MORE OR LESS ANCIENT
I
HERRICK
Herrick was a gross and good-natured clergyman who had a double chin. He kept a pet pig, which drank beer out of a tankard, and he and the pig had probably a good many of the same characteristics. It would be a libel on him to say that he was a pig, but it would not be a libel to say that he was a pet pig.
His life, like the pet pig’s, was not real, and it certainly was not earnest. He spent the best part of his youth mourning over the brevity of life, and he lived till he was comfortably over eighty. He was an Epicurean, indeed, in the vulgar sense of the word, whose dominant theme was the mortality of pretty things. For Herrick gives us the feeling that for him the world was a world of pretty things rather than of beautiful things. He was the son of a goldsmith in Cheapside, and himself served an apprenticeship to the trade. The effect of this may, I think, be seen in his verse. His spiritual home always remained in Cheapside rather than in the Church which he afterwards entered. He enjoyed the world as though it were a street of shops. To read him is to call at the florist’s and the perfumer’s and the milliner’s and the jeweller’s and the confectioner’s and the vintner’s and the fruiterer’s and the toy-seller’s. If he writes, as he proclaims, of bridegrooms and brides, he does not forget the bride’s dress or the bride’s cake. His very vision of Nature belittles it to the measure of “golden Cheapside.” He begins Fair Days with the lines:
Fair was the dawn; and but e’en now the skies
Show’d like rich cream, enspir’d with strawberries.
If he invites Phyllis to love him and live with him in the country, he reduces the hills for her to the size of bric-à-brac:
Thy feasting-tables shall be hills
With daisies spread, and daffodils.
He was one of those happily constituted men who can get pleasure from most things, and it is obvious that he got a great deal of pleasure from his life in Devonshire, where he was Vicar of Dean Prior, till he was ejected after the triumph of Cromwell in the Civil War. But his heart was never in Devonshire. There is no mirror of Devonshire in his verse. He was a censorious exile amid beauty of that sort, and could have had all the flowers and country scenes he cared for within an hour’s walk of the shop in Cheapside. He speaks in one of his poems of “this loathed country-life,” and in the verses called Dean-bourn, a rude River in Devon, by which he sometimes dwelt, he bids the river farewell, and expresses the hope that he will never set eyes on its “warty incivility” again:
To my content, I never should behold,
Were thy streams silver, or thy rocks all gold.
Rocky thou art, and rocky we discover
Thy men, and rocky are thy ways all over.
O men, O manners, now and ever known
To be a rocky generation!
A people currish, churlish as the seas,
And rude almost as rudest savages.
There is no missing the sincere unappreciativeness of these lines. The best that he can say of Devon is not that it is beautiful but that he wrote some good verses in it:
More discontents I never had
Since I was born than here,
Where I have been and still am sad,
In this dull Devonshire.
Yet justly too I must confess;
I ne’er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the Press
Than where I loathed so much.
It has been remarked that, even when he writes of fairies, he has in mind, not the fairies of the West Country, but the fairies he brought with him from Ben Jonson’s London. He is rich in the fancies of the town-poet. For him Oberon walks through a grove “tinselled with twilight,” and is led by the shine of snails. As for the cave in which the Fairy King seeks Queen Mab:
To pave
The excellency of this cave,
Squirrels’ and children’s teeth late shed
Are neatly here enchequered.
Oberon’s Feast again is a revel of fantastical dishes not from nature, but from that part of the imagination that is a toy-shop:
A little moth
Late fattened in a piece of cloth:
With withered cherries; mandrake’s ears;
Moles’ eyes; to these, the slain stag’s tears;
The unctuous dewlaps of a snail;
The broke heart of a nightingale
O’ercome in music.
The very titles of many of his poems seem to have come straight from the toy-shop. How charming some of them are:
A ternary of Littles upon a pipkin of Jelly sent to a lady;
Upon a Cherrystone sent to the tip of the Lady Jemonia Walgrave’s ear;
Upon a black Twist, rounding the Arm of the Countess of Carlisle;
Upon Julia’s Hair, bundled up in a golden net;
To the Fever, not to trouble Julia;
Upon Lucia, dabbled in the Dew;
The Funeral Rites of the Rose!
Most beautiful of all, perhaps, is the title of his most famous poem, “Gather ye rosebuds,” which runs, To the Virgins, to make much of time. Herrick’s small and delightful genius is as manifest in the titles of his poems as in the poems themselves. All the perfume of his verse is in such titles as To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses; To Mistress Katherine Bradshaw the lovely, that crowned him with Laurel; To the most virtuous Mistress Pot, who many times entertained him; and, especially, To Daisies, not to shut so soon.
Herrick appears in his poetry, if we leave out of consideration the inferior religious verse in Noble Numbers, mainly in three characters. He is the cheerful countryman, the praiser of his mistresses, and the philosopher of the mortality of pretty things. As for the first, he was too good a disciple of Horace not to be able to play the part cheerfully and to smile among his animals and his beans:
A hen
I keep, which, creaking day by day,
Tells when
She goes her long white egg to lay.
A lamb
I keep (tame) with my morsels fed,
Whose dam
An orphan left him (lately dead) ...
A cat
I keep, that plays about my house,
Grown fat
With eating many a miching mouse.
As he writes down the list, he himself realises to what an extent his life in the country is a life of make-believe among toys:
Which are
But toys to give my heart some ease:
Where care
Ne’er is, slight things do lightly please.
His mistresses are, however, a thing apart from this happy farmyard. When he goes to the farmyard for a simile in praise of Julia, the effect is amusing, but it is a little lower than love-poetry:
Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg,
Which is as white and hairless as an egg.
Some critics have doubted whether Herrick ever was actually in love. They regard his Julias and Antheas and Lucias as but an array of Delf shepherdesses that every poet of the day was expected to keep on his table. This may be true of most of the ladies, but Julia seems real enough. Herrick was obviously incapable of the passion of Keats or Shelley or Browning, but we may take it that he had been enchained and enchanted by the lady with the black eyes and the replica of his own double chin:
Black and rolling is her eye,
Double-chinn’d, and forehead high;
Lips she has, all ruby red,
Cheeks like cream enclareted;
And a nose that is the grace
And proscenium of her face.
It is not a very attractive picture, and it is characteristic of Herrick that he can paint Julia’s clothes better than he can paint her face. It was an enchained and enchanted man who wrote those lines that are far too well known to quote and far too charming to refrain from quoting:
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me.
This is no figmentary picture. The songs to Julia—most of all, the glorious Night Piece—are songs of experience. Herrick may not have loved Julia well enough to marry her, even if she had been willing, but he loved her well enough to write good verses. He could probably have said farewell to any woman as philosophically as he said farewell to sack. He was a cautious man, and a predestined bachelor. He was, indeed, a man of no very profound feeling. There is no deep tide of emotion making his verse musical. He knew love and he knew regret, but not tragically. If he wept to see the daffodils haste away so soon, we may be sure that he brushed away his tears at the sound of the dinner-bell and forgot the premature death of the flowers in cheerful conversation with his housekeeper, Prue. This does not mean that his mood was insincere; it does not mean that in To Daffodils he did not give immortal and touching expression to one of the universal sorrows of men. He comes nearer the grave music of poetry here than in any of his other poems. But the Memento mori that runs through his verses is the Memento mori of a banqueter, not of a sufferer. It is the mournfulness of a heart that has no intention of breaking.
Herrick proved a true prophet in regard to the immortality of his verse, though Hesperides made no great stir when it was published in 1648 and seems to have made no friends among critics till the end of the eighteenth century. But he never gave a wiser estimate of the quality of his work than those lines, in When he would have his verses read, where he bids us:
In sober mornings do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse;
But when that men have both well drank and fed,
Let my enchantments then be sung or read....
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointment shine,
Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.
This is the muse at play. It is absurd to speak of Herrick as though he were a great lyric poet. He is not with Shakespeare. He is not with Campion. But he is a master of light poetry—of poetry under the rose.
II
VICTOR HUGO
It is easy to disparage Victor Hugo, but, in order to disparage him, it is necessary to abstain from reading him. Take down his books and begin to read, and, even if you do not agree with the verdict, you will understand before long how it was that a generation or so ago people used to regard Victor Hugo as one of the great names in literature. It was only Swinburne, perhaps, who could describe him as “the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare,” but this did not seem an absurd exaggeration to the majority of readers at the time it was written, and even a crabbed critic like Henley accepted him as “plainly ... the greatest man of letters of his day.” His influence as well as his reputation was enormous and extended far beyond France. He was a great author for the great Russians. He was one of Dostoevsky’s favourite writers, and Notre Dame was one of the books that influenced Tolstoy; even in his censorious old age Tolstoy admitted Les Misérables through the strait gate of the best literature in What is Art? and it seems likely, as Madame Duclaux suggests, that it was at the back of his mind when he wrote Resurrection.
His greatest contemporaries, however, realised that Hugo was a charlatan as well as a man of genius. Madame Duclaux quotes Baudelaire’s comment, “Victor Hugo—an inspired donkey!” and his assertion that the Almighty, “in a mood of impenetrable mystification,” had taken genius and silliness in equal parts in order to compound the brain of Victor Hugo. She also quotes Balzac’s criticism of the first night of Les Burgraves:
The story simply does not exist, the invention is beneath contempt. But the poetry—ah, the poetry goes to your head. It’s Titian painting his fresco on a wall of mud. Yet there is in Victor Hugo’s plays an absence of heart, which was never so conspicuous. Victor Hugo is not true.
“Victor Hugo is not true.” That is the suspicion that constantly trips one up whether one reads his books or his life. In literature, in public life, in private life, he was not only amazing but an amazing humbug. We see evidence of this in the story of his relations with his wife and Juliette Drouet, his mistress, which Madame Duclaux tells again so fairly and so well. Even while he was pursuing the mistress across France, he would write fervently home to the wife: “Je t’aime! Tu es la joie et l’honneur de ma vie!” Hugo possibly meant this when he wrote it. He may have been lying to himself rather than to his wife. His falseness lay in his readiness to whisper at each shrine at which he worshipped that this was his only shrine. At the same time, no sooner do we admit that Hugo was an impostor in love and in literature than we begin to compare him with other impostors and to note certain differences in him. His early idealism was not merely an idealism of words. He was, until his marriage, as chaste as his nature was passionate. He was after marriage a faithful husband till his wife told him that she could no longer live with him as his wife. After he fell in love with Juliette Drouet in 1833, we might describe him as a high-minded bigamist, though he did not remain perfectly faithful even in his bigamy. One thing, at least, is certain: both women loved him till the end of their long lives. His dying wife wrote to him in 1868: “The end of my dream is to die in your arms.” And, when Juliette Drouet was slowly dying of cancer, and both she and Hugo were between seventy and eighty, she still insisted on nursing him at the hint of the slightest cough or headache. “Did he but stir, she was there with a warm drink or an extra covering. Every morning it was she who drew the curtains from Victor Hugo’s window, roused the old man with a kiss on the forehead, lit his fire, prepared the two fresh eggs that formed his breakfast, read him the papers.” Had he been all false, he could hardly have preserved the affection of these two rival and devoted women through years of danger and exile till the ultimate triumph of his fame. Madame Duclaux suggests, however, that he was a humbug even on that early occasion on which, seeing that Sainte-Beuve was in love with his wife, and that she in turn was attracted by Sainte-Beuve he offered with romantic generosity to let his wife choose between them and to abide by the result. Again, the fact that he insisted on remaining friends with Sainte-Beuve through the affair is regarded as evidence of his cunning determination to keep in with the reviewers at all costs. Victor Hugo would probably be suspected of having been a humbug, whatever he had done.
His self-importance is a continual challenge to our belief in him. Madame Duclaux quotes Heine’s sneer: “Hugo is worse than an egoist, he is a Hugoist,” and his device was the arrogant Ego Hugo. But at least he had the courage of his self-importance. In 1851, at the time of the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, when there was a price on his head, Hugo was driving across Paris to a meeting of the Insurrectionary Committee, and passed a group of officers on horseback:
The blood rushed to his head. He flung down the window of the cab, tore his deputy’s scarf out of his pocket, and waving it wildly, began to harangue the General:
“You, who are there, dressed in the uniform of a General, it is to you that I speak, sir. You know who I am; I am a representative of the nation: and I know who you are; you are a malefactor! And now do you wish to know my name! My name is Victor Hugo!”
This was no doubt theatrical, and both his deeds and his words during the reign of Napoleon the Little were those of a man consciously playing the leading part. But the fact remains that at this crisis he did risk everything and face twenty years’ exile for the sake of his convictions. The last stanza of “Ultima Verba” in Les Châtiments may be rhetoric, but it is not empty rhetoric:
Si l’on n’est plus que mille, eh bien, j’en suis! Si même
Ils ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla:
S’il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième;
Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là.
There is an energy of fury in Hugo’s political verse that keeps it alive even to-day, when Louis Napoleon, a charlatan without this redeeming fury, has receded into such littleness that the eye scarcely any longer perceives him. Hugo at times seems a painfully vocative poet—the poet, not merely of the vocative singular, but of the vocative plural. But there is always coursing through his verse a great natural force, like that of the wind or the waves, that carries us along as we read.
Hugo’s work, like his life, indeed, was the expression of what Madame Duclaux calls “a powerful and a sensual nature, a prodigious temperament.”
His barber complained that Hugo’s beard took the edge off any razor. At forty he cracked the kernels of peaches with his teeth; even in his old age ... he ate his oranges with the peel on and his lobsters in their shell, “because he found them more digestible.” His appetite (which was hungry, not greedy) alarmed the good Théo. “You should see the fabulous medley he makes on his plate of all sorts and conditions of viands: cutlets, a salad of white beans, stewed beef and tomato sauce, and watch him devour them, very fast, and during a long time.”
“Hugo is one of the forces of Nature!” cried Flaubert, “and there circulates in his veins the sap of trees.”
This Gargantuan appetite expresses itself everywhere in his writings. He was a Gargantua in regard to life as well as food. He devoured the past like the present. He devoured politics, religion, the stage, poetry, fiction, nature, grand-children. If he was a giant who devoured, however, he was also a giant who created. He may not have the accurate gift of observation on which we set so much store nowadays, and he may depart so far from reality as to call an English sailor in L’Homme qui rit Tom-Jim-Jack. But, if he does not create for us a world as real as Clapham Junction, he does create for us a world as real as Æsop’s Fables. He is an inventor of myths and fables, indeed. He no more attempts to imitate the surface of life than a musician attempts to imitate the sounds of life. Like Dickens, he is a great Gothic writer, who demands the right to people the work of his hands with devil or imp or angel—with figures of pity or horror, of laughter or tears. He does not possess Dickens’s comic imagination; the fantastic and the ironic take the place of humour in his books. But his work, like that of Dickens, is a gigantically grotesque pile built on the ancient Christian affirmation of love. Literature in our time may observe or ask questions: it seldom affirms. But I doubt whether it even observes the essential heart of things with as sure an eye as that of Hugo or Dickens. It does not penetrate with its pity to that underworld of pain in which Cosette and Smike grow up, starved and loveless. Hugo and Dickens were at least rescuers. They were not mere sentimentalists: they had the imaginative sympathy that would not let them rest in the presence of the miseries of life. They hated the tyranny of men and the tyranny of institutions; they hated greed and cruelty, and the iron door shut on children and on the helpless and the suffering.
Hugo has dramatised this imaginative sympathy and hatred in novels so mythical in substance that one might easily fall into the mistake of regarding them as false. We must think of Jean Valjean and Javert as figures in a morality play rather than in a psychological study if we are to appreciate the greatness of Les Misérables. They were created, not by God, but by Victor Hugo. But, if they have not at all points psychological reality, they have at least legendary reality. We can say the same of the characters in Les Travailleurs de la mer and L’Homme qui rit. They all inhabit the world, not as it actually is, but as it is transmuted in a legendary imagination. Unfortunately, Hugo professes to write about real people and not about dragons, and we constantly find ourselves applying psychological tests as we read him. When Gilliatt drowns himself in Les Travailleurs de la mer we complain not only of the dubious psychology but of the mechanical theatrical effect. Victor Hugo, we feel at such moments, was a great “producer” rather than a great artist. He would, undoubtedly, had he lived, have taken full advantage of the over-emphasis of the cinema. On the other hand, the over-emphasis of which his critics complain is not the over-emphasis of weakness straining after strength. It is rather an overflow of the Gothic imagination. “His flat foot,” he tells us, of a certain character, “was a vulture’s claw. His skull was low at the top and large about the temples. His ugly ears bristled with hair, and seemed to say: ‘Beware of speaking to the animal in this cave.’” His style is essentially the exaggerated style. His genius is the genius of exaggeration. Luckily, he exaggerates, not wholly in clouds, but in carved gnomes and all manner of fantastic detail. He omits not a comma from his dreams and nightmares. That is why his short sentences and paragraphs still startle us into attention when we open one of his novels. His imagination at least teems on every page—teems with absurdities, perhaps, as well as with truth and beauty, but teems always with interest. Madame Duclaux’s excellent biography should send many readers back to the work of this magnificent and preposterous legend-maker and lover of his fellow-men.
III
MOLIÈRE
The way of entertainers is hard. It is a good enough world for those who entertain us no higher than the ribs, but to attempt to entertain the mind is another matter. Comedy shows men and women (among other things) what humbugs they are, and, as the greatest humbugs are often persons of influence, the comic writer is naturally hated and disparaged during his lifetime in some of the most powerful circles. That Molière’s body was at first refused Christian burial may have been due to the fact that he was an actor—in theory, an actor was not allowed even to receive the Sacrament in those days unless he had renounced his profession—but his profession of comic writer had during the latter part of his life brought him into far worse disrepute than his profession of comic actor. He was the greatest portrayer of those companion figures, the impostor and the dupe, who ever lived, and, as a result, every kind of impostor and dupe, whether religious, literary, or fashionable, was enraged against him. That Molière was a successful author is not disputed, but he never enjoyed a calm and unchallenged success. He had the support of Louis XIV and the public, but the orthodox, the professional and the highbrow lost no opportunity of doing him an injury.
Molière was nearly forty-two when he produced L’École des Femmes. He had already, as Mr. Tilley tells us, in his solidly instructive study, “become an assured favourite with the public,” though Les Précieuses ridicules had given offence in the salons, and performances were suspended for a time. With the appearance of L’École des Femmes he at length stood forth a great writer, and the critics began to take counsel together. A ten months’ war followed, in the course of which he delivered two smashing blows against his enemies, first in La Critique de l’École des Femmes and L’Impromptu de Versailles. Then “on May 12, 1664, he presented at Versailles the first three acts of Tartuffe.” This began a new war which lasted, not merely ten months, but five years. It was not until 1669 that Molière received permission to produce in public the five-act play that we now know. The violence of the storm the play raised may be gauged from the quotation Mr. Tilley makes from Pierre Roullé’s pamphlet, in which Roullé called Molière “un démon vêtu de chair et habillé en homme, un libertin, un impie digne d’un supplice exemplaire.” Mr. Shaw himself never made people angrier than Molière. Having held a religious hypocrite up to ridicule, Molière went on to paint a comic portrait of a freethinker. He gave the world Dom Juan, which was a great success—for a week or two. Suddenly, it was withdrawn, and Molière never produced it again. Nor did he publish it. It had apparently offended not only the clergy but the great nobles, who disliked the exposure of a gentleman on his way to Hell.
It was, we may presume, these cumulative misfortunes that drove him into the pessimistic mood out of which Le Misanthrope was born. He had now written three masterpieces for the purpose of entertaining his fellows, and he was being treated, not as a public benefactor, but as a public enemy. One of the three had been calumniated; one was prohibited; the third had to be withdrawn. And, in addition to being at odds with the world, he was at odds with his wife. He had married her, a girl under twenty, when he himself was forty, and she apparently remained a coquette after marriage. One could not ask for clearer evidence of the sanity of Molière’s genius than the fact that he was able to make of his bitter private and public quarrels one of the most delightful comedies in literature. Alceste, it is true, with his desire to quit the insincere and fashionable world and to retire into the simple and secluded life, is said to be a study, not of Molière himself, but of a misanthropic nobleman. But, though Molière may have borrowed a few features of the nobleman’s story, he undoubtedly lent the nobleman the soul of Molière. He had the comic vision of himself as well as of the rest of humanity. He might mock the vices of the world, but he could also mock himself for hating the world, in the spirit of a superior person, on account of its vices. He could even, as a poet, see his wife’s point of view, though he might quarrel with her as a husband. Célimène, that witty and beautiful lady who refuses to retire with Alceste into his misanthropic solitude, has had all the world in love with her ever since. Molière, we may be sure, sympathised with her when she protested:
La solitude effraye une âme de vingt ans.
Molière himself played the part of Alceste, and his wife played Célimène. The play, we are told, was not one of his greatest popular successes. As one reads it, indeed, one is puzzled at times as to why it should be giving one such exquisite enjoyment. There is less action in it than in any other great play. The plot never thickens, and the fall of the curtain leaves us with nothing settled as to Alceste’s and Célimène’s future. To write a comedy which is not very comic and a drama which is not very dramatic, and to make of this a masterpiece of comic drama, is surely one of the most remarkable of achievements. It can only be explained by the fact that Molière was a great creator and not a great mechanician. He gives the secret of life to his people. His success in doing this is shown by the way in which men have argued about them ever since, as we argue about real men and women. There are even critics who are unable to laugh at Molière, so overwhelming is the reality of his characters. Mr. Tilley quotes M. Donnay as saying, “Aujourd’hui nous ne rions pas de Tartuffe ni même d’Orgon”; and even Mr. Tilley himself, discussing Le Malade imaginaire, says that we realise that Argan—Argan of the enemas—is “at bottom a tragic figure.” Again, he sees a “tragic element” in the characterisation of Harpagon in L’Avare, and, speaking of Alceste in Le Misanthrope, he observes that, “though we may be sure that [Molière] fully realised the tragic side of his character, it was not this aspect that he wished to present to the public.” It seems to me that there is a good deal of unreality in all this. It is as though the errors of men were too serious things to laugh at—as though comedy had not its own terrible wisdom and must not venture into the depths of reality. Molière would probably have had a short way with those who cannot laugh at Tartuffe, as Cervantes would have had a short way with those who cannot laugh at Don Quixote. There is as much imagination—as much sympathy, even, perhaps—in the laughter of the great comic writers as in the tears of the sentimentalist. And Molière’s aim was laughter achieved through an exaggerated imitation of reality. He was the poet of good sense, and he felt that he had but to hold up the mirror of good sense in order that we might see how absurd is every form of egotism and pretentiousness. He took the side of the simple dignity of human nature against all the narrowing vices, the anti-social vices, whether of avarice, licentiousness, self-righteousness or preciosity. He has written the smiling poetry of our sins. Not that he is indulgent to them, like Anatole France, whose view of life is sentimental. Molière’s work was a declaration of war against all those human beings who are more pleased with themselves than they ought to be, down to that amazing coterie of literary ladies in Les Femmes savantes, concerning whose projected academy of taste one of them announces in almost modern accents:
Nous serons par nos lois les juges des ouvrages;
Par nos lois, prose et vers, tout nous sera soumis;
Nul n’aura de l’esprit hors nous et nos amis;
Nous chercherons partout à trouver à redire,
Et ne verrons que nous qui sache bien écrire.
Molière has been accused of writing an attack on the higher education of women in Les Femmes savantes. What we see in it to-day is an immortal picture of those intellectual impostors of the drawing-room—the not-very-intelligentsia, as they have been wittily called—who exist in every civilised capital and in every generation. The vanities of the rival poets, it is true, are caricatured rather extravagantly, but the caricature is essentially true to life. This is what men and women are like. At least, this is what they are like when they are most exclusive and most satisfied with themselves. Molière knew human nature. That is what makes him so much greater a comic dramatist than any English dramatist who has written since Shakespeare.
Molière has been taken to task by many critics since his death. He has been accused even of writing badly. He has been accused of padding, incorrectness, and the use of jargon. He has been told that he should have written none of his plays in verse, but all of them, as he wrote L’Avare, in prose. All these criticisms are nine-tenths fatuous. Molière by the use of verse gave comic speech the exhilaration of a game, as Pope did, and literature that has exhilarating qualities of this kind has justified its existence, whether or not it squares with some hard-and-fast theory of poetry. If we cannot define poetry so as to leave room for Molière and Pope, then so much the worse for our definition of poetry. As for padding, I doubt whether any dramatist has ever kept the breath of life in his speech more continuously than Molière. His dialogue is not a flowing tap but a running stream. That Molière’s language may be faulty I will not dispute, as French is an alien and but half-known tongue to me. He produces his effects, whatever his grammar. He has created for us a world, delicious even in its insincerities and absurdities—a world seen through charming, humorous, generous, remorseless eyes—a world held together by wit—a world in which the sins of society dance to the ravishing music of the alexandrine.
IV
EDMUND BURKE
Burke, we are told, was known as “the dinner-bell” because the House of Commons emptied when he rose to speak. This is usually put down to the uncouthness of his delivery. But, after all, there was nothing in his delivery to prevent his indictment of Warren Hastings from so affecting his hearers in places that, as Lord Morley writes, “every listener, including the great criminal, held his breath in an agony of horror,” and “women were carried out fainting.” I fancy Burke’s virtues rather than his vices were at the bottom of his failure in the House of Commons. He took the imagination of an artist into politics, and he soared high above the questions of the hour among eternal principles of human nature in which country gentlemen had only a very faint interest. Not that he was a theoretical speaker in the sense of being a doctrinaire. He had no belief in paper Utopias. His object in politics was not to construct an ideal society out of his head but to construct an acceptable society out of human beings as their traditions, their environment, and their needs have moulded them. He never forgot that actual human beings are the material in which the politician must work. His constant and passionate sense of human nature is what puts his speeches far above any others that have been delivered in English. Even when he spoke or wrote on the wrong side, he was often right about human nature. Page after page of his Reflections on the French Revolution is as right about human nature as it is wrong about its ostensible subject. One might say with truth that, whatever his ostensible subject may be, Burke’s real subject is always human nature.
If he was indignant against wrong in America or India or Ireland, it was not with the indignation of a sentimentalist so much as of a moralist outraged by the degradation of human nature. He loved disinterestedness and wisdom in public affairs, and he mourned over the absence of them as a Shakespeare might have mourned over the absence of noble characters about whom to write plays. In his great Speech at Bristol he pilloried that narrow and selfish conception of freedom according to which freedom consists in the right to dominate over others. Burke demanded of human nature not an impossible perfection but at least the first beginnings of magnanimity. Thus he loathed every form of mean domination, whether it revealed itself as religious persecution or political repression. He attacked both the anti-Catholic and the anti-American would-be despots in the Speech at Bristol, and his comment may serve for almost any “anti” in any age:
It is but too true that the love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness and insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. This desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman’s instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a jail. This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the American War. Our subjects in America, our colonies, our dependants. This lust of party-power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this syren song of ambition has charmed ears that one would have thought were never organised to that sort of music.
All through his life Burke set his face against what may be called the lusts of human nature. As a Member of Parliament he refused to curry favour with his constituents by gratifying their baser appetites. In the farewell speech from which I have quoted, he has left us an impassioned statement of his position:
No man carries farther than I do the policy of making government pleasing to the people. But the widest range of this politic complaisance is confined within the limits of justice. I would not only consult the interest of the people, but I would cheerfully gratify their humours. We are all a sort of children that must be soothed and managed. I think I am not austere or formal in my nature. I would bear, I would even myself play part in, any innocent buffooneries to divert them. But I will never act the tyrant for their amusement. If they will mix malice in their sports, I shall never consent to throw them any living, sentient creature whatsoever—no, not so much as a kitling—to torment.
Burke spent the greater part of his life summoning men to the discipline of duty and away from anarchic graspings after rights. George III’s war against America, as well as the French Revolution is the assertion of a “right,” and Burke’s hatred of the war, as of the Revolution, arose from his belief that the assertion of “rights,” not for great public ends, but from ill-tempered obstinacy in clinging to a theory, was no likely means of increasing the happiness and liberties of human beings. He once received a letter from a gentleman who declared that, even if the assertion of her right to tax America meant the ruin of England, he would nevertheless say “Let her perish!” All through the American War Burke saw that what prevented peace was this sort of doctrinaire theory of the rights of England. In 1775 the American Congress appointed a deputation to lay a petition before the House of Commons. The Cabinet refused to receive an “illegal” body. Penn brought over an “olive branch of peace” from Congress in the same year, and again, holding fast to their theory of the rights of Empire, ministers replied that Congress was an illegal body. Burke saw the vital thing to decide between England and America was not some metaphysical point in the disputed question of rights, but the means by which two groups of human beings could learn to live in peace and charity in the same world. I do not wish to suggest that he cared nothing for the rights or wrongs of the quarrel. He was the impassioned champion of right, in the noble sense of the word, beyond any other statesman of his time. On the other hand, he detested the assertion of a right for its own sake—the politics born of the theory that one has the right (whether one is a man or a nation) to do what one likes with one’s own. Burke saw that this is the humour of children quarrelling in the nursery. “The question with me is,” he said, “not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy.” He regarded peace as almost an end in itself, and he besought his fellow-countrymen not to stand upon their rights at the cost of making peace impossible. “Whether liberty be advantageous or not,” he told them during the war, “(for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle), none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be frequently bought by some indulgence of liberty.” Thus we find him all through the war reminding his fellow-countrymen that the Americans were human beings—a fact of a kind that is always forgotten in time of war—and that the Anglo-American problem was chiefly a problem in human nature. “Nobody shall persuade me,” he declared, drawing on his knowledge of human nature, “when a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation.” Again, when he was told that America was worth fighting for, his reply was: “Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them.” Though opposed to the separation of America, he was in the end convinced that, if the alternatives were separation and coercion, England was more likely to gain a separate America than a bludgeoned America as a friend. Addressing his former constituents, he said:
I parted with it as with a limb, but as a limb to save the body; and I would have parted with more if more had been necessary: anything rather than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war. This mode of yielding would, it is said, give way to independency without a war. I am persuaded from the nature of things, and from every information, that it would have had a directly contrary effect. But if it had this effect, I confess that I should prefer independency without war to independency with it; and I have so much trust in the inclinations and prejudices of mankind, and so little in anything else, that I should expect ten times more benefit to this kingdom from the affection of America, though under a separate establishment, than from her perfect submission to the Crown and Parliament, accompanied with her terror, disgust and abhorrence. Bodies tied together by so unnatural a bond of union as mutual hatred are only converted to their ruin.
There, again, you see the appeal to the “nature of things,” the use of the imagination instead of blind partisan passion. He himself might have called this distinguishing quality not imagination so much as a capacity to take long views. He looked on the taking of long views as itself a primary virtue in politics. He praised Cromwell and other statesmen whom he regarded as great bad men because “they had long views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and not the destruction of their country.” Who, reading to-day his speeches on America and India, can question that Burke himself possessed the genius of the long view, which is only another name for imagination in politics?
Mr. Murison’s admirable student’s edition of some of the writings of Burke gives us examples of Burke not only during the American but during the French period. He has called his book, indeed, not after the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol or the Speech at Bristol, but after the Letter to a Noble Lord, in which Burke defends himself in the French period against the Duke of Bedford. Here, as during the American War, we find him protesting against the introduction of “metaphysical” disputes about rights into politics. During the American War he had said, in regard to the question of rights: “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions. I hate the very sound of them.” Now, during the Revolution, he declared: “Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of man.” Unfortunately, Burke himself was something of a “metaphysician” in his attack on the French Revolution. He wrote against France from prejudice and from theory, and his eye is continually distracted from the facts of human nature to a paper political orthodoxy. Even here, however, he did not forget human nature, and, in so far as the French Revolution was false to human nature—if the phrase is permissible—Burke has told the truth in lasting prose.
His greatness as an artist is shown by the fact that he can move us to silent admiration even when we disagree with him. There is plenty of dull matter in most of his writings, since much of them is necessarily occupied with the detail of dead controversies, but there is a tide of eloquence that continually returns into his sentences and carries us off our feet. We never get to love him as a man. We do not know him personally as we know Johnson. He is a voice, a figure, not one of ourselves. His eloquence is the eloquence of wisdom, seldom of personal intimacy. He is not a master of tears and laughter, but, like Milton, seems rather to represent a sort of impassioned dignity of human nature. But what an imagination he poured into the public affairs of his time—an imagination to which his time was all but indifferent until he used his eloquence in support of (in Lord Morley’s phrase) “the great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason.” Even then, however, the imagination survived, and, hackneyed though it is by quotation, one never grows weary of coming on that great passage in which he mourns over the fate of Marie Antoinette and the passing of the age of chivalry from Europe.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiments and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
As we read these sentences we cease to ask ourselves whether Burke was on the right or the wrong side in the French Revolution. We are content that a great artist has spoken from the depths of his soul. He has released the truth that is in him to the eternal enrichment of the human race.