Green grass, and such a sky?
How can they die at spring?
The writer of these lines was a poet worth rediscovering, and Messrs. Blunden and Porter have given us a book in which we can wander at will, peering into hedges and at the traffic of the grass, as in few even of the great poets. Mr. Blunden has also written an admirable, though needlessly pugnacious account of the life of The Green Man, as Clare was called in Lamb’s circle because of his clothes. It is a story of struggle, poverty, drink, a moment’s fame without money to correspond, a long family, and the madness of a man who, escaping from the asylum, ate “the grass on the roadside which seemed to taste something like bread.” Knowing the events of his life, we read Clare’s poetry with all the more intense curiosity. And, if we do not expect to find a Blake or a Wordsworth, we shall not be disappointed. Certainly this is a book that must go on the shelf near the works of Mr. Hudson.
XII
HISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS
Herodotus is one of the oldest illustrations of the fact that a test of good literature is its capacity to entertain us. There are two sorts of writing—the entertaining and the dull—and the dull is outside literature. This is a fact which, though it is perfectly obvious, tends to be forgotten by many writers, even by many able writers, in every century. Authors fall in love with their own ponderosity, forgetting that a huge tome is too often a huge tomb. That is the explanation of the long lives and the still longer histories that the publishers and the authors of the nineteenth century loved. Biographies became life-size, and histories rivalled in length the wars they chronicled. A Victorian biographer appeared to think that he was performing more ambitious work in writing a life of Milton in six volumes than if he were to write it in one. Similarly, a historian instead of giving us a Cromwell that the eye could take in as one absorbing figure, would devote one volume to this bit of him and another to that, and would leave us with a mass of information about his disjecta membra, which we might or might not piece together, just as we pleased. This was called scientific history. Its disciples forgot that history is an art and that, like all other arts, whatever its ultimate object, it should be subject to the law of entertainment. Nothing else will keep history alive, except as a schoolbook or a source-book. An inaccurate history that entertains will outlive an accurate history that wearies. Herodotus did not cease to be read, even when he was generally regarded as the father of lies. It is true that scholars no longer regard him as a liar, and that Mr. Godley, in the preface to his admirable translation in the Loeb Library, claims with Dr. Macan that “the most stringent application of historical and critical methods to the text of Herodotus leaves the work irrevocably and irreplaceably at the head of European prose literature, whether in its scientific or in its artistic character.” At the same time, even if we did not know about the scientific value of Herodotus, his artistic value would be indisputable. He was as indefatigably interested in the world as Mr. Pepys was in himself, and he can infect us with the thrill of his delightful curiosity.
Curiosity, on the other hand, implies interest in some sort of truth, and the pursuit of some sort of truth seems to be an essential in a book that is to entertain us permanently. The artist is moralist as well as entertainer, and the truth that lies in him shapes his work, whether he is Æschylus or Plato, Herodotus or Sallust. Sallust’s Jugurtha, Professor Rolfe warns us in a preface to the Loeb translation, “is rather like a historical novel of the better class than like sober history” and the Cataline, we are told, “is inaccurate in many of its details ... with inevitable distortion of the facts.” Even so, both works are entertaining statements of a great moral idea—the idea of the corruption of human nature by success. Sallust, it may be argued, had the propagandist purpose of attacking the corruption of the nobles rather than the moral purpose of exhibiting the corruption of human nature, but he writes his history with an amazing dramatic sense of the catastrophe that occurs even in great souls. It occurred in the soul of Jugurtha, and in the soul of Rome. “When Carthage, the rival of Rome’s sway, had perished root and branch, and all seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs. Those who had found it easy to bear hardship and dangers, anxiety and adversity, found leisure and wealth, desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a curse. Hence the lust for power, then for money, grew upon them; these were, I may say, the root of all evils.” What is all literature but the fable of such things? It may be an inspiring fable or a derisive fable, a tragic fable or a comic fable, but in any event it cannot be good literature unless it is an entertaining fable.
Herodotus, certainly, never forgets for long that history is a fable. That wonderful anecdote of Gyges and the infatuated King who compelled him to hide behind the door and to look on the Queen when she was naked, with the result that the Queen on discovering him, ordered him to kill the King and marry her or die himself, is not a mere unrelated scene as from a ballet, but has its tragic signature five generations later, when the power of Crœsus, the descendant of Gyges, is destroyed and he is a prisoner in the camp of Cyrus. Crœsus, being unable to understand how the disaster had happened, obtained permission from Cyrus to send messengers to Delphi to enquire of the Oracle why it had deceived him. And the priestess replied: “None may escape his destined lot, not even a god. Crœsus hath paid for the sin of his ancestor of the fifth generation: who, being of the guard of the Heraclidæ, was led by the guile of a woman to slay his master, and took to himself the royal state of that master, whereto he had no right.” We find in pagan literature a sense of the divine government of the world that is missing from the greater part of modern Christian literature. The pagan historians, I think, have a profounder sense of sin and of the sufferings that result from sin than most of the Christian historians. Nowadays, we hesitate before allowing even Richard III or Judge Jeffreys to have been a sinner. And, as we have found no substitute for those ancient colours of vice and virtue, much of our history is colourless and uninteresting. The sense of sin is of infinite value to an artist, if only because it enables him to see how striking are the contrasts that exist in every human being. He sees the great man as a miserable sinner, and he sees him all the more truthfully for this. He sees the beautiful woman as a miserable sinner, and he sees her all the more truthfully for this. Aristotle, indeed, thought that it was impossible to write great tragic literature except about a noble character who was seen to be a sinner. It was probably never done till the appearance of the Gospels, and I am not sure whether it has been done since. Shakespeare had as compassionate a sense of the flaw in human nature even at its greatest as the Greek dramatists and the supreme Greek biographer.
There is, no doubt, a school of writers who have so keen a sense of the flaws that they can see scarcely anything else. This is inimical to art. Suetonius provides us with a feast of flaws, from which we rise with the feeling that we have been dining on spiced and putrid dishes. His was not a disinterested observation of human character. He was a specialist in the vices. It is appalling to think what he would have made of Sempronia, one of the many Roman ladies whom Catiline enticed into his conspiracy. Sallust’s portrait of her is a masterpiece:
Now among these women was Sempronia, who had often committed many crimes of masculine daring. In birth and beauty, in her husband and children, she was abundantly favoured by fortune; well read in the literature of Greece and Rome, able to play the lyre and dance more skilfully than an honest woman need, and having many other accomplishments which minister to voluptuousness. But there was nothing which she held so cheap as modesty and chastity; you could not easily say whether she was less sparing of her money or her honour; her desires were so ardent that she sought men more often than she was sought by them. Even before the time of the conspiracy, she had often broken her word, repudiated her debts, been privy to murder; poverty and extravagance combined had driven her headlong. Nevertheless, she was a woman of no mean endowments; she could write verses, bandy jests, and use language which was modest, or tender, or wanton; in fine, she possessed a high degree of wit and charm.
A miserable sinner, undoubtedly. How odious and how interesting!