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POT-BOILERS

BY

CLIVE BELL

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
MCMXVIII

PRINTED AT THE COMPLETE PRESS
WEST NORWOOD
LONDON

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Dear Geoffrey Whitworth,—Considering for how many ages how many clever people have been complaining of their publishers, you might have supposed that no device for getting one of them into a scrape could have been left untried. Yet, so far as I can remember, no author has had the bright idea of denouncing his publisher, particularly, and by name, as accessory before the fact. I am willing to suspect my memory rather than my profession of being at fault in this matter; but that the practice is uncommon is most certain and that, surely, is very strange. No author thinks twice of saddling his friend, his wife, his mother, or even his mistress with the responsibility of having been the onlie begetter of some feckless cub or monstrous abortion; but on his publisher, the very man he should wish to injure, who ever thought of fastening the offence? Yet you cannot deny, my dear Whitworth, that this book is your fault. I was all for abandoning the project after I had read Mr. Arnold Bennett's volume and recognized how much more readable his journalism was than mine: your reader, I suspect, was of like mind: it was you, and you alone, who, by enlisting my vanity, conquered my pride.

Of course in the end my vanity might have triumphed without you: it is not often or easily beaten.

"Obliged by hunger and request of friends,"

I can imagine myself printing under that classic excuse, which has the merit of being in the grand literary tradition and as disingenuous as another; for in these days an author is not more hungry than every one else, and my friends would have been the first to pardon my silence. You may take it for certain, by the way, that when a man says he is publishing at the instance of two or three friends he means that he is offering the public what he knows that the public could have done perfectly well without. He means that he is printing neither to persuade nor to inform nor yet to express the truth that is in him, but simply to gratify an itch for such notoriety as the careless attention of a few thousand readers may be supposed to give. If I now contrive to escape the consequences of my own axiom it is thanks to you, My Publisher—or Publisher's representative must I say? (You are so very modest, my dear Whitworth, and so exact.) Naturally, by so obliging me you have made me your friend for life. But that was ex post facto.

I said just now that when I read Mr. Bennett's "Books and Persons," I was for abandoning a project about which, you will do me the justice of remembering, I was lukewarm from the first. I enjoyed immensely his lively papers and I felt pretty sure that no one would so enjoy mine. Your reader was good enough to point out some reasons, besides the obvious one, why this must be so; and in self-defence I am going to remind you of them. When Mr. Bennett wrote for the New Age he was a famous and full-grown author, very much at his ease, very much at his liberty, well aware that if he said what he pleased as he pleased his editor would be only too happy to print it. When I wrote most of the reviews reprinted in this volume I was commencing journalism, and I wrote them for the Athenæum.

The Athenæum, the editor of which I take this opportunity of thanking for permission to reprint my articles, is a paper, was, at any rate, a paper with ancient and peculiar customs; and of these customs perhaps the most peculiar was that, while allowing its contributors extraordinary liberty in some matters, it sustained what may perhaps be described as a literary policy. Like other venerable institutions, the Athenæum had a taste for unwritten law; its policy was adumbrated rather than defined, but few contributors, I believe, were unconscious of its existence. Not one of us, I am sure, would have expressed anything but what he thought and felt, but we all hoped that our thoughts and feelings would not be too dissimilar from those of our presiding genius, Athene the wise, our eponymous goddess; because, if they were, her high-priest, albeit one of the most charming and accomplished people in Fleet Street or thereabouts, stood ready with the inexorable blue pencil to smite once and smite no more. In the matter of expression, too, Her Omniscience was, to my mind, something over-exacting. Concision is an excellent quality in a writer. We all know what Ben Jonson said about Shakespeare and we all agree with him. Still, when, by the shape of one's paragraphs, the balance of one's sentences, and the internal rhythm of one's clauses, one fancies that an article has been raised almost to the perfection of a work of art, it is disappointing to find a line cut out here, two more there, half a dozen missing from the second galley, and from the third a whole paragraph gone for no better reason than that they are not essential to the argument—especially when one is persuaded that they are.

I have said that the editor of the Athenæum, in my time, was a charming and accomplished writer; he is also my very good friend and too generous critic, and I should be a wretch if I did not love him. But on the evening when a weekly paper goes to press, when the pages are pouring in, and some one, as likely as not, is waiting at the Café Royal, even the most cultivated and considerate of editors will be an editor. Wherefore I must now plague you and my readers with a word or two in explanation of my method of correction and revision. Re-reading these articles—some of which were written nine or ten years ago—I come on such phrases as "this is a notable achievement," "his equipment is not really strong," and I wonder, of course, what the devil I did say. No doubt it was something definite and particular, for in those days I was a most conscientious writer; but what subtle limitation, what delicately suggested reference, what finely qualifying phrase, what treasure of my critical nonage lies buried beneath this "getting out" formula I cannot now remember. I read the article again and again but I want the courage and energy to read again the book about which it was written. And, if I did, should I recapture precisely what I thought or felt and tried, by means of that lost clause or sentence, not to leave quite unexpressed? The idea is gone, and with it, no doubt, the complete significance of the article. I have botched and cobbled, but at best I have but patched a rent. I hope, however, that I have not spared many of those trusty veterans who, occasionally even in our best weekly and regularly in our morning and evening papers, are expected to do duty for sense.

Wherever the blue pencil or standardized phrase has left too deep a wound or gross a blemish I have had to rewrite. And, as I have rarely succeeded in recovering the original idea, I have had to borrow from my later thought. Of such patching I have been as thrifty as possible: also, I have not attempted to square the opinions and sentiments of early days with my later pronouncements, so, I make no doubt, some very clever readers will have the pleasure of catching me in inconsistency. If they are really clever they will catch me in worse things than that, in puerility for instance, and affectation, to say nothing of blasphemy and sedition. As for consistency, I seem consistently to have cared much for four things—Art, Truth, Liberty and Peace. I was never much in sympathy with my age.

With my youthful style I should not venture to tamper even were I conscious of any important change in my theory of composition or power of expression. And I am not. I write more fluently nowadays and therefore, probably, worse. It cannot be helped. It charms me to notice as I read these essays with what care and conscience they are done. Magna cum cura atque diligentia scripsit—they are not far from Latin Grammar days. Precisely on account of these qualities they have suffered much from editorial amendment, and on their account I have been conservative in a matter where another policy would, I dare say, have been more to the taste of some connoisseurs. The matter in question is that of the grand editorial "We." That, as you may suppose, was the person in which Pallas habitually addressed her attentive suppliants; that was the person in which these articles were written; and experiment has shown that to substitute "I," "my," and "mine" for "we," "our," and "ours," destroys invariably the texture of the prose. Whether this early prose of mine was good is not for me to decide; but that it was closely knit is indisputable, and a sensitive critic who cared to tease himself with trifles could discover, I fancy, from stylistic evidence, just which passages have been interpolated.

The articles borrowed from the Burlington Magazine, the Nation, the New Statesman, the International Journal of Ethics, and the Cambridge Magazine—to the editors of which I herewith tender customary thanks for customary favours—all having appeared over my signature were, of course, all written in the first person singular. Any one who did me the honour of reading my book, "Art," so attentively as now to notice that to its making went certain quarryings from these articles, will have enjoyed it enough, I hope, not to resent being occasionally reminded of it.

And here I might end a tedious letter: but first, if you will bear with me, I should like to say a word on a subject in which both you and I are interested. I have shown so much humility in contrasting these reviews with those of Mr. Bennett that I will permit myself one comment, by no means in disparagement of "Books and Persons," but in the hope that he, or indeed any one who concerns himself with literary criticism, may profit by it. In one respect I do fancy myself a better critic than Mr. Bennett; for though, doubtless, I lack most of those qualities that make his book a positive pleasure to read, I lack also his indiscrimination. Partly, this comes of my not being what he calls himself—"a creative artist," just as it results in my not using that term when I mean "an intelligent person"; but chiefly it is that I am, I believe, almost free from that "provincialism in time"—if I may coin a phrase—which is what is most amiss with Mr. Bennett's critical apparatus. It is a great pity Mr. Bennett should be provincial in any sense, for in the common he is not; on the contrary, he is one who has lived in France, even as Frenchmen live there, without being more than a little shocked. He has read a good many books, both old and new; he is one who cares for literature manifestly: then why does he call Mr. H. G. Wells a great imaginative artist? I will not swear to the epithets—I have not his book by me—but I am sure he is too candid to deny that if he has not used them he has used their equivalents. This much I know he has said—for I made a note when I read the essay—"astounding width of observation, a marvellously true perspective, an extraordinary grasp of the real significance of innumerable phenomena utterly diverse, profound emotional power, dazzling verbal skill." Now, my dear Whitworth, if I were to say that sort of thing about Marivaux you would raise your eyebrows—you know you would. Yet I suppose no competent judge of literature will pretend that the novels of Marivaux—to say nothing of the comedies—are inferior to those of Mr. Wells. Pray read again "Le Paysan Parvenu"—all except the eighth and last part, about which I can't help thinking there is some mystery—and then try "Mr. Britling." But if by Mr. Bennett's standards we are to give Marivaux his due, what is there left to say about Shakespeare?

Provincialism in time is as fatal to judgment as the more notorious sort, and a defective sense of proportion is at the root of both. Consider English novelists of the last hundred years. Who but a fool dare predict confidently for any living Englishman, save Hardy, so much immortality as belongs to Galt's "Annals of the Parish," or Mrs. Oliphant's "Beleagured City"? Now what figure, think you, would a critic cut who besprinkled these writers with such compliments as Mr. Bennett peppers his contemporaries withal? You need not answer. Mr. Bennett is a friend of the firm.

Had Mr. Bennett lost his head about contemporaries who were attempting to solve new artistic problems I could understand it. Young writers wax over-enthusiastic about Laforgue and Charles-Louis Philippe—both of whom, by the way, died some years ago—and are not much to blame on that account; neither should I have the least difficulty in forgiving myself were it to turn out—as it will not—that I had said too much in praise of Matisse or Picasso. The artist who even appears to have discovered or rediscovered an instrument of expression or to have extended by one semitone the gamut of æsthetic experience is bound to turn the best heads of his age. Were it possible to overrate Cézanne, not to do so would be a mark of insensibility. I was never much impressed by those superior persons of an earlier age who from the first saw through Wagner; there was a time when to dislike Wagner was, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a sign not of superiority but of stupidity. The artists, however, whom Mr. Bennett belauds so uncritically, are not of this sort. In my judgment, Mr. Wells, Mr. George Moore, and the late Sir John Galsworthy are not artists at all: be that as it may, past question they are artistically conventional and thoroughly in the tradition of British fiction. Of course they write of motor-cars and telephones where an older generation wrote of railway-trains and telegrams, and of the deuxièmes, troisièmes or quatre-vingt-dixièmes where their grandmothers wrote of les premiers amours; also, they can refer to the Almighty in the third person without bursting into capitals. But in this there is no more artistic novelty than there would be in a picture of an aeroplane painted in the manner of Ingres. Neither is there any discredit; very much the same might be said of our three best living novelists—Hardy, Conrad, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom are more or less traditional, as is Anatole France, perhaps the best novelist alive. A first-rate unconventional work of art is not a straw better than a conventional one, and to become slightly light-headed about either is not only permissible but seemly. Nevertheless, to go silly over a mediocre innovation is far more excusable than to be taken in by its equivalent in a familiar style. While to rave about Messrs. Wells, Moore and Galsworthy seems to me shocking. Surely there can be no difficulty about treating these writers as ordinary citizens of the Republic of Letters—a state, let us try to remember, that not only extends in space beyond the horizons of Tooting but in time beyond the Edwardian and even the Victorian era.

A critic, I submit, should judge a work of art, not in relation to the age and circumstances in which it was produced, but by an absolute standard based on the whole corpus of that art to which the particular work belongs. We do not want to hear how good "Tono-Bungay" seems by comparison with Mrs. Ward's last production. Marvellous, no doubt: so, no doubt, are Mrs. Ward's intellectual gifts by comparison with those of a walrus. But we want to have Mrs. Ward judged as a specimen of Humanity and "Tono-Bungay" as a specimen of Literature. It must be tried by the standards we try "Tristram Shandy" and "La Princesse de Clèves" by. How, then, does it stand? With "Liaisons Dangereuses"? Hardly. Well, is it of the class of "Evelina" or of "Adolphe," or of "Consuelo" even? Mr. Bennett can be as sharp as a special constable with Thackeray: is it as good as "Pendennis"? And, unless it be infinitely better, what sense is there in despising Thackeray and extolling Mr. Wells? Pray, Mr. Bennett, how good is this book? Let us see; I think I have a note on the subject: "his scientific romances" are "on the plane of epic poetry" and "in 'Tono-Bungay' he has achieved the same feat, magnified by ten—or a hundred"; "there are passages toward the close of the book which may fitly be compared with the lyrical freedoms of no matter what epic, and which display an unsurpassable dexterity of hand." And now what are we to say of "Manon Lescaut"? That it is a million times better than Milton and knocks spots off Homer? But all this though distressing is not conclusive; it proves provinciality but it proves nothing worse. Mr. Bennett may really have been thinking all the time of "Robert Elsmere" and "The Epic of Hades." About another of his favourites, however, he is more precise: "I re-read 'A Man of Property,'" he says, "immediately after re-reading Dostoievsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and immediately before re-reading Björnson's 'Arne.' It ranks well with these European masterpieces." I repeat that in one respect I am a better critic than Mr. Bennett.

This question of criticism fascinates me. It interests Mr. Bennett, too, and he has written several competent and surprisingly confident articles on the subject. I could almost wish to discuss one of them with him. I would help him to understand Coleridge and tell him about Dryden's essays and Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," and I would assure him, too, it was not I who wrote that unfortunate review of Conrad that gets such an exemplary drubbing at his hands for its self-complacent imbecility. He ought to know that, or he will think that I speak out of malice. He says that England has need of a literary critic. I agree. And I agree that this critic must not be of that professorial breed with which he deals so faithfully, not one who will date you every line in Shakespeare on internal evidence and then obligingly pronounce Sir Arthur Conan Doyle our greatest living writer. He will need the intelligence, the first-hand views, the open mind, the genuine taste for books, the respect for art and irreverence for persons of Mr. Bennett himself; and, as I have hinted, he will need one or two qualities for which Mr. Bennett is not so well off. He must be a resolute critic of literature and not an authority on current reputations; he must have enough natural taste to recognize a work of art in odd company, new clothes, or fancy dress; he must be the sort of person who would have seen at a glance that Kipling or Paul Bourget was not the real thing; he must be a scholar and a man of the intellectual world: and he must be as incapable of calling Mr. George Moore "a great artist" or speaking of "a first-rate beautiful thing" by that gentleman as Mr. Bennett is of eating peas with his knife.

The critic of our dreams—Mr. Bennett's and mine—has yet to be found. You will not imagine, surely, that I am putting myself forward as a candidate? Here you will find very few of the virtues and some, I suspect, of the critical vices to which I have alluded in this letter. But you need not fear, my dear Whitworth, that I am now going to tax your good nature by an elaborate defence of these essentially insignificant papers. They are an odd lot, and I think there are but two—the two last—that I am not a little ashamed of reprinting. Clearly, were I now to write on the same themes I should have something very different to say and should say it differently. Honestly, I believe these things are worth reading; I can say no more for them and I shall hold him generous who says as much. But the pleasure I shall derive from seeing them printed and off my hands will be as great almost as that which I felt when, four years ago, you, or your firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as the European situation permits.

C. B.

February 1918.

MONTAIGNE IN FACSIMILE[1]

Athenæum Jan. 1913

Let it be understood at once that the appearance of this magnificent work is a bibliophilic rather than a literary event. The literary event was the publication by M. Fortunat Strowski, in 1909, of "L'Edition Municipale," an exact transcription of that annotated copy of the 1588 quarto known to fame as "L'Exemplaire de Bordeaux." What the same eminent scholar gives us now is a reproduction in phototype of "L'Exemplaire." Any one, therefore, who goes to these volumes in search of literary discoveries is foredoomed to disappointment. Indeed, the same might have been said of "L'Edition Municipale"; for the "Motheau et Jouaust" edition, reprinted by MM. Flammarion in their "Bibliothèque classique," was complete enough to satisfy all but the most meticulous scholars, while for general literary purposes the edition published in 1595, three years after the author's death, by his niece, Mlle. de Gournay, is sufficient and adequate.

Though five editions of the "Essais" were printed during their author's life—1580 and 1582 at Bordeaux, 1584 (probably) and 1587 at Paris, 1588 at Bordeaux—to critics in search of dramatic spiritual changes a comparative study will afford but meagre sport. To be sure, the editions of '84 and '87 were nothing more than what we should now call reprints; but the edition of 1588, of which "L'Exemplaire de Bordeaux" is a copy, represents so thorough an overhauling and so generous an enlarging of the old book that some have been tempted to reckon it a new one. Yet, though it garners the fruit of eight fertile years of travel and public service, it reveals no startling change in the outlook, nor in what is more important, the insight, of its author. We need feel no surprise. Had Montaigne been the sort of man whose views and sentiments are profoundly affected by travel or office, he would not have been the object of that cult of which the three volumes before us are the latest, and perhaps the most significant, monument. That is a peculiar man whose crossings and dottings and deletions are judged worthy of photographic record by the authorities of a great industrial city.

Montaigne was thoroughly normal, not to say commonplace, in his ability to pass through foreign countries without suffering anything so alarming as a conversion. He left home on his travels in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, a learned and extremely intelligent man of affairs, who had taken, rather late in life perhaps, to playing the part of a French country gentleman; he returned with a store of acute observations and pleasant anecdotes, a little older, a little mellower, otherwise unchanged. Of those magically expanded views, those sudden yawnings of sympathetic depths, that nowadays every one may count on winning, if not by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was unusual. Even in those days there were people of extraordinary sensibility for whom life was a succession of miracles, who with difficulty recognized themselves from year to year, to whom going abroad was an emotional adventure, a supreme revelation: but of these Montaigne was not one. Him, like some others, change seems merely to have confirmed in his native predispositions and prejudices. As he grew older he grew vainer, rather more garrulous, fonder of his favourite authors, and a little less open-minded; and his travels were nothing more than a long and agreeable stage on the longest journey. There are people for whom travel provides nothing but supplementary evidence in a cause that has already been judged. Those who can find nothing good at home will smack their lips over the sourest wines abroad; and "Old Meynell" need not have left his garden to arrive at that conclusion commended by Dr. Johnson: "For anything I see, foreigners are fools." Montaigne was not of these, either; too normal to be above patriotism, he was too proud and too intelligent to be blindly patriotic.

Montaigne was the ideal man-in-the-street. We do not mean that he was typical; but if there are men-in-the-street in heaven, they will resemble Montaigne. And though we rank a third-rate saint or artist a great deal higher than a first-rate good fellow, we recognize that there is something about any kind of perfection that dazzles even those who are most alive to its essential inferiority. Montaigne is the exemplar of good feeling and good sense; in him we see those qualities chatting on terms of familiarity with genius and inspiration. He held the views that all sensible people would hold if only all were as intelligent and benevolent as they honestly believe themselves to be; he expressed them in a form appropriate to, and therefore limited by, his subject, but, within those limits, perfect.

The form in which Montaigne expressed himself was new to French literature. In the sixteenth century there was a recognized literary style based on the Latin period. Sentences were long, sonorous, and circuitous. It was a language well suited to those who followed the profession of letters, but unserviceable to one who would communicate his thoughts and feelings to others. Montaigne was not a professional author; he was a country gentleman with something of his own to say. The literature of the professionals was an ingenious and abstract superstructure built up over an idea or an emotion. Montaigne wished to set down the original thought or feeling as it sprang, hot, from the mind; and, as original thoughts and feelings present themselves always with the force of sensations, he gave them the forms of sensations—that is to say, he wrote in images. He expressed his philosophy of good sense in short, hard, coloured sentences, keeping them as close as possible to the naked thoughts they conveyed. That in print they appear as long as those of his contemporaries is a mere accident of typography; for almost every semicolon in the "Essais" one may substitute a full stop: very rarely is the long sentence in Montaigne a period.

Like most sensible men, Montaigne had an unreasonable fondness for reason; unlike most, he possessed an intellect that showed him the final consequences of his fancy. Not only have we no sufficient reason for believing that we know anything, we have none for affirming that we know nothing. By sheer reasonableness we are reduced to a state of pure Pyrrhonism, where, like the poor donkey, we must die of starvation midway between two equally large and equally appetizing bundles of hay. An affectation of superior ignorance has been a favourite literary device from the days of the Preacher to those of Anatole France. Montaigne loves to tease and confound us with a "Que sçay-ie," he has the common literary taste for humiliating unsympathetic readers; but he has also a taste for honesty not so common, even in literature. Doubt is a mark of good sense: honest doubt is a mark of genius almost. In his reflective moments the reasonable man inclines to believe that reason can prove nothing—except what he believes. How fearlessly did those nineteenth-century apostles of Reason make havoc in the parlours of meek curates and spinsters, thundering against the altogether insufficient grounds on which were accepted the surprising adventures of Noah and his Ark! But when they were told that Reason was as unfriendly to their moral code and the methods of science as to the Book of Genesis, they clapped her in jail without more ado. Reason affords no solid grounds for holding a good world better than a bad, and the sacred law of cause and effect itself admits of no logical demonstration. "Prison or the Mad House," cried the men of good sense; Montaigne was more thorough—"Tolerance," said he.

Like the man-in-the-street, Montaigne found refuge from reason in conviction. Until we have formulated a proposition reason has no excuse for interference; and emotional convictions precede intellectual propositions. Only, as we have no means of judging between convictions, we must remember that the firm and disinterested convictions of others are as respectable as our own: again we must tolerate. To credit Montaigne with that sublime liberality which is summed up in the most sublime of all Christian aphorisms—"Judge not, and thou shalt not be judged"—would be absurd. Montaigne was a Pagan, and his high conception of tolerance and humanity was derived entirely from the great pagan philosophers. Of them he was a profound and sincere disciple, so it is not surprising that his ideas were far in advance of those of his age, and of ours. For instance, he hated brutality. Both his own nature and that fine Athenian humanity which by study he had made his own were revolted by barbarous punishments. That there may be men too vile to live seemed to him, doubtless, a tenable opinion—he could forget all about the fallibility of human judgments—but "Quant à moy," he says, "en la iustice mesme, tout ce qui est au delà de la mort simple, me semble pure cruauté." To hurt others for our own good is not, he dimly perceived, to cut a very magnanimous figure. To call it hurting them for their own, he would have thought damnable; but that piece of hypocrisy is the invention of a more enlightened age. Torture he abhorred. Assuredly Montaigne would have been more at home in the streets of Periclean Athens than in those of sixteenth-century Bordeaux or twentieth-century London.

Nothing illustrates better Montaigne's essential paganism than his passionate admiration for magnanimity. That was the virtue he loved. High courage and fortitude, dignity, patience, and generosity—these are qualities, examples of which never fail to strike a spark of enthusiasm from his calm nature. He is never tired of extolling the constancy of Socrates and Cato, the courage of Cæsar, the generosity of Alexander, the great and grandiose actions of the heroes of antiquity. Indeed, this admiration for courage and dignity so transports him that once, at any rate, he surpasses most pagan philosophers, and joins hands with the latest and most Christian of Christian moralists:

"A quoy faire nous allons nous gendarmant par ces efforts de la science? Regardons à terre, les pauvres gens que nous y voyons espandus, la teste panchante apres leur besongne: qui ne sçavent ny Aristote ny Caton, ny exemple ny precepte. De ceux-là, tire Nature tous les iours, des effects de constance et de patience, plus purs et plus roides, que ne sont ceux que nous estudions si curieusement en l'escole. Combien en vois ie ordinairement, qui mescognoissent la pauvreté: combien qui desirent la mort, ou qui la passent sans alarme et sans affliction? Celui là qui fouit mon iardin, il a ce matin enterré son pere ou son fils. Les noms mesme, dequoy ils appellent les maladies, en addoucissent et amollissent l'aspreté. La phthysie, c'est la toux pour eux: la dysenterie, devoyment d'estomach: un pleuresis, c'est un morfondement: et selon qu'ils les nomment doucement, ils les supportent aussi. Elles sont bien griefves, quand elles rompent leur travail ordinaire: ils ne s'allitent que pour mourir."

This passage is exceptional; it is not the less sincere. Of its sincerity no one who reads and feels can doubt. But generally the instances of eximious virtue are what Montaigne delights to honour. Nothing in him is more lovable than this passionate hero-worship; and what quality is more lovable or more common in the ordinary man?

"Le plus sage des Français," Sainte-Beuve called him; the judgment is typical of the critic and his age. We need not stay to quarrel with it. We can hold that there is a higher wisdom than the quest of golden mediocrity without disparaging either Horace or his disciple. If the man-in-the-street be one who approaches the obvious in the spirit of a pioneer, we must admit that Montaigne rises superior to his class, for he not only explored that country, but possessed and cultivated it too, and forced it to yield an ampler harvest of good sense and humanity than any other husbandman before or since. France has ever been rich, and is as rich as ever, in men who have known how to sacrifice the shadow to the substance; in fanatics who have pursued without pause or divagation dreams of impossible Utopias and unattainable good; in idealists who have joyfully given all to love, to art, to religion, and to logic. It is not inappropriate, therefore, that France should have produced in an age of turmoil and terrible madness the man who exalted the cult of moderation to the heights of sublime philosophy.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] "Reproduction en Phototypie de l'Exemplaire, avec Notes manuscrites marginales, des Essais de Montaigne appartenant à la Ville de Bordeaux." Publiée, avec une Introduction, par Fortunat Strowski. 3 vols. (Paris, Hachette.)

IBSEN[2]

Athenæum June 1912

Was it chance made Mr. Ellis Roberts mention Cézanne on the fourth page of a book about Ibsen? One cannot think so. Similarities in the work and circumstances of the two men can hardly have escaped him. Born within a dozen years of each other (Ibsen was born in 1828), both matured in a period when the professions of writing and painting were laboriously cultivated at the expense of art. Each, unguided except by his own sense of dissatisfaction with his surroundings, found a way through the sloughs of romance and the deserts of realism, to the high country beyond them. Both sought and both found the same thing—the thing above literature and painting, the stuff out of which great literature and painting are made.

The Romantics and Realists were like people coming to cuffs about which is the more important thing in an orange, the history of Spain or the number of pips. The instinct of the romantic, invited to say what he felt about anything, was to recall its associations. A rose made him think of quaint gardens and gracious ladies and Edmund Waller and sundials, and a thousand pleasant things that, at one time or another, had befallen him or some one else. A rose touched life at a hundred pretty points. A rose was interesting because it had a past. On this the realist's comment was "Mush!" or words to that effect. In like predicament, he would give a detailed account of the properties of Rosa setigera, not forgetting to mention the urn-shaped calyx-tube, the five imbricated lobes, or the open corolla of five obovate petals. To an Ibsen or a Cézanne one account would appear as irrelevant as the other, since both omitted the thing that mattered, what philosophers used to call "the thing in itself," what now they would call "the essential reality":

Solness. ... Do you read much?

Hilda. No, never! I have given it up. For it all seems so irrelevant.

Solness. That is just my feeling.

It was just what the books left out that Ibsen wanted to express.

He soon worked through the romantic tradition. It hampered him long enough to prevent Peer Gynt from becoming a great poem; after that he found himself on the threshold of a world where everything mattered too much in itself for its associations to be of consequence. Attempting to analyse Ibsen's characters used to be a pastime for fools; to-day, we all know that they come from that world where everything has been reduced to an essence that defies analysis. There Ibsen was never so completely at home as Cézanne; he lacked the imagination by which alone one arrives and remains in the world of reality. His vision was more uncertain and so his faith was weaker. He was a less ferociously sincere artist. When vision began to fail he took refuge in a catalogue of facts or in unconvincing symbolism: Cézanne tossed his picture into a bush. Perhaps that is why a new generation, hungry for great contemporary art, turns more hopefully to painting than to literature.

Thirty years ago it would have been misleading to say, what is undoubtedly true, that it is as an artist that Ibsen is great. To call a man a good artist came to much the same thing as calling him a good ping-pong player: it implied that he was proficient in his own business; it did not imply that he was a great man who affected life greatly. Therefore many people who understood Ibsen and were moved by his plays preferred to call him a political thinker or a social reformer; while their enemies, the æsthetes, were very willing to call him a great artist, since by doing so they excused themselves from paying the least attention to anything that he said. Ibsen was a reformer in the sense that all great artists are reformers; it is impossible to speak of reality without criticizing civilization. In the same way he was a politician; it is impossible to care passionately about art without caring about the fate of mankind. But Mr. Roberts is certainly right in holding that to appreciate Ibsen we must consider him as an artist.

Ibsen approached humanity in the spirit of an artist. He sought that essential thing in men and women by which we should know them if the devil came one night and stole away their bodies; we may call it character if we choose. He imagined situations in which character would be revealed clearly. The subjects of his plays are often "problems," because he was interested in people who only when "problems" arise are seen to be essentially different from one another, or, indeed, from the furniture with which they live. There is no reason to suppose that Ibsen had any love for "problems" as such; and we are tempted to believe that some modern "problems" are nothing more than situations from Ibsen's plays. Ibsen's method is the true artist's method. The realist writing about people tends to give an inventory of personal peculiarities, and a faithful report of all that is said and done. The romantic hopes, somehow, to "create an atmosphere" by suggesting what he once felt for something not altogether unlike the matter in hand. Ibsen sets himself to discover the halfpennyworth of significance in all this intolerable deal of irrelevance. Which is the word, which the gesture, that, springing directly from the depths of one character, penetrates to the depths of another? What is the true cause of this hubbub of inconsequent words and contradictory actions? Nothing less remote than the true cause will serve, nothing else is firmly rooted in reality. Is that man expressing what he feels or is he paying out what he thinks he is expected to feel? Have I pushed simplification as far as it will go? Are there no trappings, no overtones, nothing but what is essential to express my vision of reality? And, above all, is my vision absolutely sharp and sure? These were the questions Ibsen had to answer. When he succeeded he was a great artist, not, as Mr. Roberts suggests, in the manner of Shakespeare, but in the manner of Æschylus.

There is no more obvious proof of the greatness of Ibsen's art than the perfection of its form. To assert that fine form always enfolds fine thought and feeling would imply a knowledge of literature to which it would be effrontery in a critic to pretend. He may be allowed, however, to advise any one who is ready with an instance of great form enclosing a void to verify his impressions: it was thus that one critic at any rate came to appreciate Goldoni and Alfieri. Be that as it may, this is certain: a perfectly conceived idea never fails to express itself in perfect form. Ibsen did not shirk the labour of making his conceptions as hard, and definite, and self-supporting as possible. No matter how autobiographical some of his best plays may be, he is too good an artist to allow them to lean on his personal experience; they have to stand firmly on their own feet. Ibsen, therefore, worked his conceptions to such a degree of hardness and self-consistency that he could detach them from himself and study them impersonally. That is why his plays are models of form. And if there be an Academy of Letters that takes its duties seriously, Rosmersholm and Ghosts are, we presume, in the hands of every young person within its sphere of influence. The students are shown, we hope, that Ibsen's form is superb, not because Ibsen paid any particular attention to the precepts of Aristotle, but because, like Sophocles, who had the misfortune to predecease the Stagirite, he knew precisely what he wanted to say, and addressed himself exclusively to the task of saying it. To achieve great form is needed neither science nor tradition, but intense feeling, vigorous thinking, and imagination. Formlessness is not a sign of spirited revolt against superstition; it is a mere indication of muddleheadedness.

The subject-matter of Ibsen's plays is reality; unfortunately, his imagination was not always strong enough to keep a sure hold on it. When the vision faded he took refuge in symbolism or literality. There was a commonplace background to his mind, of which we see too much in such plays as An Enemy of the People and Pillars of Society. It is this commonplace and rather suburban quality that tempts us occasionally to explain Ibsen's popularity by the fact that he represented the revolt of the supremely unimportant, of whom there happen to be quite a number in the world. With the symbolism of The Master-Builder no fault can be found. It is a legitimate and effective means of expressing a sense of reality. The theme is never lost. The artist who sacrifices his human relations, but dare not give all, dare not give his vanity or his life to the ideal, moves steadily to his inevitable doom. Whether he move in the form of Halvard Solness, the cowardly architect of genius, fearless of ideas but fearful of action, or in the form of the symbolical master-builder, the artist who tries to have the best of both worlds, matters not a straw. The medium of expression changes, but the theme is constant: the conception is whole. That is more than can be said of The Lady from the Sea, where the symbolism comes perilously near padding; or of When We Dead Awaken, where it often expresses nothing relevant, merely standing picturesquely for commonplaces, and filling gaps.

To read one of Ibsen's great plays is always thrilling; to read one for the first time is an event. If a savage who took locomotives and motor-cars for granted, as inexplicable creatures of whim and fancy, suddenly were shown, not by vague adumbration, but by straightforward exposition, that they were expressions of intelligible laws controlled by comprehensible machinery, he could not be more amazed than was the nineteenth century by Ibsen. For Ibsen took nothing for granted. He saw little on the surface of life that corresponded with reality; but he did not cease to believe in reality. That was where he differed both from the Philistines and from the elect. He saw that the universe was something very different from what it was generally supposed to be: he saw the futility of popular morals and popular metaphysics; but he neither swallowed the conventions nor threw up his hands in despair, declaring the whole thing to be an idiotic farce. He knew that truth and goodness had nothing to do with law and custom; but he never doubted that there were such things; and he went beneath the surface to find them. It was Ibsen's revelation of a new world, in which moral values were real and convincing, that thrilled the nineteenth century, and thrills us yet. Can any one read sedately that scene in Ghosts in which Mrs. Alving shows with bewildering simplicity that, however respectable the Pastor's morality may be, it is pure wickedness?

Pastor Manders. You call it "cowardice" to do your plain duty? Have you forgotten that a son ought to love and honour his father and mother?

Mrs. Alving. Do not let us talk in such general terms. Let us ask: Ought Oswald to love and honour Chamberlain Alving?

Manders. Is there no voice in your mother's heart that forbids you to destroy your son's ideals?

Mrs. Alving. But what about the truth?

Manders. But what about the ideals?

Mrs. Alving. Oh—ideals, ideals! If only I were not such a coward!

Ibsen's social and political ideas follow necessarily from the nature of his art. He knew too much about the depths of character to suppose that people could be improved from without. He agreed with our grandmothers that what men need are new hearts. It is good feeling that makes good men, and the sole check on bad feeling is conscience. Laws, customs, and social conventions he regarded as ineffectual means to good. There is no virtue in one who is restrained from evil by fear. He went further: he regarded external restraints as means to bad, since they come between a man and his conscience and blunt the moral sense. "So long as I keep to the rules," says the smug citizen, "I am of the righteous." Ibsen loathed the State, with its negative virtues, its mean standards, its mediocrity, and its spiritual squalor. He was a passionate individualist.

Perhaps no one has seen more clearly that the State, at its best, stands for nothing better than the lowest common factor of the human mind. What else can it stand for? State ideals must be ideals that are not beyond the intellect and imagination of "the average citizen"; also, since average minds are not pervious to reason, the reasoning of statesmen must be rhetoric. State morals—law and custom that is to say—are nothing more than excuses for not bothering about conscience. But Ibsen, being an artist, knew that he who would save his soul must do what he feels to be right, not what is said to be so. Feeling is the only guide, and the man who does what he feels to be wrong does wrong, whatever the State may say.

The plain, though by no means frank, determination of society to suppress the individual conscience lest it should clash with the interests of the community seems positively to have shocked him. To be fine, he believed, men must think and feel for themselves and live by their own sense of truth and beauty, not by collective wisdom or reach-me-down ideals.

"What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths so stricken in years that they are sinking into decrepitude. When a truth is so old as that, gentlemen, it's in a fair way to become a lie (Laughter and jeers)."

How could Ibsen help being something of a politician? He seems really to have wished his fellow-creatures to be fine, and to have been angry with them because they wished to be nothing of the sort. He did not understand that this passionate individualism, this sense of personal responsibility, this claim to private judgment, is what no modern State, be it democratic, bureaucratic or autocratic, can tolerate. Men long for the ease and assurance of conformity and so soon as they are sufficiently organized enforce it. Truth is the enemy—écrasez l'infâme! Poor, silly old Stockmann in An Enemy of the People blurts it out, blurts out that the water-supply is contaminated and his native health-resort no better than a death-trap, for no better reason than that he feels it is what he ought to do. He fails to consider the feelings and, what is even more important, the financial interests of his neighbours, and the neighbours make short work of him, as they generally do of people who think and feel and act for themselves—of saints and artists in fact. Thus it comes about that the prophets are stoned and the best plays censored, while people such as Ibsen loathe the State with its herd-instincts, now decently baptized however, and known as Morality and Idealism.

Whether Ibsen was in the right is not for a reviewer to decide. Mr. Roberts has strong views on the subject, which he is at no pains to conceal. For this we are far from blaming him. Indeed, we feel that the personal note imported by the author's intellectual bias gives some flavour to a book which, owing to the complete absence of charm or distinction, would be otherwise insipid. It is a competent, but woefully uninspiring, piece of work. Above all things, Mr. Roberts lacks humour—a quality indispensable in a writer on Ibsen. For Ibsen, like other men of genius, is slightly ridiculous. Undeniably, there is something comic about the picture of the Norwegian dramatist, spectacled and frock-coated, "looking," Mr. Archer tells us, "like a distinguished diplomat," at work amongst the orange-groves of Sorrento on Ghosts.

"Ibsen was keenly sensitive to place, and if we would get the utmost feeling out of his plays we must remember how large a part was played by fortunate or unfortunate position and circumstances in contributing to the wonderful 'atmosphere' of the dramas."

That is what Mr. Roberts thinks. A sense of humour would also have saved him from the one black note of sentimentality in the book:

"Ellida might be Solveig analysed—but analysed with how loving a touch, how unerring a kindness; it is as if a great surgeon were operating on a woman he loved."

Such things, we had imagined, could only be written by members of the Académie française.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] "Henrik Ibsen: a Critical Study." By R. Ellis Roberts. (Secker.)

MISS COLERIDGE[3]

Athenæum July 1910

The greatest art is, in a sense, impersonal. We have no biographies of Homer and Sophocles, nor do we need them. Of Milton and Keats we know something; yet, knowing nothing, should we enjoy their work the less? It is not for what it reveals of Milton that we prize "Paradise Lost"; the "Grecian Urn" lives independent of its author and his circumstances, a work of art, complete in itself.

Precisely opposite is the case of Miss Mary Coleridge's poems: they, when in 1908 Mr. Elkin Mathews produced a more or less complete edition, excited us, not because, as verse, they were particularly good, but because they discovered, or seemed to discover, an attractive character. Indeed, Miss Coleridge's art was anything but exciting: her diction was not beautiful, her rhythms pleased the ear but moderately, one looked in vain for that magic of expression which transmutes thought and feeling into poetry. But if the expression wanted magic, that which was expressed seemed an enchantment almost. The gentle spirit, with its vein of tender pessimism, in puzzled revolt against the wrongness and cruelty of a shadowy world, the brooding thought too whimsical to be bitter, the fancy too refined to be boisterously merry—all these conspired to fascinate us as we came to perceive and appreciate them beneath the rather stiff little verses. To read Miss Coleridge's poems was to make acquaintance with a charming and delicate soul that wished to be understood and was willing to be intimate. Life astonished her, and her comments on life are her poems. They are often mystical, not to say obscure; and the obscurity, as a rule, is caused by vagueness rather than profundity, by the fact that she hardly knows herself what she feels, or thinks, or believes. But from so gracious a spirit one accepts without demur that which from another would not have passed unchallenged. Miss Coleridge bewitched us with her personality; we knew that her poems were slight, we felt that they revealed a part of her only, we had suspicions, but we held our peace. Had we turned to her novels, in spite of the brilliancy of one of them—"The King with Two Faces"—our suspicions would have been strengthened. But we did not turn; or if we did, they forced us into no questioning mood. It was left for this tell-tale volume of "Gathered Leaves" to press the question insistently, and to answer it. The spell is broken. We know now both why the poems are good and why they are not better.

No one will blame Miss Sichel for setting the truth before all things: clearly, by publishing these stories and essays she supplies an opportunity of correcting a too flattering estimate; but, foreseeing, no doubt, that we shall avail ourselves of it, she supplies also a memoir of fifty pages on which our final estimate is to be based. That this memoir is a competent piece of work need hardly be said. Miss Sichel's competence is notorious; as an efficient biographer her reputation is secure. Not every subject, however, is suited to her pen. Miss Coleridge did not develop along conventional lines; in fact, she differed so disconcertingly from the type with which we have grown agreeably familiar in the "English Men of Letters" series, that, without violence, she could never have been fitted into the traditional mould. Her biographer has done the work thoroughly, but she is a thought heavy in the hand; she is too literary, not to say professional; she is definite at all costs. She has "restored" Miss Coleridge as a German archæologist might restore a Tanagra figure. Indeterminate lines have been ruthlessly rectified and asymmetry has grown symmetrical. Though we do not suggest that she misunderstood her friend, we are sure that the lady exhibited in the memoir is not the lady who reveals herself in the poems.

Of the author of the poems we catch a glimpse in the fragments of letters and diaries which form the penultimate section of the volume. But here, again, we find cause for discontent. If private reasons forbade fullness, was it wise to print scraps? Why tantalize us? In the letters we should, perhaps, have recaptured the lady we have lost in the essays and stories; but these fragments, though suggestive, are too slight to be consolatory: besides, Miss Coleridge was no coiner of aphorisms and epigrams who could give her meaning in a handful of sentences. Here is the first "detached thought" in the book:

"'Whom the gods love die young' and whom they hate die old, but whom they honour, these they take up to their eternal habitations in the ripe summer time of existence."

One wonders how it came there.

The suspicions which this volume helps to confirm, the melancholy guesses it answers, are that Miss Coleridge, with all her imagination, had not the constructive imagination of an artist, and that, in spite of her gaiety and spirits, fundamentally she was feeble. The imagination of an artist, if we may be allowed a seeming paradox, works logically. Not fortuitously, but by some mysterious necessity, does one vision follow another. There is a rational, if unconscious, order in the pageantry of images; there is an inevitableness in their succession closely allied to the logical necessity by which one idea follows another in a well-reasoned argument. In Miss Coleridge's mind images arranged themselves in no progressive order; one bears no particular relationship to another; they are disconnected, sporadic. Great imagination is architectural; it sets fancy upon fancy until it has composed a splendid and intelligible whole—a valid castle in the air. Miss Coleridge could not build; ideas broke in her mind in showers of whims, and lay where they fell at haphazard; she has bequeathed no castles, but a garden strewn with quaint figures, where every thought is tagged with gay conceits. Her short poems are often successful because she could pick at choice a thought or fancy and twist it into a stanza; but when she attempted a tale or an essay she gathered a handful of incongruous oddments and made of them a patchwork.

This first defect was, we conjecture, a consequence of that other and more fundamental flaw to which we have already drawn attention. If Miss Coleridge's artificers played truant, it was because she lacked strength to keep them at their task. For an indolent and lawless imagination force of character is the only whip, force of intellect the only guide. Miss Coleridge was deficient in both respects, and so her fancy sat playing with chips and pebbles, making mud-pies when it should have been making palaces.

Miss Coleridge never created a real work of art because she could not grasp emotions, or, if she grasped, failed to hold them. Perhaps she was too much of a Victorian lady to do more than express the culture of an imperfect age imperfectly. At any rate, it is clear that a shrinking fastidiousness excluded from her world much of the raw material from which great art is made. Stray reflections on Greek life and thought, though in themselves trivial, are interesting for what they betray of a state of mind familiar and always slightly distressing to people who take art seriously. She was a fair scholar Miss Sichel tells us; certainly she studied under an excellent master—the author of "Ionica"; yet she could say of the "Bacchæ": "The Hallelujah Lasses get drunk on the wine of the spirit, not the wine of the grape"; and of the "Medea":

"Medea is thoroughly fin de siècle; says she would rather go into battle three times than have a baby once, pitches into men like anything. But there's too much Whitechapel about her. How are you to be seriously interested in a woman who has murdered her mother and boiled her father-in-law before the play begins?"

What is this but the shy jauntiness, the elaborate understatement, of something small in the presence of something great? That uneasy titter, caught from time to time as one turns Miss Coleridge's pages, we seem to have heard before in the Arena chapel or at the end of a Bach fugue. It is the comment of sophisticated refinement that can neither sit still nor launch out into rapturous, but ill-bred, ecstasies, of the weakling who takes refuge in slang or jocularity for fear of becoming natural and being thought ridiculous. Miss Coleridge stood for Kensington and Culture, so she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at Medea, and called the Bacchæ "Hallelujah Lasses." She and Kensington admired Greek literature and art, of course, with enthusiasm tempered by taste; but the "glory that was Greece," the merciless honesty and riotous passions, the adventurous thought and feeling, were meat too strong for a society whose happiness depended on gazing at one half of life with closed eyes and swallowing the other in sugar-coated pills.

So we shall not turn again to "Gathered Leaves," though we shall sometimes read the poems. Henceforth, they will conjure up a less elusive figure. They will show us a pensive lady, rather well dressed in the fashion of five-and-twenty years ago, who sits in a Morris drawing-room, the white walls of which are spotted with Pre-Raphaelite pictures, and muses on what her surroundings represent. She is intelligent and graceful; witty in season, fantastic in measure. Her mind is ruffled by the perplexities appropriate to her age and state; she searches Canon Dixon's latest poem for light on Holman Hunt's last picture. Her life is an exquisite preoccupation with the surface of truth and the heart of unreality. Her poems suggest once more the atmosphere of an age already dead and half-forgotten; of Sunday afternoons in large rooms with long blinds, behind which men yawn and cultivated women are earnest and playful; of a world in which people must pretend courageously that life is very important for fear of discovering that it hardly signifies. It is a strange world, faded, friendly, urbane, and, we are happy to think, already infinitely remote.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] "Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge." With a Memoir by Edith Sichel. (Constable and Co.)

This review, when first published, gave pain, I know; it gave pain to friends of Miss Coleridge and to friends of Miss Sichel and to many of the charming people who were friends of both. The pain, of course, I regret; but I cannot say that I regret the article. The criticism still seems to me fair, and I know that it was honest: nevertheless, were Miss Sichel alive, I should not care to reprint it. But that able and friendly lady is now dead, and her eulogy has been pronounced by those who knew her best and could best appreciate her. I, of course, have criticized her only in her public character, as a writer, and in so doing have transgressed no law that I, at any rate, can respect. As Voltaire says, "On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité." To the living, perhaps, I have not always been as civil as could have been desired; but of the dead I have told no lies that I am aware of.

PEACOCK[4]

I

Athenæum Feb. 1911

In the first place, were these plays worth publishing? With some hesitation we will admit that they were. Presumably the possessors of Messrs. Dent's pretty edition, or of any edition for that matter, will be glad to set this small volume beside the others and thus become owners of the complete prose works of an English classic. For Peacock is a classic; otherwise they might well have been allowed to acquire that portentous dignity which grows like moss on ancient and unprinted MSS. in the British Museum. Here and there, in the farces, one may discover examples of truly "Peacockian" wit and style, but these rare gems have mostly been worked into the novels; while the residue, which includes a drama in blank verse, has little if any intrinsic value. The earliest works of Peacock—a brilliant amateur to the last—are as amateurish as the earliest works of his friend Shelley and as thin and conventional as the worst of Goldoni. Nevertheless they are readable; so we need not stay to quarrel with the enthusiastic editor who claims that they are "replete with fun, written in a flexible style, and bearing the imprint of a scholarly discrimination."

English prose and humour are certainly the richer for one or two speeches in this little book, but the service it performs, or can be made to perform, is greater than that of rescuing a few fragments of humorous prose or even of filling a gap on our shelves. It sends us back to perhaps the least known of the great English, writers. The "Life" of Peacock has yet to be written: an ineffectual memoir by Sir Henry Cole, some personal recollections by the author's granddaughter Mrs. Clarke, a critical essay from the versatile but vapid pen of Lord Houghton, the gossip of Robert Buchanan, and editorial notices by Prof. Saintsbury and the late Richard Garnett, together afford nothing more than a perfunctory appreciation. Two writers, indeed, have attempted a more elaborate estimate: James Spedding, an able prig,[5] reviewed Peacock's novels in the Edinburgh of January 1839, and more than half a century later Mr. Herbert Paul contributed to the Nineteenth Century a paper on the same subject. Unluckily, the judgment of both is vitiated by a common defect. Both are good journalists, but both are better party men; consequently, neither can appreciate the attitude of one to whom collective wisdom was folly, who judged every question in politics, philosophy, literature, and art on its merits, and whose scorn for those who judged otherwise was expressed without any of those obliging circumlocutions that are prized so highly in political life. With the possible exception of Prof. Saintsbury, not one of Peacock's interpreters has understood his position or shared his point of view; did not Dr. Arthur Button Young, the editor of these plays, himself affirm that

"his stories deal with tangible realities, and not with obscure or absurd situations, as is the case with those of many novelists.... For this reason alone they deserve to be widely known, as also their author, for having helped to raise the tone of novel-writing at a critical juncture in its development, by introducing into his tales instruction and information"?

It is only fair to add that this bit of criticism occurs in his "Inaugural Dissertation presented to the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau for the Asquisition of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy."

In calling Peacock a great writer we have raised a claim that needs some support. His exquisite style with its Tacitean flavour, the perfection of his lyrics, his wit, and that intellectual brilliancy which sparkles from all the facets of his satire, parody, and epigram, suffice to endear him to the small, fastidious world whose approval is best worth having, and also, perhaps, to justify our opinion. But, unless we mistake, the appeal of his novels goes farther than the frontiers of good taste. Peacock's mind was original; he thought about many things and he did his own thinking. He is the other side to every question; his way of looking at life is a perpetual challenge; and a man without a vestige of humour or taste may read him with profit for his point of view.

Peacock belongs to no school or age. He has been called a man of the eighteenth century living in the nineteenth; nothing could be farther from the truth. He loved the sense and dignity of the Augustans, just as he loved the fire and romance of the Renaissance, and the mysterious gaiety of the Middle Ages; but he could have criticized any of them with as good a will as he criticized the age of machinery and "the march of mind," and, had he been born in any one of them, would doubtless have done so. He was a student of bardic poetry who yet admired Ariosto; his passion for classical literature was uncommonly wise and sincere; he read Sophocles for pleasure. So remote was he from the eighteenth-century Grecians that he could perceive and enjoy the romantic element in Greek life and art; yet it is a mistake to call him a Greek. An Athenian of the time of Pericles was, he thought, the noblest specimen of humanity that history had to show, and of that nobility he assimilated what he could. He acquired a distaste for cant, prudery, facile emotion, and philanthropy; he learnt to enjoy the good things of life without fear or shame; to love strength and beauty, and to respect the truth. For all that, he was a modern too; sharp eyes can see it in his verse. A touch of gloating and uninquisitive wonder, a suspicion of sentiment for sentiment's sake, the ghost of an appeal from the head to the heart, from the certainty of the present to the mystery of the past and the future, betray the descendant of Shakespeare and Sterne. The very culture that he inherited from a Græco-Roman civilization, his bookishness, his archæology, his conscious Paganism, would have looked queer in an Athenian of the fifth century B.C. The author of "Love and Age" was no Greek; but he was Greek enough to stand out above his fellows, from whom he is most honourably distinguished by his Athenian open-mindedness.

That Peacock cultivated prejudices is not disputed; for instance, he could not abide tobacco-smoke, Lord Brougham, or the Great Exhibition of 1851. But his prejudices were as peculiar to himself as were the principles of Sir Thomas Browne. They were not the prejudices of his age and state, neither were they of the kind that is fatal to free thinking and plain speaking. Unlike the popular dogmas of the muscular Christians and their rivals the muscular agnostics, his whims and fancies were superficial and involved no intellectual confusion. He compelled no one to build on unproved hypotheses, nor would he suffer himself to be compelled. Though sceptical about progress and mistrustful of democracy, to the end of his life he disliked the Conservative party; and perhaps his finest flights of sarcasm occur in "The Misfortunes of Elphin," where he ridicules Canning's florid rhetoric in defence of the Constitution.

"'Reports have been brought to me [says Elphin], that the embankment, which has been so long entrusted to your care, is in a state of dangerous decay.'

"'Decay,' said Seithenyn, 'is one thing, and danger is another. Everything that is old must decay. That the embankment is old, I am free to confess; that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I will not altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I do most sturdily gainsay. It does its business well: it works well: it keeps out the water from the land, and it lets in the wine upon the High Commission of Embankment. Cupbearer, fill. Our ancestors were wiser than we: they built it in their wisdom; and, if we should be so rash as to try to mend it, we should only mar it.'

"'The stonework,' said Teithrin, 'is sapped and mined: the piles are rotten, broken, and dislocated: the floodgates and sluices are leaky and creaky.'

"'That is the beauty of it,' said Seithenyn. 'Some parts of it are rotten, and some parts of it are sound.'

"'It is well,' said Elphin, 'that some parts are sound: it were better that all were so.'

"'So I have heard some people say before,' said Seithenyn; 'perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity: that very unamiable sort of people, who are in the habit of indulging their reason. But I say, the parts that are rotten give elasticity to those that are sound: they give them elasticity, elasticity, elasticity. If it were all sound, it would break by its own obstinate stiffness: the soundness is checked by the rottenness, and the stiffness is balanced by the elasticity. There is nothing so dangerous as innovation. See the waves in the equinoctial storms, dashing and clashing, roaring and pouring, spattering and battering, rattling and battling against it. I would not be so presumptious as to say, I could build anything that would stand against them half an hour; and here this immortal old work, which God forbid the finger of modern mason should bring into jeopardy, this immortal work has stood for centuries, and will stand for centuries more, if we let it alone. It is well: it works well: let well alone. Cupbearer, fill. It was half rotten when I was born, and that is a conclusive reason why it should be three parts rotten when I die.'"

Peacock's attitude towards women affords an example of the liberality of his views and of his isolation. It shocked Victorian sentimentalists, and would probably infuriate the more austere feminists of to-day. His heroines, like all his characters, are roughly and extravagantly sketched; what makes them peculiar is that they are sometimes almost alive. Stupidity, ignorance, and incompetence, craven submissiveness or insipid resignation, he did not commend in women: on the contrary, intellect, wit, gaiety, spirit, and even a first in the Classical Tripos seemed or would have seemed desirable and ladylike attributes to the creator of Anthelia Melincourt and Morgana Gryll. What was called "womanliness" in the forties displeased him; but he liked women to be feminine, and knew that distinguished women have ever been distinguished as women.

The truth is, Peacock had standards tested by which the current ideas of almost any age would be found wanting. Without being a profound thinker, he was one of those people who "bother about ends" to the extent of being unwilling to approve of means unless they are satisfied that the end in view is good—or at least that there is some end in view. With a self-complacent age, in which every one was shouting "Forward!" and no one was expected to inquire "Whither?" he was necessarily out of sympathy. To the shouters he seemed irrational and irrelevant. They called him "immoral" when they were solemn, and "whimsical" when they were merry; and "whimsical" is the epithet with which we are tempted to label him, if labelled he must be. Genius makes strange bedfellows; and Peacock's intellectual candour finds itself associated with the emotional capriciousness of Sterne. Truly, he is always unexpected, and as often as not superficially inconsequent. To state the three parts of a syllogism is not in his way; and by implication he challenged half the major premises in vogue. His scorn of rough-and-ready standards, commonplaces, and what used to be called "the opinion of all sensible men" made him disrespectful to common sense. It was common sense once to believe that the sun went round the earth, and it is still the mark of a sensible man to ignore, on occasions, the law of contradictions. To that common sense which is compounded of mental sluggishness and a taste for being in the majority Peacock's wit was a needle. He was intellectual enough to enjoy pricking bladders, and so finished a performer that we never tire of watching him at his play.

He was, in fact, an artist with intellectual curiosity; and just as he lacked the depth of a philosopher so he wanted the vision of a poet. That he possessed genius will not be denied; but his art is fanciful rather than imaginative and of creative power he had next to none. His life was neither a mission nor a miracle. But he was blessed with that keen delight in his own sensations which makes a world full of beautiful and amusing things, charming people, wine, and warm sunshine seem, on the whole, a very tolerable place, and all metaphysical speculation and political passion a little unnecessary. He made an art of living, and his novels are a part of his life. He wrote them because he had a subtle sense of the ludicrous, a turn for satire, and style. He wrote because he enjoyed writing; and, with a disregard for the public inconceivable in a man of sense, he wrote the sort of books that he himself would have liked to read. They are the sort, we think, that will always be worth reading.

II[6]

Athenæum Oct. 1911

"Between the publication of his [Peacock's] first and last poem sixty years had elapsed; but the records of his existence would, if placed in close juxtaposition, hardly fill out ten years."

Thus writes Mr. Freeman; and Mr. Van Doren's book is a failure just because he has insisted on expanding those records into a volume of three hundred pages. Of such a work a great part must consist in stating trivial facts and drawing from them inferences which there is no reason to accept, and which would be unimportant if accepted.

"About the time of the publication of 'Palmyra,' the young poet went back to Chertsey to live. His grandfather, Thomas Love, died December 10, 1805, and Mrs. Love, thus left alone, probably desired the companionship of her daughter and grandson. A letter to Hookham, dated two years later, testifies that Peacock soon extended one of his walking tours much farther than he had hitherto gone, in an excursion to Scotland."

Here follows an extract from a rather gushing and quite unimportant letter about the beauties of Scotch scenery, after which the paragraph concludes as follows:

"Nothing further is known of this Scottish tour, but from it probably dates Peacock's inveterate prejudice against the Scotch."

This is Mr. Van Doren at his worst and hack biography at normal. At his best he gives a straightforward account of the little that industry can unearth concerning a writer of first-rate importance who died but fifty-five years ago and whose life is yet more obscure than that of many a smaller man who has been dead twice or thrice as long. Industry in quest of facts is, indeed, Mr. Van Doren's chief merit, which only aggravates our surprise and regret at his having concluded his researches without discovering that Old Sarum is not in Cornwall. Still, he has written a readable book. His knowledge of English is superior to that of the majority of his compatriots; and when he is not trying to be caustic or facetious he is often quite sensible. We can say no more for him however.

Mr. Freeman aims higher, and though he comes short of his mark his is a valuable book. He can write well, and will write better; at present he is set upon being witty and clever, which is the more to be regretted in that he is both by nature. He has a view of life and letters which, if it be literary and rather superficial, is, at all events, personal. Perceiving the insufficiency of material for a biography, he has attempted an appreciation of Peacock's art. As we set ourselves a similar task so recently as February last, when reviewing Dr. Young's edition of the plays, we feel no call to restate our estimate or pit it against that of this new critic. It need only be said that he realizes, as does Mr. Van Doren, the singularity of Peacock's genius; that, though neither has succeeded in showing precisely why it is unique, the English critic has brought forward some highly illuminating suggestions; and that reduction by a half would be the greatest improvement that either book could undergo.

In the circumstances, our interest tends to centre on the biographical parts of both works. For both are biographical: only Mr. Freeman, who claims attention for judgment rather than for learning, has been at less pains to sift and record the minute evidence that contemporary literature and journalism afford. Fresh evidence, in the shape of letters and memoirs, may, of course, be brought forward; until then these two volumes will be final. So far as external evidence goes, the student is now in possession of all that is known about the author of "Headlong Hall."

It is surprising that Mr. Freeman's tact did not rescue him from the temptation into which Mr. Van Doren's industry led him inevitably—the temptation of finding in Peacock's mature work definable traces of childish memories and impressions. Still more surprising is it that, when both have quoted much that is worthless, neither should have printed the one significant document amongst the surviving fragments of his boyhood. This is a letter in verse to his mother, which not only gives promise of the songs that, above all else, have made their author famous, but is also worth quoting for its peculiar charm and fancy. Unless we mistake, it has only once been printed, and is hardly known to the literary public, so here it is:

Dear Mother,

I attempt to write you a letter

In verse, tho' in prose I could do it much better;

The Muse, this cold weather, sleeps up at Parnassus,

And leaves us poor poets as stupid as asses.

She'll tarry still longer, if she has a warm chamber,

A store of old massie, ambrosia, and amber.

Dear mother, don't laugh, you may think she is tipsy

And I, if a poet, must drink like a gipsy.

Suppose I should borrow the horse of Jack Stenton—

A finer ridden beast no muse ever went on—

Pegasus' fleet wings perhaps now are frozen,

I'll send her old Stenton's, I know I've well chosen;

Be it frost, be it thaw, the horse can well canter;

The sight of the beast cannot help to enchant her.

All the boys at our school are well, tho' yet many

Are suffered, at home, to suck eggs with their granny.

"To-morrow," says daddy, "you must go, my dear Billy,

To Englefield House; do not cry, you are silly."

Says the mother, all dressed in silk and in satin,

"Don't cram the poor boy with your Greek and your Latin,

I'll have him a little longer before mine own eyes,

To nurse him and feed him with tarts and mince-pies;

We'll send him to school when the weather is warmer;

Come kiss me, my pretty, my sweet little charmer!"

But now I must banish all fun and all folly,

So doleful's the news I am going to tell ye:

Poor Wade, my schoolfellow, lies low in the gravel,

One month ere fifteen put an end to his travel;

Harmless and mild, and remark'd for good nature;

The cause of his death was his overgrown stature:

His epitaph I wrote, as inserted below;

What tribute more friendly could I on him bestow?

The bard craves one shilling of his own dear mother,

And, if you think proper, add to it another.

That epitaph is better known, but deserves to be better still:

Here lies interred, in silent shade,

The frail remains of Hamlet Wade;

A youth more promising ne'er took breath;

But ere fifteen laid cold in death!

Ye young, ye old, and ye of middle age,

Act well your part, for quit the stage

Of mortal life, one day you must,

And, like him, crumble into dust.

Surely the boy of nine years old who wrote this was destined to be something better than a minor poet. And did not the delightful mother who encouraged him to express himself deserve something better for her son? Indeed, he must have been an enchanting child, with his long, flaxen curls, bright colouring, and fine, intelligent head. One fancies him a happy creature, making light work of his Greek and Latin grammar at Mr. Wicks's school on Englefield Green, at home spoilt and educated, in the best and most literal sense of the word, by his pretty mother and his gallant old grandfather. No wonder Queen Charlotte, driving in Windsor Park, stopped her carriage and got down to kiss the winsome little boy.

From Peacock's youth and early writings (he was born in 1785 and published "Palmyra" in 1806) we can gather some idea of his character. The obvious thing about him is his cleverness. The question is, What will he make of it? He tries business for a short time; the sea for an even shorter; and then he settles down in the country to a life of study and composition: he will be a man of letters. His poems are what we should expect a clever lad to write. Had they been written at the end of the nineteenth century doubtless they would have been as fashionably decadent as, written at the beginning, they are fashionably pompous. It was clear from the first that Peacock would not be a poet; he lacked the essential quality—the power of feeling deeply. Before he was twenty it must have been clear that he possessed a remarkable head and an ordinary heart. He had wits enough for anything and sufficient feeling and imagination to write a good song; but in these early days his intellect served chiefly to save him from sentimentality and the grosser kinds of rhetoric. It gained him a friend too, and that friend was Shelley.

To think of Peacock's youth is to think of his relations with Shelley. He seems to have given more than he received: his nature was not receptive. He made the poet read Greek, and persuaded him that he was not infected with elephantiasis by quoting Lucretius "to the effect that the disease was known to exist on the banks of the Nile, neque præterea usquam." These words were "the greatest comfort to Shelley." The two young men did a vast amount of walking, arguing, and miscellaneous reading together, in which Peacock, partly from conviction and partly from affectation, seems to have been pretty consistent in performing the office of a wet blanket. Testing his intellect on other people's enthusiasms, falling sedately and whimsically in love with various ladies, amongst them his future wife, but keeping such feelings as he had for the most part to himself, Peacock slipped through all the critical stages of youth till in 1816 he published "Headlong Hall." Brains will not make a poet, but they made a superb satirist.

There is nothing to puzzle us in Peacock's accepting a post under the East India Company. An unusually strong inclination toward Miss Jane Gryffydh, his "milk-white Snowdonian Antelope" as Shelley calls her, whom he had not seen for more than eight years, and to whom he became engaged without further inspection, may possibly have counted for something in his decision. But the obvious explanation is that a man who lives by the head needs regular employment, and only he who lives by the emotions has anything to lose by it. Peacock's feelings were not so fine that routine could blunt them, nor so deep that an expression of them could give a satisfactory purpose to life. He entered the Company's service at the age of four-and-thirty; he found in it congenial friends, congenial employment, and a salary that enabled him to indulge his rather luxurious tastes. He kept chambers in London, a house on the Thames, a good cellar we may be sure, and a wife. Of this part of his life we know little beyond the fact that he was an able and industrious official. Probably, we shall not be far wrong in supposing him to have been much like other officials, only more intelligent, more witty, more sceptical, more learned, and more "cranky": also he kept stored somewhere at the back of his mind a spark of that mysterious thing called genius. At any rate, his recorded opinion, "There has never been anything perfect under the sun except the compositions of Mozart," smacks strongly of classical concerts and the Treasury.

Though during this period he wrote his most entertaining, and perhaps his most brilliant novel, "Crotchet Castle," the years were heavy with misfortune. His mother, the human being for whom he seems to have cared most, died in 1833; before that date his wife had become a hopeless invalid. Three of his four children were dead before he retired from affairs. Already he had outlived many of his companions. Sorrow does not seem to have embittered but neither did it sweeten greatly his temper. His reticence stiffened, so did his prejudices. Only emotion enables a man to make something noble and lovely of pain; but intellect teaches him to bear it like a gentleman.

It is easy to draw a pleasant picture of Peacock's old age; deeply considered, however, it is profoundly sad. He had stood for many great causes but for none had he stood greatly. Good nature and benevolence had done duty for love and pity. He had been more intimate with books than with men. And so, at the end, he found himself alone. His tragedy is not that he was lonely, but that he preferred to be so. He retired with a handsome pension to a sheltered life at Halliford. The jolly old pagan, the scholar, and the caustic satirist were still alive in him. He wrote "Gryll Grange." He packed poor Robert Buchanan out of the house for smoking in it. He terrified a meek curate, who came to persuade him to leave his burning home, by shouting at him, "By the immortal gods I will not move." He carried on a desultory correspondence with Lord Broughton, full of literary humour and literary sentiment. He practised small benevolences and small tyrannies, liked to see smiling faces about him, and declined to believe seriously in the unhappiness of others. He was a thoroughly good-natured, selfish old man.

In old age he had to pay the penalty that awaits those who live by the head and not by the heart. He had kind acquaintances, but he had no real friends. He had nothing to look back upon but a series of more or less amusing events and a tale of successful achievements—no high enterprises, no splendid failures, no passionate affections. Before him lay nothing but his books, his dinner, and a literary reputation. Capable biographers can make pretty pictures of the white-haired scholar surrounded by his favourite authors. They can turn his petulant limitations and querulous prejudices into exquisite foibles, his despotisms into quaint impetuosity, his insensibility to human want and misery into mellow wisdom. But we cannot forget that the last years of those who have never passionately pursued impossible ideals or loved imperfect human beings are probably more attractive to the biographers who record than to the men and women who have to endure them.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] "The Plays of Thomas Love Peacock." Published for the first time. Edited by A. B. Young. (David Nutt.)

[5] The week after this article appeared Sir Frederick Pollock wrote to the Athenæum complaining of my having called Spedding a prig. Well, here is a sample of what Spedding has to say about "Melincourt":

"Had the business ended here we should have thought that the author's better genius had prevailed. We might indeed have questioned many of his doctrines, both social and political; and shown cause to doubt whether in the faithful bosom of real nature they would yield so fair a harvest as in the more accommodating soil of fiction. But we should have met him with undivided sympathy, as no idle talker on no idle theme. This, however, his worst genius interferes to prevent. He has only a half faith in the cause he has espoused, and dares not let go his interest with the other party. It is as if, having, in sport or curiosity, raised the veil of truth, he had felt rebuked by the severity of her aspect, and turned for relief to more than usual levity and mockery. Hence the perpetual interruption of the serious and affecting, and sometimes even awful, interest which belongs to the main argument of the piece, by scenes of farcical and extravagant caricature which might be pleasant enough as varieties in that farce of unreason with which he usually entertains us, but which, coming upon the mind in a state of serious emotion, are offensive and disagreeable. The two styles appear two opposite and incompatible moods; and it is impossible so to govern the imagination or the sympathies as to be in the humour for both. If you are not disgusted with the lighter, you cannot but be wearied with the graver."

And again:

"As it is, this affected contrast [the contrast which Spedding thinks Peacock may have intended between the beauty of Forester and Anthelia's view of life, and the "gross pictures of corruption, quackery, and worldliness" with which he surrounds them], instead of bringing the virtue of his hero into stronger relief, serves only to make more conspicuous his own want of constancy in his purpose and faith in his principles."

Spedding solemnly proceeds to give Peacock a little advice about the construction of his novels, and recommends that "Melincourt" should be divided into two stories: one to deal with the adventures of Sir Oran Haut-ton and his election for the borough of Onevote; the other to treat of "the graver questions concerning the realizations of the spirit of chivalry under the forms of modern society ... with Forester and Anthelia for the central figures."

"If he would but set about this latter task in a faithful spirit, we do not fear to predict, from the specimen which the tale before us, even in its present state, exhibits, that he would produce a work of far higher and more enduring interest than any he has yet attempted."

Let the reader consider "Melincourt," what manner of work it is, and then judge faithfully between me and Sir Fred.

[6] "The Life of Thomas Love Peacock," By Carl Van Doren. (Dent and Sons.)

"Thomas Love Peacock." By A. Martin Freeman. (Martin Secker.)

BOSWELL'S LETTERS[7]

Athenæum Feb. 1909

Boswell's letters enjoy the advantage of a mysterious history. They were written between 1758 and 1795, not without a view to publication, but were lost for more than fifty years. At Boulogne in 1850 Major Stone, of the East India Company, had the fortunate curiosity to examine a scrap of paper in which was wrapped some small purchase; it turned out to be a letter signed by James Boswell, and was traced to the store of an itinerant paper-vendor, where the letters published in 1856 were discovered. The anonymous editor of this issue is conjectured—with good reason, as we think—by Mr. Seccombe, who introduces the volume, to have been a Philip Francis of the Middle Temple who became later Sir Philip of the Supreme Consular Court of the Levant; but this matter also is obscure. The strangest mystery of all, however, is that these interesting, entertaining, in fact delightful letters, though on their first appearance they created a mild literary sensation, till last December had never been reprinted.

The volume before us is a reprint from the first edition, the introduction by Mr. Seccombe being substituted for that of the original editor. We wish that Mr. Seccombe had been less modest—less conservative at any rate. With his view that "the editing was admirably done" we cannot agree entirely. Francis, who has intercalated blocks of exegesis and comment between the letters, writes good, straightforward prose, and appears to have been a good, sensible sort of man. He has enlivened his editorial labours with irruptions of legal facetiousness and sagacious reflections. He admires Carlyle. But his lack of subtlety and his prodigious good sense make him incapable of appreciating the character of Boswell. Passages in the letters which seemed to him ridiculous he, in his solicitude for the reader's enjoyment, has been careful to print in italics; for it is difficult to suppose that Boswell underlined them himself. The originals are again lost; should the passages in question really be underlined, it would follow that Boswell was not unintentionally or unconsciously ridiculous; that all his life he practised an elaborate mystification; that he succeeded in hoodwinking the world; that he enlightened Temple alone, who nevertheless appears to have treated him as though he were what the world took him for; and that Francis, who saw these underlined manuscripts, and yet persisted in the conventional view of Boswell, was not a Mid-Victorian prig but a common imbecile. It is true that he has been stupid enough to mangle and emasculate the letters that he was employed to publish; an officious prude unquestionably he was, but no fool, much less an idiot.

To discuss the character of Boswell has ever been a delicate, not to say dangerous, undertaking; but at least we may affirm that those who, judging him from the "Life of Johnson," are dissatisfied with the ordinary, unfavourable view, will not be put out of countenance by these letters. To be sure they will not be disappointed of the popular "Bozzy," ridiculous, vain, and a little vulgar, something of a snob, of a sycophant even, with an undignified zeal for notoriety and an imperfect moral sense; but beside him they will find another Boswell, the friend of Hume and Johnson, with his passion for excellence, generous nature, good understanding, and genius for observation—a man by no means to be despised. They will see how this man expresses thoughts and feelings, often sufficiently commonplace, in words so astonishingly appropriate that we are amazed by the sheer truth of the self-revelation; and they may even conjecture that some of his performances, which have been lightly attributed to dull self-complacency or a defective sense of proportion, are more probably the effects of a whimsical and fantastic mind through which ran possibly a queer strain of madness. Be that as it may, we now select for quotation a few characteristic passages, leaving the reader to decide for himself when and how far Boswell is laughing at "Bozzy."

The correspondence with Temple, a fellow-student at Edinburgh, began in 1758, when Boswell was eighteen; for the first eight years, however, he was too busy making acquaintance with Johnson, travelling on the Continent, and conducting his famous Corsican adventure, to be a very prolific letter-writer. In 1766 he settled down in Edinburgh to the law, which he found intolerably dreary, and a love-affair, which he found too exciting. "The dear infidel," as he called her, besides being another man's wife, seems to have been an extravagant and disreputable young woman:

"In a former part of this letter I have talked a great deal of my sweet little mistress; I am, however, uneasy about her. Furnishing a house and maintaining her with a maid will cost me a great deal of money, and it is too like marriage, or too much a settled plan of licentiousness; but what can I do?

"Besides, she is ill-bred, quite a rompish girl. She debases my dignity; she has no refinement, but she is very handsome and very lively."

What he did was to break with her; four weeks later he writes:

"My life is one of the most romantic that I believe either you or I really know of; and yet I am a very sensible, good sort of man. What is the meaning of this, Temple? You may depend upon it that very soon my follies will be at an end, and I shall turn out an admirable member of society. Now that I have given my mind the turn, I am totally emancipated from my charmer, as much as from the gardener's daughter who now puts on my fire and performs menial offices like any other wench; and yet just this time twelve month I was so madly in love as to think of marrying her."

The frequency and solemnity of Boswell's resolutions to amend are extraordinary, though the fact that his correspondent was a curate suggests an explanation; in carrying them out he was perfectly normal.

Boswell tells us that he "looks with horror on adultery," and the love-affairs with which his letters overflow appear, for the most part, to have been sufficiently innocent; for an "Italian angel," Zelide (whom he knew at Utrecht), Miss Bosville, and "La Belle Irlandaise" he cherished at different times a chaste flame; while Miss Blair, a neighbour and lady of fortune, very nearly caught him. But Boswell decided that he would not have a "Scots lass." "You cannot say how fine a woman I may marry; perhaps a Howard or some other of the noblest in the kingdom." "Rouse me, my friend!" he cries; "Kate has not fire enough; she does not know the value of her lover!" Nevertheless, he was to have a "Scots lass" after all, for in the autumn of 1769 he married Miss Margaret Montgomerie, "a true Montgomerie, whom I esteem, whom I love, after fifteen years, as on the day when she gave me her hand" ("Letter to the People of Scotland").

After his marriage Boswell's life continued agitated and desultory: he practised at the Scotch Bar, without much success, and was called to the English; almost every year he visited London, where he cultivated Johnson, enjoyed good company and fine, made the most of his social and literary importance, and revelled in the genuine and flattering friendship of Paoli, who seems to have made him free of his house: "I felt more dignity when I had several servants at my devotion, a large apartment, and the convenience and state of a coach."

It was absurd of him, no doubt, to say, "Am I not fortunate in having something about me that interests most people at first sight in my favour?" but it seems to have been near the truth. "I am really the great man now. I have had David Hume in the forenoon, and Mr. Johnson in the afternoon." These great men were interested somehow, and so, one must suppose, was Miss Silverton:

"There is a Miss Silverton in the Fly with me, an amiable creature, who has been in France. I can unite little fondnesses with perfect conjugal love."

There was, too, "an agreeable young widow" who, also in a fly, "nursed me, and supported my lame foot on her knee."

Boswell's life in Edinburgh was not happy; he hated the rough society of Scotch lawyers, and quarrelled with his father, the Laird of Auchinleck, who seems to have been a tiresome, disagreeable old man. The Laird died in 1782, and seven years later Boswell lost his "valuable wife." His story becomes melancholy: money troubles and family perplexities beset him (he was left with five children); and it may be that what once made him odd, aggravated by his breaking health, now made him gloomy. After his wife's death he came to London for good. Already he had taken a house in Queen Anne Street, and here he worked hard at "The Life," comforted a little by his assurance that it would be a masterpiece:

"I am absolutely certain that my mode of biography, which gives not only a History of Johnson's visible progress through the world, and of his publications, but a view of his mind in his letters and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet appeared."

With this bold but just prophecy we may leave him; he died in 1795.

FOOTNOTE:

[7] "Letters of James Boswell to the Rev. W. J. Temple." (Sidgwick and Jackson.)

CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LOVE-LETTERS[8]

I

Athenæum May and Oct. 1909

Are people still interested in the Carlyles? Some are, we suppose. The older generation is interested in Carlyle, at any rate; though the younger, we believe, is not. For men and women under thirty the redoubtable sage has apparently no message; but for many of their fathers and mothers his least word still has a certain importance.

Such reverent curiosity, though it may excuse some bad books and much futile research, will, we fear, hardly justify the volume before us—Mr. Archibald's we mean, which tells us little about Carlyle and that little by no means new. One chapter only can be manufactured out of his sufficiently indefinite relations with Miss Gordon; though ten more pages are filled out with a discussion of that wholly unimportant question "Who was Blumine?" The reasonable conjecture is, of course, that Carlyle's method resembled that of other writers; his heroine, no doubt, was the child of his own imagination, and when a model was needed he drew indiscriminately from the ladies with whom he was acquainted.

Should any one chance to be interested in Margaret Gordon, her ancestors, her kindred, or her husband, he may glean a certain amount of information from this book. Born at Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island) in 1798, she was left fatherless at the age of four, and brought up in Scotland by her aunt. Between 1818 and 1820 she may have had a love-affair or flirtation with Carlyle; and in 1824 she married Mr. Bannerman, a commonplace, good-humoured business-man from Aberdeen, who became a Member of Parliament. Mr. Bannerman speculated, lost his fortune, and was consoled with a colonial governorship and a knighthood. Lady Bannerman was drawn into the Evangelical movement, devoted the last years of her life to works of piety, and died (1878) in a little house at Greenwich and the odour of sanctity. As to what manner of woman she may have been we are left in ignorance; into her mode of thinking, feeling, and seeing—into her character, that is—Mr. Archibald has obtained no insight. The necessary changes in matters of history having been made, his volume might do duty as the biographical memoir of thousands of her contemporaries. But perhaps a couple of specimens of the style and substance of Mr. Archibald's prose will best give the measure of his understanding:

"Lady Bannerman dispensed the hospitality of Government House with the dignity and grace which might be expected of one who for over thirty years had moved in the best society of England. She had the power of putting all at their ease, of identifying herself with their individual interests, and of entering with animation into the affairs of the hour. But while she was kind and gracious and frank, and would freely enter into conversation with any one, there was always a certain dignity which prevented any attempt at undue familiarity."

Again:

"In St. John's she was exceedingly kind and charitable to the poor, and she and Lady Hoyles were active workers in the Dorcas Society. She worshipped at St. Thomas' (Episcopal) Church, and was especially interested in her Sunday-school class. As we have seen, her sympathies were more with the Presbyterian Church, but probably because of her husband's official position, she always chose in the Colonies to connect herself with the Church of England."

If this be a fair account of Lady Bannerman, we may be pardoned for wondering why any one thought her biography worth writing. What it all has to do with Carlyle is to us far from clear. The eyes of publishers, however, are in these matters notoriously sharper than those of reviewers.

II

Having disposed of Carlyle's first love, we can attend to his second—if that is where Miss Welsh comes in order of seniority; for our text mercifully obliges us to say nothing of Miss Aurora Kirkpatrick, another claimant to the honour of having sat for Blumine, while on the glories of Lady Ashburton, who, to be frank, interests us no more than the simplest of these extremely simple "misses," the title of our essay precludes us from expatiating. But can we? Does not the great man, who was to give Jane the splendour of his name, seem rather to demand prompt satisfaction for the insult paid him in our first paragraph? There we said, or implied, that he was obsolescent; and it is, perhaps, worth pausing to inquire how a man who seemed to his own age one of the great teachers and spiritual masters of humanity—the peer of Pythagoras and Buddha, of Plato, Epictetus, St. Francis and Rousseau—comes in this generation to be held a little higher than Emerson, a good deal lower than Matthew Arnold, immeasurably so than Renan. And is it not worth pausing again to reflect that, contemporaneously with these men, and almost unknown to Western Europe, lived one who bids fair to produce a greater effect on the world than has been produced by any teacher since the crucifixion?

It was primarily as a teacher, as a disseminator of ideas, that Carlyle appeared venerable to his own age; in a less degree they admired him as an historian and an artist. To-day, his ideas are as musty as those of Godwin—a better exponent of deeper speculations: as an historian—in spite of an undeniable gift for visualizing and describing scenes from the past—he is hardly of more consequence than Creighton or Stanhope: while, as an artist, he ranks with such faded rhetoricians as Châteaubriand.

What is the meaning of this? Why simply that the Victorians made the mistake about Carlyle that every age makes about its Carlyles. They took a thoughtful journalist for a master; and this they did because the journalist had the skill and conviction to persuade them, and himself, that what is commonest and most vigorous in human nature is also most sublime. Carlyle could, in perfect good faith, give tone to the vulgar instincts and passions; he could make narrow-mindedness, brutality, intolerance, obtuseness, and sentimentality seem noble; he knew, being an unconscious hypocrite, how, without a glimmer of open cynicism, to make the best of both worlds. For instance, Carlyle and his public wished to believe in Eternal Justice regulating the affairs of men. They believed in it as something emotionally congenial to them, not, you may be sure, as a metaphysical truth discovered and confirmed by the intellect. Intellectual processes were not in Carlyle's way: he was a popular philosopher. From this belief in Eternal Justice he naturally deduced the doctrine that Right is Might, which doctrine applied to history bore fruit most grateful to hero-worshippers—a sect that flourished uncommonly in those days. When, however, it was pointed out by earthy and eristic rationalists that if in the past Right was Might then it followed that Might was Right, Carlyle, who had ever the shortest of ways with dissenters, drowned the argument in a flood of invective. Of course if Right is Might it does follow that the good cause has always been the successful one; and in that case it looks as though the successful one must always have been the good. Might, in fact, is Right. Carlyle knew better: and he who would be the prophet of his age must know, as he did, to reject unwholesome conclusions without invalidating the healthy premises from which they follow.

Each age has its Carlyles, but it never much respects the Carlyles of other ages. We have our Ferrero and our H. G. Wells, to say nothing of such small fry as Faguets, Marinetti, e tutti quanti. They are people who have something for their own age and nothing for any other, and their own age is pretty sure to prefer them to any great man it may produce but fail to smother: they are adored and duly forgotten. They must come forward as the critics and guides of society; whether they declare their messages in prose or verse, in novels, histories, speeches, essays, or philosophical treatises is of no consequence. It must be possible to make prophets of them, that is all. A pure artist or philosopher or man of science, one who is concerned with Beauty or Truth but not with its application to contemporary life will not do. Darwin and Swinburne, therefore, the greatest of the English Victorians, were not eligible; but the age chose Carlyle for its select preacher when it might have had Mill. Naturally it preferred his coloured rhetoric and warm sentimentality to Mill's cold reason and white-hot emotion. It chose him because he was what Mill was not—a Carlyle. Yet, though Utilitarianism is discredited, Mill remains; the candour and subtlety of his intellect impress us still, and his Autobiography will seem to future generations one of the most moving documents of the nineteenth century.

As for Carlyle, "nobody marks him"; we only wonder that he will still be talking. The old controversy between those who wish to believe the truth and those who insist that what they wish to believe is true raves on; but neither side dreams of briefing the Chelsea sage. His vatic eloquence carries no conviction. Men and women of the younger generation, whatever their views, find no support in him, because he appeals to axioms and postulates which to them seem unreal. It is not that his arguments are old-fashioned, but that they are based on nothing and apply to nothing. A modern emotionalist may call in Tolstoy or Bergson or Berkley or Léon Bloy or Péguy or Plato himself to break the head of Anatole France or Bertrand Russell, but he will not trouble Carlyle. And besides finding him empty, the new age is quite aware of his positive defects. It cannot away with his peasant morality—moralizing rather—his provincialism, and the grossness of his method. From the beginning to the end of his works there is neither pure thought nor pure feeling—nothing but a point of view which is now perceived to be ridiculously plebeian. Nevertheless, Carlyle had one positive gift that the younger generation is perhaps not very well qualified to appreciate, he was an extraordinarily capable man of letters. His footnotes, for instance, might serve as models; he had a prodigious talent for picking out just those bits of by-information that will amuse and interest a reader and send him back to the text with renewed attention. His editing of Mrs. Carlyle's letters—letters which come not within our terms of reference and from which, therefore, we cannot decently quote—is remarkable: only, even here, his intolerable virtue and vanity, his callous self-content, his miserable, misplaced self-pity and his nauseous sentimentality parade themselves on almost every page. For all his "Oh heavenses," "courageous little souls," and "ay de mis," he never once guessed the nature of his offence, never realized the beastliness of that moral and religious humbug which to himself seems always to have justified him in playing tyrant and vampire to a woman of genius.

III

The volumes before us, as we have hinted, were expected, not without excitement, by those people for whose benefit we are about to review them. It must be confessed that they have not wholly escaped the fate that is apt to befall the progeny of parturient mountains. Not that they are precisely what Horace would have expected them to be: they are anything but small; yet, about the contents there is something mousey—the colour perhaps. The fact is, they are disappointing. The letters they contain—a bare third of which are by Jane Welsh—were all written between the middle of 1821 and the end of 1826—that is to say, before either Jane or Carlyle had found themselves. At his best, Carlyle was not a letter-writer; he was a clever man who wrote letters. These have sometimes the personal quality of a good essay, never the charm of familiar correspondence. In these early days his mind is as undeveloped as his style; he is crude, awkward, over-emphatic; apter at catching the faults than the excellences of the eighteenth-century prose writers. That one should write to please rather than to improve one's correspondent was an idea which seems hardly to have occurred to him:

"When I sit down to write Letters to people I care anything for, I am too apt to get into a certain ebullient humour, and so to indite great quantities of nonsense, which even my own judgment condemns—when too late for being mended."

That is his own admission. Here is a specimen of his solemn admonitions to his future wife:

"I very much approve your resolution to exercise your powers in some sort of literary effort; and I shall think myself happy, if by any means I can aid you in putting it in practice. There is nothing more injurious to the faculties than to sit poring over books continually without attempting to exhibit any of our own conceptions. We amass ideas, it is true; but at the same time we proportionally weaken our powers of expressing them; a power equally valuable with that of conceiving them, and which, tho' in some degree like it the gift of Nature, is in a far higher degree the fruit of art, and so languishes more irretrievably by want of culture," etc.

Even when writing to a lady with whom one is on the most delicate terms such austerity is excessive, especially when it runs into a dozen pages. Carlyle is at his best when describing people, and it is to be regretted that his editor, out of respect for the memory of Campbell's widow and others long since deceased, has felt obliged to suppress more than one passage in which contemporaries are freely handled. He is at his worst when writing, and generally complaining, about himself; and, like the majority of people who take themselves very seriously, most amusing when unconsciously so. In the October of 1824 he visited Paris and told Miss Welsh just what he thought of it:

"[I am] daily growing more and more contemptuous of Paris, and the manière d'être of its people. Poor fellows! I feel alternately titillated into laughter and shocked to the verge of horror at the hand they make of Life.... Their houses are not houses, but places where they sleep and dress; they live in cafés and promenades and theatres; and ten thousand dice are set a-rattling every night in every quarter of their city. Every thing seems gilding and fillagree, addressed to the eye, not to the touch."

Mrs. Carlyle, on the other hand, had a genuine gift; her genius may be small, but it is undeniable. She was never in the first flight of letter-writers, a tiny band which consists, we take it, of Mérimée, Mme. de Sévigné, Horace Walpole, Byron, and whom else? But in that larger second class, the class of Gray and Julie de Lespinasse, Lady Mary Montagu, Swift, Flaubert, Leopardi, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Fitzgerald, Voltaire, Cicero we suppose, and a good many more, she is entitled to a place. Jane Welsh, however, is by no means Mrs. Carlyle. She was but twenty-five when she married. Here we find her rather too conscious of her own superiority; not only was she the beauty, she was also the Muse of the village; had she been less vain she must have been unnatural. Yet, under all her pert provincialism, we can detect that mysterious quality which distinguishes the good letter-writer. She writes to please two people—her correspondent and herself; she has no need, therefore, to canvass general truths, but can afford to be personal and charming. Her artful wit gives pith and moment to the most trivial enterprises, and turns domestic projects into adventures of high romance. She never makes great things small by declamation; she prefers to make small things great by insinuation. Her friend is assumed to be interested in all that concerns herself, so she is not afraid to be intimate; and a correspondent both clever and intimate is one of those things that make life precious. In a word, her letters (which, to our dismay, besides occupying a bare third of the two volumes, are towards the end disastrously affected by the style of her lover) succeed in giving a whimsical view of her ordinary and external life, viewed from standpoints above and beyond the reach of externals—the head and the heart. Her account of the affair with Mr. Dugald G—— is, in its way, a little masterpiece, but too long for quotation. We select a shorter specimen of her style:

"Such a week I spent in Galloway! There was no amusement within doors, and the weather precluded the chance of finding any without. 'Cœlebs in Search of a Wife' was the only book in the house, and even that was monopolized by a young lady who came to my Uncle's (I strongly suspect) on Cœleb's errand. The rest of us had no weapon of any sort to combat time with, and for four whole days I sat counting the drops of rain that fell from the ceiling into a bowl beneath, or in burbling the chain of my watch for the pleasure of undoing it. 'Oh, Plato! what tasks for a philosopher!' At length in a frenzy of ennui I mounted a brute of a horse that could do nothing but trot, and rode till I was ready to drop from the saddle—just for diversion. I left my companions wondering when it would be fair; and when I returned they were still wondering. How very few people retain their faculties in rainy weather!"

We can hardly make evident by short quotations the difference between the letters of a gifted person and of one who had a gift for letter-writing; the reader, however, who will be at pains to take Lamb's correspondence from the shelf and compare his letters with those of Mrs. Carlyle will no doubt discover what it is that they both possess and Carlyle lacks. We would say, if permitted once again to trot out the weary and well-fired hack, that you may think of Carlyle writing his "Frederick" in a tail-coat, or whatever costume you prefer, and feel sure, if your mind be not too literal, that his letters were written in the same full dress. Far pleasanter to imagine Jane Welsh, coming home from a rout, slipping a gay dressing-gown over a satin petticoat, and gossiping till the fire burnt low. What is more, before she had the privilege of "doing for" a great man with a Scotch sense of economy and a peasant's notion of wifely duties, she may often have so gossiped. The fact is, Carlyle, in his most playful moments, kept one eye on "the eternities," and Jane, in her most solemn, never lost sight of the comic spirit.

The volumes before us are well printed on good paper, and without are embellished by a device—two hearts, stamped in gold, linked with a golden ring, and supported by a plump little cupid; the same device is repeated on the title-page in mauve. Trifles may be significant; whether this symbol was suggested by the editor, or whether the editor was influenced by it, are questions deserving thought. Turning to matters less subtle, we wish that Mr. Alexander Carlyle had not found it necessary to rake up the ashes which reticence had allowed to grow cold. Also, we wish that he had adopted some other policy towards Jane Welsh; the pin, even between deft fingers, is an ignoble and unattractive weapon. In his notes he contrives a small and unpleasant sensation (vol. i, p. 319) which would be more effective were it supported by anything better than a piece of gossip, for which no authority is given, and the doubtful interpretation of one passage in a letter. We are grateful to him, however, for translating all the Latin, French, German, Italian, and Scotch words, and for several touches of unconscious humour, of which the following is a pleasant example:

"Pen (from Penfillan, home of Miss Welsh's paternal grandfather) was her pet name used to distinguish her from the Welshes of her maternal grandfather's household, especially from her mother's younger sister, whose name was also Jeannie Welsh. Conscious of procrastinating too long in writing, Miss Welsh here sportively enlarges Pen not into Penfillan, but into Penelope, the name of Ulysses' faithful wife, who put off so long the hateful task of choosing a husband from the wasteful and riotous horde of suitors assembled in her house during Ulysses' protracted absence. See Homer's 'Odyssey.'"

FOOTNOTE:

[8] "The Love-Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh." Edited by Alexander Carlyle. 2 vols. Illustrated. (John Lane.)

"Carlyle's First Love, Margaret Gordon, Lady Bannerman." By Raymond Clare Archibald. (John Lane.)

THE LYSISTRATA[9]

Αι Χἁριτες τἑμἑνὁς τι λαβεἱν ὁπερ οὑχἱ πεσεἱται ζητοὑσαι ψυχἡν εὑρον Ἁριστοφἁνους.
[Greek: Ahi Charites temenos ti labein hoper ouchi peseitai zêtousai psuchên euron Aristophanous.]

Plato.

Athenæum Jan. 1912

To Plato it seemed that the Graces, seeking an imperishable temple, discovered the soul of Aristophanes. To the grocers and statesmen of Queen Victoria it seemed otherwise. Their taste was a good deal nicerζητοὑσαι ψυχἡν Αριστοφἁνους than that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante, Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of St. Chrysostom (who could not sleep without an Aristophanes under his pillow) or the author of "The Song of Solomon." They did not like vulgarity and they put a stop to it: also in that age Punch and the Times flourished. What is decent or indecent, vulgar or refined, is, of course, a matter of taste; and each age has a taste of its own. The taste of Athens in her prime, or of Rome in hers, of Italy in the days of Dante or of Raphael, of the court of Elizabeth, or of eighteenth-century France was not the taste of Victorian England. And the strange thing is that, though not only in the arts, but in all the delicacies of life—in personal relations, in sentiment and wit—the great poets, artists and critics are admitted to have been more subtle and fastidious than most curates or tradesmen, in the matter of morals the curates and tradesmen are allowed to know better. In this one respect their sensibilities are to be preferred; in all others they modestly confess themselves inferior to the greatest minds of the ages. Things that seemed beautiful or interesting or amusing to Shakespeare or Plato, to Chaucer or Aristophanes, they know, for certain, to be evil. And since they are evil they are not to be mentioned; discussion of them even—since they are quite sure that they are evil—is a crime. Now the prevention of crime is a duty of the state; so very few of the world's great masterpieces could have been published for the first time in modern England; and it has been impossible for Mr. Bickley Rogers to give us even a translation of the Lysistrata.

Were Aristophanes alive and publishing now, not only would his plays be vetoed by the Censor for indelicacy, and boycotted by the libraries, he would be in personal danger on another account; for a judge of the High Court could surely be found to sentence the author of The Birds to six months' hard labour for blasphemy. Mr. Rogers, therefore, who made this translation, not in the Athens of Plato, but in the London of Podsnap—in 1878, to be exact—is not much to be blamed for having allowed it to bear the mark of its age. Nevertheless, though pardonable, his compromise is deplorable, since it robs this translation of precisely that quality which gives to most of the others their high importance. For Mr. Rogers is one of those who during the last five-and-twenty years have been busy awakening us to a new sense of the possibilities of life. His share in that task has been to express and restate, in a form appreciable by the modern mind, some of the adventures and discoveries of the Hellenic genius. He is one of those scholars who, consciously or unconsciously, have joined hands with the boldest spirits of the age, and, by showing what the Greeks thought and felt, have revealed to us new worlds of thought and feeling. Now, to write like the sociologists, the subject of the Lysistrata is the fundamental nature and necessity of the interdependence of the sexes. But what Aristophanes thought and felt about the matter is just what we shall not find in this translation. For instance, the scene between Cinesias and Myrrhina is essential to a perfect understanding of the play, but the latter part of it (ll. 905-60) is not so much as paraphrased here. And so the spirit languishes; it could flourish only in the body created for it by the poet, and that body has been mutilated.

This version, then, fails to bring out the profound, comic conception that gives unity and significance to the original; nevertheless, it has something more than such literary interest as may be supposed to belong to any work by Mr. Rogers. The comic poet offers matter worthy the consideration of politicians and political controversialists, and this the translator has rendered fearlessly and well. For the Lysistrata is a political play, and cannot be discussed profitably apart from its political ideas and arguments. It can no more be treated as pure literature than the poetry of Keats can be treated as anything else. Frankly "pacificist," and to some extent "feminist," hostile, at any rate, to arrogant virility, it sounds in its ideas and arguments oddly familiar to modern ears; and, in the interest of those ears, it may be worth pausing a moment to consider the circumstances in which it was produced.

Some eighteen months earlier—towards the end of 413 B.C.—had come news of the most stunning disaster that was to befall Athens till the final catastrophe at Aegospotami. The greatest armament ever assembled by a Greek state had been annihilated, literally, before Syracuse: the city, itself, was in danger. For that not the less was Aristophanes permitted to produce in the state theatre at the public cost his fiercely anti-militarist and anti-imperialist play. Was it the best, or one of the two or three best, comedies of the year? That was what the Athenians wanted to know. If it was, of course it ought to be presented.

During this long and horrible war (it lasted twenty-eight years), power, as was to be expected, slipped into the hands of vile and violent demagogues, of men who by rhetoric and intrigue induced the people more than once to reject on fair occasions reasonable terms, who in 420, guided by Alcibiades, contrived by an infamous stratagem to upset the Peace of Nicias, and by a combination of evil motives—private interest, public vanity, vindictiveness, greed, and sentimentality—prolonged the war until it ended in the ruin of the city and the irreparable debasement of ancient civilization. These men, as may be supposed, were the butts of our poet's bitterest satire and most furious invective. Yet even they, though incessantly attacked and exposed, never succeeded in prohibiting, and perhaps never wished to prohibit, the performance of his plays.

It has been said that Athens attempted to impose her civilization on the Hellenic world and became barbarous in the attempt. There is, of course, much truth in this. To wage war successfully a state must make itself to some extent barbarous; and the Peloponnesian War ended the progressive phase of Greek culture. The state conquered by Rome was something unrecognizably inferior to the state that Pericles so recklessly jeopardized; and it is interesting to note that the conquest of Greece by Rome did far more for the spread of Greek civilization and culture than any of those projects of aggrandizement and expansion so artfully devised by Athenian imperialists. No reader of Thucydides can doubt that as the struggle intensified Athenian civility diminished: yet, when we remember that even in the throes of war the right of the individual to live and speak freely was not lost, that, on the contrary, during the war, came forth some of the finest and freest criticism with which the world has ever been blest, we shall incline to suspect that even in her decline Athens was decidedly more civilized than most states at their apogee.

ὁ δε ἁνεξἑταστος βἱος οὑ βιωτὁς [Greek: ho de anexetastos bios ou biôtos], said Socrates—a life unsifted is a life unspent. Because the Athenians really believed this, because they saw dimly that good states of mind, not wealth nor comfort nor power nor prestige—which are but means—but states of mind, which alone are good in themselves, are the proper end of existence, they refused to sacrifice individual liberty to any god of efficiency. It was to the mind of the individual they looked for absolute good: the state was but a means. Therefore at Athens, after twenty years of stultifying war, the right of the individual to free expression and self-development was scrupulously respected. In this truly liberal atmosphere vivid and original characters grew and flourished, thought and felt, and of their thoughts and feelings have left such record as still charms and tantalizes less fortunate generations. This belief in personal liberty, this respect for the individual mind as the sole source of truth and beauty, made possible Athens, a small short-lived state in the distant past, an ideal towards which the best minds are ever looking back, the glory and grand achievement of the Western world.[11]

Our enthusiasm for that Athenian spirit, which respected art and gave free rein to criticism even at the most desperate moment of the city's history, has carried us a little, but only a little, away from the matter in hand—the political ideas of the Lysistrata. Political wisdom, like human folly, seems to obey a law known to men of science as "the Conservation of Energy"—quantity and quality are permanent, form alone changes. It is the Aristophanic method that differs so greatly from that of most modern satirists. For Aristophanes does not confine himself to driving the blade of his wit into the rotten parts of a bad case; he does not score intellectual points only. His method is more fundamental. A clever controversialist can always find joints in the harness of his foe. When Mr. Shaw meets Mr. Belloc in public controversy it is hard to say which makes the greater number of hits. Even harder is it to say that the cause of truth has been much advanced. One may hold, fairly enough, that both sides have been made ludicrous; but it is still fairer to admit that neither has been utterly discredited. If Aristophanes never succeeded in ruining a party, at least he succeeded in discrediting some pestilent opinions. This he did, not so much by a brisk display of intellectual handiness, as by showing that a pompous superstructure was baseless. He makes us feel a position to be absurd, instead of merely thinking certain things in it silly.

The superior, sneering official has not escaped shrewd knocks from the wits of every age. There is a type of mind which, under every form of government, pushes to the front by sheer lack of virtue. Wherever life has become sufficiently mechanical to support a bureaucracy, there will the Poloniuses and Shallows gather, and, wherever there is an official caste, there will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the self-complacent magistrate has been the butt of the ages, Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, have alone revealed his essential nullity, because they alone have looked for something essential beneath the accidental. Nothing could be simpler than the character of Polonius; nothing could be more subtle. A rap here, a stab there, and the soul of a minister is exposed. We have come to see, we scarcely know how, that, if he ever had one, he has lost it. Some idea of the simplicity and subtlety of the Aristophanic method may be gathered from the following scene, but to illustrate the extravagance and beauty of the form, or the profundity of the conception, no quotation can suffice. Lysistrata has unfolded her famous scheme for stopping the war: there is to be a sympathetic strike; the women of all the combatant states, principals and allies, are to withhold their services until the war has been stopped:

Lysistrata [ending a speech]. Then shall the people revere us and honour us,

givers of Joy, and givers of Peace.

Magistrate. Tell us the mode and the means of your doing it.

Lys. First we will stop the disorderly crew,

Soldiers in arms promenading and marketing.

Stratyllis [leader of the chorus of women]. Yea, by divine Aphrodite, 'tis true.

Lys. Now in the market you see them like Corybants,

jangling about with their armour of mail.

Fiercely they stalk in the midst of the crockery,

sternly parade by the cabbage and kail.

Mag. Right, for a soldier should always be soldierly!

Lys. Troth, 'tis a mighty ridiculous jest,

Watching them haggle for shrimps in the market-place,

grimly accoutred with shield and with crest.

* * * * *

Strat. Comes, like a Tereus, a Thracian irregular,

shaking his dart and his target to boot;

Off runs a shopgirl, appalled at the sight of him,

down he sits soldierly, gobbles her fruit.

Mag. You, I presume, could adroitly and gingerly

settle this intricate, tangled concern:

You in a trice could relieve our perplexities.

Lys. Certainly.

Mag. How? permit me to learn.

Lys. Just as a woman, with nimble dexterity,

thus with her hands disentangles a skein.

* * * * *

Mag. Wonderful, marvellous feats, not a doubt of it,

you with your skeins and your spindles can show;

Fools! do you really expect to unravel a

terrible war like a bundle of tow?

Lys. Ah, if you only could manage your politics

just in the way that we deal with a fleece!

* * * * *