie-Anne Vallon was an event of supreme importance in his life. He holds that the facts he has discovered throw “light upon many of Wordsworth’s poems.” I do not think that on this point he has proved his case. In his two-volume life of Wordsworth, it may be remembered, he even goes so far as to assign the “Lucy” of so many beautiful poems to a French original. Lovers of a great poet are naturally led to speculate as to the experiences out of which his poems grew. There is nothing of the vice of Paul Pry in attempting thus to discover the sources of the experiences the poet communicates in his verse. The theme of every poet is the experiences that have moved his soul most profoundly. And many, or most, of those experiences spring from his relations with other human beings. At the same time, there is no evidence that Wordsworth in his work was ever influenced by Marie-Anne Vallon as Keats was influenced by Fanny Brawne. It is doubtful if any women every really took the place of his sister in his heart. “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,” could be said only of Dorothy. It was the fire of affection, not the fire of passion, that glowed in Wordsworth’s soul. “Oh, my dear, dear sister!” he cried in one of his letters, “with what transport shall I again meet you! With what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. So eager is my desire to see you that all other obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running, or rather flying, to my arms.” He was in life as in literature a devoted brother rather than a devoted lover. Even Professor Harper can give no other woman but Dorothy the position of presiding genius over his life and work. This does not necessarily involve our acceptance of the common theory that Dorothy was the original around whom the “Lucy” poems were written. But, had Lucy been a Frenchwoman, Wordsworth would hardly have written:

I travelled among unknown men

In lands beyond the sea;

Nor England did I know till then

What love I bore to thee....

Among thy mountains did I feel

The joy of my desire;

And she I cherished turned her wheel

Beside an English fire.

To interpret this as a dramatisation of his early passion in France is to strain probability.[1]

[1] I understand that Professor Harper disclaims what seemed to me the obvious interpretation of a passage in his book.

Professor Harper, then, has discovered an interesting episode in Wordsworth’s life, but I do not think he has discovered what may be called a key episode. It may turn out to have had more influence on Wordsworth’s destiny than at present appears. But we do not yet know enough even about the circumstances to get any fresh light from it either on his work or on his character.

As regards Annette, we learn from a letter of Dorothy’s, written in 1815, that she shared, and continued to share, the Royalist convictions of her people. She often, Dorothy affirms, “risked her life in defence of adherents to that cause, and she despised and detested Buonaparte.” In 1820, Wordsworth, his wife, and Dorothy visited Paris and lived on intimate terms with Annette, Caroline, and Caroline’s husband. They even went to lodge in the same street. Of Caroline it was reported earlier that “she resembles her father most strikingly.” For the rest, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, when writing his uncle’s biography, said nothing about the matter. He cannot be accused of having hidden anything of very great significance. The truth is now out, and we know little more about Wordsworth than we knew before.

XIV
THE POETRY OF POE

“My first object (as usual) was originality,” said Poe, in discussing the versification of “The Raven.” It is a remarkable fact that the two great poets of America—Poe and Whitman—were two of the most deliberately original poets of the nineteenth century—in English at least. They were both conscious frontiersmen of poetry, drawn to unmapped territories, settlers on virgin soil. This may help to explain some of their imperfections. Each of them gives us the impression of a genius rich but imperfectly cultivated. Different though they were from each other, they resembled each other in a certain lack of the talent of order, of taste, of “finish.” They were both capable of lapses from genius into incompetence, from beauty into provincialism, to an unusual degree. A contemporary critic said of Poe that he had not talent equal to his genius. Neither had Whitman. In the greatest poets, genius and talent go hand in hand. Poe seldom wrote a poem in which his mood seems to have attained its perfect expression. His poetry does not get near perfection even in the sense in which Coleridge’s fragments do. It seems, as a rule, like a first sketch for greater things. His Complete Poems, indeed, is one of the most wonderful sketch-books of a man of genius in literature.

Poe himself attributed the defects of his work to lack of leisure rather than to lack of talent. “Events not to be controlled,” he said in the preface to the 1845 edition of his poems, “have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose but a passion, and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not—they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the petty compensations, or the more petty commendations, of mankind.” Other poets, however, who have lived in as bitter circumstances as Poe, have written an incomparably greater body of good poetry. There was in him some flaw that kept him, as a rule, from being more than a great beginner. It may have been partly due to theatrical qualities that he inherited from his actress mother. Again and again he mingles the landscape of dreamland with the tawdry grandeur of the stage. He takes a footlights view of romance when, having begun “Lenore” with the lines——

Ah, broken is the golden bowl!—the spirit flown for ever!—

Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river

he continues:

And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now, or never more.

This, no doubt, was in tune with the fashionable romance of the day, but Poe’s romantic conceptions at times were those of one who was especially entranced by stage trappings. He made his heroines rich and highborn as well as beautiful. In “Lenore” he cries:

Wretches, ye loved her for her wealth, and hated her for her pride!

In “The Sleeper” he speaks of:

The crested palls

Of her grand family funerals.

In “Annabel Lee” he made the very angels heroes of the green-room:

Her highborn kinsmen came

And bore her away from me.

On the other hand, Poe’s theatricalism, though it explains some of the faults of his poetry, leaves unexplained the fact that he has cast a greater spell on succeeding poets than has even so great a theatrical genius as Byron. Poe is one of those poets who are sources of poetry. He discovered—though not without forerunners such as Coleridge—a new borderland for the imagination, where death and despair had a new strangeness. He seems to have reached it, not through mere fancy, as his imitators do, but through experience. When he was a youth he worshipped Mrs. Helen Stannard, the mother of one of his friends. She went mad and died, and for some time after her death Poe used to haunt her tomb by night, and “when the autumnal rains fell and the winds wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest, and came away most regretfully.” J. H. Ingram and other writers have found in these “solitary churchyard vigils” the clue to “much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet’s after life.” Love overshadowed by death, beauty overshadowed by death, remained the recurrent theme of his verse. It is the theme of his supreme poem, “Annabel Lee,” with its haunting close:

In the sepulchre there by the sea,

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Poe was a poet for whom life was darkened by experience and illuminated only by visions. In the beginning, romance

loves to nod and sing

With drowsy head and painted wing,

Among the green leaves as they shake

Far down within some shadowy lake.

In time, however, this born day-dreamer can find no comfort in day-dreaming:

Of late, eternal Condor years

So shake the very Heaven on high

With tumult as they thunder by,

I have no time for idle cares

Through gazing on the unquiet sky.

And when an hour with calmer wings

Its down upon my spirit flings—

That little time with lyre and rhyme

To while away—forbidden things!—

My heart would feel to be a crime

Unless it trembled with the strings.

There is a terrible sincerity in Poe’s sense of the presence of death. His vision of mortal men, at least, was not theatrical in its gloom:

Mimes, in the form of God on high,

Mutter and mumble low,

And hither and thither fly—

Mere puppets they, who come and go

At bidding of vast formless things

That shift the scenery to and fro,

Flapping from out their Condor wings

Invisible Woe!

Poe and Whitman were both poets preoccupied with the thought of death, but, whereas Whitman forced himself to praise it, Poe was in revolt against it as the ultimate tyrant. He saw it as the one thing that made dreadful those enchanted islands, those enchanted valleys, those enchanted palaces in which, for him, so much of the beauty of the world took refuge. He could not reconcile himself to a world that was governed by mortality. There is the wistfulness of the exile from a lost Paradise running through his verse. He is essentially a man for whom the spiritual universe exists. His angels and demons may not resemble the angels and demons of the churches—may, indeed, be little more than formulæ in his dreamland. But they are at least the formulæ of a poet into whose dreams has come the rumour of immortality. He cannot believe that the City of Death, with its awful stillness, can last for ever—that city where

Shrines and palaces and towers

(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)

Resemble nothing that is ours.

Around, by lifting winds forgot,

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

He feels that somewhere Eldorado is to be found, as it is by the knight who sought it:

And as his strength

Failed him at length

He met a pilgrim shadow—

“Shadow,” said he,

“Where can it be—

This land of Eldorado?”

“Over the Mountains

Of the Moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

Ride, boldly ride,”

The shade replied—

“If you seek for Eldorado!”

It is true that his vision, whether of life or immortality, has something of the incoherence of the landscape of his “Dreamland”:

Mountains toppling evermore

Into seas without a shore.

If his imagination passes “out of space, out of time,” it is on the wings of trance rather than of faith. At the same time, his dreams would not have made so strong an appeal to generations of readers if they had been mere sensational fancies, and had not seemed to wander in a wider universe than we are conscious of in our everyday life. They cannot be dismissed as the visions of a drugged man. They are the questionings of a spirit.

It may be that, like some of the decadents of Europe, Poe was preyed upon by a demon—that he was an outcast poet in whose sky was

The cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view.

But in the best of the decadents the soul survived; and if they have a place in literature it is because they have left a record of the travels of the prodigal soul in a far country. Poe, though not sharing their decadence, is also the poet of a far country. That loveliest of his poems (if we except “Annabel Lee”), “To Helen”—what is it but a triumphant cry of return? Unlike “The Raven,” it is a poem that never loses its beauty with repetition. “Annabel Lee” may be the fullest expression of his genius, but “To Helen” is the most exquisite. Even to write it down, hackneyed though it is, renews one’s delight:

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore,

That gently, o’er the perfumed sea,

The weary, way-born wanderer bore

To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece

And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand

The agate lamp within thy hand!

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

Are Holy Land!

Here, as nowhere else, Poe achieved coherent and consummate grace of form. Here, if almost nowhere else, his talent was equal to his genius.

XV
HAWTHORNE

Hawthorne is the only American admitted into the English Men of Letters Series. This may be partly accidental, and due to the fact that it was possible to get so fine a critic as Henry James to write about him. It also suggests, however, that in 1879 Hawthorne was held in higher esteem than he is held to-day. There are several American writers about whom we are nowadays more curious. Emerson does not soar at quite such an altitude as he once did, but he is still an indubitable figure of genius on the sunny side of the clouds. Thoreau, with the challenge of his sardonic simplicity, will interest us so long as there is a society to protest against. Poe, after we have refined him in the fiercest fires of criticism, remains gold of the most precious. Whitman holds us as the giant aborigine of democracy as well as the rhapsodist of brotherhood and death. Washington Irving, on the other hand, has disappeared except from the schoolbooks, and Oliver Wendell Holmes has ceased to be read by people under fifty. Longfellow has become an exiguous contributor to an anthology except in so far as he is taught, like Irving, to schoolchildren, and Lowell is oftener quoted by politicians than by critics of letters. There is no need to discuss just now whether this waning of reputations is likely to be permanent. It is enough to note that Hawthorne, though he has not waned to the extent that Longfellow has, has ceased for most readers to be a star of the first or second magnitude. How many critics would now place him, as he was once placed, among the great masters of English prose? How many editors of a series of lives of great writers would unhesitatingly include in it a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne?

Hawthorne may nevertheless justly be regarded as a classic, and there have been few writers whose short stories would bear re-reading so well as Hawthorne’s three-quarters of a century after their first appearance. The prose, as anyone may see by dipping into Mr. Carl van Doren’s admirable selection from Twice-told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, and The Snow Image, is beautiful prose, even if it falls short of supreme greatness. It flows with a rhythm at once charming and forceful. It is transparent, and through it we can see life as Hawthorne’s imagination played on it like sunlight refracted through water. He is a music-maker rather than a phrase-maker in his use of words. Movement is more to him than metaphor, though he can combine them attractively, as in the opening sentence of The Seven Vagabonds:

Rambling on foot in the spring of my life and the summer of the year, I came one afternoon to a point which gave me the choice of three directions.

You may turn Hawthorne’s pages almost at random, and you can scarcely help noticing example after example of this characteristic rhythm of his. It is noticeable even in such a simple narrative sentence as that with which The Artist of the Beautiful opens:

An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop.

And, again, we find it in a meditative passage such as:

I saw mankind, in this weary old age of the world, either enduring a sluggish existence amid the smoke and dust of cities, or, if they breathed a purer air, still lying down at night with no hope but to wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up life, among the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that had darkened the sunshine of to-day.

This all flows with something of the noble ease of hexameters, yet without falling into the vices of pseudo-poetic prose. The mere sound of his sentences gives Hawthorne’s prose a wonderful momentum that keeps us interested even when at times we begin to wonder if his subject-matter is quite as interesting as it ought to be. This grave and equable momentum is one of his greatest technical qualities. It is a quality that cannot be adequately illustrated in single sentences or detached passages, because its success is not the success of occasional felicities but of something sustained and pervasive. It may even be imputed as a fault to Hawthorne that he can never, or almost never, escape from the equable rhythm of his prose. He seldom ends a story with the slightly different momentum due to an ending. It is not merely, however, that his stories end quietly: he is like a rider who rides beautifully but does not know how to dismount. He maintains his graceful ease of motion until the last moment, and then he slides off as best he can.

But it would be folly to regard Hawthorne’s rhythm as wholly—or even mainly—a technical quality. The rhythm of prose is never that, and it is in vain to play the sedulous ape to the great masters if nothing but their style is imitated. It is not an accident that the greatest English prose is to be found in the Bible. The rhythm of the greatest prose seems at times the rhythm of the spirit of man as it contemplates the life of men in the light of eternity. The rhythm to a Plato, a Milton, a Sir Thomas Browne, is inevitably of a kind that a Jane Austen or a Thackeray, with all their genius, could never achieve. It is the echo of the emotion felt by men to whom time and place are fables with another meaning besides that which appears on the surface. The realists can never write the greatest prose, because to them the world they see is not fabulous but a hard fact. The greatest writers all see the world as fabulous. Their men and women are inhabited by angels or devils, or, on a lower plane, have something of the nature of ghosts or fairies or goblins. If Othello were not a fable as well as a man, he would be no better than a criminal lunatic. If King Lear were not a fable as well as man, he would be a subject for the psychoanalyst. Imagine either of them as a modern Englishman, putting his case before a judge and jury, and you will see how the artist, even though his characters as a rule are characters such as may be found in reality, must remove them out of and above reality into the region of fables in order to make them permanently real to the imagination. Dickens turned Victorian England into a myth peopled by goblins. Dostoievsky turned Russia into a myth peopled by goblins and demons. It is not that they denied the reality of the world before their eyes, but that they saw within it and about it another world apart from which it had very little meaning.

Hawthorne was a writer extremely conscious of this second world within and about the world. He had abandoned the Puritanical orthodoxy of his people, but none the less he was haunted like them by a sense of a second meaning in life beyond the surface meaning of the day’s work and the day’s play. Many of his stories are stories in which, as in Young Goodman Brown, everyday reality passes into fable and back again as swiftly as though the two worlds were but different stages in a transformation scene. His genius turned more naturally to allegory than any other writer’s since Bunyan. This is generally counted a defect, and, indeed, if, instead of alternating the everyday world with the fabulous world, he had interwoven them in such a way that the world never became less real on account of the fable it bore within it like an inner light, Hawthorne would have been a greater writer. At the same time, it is better that he should have sacrificed observation than that he should have sacrificed imagination. He lived in an atmosphere in which it must have been extraordinarily difficult to stand sufficiently remote from everyday life to see it not merely with the eye but with the imagination. To the eye, there must have been little enough of fantasy in the narrow lives of the men and women about him. “Never comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region,” he wrote of the Custom-house in which he passed so many years and that made “such havoc of his wits.” He had to transform his surroundings into a strange land into which a bird of Paradise might enter. He did this by the invention of a sort of moral fairyland, into which he could project his vision of the mystery of human life. He often offends our sense of reality, but he never leaves us in doubt of the reality of this moral fairyland as the image of all he knew and felt about human life. It is a Puritanical fairyland into which sin has come. But, strong though his sense of sin is, Hawthorne does not always in his view of sin agree with the Puritans. He is more Christian, and he condemns the sin of self-righteousness more than the sins of the flesh. Even so, his imagination is very close to that of the Puritans, who believed in witches and in men possessed by the Devil. The difference is that Hawthorne was inclined to believe that the good church-going people were also witches and men possessed by the Devil. Unless I misunderstand Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne is here telling us how he was tempted to believe this, and reproaching himself for having given way to temptation. In The Scarlet Letter, the egoism of the vengeful husband, not the adultery of the wife or the cowardice of the minister who sins with her, is the unpardonable sin of the story. That Hawthorne’s imaginative morality had the vehemence of genius is shown by the fact that The Scarlet Letter still holds us under its spell in days in which moral values have subtly and swiftly changed. People are no longer thrilled at the thought of a scarlet A on a woman’s breast; they would scarcely be thrilled by the spectacle of a whole scarlet alphabet hung round a woman’s neck like a collar. Yet Hawthorne’s novel survives—a fable of the permanent and dubious warfare between good and evil, in which good changes its shape into that of evil, and evil is transmuted into good through suffering. His genius survives, like that of Hans Andersen, because, not only does it carry the burden of morality, but it is led on its travels by a fancy wayward and caressing as the summer wind. He is the first prose myth-maker of America, and he has left no successors in his kind.

XVI
JONAH IN LANCASHIRE

The author of Patience—the other Patience, I mean, not the Gilbert opera—is beginning to be discovered even by the average reader. It is not long since we had modernised versions of his two most remarkable poems, Pearl and Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight. Gaston Paris describes the latter as “the jewel of English mediæval literature,” and even among those who read idly for amusement it should become a favourite book in Mr. Ernest Kirtlan’s easy rendering. Who the maker of these poems was we know not. Editors have invented a personal history for him, but other editors have ruthlessly pulled it to pieces. It was suggested that he wrote the romance Sir Gawayne in his gaudy youth. Then, having lost a child, he composed in Pearl a passionate lament for her. Afterwards, in the evening of his life, he wrote Patience as an expression of his submission to the will of God. Mr. Bateson will have nothing to do either with this pathetic life-history or with the chronology. He regards Patience as the earliest of the poems, and is of the opinion that Pearl, far from being a lament for a lost child, is “largely a theological discussion in elegiac form.” One would think there must be something seriously wrong in a poem about which a dispute of the kind could rage among the interpreters. But this is not necessarily so. No one denies that the Song of Solomon is a great poem, and yet men have quarrelled as to whether it should be read as the holiest of symbolic poems or as an early masterpiece of the fleshly school of literature. Coming to Patience itself, I fancy that the man who could discover personal confessions in it could discover personal confessions in Euclid. I find it difficult to believe in the bereaved father who turned for a lesson in resignation to the story of Jonah. It is the homilist, not the tortured human being, who fishes in the Book of Jonah for comfortable morals. Patience is a sermon addressed to other people, not to the poet’s own soul. Feeling this, one may allow oneself to be amused by its quaintness as well as to admire the hue and vigour of its narrative.

Patience is the story of Jonah told by an original artist. Jonah is here painted in English colours. He is the Jonah not of a tragic-hearted Hebrew but of a familiar Lancashire man who wrote in a Lancashire dialect at the time of Chaucer. Tertullian had written a Latin poem on the same theme, and Mr. Bateson gives us the text of this in an appendix, suggesting, as other scholars have done, that it is one of the sources of Patience. The Jonah of Tertullian, however, is a formal figure compared to the Jonah of the Englishman. Jonah in the old Lancashire poem is a lithe and live fellow from the moment at which he steps aboard the ship to make his escape from the perilous will of God.

Was neuer so joyful a Jue as Jonas was thenne,

we are told in a lively line at this point of the narrative. The storm that follows is described with such a sense of reality that it has been suggested that the poet himself must have experienced some such tempest when making a pilgrimage to Compostella, “the favourite journey of Englishmen at the time,” and a journey of the ancient popularity of which we are still reminded in the streets of London once a year when children set up their grottoes on the footpaths as an excuse for begging pennies. Mr. Bateson attempts to bring home to us the desperate circumstances of seafaring in the Middle Ages by quoting the statement that “John of Gaunt, on one occasion, was tossing about in the Channel for nine months, unable to land at Calais.” I confess I cannot believe the story in this form, and we need no such incredible example to enable us to realise the terrors of the storm that swept down on Jonah, when the frightened sailors attempted to lighten the ship by throwing overboard

Her bagges, and her feather-beddes, and her bryght wedes.

The introduction of the feather-beds into the narrative would alone be a sufficient reason for welcoming the Lancashire version of the Jonah story. The description of the panic-stricken sailors “glewing,” or calling, on their very various gods (who included Fernagu, a French giant) is another addition that pleases by its strangeness:

Bot vchon glewed on his god thet gayned hym beste;

Summe to Vernagu ther vouched avowes solemne,

Summe to Diana deuout, and derf Nepturne,

To Mahoun and to Mergot, the Mone and the Sunne.

Both in Tertullian and in Patience Jonah is made not only to sleep but to snore while the others pray during the storm. Tertullian puts it:

Sternentem inflata resonabat nare soporem.

The English poet writes still more vividly that Jonah lay in the bottom of the boat,

Slypped vpon a sloumbe-slepe, and sloberande he routes.

A “freke,” or man, was sent to rouse him and to prepare him for the casting of lots:

The freke hym frunt with his fot, and bede hym ferk up.

Then came the casting of the lots:

And ay the lote, vpon laste, lymped on Jonas.

The sailors immediately began to upbraid Jonah in masculine English:

What the deuel hest thou don, dotede wrech?

What seches thou on see, synful schrewe,

With thy lastes [crimes] so luther [evil] to lose vus vchone?

Soon after follows the decision to throw him overboard:

Now is Jonas the Jwe jugged to drowne.

“A wylde walteande whale” comes up opportunely to the side of the boat:

And swyftely swenged hym to swepe, and his swallow opened...,

With-outen towche of any tothe he tult in his throte.

In spite of his safe passage beyond the whale’s teeth, however, Jonah’s plight was not an enviable one:

Lorde! colde was his cumfort, and his care huge.

The poet describes him as passing down the throat like a “mote in at a minster door”:

He glydes in by the gills ...;

Ay, hele ouer hed, hourlande aboute,

Til he blunt [staggered] in a blok as brod as a halle;

And ther he festnes the fete, and fathmes about,

And stod up in his stomak, that stank as the deuel.

So realistic is the description of the whale’s inside that Mr. Bateson thinks it likely that the poet had been listening to the stories of whalers. He also endorses the poet’s view of the horrors of the situation by quoting one writer who states that “the breath of the whale is frequently attended by such an insupportable smell as to bring on disorder of the brain.” If the whale made Jonah feel sick, however, Jonah, according to the poet, had much the same effect on the whale. In a moving two lines on the whale’s discomforts we are told:

For thet mote in his mawe made hym, I trowe,

Though hit lyttel were hym wyth, to wamel at his hert.

These two lines Mr. Bateson translates into colourless modern English: “For the mote made him—though it were little as compared with him—to feel sick,” and adds for our information that “the reader of whaling stories will recall how frequently the whale suffers from dyspepsia!”

We need not follow the poet in detail through the rest of the narrative, which is full of life-giving detail till the end. After God had commanded the whale——

That he hym sput spakly vpon spare drye,

we see Jonah washing his muddy mantle on the beach and proceeding with his message of doom to the “burgesses and bachelors” of Nineveh. The gourd under which he sleeps becomes a “wodbynde” (some kind of convolvulus): it is “hedera,” or ivy, in the Vulgate. Jonah’s delight, as he lay under it—“so glad of his gay lodge”—is amusingly described. He——

Lys loltrande ther-inne lokande to toune.

So contentedly did he “loll” there, indeed—“so blithe of his wood-bine”—that he cared not a penny for any “diet” that day; and when it “nighed to night” and “nappe hym bihoued,” he slept the sleep of the just “vnder leues.” In his account of Jonah’s anger against God, and God’s argument in favour of sparing Nineveh, the poet elaborates as ever the Bible narrative, and the appeal for the right of the inhabitants to live is tenderer than in the more concise original. God pleads, for instance, for the “lyttel bairnes on barme (breast) that neuer bale wrought,” and the reference to “much cattle” becomes:

And als ther ben doumbe bestes in the burgh many.

I do not suggest that Patience is better than the Book of Jonah, or as good, but that it has the vitality of an original work. The poet has a personal knowledge of character—a sense of drama, and a sense of life. Mr. Bateson’s edition of the poem was first published seven years ago. He has now largely recast and rewritten it. I have taken some liberties with his text in quoting it, slightly modernising it in places. It is an edition for students of mediæval literature rather than for the general reader. But with the help of its excellent glossary others than scholars should be able to enjoy it if they are prepared to take a little pains. And it is worth taking pains to become acquainted with so vivid and robust a poet as the author of Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight.