“There is not, in the whole of modern history, a more suggestive subject than that of the persistent attempts of every Western literature to versify the Psalms in its own idiom, and the uniform failure of these attempts. At the time that Sternhold was ‘bringing’ the Psalms into ‘fine Englysh meter’ for Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the same kind of work for their own monarchs—notably Clement Marot for Francis the First. And it has been going on ever since, without a single protest of any importance having been entered against it. This is astonishing, for the Bible, even from the point of view of the literary critic, is a sacred book. Perhaps the time for entering such a protest is come, and a literary journal may be its proper medium.
A great living savant has characterized the Bible as ‘a collection of the rude imaginings of Syria,’ ‘the worn-out old bottle of Judaism into which the generous new wine of science is being poured.’ The great savant was angry when he said so. The ‘new wine’ of science is a generous vintage, undoubtedly, and deserves all the respect it gets from us; so do those who make it and serve it out; they have so much intelligence; they are so honest and so fearless. But whatever may become of their wine in a few years, when the wine-dealers shall have passed away, when the savant is forgotten as any star-gazer of Chaldæa,—the ‘old bottle’ is going to be older yet,—the Bible is going to be eternal. For that which decides the vitality of any book is precisely that which decides the value of any human soul—not the knowledge it contains, but simply the attitude it assumes towards the universe, unseen as well as seen. The attitude of the Bible is just that which every soul must, in its highest and truest moods, always assume—that of a wise wonder in front of such a universe as this—that of a noble humility before a God such as He ‘in whose great Hand we stand.’ This is why—like Alexander’s mirror—like that most precious ‘Cup of Jemshîd,’ imagined by the Persians—the Bible reflects to-day, and will reflect for ever, every wave of human emotion, every passing event of human life—reflect them as faithfully as it did to the great and simple people in whose great and simple tongue it was written. Coming from the Vernunft of Man, it goes straight to the Vernunft. This is the kind of literature that never does die: a fact which the world has discovered long ago. For the Bible is Europe’s one book. And with regard to Asia, as far back as the time of Chrysostom it could have been read in languages Syrian, Indian, Persian, Armenian, Ethiopic, Scythian, and Samaritan; now it can be read in every language, and in almost every dialect, under the sun.
And the very quintessence of the Bible is the Book of the Psalms. Therefore the Scottish passion for Psalm-singing is not wonderful; the wonder is that, liking so much to sing, they can find it possible to sing so badly. It is not wonderful that the court of Francis I should yearn to sing Psalms; the wonderful thing is that they should find it in their hearts to sing Marot’s Psalms when they might have sung David’s—that Her Majesty the Queen could sing to a fashionable jig, ‘O Lord, rebuke me not in Thine indignation’; and that Anthony, King of Navarre, could sing to the air of a dance of Poitou, ‘Stand up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel.’ For, although it is given to the very frogs, says Pascal, to find music in their own croaking, the ears that can find music in such frogs as these must be of a peculiar convolution.
In Psalmody, then, Scottish taste and French are both bad, from the English point of view; but then the English, having Hopkins in various incarnations, are fastidious.
When Lord Macaulay’s tiresome New Zealander has done contemplating the ruins of London Bridge, and turned in to the deserted British Museum to study us through our books—what volume can he take as the representative one—what book, above all others, can the ghostly librarian select to give him the truest, the profoundest insight into the character of the strange people who had made such a great figure in the earth? We, for our part, should not hesitate to give him the English Book of Common Prayer, with the authorized version of the Psalms at the end, as representing the British mind in its most exalted and its most abject phases. That in the same volume can be found side by side the beauty and pathos of the English Litany, the grandeur of the English version of the Psalms and the effusions of Brady and Tate—masters of the art of sinking compared with whom Rous is an inspired bard—would be adequate evidence that the Church using it must be a British Church—that British, most British, must be the public tolerating it.
‘By thine agony and bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy Precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, God Lord, deliver us.’
Among Western peoples there is but one that could have uttered in such language this cry, where pathos and sublimity and subtlest music are so mysteriously blended—blended so divinely that the man who can utter it, familiar as it is, without an emotion deep enough to touch close upon the fount of tears must be differently constituted from some of us. Among Western peoples there is, we say, but one that could have done this; for as M. Taine has well said:—‘More than any race in Europe they (the British) approach by the simplicity and energy of their conceptions the old Hebraic spirit. Enthusiasm is their natural condition, and their Deity fills them with admiration as their ancient deities inspired them with fury.’ And now listen to this:—
When we, our wearied limbs to rest,
Sat down by proud Euphrates’ stream,
We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest,
And Zion was our mournful theme.Among all the peoples of the earth there is but one that could have thus degraded the words: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’ For, to achieve such platitude there is necessary an element which can only be called the ‘Hopkins element,’ an element which is quite an insular birthright of ours, a characteristic which came over with the ‘White Horse,’—that ‘dull and greasy coarseness of taste’ which distinguishes the British mind from all others; that ‘ächtbrittische Beschränktheit,’ which Heine speaks of in his tender way. The Scottish version is rough, but Brady and Tate’s inanities are worse than Rous’s roughness.
Such an anomaly as this in one and the same literature, in one and the same little book, is unnatural; it is monstrous: whence can it come? It is, indeed, singular that no one has ever dreamed of taking the story of the English Prayer-book, with Brady and Tate at the end, and using it as a key to unlock that puzzle of puzzles which has set the Continental critics writing nonsense about us for generations:—‘What is it that makes the enormous, the fundamental, difference between English literature—and all other Western literatures—Teutonic no less than Latin or Slavonic?’ The simple truth of the matter is, that the British mind has always been bipartite as now—has always been, as now, half sublime and half homely to very coarseness; in other words, it has been half inspired by David King of Israel, and half by John Hopkins, Suffolk schoolmaster and archetype of prosaic bards, who, in 1562, took such of the Psalms as Sternhold had left unsullied and doggerellized them. For, as we have said, Hopkins, in many and various incarnations, has been singing unctuously in these islands ever since the introduction of Christianity, and before; for he is Anglo-Saxon tastelessness, he is Anglo-Saxon deafness to music and blindness to beauty. When St. Augustine landed here with David he found not only Odin, but Hopkins, a heathen then, in possession of the soil.
There is, therefore, half of a great truth in what M. Taine says. The English have, besides the Hopkins element, which is indigenous, much of the Hebraic temper, which is indigenous too; but they have by nature none of the Hebraic style. But, somehow, here is the difference between us and the Continentals; that, though style is born of taste—though le style c’est la race; and though the Anglo-Saxon started, as we have seen, with Odin and Hopkins alone; yet, just as instinct may be sown and grown by ancestral habit of many years—just as the pointer puppy, for instance, points, he knows not why, because his ancestors were taught to point before him—so may the Hebraic style be sown and grown in a foreign soil if the soil be Anglo-Saxon, and if the seed-time last for a thousand years. The result of all this is, that the English, notwithstanding their deficiency of artistic instinct and coarseness of taste, have the Great Style, not only in poetry, sometimes, but in prose sometimes when they write emotively, as we see in the English Prayer-book, in parts of Raleigh’s ‘History of the World,’ in Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, in Hall’s ‘Contemplations,’ and other such books of the seventeenth century.
The Great Style is far more easily recognized than defined. To define any kind of style, indeed, we must turn to real life. When we say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or conscious grace which we call manner. The difference is fundamental. It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or grace—manner is conscious power or grace. But the Great Style, both in literature and in life, is unconscious power and unconscious grace in one.
And, whither must we turn in quest of this, as the natural expression of a national temper? Not to the Celt, we think, as Mr. Arnold does. Not, indeed, to those whose languages, complex of syntax and alive with self-conscious inflections, bespeak the scientific knowingness of the Aryan mind—not, certainly, to those who, though producing Æschylus, turned into Aphrodite the great Astarte of the Syrians, but to the descendants of Shem,—the only gentleman among all the sons of Noah; to those who, yearning always to look straight into the face of God and live, can see not much else. The Great Style, in a word, is Semitic. It would be a mistake to call it Asiatic. For though two of its elements, unconsciousness and power, are, no doubt, plentiful enough in India, the element of grace is lacking, for the most part. The Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemotive as compared with Semitic hymns, and, on the other hand, such a high reach of ethical writing as even that noble and well-known passage from Manu, beginning, ‘Single is each man born into the world, single he dies,’ etc., is quite logical and self-conscious when compared with the ethical parts of Scripture. The Persians have the grace always, the power often, but the unconsciousness almost never. We might perhaps say that there were those in Egypt once who came near to the great ideal. That description of the abode of ‘Nin-ki-gal,’ the Queen of Death, recently deciphered from a tablet in the British Museum, is nearly in the Great Style, yet not quite. Conscious power and conscious grace are Hellenic, of course. That there is a deal of unconsciousness in Homer is true; but, put his elaborate comparisons by the side of the fiery metaphors of the sacred writers, and how artificial he seems. And note that, afterwards, when he who approached nearest to the Great Style wrote Prometheus and the Furies, Orientalism was overflowing Greece, like the waters of the Nile. It is to the Latin races—some of them—that has filtered Hellenic manner; and whensoever, as in Dante, the Great Style has been occasionally caught, it comes not from the Hellenic fountain, but straight from the Hebrew.
What the Latin races lack, the Teutonic races have—unconsciousness; often unconscious power; mostly, however, unconscious brutalité. Sublime as is the Northern mythology, it is vulgar too. The Hopkins element,—the dull and stupid homeliness,—the coarse grotesque, mingle with and mar its finest effects. Over it all the atmosphere is that of pantomime—singing dragons, one-eyed gods, and Wagner’s libretti. Even that great final conflict between gods and men and the swarming brood of evil on the plain of Wigrid, foretold by the Völu-seeress, when from Yötunland they come and storm the very gates of Asgard;—even this fine combat ends in the grotesque and vulgar picture of the Fenrir-wolf gulping Odin down like an oyster, and digesting the universe to chaos. But, out of the twenty-three thousand and more verses into which the Bible has been divided, no one can find a vulgar verse; for the Great Style allows the stylist to touch upon any subject with no risk of defilement. This is why style in literature is virtue. Like royalty, the Great Style ‘can do no wrong.’
Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the Anglo-Saxons have by far the largest endowment. They wanted another element, in short, not the Hellenic element; for there never was a greater mistake than that of supposing that Hellenism can be engrafted on Teutonism and live; as Landor and Mr. Matthew Arnold—two of the finest and most delicate minds of modern times—can testify.
But, long before the memorable Hampton Court Conference; long before the Bishops’ Bible or Coverdale’s Bible; long before even Aldhelm’s time—Hebraism had been flowing over and enriching the Anglo-Saxon mind. From the time when Cædmon, the forlorn cow-herd, fell asleep beneath the stars by the stable-door, and was bidden to sing the Biblical story, Anglo-Saxon literature grew more and more Hebraic. Yet, in a certain sense, the Hebraism in which the English mind was steeped had been Hebraism at second hand—that of the Vulgate mainly—till Tyndale’s time, or rather till the present Authorized Version of the Bible appeared in 1611. ‘There is no book,’ says Selden, ‘so translated as the Bible for the purpose. If I translate a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into French-English. “Il fait froid,” I say, ’tis cold, not it makes cold; but the Bible is rather translated into English words than into English phrase, The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that language is kept.’
And in great measure this is true, no doubt; yet literal accuracy—importation of Hebraisms—was not of itself enough to produce a translation in the Great Style—a translation such as this, which, as Coleridge says, makes us think that ‘the translators themselves were inspired.’ To reproduce the Great Style of the original in a Western idiom, the happiest combination of circumstances was necessary. The temper of the people receiving must, notwithstanding all differences of habitation and civilization, be elementally in harmony with that of the people giving; that is, it must be poetic rather than ratiocinative. Society must not be too complex—its tone must not be too knowing and self-glorifying. The accepted psychology of the time must not be the psychology of the scalpel—the metaphysics must not be the metaphysics of newspaper cynicism; above all, enthusiasm and vulgarity must not be considered synonymous terms. Briefly, the tone of the time must be free of the faintest suspicion of nineteenth century flavour. That this is the kind of national temper necessary to such a work might have been demonstrated by an argument a priori. It was the temper of the English nation when the Bible was translated. That noble heroism—born of faith in God and belief in the high duties of man—which we have lost for the hour—was in the very atmosphere that hung over the island. And style in real life, which now, as a consequence of our loss, does not exist at all among Englishmen, and only among a very few Englishwomen—having given place in all classes to manner—flourished then in all its charm. And in literature it was the same: not even the euphuism imported from Spain could really destroy or even seriously damage the then national sense of style.
Then, as to the form of literature adopted in the translation, what must that be? Evidently it must be some kind of form which can do all the high work that is generally left to metrical language, and yet must be free from any soupçon of that ‘artifice,’ in the ‘abandonment’ of which, says an Arabian historian, ‘true art alone lies.’ For, this is most noteworthy, that of literature as an art, the Semites show but small conception, even in Job. It was too sacred for that—drama and epic in the Aryan sense were alike unknown.
But if the translation must not be metrical in the common acceptation of that word, neither must it be prose; we will not say logical prose; for all prose, however high may be its flights, however poetic and emotive, must always be logical underneath, must always be chained by a logical chain, and earth-bound like a captive balloon; just as poetry, on the other hand, however didactic and even ratiocinative it may become, must always be steeped in emotion. It must be neither verse nor prose, it seems. It must be a new movement altogether. The musical movement of the English Bible is a new movement; let us call it ‘Bible Rhythm.’ And the movement was devised thus: Difficulty is the worker of modern miracles. Thanks to Difficulty—thanks to the conflict between what Selden calls ‘Hebrew phrase and English phrase,’ the translators fashioned, or rather, Difficulty fashioned for them, a movement which was neither one nor wholly the other—a movement which, for music, for variety, splendour, sublimity, and pathos, is above all the effects of English poetic art, above all the rhythms and all the rhymes of the modern world—a movement, indeed, which is a form of art of itself—but a form in which ‘artifice’ is really ‘abandoned’ at last. This rhythm it is to which we referred as running through the English Prayer-book, and which governs every verse of the Bible, its highest reaches perhaps being in the Psalms—this rhythm it is which the Hopkinses and Rouses have—improved! It would not be well to be too technical here, yet the matter is of the greatest literary importance just now, and it is necessary to explain clearly what we mean.
Among the many delights which we get from the mere form of what is technically called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is expectation and the fulfilment of expectation. In rhymed verse this is obvious: having familiarized ourselves with the arrangement of the poet’s rhymes, we take pleasure in expecting a recurrence of these rhymes according to this arrangement. In blank verse the law of expectation is less apparent. Yet it is none the less operative. Having familiarized ourselves with the poet’s rhythm, having found that iambic foot succeeds iambic foot, and that whenever the iambic waves have begun to grow monotonous, variations occur—trochaic, anapæstic, dactylic—according to the law which governs the ear of this individual poet;—we, half consciously, expect at certain intervals these variations, and are delighted when our expectations are fulfilled. And our delight is augmented if also our expectations with regard to cæsuric effects are realized in the same proportions. Having, for instance, learned, half unconsciously, that the poet has an ear for a particular kind of pause; that he delights, let us say, to throw his pause after the third foot of the sequence,—we expect that, whatever may be the arrangement of the early pauses with regard to the initial foot of any sequence,—there must be, not far ahead, that climacteric third-foot pause up to which all the other pauses have been tending, and upon which the ear and the soul of the reader shall be allowed to rest to take breath for future flights. And when this expectation of cæsuric effects is thus gratified, or gratified in a more subtle way, by an arrangement of earlier semi-pauses, which obviates the necessity of the too frequent recurrence of this final third-foot pause, the full pleasure of poetic effects is the result. In other words, a large proportion of the pleasure we derive from poetry is in the recognition of law. The more obvious and formulated is the law,—nay, the more arbitrary and Draconian,—the more pleasure it gives to the uncultivated ear. This is why uneducated people may delight in rhyme, and yet have no ear at all for blank verse; this is why the savage, who has not even an ear for rhyme, takes pleasure in such unmistakable rhythm as that of his tom-tom. But, as the ear becomes more cultivated, it demands that these indications of law should be more and more subtle, till at last recognized law itself may become a tyranny and a burden. He who will read Shakespeare’s plays chronologically, as far as that is practicable, from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ to the ‘Tempest,’ will have no difficulty in seeing precisely what we mean. In literature, as in social life, the progress is from lawless freedom, through tyranny, to freedom that is lawful. Now the great features of Bible Rhythm are a recognized music apart from a recognized law—‘artifice’ so completely abandoned that we forget we are in the realm of art—pauses so divinely set that they seem to be ‘wood-notes wild,’ though all the while they are, and must be, governed by a mysterious law too subtly sweet to be formulated; and all kind of beauties infinitely beyond the triumphs of the metricist, but beauties that are unexpected. There is a metre, to be sure, but it is that of the ‘moving music which is life’; it is the living metre of the surging sea within the soul of him who speaks; it is the free effluence of the emotions and the passions which are passing into the words. And if this is so in other parts of the Bible, what is it in the Psalms, where ‘the flaming steeds of song,’ though really kept strongly in hand, seem to run reinless as ‘the wild horses of the wind’?”
Chapter XVI
A HUMOURIST UPON HUMOUR
The reaching of a decision as to what article to select as typical of what I may call ‘The Renascence of Wonder’ essays gave me so much trouble that when I came to the still more difficult task of selecting an essay typical of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s criticism dealing with what he calls ‘the laws of cause and effect in literary art’ it naturally occurred to me to write to him asking for a suggestive hint or two. In response to my letter I got a thoroughly characteristic reply, in which his affection for a friend took entire precedence of his own work:—
“My dear Mr. Douglas,—The selections from my critiques must really be left entirely to yourself. They are to illustrate your own critical judgment upon my work, and not mine. Overwhelmed as I am with avocations which I daresay you little dream of, for me to plunge into the countless columns of the ‘Athenæum,’ in quest of articles of mine which I have quite forgotten, would be an intolerable burden at the present moment. I can think of only one article which I should specially like reproduced, either in its entirety or in part—not on account of any merit in it which I can recall, but because it was the means of bringing me into contact with one of the most delightful men and one of the most splendidly equipped writers of our time, whose sudden death shocked and grieved me beyond measure. A few days after the article appeared, the then editor of the ‘Athenæum,’ Mr. MacColl, the dear friend with whom I was associated for more than twenty years, showed me a letter that he had received from Traill. It was an extremely kind letter. Among the many generous things that Traill said was this—that it was just the kind of review article which makes the author regret that he had not seen it before his book appeared. I wrote to Traill in acknowledgment of his kind words; but it was not until a good while after this that we met at the Incorporated Authors’ Society dinner. At the table where I was sitting, and immediately opposite me, sat a gentleman whose countenance, especially when it was illuminated by conversation with his friends, perfectly charmed me. Although there was not the smallest regularity in his features, the expression was so genial and so winsome that I had some difficulty in persuading myself that it was not a beautiful face after all, and his smile was really quite irresistible. The contrast between his black eyebrows and whiskers and the white hair upon his head gave him a peculiarly picturesque appearance. Another thing I noticed was a boyish kind of lisp, which somehow, I could not say why, gave to the man an added charm. I did not know it was Traill, but after the dinner was over, when I was saying to myself, ‘That is a man I should like to know,’ a friend who sat next him—I forget who it was—brought him round to me and introduced him as ‘Mr. Traill.’ ‘You and I ought to know each other,’ he said, ‘for, besides having many tastes in common, we live near each other.’ And then I found that he lived near the ‘Northumberland Arms,’ between Putney and Barnes. I think that he must have seen how greatly I was drawn to him, for he called at The Pines in a few days—I think, indeed, it was the very next day—and then began a friendship the memory of which gives me intense pleasure, and yet pleasure not unmixed with pain, when I recall his comparatively early and sudden death. I used to go to his gatherings, and it was there that I first met several interesting men that I had not known before. One of them, I remember, was Mr. Sidney Low, then the editor of the ‘St. James’s Gazette.’ And I also used to meet there interesting men whom I had known before, such as the late Sir Edwin Arnold, whose ‘Light of Asia,’ and other such works, I had reviewed in the ‘Athenæum.’ I do not hesitate for a moment to say that Traill was a man of genius. Had he lived fifty years earlier, such a writer as he who wrote ‘The New Lucian,’ ‘Recaptured Rhymes,’ ‘Saturday Songs,’ ‘The Canaanitish Press’ and ‘Israelitish Questions,’ ‘the Life of Sterne,’ and the brilliant articles in the ‘Saturday Review’ and the ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ would have made an unforgettable mark in literature. But there is no room for anybody now—no room for anybody but the very, very few. When he was about starting ‘Literature,’ he wrote to me, and a gratifying letter it was. He said that, although he had no desire to wean me from the ‘Athenæum,’ he should be delighted to receive anything from me when I chanced to be able to spare him something. It was always an aspiration of mine to send something to a paper edited by so important a literary figure—a paper, let me say, that had a finer, sweeter tone than any other paper of my time—I mean, that tone of fine geniality upon which I have often commented, that tone without which, ‘there can be no true criticism.’ A certain statesman of our own period, who had pursued literature with success, used to say (alluding to a paper of a very different kind, now dead), that the besetting sin of the literary class is that lack of gentlemanlike feeling one towards another which is to be seen in all the other educated classes. This might have been so then, but, through the influence mainly of ‘Literature’ and H. D. Traill, it is not so now. Many people have speculated as to why a literary journal, edited by such a man, and borne into the literary arena on the doughty back of the ‘Times,’ did not succeed. I have a theory of my own upon that subject. Although Traill’s hands were so full of all kinds of journalistic and magazine work in other quarters, it is a mistake to suppose that his own journal was badly edited. It was well edited, and it had a splendid staff, but several things were against it. It confined itself to literature, and did not, as far as I remember, give its attention to much else. Its price was sixpence; but its chief cause of failure was what I may call its ‘personal appearance.’ If personal appearance is an enormously powerful factor at the beginning of the great human struggle for life, it is at the first quite as important a factor in the life struggle of a newspaper or a magazine. When the ‘Saturday Review’ was started, its personal appearance—something quite new then—did almost as much for it as the brilliant writing. It was the same with the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ when it started. Carlyle was quite right in thinking that there is a great deal in clothes. Now, as I told Traill when we were talking about this, ‘Literature’ in appearance seemed an uninviting cross between the ‘Law Times’ and ‘The Lancet’—it seemed difficult to connect the unbusiness-like genius of literature with such a business-like looking sheet as that. Traill laughed, but ended by saying that he believed there was a great deal in that notion of mine. Some one was telling me the other day that Traill, who died only about four years ago, was beginning to be forgotten. I should be sorry indeed to think that. All that I can say is that for a book such as yours to be written about me, and no book to be written about Traill, presents itself to my mind as being as grotesque an idea as any that Traill’s own delightful whimsical imagination could have pictured.”
Of course I comply with Mr. Watts-Dunton’s wishes, and I do this with the more alacrity because there is this connection between the essay on Sterne and the imaginative work—the theory of absolute humour exemplified in Mrs. Gudgeon is very brilliantly expounded in the article. It was a review of Traill’s ‘Sterne,’ in the ‘English Men of Letters,’ and it appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of November 18, 1882. I will quote the greater part of it:—
“Contemporary humour, for the most part, even among cultivated writers, is in temper either cockney or Yankee, and both Sterne and Cervantes are necessarily more talked about than studied, while Addison as a humorist is not even talked about. In gauging the quality of poetry—in finding for any poet his proper place in the poetic heavens—there is always uncertainty and difficulty. With humour, however, this difficulty does not exist, if we bear steadily in mind that all humour is based upon a simple sense of incongruous relations, and that the quality of every man’s humour depends upon the kind of incongruity which he recognizes and finds laughable. If, for instance, he shows himself to have no sense of any incongruities deeper than those disclosed by the parodist and the punster, his relation to the real humourist and the real wit is that of a monkey to a man; for although the real humourist may descend to parody, and the real wit may descend to punning, as Aristophanes did, the pun and the parody are charged with some deeper and richer intent. Again, if a man’s sense of humour, like that of the painter of society, is confined to a sense of the incongruous relations existing between individual eccentricity and the social conventions by which it is surrounded, he may be a humourist no doubt—according, at least, to the general acceptation of that word, though a caricaturist according to a definition of humour and caricature which we once ventured upon in these columns; but his humour is jejune, and delightful to the Philistine only. If, like that of Cervantes and (in a lower degree) Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens, a writer’s sense of the incongruous is deeper than this, but is confined nevertheless to what Mr. Traill calls ‘the irony of human intercourse,’ he is indeed a humourist, and in the case of Cervantes a very great humourist, yet not necessarily of the greatest; for just as the greatest poet must have a sense of the highest and deepest harmonies possible for the soul of man to apprehend, so the greatest humourist must have a sense of the highest and deepest incongruities possible. And it will be found that these harmonies and these incongruities lie between the very ‘order of the universe’ itself and the mind of man. In certain temperaments the eternal incongruities between man’s mind and the scheme of the universe produce, no doubt, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Novalis; but to other temperaments—to a Rabelais or Sterne, for instance—the apprehension of them turns the cosmos into disorder, turns it into something like that boisterous joke which to most temperaments is only possible under the excitement of some ‘paradis artificiel.’ Great as may be the humourist whose sense of irony is that of ‘human intercourse,’ if he has no sense of this much deeper irony—the irony of man’s intercourse with the universal harmony itself—he cannot be ranked with the very greatest. Of this irony in the order of things Aristophanes and Rabelais had an instinctive, while Richter had an intellectual enjoyment. Of Swift and Carlyle it might be said that they had not so much an enjoyment as a terrible apprehension of it. And if we should find that this quality exists in ‘Tristram Shandy,’ how high, then, must we not place Sterne! And if we should find that Cervantes deals with the ‘irony of human intercourse’ merely, and that his humour is, with all its profundity, terrene, what right have critics to set Cervantes above Sterne? Why is the sense of incongruity upon which the humour of Cervantes is based so melancholy? Because it only sees the farce from the human point of view. The sad smile of Cervantes is the tearful humour of a soul deeply conscious of man’s ludicrous futility in his relations to his fellow-man. But while the futilities of ‘Don Quixote’ are tragic because terrene, the futilities of ‘Tristram Shandy’ are comic because they are derived from the order of things. It is the great humourist Circumstance who causes Mrs. Shandy to think of the clock at the most inopportune moment, and who, stooping down from above the constellations, interferes to flatten Tristram’s nose. And if Circumstance proves to be so fond of fun, he must be found in the end a benevolent king; and hence all is well.
While, however, it is, as we say, easy in a general way to gauge a humourist and find his proper place, it is not easy to bring Sterne under a classification. In Sterne’s writings every kind of humour is to be found, from a style of farce which even at Crazy Castle must have been pronounced too wild, up to humour as chaste and urbane as Addison’s, and as profound and dramatic as Shakespeare’s. In loving sympathy with stupidity, for instance, even Shakespeare is outdone by Sterne in his ‘fat, foolish scullion.’ Lower than the Dogberry type there is a type of humanity made up of animal functions merely, to whom the mere fact of being alive is the one great triumph. While the news of Bobby’s death, announced by Obadiah in the kitchen, suggests to Susannah the various acquisitions to herself that must follow such a sad calamity to the ‘fat, foolish scullion,’ scrubbing her pans on the floor, it merely recalls the great triumphant fact of her own life, and consequently to the wail that ‘Bobby is certainly dead’ her soul merely answers as she scrubs, ‘So am not I.’ In four words that scullion lives for ever.
Sterne’s humour, in short, is Shakespearean and Rabelaisian, Cervantic and Addisonian too; how, then, shall we find a place for such a Proteus? So great is the plasticity of genius, so readily at first does it answer to impressions from without, that in criticizing its work it is always necessary carefully to pierce through the method and seek the essential life by force of which methods can work. Sterne having, as a student of humourous literature, enjoyed the mirthful abandon of Rabelais no less than the pensive irony of Cervantes, it was inevitable that his methods should oscillate between that of Rabelais on the one hand, and that of Cervantes on the other, and that at first this would be so without Sterne’s natural endowment of humour being necessarily either Rabelaisian or Cervantic, that is to say, either lyric or dramatic, either the humour of animal mirth or the humour of philosophic meditation. But the more deeply we pierce underneath his methods, the more certainly shall we find that he was by nature the very Proteus of humour which he pretended to be. And after all this is the important question as regards Sterne. Lamb’s critical acuteness is nowhere more clearly seen than in that sentence where he speaks of his own ‘self-pleasing quaintness.’ When any form of art departs in any way from symmetrical and normal lines, the first question to ask concerning it is this: Is it self-pleasing or is it artificial and histrionic? That which pleases the producer may perhaps not please us; but if we feel that it does not really and truly please the artist himself, the artist becomes a mountebank, and we turn away in disgust. In the humourous portions of Sterne’s work there is, probably, not a page, however nonsensical, which he did not write with gusto, and therefore, bad as some of it may be, it is not to the true critic an offence. . . .
‘Yorickism’ is, there is scarcely need to say, the very opposite of the humour of Swift. One recognizes that the universe is rich in things to laugh at and to love; the other recognizes that the universe is rich in things to laugh at and to hate. One recognizes that among these absurd things there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so lovable as a man; the other recognizes that there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so hateful as a man. The intellectual process is the same; the difference lies in the temperament—the temperament of Jaques and the temperament of Apemantus. And in regard to misanthropic ridicule it is difficult to say which fate is more terrible, Swift’s or Carlyle’s—that of the man whose heart must needs yearn towards a race which his piercing intellect bids him hate, or that of the man, religious, conscientious, and good, who would fain love his fellows and cannot. It is idle for men of this kind to try to work in the vein of Yorick. It needs the sweet temper of him who at the Mermaid kept the table in a roar, or of him who, in the words of the ‘cadet of the house of Keppoch,’ was ‘sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes Yorick, a very great favourite of the gentlemen.’ Sterne, like Jaques and Hamlet, deals with ‘the irony of human intercourse,’ but what he specially recognizes is a deeper irony still—the irony of man’s intercourse with himself and with nature, the irony of the intercourse between man the spiritual being and man the physical being—the irony, in short, of man’s position amid these natural conditions of life and death. It is in the apprehension of this anomaly—a spiritual nature enclosed in a physical nature—that Sterne’s strength lies.
Man, the ‘fool of nature,’ prouder than Lucifer himself, yet ‘bounded in a nutshell,’ brother to the panniered donkey, and held of no more account by the winds and rains of heaven than the poor little ‘beastie’ whose house is ruined by the ploughshare—here is, indeed, a creature for Swift and Carlyle and Sterne and Burns to marvel at and to laugh at, but with what different kinds of laughter! There is nothing incongruous in the condition of the lower animals, because they are in entire harmony with their natural surroundings; there is nothing more absurd in the existence and the natural functions of a horse or a cow than in the existence and the natural functions of the grass upon which they feed; but imagine a spiritual being so placed, so surrounded, and so functioned, and you get an absurdity compared with which all other absurdities are non-existent, or, at least, are fit quarry for the satirist, but hardly for the humourist. That Sterne’s donkey should owe his existence to the exercise of certain natural functions on the part of his unconscious progenitors, that he should continue to hold his place by the exercise on his own part of certain other natural functions, is in no way absurd, and contains in it no material for humoristic treatment. To render him absurd you must bring him into relation with man; you must clap upon his back panniers of human devising or give him macaroons kneaded by a human cook. Then to the general observer he becomes absurd, for he is tried by human standards. But to Yorick it is not so much the donkey who is absurd as the fantastic creature who made the panniers and cooked the macaroons. All other humour is thin compared with this. Besides, it never grows old. It is difficult, no doubt, to think that the humour of Cervantes will ever lose its freshness; but the kind of humour we have called Yorickism will be immortal, for no advance in human knowledge can dim its lustre. Certainly up to the present moment the anomaly of man’s position upon the planet is not lessened by the revelations of science as to his origin and development. On the contrary, it is increased, as we hinted in speaking of Thoreau. If man was a strange and anomalous ‘piece of work’ as Hamlet knew him under the old cosmogony, what a ‘piece of work’ does he appear now! He has the knack of advancing and leaving the woodchucks behind, but how has he done it? By the fact of his being the only creature out of harmony with surrounding conditions. A contented conservatism is the primary instinct of the entire animal kingdom, and if any species should change, it is not (as Lamarck once supposed) from any ‘inner yearning’ for progress, but because it was pushed on by overmastering circumstances. An ungulate becomes the giraffe, not because it is uncomfortable in its old condition and yearns for giraffe-hood, but because, being driven from grass to leaves by natural causes, it must elongate its neck or starve. But man really has this yearning for progress, and, because he is out of harmony with everything, he advances till at last he turns all the other creatures into food or else into weight-carriers, and outstrips them so completely that he forgets he is one of them. If Uncle Toby’s progenitors were once as low down in the scale of life as the fly that buzzed about his nose, the fly had certainly more right to buzz than had that over-developed, incongruous creature, Captain Shandy, to be disturbed at its buzzing, and the patronizing speech of the captain as he opens the window gains an added humour, for it is the fly that should patronize and take pity upon the man.
And while Sterne’s abiding sense of the struggle between man’s spiritual nature and the conditions of his physical nature accounts for the metaphysical depth of some of his humour, it greatly accounts for his indecencies too. Sterne had that instinct for idealizing women, and the entire relations between the sexes which accompanies the poetic temperament. To such natures the spiritual side of sexual relations is ever present; and as a consequence of this the animal side never loses with them the atmosphere of wonder with which it was enveloped in their boyish days. Not that we are going to justify Sterne’s indecencies. Coleridge’s remark that the pleasure Sterne got from his double entendre was akin to ‘that trembling daring with which a child touches a hot teapot because it has been forbidden,’ partly explains, but it does not excuse, Sterne’s transgressions herein. The fact seems to be that if we divide love into the passion of love, the sentiment of love, and the appetite of love, and inquire which of these was really known to Sterne, we shall come to what will seem to most readers the paradoxical conclusion that it was the sentiment only. There is abundant proof of this. In the ‘Letter to the Earl of —,’ printed by his daughter, after dilating upon the manner in which the writing of the ‘Sentimental Journey’ has worn out both his spirits and body, he says: ‘I might indeed solace myself with my wife (who is come to France), but, in fact, I have long been a sentimental being, whatever your lordship may think to the contrary. The world has imagined because I wrote “Tristram Shandy” that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was.’ Upon this passage Mr. Traill has the pertinent remark: ‘The connubial affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently, opposed to the sentimental emotions—as the lower to the higher. To indulge the former is to be “Shandian,” that is to say, coarse and carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend one’s days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste.’ Now, to men of this kind there is not uncommonly, perhaps, a charm in a licentious double entendre which is quite inscrutable to those of a more animal temperament. The incongruity between the ideal and the actual relations brings poignant distress at first, and afterwards a sense of irresistible absurdity. Originally the fascination of repulsion, it becomes the fascination of attraction, and it is not at all fanciful to say that in Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, Sterne (quite unconsciously to himself perhaps) realized to his own mind those two opposite sides of man’s nature whose conflict in some form or another was ever present to Sterne’s mind. And, as we say, it has a deep relation to the kind of humour with which Sterne was so richly endowed. After one of his most sentimental flights, wherein the spiritual side of man is absurdly exaggerated, there comes upon him a sudden revulsion (which at first was entirely natural, if even self-conscious afterwards). The incongruity of all this sentiment with man’s actual condition as an animal strikes him with irresistible force, and he says to man, ‘What right have you in that galley after all—you who came into the world in this extremely unspiritual fashion and keep in it by the agency of functions which are if possible more unspiritual and more absurd still?’
No doubt the universal sense of shame in connection with sexual matters, which Hartley has discussed in his subtle but rather far-fetched fashion, arises from an acute apprehension of this great and eternal incongruity of man’s existence—the conflict of a spiritual nature and such aspirations as man’s with conditions entirely physical. And perhaps the only truly philosophical definition of the word ‘indecency’ would be this: ‘A painful and shocking contrast of man’s spiritual with his physical nature.’ When Hamlet, with his finger on Yorick’s skull, declares that his ‘gorge rises at it,’ and asks if Alexander’s skull ‘smelt so,’ he shocks us as deeply in a serious way as Sterne in his allusion to the winding up of the clock shocks us in a humourous way, and to express the sensation they each give there is, perhaps, no word but ‘indecent.’”
I have now cited the opinions of Mr. Watts-Dunton upon the metaphysical meaning of humour. In order to show what are his opinions upon wit, I think I shall do well to turn from the ‘Athenæum’ articles, and to quote from the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ a few sentences upon wit, and upon the distinction between comedy and farce. For the obvious reason that the ‘Athenæum’ articles are buried in oblivion, and the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ articles are certainly not so deeply buried, it is from the former that I have been mainly quoting; but some of the most important parts of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work are to be found in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’ Perhaps, however, I had better introduce my citations by saying a few words about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s connection with that work.
The story of the way in which he came to write in the ‘Encyclopædia’ has been often told by Prof. Minto. At the time when the ninth edition was started, he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were living in adjoining chambers and were seeing each other constantly. When Minto was writing his articles upon Byron and Dickens, he told Mr. Watts-Dunton that Baynes would be delighted to get work from him. But at that time Mr. Watts-Dunton had got more critical work in hand than he wanted, and besides he had already a novel and a body of poetry ready for the press, and wished to confine his energies to creative work. Besides this, he felt, as he declared, that he could not do the work fitted for the compact, businesslike pedestrian style of an encyclopædia. But when the most important treatise in the literary department of the work—the treatise on Poetry—was wanted, a peculiar difficulty in selecting the writer was felt. The article in the previous edition had been written by David Macbeth Moir, famous under the name of ‘Delta’ as the author of ‘The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch.’ Moir’s article was intelligent enough, but quite inadequate to such a work as the publishers of the ‘Encyclopædia’ aspired to make. A history of Poetry was, of course, quite impossible; it followed that the treatise must be an essay on the principles of poetic art in relation to all other arts, as exemplified by the poetry of the great literatures. It was decided, according to Minto’s account, that there were but three men, that is to say, Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and Theodore Watts, who could produce this special kind of work, the other critics being entirely given up to the historic method of criticism. The choice fell upon Watts, and Baynes went to London for the purpose of inviting him to do the work, and explaining exactly what was wanted.
I think all will agree with me that there never was a happier choice. Mr. Arthur Symons, in an article on ‘The Coming of Love’ in the ‘Saturday Review’ has written very luminously upon this subject. He tells us that, wide as is the sweep of the treatise, it is but a brilliant fragment, owing to the treatise having vastly overflowed the space that could be given to it. The truth is that the essay is but the introduction to an exhaustive discussion of what the writer believes to be the most important event in the history of all poetry—the event discussed under the name of ‘The Renascence of Wonder.’ The introduction to the third volume of the new edition of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature’ is but a bare outline of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings upon this subject. It has been said over and over again that since the best critical work of Coleridge there has been nothing in our literature to equal this treatise on Poetry. It has been exhaustively discussed in England, America, and on the Continent, especially in Germany, where it has been compared to the critical system of Goethe. Those who have not read it will be surprised to hear that it is not confined to the formulating of generalizations on poetic art; it is full of eloquent passages on human life and human conduct.
It was in an article upon a Restoration comic dramatist, Vanbrugh, that Mr. Watts-Dunton first formulated his famous distinction between comedy and farce:—