"'Gastibelza, l'homme à la carabine,
Chantait ainsi:
Quelqu'un a-t-il connu Doña Sabine?
Quelqu'un d'ici?
Dansez, chantez, villageois! la nuit gagne
Le mont Falou—
Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne
Me rendra fou!'
"'The song of songs which is Hugo's,' he calls it; and goes on to ask how often one has chanted or shouted or otherwise declaimed it to himself, on horseback at full gallop or when swimming at his best as a boy in holiday time; and how often the matchless music, ardour, pathos of it have not reduced his own ambition to a sort of rapturous and adoring despair—yes, and requickened his old delight in it with a new delight in the sense that he will always have this to rejoice in, to adore, and to recognise as something beyond the reach of man. Well, that is the sense in which our poem should be our favourite poem. Now, for my part, there's a page or so of Browning's Saul—"
"What do you say to Meredith's Phœbus with Admetus?" interrupted X.
I looked up at him quickly, almost shamefacedly. "Now, how on earth did you guess—"
X laid down his pipe, stared up at the sky-light, and quoted, almost under his breath:—
"'Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats!
Laurel, ivy, vine, wreath'd for feasts not few!'"
"'Bulls that walk the pasture in kingly-flashing coats!
Laurel, ivy, vine, wreath'd for feasts not few!'"
Why is it possible to consider Mr. Meredith—whose total yield of verse has been so scanty and the most of it so 'harsh and crabbed,' as not only 'dull fools' suppose—beside the great poets who have been his contemporaries, and to feel no impropriety in the comparison? That was the question X and I found ourselves discussing, ten minutes later.
"Because," maintained X, "you feel at once that with Meredith you have hold of a man. You know—as surely, for example, as while you are listening to Handel—that the stuff is masculine, and great at that."
"That is not all the secret," I maintained, "although it gets near to the secret. Why is it possible to consider Coleridge alongside of Wordsworth and Byron, yet feel no impropriety? Coleridge's yield of verse was ridiculously scanty beside theirs, and a deal more sensuous than Wordsworth's, at any rate, and yet more manly, in a sense, than Byron's, which again was thoroughly manly within the range of emotion? Why? Because Coleridge and Meredith both have a philosophy of life: and he who has a philosophy of life may write little or much; may on the one hand write Christabel and leave it unfinished and decline upon opium; or may, on the other hand, be a Browning or a Meredith, and 'keep up his end' (as the saying is) nobly to the last, and vex us all the while with his asperities; and yet in both cases be as certainly a masculine poet. Poetry (as I have been contending all my life) has one right background and one only: and that background is philosophy. You say, Coleridge and Meredith are masculine. I ask, Why are they masculine? The answer is, They have philosophy."