War Letters of a Public-School Boy

by Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

Of all names in literature he reverenced most that of Shakespeare, in whom he saw "the spirit of the Renaissance personified," and whom he described "as romantic, philosophic, realistic, and as varied and impersonal as Nature." He was never weary of reading the tragedies and historical plays. He resented any word in disparagement of Shakespeare, and could not understand the inability of a supreme artist like Tolstoy to appreciate his greatness. Though he has written a noble sonnet in homage to Shakespeare's genius, Matthew Arnold once permitted himself to say that "Homer leaves Shakespeare as far behind as perfection leaves imperfection." Paul wrote in a marginal note, "Bosh! to put it bluntly." He would say with Goethe, "The first page of Shakespeare made me his for life, and when I had perused an entire play I stood like one born blind, to whom sight by some miraculous power had been restored in a moment." Paul and I often exchanged ideas on Shakespeare. He was lost in wonder at Shakespeare's creative power, his inexhaustible fertility, the universality of his range, the perfection of his portraiture, his mastery over all moods, his cunning artistry in the use of words, his exuberant imagery and effortless ease. He made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon to see with his own eyes the spots and scenes amid which Shakespeare's youth and declining years were spent. The smiling beauty of Stratford and the rich rural charm of its surroundings left on his mind a delightful impression that was never erased.

Next to Shakespeare his admiration flowed out to Milton. When he went into the battle-line he took with him only two books—his Shakespeare and his Milton. With Milton's character he had some marked affinities—the virginal purity of Milton's youth, his love of learning, his hatred of all tyrannies, secular and spiritual, making a strong appeal to the sympathies of my son. "Milton," he wrote, "is perhaps the very grandest figure in English history." "In Milton the spirit of Puritanism is combined with a purely Hellenic love of beauty." "'Paradise Lost' may be regarded (1) as a reflection of the Puritan point of view; (2) as a poem pure and simple; (3) as an epic of the classical school."

Profound as was his admiration for "Paradise Lost," he could not forbear smiling at Taine's quip that the Miltonic Adam is "your true Paterfamilias, a member of the Opposition, a Whig, a Puritan, who entered Paradise via England."

Paul extolled Pope's ingenuity and metrical felicity—he has thoroughly annotated the "Essay on Man"—but was acutely conscious of aridity and the absence of rapture and vision in Pope as in Dryden. He singled out as "the finest passage in the 'Essay on Man'" the eight lines in which Pope contrasts the majesty of the Universe with the insignificance of man, beginning:

Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly,
Planets and suns run lawless through the sky.

He had not much respect for Pope's philosophy, and, commenting on one passage in the same poem, writes: "Pope, like many other unsound reasoners, when his position becomes dangerous, seeks to vindicate himself by insults."

Above all nineteenth-century poets he loved Wordsworth, the revelation of whose richness and glory only came to him after he was seventeen. There were no bounds to his admiration for the Wordsworth sonnets. Many a time since the War he would recite the glorious sonnet which proclaims that

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifest.

The magic of Keats and his adoration of beauty struck a responsive chord in Paul's nature. Tennyson did not stir him to the depths of his being like Wordsworth. "Ulysses," "The Revenge," and "Crossing the Bar" were the only Tennyson poems that he cared for. In an essay written when he was eighteen he defined poetry as "the soul of man put into untrammelled speech, the voice of angels, the music of the spheres." He read with critical discernment, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing, with the author. It was his habit when reading a book to mark passages that impressed him and make comments in the margin. Some of his obiter dicta shall be given. In judging them it should be remembered that they were all pronounced before he was nineteen.

How aptly said that Dante seems to have tried to write a poem with a sculptor's chisel or a painter's brush.