AMONG
FAMOUS BOOKS
BY
JOHN KELMAN, D.D.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
Printed in 1912
PREFACE
The object of the following lectures is twofold. They were delivered in the first place for the purpose of directing the attention of readers to books whose literary charm and spiritual value have made them conspicuous in the vast literature of England. Such a task, however, tends to be so discursive as to lose all unity, depending absolutely upon the taste of the individual, and the chances of his experience in reading.
I have accordingly taken for the general theme of the book that constant struggle between paganism and idealism which is the deepest fact in the life of man, and whose story, told in one form or another, provides the matter of all vital literature. This will serve as a thread to give continuity of thought to the lectures, and it will keep them near to central issues.
Having said so much, it is only necessary to add one word more by way of explanation. In quest of the relations between the spiritual and the material, or (to put it otherwise) of the battle between the flesh and the spirit, we shall dip into three different periods of time: (1) Classical, (2) Sixteenth Century, (3) Modern. Each of these has a character of its own, and the glimpses which we shall have of them ought to be interesting in their own right. But the similarity between the three is more striking than the contrast, for human nature does not greatly change, and its deepest struggles are the same in all generations.
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
LECTURE II
LECTURE III
LECTURE IV
LECTURE V
LECTURE VI
LECTURE VII
LECTURE VIII
LECTURE IX
[Mr. G.K. Chesterton's Point of View]
LECTURE X
LECTURE I
THE GODS OF GREECE
It has become fashionable to divide the rival tendencies of modern thought into the two classes of Hellenistic and Hebraistic. The division is an arbitrary and somewhat misleading one, which has done less than justice both to the Greek and to the Hebrew genius. It has associated Greece with the idea of lawless and licentious paganism, and Israel with that of a forbidding and joyless austerity. Paganism is an interesting word, whose etymology reminds us of a time when Christianity had won the towns, while the villages still worshipped heathen gods. It is difficult to define the word without imparting into our thought of it the idea of the contrast between Christian dogma and all other religious thought and life. This, however, would be an extremely unfair account of the matter, and, in the present volume, the word will be used without reference either to nationality or to creed, and it will stand for the materialistic and earthly tendency as against spiritual idealism of any kind. Obviously such paganism as this, is not a thing which has died out with the passing of heathen systems of religion. It is terribly alive in the heart of modern England, whether formally believing or unbelieving. Indeed there is the twofold life of puritan and pagan within us all. A recent well-known theologian wrote to his sister: "I am naturally a cannibal, and I find now my true vocation to be in the South Sea Islands, not after your plan, to be Arnold to a troop of savages, but to be one of them, where they are all selfish, lazy, and brutal." It is this universality of paganism which gives its main interest to such a study as the present. Paganism is a constant and not a temporary or local phase of human life and thought, and it has very little to do with the question of what particular dogmas a man may believe or reject.
Thus, for example, although the Greek is popularly accepted as the type of paganism and the Christian of idealism, yet the lines of that distinction have often been reversed. Christianity has at times become hard and cold and lifeless, and has swept away primitive national idealisms without supplying any new ones. The Roman ploughman must have missed the fauns whom he had been accustomed to expect in the thicket at the end of his furrow, when the new faith told him that these were nothing but rustling leaves. When the swish of unseen garments beside the old nymph-haunted fountain was silenced, his heart was left lonely and his imagination impoverished. Much charm and romance vanished from his early world with the passing of its pagan creatures, and indeed it is to this cause that we must trace the extraordinarily far-reaching and varied crop of miraculous legends of all sorts which sprang up in early Catholic times. These were the protest of unconscious idealism against the bare world from which its sweet presences had vanished.
"In th' olde dayes of the King Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queen, with hir joly companye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;
This was the olde opinion, as I rede.
But now can no man see none elves mo.
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of limitours and othere holy freres,
This maketh that there been no fayeryes.
For ther as wont to walken was an elf,
Ther walketh now the limitour himself."
Against this impoverishment the human revolt was inevitable, and it explains the spirit in such writers as Shelley and Goethe. Children of nature, who love the sun and the grass, and are at home upon the earth, their spirits cry for something to delight and satisfy them, nearer than speculations of theology or cold pictures of heaven. Wordsworth, in his famous lines, has expressed the protest in the familiar words:—
"Great God, I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."
The early classic thought which found its most perfect expression in the mythology of Greece was not originally or essentially pagan. It was humanistic, and represented the response of man's spirit to that free and beautiful spirit which he found in nature around him. All such symbolism of Greek religion as that of the worship of Dionysus and Ceres, shows this. In these cults the commonest things of life, the wine and corn wherewith man sustained himself, assumed a higher and richer meaning. Food and drink were not mere sensual gratifications, but divine gifts, as they are in the twenty-third Psalm; and the whole material world was a symbol and sacrament of spiritual realities and blessings. Similarly the ritual of Eleusis interpreted man's common life into a wonderful world of mystic spirituality. Thus there was a great fund of spiritual insight of the finest and most beautiful sort in the very heart of that life which has thoughtlessly been adopted as the type of paganism.
Yet the history of Greece affords the explanation and even the justification of the popular idea. The pagan who is in us all, tends ever to draw us downwards from sacramental and symbolic ways of thinking to the easier life of the body and the earth. On the one hand, for blood that is young and hot, the life of sense is overwhelming. On the other hand, for the weary toiler whose mind is untrained, the impression of the world is that of heavy clay. Each in his own way finds idealism difficult to retain. The spirituality of nature floats like a dream before the mind of poets, and is seen now and then in wistful glimpses by every one; but it needs some clearer and less elusive form, as well as some definite association with conscience, if it is to be defended against the pull of the green earth. It has been well said that, for the Greek, God was the view; but when the traveller goes forward into the view, he meets with many things which it is dangerous to identify with God. For the young spirit of the early times the temptation to earthliness was overwhelming. The world was fair, its gates were open, and its barriers all down. Men took from literature and from religion just as much of spirituality as they understood and as little as they desired, and the effect was swift and inevitable in that degeneration which reached its final form in the degraded sensuality of the later Roman Empire.
The confusing element in all such inquiry lies in the fact that one can never get an unmixed paganism nor a perfect idealism. Just as the claims of body and spirit are in our daily life inextricably interwoven, so the Greek thought hung precariously between the two, and was always more or less at the mercy of the individual interpreter and of the relative strength of his tastes and passions. So we shall find it all through the course of these studies. It would be preposterous to deny some sort of idealism to almost any pagan who has ever lived. The contrast between pagan and idealist is largely a matter of proportion and preponderating tendency: yet the lines are clear enough to enable us to work with this distinction and to find it valuable and illuminating.
The fundamental fact to remember in studying any of the myths of Greece is, that we have here a composite and not a simple system of thought and imagination. There are always at least two layers: the primitive, and the Olympian which came later. The primitive conceptions were those afforded by the worship of ghosts, of dead persons, and of animals. Miss Jane Harrison has pointed out in great detail the primitive elements which lingered on through the Olympian worship. Perhaps the most striking instance which she quotes is the Anthesteria, or festival of flowers, at the close of which the spirits were dismissed with the formula, "Depart, ye ghosts, the revels now are ended." Mr. Andrew Lang has suggested that the animals associated with gods and goddesses (such as the mouse which is found in the hand, or the hair, or beside the feet of the statues of Apollo, the owl of Minerva, etc.) are relics of the earlier worship. This would satisfactorily explain much of the disreputable element which lingered on side by side with the noble thoughts of Greek religion. The Olympians, a splendid race of gods, representing the highest human ideals, arrived with the Greeks; but for the sake of safety, or of old association, the primitive worship was retained and blended with the new. In the extreme case of human sacrifice, it was retained in the form of surrogates—little wooden images, or even actual animals, being sacrificed in lieu of the older victims. But all along the line, while the new gods brought their spiritual conceptions, the older ones held men to a cruder and more fleshly way of thinking. There is a similar blend of new and old in all such movements as that of the Holy Grail and the Arthurian legends, where we can see the combination of Christian and pagan elements so clearly as to be able to calculate the moral and spiritual effect of each. Thus we have in the early Greek mythology much of real paganism involved in the retention of the old and earth-bound gods which attached themselves to the nobler Olympians as they came, and dragged them down to the ancient level.
This blending may be seen very clearly in the mythology of Homer and Hesiod. There it has been so thorough that the only trace of superposition which we can find is the succession of the dynasties of Chronos and Jupiter. The result is the most appalling conception of the morality of celestial society. No earthly state could hope to continue for a decade upon the principles which governed the life of heaven; and man, if he were to escape the sudden retributions which must inevitably follow anything like an imitation of his gods, must live more decently than they.
Now Homer was, in a sense, the Bible of the Greeks, and as society improved in morals, and thought was directed more and more fearlessly towards religious questions, the puzzle as to the immoralities of the gods became acute. The religious and intellectual developments of the sixth century B.C. led to various ways of explaining the old stories. Sophocles is conciliatory, conceiving religion in a sunny good temper which will make the best of the situation whatever it is. Æschylus is sombre and deeply tragic, while yet he remains orthodox on the side of the gods. But Euripides is angry at the old scandals, and in the name of humanity his scepticism rises in protest.
It may be interesting, at this point, to glance for a little at the various theories which have been brought forward to explain the myths. The commonest of all such theories is that the divine personalities stand for the individual powers of nature. Most especially, the gods and goddesses symbolise the sun, moon, and stars, night and morning, summer and winter, and the general story of the year. No one will deny that the personification of Nature had a large share in all mythology. The Oriental mythologies rose to a large extent in this fashion. The Baals of Semitic worship all stood for one or other of the manifestations of the fructifying powers of nature, and the Chinese dragon is the symbol of the spiritual mystery of life suggested by the mysterious and protean characteristics of water. It is very natural that this should be so, and every one who has ever felt the power of the sun in the East will sympathise with Turner's dying words, "The sun, he is God."
As a key to mythology this theory was especially associated with the name of Plutarch among ancient writers, and it has been accepted more or less completely by a vast number of moderns. In the late Sir George Cox's fascinating stories it was run to utter absurdity. The story is beautifully told in every case, and when we have enjoyed it and felt something of the exquisiteness of the conception and of the variety and range of thought exhibited in the fertile minds of those who had first told it, Sir George Cox draws us back sharply to the assertion that all we have been hearing really meant another phase of sunset or sunrise, until we absolutely rebel and protest that the effect is unaccountable upon so meagre a cause. It is an easy method of dealing with folk-lore. If you take the rhyme of Mary and her little lamb, and call Mary the sun and the lamb the moon, you will achieve astonishing results, both in religion and astronomy, when you find that the lamb followed Mary to school one day. This nature element, however, had undoubtedly a very considerable part in the origin of myths, and when Max Müller combines it with philology it opens a vast field of extraordinarily interesting interpretations resting upon words and their changes.
A further theory of myths is that which regards them as the stories of races told as if they had been the lives of individuals. This, as is well known, has had permanent effects upon the interpretation not only of Greek but of Hebrew ancient writings, and it throws light upon some of those chapters of Genesis which, without it, are but strings of forgotten and unpronounceable names.
But beyond all such explanations, after we have allowed for them in every possible way, there remains a conviction that behind these fascinating stories there is a certain irreducible remainder of actual fact. Individual historic figures, seen through the mists of time, walk before our eyes in the dawn. Long before history was written men lived and did striking deeds. Heroic memories and traditions of such distinguished men passed in the form of fireside tales from one generation to another through many centuries. Now they come to us, doubtless hugely exaggerated and so far away from their originals as to be unrecognisable, and yet, after all, based upon things that happened. For the stories have living touches in them which put blood into the glorious and ghostly figures, and when we come upon a piece of genuine human nature there is no possibility of mistaking it. This thing has been born, not manufactured: nor has any portrait that is lifelike been drawn without some model. Thus, through all the mist and haze of the past, we see men and women walking in the twilight—dim and uncertain forms indeed, yet stately and heroic.
Now all this has a bearing upon the main subject of our present study. Meteorology and astronomy are indeed noble sciences, but the proper study of mankind is man. While, no doubt, the sources of all early folk-lore are composite, yet it matters greatly for the student of these things whether the beginnings of religious thought were merely in the clouds, or whether they had their roots in the same earth whereon we live and labour. The heroes and great people of the early days are eternal figures, because each new generation gives them a resurrection in its own life and experience. They have eternal human meanings, beneath whatever pageantry of sun and stars the ancient heroes passed from birth to death. Soon everything of them is forgotten except the ideas about human life for which they stand. Then each of them becomes the expression of a thought common to humanity, and therefore secure of its immortality to the end of time; for the undying interest is the human interest, and all ideas which concern the life of man are immortal while man's race lasts. In the case of such legends as those we are discussing, it is probable that beyond the mere story some such ideal of human life was suggested from the very first. Certainly, as time went on, the ideal became so identified with the hero, that to thoughtful men he came to stand for a particular idealism of human experience. Thus Pater speaks of Dionysus as from first to last a type of second birth, opening up the hope of a possible analogy between the resurrections of nature and something else, reserved for human souls. "The beautiful, weeping creatures, vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to pieces, and rejuvenescent again at last, like a tender shoot of living green out of the hardness and stony darkness of the earth, becomes an emblem or ideal of chastening and purification, and of final victory through suffering." This theory would also explain the fact that one nation's myths are not only similar to, but to a large extent practically identical with, those of other nations. There is a common stock of ideas supplied by the common elements of human nature in all lands and times; and these, when finely expressed, produce a common fund of ideals which will appeal to the majority of the human race.
Thus mythology was originally simple storytelling. But men, even in the telling of the story, began to find meanings for it beyond the mere narration of events; and thus there arose in connection with all stories that were early told, a certain number of judgments of what was high and admirable in human nature. These were not grounded upon philosophical or scientific bases, but upon the bed-rock of man's experience. Out of these judgments there grew the great ideals which from first to last have commanded the spirit of man.
In this connection it is interesting to remember that in Homer the men were regarded as the means of revealing ideas and characters, and not as mere natural objects in themselves. The things among which they lived are described and known by their appearances; the men are known by their words and deeds. "There is no inventory of the features of men, or of fair women, as there is in the Greek poets of the decline or in modern novels. Man is something different from a curious bit of workmanship that delights the eye. He is a 'speaker of words and a doer of deeds,' and his true delineation is in speech and action, in thought and emotion." Thus, from the first, ideas are the central and important element. They spring from and cling to stories of individual human lives, and the finest of them become ideals handed down for the guidance of the future race. The myths, with their stories of gods and men, and their implied or declared religious doctrines, are but the forms in which these ideals find expression. The ideals remain, but the forms of their expression change, advancing from cruder to finer and from more fanciful to more exactly true, with the advance of thought and culture. Meanwhile, the ideals are above the world,—dwelling, like Plato's, in heaven,—and there are always two alternatives for every man. He may go back either with deliberate intellectual assent, or passion-led in sensual moods, to the powers of nature and the actual human stories in their crude and earthly form; or he may follow the idealisation of human experience, and discover and adopt the ideals of which the earthly stories and the nature processes are but shadows and hints. In the former case he will be a pagan; in the latter, a spiritual idealist. In what remains of this lecture, we shall consider four of the most famous Greek legends—those of Prometheus, Medusa, Orpheus, and Apollo—in the light of what has just been stated.
Prometheus, in the early story, is a Titan, who in the heavenly war had fought on the side of Zeus. It is, however, through the medium of the later story that Prometheus has exercised his eternal influence upon the thought of men. In this form of the legend he appears constantly living and striving for man's sake as the foe of God. We hear of him making men and women of clay and animating them with celestial fire, teaching them the arts of agriculture, the taming of horses, and the uses of plants. Again we hear of Zeus, wearied with the race of men—the new divinity making a clean sweep, and wishing to begin with better material. Zeus is the lover of strength and the despiser of weakness, and from the earth with its weak and pitiful mortals he takes away the gift of fire, leaving them to perish of cold and helplessness. Then it is that Prometheus climbs to heaven, steals back the fire in his hollow cane, and brings it down to earth again. For this benefaction to the despised race Zeus has him crucified, fixed for thirty thousand years on a rock in the Asian Caucasus, where, until Herakles comes to deliver him, the vulture preys upon his liver.
Such a story tempts the allegorist, and indeed the main drift of its meaning is unmistakable. Cornutus, a contemporary of Christ, explained it "of forethought, the quick inventiveness of human thought chained to the painful necessities of human life, its liver gnawed unceasingly by cares." In the main, and as a general description, this is quite unquestionable. Prometheus is the prototype of a thousand other figures of the same kind, not in mythology only, but in history, which tell the story of the spiritual effort of man frustrated and brought to earth. It is the story of Tennyson's youth who
"Rode a horse with wings that would have flown
But that his heavy rider bore him down."
Only, in the Prometheus idea, it is not a man's senses, as in Tennyson's poem, but the outward necessity of things, the heavy and cruel powers of nature around him, that prove too much for his aspirations. In this respect the story is singularly characteristic of the Greek spirit. That spirit was always daring with truth, feeling the risks of knowledge and gladly taking them, passionately devoted to the love of knowledge for its own sake.
The legend has, however, a deeper significance than this. One of the most elemental questions that man can ask is, What is the relation of the gods to human inquiry and freedom of thought? There always has been a school of thinkers who have regarded knowledge as a thing essentially against the gods. The search for knowledge thus becomes a phase of Titanism; and wherever it is found, it must always be regarded in the light of a secret treasure stolen from heaven against the will of contemptuous or jealous divinities. On the other hand, knowledge is obviously the friend of man. Prometheus is man's champion, and no figure could make a stronger appeal than his. Indeed, in not a few respects he approaches the Christian ideal, and must have brought in some measure the same solution to those who were able to receive it. Few touches in literature, for instance, are finer than that in which he comforts the daughters of Ocean, speaking to them from his cross.
The idea of Titanism has become the commonplace of poets. It is familiar in Milton, Byron, Shelley, and countless others, and Goethe tells us that the fable of Prometheus lived within him. Many of the Titanic figures, while they appeared to be blaspheming, were really fighting for truth and justice. The conception of the gods as jealous and contemptuous was not confined to the Greek mythology, but has appeared within the pale of Christian faith as well as in all heathen cults. Nature, in some of its aspects, seems to justify it. The great powers appear to be arrayed against man's efforts, and present the appearance of cruel and bullying strength. Evidently upon such a theory something must go, either our faith in God or our faith in humanity; and when faith has gone we shall be left in the position either of atheists or of slaves. There have been those who accepted the alternative and went into the one camp or the other according to their natures; but the Greek legend did not necessitate this. There was found, as in Æschylus, a hint of reconciliation, which may be taken to represent that conviction so deep in the heart of humanity, that there is "ultimate decency in things," if one could only find it out; although knowledge must always remain dangerous, and may at times cost a man dear.
The real secret lies in the progress of thought in its conceptions of God and life. Nature, as we know and experience it, presents indeed an appalling spectacle against which everything that is good in us protests. God, so long as He is but half understood, is utterly unpardonable; and no man yet has succeeded in justifying the ways of God to men. But "to understand all is to forgive all"—or rather, it is to enter into a larger view of life, and to discover how much there is in us that needs to be forgiven. This is the wonderful story which was told by the Hebrews so dramatically in their Book of Job; and the phases through which that drama passes might be taken as the completest commentary on the myth of Prometheus which ever has been or can be written.
In two great battlegrounds of the human spirit the problem raised by Prometheus has been fought out. On the ground of science, who does not know the defiant and Titanic mood in which knowledge has at times been sought? The passion for knowing flames through the gloom and depression and savagery of the darker moods of the student. Difficulties are continually thrust into the way of knowledge. The upper powers seem to be jealous and outrageously thwarting, and the path of learning becomes a path of tears and blood. That is all that has been reached by many a grim and brave student spirit. But there is another possible explanation; and there are those who have attained to a persuasion that the gods have made knowledge difficult in order that the wise may also be the strong.
The second battleground is that of philanthropy. Here also there has been an apparently reasonable Titanism. Men have struggled in vain, and then protested in bitterness, against the waste and the meaninglessness of the human débâcle. The only aspect of the powers above them has seemed to many noble spirits that of the sheer cynic. He that sitteth in the heavens must be laughing indeed. In Prometheus the Greek spirit puts up its daring plea for man. It pleads not for pity merely, but for the worth of human nature. The strong gods cannot be justified in oppressing man upon the plea that might is right, and that they may do what they please. The protest of Prometheus, echoed by Browning's protest of Ixion, appeals to the conscience of the world as right; and, kindling a noble Titanism, puts the divine oppressor in the wrong. Finally, there dawns over the edge of the ominous dark, the same hope that Prometheus vaguely hinted to the Greek. To him who has understood the story of Calvary, the ultimate interpretation of all human suffering is divine love. That which the cross of Prometheus in all its outrageous cruelty yet hints as in a whisper, the Cross of Christ proclaims to the end of time, shouting down the centuries from its blood and pain that God is love, and that in all our affliction He is afflicted.
Another myth of great beauty and far-reaching significance is that of Medusa. It is peculiarly interesting on account of its double edge, for it shows us both the high possibilities of ideal beauty and the deepest depths of pagan horror. Robert Louis Stevenson tells us how, as he hung between life and death in a flooded river of France, looking around him in the sunshine and seeing all the lovely landscape, he suddenly felt the attack of the other side of things. "The devouring element in the universe had leaped out against me, in this green valley quickened by a running stream. The bells were all very pretty in their way, but I had heard some of the hollow notes of Pan's music. Would the wicked river drag me down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time?" It was in this connection that he gave us that striking and most suggestive phrase, "The beauty and the terror of the world." It is this combination of beauty and terror for which the myth of Medusa stands. It finds its meaning in a thousand instances. On the one hand, it is seen in such ghastly incidents as those in which the sheer horror of nature's action, or of man's crime, becomes invested with an illicit beauty, and fascinates while it kills. On the other hand, it is seen in all of the many cases in which exquisite beauty proves also to be dangerous, or at least sinister. "The haunting strangeness in beauty" is at once one of the most characteristic and one of the most tragic things in the world.
There were three sisters, the Gorgons, who dwelt in the Far West, beyond the stream of ocean, in that cold region of Atlas where the sun never shines and the light is always dim. Medusa was one of them, the only mortal of the trio. She was a monster with a past, for in her girlhood she had been the beautiful priestess of Athene, golden-haired and very lovely, whose life had been devoted to virgin service of the goddess. Her golden locks, which set her above all other women in the desire of Neptune, had been her undoing: and when Athene knew of the frailty of her priestess, her vengeance was indeed appalling. Each lock of the golden hair was transformed into a venomous snake. The eyes that had been so love-inspiring were now bloodshot and ferocious. The skin, with its rose and milk-white tenderness, had changed to a loathsome greenish white. All that remained of Medusa was a horrid thing, a mere grinning mask with protruding beast-like tusks and tongue hanging out. So dreadful was the aspect of the changed priestess, that her face turned all those who chanced to catch sight of it to stone. There is a degree of hideousness which no eyes can endure; and so it came to pass that the cave wherein she dwelt, and all the woods around it, were full of men and wild beasts who had been petrified by a glance of her,—grim fossils immortalised in stone,—while the snakes writhed and the red eyes rolled, waiting for another victim.
This was not a case into which any hope of redemption could enter, and there was nothing for it but to slay her. To do this, Perseus set out upon his long journey, equipped with the magic gifts of swiftness and invisibility, and bearing on his arm the shield that was also a mirror. The whole picture is infinitely dreary. As he travels across the dark sea to the land where the pillars of Atlas are visible far off, towering into the sky, the light decreases. In the murky and dangerous twilight he forces the Graiai, those grey-haired sisters with their miserable fragmentary life, to bestir their aged limbs and guide him to the Gorgons' den. By the dark stream, where the yellow light brooded everlastingly, he reached at last that cave of horrors. Well was it then for Perseus that he was invisible, for the snakes that were Medusa's hair could see all round. But at that time Medusa was asleep and the snakes asleep, and in the silence and twilight of the land where there is "neither night nor day, nor cloud nor breeze nor storm," he held the magic mirror over against the monster, beheld her in it without change or injury to himself, severed the head, and bore it away to place it on Athene's shield.
It is very interesting to notice how Art has treated the legend. It was natural that so vivid an image should become a favourite alike with poets and with sculptors, but there was a gradual development from the old hideous and terrible representations, back to the calm repose of a beautiful dead face. This might indeed more worthily record the maiden's tragedy, but it missed entirely the thing that the old myth had said. The oldest idea was horrible beyond horror, for the darker side of things is always the most impressive to primitive man, and sheer ugliness is a category with which it is easy to work on simple minds. The rudest art can achieve such grotesque hideousness long before it can depict beauty. Later, as we have seen, Art tempered the face to beauty, but in so doing forgot the meaning of the story. It was the old story that has been often told, of the fair and frail one who had fallen among the pitiless. For her there was no compassion either in mortals or in immortals. It was the tragedy of sweet beauty desecrated and lost, the petrifying horror of which has found its most unflinching modern expression in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Corruptio optimi pessima.
To interpret such stories as these by any reference to the rising sun, or the rivalry between night and dawn, is simply to stultify the science of interpretation. It may, indeed, have been true that most of those who told and heard the tale in ancient times accepted it in its own right, and without either the desire or the thought of further meanings. Yet, even told in that fashion, as it clung to memory and imagination, it must continually have reminded men of certain features of essential human nature, which it but too evidently recorded. Here was one of the sad troop of soulless women who appear in the legends of all the races of mankind. Medusa had herself been petrified before she turned others to stone. The horror that had come upon her life had been too much to bear, and it had killed her heart within her.
So far of passion and the price the woman's heart has paid for it. But this story has to do also with Athene, on whose shield Medusa's head must rest at last. For it is not passion only, but knowledge, that may petrify the soul. Indeed, the story of passion can only do this when the dazzling glamour of temptation has passed, and in place of it has come the cold knowledge of remorse. Then the sight of one's own shame, and, on a wider scale, the sight of the pain and the tragedy of the world, present to the eyes of every generation the spectacle of victims standing petrified like those who had seen too much at the cave's mouth in the old legend.
It is peculiarly interesting to contrast the story of Medusa with its Hebrew parallel in Lot's wife. Both are women presumably beautiful, and both are turned to stone. But while the Greek petrifaction is the result of too direct a gaze upon the horrible, the Hebrew is the result of too loving and desirous a gaze upon the coveted beauty of the world. Nothing could more exactly represent and epitomise the diverse genius of the nations, and we understand the Greek story the better for the strong contrast with its Hebrew parallel. To the Greek, ugliness was dangerous; and the horror of the world, having no explanation nor redress, could but petrify the heart of man. To the Hebrew, the beauty of the world was dangerous, and man must learn to turn away his eyes from beholding vanity.
The legend of Medusa is a story of despair, and there is little room in it for idealism of any kind; and yet there may be some hint, in the reflecting shield of Perseus, of a brighter and more heartening truth. The horror of the world we have always with us, and for all exquisite spirits like those of the Greeks there is the danger of their being marred by the brutality of the universe, and made hard and cold in rigid petrifaction by the too direct vision of evil. Yet for such spirits there is ever some shield of faith, in whose reflection they may see the darkest horrors and yet remain flesh and blood. Those who believe in life and love, whose religion—or at least whose indomitable clinging to the beauty they have once descried—has taught them sufficient courage in dwelling upon these things, may come unscathed through any such ordeal. But for that, the story is one of sheer pagan terror. It came out of the old, dark pre-Olympian mythology (for the Gorgons are the daughters of Hades), and it embodied the ancient truth that the sorrow of the world worketh death. It is a tragic world, and the earth-bound, looking upon its tragedy, will see in it only the macabre, and feel that graveyard and spectral air which breathes about the haunted pagan sepulchre.
Another myth in which we see the contrast between essential paganism and idealism is that of Orpheus. The myth appears in countless forms and with innumerable excrescences, but in the main it is in three successive parts. The first of these tells of the sweet singer loved by all the creatures, the dear friend of all the world, whose charm nothing that lived on earth could resist, and whose spell hurt no creature whom it allured. The conception stands in sharp contrast to the ghastly statuary that adorned Medusa's precincts. Here, with a song whose sweetness surpassed that of the Sirens, nature, dead and living both (for all lived unto Orpheus), followed him with glad and loving movement. Nay, not only beasts and trees, but stones themselves and even mountains, felt in the hard heart of them the power of this sweet music. It is one of the most perfect stories ever told—the precursor of the legends that gathered round Francis of Assisi and many a later saint and artist. It is the prophecy from the earliest days of that consummation of which Isaiah was afterwards to sing and St. Paul to echo the song, when nature herself would come to the perfect reconciliation for which she had been groaning and travailing through all the years.
The second part of the story tells of the tragedy of love. Such a man as Orpheus, if he be fortunate in his love, will love wonderfully, and Eurydice is his worthy bride. Dying, bitten by a snake in the grass as she flees from danger, she descends to Hades. But the surpassing love of the sweet singer dares to enter that august shadow, not to drink the Waters of Lethe only and to forget, but also to drink the waters of Eunoe and to remember. His music charms the dead, and those who have the power of death. Even the hard-hearted monarch of hell is moved for Orpheus, who
"Drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek,
And made hell grant what love did seek."
But the rescue has one condition. He must restrain himself, must not look upon the face of his beloved though he bears her in his arms, until they have passed the region of the shadow of death, and may see one another in the sunlight of the bright earth again. The many versions of the tragic disobedience to this condition bear eloquent testimony, not certainly to any changing phase of the sky, but to the manifold aspects of human life. According to some accounts, it was the rashness of Orpheus that did the evil—love's impatience, that could not wait the fitting time, and, snatching prematurely that which was its due, sacrificed all. According to other accounts, it was Eurydice who tempted Orpheus, her love and pain having grown too hungry and blind. However that may be, the error was fatal, and on the very eve of victory all was lost. It was lost, not by any snatching back in which strong hands of hell tore his beloved from the man's grasp. Within his arms the form of Eurydice faded away, and as he clutched at her his fingers closed upon the empty air. That, too, is a law deep in the nature of things. It is by no arbitrary decree that self-restraint has been imposed on love. In this, as in all other things, a man must consent to lose his life in order to find it; and those who will not accept the conditions, will be visited by no melodramatic or violent catastrophe. Love which has broken law will simply fade away and vanish.
The third part of the story is no less interesting and significant. Maddened with this second loss, so irrevocable and yet due to so avoidable a cause, Orpheus, in restless despair, wandered about the lands. For him the nymphs had now no attractions, nor was there anything in all the world but the thought of his half-regained Eurydice, now lost for ever. His music indeed remained, nor did he cast away his lute; but it was heard only in the most savage and lonely places. At length wild Thracian women heard it, furious in the rites of Dionysus. They desired him, but his heart was elsewhere, and, in the mad reaction of their savage breasts, when he refused them they tore him limb from limb. He was buried near the river Hebrus, and his head was thrown into the stream. But as the waters bore it down, the lips whose singing had charmed the world still repeated the beloved name Eurydice to the waters as they flowed.
Here again it is as if, searching for the dead in some ancient sepulchre, we had found a living man and friend. The symbolism of the story, disentangled from detail which may have been true enough in a lesser way, is clear to every reader. It tells that love is strong as death—that old sweet assurance which the lover in Canticles also discovered. Love is indeed set here under conditions, or rather it has perceived the conditions which the order of things has set, and these conditions have been violated. But still the voice of the severed head, crying out the beloved name as the waters bore it to the sea, speaks in its own exquisite way the final word. It gives the same assurance with the same thrill which we feel when we read the story of Herakles wrestling with death for the body of Alkestis, and winning the woman back from her very tomb.
But before love can be a match for death, it first must conquer life, and the early story of the power of Orpheus over the wild beasts, restoring, as it does, an earthly paradise in which there is nothing but gentleness, marks the conquest of life by love. All life's wildness and savagery, which seem to give the lie to love continually, are after all conquerable and may be tamed. And the lesson of it all is the great persuasion that in the depth of things life is good and not evil. When we come to the second conflict, and that love which has mastered life now pits itself against death, it goes forward to the greater adventure with a strange confidence. Who that has looked upon the face of one dearly beloved who is dead, has not known the leap of the spirit, not so much in rebellion as in demand? Love is so great a thing that it obviously ought to have this power, and somehow we are all persuaded that it has it—that death is but a puppet king, and love the master of the universe after all. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is but a faltering expression of this great assurance, yet it does express it.
For it explains to all who have ears to hear, what are the real enemies of love which can weaken it in its conflict with death. The Thracian women, those drunken bacchanals that own no law but their desires, stand for the lawless claim and attack of the lower life upon the higher. They but repeat, in exaggerated and delirious form, the sad story of the forfeiture of Eurydice. It is the touch of lawlessness, of haste, of selfishness, that costs love its victory and finally slays it, so far as love can be slain.
In this wonderful story we have a pure Greek creation in the form of one of the finest sagas of the world. The battle between the pagan and ideal aspects of life is seen in countless individual touches throughout the story; but the whole tale is one continuous symbolic warning against paganism, and a plea for idealism urged in the form of a mighty contrast. Love is here seen in its most spiritual aspect. Paganism enters with the touch of lawlessness. On the large scale the battle was fought out some centuries later, in the days of the Roman Empire, for all the world to see. The two things which give their character to the centuries from Augustus to Constantine are the persistent cry of man for immortality, and the strong lusts of the flesh which silenced it. On the smaller scale of each individual life, men and women will understand to the end of time, from their own experience, the story of Orpheus.
It is peculiarly interesting to remember that the figure of the sweet singer grew into the centre of a great religious creed. The cult of Orphism, higher and more spiritual than that of either Eleusis or Dionysus, appears as early as the sixth century B.C., and reaches its greatest in the fifth and fourth centuries. The Orphic hymns proclaim the high doctrine of the divineness of all life, and open, at least for the hopes of men, the gates of immortality. The secret societies which professed the cult had the strongest possible influence upon the thought of early Athens, but their most prominent effect is seen in Plato, who derived from them his main doctrines of pre-existence, penance, reincarnation and the final purification of the soul. Even the early Christians, who hated so bitterly many of the myths of paganism, and found in them nothing but doctrines of devils, treated this story tenderly, blended the picture of Orpheus with that of their own Good Shepherd, and found it edifying to Christian faith.
One more instance may be given in the story of Apollo, in which, more perhaps than in any other, there is an amazing combination of bad and good elements. On the one hand there are the innumerable immoralities and savageries that are found in all the records of mythology. On the other hand, he who flays Marsias alive and visits the earth with plagues is also the healer of men. He is the cosmopolitan god of the brotherhood of mankind, the spirit of wisdom whose oracle acknowledged and inspired Socrates, and, generally, the incarnation of the "glory of the Lord."
We cannot here touch upon the marvellous tales of Delos and of Delphi, nor repeat the strains that Pindar sang, sitting in his iron chair beside the shrine. This much at least we may say, that both the Apollo of Delos and the Apollo of Delphi are foreign gods, each of whom appropriated to his own use a sacred place where the ancient earth-bound religion had already established its rites. The Greeks brought with them a splendid god from their former home, but in his new shrine he was identified with a local god, very far from splendid; and this seems to be the most reasonable explanation of the inconsistency between the revolting and the beautiful elements in his worship. Pindar at least repudiated the relics of the poorer cult, and cried concerning such stories as were current then, "Oh, my tongue, fling this tale from thee; it is a hateful cleverness that slanders gods." No one who has realised the power and glory of the Eastern sun, can wonder at the identification both of the good and bad symbolism with the orb of day. Sun-worship is indeed a form of nature-worship, and there are physical reasons obvious enough for its being able to incorporate both the clean and unclean, both the deadly and the benign legends. Yet there is a splendour in it which is seen in its attraction for such minds as those of Aurelian and Julian, and which is capable of refinement in the delicate spirituality of Mithra, that worship of the essential principle of light, the soul of sunshine. In the worship of Apollo we have a combination, than which none on record is more striking, of the finest spirituality with the crudest paganism.
Here then, in the magical arena of the early world of Greece, we see in one of its most romantic forms the age-long strife between paganism and spirituality. We have taken at random four of the most popular stories of Greece. We have found in each of them pagan elements partly bequeathed by that earlier and lower earth-bound worship which preceded the Olympians, partly added in decadent days when the mind of man was turned from the heights and grovelling again. But we have seen a deeper meaning in them, far further-reaching than any story of days and nights or of years and seasons. It is a story of the aspiring spirit which is ever wistful here on the green earth (although that indeed is pleasant), and which finds its home among high thoughts, and ideas which dwell in heaven. We shall see many aspects of the same twofold thought and life, as we move about from point to point among the literature of later days. Yet we shall seldom find any phase of the conflict which has not been prophesied, or at least foreshadowed, in these legends of the dawn. The link that binds the earliest to the latest page of literature is just that human nature which, through all changes of country and of time, remains essentially the same. It is this which lends to our subject its individual as well as its historical interest. The battle is for each of us our own battle, and its victories and defeats are our own.
LECTURE II
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN
Much has been written, before and after the day of Walter Pater, concerning that singularly pure and yet singularly disappointing character, Marcus Aurelius, and his times. The ethical and religious ferment of the period has been described with great fullness and sympathy by Professor Dill. Yet it may be said, without fear of contradiction, that no book has ever been written, nor is likely ever to appear, which has conveyed to those who came under its spell a more intimate and familiar conception of that remarkable period and man than that which has been given by Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean.
Opinion is divided about the value of Pater's work, and if it be true that some of his admirers have provoked criticism by their unqualified praise, it is no less true that many of his detractors appear never to have come in contact with his mind at all. Born in 1839, he spent the greater part of his life in Queen's College, Oxford, where he died in 1894. As literary critic, humanist, and master of a thoroughly original style, he made a considerable impression upon his generation from the first; but it may be safely said that it is only now, when readers are able to look upon his work in a more spacious and leisurely way, that he and his contribution to English thought and letters have come to their own.
The family was of Dutch extraction, and while the sons of his grandfather were trained in the Roman Catholic religion, the daughters were Protestants from their childhood. His father left the Roman Catholic communion early in life, without adopting any other form of Christian faith. It is not surprising that out of so strongly marked and widely mingled a heredity there should have emerged a writer prone to symbolism and open to the sense of beauty in ritual, and yet too cosmopolitan to accept easily the conventional religious forms. Before his twentieth year he had come under the influence of Ruskin's writings, but he soon parted from that wayward and contradictory master, whose brilliant dogmatism enslaved so thoroughly, but so briefly, the taste of young England. Ruskin, however, had awakened Pater, although to a style of criticism very different from his own, and for this service we owe him much. The environment of Oxford subjected his spirit to two widely different sets of influences. On the one hand, he was in contact with such men as Jowett, Nettleship, and Thomas Hill Green: on the other hand, with Swinburne, Burne-Jones, and the pre-Raphaelites. Thus the awakened spirit felt the dominion both of a high spiritual rationalism, and of the beauty of flesh and the charm of the earth. A visit to Italy in company with Shadwell, and his study of the Renaissance there, made him an enthusiastic humanist. The immediate product of this second awakening was the Renaissance Essays, a very remarkable volume of his early work. Twelve years later, Marius the Epicurean, his second book, appeared in 1885. In Dr. Gosse, Pater has found an interpreter of rare sympathy and insight, whose appreciations of his contemporaries are, in their own right, fine contributions to modern literature.
The characteristics of his style were also those both of his thought and of his character. Dr. Gosse has summed up the reserve and shy reticence and the fastidious taste which always characterise his work, in saying that he was "one of the most exquisite, most self-respecting, the most individual prose writers of the age." Even in the matter of style he consciously respected his own individuality, refusing to read either Stevenson or Kipling for fear that their masterful strength might lead him out of his path. Certainly his bitterest enemies could not accuse him of borrowing from either of them. Mr. Kipling is apt to sacrifice everything to force, while Pater is perhaps the gentlest writer of our time. In Stevenson there is a delicate and yet vigorous human passion, but also a sense of fitness, a consciousness of style that is all his own. He is preaching, and not swearing at you, as you often feel Mr. Kipling to be doing. To preach at one may be indeed to take a great liberty, but of course much will depend upon whether the preaching is good preaching. Be that as it may, Pater is distinctive, and borrows nothing from any writer whose influence can be traced in his work. He neither swears nor preaches, but weaves about his reader a subtle film of thought, through whose gossamer all things seem to suffer a curious change, and to become harmonious and suggestive, as dark and quiet-coloured things often are. The writer does not force himself upon his readers, nor tempt even the most susceptible to imitate him; rather he presupposes himself, and dominates without appearing. His reticence, to which we have already referred, is one of his most characteristic qualities. Dr. Gosse ascribes it to a somewhat low and sluggish vitality of physical spirits. For one in this condition "the first idea in the presence of anything too vivacious is to retreat, and the most obvious form of social retreat is what we call affectation." That Pater's style has impressed many readers as affected there can be no question, and it is as unquestionable that Dr. Gosse's explanation is the true one.
His style has been much abused by critics who have found it easy to say smart things about such tempting peculiarities. We may admit at once that the writing is laboured and shows constant marks of the tool. The same criticism applies, for that matter, to much that Stevenson has written. But unless a man's style is absolutely offensive, which Pater's emphatically is not, it is a wise rule to accept it rather as a revelation of the man than as a chance for saying clever things. As one reads the work of some of our modern critics, one cannot but perceive and regret how much of pleasure and of profit their cleverness has cost them. Acknowledging his laboriousness and even his affectation, we still maintain that the style of Walter Pater is a very adequate expression of his mind. There is a calm suggestive atmosphere, a spirit half-childish and half-aged about his work. It is the work of a solemn and sensitive child, who has kept the innocence of his eye for impressions, and yet brought to his speech the experience, not of years only, but of centuries. He has many things to teach directly; but even when he is not teaching so, the air you breathe with its delicate suggestion of faint odours, the perfect taste in selection, the preferences and shrinkings and shy delights, all proclaim a real and high culture. And, after all, the most notable point in his style is just its exactness. Over-precise it may be sometimes, and even meticulous, yet that is because it is the exact expression of a delicate and subtle mind. In his Appreciations he lays down, as a first canon for style, Flaubert's principle of the search, the unwearied search, not for the smooth, or winsome, or forcible word as such, but, quite simply and honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning. It will be said in reply to any such defence that the highest art is to conceal art. That is an old saying and a hard one, and it is not possible to apply its rule in every instance. Pater's immense sense of the value of words, and his choice of exact expressions, resulted in language marvellously adapted to indicate the almost inexpressible shades of thought. When a German struggles for the utterance of some mental complexity he fashions new compounds of words; a Frenchman helps out his meaning by gesture, as the Greek long ago did by tone. Pater knows only one way of overcoming such situations, and
that is by the painful search for the unique word that he ought to use.
One result of this habit is that he has enriched our literature with a large number of pregnant phrases which, it is safe to prophesy, will take their place in the vernacular of literary speech. "Hard gem-like flame," "Drift of flowers," "Tacitness of mind,"—such are some memorable examples of the exact expression of elusive ideas. The house of literature built in this fashion is a notable achievement in the architecture of language. It reminds us of his own description of a temple of Æsculapius: "His heart bounded as the refined and dainty magnificence of the place came upon him suddenly, in the flood of early sunshine, with the ceremonial lights burning here and there, and with all the singular expression of sacred order, a surprising cleanliness and simplicity." Who would not give much to be able to say the thing he wants to say so exactly and so beautifully as that is said? Indeed the love of beauty is the key both to the humanistic thought and to the simple and lingering style of Pater's writing. If it is not always obviously simple, that is never due either to any vagueness or confusion of thought, but rather to a struggle to express precise shades of meaning which may be manifold, but which are perfectly clear to himself.
A mind so sensitive to beauty and so fastidious in judging of it and expressing it, must necessarily afford a fine arena for the conflict between the tendencies of idealism and paganism. Here the great struggle between conscience and desire, the rivalry of culture and restraint, the choice between Athens and Jerusalem, will present a peculiarly interesting spectacle. In Walter Pater both elements are strongly marked. The love of ritual, and a constitutional delight in solemnities of all kinds, was engrained in his nature. The rationalism of Green and Jowett, with its high spirituality lighting it from within, drove off the ritual for a time at least. The result of these various elements is a humanism for which he abandoned the profession of Christianity with which he had begun. Yet he could not really part from that earlier faith, and for a time he was, as Dr. Gosse has expressed it, "not all for Apollo, and not all for Christ." The same writer quotes as applicable to him an interesting phrase of Daudet's, "His brain was a disaffected cathedral," and likens him to that mysterious face of Mona Lisa, of whose fantastic enigma Pater himself has given the most brilliant and the most intricate description. From an early Christian idealism, through a period of humanistic paganism, he passed gradually and naturally back to the abandoned faith again, but in readopting it he never surrendered the humanistic gains of the time between. He accepted in their fullness both ideals, and so spiritualised his humanism and humanised his idealism. Anything less rich and complete than this could never have satisfied him. Self-denial is obviously not an end in itself; and yet the real end, the fulfilment of nature, can never by any possibility be attained by directly aiming at it, but must ever involve self-denial as a means towards its attainment. It is Pater's clear sight of the necessity of these two facts, and his lifelong attempt to reconcile them, that give him, from the ethical and religious point of view, his greatest importance.
The story of this reconciliation is Marius the Epicurean. It is a spiritual biography telling the inner history of a Roman youth of the time of Marcus Aurelius. It begins with an appreciative interpretation of the old Roman religion as it was then, and depicts the family celebrations by which the devout were wont to seek "to produce an agreement with the gods." Among the various and beautiful tableaux of that Roman life, we see the solemn thoughtful boy reading hard and becoming a precocious idealist, too old already for his years, but relieving the inward tension by much pleasure in the country and the
open air. A time of delicate health brings him and us to a temple of Æsculapius. The priesthood there is a kind of hospital college brotherhood, whose teaching and way of life inculcate a mysteriously sacramental character in all matters of health and the body.
Like all other vital youths, Marius must eat of the tree of knowledge and become a questioner of hitherto accepted views. "The tyrannous reality of things visible," and all the eager desire and delight of youth, make their strong appeal. Two influences favour the temptation. First there is his friend, Flavian the Epicurean, of the school that delights in pleasure without afterthought, and is free from the burden and restraint of conscience; and later on, The Golden Book of Apuleius, with its exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, and its search for perfectness in the frankly material life. The moral of its main story is that the soul must not look upon the face of its love, nor seek to analyse too closely the elements from which it springs. Spirituality will be left desolate if it breaks this ban, and its wiser course is to enjoy without speculation. Thus we see the youth drawn earthwards, yet with a clinging sense of far mystic reaches, which he refuses as yet to explore. The death of Flavian rudely shatters this phase of his experience, and we find him face to face with death. The section begins with the wonderful hymn of the Emperor Hadrian to his dying soul—
Dear wanderer, gipsy soul of mine,
Sweet stranger, pleasing guest and comrade of my flesh,
Whither away? Into what new land,
Pallid one, stoney one, naked one?
But the sheer spectacle and fact of death is too violent an experience for such sweet consolations, and the death of Flavian comes like a final revelation of nothing less than the soul's extinction. Not unnaturally, the next phase is a rebound into epicureanism, spiritual indeed in the sense that it could not stoop to low pleasures, but living wholly in the present none the less, with a strong and imperative appreciation of the fullness of earthly life.
The next phase of the life of Marius opens with a journey to Rome, during which he meets a second friend, the soldier Cornelius. This very distinctly drawn character fascinates the eye from the first. In him we meet a kind of earnestness which seems to interpret and fit in with the austere aspects of the landscape. It is different from that disciplined hardness which was to be seen in Roman soldiers as the result of their military training; indeed, it seems as if this were some new kind of knighthood, whose mingled austerity and blithe ness were strangely suggestive of hitherto unheard-of achievements in character.
The impression made by Rome upon the mind of Marius was a somewhat morbid one. He was haunted more or less by the thought of its passing and its eventual ruin, and he found much, both in its religion and its pleasure, to criticise. The dominant figure in the imperial city was that of Marcus Aurelius the Emperor, so famous in his day that for two hundred years after his death his image was cherished among the Penates of many pious families. Amid much that was admirable in him, there was a certain chill in his stoicism, and a sense of lights fading out into the night. His words in praise of death, and much else of his, had of course a great distinction. Yet in his private intercourse with Marcus Aurelius, Marius was not satisfied, nor was it the bleak sense that all is vanity which troubled him, but rather a feeling of mediocrity—of a too easy acceptance of the world—in the imperial philosophy. For in the companionship of Cornelius there was a foil to the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, and his friend was more truly an aristocrat than his Emperor. Cornelius did not accept the world in its entirety, either sadly or otherwise. In him there was "some inward standard ... of distinction, selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the period and the corrupt life across which they were moving together." And, apparently as a consequence of this spirit of selection, "with all the severity of Cornelius, there was a breeze of hopefulness—freshness and hopefulness—as of new morning, about him." Already, it may be, the quick intelligence of the reader has guessed what is coming. Jesus Christ said of Himself on one occasion, "For distinctions I am come into the world." Marius' criticism of the Emperor reached its climax in his disgust at the amusements of the amphitheatre, which also Marcus Aurelius accepted.
There follows a long account of Roman life and thought, with much speculation as to the ideal commonwealth. That dream of the philosophers remains for ever in the air, detached from actual experiences and institutions, but Marius felt himself passing beyond it to something in which it would be actually realised and visibly localised, "the unseen Rome on high." Thus in correcting and supplementing the philosophies, and in insisting upon some actual embodiment of them on the earth, he is groping his way point by point to Christ. The late Dean Church has said: "No one can read the wonderful sayings of Seneca, Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, without being impressed, abashed perhaps, by their grandeur. No one can read them without wondering the next moment why they fell so dead—how little response they seem to have awakened round them." It is precisely at this point that the young Christian Church found its opportunity. Pagan idealisms were indeed in the air. The Christian idealism was being realised upon the earth, and it was this with which Marius was now coming into contact.
So he goes on until he is led up to two curious houses. The first of these was the house of Apuleius, where in a subtle and brilliant system of ideas it seemed as if a ladder had been set up from earth to heaven. But Marius discovered that what he wanted was the thing itself and not its mere theory, a life of realised ideals and not a dialectic. The second house was more curious still. Much pains is spent upon the description of it with its "quiet signs of wealth, and of a noble taste," in which both colour and form, alike of stones and flowers, seemed expressive of a rare and potent beauty in the personality that inhabited them. There were inscriptions there to the dead martyrs, inscriptions full of confidence and peace. Old pagan symbols were there also—Herakles wrestling with death for possession of Alkestis, and Orpheus taming the wild beasts—blended naturally with new symbols such as the Shepherd and the sheep, and the Good Shepherd carrying the sick lamb upon his shoulder. The voice of singers was heard in the house of an evening singing the candle hymn, "Hail, Heavenly Light." Altogether there seemed here to be a combination of exquisite and obvious beauty with "a transporting discovery of some fact, or series of facts, in which the old puzzle of life had found its solution."
It was none other than the Church of the early Christian days that Marius had stumbled on, under the guidance of his new friend; and already in heart he had actually become a Christian without knowing it, for these friends of comeliness seemed to him to have discovered the secret of actualising the ideal as none others had done. At such a moment in his spiritual career it is not surprising that he should hesitate to look upon that which would "define the critical turning-point," yet he looked. He saw the blend of Greek and Christian, each at its best—the martyrs' hope, the singers' joy and health. In this "minor peace of the Church," so pure, so delicate, and so vital that it made the Roman life just then "seem like some stifling forest of bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign enchantment, out of the generations of living trees," he seemed to see the possibility of satisfaction at last. For here there was a perfect love and self-sacrifice, outwardly expressed with a mystic grace better than the Greek blitheness, and a new beauty which contrasted brightly with the Roman insipidity. It was the humanism of Christianity that so satisfied him, standing as it did for the fullness of life, in spite of all its readiness for sacrifice. And it was effective too, for it seemed to be doing rapidly what the best paganism was doing very slowly—attaining, almost without thinking about it, the realisation of the noblest ideals.
"And so it came to pass that on this morning Marius saw for the first time the wonderful spectacle—wonderful, especially, in its evidential power over himself, over his own thoughts—of those who believe. There were noticeable, among those present, great varieties of rank, of age, of personal type. The Roman ingenuus, with the white toga and gold ring, stood side by side with his slave; and the air of the whole company was, above all, a grave one, an air of recollection. Coming thus unexpectedly upon this large assembly, so entirely united, in a silence so profound, for purposes unknown to him, Marius felt for a moment as if he had stumbled by chance upon some great conspiracy. Yet that could scarcely be, for the people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel, or pattern, of a new world, from the very face of which discontent had passed away. Corresponding to the variety of human type there present, was the various expression of every form of human sorrow assuaged. What desire, what fulfilment of desire, had wrought so pathetically on the features of these ranks of aged men and women of humble condition? Those young men, bent down so discreetly on the details of their sacred service, had faced life and were glad, by some science, or light of knowledge they had, to which there had certainly been no parallel in the older world. Was some credible message from beyond 'the flaming rampart of the world'—a message of hope regarding the place of men's souls and their interest in the sum of things—already moulding anew their very bodies, and looks, and voices, now and here? At least, there was a cleansing and kindling flame at work in them, which seemed to make everything else Marius had ever known look comparatively vulgar and mean."
The spectacle of the Sacrament adds its deep impression, "bread and wine especially—pure wheaten bread, the pure white wine of the Tusculan vineyards. There was here a veritable consecration, hopeful and animating, of the earth's gifts, of old dead and dark matter itself, now in some way redeemed at last, of all that we can touch and see, in the midst of a jaded world that had lost the true sense of such things."
The sense of youth in it all was perhaps the dominating impression—the youth that was yet old as the world in experience and discovery of the true meaning of life. The young Christ was rejuvenating the world, and all things were being made new by him.
This is the climax of the book. He meets Lucian the aged, who for a moment darkens his dawning faith, but that which has come to him has been no casual emotion, no forced or spectacular conviction. He does not leap to the recognition of Christianity at first sight, but very quietly realises and accepts it as that secret after which his pagan idealism had been all the time groping. The story closes amid scenes of plague and earthquake and martyrdom in which he and Cornelius are taken prisoners, and he dies at last a Christian. "It was the same people who, in the grey, austere evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried them secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy also, holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of a martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the Church had always said, was a kind of Sacrament with plenary grace."
Such is some very brief and inadequate conception of one of the most remarkable books of our time, a book "written to illustrate the highest ideal of the æsthetic life, and to prove that beauty may be made the object of the soul in a career as pure, as concentrated, and as austere as any that asceticism inspires. Marius is an apology for the highest Epicureanism, and at the same time it is a texture which the author has embroidered with exquisite flowers of imagination, learning, and passion. Modern humanism has produced no more admirable product than this noble dream of a pursuit through life of the spirit of heavenly beauty." Nothing could be more true, so far as it goes, than this admirable paragraph, yet Pater's book is more than that. The main drift of it is the reconciliation of Hellenism with Christianity in the experience of a man "bent on living in the full stream of refined sensation," who finds Christianity in every point fulfilling the ideals of Epicureanism at its best.
The spiritual stages through which Marius passes on his journey towards this goal are most delicately portrayed. In the main these are three, which, though they recur and intertwine in his experience, yet may be fairly stated in their natural order and sequence as normal types of such spiritual progress.
The first of these stages is a certain vague fear of evil, which seems to be conscience hardly aware of itself as such. It is "the sense of some unexplored evil ever dogging his footsteps," which reached its keenest poignancy in a constitutional horror of serpents, but which is a very subtle and undefinable thing, observable rather as an undertone to his consciousness of life than as anything tangible enough to be defined or accounted for by particular causes. On the journey to Rome, the vague misgivings took shape in one definite experience. "From the steep slope a heavy mass of stone was detached, after some whisperings among the trees above his head, and rushing down through the stillness fell to pieces in a cloud of dust across the road just behind him, so that he felt the touch upon his heel." That was sufficient, just then, to rouse out of its hiding-place his old vague fear of evil—of one's "enemies." Such distress was so much a matter of constitution with him, that at times it would seem that the best pleasures of life could but be snatched hastily, in one moment's forgetfulness of its dark besetting influence. A sudden suspicion of hatred against him, of the nearness of enemies, seemed all at once to alter the visible form of things. When tempted by the earth-bound philosophy of the early period of his development, "he hardly knew how strong that old religious sense of responsibility, the conscience, as we call it, still was within him—a body of inward impressions, as real as those so highly valued outward ones—to offend against which, brought with it a strange feeling of disloyalty, as to a person." Later on, when the "acceptance of things" which he found in Marcus Aurelius had offended him, and seemed to mark the Emperor as his inferior, we find that there is "the loyal conscience within him, deciding, judging himself and every one else, with a wonderful sort of authority." This development of conscience from a vague fear of enemies to a definite court of appeal in a man's judgment of life, goes side by side with his approach to Christianity. The pagan idealism of the early days had never been able to cope with that sense of enemies, nor indeed to understand it; but in the light of his growing Christian faith, conscience disentangles itself and becomes clearly defined.
Another element in the spiritual development of Marius is that which may be called his consciousness of an unseen companion. Marius was constitutionally personel, and never could be satisfied with the dry light of pure reason, or with any impersonal ideal whatsoever. For him the universe was alive in a very real sense. At first, however, this was the vaguest of sentiments, and it needed much development before it became clear enough to act as one of the actual forces which played upon his life. We first meet with it in connection with the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and his habit of inward conversation with himself, made possible by means of the Logos, "the reason able spark in man, common to him with the gods." "There could be no inward conversation with oneself such as this, unless there were indeed some one else aware of our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or displeased at one's disposition of oneself." This, in a dim way, seemed a fundamental necessity of experience—one of those "beliefs, without which life itself must be almost impossible, principles which had their sufficient ground of evidence in that very fact." So far Marcus Aurelius. But the conviction of some august yet friendly companionship in life beyond the veil of things seen, took form for Marius in a way far more picturesque. The passage which describes it is one of the finest in the book, and may be given at length.
"Through a dreamy land he could see himself moving, as if in another life, and like another person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to point, weeping, delighted, escaping from various dangers. That prospect brought him, first of all, an impulse of lively gratitude: it was as if he must look round for some one else to share his joy with: for some one to whom he might tell the thing, for his own relief. Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted in this way or that, or at least pleasant to him, had been, through one or another long span of it, the chief delight of the journey. And was it only the resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused through his memory, that in a while suggested the question whether there had not been—besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude which in spite of ardent friendship he had perhaps loved best of all things—some other companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side throughout; doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was there at all? Must not the whole world around have faded away for him altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it?" One can see in this sense of constant companionship the untranslated and indeed the unexamined Christian doctrine of God. And, because this God is responsive to all the many-sided human experience which reveals Him, it will be an actual preparation not for Theism only, but for that complexity in unity known as the Christian Trinity. Nothing could better summarise this whole achievement in religion than Pater's apt sentence, "To have apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that it defined personal gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the shadows of the world."
The third essential development of Marius' thought is that of the City of God, which for him assumes the shape of a perfected and purified Rome, the concrete embodiment of the ideals of life and character. This is indeed the inevitable sequel of any such spiritual developments as the fear of enemies and the sense of an unseen companion. Man moves inevitably to the city, and all his ideals demand an embodiment in social form before they reach their full power and truth. In that house of life which he calls society, he longs to see his noblest dreams find a local habitation and a name. This is the grand ideal passed from hand to hand by the greatest and most outstanding of the world's seers—from Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to Dante—the ideal of the City of God. It is but little developed in the book which we are now considering, for that would be beside the purpose of so intimate and inward a history. Yet we see, as it were, the towers and palaces of this "dear City of Zeus" shining in the clear light of the early Christian time, like the break of day over some vast prospect, with the new City, as it were some celestial new Rome, in the midst of it.
These are but a few glimpses at this very significant and far-reaching book, which indeed takes for its theme the very development from pagan to Christian idealism with which we are dealing. In it, in countless bright and vivid glances, the beauty of the world is seen with virgin eye. Many phases of that beauty belong to the paganism which surrounds us as we read, yet these are purified from all elements that would make them pagan in the lower sense, and under our eyes they free themselves for spiritual flights which find their resting-place at last and become at once intelligible and permanent in the faith of Jesus Christ.
LECTURE III
THE TWO FAUSTS
It may seem strange to pass immediately from the time of Marcus Aurelius to Marlowe and Goethe, and yet the tale upon which these two poets wrought is one whose roots are very deep in history, and which revives in a peculiarly vital and interesting fashion the age-long story of man's great conflict. Indeed the saga on which it is founded belongs properly to no one period, but is the tragic drama of humanity. It tells, through all the ages, the tale of the struggle between earth and the spiritual world above it; and the pagan forms which are introduced take us back into the classical mythology, and indeed into still more ancient times.
The hero of the story must be clearly distinguished from Fust the printer, a wealthy goldsmith of Mayence, who, in the middle of the fifteenth century, was partner with Gutenberg in the new enterprise of printing. Robert Browning, in Fust and his Friends, tells us, with great vivacity, the story of the monks who tried to exorcise the magic spirits from Fust, but forgot their psalm, and so caused an awkward pause during which Fust retired and brought out a printed copy of the psalm for each of them. The only connection with magic which this Fust had, was that so long as this or any other process was kept secret, it was attributed to supernatural powers.
Faust, although a contemporary of Fust the printer, was a very different character. Unfortunately, our information about him comes almost entirely from his enemies, and their accounts are by no means sparing in abuse. Trithemius, a Benedictine abbot of Spanheim in the early part of the sixteenth century, writes of him with the most virulent contempt, as a debauched person and a criminal whose overweening vanity arrogated to itself the most preposterous supernatural powers. It would appear that he had been some sort of travelling charlatan, whose performing horse and dog were taken for evil spirits, like Esmeralda's goat in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame. Even Melanchthon and Luther seem to have shared the common view of him, and at last there was published at Frankfurt the Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus. The date of this work is 1587, and a translation of it appeared in London in 1592. It is a discursive composi tion, founded upon reminiscences of some ancient stroller who lived very much by his wits; but it took such a hold upon the imagination of the time that, by the latter part of the sixteenth century, Faust had become the necromancer par excellence. Into the Faust-book there drifted endless necromantic lore from the Middle Ages and earlier times. It seems to have had some connection with Jewish legends of magicians who invoked the Satanim, or lowest grade of elemental spirits not unlike the "elementals" of modern popular spiritualism. It was the story of a Christian selling his soul to the powers of darkness, and it had behind it one of the poems of Hrosvitha of Gandersheim which relates a similar story of an archdeacon of Cilicia of the sixth century, and also the popular tradition of Pope Sylvester the Second, who was suspected of having made the same bargain. Yet, as Lebahn says, "The Faust-legend in its complete form was the creation of orthodox Protestantism. Faust is the foil to Luther, who worsted the Devil with his ink-bottle when he sought to interrupt the sacred work of rendering the Bible into the vulgar tongue." This legend, by the way, is a peculiarly happy one, for Luther not only aimed his ink-bottle at the Devil, but most literally and effectively hit him with it, when he wrote those books that changed the face of religious Europe.
The Historie had an immense and immediate popularity, and until well into the nineteenth century it was reproduced and sold throughout Europe. As we read it, we cannot but wonder what manner of man it really was who attracted to himself such age-long hatred and fear, and held the interest of the centuries. In many respects, doubtless, his story was like that of Paracelsus, in whom the world has recognised the struggle of much good with almost inevitable evil, and who, if he had been born in another generation, might have figured as a commanding spiritual or scientific authority.
Christopher Marlowe was born at Canterbury in 1564, two months before Shakespeare. He was the son of a shoemaker, and was the pupil of Kett, a fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi College. This tutor was probably accountable for much in the future Marlowe, for he was a mystic, and was burnt for heresy in 1589. After a short and extremely violent life, the pupil followed his master four years later to the grave, having been killed in a brawl under very disgraceful circumstances. He only lived twenty-nine years, and yet he, along with Kyd, changed the literature of England. Lyly's Pastorals had been the favourite reading of the people until these men came, keen and audacious, to lead and sing their
"brief, fiery, tempestuous lives." When they wrote their plays and created their villains, they were not creating so much as remembering. Marlowe's plays were four, and they were all influential. His Edward the Second was the precursor of the historical plays of Shakespeare. His other plays were Tamburlaine the Great, Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta (Barabbas). These three were all upon congenial lines, expressing that Titanism in revolt against the universe which was the inspiring spirit of Marlowe. But it was the character of Faust that especially fascinated him, for he found in the ancient magician a pretty clear image of his own desires and ambitions. He was one of those who loved "the dangerous edge of things," and, as Charles Lamb said, "delighted to dally with interdicted subjects." The form of the plays is loose and broken, and yet there is a pervading larger unity, not only of dramatic action, but of spirit. The laughter is loud and coarse, the terror unrelieved, and the splendour dazzling. There is no question as to the greatness of this work as permanent literature. It has long outlived the amazing detractions of Hallam and of Byron, and will certainly be read so long as English is a living tongue.
The next stage in this curious history is a peculiarly interesting one. In former days there sprang up around every great work of art a forest of slighter literature, in the shape of chap-books, ballads, and puppet plays. By far the most popular of the puppet plays was that founded upon Marlowe's Faust. The German version continued to be played in Germany until three hundred years later. Goethe constructed his masterpiece largely by its help. English actors travelling abroad had brought back the story to its native land of Germany, and in every town the bands of strolling players sent Marlowe's great conception far and wide. In England also the puppet play was extremely popular. The drama had moved from the church to the market-place, and much of the Elizabethan drama appeared in this quaint form, played by wooden figures upon diminutive boards. To the modern mind nothing could be more incongruous than the idea of a solemn drama forced to assume a guise so grotesque and childish; but, according to Jusserand, much of the stage-work was extremely ghastly, and no doubt it impressed the multitude. There is even a story of some actors who had gone too far, and into the midst of whose play the real devil suddenly descended with disastrous results. It must, however, be allowed that even the serious plays were not with out an abundant element of grotesqueness. The occasion for Faustus' final speech of despair, for instance, was the lowering and raising before his eyes of two or three gilded arm-chairs, representing the thrones in heaven upon which he would never sit. It does not seem to have occurred to the audience as absurd that heaven should be regarded as a kind of drawing-room floating in the air, and indeed that idea is perhaps not yet obsolete. However that may be, it is quite evident that such machinery, ill-suited though it was to the solemnities of tragedy, must have been abundantly employed in the puppet plays.
The German puppet play of Faust has been transcribed by Dr. Hamm and translated by Mr. Hedderwick into English. It was obtained at first with great difficulty, for the showmen kept the libretto secret, and could not be induced to lend it. Dr. Hamm, however, followed the play round, listening and committing much of it to memory, and his version was finally completed when his amanuensis obtained for a day or two the original manuscript after plying one of the assistants with much beer and wine. It was a battered book, thumb-marked and soaked with lamp oil, but it has passed on to posterity one of the most remarkable pieces of dramatic work which have come down to us from those times.
In all essentials the play is the same as that of Marlowe, except for the constant interruptions of the clown Casper, who intrudes with his absurdities even into the most sacred parts of the action, and entirely mars the dreadful solemnity of the end by demanding his wages from Faust while the clock is striking the diminishing intervals of the last hour.
It was through this curious intermediary that Goethe went back to Marlowe and created what has been well called "the most mystic poetic work ever created," and "the Divina Commedia of the eighteenth century." Goethe's Faust is elemental, like Hamlet. Readers of Wilhelm Meister will remember how profound an impression Hamlet had made upon Goethe's mind, and this double connection between Goethe and the English drama forms one of the strongest and most interesting of all the links that bind Germany to England. His Faust was the direct utterance of Goethe's own inner life. He says: "The marionette folk of Faust murmured with many voices in my soul. I, too, had wandered into every department of knowledge, and had returned early enough, satisfied with the vanity of science. And life, too, I had tried under various aspects, and always came back sorrowing and unsatisfied." Thus Faust lay in the depths of Goethe's life as a sort of spiritual pool, mirroring all its incidents and thoughts. The play was begun originally in the period of his Sturm und Drang, and it remained unpublished until, in old age, the ripened mind of the great poet took it over practically unchanged, and added the calmer and more intellectual parts. The whole of the Marguerite story belongs to the earlier days.
There is nothing in the whole of literature which could afford us a finer and more fundamental account of the battle between paganism and idealism in the soul of man, than the comparison between the Fausts of Marlowe and of Goethe. But before we come to this, it may be interesting to notice two or three points of special interest in the latter drama, which show how entirely pagan are the temptations of Faust.
The first passage to notice is that opening one on Easter Day, where the devil approaches Faust in the form of a dog. Choruses of women, disciples, and angels are everywhere in the air; and although the dog appears first in the open, yet the whole emphasis of the passage is upon the contrast between that brilliant Easter morning with its sunshine and its music, and the close and darkened study into which Faust has shut himself. It is true he goes abroad, but it is not to join with the rest in their rejoicing, but only as a spectator, with all the superiority as well as the wistfulness of his illicit knowledge. Evidently the impression intended is that of the wholesomeness of the crowd and the open air. He who goes in with the rest of men in their sorrow and their rejoicing cannot but find the meaning of Easter morning for himself. It is a festival of earth and the spring, an earth idealised, whose spirit is incarnate in the risen Christ. Faust longs to share in that, and on Easter Eve tries in vain to read his Gospel and to feel its power. But the only cure for such morbid introspectiveness as his, is to cast oneself generously into the common life of man, and the refusal to do this invites the pagan devil.
Another point of interest is the coming of the Erdgeist immediately after the Weltschmerz. The sorrow that has filled his heart with its melancholy sense of the vanity and nothingness of life, and the thousandfold pity and despondency which go to swell that sad condition, are bound to create a reaction more or less violent towards that sheer worldliness which is the essence of paganism. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress it is immediately after his floundering in the Slough of Despond that Christian is accosted by Mr. Worldly Wiseman. Precisely the same experience is recorded here in Faust, although the story is subtler and more complex than that of Bunyan. The Erdgeist which comes to the saddened scholar is a noble spirit, vivifying and creative. It is the world in all its glorious fullness of meaning, quite as true an idealism as that which is expressed in the finest spirit of the Greeks. But for Faust it is too noble. His morbid gloom has enervated him, and the call of the splendid earth is beyond him. So there comes, instead of it, a figure as much poorer than that of Worldly Wiseman as the Erdgeist is richer. Wagner represents the poor commonplace world of the wholly unideal. It is infinitely beneath the soul of Faust, and yet for the time it conquers him, being nearer to his mood. Thus Mephistopheles finds his opportunity. The scholar, embittered with the sense that knowledge is denied to him, will take to mere action; and the action will not be great like that which the Erdgeist would have prompted, but poor and unsatisfying to any nobler spirit than that of Wagner.
The third incident which we may quote is that of Walpurgis-Night. Some critics would omit this part, which, they say, "has naught of interest in bearing on the main plot of the poem." Nothing could be more mistaken than such a judgment. In the Walpurgis-Night we have the play ending
in that sheer paganism which is the counterpart to Easter Day at the beginning. Walpurgis has a strange history in German folklore. It is said that Charlemagne, conquering the German forests for the Christian faith, drove before him a horde of recalcitrant pagans, who took a last shelter among the trees of the Brocken. There, on the pagan May-day, in order to celebrate their ancient rites unmolested, they dressed themselves in all manner of fantastic and bestial masks, so as to frighten off the Christianising invaders from the revels. The Walpurgis of Faust exhibits paganism at its lowest depths. Sir Mammon is the host who invites his boisterous guests to the riot of his festive night. The witches arrive on broomsticks and pitchforks; singing, not without significance, the warning of woe to all climbers—for here aspiration of any sort is a dangerous crime. The Crane's song reveals the fact that pious men are here, in the Blocksberg, united with devils; introducing the same cynical and desperate disbelief in goodness which Nathaniel Hawthorne has told in similar fashion in his tale of Young Goodman Brown; and the most horrible touch of all is introduced when Faust in disgust leaves the revel, because out of the mouth of the witch with whom he had been dancing there had sprung a small red mouse. Throughout the whole play the sense of holy and splendid ideals shines at its brightest in lurid contrast with the hopeless and sordid dark of the pagan earth.
Returning now to our main point, the comparison of Marlowe's play with Goethe's, let us first of all contrast the temptations in the two. Marlowe's play is purely theological. Jusserand finely describes the underlying tragedy of it. "Faust, like Tamburlaine, and like all the heroes of Marlowe, lives in thought, beyond the limit of the possible. He thirsts for a knowledge of the secrets of the universe, as the other thirsted for domination over the world." Both are Titanic figures exactly in the pagan sense, but the form of Faustus' Titanism is the revolt against theology. From the early days of the Christian persecutions, there had been a tendency to divorce the sacred from the secular, and to regard all that was secular as being of the flesh and essentially evil. The mediæval views of celibacy, hermitage, and the monastic life, had intensified this divorce; and while many of the monks were interested in human secular learning, yet there was a feeling, which in many cases became a kind of conscience, that only the divine learning was either legitimate or safe for a man's eternal well-being. The Faust of Marlowe is the Prometheus of his own day. The new knowledge of the Renaissance had spread like fire across Europe, and those who saw in it a resurrection of the older gods and their secrets, unhesitatingly condemned it. The doctrine of immortality had entirely supplanted the old Greek ideal of a complete earthly life for man, and all that was sensuous had come to be regarded as intrinsically sinful. Thus we have for background a divided universe, in which there is a great gulf fixed between this world and the next, and a hopeless cleavage between the life of body and that of spirit.
In this connection we may also consider the women of the two plays. Charles Lamb has asked, "What has Margaret to do with Faust?" and has asserted that she does not belong to the legend at all. Literally, this is true, in so far as there is no Margaret in the earlier form of the play, whose interest was, as we have seen, essentially theological. Yet Margaret belongs to the essential story and cannot be taken out of it. She is the "eternal feminine," in which the battle between the spirit and the flesh, between idealism and paganism, will always make its last stand. Even Marlowe has to introduce a woman. His Helen is, indeed, a mere incident, for the real bride of the soul must be either theological or secular science; and yet so essential and so poignant is the question of woman to the great drama, that the passage in which the incident of Helen is introduced far surpasses anything else in Marlowe's play, and indeed is one of the grandest and most beautiful in all literature.
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."
Still, Marlowe's motif is not sex but theology. The former heretics whom we named had been saved—Theophilus by the intervention of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Pope Sylvester snatched from the very jaws of hell—by a return to orthodoxy. That was in the Roman Catholic days, but the savage antithesis between earth and heaven had been taken over by the conscience of Protestantism, making a duality which rendered life always intellectually anxious and almost impossible. It is this condition in which Marlowe finds himself. The good and the evil angels stand to right and left of his Faustus, pleading with him for and against secular science on the one side and theological knowledge on the other. For that is the implication behind the contest between magic and Christianity. "The Faust of the earlier Faust-books and ballads, dramas, puppet shows, which grew out of them, is damned because he prefers the human to the divine knowledge. He laid the Holy Scriptures behind the door and under the bench, refused to be called Doctor of Theology, but preferred to be called Doctor of Medicine." Obviously here we find ourselves in a very lamentable cul-de-sac. Idealism has floated apart from the earth and all its life, and everything else than theology is condemned as paganism.
Goethe changes all that. In the earlier Weltschmerz passages some traces of it still linger, where Faust renounces theology; but even there it is not theology alone that he renounces, but philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence as well, so that his renunciation is entirely different from that of Marlowe's Faustus. In Goethe it is no longer one doctrine or one point of view against another doctrine or another point of view. It is life, vitality in all its forms, against all mere doctrine whatsoever.
"Grey, dearest friend, is every theory,
But golden-green is the tree of life."
Thus the times had passed into a sense of the limits of theology such as has been well expressed in Rossetti's lines—
"Let lore of all theology
Be to thee all it can be,
But know,—the power that fashions man
Measured not out thy little span
For thee to take the meting-rod
In turn and so approve on God."
So in Goethe we have the unsatisfied human spirit with its infinite cravings and longings for something more than earth can give—something, however, which is not separated from the earth, and which is entirely different from theological dogma or anything of that sort. In this, Goethe is expressing a constant yearning of his own, which illuminated all his writings like a gentle hidden fire within them, hardly seen in many passages and yet always somehow felt. It is through the flesh that he will find the spirit, through this world that he will find the next. The quest is ultimately the same as that of Marlowe, but the form of it is absolutely opposed to his. Goethe is as far from Marlowe's theological position as Peer Gynt is, and indeed there is a considerable similarity between Ibsen's great play and Goethe's. As the drama develops, it is true that the love of Faust becomes sensual and his curiosity morbid; but the tragedy lies no longer in the belief that sense and curiosity are in themselves wrong, but in the fact that Faust fails to distinguish their high phases from their low. We have already seen that the Erdgeist which first appeals to Faust is too great for him, and it is there that the tragedy really lies. The earth is not an accursed place, and the Erdgeist may well find its home among the ideals; but Wagner is neither big enough nor clean enough to be man's guide.
The contrast between the high and low ideals comes to its finest and most tragic in the story of Margaret. Spiritual and sensual love alternate through the play. Its tragedy and horror concentrate round the fact that love has followed the lower way. Margaret has little to give to Faust of fellowship along intellectual or spiritual lines. She is a village maiden, and he takes from her merely the obvious and lower kind of love. It is a way which leads ultimately to the dance of the witches and the cellar of Auerbach, yet Faust can never be satisfied with these, and from the witch's mouth comes forth the red mouse—the climax of disgust. In Auerbach's cellar he sees himself as the pagan man in him would like to be. In Martha one sees the pagan counterpart to the pure and simple Margaret, just as Mephistopheles is the pagan counterpart to Faust. The lower forms of life are the only ones in which Martha and Mephistopheles are at home. For Faust and Margaret the lapse into the lower forms brings tragedy. Yet it must be remembered also that Faust and Mephistopheles are really one, for the devil who tempts every man is but himself after all, the animal side of him, the dog.
The women thus stand for the most poignant aspect of man's great temptation. It is not, as we have already said, any longer a conflict between the secular and the sacred that we are watching, nor even the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. It is between a higher and a lower way of treating life, flesh and spirit both. Margaret stands for all the great questions that are addressed to mankind. There are for every man two ways of doing work, of reading a book, of loving a woman. He who keeps his spiritual life pure and high finds that in all these things there is a noble path. He who yields to his lower self will prostitute and degrade them all, and the tragedy that leads on to the mad scene at the close, where the cries of Margaret have no parallel in literature except those of Lady Macbeth, is the inevitable result of choosing the pagan and refusing the ideal. The Blocksberg is the pagan heaven.
A still more striking contrast between the plays meets us when we consider the respective characters of Mephistopheles. When we compare the two devils we are reminded of that most interesting passage in Professor Masson's great essay, which describes the secularisation of Satan between Paradise Lost and the Faust of Goethe:—
"We shall be on the right track if we suppose Mephistopheles to be what Satan has become after six thousand years.... Goethe's Mephistopheles
is this same being after the toils and vicissitudes of six thousand years in his new vocation: smaller, meaner, ignobler, but a million times sharper and cleverer.... For six thousand years he has been pursuing the walk he struck out at the beginning, plying his self-selected function, dabbling devilishly in human nature, and abjuring all interest in the grander physics; and the consequence is, as he himself anticipated, that his nature, once great and magnificent, has become small, virulent, and shrunken. He, the scheming, enthusiastic Archangel, has been soured and civilised into the clever, cold-hearted Mephistopheles."
Marlowe's devil is of the solemn earlier kind, not yet degraded into the worldling whom Goethe has immortalised. Marlowe's Mephistophilis is essentially the idealist, and it is his Faust who is determined for the world. One feels about Mephistophilis that he is a kind of religious character, although under a cloud. The things he does are done to organ music, and he might be a figure in some stained-glass window of old. Not only is he "a melancholy devil, with a soul above the customary hell," but he actually retains a kind of despairing idealism which somehow ranks him on the side rather of good than of evil. The puppet play curiously emphasises this. "Tell me," says Faust, "what would you do if you could attain to ever lasting salvation?" "Hear and despair! Were I to attain to everlasting salvation, I would mount to heaven on a ladder, though every rung were a razor edge." The words are exactly in the spirit of the earlier play. So sad is the devil, so oppressed with a sense of the horror of it all, that, as we read, it almost seems as if Faust were tempting the unwilling Mephistophilis to ruin him.
"Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it;
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul!"
To which Faust replies—
"What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate
For being deprived of the joys of heaven?
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,
And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess."
Goethe's Mephistopheles near the end of the play taunts Faust in the words, "Why dost thou seek our fellowship if thou canst not go through with it?... Do we force ourselves on thee, or thou on us?" And one has the feeling that, like most other things the fiend says, it is an apparent truth which is really a lie; but it would have been entirely true if Marlowe's devil had said it.
The Mephistopheles of Goethe is seldom solemnised at all. Once indeed on the Harz Mountains he says—
"Naught of this genial influence do I know!
Within me all is wintry.
How sadly, yonder, with belated glow,
Rises the ruddy moon's imperfect round!"
Yet there it is merely by discomfort, and not by the pain and hideous sorrow of the world surrounding him, that he is affected. He is like Satan in the Book of Job, except that he is offering his victim luxuries instead of pains. In the prologue in Heaven he speaks with such a jaunty air that Professor Blackie's translation has omitted the passage as irreverent. He is the spirit that denies—sceptical and cynical, the anti-Christian that is in us all. His business is to depreciate spiritual values, and to persuade mortals that there is no real distinction between good and bad, or between high and low. We have seen in the character of Cornelius in Marius the Epicurean "some inward standard ... of distinction, selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the period." Here is the extreme opposite. There is no divine discontent in him, nor longing for happier things. He would never have said that he would climb to heaven upon a ladder of razor edges. There is nothing of the fallen angel about him at all, for he is a spirit perfectly content with an intolerable past, present, and future. Before the throne of God he swaggers with the same easy insolence as in Martha's garden. He is the very essence and furthest reach of paganism.
So we have this curious fact, that Marlowe's Faust is the pagan and Mephistophilis the idealist; while Goethe reverses the order, making paganism incarnate in the fiend and idealism in the nobler side of the man. It is a far truer and more natural story of life than that which had suggested it; for in the soul of man there is ever a hunger and thirst for the highest, however much he may abuse his soul. At the worst, there remains always that which "a man may waste, desecrate, never quite lose."
One more contrast marks the difference of the two plays, namely, the fate of Faust. Marlowe's Faust is utterly and irretrievably damned. On the old theory of an essential antagonism between the secular and the sacred, and upon the old cast-iron theology to which the intellect of man was enjoined to conform, there is no escape whatsoever for the rebel. So the play leads on to the sublimely terrific passage at the close, when, with the chiming of the bell, terror grows to madness in
the victim's soul, and at last he envies the beasts that perish—
"For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.
Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven."
Goethe, with his changed conception of life in general, could not have accepted this ending. It was indeed Lessing who first pointed out that the final end for Faust must be his salvation and not his doom; but Goethe must necessarily have arrived at the same conclusion even if Lessing had not asserted it. It is clearly visible throughout the play, by touches here and there, that Faust is not "wholly damnable" as Martha is. His pity for women, relevant to the main plot of the play, breaks forth in horror when he discovers the fate of Margaret. "The misery of this one pierces me to the very marrow, and harrows up my soul; thou art grinning calmly over the doom of thousands!" And these words follow immediately after an outbreak of blind rage called forth by Mephistopheles' famous words, "She is not the first." Such a Faust as this, we feel, can no more be ultimately lost than can the Mephistophilis of Marlowe. As for Marlowe's Faust, the plea for his destruction is the great delusion of a hard theology, and the only really damnable person in the whole company is the Mephistopheles of Goethe, who seems from first to last continually to be committing the sin against the Holy Ghost.
The salvation of Faust is implicit in the whole structure and meaning of the play. It is worked out mystically in the Second Part, along lines of human life and spiritual interest far-flung into the sphere that surrounds the story of the First. But even in the First Part, the happy issue is involved in the terms of Faust's compact with the devil. Only on the condition that Mephistopheles shall be able to satisfy Faust and cheat him "into self-complacent pride, or sweet enjoyment," only
"If ever to the passing hour I say,
So beautiful thou art! thy flight delay"—
only then shall his soul become the prey of the tempter. But from the first, in the scorn of Faust for this poor fiend and all he has to bestow, we read the failure of the plot. Faust may sign a hundred such bonds in his blood with little fear. He knows well enough that a spirit such as his can never be satisfied with what the fiend has to give, nor lie down in sleek contentment to enjoy the earth without afterthought.
It is the strenuous and insatiable spirit of the man that saves him. It is true that "man errs so long as he is striving," but the great word of the play is just this, that no such errors can ever be final. The deadly error is that of those who have ceased to strive, and who have complacently settled down in the acceptance of the lower life with its gratifications and delights.
But such striving is, as Robert Browning tells us in Rabbi ben Ezra and The Statue and the Bust, the critical and all-important point in human character and destiny. It is this which distinguishes pagan from idealist in the end. Faust's errors fall off from him like a discarded robe; the essential man has never ceased to strive. He has gone indeed to hell, but he has never made his bed there. He is saved by want of satisfaction.
LECTURE IV
CELTIC REVIVALS OF PAGANISM
Omar Kayyám and Fiona Macleod
It is extremely difficult to judge justly and without prejudice the literature of one's own time. So many different elements are pouring into it that it assumes a composite character, far beyond the power of definition or even of epigram to describe as a whole. But, while this is true, it is nevertheless possible to select from this vast amalgam certain particular elements, and to examine them and judge them fairly.
The field in which we are now wandering may be properly included under the head of ancient literature, although in another sense it is the most modern of all. The two authors whom we shall consider in this lecture, although they have come into our literature but recently, yet represent very ancient thought. There is nothing whatsoever that is modern about them. They describe bed-rock human passions and longings, sorrowings and consolations. Each may be claimed as a revival of ancient paganism, but only one of them is capable of translation into a useful idealism.
OMAR KAYYÁM
In the twelfth century, at Khorassán in Persia Omar Kayyám the poet was born. He lived and died at Naishápúr, following the trade of a tent-maker, acquiring knowledge of every available kind, but with astronomy for his special study. His famous poem, the Rubáiyát, was first seen by Fitzgerald in 1856 and published in 1868. So great was the sensation produced in England by the innovating sage, that in 1895 the Omar Kayyám Club was founded by Professor Clodd, and that club has since come to be considered "the blue ribbon of literary associations."
In Omar's time Persian poetry was in the hands of the Súfis, or religious teachers of Persia. He found them writing verses which professed to be mystical and spiritual, but which might sometimes be suspected of earthlier meanings lurking beneath the pantheistic veil. It was against the poetry of such Súfis that Omar Kayyám rose in revolt. Loving frankness and truth, he threw all disguises aside, and became the exponent of materialistic epicureanism naked and unashamed.
A fair specimen of the finest Súfi poetry is The Rose Garden of Sa'di, which it may be convenient to quote because of its easy accessibility in English translation. Sa'di also was a twelfth-century poet, although of a later time than Omar. He was a student of the College in Baghdad, and he lived as a hermit for sixty years in Shiraz, singing of love and war. His mind is full of mysticism, wisdom and beauty going hand in hand through a dim twilight land. Dominating all his thought is the primary conviction that the soul is essentially part of God, and will return to God again, and meanwhile is always revealing, in mysterious hints and half-conscious visions, its divine source and destiny. Here and there you will find the deep fatalism of the East, as in the lines—
"Fate will not alter for a thousand sighs,
Nor prayers importunate, nor hopeless cries.
The guardian of the store-house of the wind
Cares nothing if the widow's lantern dies."
These, however, are relieved by that which makes a friend of fate—
"To God's beloved even the dark hour
Shines as the morning glory after rain.
Except by Allah's grace thou hast no power
Nor strength of arm such rapture to attain."
It was against this sort of poetry that Omar Kayyám revolted. He had not any proof of such spiritual assurances, and he did not want that of which he had no proof. He understood the material world around him, both in its joy and sorrow, and emphatically he did not understand any other world. He became a sort of Marlowe's Faust before his time, and protested against the vague spirituality of the Súfis by an assertion of what may be called a brilliant animalism. He loved beauty as much as they did, and there is an oriental splendour about all his work, albeit an earthly splendour. He became, accordingly, an audacious epicurean who "failed to find any world but this," and set himself to make the best of what he found. His was not an exorbitant ambition nor a fiery passion of any kind. The bitterness and cynicism of it all remind us of the inscription upon Sardanapalus' tomb—"Eat, drink, play, the rest is not worth the snap of a finger." Drinking-cups have been discovered with such inscriptions on them—"The future is utterly useless, make the most of to-day,"—and Omar's poetry is full both of the cups and the inscription.
The French interpreter, Nicolas, has indeed spiritualised his work. In his view, when Omar raves about wine, he really means God; when he speaks of love, he means the soul, and so on. As a matter of fact, no man has ever written a plainer record of what he means, or has left his meaning less ambiguous. When he says wine and love he means wine and love—earthly things, which may or may not have their spiritual counterparts, but which at least have given no sign of them to him. The same persistent note is heard in all his verses. It is the grape, and wine, and fair women, and books, that make up the sum total of life for Omar as he knows it.
"Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.
A Book of verses underneath the Bough,
A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show."
It would show a sad lack of humour if we were to take this too seriously, and shake our heads over our eastern visitor. The cult of Omar has been blamed for paganising English society. Really it came in as a foreign curiosity, and, for the most part, that it has remained. When we had a visit some years ago from that great oriental potentate Li Hung Chang, we all put on our best clothes and went out to welcome him. That was all right so long as we did not naturalise him, a course which neither he nor we thought of our adopting. Had we naturalised him, it would have been a different matter, and even Mayfair might have found the fashions of China somewhat risqué. One remembers that introductory note to Browning's Ferishtah's Fancies—"You, Sir, I entertain you for one of my Hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments: you will say they are Persian; but let them be changed."[1] The only safe way of dealing with Omar Kayyám is to insist that his garments be not changed. If you naturalise him he will become deadly in the West. The East thrives upon fatalism, and there is a glamour about its most materialistic writings, through which far spiritual things seem to quiver as in a sun-haze. The atmosphere of the West is different, and fatalism, adopted by its more practical mind, is sheer suicide.
Not that there is much likelihood of a nation with the history and the literature of England behind it, ever becoming to any great extent materialistic in the crude sense of Omar's poetry. The danger is subtler. The motto, "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die," is capable of spiritualisation, and if you spiritualise that motto it becomes poisonous indeed. For there are various ways of eating and drinking, and many who would not be tempted with the grosser appetites may become pagans by devoting themselves to a rarer banquet, the feast of reason and the flow of soul. It is possible in that way also to take the present moment for Eternity, to live and think without horizons. Mr. Peyton has said, "You see in some little house a picture of a cottage on a moor, and you wonder why these people, living, perhaps, in the heart of a great city, and in the most commonplace of houses, put such a picture there. The reason for it is, that that cottage is for them the signal of the immortal life of men, and the moor has infinite horizons." That is the root of the matter after all—the soul and horizons. He who says, "To-day shall suffice for me," whether it be in the high intellectual plane or in the low earthly one, has fallen into the grip of the world that passeth away; and that is a danger which Omar's advent has certainly not lessened.
The second reason for care in this neighbourhood is that epicureanism is only safe for those whose tastes lie in the direction of the simple life. Montaigne has wisely said that it is pernicious to those who have a natural tendency to vice. But vice is not a thing which any man loves for its own sake, until his nature has suffered a long process of degradation. It is simply the last result of a habit of luxurious self-indulgence; and the temptation to the self-indulgent, the present world in one form or another, comes upon everybody at times. There are moods when all of us want to break away from the simple life, and feel the splendour of the dazzling lights and the intoxication of the strange scents of the world. To surrender to these has always been, and always will be, deadly. It is the old temptation to cease to strive, which we have already found to be the keynote of Goethe's Faust. Kingsley, in one of the most remarkable passages of Westward Ho! describes two of Amyas Leigh's companions, settled down in a luscious paradise of earthly delights, while their comrades endured the never-ending hardships of the march. By the sight of that soft luxury Amyas was tempted of the devil. But as he gazed, a black jaguar sprang from the cliff above, and fastened on the fair form of the bride of one of the recreants. "O Lord Jesus," said Amyas to himself, "Thou hast answered the devil for me!"
It does not, however, need the advent of the jaguar to introduce the element of sheer tragedy into luxurious life. In his Conspiracy of Pontiac, Parkman tells with rare eloquence the character of the Ojibwa Indians: "In the calm days of summer, the Ojibwa fisherman pushes out his birch canoe upon the great inland ocean of the North; ... or he lifts his canoe from the sandy beach, and, while his camp-fire crackles on the grass-plot, reclines beneath the trees, and smokes and laughs
away the sultry hours, in a lazy luxury of enjoyment.... But when winter descends upon the North, sealing up the fountains ... now the hunter can fight no more against the nipping cold and blinding sleet. Stiff and stark, with haggard cheek and shrivelled lip, he lies among the snow-drifts; till, with tooth and claw, the famished wild-cat strives in vain to pierce the frigid marble of his limbs."
Meredith tells of a bird, playing with a magic ring, and all the time trying to sing its song; but the ring falls and has to be picked up again, and the song is broken. It is a good parable of life, that impossible compromise between the magic ring and the simple song. Those who choose the earth-magic of Omar's epicureanism will find that the song of the spirit is broken, until they cease from the vain attempt at singing and fall into an earth-bound silence.
Thus Omar Kayyám has brought us a rich treasure from the East, of splendid diction and much delightful and fascinating sweetness of poetry. All such gifts are an enrichment to the language and a decoration to the thought of a people. When, however, they are taken more seriously, they may certainly bring plague with them, as other Eastern things have sometimes done.
FIONA MACLEOD
To turn suddenly from this curious Persian life and thought to the still more curious life and thought of ancient Scotland is indeed a violent change. Nothing could be more dissimilar than the two types of paganism out of which they spring; and if Fiona Macleod's work may have its dangers for the precarious faith of modern days, they are certainly dangers which attack the soul in a different fashion from those of Omar.
The revelation of Fiona Macleod's identity with William Sharp came upon the English-reading world as a complete surprise. Few deaths have been more lamented in the literary world than his, and that for many reasons. His biography is one of the most fascinating that could be imagined. His personality was a singularly attractive one,—so vital, so indefatigable,—with interests so many-sided, and a heart so sound in all of them. It is characteristic of him that in his young days he ran away for a time with gipsies, for he tells us, "I suppose I was a gipsy once, and before that a wild man of the woods." The two great influences of his life were Shelley and D.G. Rossetti. The story of his literary struggles is brimful of courage and romance, and the impression of the book is mainly that of ubiquity. His insatiable curiosity seems to have led him to know everybody, and every place, and everything.
At length Fiona Macleod was born. She arose out of nowhere, so far as the reading public could discover. Really there was a hidden shy self in Sharp, which must find expression impossible except in some secret way. We knew him as the brilliant critic, the man of affairs, and the wide and experienced traveller. We did not know him, until we discovered that he was Fiona, in that second life of his in the borderland where flesh and spirit meet.
First there came Pharais in 1893, and that was the beginning of much. Then came The Children of To-morrow, the forerunner of Fiona Macleod. It was his first prose expression of the subjective side of his nature, together with the element of revolt against conventionalities, which was always strongly characteristic of him. It introduced England to the hidden places of the Green Life.
The secret of his double personality was confided only to a few friends, and was remarkably well kept. When pressed by adventurous questioners, some of these allies gave answers which might have served for models in the art of diplomacy. So Sharp wrote on, openly as William Sharp, and secretly as Fiona Macleod. Letters had to reach Fiona somehow, and so it was given out that she was his cousin, and that letters sent to him would be safely passed on to her. If, however, it was difficult to keep the secret from the public, it was still more difficult for one man to maintain two distinct personalities. William Sharp of course had to live, while Fiona might die any day. Her life entailed upon him another burden, not of personification only, but of subject and research, and he was driven to sore passes to keep both himself and her alive. For each was truly alive and individual—two distinct people, one of whom thought of the other as if she were "asleep in another room." Even the double correspondence was a severe burden and strain, for Fiona Macleod had her own large post-bag which had to be answered, just as William Sharp had his. But far beyond any such outward expressions of themselves as these, the difficulty of the double personality lay in deep springs of character and of taste. Sharp's mind was keenly intellectual, observant, and reasoning; while Fiona Macleod was the intuitional and spiritual dreamer. She was indeed the expression of the womanly element in Sharp. This element certainly dominated him, or rather perhaps he was one of those who have successfully invaded the realm of alien sex. In his earlier work, such as The Lady of the Sea,—"the woman who is in the heart of woman,"—we have proof of this; for in that especially he so "identified himself with woman's life, seeing it through her own eyes that he seems to forget sometimes that he is not she." So much was this the case that Fiona Macleod actually received at least one proposal of marriage. It was answered quite kindly, Fiona replying that she had other things to do, and could not think of it; but the little incident shows how true the saying about Sharp was, that "he was always in love with something or another." This loving and love-inspiring element in him has been strongly challenged, and some of the women who have judged him, have strenuously disowned him as an exponent of their sex. Yet the fact is unquestionable that he was able to identify himself in a quite extraordinary degree with what he took to be the feminine soul.
It seems to have something to do with the Celtic genius. One can always understand a Scottish Celt better by comparing him with an Irish one or a Welsh; and it will certainly prove illuminative in the present case to remember Mr. W.B. Yeats while one is thinking of Fiona Macleod. To the present writer it seems that the woman-soul is apparent in both, and that she is singing the same tune; the only difference being, as it were, in the quality of the voice, Fiona Macleod singing in high soprano, and Mr. Yeats in deep and most heart-searching contralto.
The Fiona Macleod side of Sharp never throve well in London. Hers was the fate of those who in this busy world have retained the faculty and the need for dreaming. So Sharp had to get away from London—driven of the spirit into the wilderness—that his other self might live and breathe. One feels the power of this second self especially in certain words that recur over and over again, until the reader is almost hypnotised by their lilting, and finds himself in a kind of sleep. That dreaming personality, with eyes half closed and poppy-decorated hair, could never live in the bondage of the city cage. The spirit must get free, and the longing for such freedom has been well called "a barbaric passion, a nostalgia for the life of the moor and windy sea."
There are two ways of loving and understanding nature. Meredith speaks of those who only see nature by looking at it along the barrel of a gun. The phrase describes that large company of people who feel the call of the wild indeed, and long for the country at certain seasons, but must always be doing something with nature—either hunting, or camping out, or peradventure going upon a journey like Baal in the Old Testament. But there is another way, to which Carlyle calls attention as
characteristic of Robert Burns, and which he pronounces the test of a true poet. The test is, whether he can wander the whole day beside a burn "and no' think lang." Such was Fiona's way with nature. She needed nothing to interest her but the green earth itself, and its winds and its waters. It was surely the Fiona side of Sharp that made him kiss the grassy turf and then scatter it to the east and west and north and south; or lie down at night upon the ground that he might see the intricate patterns of the moonlight, filtering through the branches of the trees.
In all this, it is needless to say, Mr. Yeats offers a close parallel. He understands so perfectly the wild life, that one knows at once that it is in him, like a fire in his blood. Take this for instance—
"They found a man running there;
He had ragged long grass-coloured hair;
He had knees that stuck out of his hose;
He had puddle water in his shoes;
He had half a cloak to keep him dry,
Although he had a squirrel's eye."
Such perfect observation is possible only to the detached spirit, which is indeed doing nothing to nature, but only letting nature do her work. In the sharp outline of this imagery, and in the mind that saw and the heart that felt it, there is something of the keenness of the squirrel's eye for nature.
Fiona's favourite part of nature is the sea. That great and many-sided wonder, whether with its glare of phosphorescence or the stillness of its dead calm, fascinates the poems of Sharp and lends them its spell. But of the prose of Fiona it may be truly said that everything
"... doth suffer a sea-change,
Into something rich and strange."
These marvellous lines were never more perfectly illustrated than here. As we read we behold the sea, now crouching like a gigantic tiger, now moaning with some Celtic consciousness of the grim and loathsome treasures in its depths, ever haunted and ever haunting. It is probable that Sharp never wrote anything that had not for his ear an undertone of the ocean. Sitting in London in his room, he heard, on one occasion, the sound of waves so loud that he could not hear his wife knocking at the door. Similarly in Fiona Macleod's writing seas are always rocking and swinging. Gulfs are opening to disclose the green dim mysteries of the deeper depths. The wind is running riot with the surface overhead, and the sea is lord in all its mad glory and wonder and fear.
Mr. Yeats has the same characteristic, but again it is possible to draw a fantastic distinction like that between the soprano and the alto. It is lake water rather than the ocean that sounds the undertone of Mr. Yeats' poetry—
"I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core."
The oldest sounds in the world, Mr. Yeats tells us are wind and water and the curlew: and of the curlew he says—
"O curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters of the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind."
In all this you hear the crying of the wind and the swiftly borne scream of the curlew on it, and you know that lake water will not be far away. This magic power of bringing busy city people out of all their surroundings into the green heart of the forest and the moorland, and letting them hear the sound of water there, is common to them both.
Fiona Macleod is a lover and worshipper of beauty. Long before her, the Greeks had taught the world their secret, and the sweet spell had penetrated many hearts beyond the pale of Greece. It was Augustine who said, "Late I have loved thee, oh beauty, so old and yet so new, late I have loved thee." And Marius the Epicurean, in Pater's fine phrase, "was one who was made perfect by love of visible beauty." It is a direct instinct, this bracing and yet intoxicating love of beauty for its own sake. Each nation produces a spiritual type of it, which becomes one of the deepest national characteristics, and the Celtic type is easily distinguished. No Celt ever cared for landscape. "It is loveliness I ask, not lovely things," says Fiona; and it is but a step from this to that abstract mystical and spiritual love of beauty, which is the very soul of the Celtic genius. It expresses itself most directly in colours, and the meaning of them is far more than bright-hued surfaces. The pale green of running water, the purple and pearl-grey of doves, still more the remote and liquid colours of the sky, and the sad-toned or the gay garments of the earth—these are more by far to those who know their value than pigments, however delicate. They are either a sensuous intoxication or else a mystic garment of the spirit. Seumas, the old islander, looking seaward at sunrise, says, "Every morning like this I take my hat off to the beauty of the world." And as we read we think of Mr. Neil Munro's lord of Doom Castle walking uncovered in the night before retiring to his rest, and with tears welling in his eyes exclaiming that the mountains are his evening prayer. Such mystics as these are in touch with far-off things. Sharp, indeed, was led definitely to follow such leading into regions of spiritualism where not many of his readers will be able or willing to follow him, but Fiona Macleod left the mystery vague. It might easily have defined itself in some sort of pantheistic theory of the universe, but it never did so. "The green fire" is more than the sap which flows through the roots of the trees. It is as Alfred de Musset has called it, the blood that courses through the veins of God. As we realise the full force of that imaginative phrase, the dark roots of trees instinct with life, and the royal liquor rising to its foam of leaves, we have something very like Fiona's mystic sense of nature. Any extreme moment of human experience will give an interpretation of such symbolism—love or death or the mere springtide of the year.
It is not without significance that Sharp and Mr. Yeats and Mr. Symons all dreamed on the same night the curious dream of a beautiful woman shooting arrows among the stars. All the three had indeed the beautiful woman in the heart of them, and in far-darting thoughts and imaginations she was ever sending arrows among the stars. But Mr. Yeats is calmer and less passionate than Fiona, as though he were crooning a low song all the time, while the silent arrows flash from his bow. Sometimes, indeed, he will blaze forth flaming with passion in showers of light of the green fire. Yet from first to last, there is less of the green fire and more of the poppies in Mr. Yeats and it is Fiona who shoots most constantly and farthest among the stars.
Haunted, that is the word for this world into which we have entered. The house without its guests would be uninhabitable for such poets as these. The atmosphere is everywhere that of a haunted earth where strange terrors and beauties flit to and fro—phantoms of spectral lives which seem to be looking on while we play out our bustling parts upon the stage. They are separate from the body, these shadows, and belong to some former life. They are an ancestral procession walking ever behind us, and often they are changing the course of our visible adventures by the power of sins and follies that were committed in the dim and remotest past. Certainly the author is, as he says, "Aware of things and living presences hidden from the rest." "The shadows are here." The spirits of the dead and the never born are out and at large. These or others like them were the folk that Abt Vogler encountered as he played upon his instrument—"presences plain in the place."
One of the most striking chapters in that very remarkable book of Mr. Fielding Hall's, The Soul of a People, is that in which he describes the nats, the little dainty spirits that haunt the trees of Burmah. But it is not only the Eastern trees that are haunted, and Sharp is always seeing tree-spirits, and nature-spirits of every kind, and talking with them. Now and again he will give you a natural explanation of them, but that always jars and sounds prosaic. In fact, we do not want it; we prefer the "delicate throbbing things" themselves, to any facts you can give us instead of them, for to those who have heard and seen beyond the veil, they are far more real than any of your mere facts. Here we think of Mr. Yeats again with his cry, "Come into the world again wild bees, wild bees." But he hardly needed to cry upon them, for the wild bees were buzzing in every page he wrote.
A world haunted in this fashion has its sinister side, allied with the decaying corpses deep in the earth. When passion has gone into the world beyond that which eye hath seen and ear heard, it takes, in presence of the thought of death, a double form. It is in love with death and yet it hates death. So we come back to that singular sentence of Robert Louis Stevenson's, "The beauty and the terror of the world," which so adequately describes the double fascination of nature for man. Her spell is both sweet and terrible, and we would not have it otherwise The menace in summer's beauty, the frightful contrast between the laughing earth and the waiting death, are all felt in the prolonged and deep sense of gloom that broods over much of Fiona's work, and in the second-sight which very weirdly breaks through from time to time, forcing our entrance into the land from which we shrink.
Mr. Yeats is not without the same sinister and moving undergloom, although, on the whole, he is aware of kindlier powers and of a timid affection between men and spirits. He actually addresses a remonstrance to Scotsmen for having soured the disposition of their ghosts and fairies, and his reconstructions of the ancient fairyland are certainly full of lightsome and pleasing passages. Along either lane you may arrive at peace, which is the monopoly neither of the Eastern nor of the Western Celt, but it is a peace never free from a great wistfulness.
"How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face."
That there is much paganism in all this must be obvious to any one who has given any attention to the subject. The tale of The Annir-Choille confesses it frankly enough, where the young Christian prince is brought back by the forest maiden from his new faith to the ancient pagan world. Old gods are strewn everywhere upon the waysides down which Fiona leads us, and there are many times when we cannot disentangle the spiritual from the material, nor indeed the good from the evil influences. Dr. John Brown used to tell the story of a shepherd boy near Biggar, who one day was caught out on the hill in a thunder-storm. The boy could not remember whether thunder-storms were sent by God or Satan, and so to be quite safe, he kept alternately repeating the ejaculations, "Eh, guid God," and "Eh, bonny deil." One often thinks of Fiona in connection with that story. You are seldom quite sure whether it is a Christian or a pagan deity whom you are invoking, but there is no question as to the paganism of the atmosphere which you often breathe.
As a matter of fact, William Sharp began in frank and avowed paganism, and passed from that through various phases into a high spirituality. His early utterances in regard to Art, in which he deprecated any connection between Art and a message, and insisted upon its being mere expression, were of course sheer paganism. In 1892, before Fiona was born, he published one of those delightful magazines which run through a short and daring career and then vanish as suddenly as they arose. In fact his magazine, The Pagan Review, from first to last had only one number. It was edited by Mr. Brooks and William Sharp, and its articles were contributed by seven other people. But these seven, and Mr. Brooks as well, turned out eventually all to be William Sharp himself. It was "frankly pagan; pagan in sentiment, pagan in convictions, pagan in outlook.... The religion of our forefathers has not only ceased for us personally, but is no longer in any vital and general sense a sovereign power in the realm." He finished up with the interesting phrase, "Sic transit gloria Grundi," and he quotes Gautier: "'Frankly I am in earnest this time. Order me a dove-coloured vest, apple-green trousers, a pouch, a crook; in short, the entire outfit of a Lignon shepherd. I shall have a lamb washed to complete the pastoral....' This is the lamb."
The magazine was an extraordinarily clever production, and the fact that he was its author is significant. For to the end of her days Fiona was a pagan still, albeit sometimes a more or less converted pagan. In The Annir-Choille, The Sin-Eater, The Washer of the Ford, and the others, you never get away from the ancient rites, and there is one story which may be taken as typical of all the rest, The Walker in the Night:—
"Often he had heard of her. When any man met this woman his fate depended on whether he saw her before she caught sight of him. If she saw him first, she had but to sing her wild strange song, and he would go to her; and when he was before her, two flames would come out of her eyes, and one flame would burn up his life as though it were dry tinder, and the other would wrap round his soul like a scarlet shawl, and she would take it and live with it in a cavern underground for a year and a day. And on that last day she would let it go, as a hare is let go a furlong beyond a greyhound. Then it would fly like a windy shadow from glade to glade, or from dune to dune, in the vain hope to reach a wayside Calvary: but ever in vain. Sometimes the Holy Tree would almost be reached; then, with a gliding swiftness, like a flood racing down a valley, the Walker in the Night would be alongside the fugitive. Now and again unhappy nightfarers—unhappy they, for sure, for never does weal remain with any one who hears what no human ear should hearken—would be startled by a sudden laughing in the darkness. This was when some such terrible chase had happened, and when the creature of the night had taken the captive soul, in the last moments of the last hour of the last day of its possible redemption, and rent it this way and that, as a hawk scatters the feathered fragments of its mutilated quarry."
We have said that nature may be either an intoxication or a sacrament, and paganism might be defined as the view of nature in the former of these two lights. But where you have a growing spirituality like that of William Sharp, you are constantly made aware of the hieratic or sacramental quality in nature also. It is this which gives its peculiar charm and spell to Celtic folklore in general. The Saxon song of Beowulf is a rare song, and its story is the swinging tale of a "pagan gentleman very much in the rough," but for the most part it is quite destitute of spiritual significance. It may be doubted if this could be said truly of any Celtic tale that was ever told. Fiona Macleod describes The Three Marvels as "studies in old religious Celtic sentiment, so far as that can be recreated in a modern heart that feels the same beauty and simplicity in the early Christian faith"; and there is a constant sense that however wild and even wicked the tale may be, yet it has its Christian counterpart, and is in some true sense a strayed idealism.
At this point we become aware of one clear distinction between William Sharp and Fiona Macleod. To him, literature was a craft, laboured at most honestly and enriched with an immense wealth both of knowledge and of cleverness; but to her, literature was a revelation, with divine inspirations behind it—inspirations authentically divine, no matter by what name the God might be called. So it came to pass that The Pagan Review had only one number. That marked the transition moment, when Fiona Macleod began to predominate over William Sharp, until finally she controlled and radically changed him into her own likeness. He passes on to the volume entitled The Divine Adventure, which interprets the spirit of Columba. Nature and the spiritual meet in the psychic phase into which Sharp passed, not only in the poetic and native sense, but in a more literal sense than that. For the Green Life continually leads those who are akin to it into opportunities of psychical research among obscure and mysterious forces which are yet very potent. With a nature like his it was inevitable that he should be eventually lured irresistibly into the enchanted forest, where spirit is more and more the one certainty of existence.
For most of us there is another guide into the spirit land. In the region of the spectral and occult many of us are puzzled and ill at ease, but we all, in some degree, understand the meaning of ordinary human love. Even the most commonplace nature has its magical hours now and then, or at least has had them and has not forgotten; and it is love that "leads us with a gentle hand into the silent land." This may form a bond of union between Fiona Macleod and many who are mystified rather than enlightened by psychic phenomena in the technical meaning of the phrase. Here, perhaps, we find the key to the double personality which has been so interesting in this whole study. It was William Sharp who chose for his tombstone the inscription, "Love is more great than we conceive, and death is the keeper of unknown redemptions." Fiona's work, too, is full of the latent potency of love. Like Marius, she has perceived an unseen companion walking with men through the gloom and brilliance of the West and North, and sometimes her heart is so full that it cannot find utterance at all. In the "dream state," that which is mere nature for the scientist reveals itself, obscurely indeed and yet insistently, as very God. God is dwelling in Fiona. He is smiling in all sunsets. He is filling the universe with His breath and holding us all in His "Mighty Moulding Hand."
The relation in which all this stands to Christianity is a very curious question. The splendour, beauty, and spirituality of it all are evident enough, but the references to anything like dogmatic or definite Christian doctrine are confusing and obscure. Perhaps it was impossible that one so literally a child of nature, and who had led such an open-air life from his childhood, could possibly have done otherwise than to rebel. It was the gipsy in him that revolted against Christianity and every other form and convention of civilised life, and claimed a freedom far beyond any which he ever used. We read that in his sixth year, when already he found the God of the pulpit remote and forbidding, he was nevertheless conscious of a benign and beautiful presence. On the shore of Loch Long he built a little altar of rough stones beneath a swaying pine, and laid an offering of white flowers upon it. In the college days he turned still more definitely against orthodox Presbyterianism; but he retained all along, not only belief in the central truths that underlie all religions, but great reverence and affection for them.
It is probable that towards the close he was approaching nearer to formal Christianity than he knew. We are told that he "does not reverence the Bible or Christian Theology in themselves, but for the beautiful spirituality which faintly breathes through them like a vague wind blowing through intricate forests." His quarrel with Christianity was that it had never done justice to beauty, that it had a gloom upon it, and an unlovely austerity. This indeed is a strange accusation from so perfect an interpreter of the Celtic gloom as he was, and the retort tu quoque is obvious enough. There have indeed been phases of Christianity which seemed to love and honour the ugly for its own sake, yet there is a rarer beauty in the Man of Sorrows than in all the smiling faces of the world. This is that hidden beauty of which the saints and mystics tell us. They have seen it in the face more marred than any man's, and their record is that he who would find a lasting beauty that will satisfy his soul, must find it through pain conquered and ugliness transformed and sorrow assuaged. The Christ Beautiful can never be seen when you have stripped him of the Crown of Thorns, nor is there any loveliness that has not been made perfect by tears. Thus though there is truth in Sharp's complaint that Christianity has often done sore injustice to beauty as such, yet it must be repeated that this exponent of the Celtic heart somehow missed the element in Christianity which was not only like, but actually identical with, his own deepest truth.
Sharp often reminds one of Heine, with his intensely human love of life, both in its brightness and in its darkness. Where that love is so intense as it was in these hearts, it is almost inevitable that it should sometimes eclipse the sense of the divine. Thus Sharp tells us that "Celtic paganism lies profound still beneath the fugitive drift of Christianity and civilisation, as the deep sea beneath the coming and going of the tides." He was indeed so aware of this underlying paganism, that we find it blending with Christian ideas in practically the whole of his work. Nothing could be quoted as a more distinctive note of his genius than that blend. It is seen perhaps most clearly in such stories as The Last Supper and The Fisher of Men. In these tales of unsurpassable power and beauty, Fiona Macleod has created the Gaelic Christ. The Christ is the same as He of Galilee and of the Upper Room in Jerusalem, and His work the same. But he talks the sweet Celtic language, and not only talks it but thinks in it also. He walks among the rowan trees of the Shadowy Glen, while the quiet light flames upon the grass, and the fierce people that lurk in shadow have eyes for the helplessness of the little lad who sees too far. Such tales are full of a strange light that seems to be, at one and the same time, the Celtic glamour and the Light of the World.
All the lovers of Mr. Yeats must have remembered many instances of the same kind in his work. "And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart longs for, and have no fear."
Mr. Yeats is continually identifying these apparently unrelated things; and youth and peace, faith and beauty, are ever meeting in converging lines in his work. No song of his has a livelier lilt than the Fiddler of Dooney.
"I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at Sligo fair.
When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate.
And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With, 'Here is the fiddler of Dooney!'
And dance like a wave of the sea."
In a few final words we may try to estimate what all this amounts to in the long battle between paganism and idealism. There is no question that Fiona Macleod may be reasonably claimed by either side. Certainly it is true of her work, that it is pure to the pure and dangerous to those who take it wrongly. Meredith's great line was never truer than it is here, "Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare." The effect upon the mind,
and the tendency in the life, will depend upon what one brings to the reading of it.
All this bringing back of the discarded gods has its glamour and its risk. Such gods are excellent as curiosities, and may provide the quaintest of studies in human nature. They give us priceless fragments of partial and broken truth, and they exhibit cross-sections of the evolution of thought in some of its most charming moments. Besides all this, they are exceedingly valuable as providing us with that general sense of religion, vague and illusive, which is deeper than all dogma.
But, for the unwary, there is the double danger in all this region that they shall, on the one hand, be tempted to worship the old gods; or that, on the other hand, even in loving them without definite worship, the old black magic may spring out upon them. As to the former alternative, light minds will always prefer the wonderfully coloured but more or less formless figure in a dream, to anything more definite and commanding. They will cry, "Here is the great god"; and, intoxicated by the mystery, will fall down to worship. But that which does not command can never save, and for a guiding faith we need something more sure than this.
Moreover, there is the second alternative of the old black magic. A discarded god is always an uncanny thing to take liberties with. While the earth-spirit in all its grandeur may appeal to the jaded and perplexed minds of to-day as a satisfying object of faith, the result will probably be but a modern form of the ancient Baal-worship. It will in some respects be a superior cult to its ancient prototype. Its devotees will not cut themselves with knives. They will cut themselves with sweet and bitter poignancies of laughter and tears, when the sun shines upon wet forests in the green earth. This, too, is Baal-worship, hardly distinguishable in essence from that cruder devotion to the fructifying and terrifying powers of nature against which the prophets of Israel made their war. In much that Fiona Macleod has written we feel the spirit struggling like Samson against its bonds of green withes, though by no means always able to break them as he did; or lying down in an earth-bound stupor, content with the world that nature produces and sustains. Here, among the elemental roots of things, when the heart is satisfying itself with the passionate life of nature, the red flower grows in the green life, and the imperative of passion becomes the final law.
On the other hand, a child of nature may remember that he is also a child of the spirit; and, even in the Vale Perilous, the spirit may be
an instinctive and faithful guide. Because we love the woods we need not worship the sacred mistletoe. Because we listen to the sea we need not reject greater and more intelligible voices of the Word of Life. And the mention of the sea, and the memory of all that it has meant in Fiona Macleod's writing, reminds us strangely of that old text, "Born of water and of the Spirit." While man lives upon the sea-girt earth, the voices of the ocean, that seem to come from the depths of its green heart, will always call to him, reminding him of the mysterious powers and the terrible beauties among which his life is cradled. Yet there are deeper secrets which the spirit of man may learn—secrets that will still be told when the day of earth is over, when the sea has ceased from her swinging, and the earth-spirit has fled for ever. It is well that a man should remember this, and remain a spiritual man in spite of every form of seductive paganism.
Sharp has said in his Green Fire:—
"There are three races of man. There is the myriad race which loses all, through (not bestiality, for the brute world is clean and sane) perverted animalism; and there is the myriad race which denounces humanity, and pins all its faith and joy to a life the very conditions of whose existence are incompatible with the law to which we are
subject; the sole law, the law of nature. Then there is that small untoward class which knows the divine call of the spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in the heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the rainbows of hope upon our human horizons: which hears and sees, and yet turns wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth, of which we are part, to the common kindred of living things, with which we are at one—is content, in a word, to live, because of the dream that makes living so mysteriously sweet and poignant; and to dream, because of the commanding immediacy of life."
There are indeed the three races. There is the pagan, which knows only the fleshly aspect of life, and seeks nothing beyond it. There is the spiritual, which ignores and seeks to flee from that to which its body chains it. There is also that wise race who know that all things are theirs, flesh and spirit both, and who have learned how to reap the harvests both of time and of eternity.
LECTURE V
JOHN BUNYAN
We have seen the eternal battle in its earlier phases surging to and fro between gods of the earth that are as old as Time, and daring thoughts of men that rose beyond them and claimed a higher inheritance. Between that phase of the warfare and the same battle as it is fought to-day, we shall look at two contemporary men in the latter part of the seventeenth century who may justly be taken as examples of the opposing types. John Bunyan and Samuel Pepys, however, will lead us no dance among the elemental forces of the world. They will rather show us, with very fascinating naïveté, true pictures of their own aspirations, nourished in the one case upon the busy and crowded life of the time, and in the other, upon the definite and unquestioned conceptions of a complete and systematic theology. Yet, typical though they are, it is easy to exaggerate their simplicity, and it will be interesting to see how John Bunyan, supposed to be a pure idealist, aloof from the world in which he lived, yet had the most intimate and even literary connection with that world. Pepys had certain curious and characteristic outlets upon the spiritual region, but he seems to have closed them all, and become increasingly a simple devotee of things seen and temporal.
Bunyan comes upon us full grown and mature in the work by which he is best known and remembered. His originality is one of the standing wonders of history. The Pilgrim's Progress was written at a time when every man had to take sides in a savage and atrocious ecclesiastical controversy. The absolute judgments passed on either side by the other, the cruelties practised and the dangers run, were such as to lead the reader to expect extreme bitterness and sectarian violence in every religious writing of the time. Bunyan was known to his contemporaries as a religious writer, pure and simple, and a man whose convictions had caused him much suffering at the hands of his enemies. Most of the first readers of the Pilgrim's Progress had no thought of any connection between that book and worldly literature; and the pious people who shook their heads over his allegory as being rather too interesting for a treatise on such high themes as those which it handled, might perhaps have shaken their heads still more solemnly had they known how much of what they called the world was actually behind it. Bunyan was a voluminous writer of theological works, and the complete edition of them fills three enormous volumes, closely printed in double column. But it is the little allegory embedded in one of these volumes which has made his fame eternal, and for the most part the rest are remembered now only in so far as they throw light upon that story. One exception must be made in favour of Grace Abounding. This is Bunyan's autobiography, in which he describes, without allegory, the course of his spiritual experience. For an understanding of the Pilgrim's Progress it is absolutely necessary to know that companion volume.
It is very curious to watch the course of criticism as it was directed to him and to his story. The eighteenth century had lost the keenness of former controversies, and from its classic balcony it looked down upon what seemed to it the somewhat sordid arena of the past. The Examiner complains that he never yet knew an author that had not his admirers. Bunyan and Quarles have passed through several editions and pleased as many readers as Dryden and Tillotson. Even Cowper, timidly appreciative and patronising, wrote of the "ingenious dreamer"—
"I name thee not, lest so despised a name
Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame,"
—lines which have a pathetic irony in them, as we contrast the anxious Cowper, with the occasional revivals of interest and the age-long tone of patronage which have been meted out to him, with the robust and sturdy immortality of the man he shrank from naming. Swift discovered Bunyan's literary power, and later Johnson and Southey did him justice. In the nineteenth century his place was secured for ever, and Macaulay's essay on him will probably retain its interest longer than anything else that Macaulay wrote.
We are apt to think of him as a mere dreamer, spinning his cobwebs of imagination wholly out of his own substance—a pure idealist, whose writing dwells among his ideals in a region ignorant of the earth. In one of his own apologies he tells us, apparently in answer to accusations that had been made against him, that he did not take his work from anybody, but that it came from himself alone. Doubtless that is true so far as the real originality of his work is concerned, its general conception, and the working out of its details point by point. Yet, to imagine that if there had been no other English literature the Pilgrim's Progress would have been exactly what it is, is simply to ignore the facts of the case. John Bunyan is far more interesting just because his work is part of English literature, because it did feel the influences of his own time and of the past, than it could ever have been as the mere monstrosity of detachment which it has been supposed to be. The idealist who merely dreams and takes no part in the battle, refusing to know or utilise the writing of any other man, can be no fair judge of the life which he criticises, and no reliable guide among its facts.
Bunyan might very easily indeed have been a pagan of the most worldly type. It was extremely difficult for him to be a Puritan, not only on account of outward troubles, but also of inward ones belonging to his own disposition and experience. Accepting Puritanism, the easiest course for him would have been that of fanaticism, and had he taken that course he would certainly have had no lack of companions. It was far more difficult to remain a Puritan and yet to keep his heart open to the beauty and fascination of human life. Yet he was interested in what men were writing or had written. All manner of songs and stories, heard in early days in pot-houses, or in later times in prison, kept sounding in his ears, and he wove them into his work. The thing that he meant to
say, and did say, was indeed one about which controversy and persecution were raging, but, except in a very few general references, his writing shows no sign of this. His eye is upon far-off things, the things of the soul of man and the life of God, but the way in which he tells these things shows innumerable signs of the bright world of English books.
It is worth while to consider this large and human Bunyan, who has been very erroneously supposed to be a mere literary freak, detached from all such influences as go to the making of other writers. He tells us, indeed, that "when I pulled it came," and that is delightfully true. Yet, it came not out of nowhere, and it is our part in this essay to inquire as to the places from which it did come. As we have said, it came out of two worlds, and the web is most wonderfully woven and coloured, but our present concern is rather with the earthly part of it than the heavenly.
No one can read John Bunyan without thinking of George Herbert. Few of the short biographies in our language are more interesting reading than Isaac Walton's life of Herbert. That master of simplicity is always fascinating, and in this biography he gives us one of the most beautiful sketches of contemporary narrative that has ever been penned. Herbert was the quaintest of the saints. He lived in the days of Charles the First and James the First, a High Churchman who had Laud for his friend. Shy, sensitive, high-bred, shrinking from the world, he was at the same time a man of business, skilful in the management of affairs, and yet a man of morbid delicacy of imagination. The picture of his life at Little Gidding, where he and Mr. Farrer instituted a kind of hermitage, or private chapel of devotion, in which the whole of the Psalms were read through once in every twenty-four hours, grows peculiarly pathetic when we remember that the house and chapel were sacked by the parliamentary army, in which for a time John Bunyan served. No two points of view, it would seem, could be more widely contrasted than those of Bunyan and Herbert, and yet the points of agreement are far more important than the differences between them, and The Temple has so much in common with the Pilgrim's Progress that one is astonished to find that the likenesses seem to be entirely unconscious. Matthew Henry is perpetually quoting The Temple in his Commentary. Writing only a few years earlier, Bunyan reproduces in his own fashion many of its thoughts, but does not mention its existence.
In order to know Bunyan's early life, and indeed to understand the Pilgrim's Progress at all adequately, one must read Grace Abounding. It is a short book, written in the years when he was already growing old, for those whom he had brought into the fold of religion. From this autobiography it has usually been supposed that he had led a life of the wildest debauchery before his Christian days; but the more one examines the book, and indeed all his books, the less is one inclined to believe in any such desperate estimate of the sins of his youth. The measure of sin is the sensitiveness of a man's conscience; and where, as in Bunyan's case, the conscience is abnormally delicate and subject to violent reactions, a life which in another man would be a pattern of innocence and respectability may be regarded as an altogether blackguardly and vicious one. It was, however evidently a life of strong and intense worldly interest stepping over the line here and there into positive wrong-doing, but for the most part blameworthy mainly on account of its absorption in the passing shows of the hour.
What then was that world which interested Bunyan so intensely, and cost him so many pangs of conscience? No doubt it was just the life of the road as he travelled about his business; for though by no means a tinker in the modern sense of the word, he was an itinerant brazier, whose business took him constantly to and fro among the many villages of the district of Bedford. He must have heard in inns and from wayside companions many a catch of plays and songs, and listened to many a lively story, or read it in the chap-books which were hawked about the country then. It must also be remembered that these were the days of puppet shows. The English drama, as we have already mentioned in connection with Faust, was by no means confined to the boards of actual theatres where living actors played the parts. Little mimic stages travelled about the country in all directions reproducing the plays, very much after the fashion of Punch and Judy; and even the solemnest of Shakespeare's tragedies were exhibited in this way. There is no possibility of doubt that Bunyan must have often stood agape at these exhibitions, and thus have received much of the highest literature at second hand.
As to how much of it he had actually read, that is a different question. One is tempted to believe that he must have read George Herbert, but of this there is no positive proof. We are quite certain about five books, for which we have his own express statements. His wife brought him as her dowry the very modest furniture of two small volumes, Baily's Practice of Piety and Dent's The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven. The first is a very complicated and elaborate statement of Christian dogma, which Bunyan passes by with the scant praise, "Wherein I also found some things that were somewhat pleasing to me." The other is a much more vital production. Even to this day it is an immensely interesting piece of reading. It consists of conversations between various men who stand for types of worldling, ignoramus, theologian, etc., and there are very clear traces of it in the Pilgrim's Progress, especially in the talks between Bunyan's pilgrims and the man Ignorance.
Another book which played a large part in Bunyan's life was the short biography of Francis Spira, an Italian, who had died shortly before Bunyan's time. Spira had been a Protestant lawyer in Italy, but had found it expedient to abate the open profession of Protestantism with which he began, and eventually to transfer his allegiance to the Roman Church. The biography is for the most part an account of his death-bed conversation, which lasted a long time, since his illness was even more of the mind than of the body. It is an extremely ghastly account of a morbid and insane melancholia. It was the fashion of the time to take such matters spiritually rather than physically, and we read that many persons went to his death-bed and listened to his miserable cries and groanings in the hope of gaining edification for their souls. How the book came into Bunyan's hands no one can tell, but evidently he had found it in English translation, and many of the darkest parts of Grace Abounding are directly due to it, while the Man in the Iron Cage quotes the very words of Spira.
Another book which Bunyan had read was Luther's Commentary on the Galatians. The present writer possesses a copy of that volume dated 1786, at the close of which there are fourteen pages, on which long lists of names are printed. The names are those of weavers, shoe-makers, and all sorts of tradesmen in the western Scottish towns of Kilmarnock, Paisley, and others of that neighbourhood, who had subscribed for a translation of the commentary that they might read it in their own tongue. This curious fact reminds us that the book had among the pious people of our country an audience almost as enthusiastic as Bunyan himself was. Another of his books, and the only one quoted by name in the Pilgrim's Progress or Grace Abounding, with the exception of Luther on Galatians, is Foxe's Book of Martyrs, traces of which are unmistakable in such incidents as the trial and death of Faithful and in other parts.
In these few volumes may be summed up the entire literary knowledge which Bunyan is known to have possessed. He stands apart from mere
book-learning, and deals with life rather through his eyes and ears directly than through the medium of books. But then those eyes and ears of his were no ordinary organs; and his imagination, whose servants they were, was quick to enlist every vital and suggestive image and idea for its own uses. Thus the rich store of observation which he had already laid up through the medium of puppet plays, fragments of song and popular story, was all at his disposal when he came to need it. Further, even in his regenerate days, there was no dimming of the imaginative faculty nor of the observant. The whole neighbourhood in which he lived was an open book, in which he read the wonderful story of life in many tragic and comic tales of actual fact; and in the prison where he spent twelve years, he must often have heard from his fellow-prisoners such fragments as they knew and remembered, with which doubtless they would beguile the tedium of their confinement. That would be for the most part in the first and second imprisonments, extending from the years 1660 to 1672. The third imprisonment was a short affair of only some nine months, spent in the little prison upon the bridge of Bedford, where there would be room for very few companions. The modern bridge crosses the river at almost exactly the same spot; and if you look over the parapet you may see, when the river is low, traces of what seem to be the foundations of the old prison bridge.
When we would try to estimate the processes by which the great allegory was built up, the first fact that strikes us is its extreme aloofness from current events which must have been very familiar to him. In others of his works he tells many stories of actual life, but these are of a private and more or less gossiping nature, many of them fantastic and grotesque, such as those appalling tales of swearers, drunkards, and other specially notorious sinners being snatched away by the devil—narratives which bear the marks of crude popular imagination in details like the actual smell of sulphur left behind. In the whole Pilgrim's Progress there is no reference whatever to the Civil War, in which we know that Bunyan had fought, although there are certain parts of it which were probably suggested by events of that campaign. The allegory is equally silent concerning the Great Fire and the Great Plague of London, which were both fresh in the memory of every living man. The only phrase which might have been suggested by the Fire, is that in which the Pilgrim says, "I hear that our little city is to be destroyed by fire"—a phrase which obviously has much more direct connection with the destruc tion of Sodom than with that of London. The only suggestions of those disastrous latter years of the reign of Charles the Second, are some doubtful allusions to the rise and fall of persecution, few of which can be clearly identified with any particular events.
There are several interesting indications that Bunyan made use of recent and contemporary secular literature. The demonology of the Pilgrim's Progress is quite different from that of the Holy War. It used to be suggested that Bunyan had altered his views in consequence of the publication of Milton's Paradise Regained, which appeared in 1671. That was when it was generally supposed that he had written the Pilgrim's Progress in his earlier imprisonment. If, as is now conceded, it was in the later imprisonment that he wrote the book, this theory loses much of its plausibility, for Milton published his Paradise Regained before the first edition of the Pilgrim's Progress was penned. It is, of course, always possible that between the Pilgrim's Progress and the Holy War Bunyan may have seen Milton's work, or may have been told about it, for he certainly changed his demonology and made it more like Milton's. Again, there are certain passages in Spenser's Faerie Queene which bear so close a resemblance to Bunyan's description of the Celestial City, that it is difficult not to suppose that either directly or indirectly that poem had influenced Bunyan's creation; while in at least one of his songs he approaches so near both the language and the rhythm of a song of Shakespeare's as to make it very probable that he had heard it sung.[2]
These suppositions are not meant in any way to detract from the originality of the great allegory, but rather to link the writer in with that English literature of which he is so conspicuous an ornament. They are no more significant and no less, than the fact that so much of the geography of the Pilgrim's Progress seems not to have been created by his imagination, but to have been built up from well-remembered landscapes. From his prison window he could not but see the ruins of old Bedford Castle, which stood demolished upon its hill even in his time. This, together with Cainhoe Castle, only a few miles away, may well have suggested the Castle of Despair in Bypath Meadow near the River of God. Again, memories of Elstow play a notable part in the story. A cross stood there, at the foot of which, when he was play ing the game of cat upon a certain Sunday, the voice came to his soul with its tremendous question, "Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven or have thy sins and go to hell?" There stood the Moot Hall as it stands to-day, in which, during his worldly days, he had danced with the rest of the villagers and gained his personal knowledge of Vanity Fair. There, as he tells us expressly, is the wicket gate, the rough old oak and iron gate of Elstow parish church. Close beside it, just as you read in the story, stands that great tower which suggested a devil's castle beside the wicket gate, whence Satan showered his arrows on those who knocked below. Not only so, but there was a special reason why for Bunyan that ancient church tower may well have been symbolic of the stronghold of the devil; for it had bells in it, and he was so fond of bell-ringing that it got upon his conscience and became his darling sin. It is easy to make light of his heart-searchings about so innocent an employment, but doubtless there were other things that went along with it. We have all seen those large drinking-vessels, known as bell-ringers' jugs; and these perhaps may suggest an explanation of the sense of sin which burdened his conscience so heavily. Anyhow, there the tower stands, and in the Gothic doorway of it there are one or two deeply cut grooves, obviously made by the ropes of the bell-ringers when, instead of standing below their ropes, they preferred the open air, and drew the ropes through the archway of the door, so as to cut into its moulding. The little fact gains much significance in the light of Bunyan's own confession that he was so afraid that the bell would fall upon him and kill him as a punishment from God, that he used to go outside the door to ring it. Then again there was the old convent at Elstow, where, long before Bunyan's time, nuns had lived, who were known to tradition as "the ladies of Elstow." Very aristocratic and very human ladies they seem to have been, given to the entertainment of their friends in the intervals of their tasteful devotion, and occasionally needing a rebuke from headquarters. Yet it seems not improbable that there is some glorified memory of those ladies in the inhabitants of the House Beautiful, which house itself appears to have been modelled upon Houghton House on the Ampthill heights, built by Sir Philip Sidney's sister but a century before. The silver mine of Demas might seem to have come from some far-off source in chap-book or romance, until we remember that at the village of Pulloxhill, which had been the original home of the Bunyan family, and near which Bunyan was arrested and brought for examination to the house of Justice Wingate, there are the actual remains of an ancient gold mine whose tradition still lingers among the villagers.
All these things seem to indicate that the great allegory is by no means so remote from the earth as has sometimes been imagined; and perhaps the most touching commentary upon this statement is the curious and very unlovely burying-ground in Bunhill fields, cut through by a straight path that leads from one busy thoroughfare to another. A few yards to the left of that path is the tomb and monument of John Bunyan, while at an equal distance to the right lies Daniel Defoe. The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe are perhaps the two best-known stories in the world, and they are not so far remote from one another as they seem.
Nor was it only in the outward material with which he worked that John Bunyan had much in common with the romance and poetry of England. He could indeed write verses which, for sheer doggerel, it would be difficult to match, but in spite of that there was the authentic note of poetry in him. Some of his work is not only vigorous, inspiring, and full of the brisk sense of action, but has an unconscious strength and worthiness of style, whose compression and terseness have fulfilled at least one of the canons of high literature. Take, for example, the lines on Faithful's death —
"Now Faithful, play the man, speak for thy God:
Fear not the wicked's malice, nor their rod:
Speak boldly, man, the truth is on thy side;
Die for it, and to life in triumph ride."
Or take this as a second example, from his Prison Meditations—
"Here come the angels, here come saints,
Here comes the Spirit of God,
To comfort us in our restraints
Under the wicked's rod.
This gaol to us is as a hill,
From whence we plainly see
Beyond this world, and take our fill
Of things that lasting be.
We change our drossy dust for gold,
From death to life we fly:
We let go shadows, and take hold
Of immortality."
This whole poem has in it not merely the bright march of a very vigorous mind, but also a great many of the elements which long before had built up the ancient romances. In it, and in much else that he wrote, he finds a congenial escape from the mere middle-class respectability of his time, and ranges himself with the splendid chivalry both of the past and of the present. There is an elfin element in him as there was in Chaucer, which now and again twinkles forth in a quaint touch of humour, or escapes from the merely spiritual into an extremely interesting human region.
In Grace Abounding he very pleasantly tells us that he could have written in a much higher style if he had chosen to do so, but that for our sakes he has refrained. He does, however, sometimes "step into" his finer style. There is some exquisite pre-Raphaelite work that comes unexpectedly upon the reader, in which he is not only a poet, but a writer capable of seeing and of describing the most highly coloured and minute detail: "Besides, on the banks of this river on either side were green trees, that bore all manner of fruit...." "On either side of the river was also a meadow, curiously beautified with lilies; and it was green the year long." At other times he affrights us with a sudden outburst of the most terrifying imagination, as in the close of the poem of The Fly at the Candle—
"At last the Gospel doth become their snare,
Doth them with burning hands in pieces tear."
His imagination was sometimes as quaint and sweet as at other times it could be lurid and powerful. Upon a Snail is not a very promising subject for a poem, but its first lines justify the experiment—
"She goes but softly, but she goeth sure;
She stumbles not, as stronger creatures do."
He can adopt the methods of the stately poets of nature, and break into splendid descriptions of natural phenomena —
"Look, look, brave Sol doth peep up from beneath,
Shews us his golden face, doth on us breathe;
Yea, he doth compass us around with glories,
Whilst he ascends up to his highest stories,
Where he his banner over us displays,
And gives us light to see our works and ways."
Again in the art of childlike interest and simplicity he can write such lines as these—
OF THE CHILD WITH THE BIRD ON THE BUSH
"My little bird, how canst thou sit
And sing amidst so many thorns?
Let me but hold upon thee get,
My love with honour thee adorns.
'Tis true it is sunshine to-day,
To-morrow birds will have a storm;
My pretty one, come thou away,
My bosom then shall keep thee warm.
My father's palace shall be thine,
Yea, in it thou shalt sit and sing;
My little bird, if thou'lt be mine,
The whole year round shall be thy spring.
I'll keep thee safe from cat and cur,
No manner o' harm shall come to thee:
Yea, I will be thy succourer,
My bosom shall thy cabin be."
The last line might have been written by Ben Jonson, and the description of sunrise in the former poem might almost have been from Chaucer's pen.
Yet the finest poetry of all is the prose allegory of the Pilgrim's Progress. English prose had taken many centuries to form, in the moulding hands of Chaucer, Malory, and Bacon. It had come at last to Bunyan with all its flexibility and force ready to his hand. He wrote with virgin purity, utterly free from mannerisms and affectations; and, without knowing himself for a writer of fine English, produced it.
The material of the allegory also is supplied from ancient sources. One curious paragraph in Bunyan's treatise entitled Sighs from Hell, gives us a broad hint of this. "The Scriptures, thought I then, what are they? A dead letter, a little ink and paper, of three or four shillings price. Alack! what is Scripture? Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on Horseback or Bevis of Southampton. Give me some book that teaches curious Arts, that tells old Fables." In The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven there is a longer list of such romances as these, including Ellen of Rummin, and many others. As has been already stated, these tales of ancient folklore would come into his hands either by recitation or in the form of chap-books. The chap-book literature of Old England was most voluminous and interesting. It consisted of romances and songs, sold at country fairs and elsewhere, and the passing reference which we have quoted proves conclusively, what we might have known without any proof, that Bunyan knew them.
George on Horseback has been identified by Professor Firth with the Seven Champions of England, an extremely artificial romance, which may be taken as typical of hundreds more of its kind. The 1610 edition of it is a very lively book with a good deal of playing to the gallery, such as this: "As for the name of Queen, I account it a vain title; for I had rather be an English lady than the greatest empress in the world." There is not very much in this romance which Bunyan has appropriated, although there are several interesting correspondences. It is very courtly and conventional. The narrative is broken here and there by lyrics, quite in Bunyan's manner, but it is difficult to imagine Bunyan, with his direct and simple taste, spending much time in reading such sentences as the following: "By the time the purple-spotted morning had parted with her grey, and the sun's bright countenance appeared on the mountain-tops, St. George had rode twenty miles from the Persian Court." On the other hand, when Great-Heart allows Giant Despair to rise after his fall, showing his chivalry in refusing to take advantage of the fallen giant, we remember the incident of Sir Guy and Colebrand in the Seven Champions.
"Good sir, an' it be thy will,
Give me leave to drink my fill,
For sweet St. Charity,
And I will do thee the same deed
Another time if thou have need,
I tell thee certainly."
St. George, like Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, traverses an Enchanted Vale, and hears "dismal croakings of night ravens, hissing of serpents, bellowing of bulls, and roaring of monsters."[3] St. Andrew traverses a land of continual darkness, the Vale of Walking Spirits, amid similar sounds of terror, much as the pilgrims of the Second Part of Bunyan's story traverse the Enchanted Ground. And as these pilgrims found deadly arbours in that land, tempting them to repose which must end in death, so St. David was tempted in an Enchanted Garden, and fell flat upon the ground, "when his eyes were so fast locked up by magic art, and his waking senses drowned in such a dead slumber, that it was as impossible to recover himself from sleep as to pull the sun out of the firmament."
Bevis of Southampton has many points in common with St. George in the Seven Champions. The description of the giant, the escape of Bevis from his dungeon, and a number of other passages show how much was common stock for the writers of these earlier romances. There is the same rough humour in it from first to last, and the wonderful swing and stride of vigorous rhyming metre. Of the humour, one quotation will be
enough for an example. It is when they are proposing to baptize the monstrous giant at Cologne, whom Bevis had first conquered and then engaged as his body-servant. At the christening of Josian, wife of Bevis, the Bishop sees the giant.
"'What is,' sayde he, 'this bad vysage?'
'Sir,' sayde Bevys, 'he is my page—
I pray you crysten hym also,
Thoughe he be bothe black and blo!'
The Bysshop crystened Josian,
That was as white as any swan;
For Ascaparde was made a tonne,
And whan he shulde therein be done,
He lept out upon the brenche
And sayde: 'Churle, wylt thou me drenche?
The devyl of hel mot fetche the
I am to moche crystened to be!'
The folke had gode game and laughe,
But the Bysshop was wrothe ynoughe."
There is a curious passage which is almost exactly parallel to the account of the fight with Apollyon in the Pilgrim's Progress, and which was doubtless in Bunyan's mind when he wrote that admirable battle sketch—
"Beves is swerde anon upswapte,
He and the geaunt togedre rapte;
And delde strokes mani and fale,
The nombre can i nought telle in tale.
The geaunt up is clubbe haf,
And smot to Beves with is staf,
But his scheld flegh from him thore,
Three acres brede and somedel more,
Tho was Beves in strong erur
And karf ato the grete levour,
And on the geauntes brest a-wonde
That negh a-felde him to the grounde.
The geaunt thoughte this bataile hard,
Anon he drough to him a dart,
Throgh Beves scholder he hit schet,
The blold ran doun to Beves' fet,
The Beves segh is owene blod
Out of his wit he wex negh wod,
Unto the geaunt ful swithe he ran,
And kedde that he was doughti man,
And smot ato his nekke bon;
The geant fel to grounde anon."
It is part of his general sympathy with the spirit of the romances that Bunyan's giants were always real giants to him, and he evidently enjoyed them for their own sake as literary and imaginative creations, as well as for the sake of any truths which they might be made to enforce. Despair and Slay-Good are distinct to his imagination. His interest remains always twofold. On the one hand there is allegory, and on the other hand there is live tale. Sometimes the allegory breaks through and confuses the tale a little, as when Mercy begs for the great mirror that hangs in the dining-room of the shepherds, and carries it with her through the remainder of her journey. Sometimes the allegory has to stop in order that a sermon may be preached on some particular point of theology, and such sermons are by no means short. Still the story is so true to life that its irresistible sim plicity and naturalness carry it on and make it immortal. When we read such a conversation as that between old Honest and Mr. Standfast about Madam Bubble, we feel that the tale has ceased to be an allegory altogether and has become a novel. This is perhaps more noticeable in the Second Part than in the First. The First Part is indeed almost a perfect allegory; although even there, from time to time, the earnestness and rush of the writer's spirit oversteps the bounds of consistency and happily forgets the moral because the story is so interesting, or forgets for a moment the story because the moral is so important. In the Second Part the two characters fall apart more definitely. Now you have delightful pieces of crude human nature, naïve and sparkling. Then you have long and intricate theological treatises. Neither the allegorical nor the narrative unity is preserved to anything like the same extent as on the whole is the case in Part I. The shrewd and humorous touches of human nature are especially interesting. Bunyan was by no means the gentle saint who shrank from strong language. When the gate of Doubting Castle is opening, and at last the pilgrims have all but gone free, we read that "the lock went damnable hard." When Great-Heart is delighted with Mr. Honest, he calls him "a cock of the right kind." The poem On Christian Behaviour, which we have quoted, contains the lines—
"When all men's cards are fully played,
Whose will abide the light?"
These are quaint instances of the way in which even the questionable parts of the unregenerate life of the dreamer came in the end to serve the uses of his religion.
There are many gems in the Second Part of the Pilgrim's Progress which are full of mother-wit and sly fun. Mr. Honest confesses, "I came from the town of Stupidity; it lieth about four degrees beyond the City of Destruction." Then there is Mr. Fearing, that morbidly self-conscious creature, who is so much at home in the Valley of Humiliation that he kneels down and kisses the flowers in its grass. He is a man who can never get rid of himself for a moment, and who bores all the company with his illimitable and anxious introspection. Yet, in Vanity Fair, when practical facts have to be faced instead of morbid fancies and inflamed conscience, he is the most valiant of men, whom they can hardly keep from getting himself killed, and for that matter all the rest of them. Here, again, is an inimitable flash of insight, where Simple, Sloth, and Presumption have prevailed with "one Short-Wind, one Sleepy-Head, and with a young woman, her name was Dull, to turn out of the way and become as they."
Every now and then these natural touches of portraiture rise to a true sublimity, as all writing that is absolutely true to the facts of human nature tends to do. Great-Heart says to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, "Let me see thy sword," and when he has taken it in his hand and looked at it for awhile, he adds, "Ha! it is a right Jerusalem blade." That sword lingers in Bunyan's imagination, for, at the close of Valiant's life, part of his dying speech is this "My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles."
Bunyan is so evidently an idealist and a prince of spiritual men, that no one needs to point out this characteristic of the great dreamer, nor to advertise so obvious a thing as his spiritual idealism. We have accordingly taken that for granted and left it to the reader to recognise in every page for himself. We have sought in this to show what has sometimes been overlooked, how very human the man and his work are. Yet his humanism is ever at the service of the spirit, enlivening his book and inspiring it with a perpetual and delicious interest, but never for a moment entangling him again in the old yoke of bondage, from which at his conversion he had been set free. For the human as opposed to the divine, the fleshly as the rival of the spiritual, he has an open and profound contempt, which he expresses in no measured terms in such passages as that concerning Adam the First and Madam Wanton. These are for him sheer pagans. At the cave, indeed, which his pilgrim visits at the farther end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we read that Pope and Pagan dwelt there in old time, but that Pagan has been dead many a day. Yet the pagan spirit lives on in many forms, and finds an abiding place and home in Vanity Fair. As Professor Firth has pointed out, Ben Jonson, in his play Bartholomew Fair, had already told the adventures of two Puritans who strayed into the Fair, and who regarded the whole affair as the shop of Satan. There were many other Fairs, such as that of Sturbridge, and the Elstow Fair itself, which was instituted by the nuns on the ground close to their convent, and which is held yearly to the present day. Such Fairs as these have been a source of much temptation and danger to the neighbourhood, and represent in its popular form the whole spirit of paganism at its worst.
All the various elements of Bunyan's world live on in the England of to-day. Thackeray, with a stroke of characteristic genius, has expanded and applied the earlier conception of paganism in his great novel whose title Vanity Fair is borrowed from Bunyan. But the main impression of the allegory is the victory of the spiritual at its weakest over the temporal at its mightiest. His descriptions of the supper and bed chamber in the House Beautiful, and of the death of Christiana at the end of the Second Part, are immortal writings, in the most literal sense, amid the shows of time. They have indeed laid hold of immortality not for themselves only, but for the souls of men. Nothing could sum up the whole story of Bunyan better than the legend of his flute told by Mr. S.S. M'Currey in his book of poems entitled In Keswick Vale. The story is that in his prison Bunyan took out a bar from one of the chairs in his cell, scooped it hollow, and converted it into a flute, upon which he played sweet music in the dark and solitary hours of the prison evening. The jailers never could find out the source of that music, for when they came to search his cell, the bar was replaced in the chair, and there was no apparent possibility of flute-playing; but when the jailers departed the music would mysteriously recommence. It is very unlikely that this legend is founded upon fact, or indeed that Bunyan was a musician at all (although we do have from his pen one touching and beautiful reference to the finest music in the world being founded upon the bass), but, like his own greater work, the little legend is an allegory. The world for centuries has heard sweet music from Bunyan, and has not known whence it came. It has seemed to most men a miracle, and indeed they were right in counting it so. Yet there was a flute from which that music issued, and the flute was part of the rough furniture of his imprisoned world. He was no scholar, nor delicate man of belles lettres, like so many of his contemporaries. He took what came to his hand; and in this lecture we have tried to show how much did come thus to his hand that was rare and serviceable for the purposes of his spirit, and for the expression of high spiritual truth.