WHY WE SHOULD READ——
[BY THE SAME AUTHOR]
A PUBLIC SCHOOL IN WAR TIME
APRIL'S LONELY SOLDIER
INTERLUDE
REBELLION
FROM SHAKESPEARE TO O. HENRY
THE EDUCATION OF A PHILANDERER
BOOKS AND THEIR WRITERS
LOVERS OF SILVER
A SCHOOLMASTER'S DIARY
UNCLE LIONEL
COLOUR-BLIND
Educational
A SCHOOL SHAKESPEARE (in 18 vols.)
AN ENGLISH COURSE FOR ARMY CANDIDATES
AN ENGLISH COURSE FOR SCHOOLS
SEVEN PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE FOR SCHOOLS (in 1 vol.)
AN ENGLISH COURSE FOR EVERYBODY
WHY WE SHOULD READ——
BY
S. P. B. MAIS
Author of "Books and Their Writers"
"He who first praises a book becomingly is next in merit to the author"
W. S. Landor
LONDON
GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
ST MARTIN'S STREET
1921
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED EDINBURGH
TO
MY WIFE
[CONTENTS]
- page
- Introduction [9]
- PART I: SOME ENGLISH CLASSICS
- PART II: SOME CONTEMPORARIES
-
- George Santayana [65]
- The Poems of Francis Brett-Young [76]
- The Poems of Iris Tree [81]
- The Poems of Aldous Huxley [88]
- The Poems of Robert Graves [97]
- J. D. Beresford [101]
- Night and Day [105]
- E. C. Booth [112]
- Ford Madox Hueffer [126]
- The Ballad of the White Horse [139]
- E. M. Forster [152]
- Sheila Kaye-Smith [157]
- PART III: BOOKS ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
- PART IV: CERTAIN FOREIGNERS
[INTRODUCTION]
From reviews that I have read of earlier books of mine I have at last learnt wisdom. It seems that I must be explicit about my intentions in a preface in order to save the critics the trouble of reading the book through.
Now it must be remembered that literary critics are men of intelligence who have read everything and damned most things. Very few indeed are the books which they allow to be worth the trouble that must have been taken to write them.
And it is certainly true that we suffer from a flood of reading matter which serves no more purpose than a packet of the cheapest cigarettes or a cocktail.
We have not troubled to acquire a critical sense. We accept what we see on the bookstalls and buy books almost entirely from the attractiveness of their wrappers. But there ought to be a mean between a ferocious disdain of all modern writing and a surfeiting on all that is published. The majority of men and women are very much like myself, I imagine. They read with equal interest a modern novel, say, of Sheila Kaye-Smith, an exposition of the Relativity Theory like Eddington's Space, Time and Gravitation, E. V. Lucas's essays, Henri Fabre and Trotter, and at the same time keep harking back to reread Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Shelley and other favourites among the classics.
Even so, they are apt to miss much that is readable ... and from my correspondence I gather that I have many times been lucky enough to introduce an author to a new reader, as a result of which an undying friendship between the two has been caused.
Merely to turn over the following pages will not give the critic any clue why I chose the writers and books that I have chosen.
In point of fact, it just happens that these are the people who have attracted me sufficiently in my reading during the last year to jot down not so much why I found them attractive as what I found attractive in them.
It is quite by chance that there should be almost an equal number of foreigners, contemporaries and native classics in my list. I suppose it means that I devote about one-third of my reading hours to each.
With regard to my method of approach, it is no good reviling me for not criticising each book or author according to a stereotyped plan, as if I were a chemist analysing a compound. I am not analysing so much as enjoying. My position is that of the not altogether successful cricketer who yet takes a keen delight in watching great players bat. I do not propose to sit down and lay emphasis on the chances given or the faulty strokes: my object is rather to take as many enthusiasts of the game with me as I can find and just lie down and watch an innings which I know to be a good one.
To call this "gush" or "gusto," as some of my reviewers do, is merely silly. I am not so mentally deficient as they would have people to believe.
Merely to "slobber" over a book or a person is not one of my characteristics. It is extremely easy to pick holes, to adopt a negative attitude, to call down fire from heaven and make a show with the fists when your enemy is merely an author. That is not my idea of honourable action. If a book is bad (and I agree that most books are), let it die by itself. Professional critics only too frequently remind me of vultures: they crowd round the weak and the dying ready to devour.
The object of any man who enjoys life is to share his enjoyment with others. If a book appeals to me I want as many people as possible to derive the pleasure that I derived from it.
I would have my critics remember that this is not a book on "Why we should not Read——" (which would have been very easy to write), and therefore is meant to be laudatory. I do demand sincerity in my authors and at any rate a feeling for beauty.... Knowing full well as a novelist myself how extremely hard these desiderata are to be obtained, I am perhaps more lenient than some critics who have never tackled a creative task, just as I am less inclined to decry another man's strokes at cricket when I think of my own feeble efforts, but it is very definitely worth pointing out that the severest critics of any sport are always those who know nothing about it, and I am beginning to believe that these modern critics who find no good in any work which comes under their notice know nothing whatever about literature, but, like the audiences at a Cup-tie, talk a wonderful jargon which is apt to deceive all but the elect.
I feel that I have wasted too much time on the critics. They don't really count for anything on either side.
To you for whom I have written this book there is perhaps just this to say. Don't begin by looking for fresh light on authors that you already know. My sole object is to introduce you to authors that you don't yet know. This introduction was not written for you. You can leave it out. The introduction was written for the critics, the book for you, and the proportion of pages devoted to them set against the pages devoted to you will give you an accurate idea of the proportion of favour that I want, yours and the critics'.
Five of the shortest chapters in this book have been already published, one in To-Day, the others in John o' London's Weekly; to the editors of these journals I am indebted for permission to reprint.
[PART I]
SOME ENGLISH CLASSICS
I
TOM JONES
I suppose there is still somebody living who has not read Tom Jones: it seems inconceivable that it should be so, but queer things of this sort do happen. Only the other day I met a man who had never seen any Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. To say that Fielding possessed more wit and humour and more knowledge of mankind than any other person of modern times, except Shakespeare, ought to be sufficient to drive anyone ignorant of his work at once to the nearest bookshop. "Since the days of Homer," says one great critic, "the world has not seen a more artful fable [than Tom Jones]. The characters and adventures are wonderfully diversified; yet the circumstances are all so natural, and rise so easily from one another, and co-operate with so much regularity in bringing on, even while they seem to retard, the catastrophe, that the curiosity of the reader is kept always awake, and instead of flagging, grows more and more impatient as the story advances, till at last it becomes downright anxiety. And when we get to the end, and look back on the whole contrivance, we are amazed to find that of so many incidents there should be so few superfluous; that in such variety of fiction there should be so great probability, and that so complete a tale should be so perspicuously conducted and with perfect unity of design."
We read and reread Tom Jones in order to recapture some of that first careless rapture which is so refreshing a point in Fielding's fiction, to get away from the weary, meticulous self-analysis of the modern novelist, to the full-blooded, honest attitude of the country-bred Englishman of the eighteenth century. Here we have a tale told for the sake of narrative, with incidents, the interest in which never for a moment flags, characters all lively, true and fresh, dialogue full of point, variety and suitability. It is a test of our interest that we feel angry at the constant digressions and interruptions, but who would do without those masterly initial chapters in each book?
As to the charge of coarseness which has been brought against him, we feel that Fielding would have been dumbfounded with surprise. He states explicitly, over and over again, that to recommend goodness and innocence was always his sincere endeavour, and certainly no higher-souled, purer heroine than Sophia Western ever walked. Even Tom Jones himself, who was singularly unable to resist the importunity of frail ladies, acts up to a code which is certainly not coarse.
"I do not pretend to the gift of chastity more than my neighbours," he says to Nightingale. "I have been guilty with women, I own it, but am not conscious that I ever injured any. Nor would I, to procure pleasure to myself, be knowingly the cause of misery to any human being."
Allworthy, as his name suggests, is a model of what we should all like to be, generous, pure, slow to believe evil, quick to forgive, a true friend and a merciful judge.
"It hath been my constant maxim in life," he says to Blifil when he hears of his sister's marriage, "to make the best of all matters that happen."
Not that Fielding makes his characters impossibly good: there is none that avoids some taint. Allworthy is altogether too credulous, and Sophia's allegiance to her family passes the bounds of common sense, while the rest of the characters have very much of the earthy in their texture. The lovable Partridge is a coward, his wife a shrew, Allworthy's sister and her husband hate each other like poison, Square and Thwackum are eaten up with hypocrisy and deceit, young Blifil is an unredeemed villain, Squire Western is an ignorant, blasphemous boor, and his sister would be a thorn in any man's flesh. Square, with his eternal harping on the natural beauty of virtue, and Thwackum, with his chatter about the divine power of grace, are a pretty couple of scoundrels for Fielding to lavish his irony on.
"Had not Thwackum too much neglected virtue, and Square religion, in the composition of their several systems, and had not both utterly discarded all natural goodness of heart, they had never been represented as the objects of derision in this history," says the author.
But perhaps Fielding's greatest charm lies in his firm, masculine, straightforward, even racy English. We may take as an example what the ordinary author finds most difficult, the description of his heroine.
"Her shape was not only exact, but extremely delicate; and the nice proportion of her arms promised the truest symmetry in her limbs. Her hair, which was black, was so luxuriant that it reached her middle, before she cut it to comply with the modern fashion, and it was now curled so gracefully in her neck that few could believe it to be her own.... Her eyebrows were full, even, and arched beyond the power of art to imitate. Her black eyes had a lustre in them which all her softness could not extinguish. Her nose was exactly regular, and her mouth, in which were two rows of ivory, exactly answered Sir John Suckling's description in those lines:
'Her lips were red, and one was thin,
Compared to that was next her chin.
Some bee had stung it newly.'
Her cheeks were of the oval kind, and in her right she had a dimple, which the least smile discovered."
Such is the girl who fell in love with Tom Jones in her teens and who after an amazing series of misfortunes ultimately married him, in spite of her knowledge of his many temporary intrigues with other women. Indeed, if she followed after her father, she would have "liked him the better for it."
"You have not the worse opinion of a young fellow," bellows the Squire to Sophia, "for getting a bastard, have you, girl? No, no, the women will like un the better for't."
Certainly Sophia did not seem to like Tom the worse for his amatory adventure with Molly Seagrim, perhaps because she, like her creator, was able to differentiate between real love and that "desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh" which passes for love.
In other words, Fielding has made her human.
"We ... are admitted behind the scenes of this great theatre of nature," he proudly says in one of his prefaces "(and no author ought to write anything besides dictionaries and spelling-books who hath not this privilege)...." He is certainly admitted behind the scenes of the country squire's household.
Sophia's aunt, with her political and philosophical analogies ("You are to consider me, child, as Socrates, not asking your opinion, but only informing you of mine"; and again, "The French shall as soon persuade me that they take foreign towns in defence only of their own country as you can impose on me to believe you have never yet thought seriously of matrimony ..."); Sophia's father's relations with his wife ("His conversation consisted chiefly of halloaing, singing, relations of sporting adventures, bawdy, and abuse of women and of the Government: these, however, were the only seasons when Mr Western saw his wife, for when he repaired to her bed he was generally so drunk that he could not see; and, in the sporting season, he always rose from her before it was light") and his attitude to her after she died ("When anything in the least soured him, as a bad scenting day, or a distemper among his hounds, or any other such misfortune, he constantly vented his spleen by invectives against the deceased, saying, 'If my wife was alive now, she would be glad of this.'")—all these pictures are lightning strokes of verisimilitude which prove how perfectly at home Fielding was in the great theatre of nature.
When we come to the lower classes, to Mrs Honour, with her "Marry, come up!" "Hoity toity!" prefaces to gossip, which is only rivalled and not excelled by her counterpart in Shakespeare, Juliet's nurse; to Partridge, with his pricelessly irrelevant tags from the classics: "infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem," "hinc illæ lachrymæ," "tempus edax rerum," and so on, we can only give ourselves up whole-heartedly to the enjoyment of them and wish that they may go on talking for ever.
Then there is the surgeon whose talk might well be set for dictation in schools: "I was once, I remember, called to a patient who had received a violent contusion in his tibia, by which the exterior cutis was lacerated, so that there was a profuse sanguinary discharge; and the interior membranes were so divellicated that the os or bone very plainly appeared through the aperture of the vulnus or wound. Some febrile symptoms intervening at the same time (for the pulse was exuberant, and indicated much phlebotomy), I apprehended an immediate mortification."
The fact is that Fielding, like the classical author he is so fond of quoting, finds everything and particularly everyone in the world amusing and interesting.
It was a stroke of genius to send Sophia and Tom wandering from inn to inn, for in no other way than by making his characters take to the open road could the author have introduced such a variety of characters or such exciting episodes.
"For though every good author will confine himself within the bounds of probability, it is by no means necessary that his characters, or his incidents, should be trite, common or vulgar; such as happen in every street, or in every house, or which may be met with in the home articles of a newspaper. Nor must he be inhibited from showing many persons and things, which may possibly have never fallen within the knowledge of great part of his readers."
In one point Fielding certainly does strain the bounds of probability beyond all bearing: there never was such a book for impossible coincidences as Tom Jones. Everybody appears to know everybody else and everybody else's business; people turn up in the most unexpected places (especially bedrooms) at the most unfortunate moments. It is like a musical comedy in this respect. There is much more of the surprising than there is of the credible in events, not in the people, who are, as I have said, only too natural.
It is not so much surprising that Partridge should read Erasmus, Ovid, Pope's Homer, The Spectator, Robinson Crusoe and Thomas à Kempis as that he should have ever met Tom Jones as he did and when he did.
It is not at all surprising that a barber should quote Latin tags irrelevantly, or that he should join Tom with the idea of fighting for the Jacobites, but not be "over-nice" when he found out that he was "booked" for the other side (though he was going to fight against his own cause, yet he would not drink against it); but it is impossible to believe that the same people should jump into and out of the story and meet again after a score of years or more.
There are readers who object to the interpolation of the episode of the Man of the Hill on the ground that it only retards the action. Such people ought not to read Tom Jones. The true reader is in no hurry to get on with the story, though he is thrilled with the intricacies of it; he is ready to turn aside into any by-path which will shed more light on the England of the eighteenth century. For after all it is from the Man of the Hill that we hear that "he could not only hit a standing mark with great certainty, but hath actually shot a crow as it was flying in the air"; that there were gentlemen farmers of three hundred pounds a year in 1657; that on five hundred pounds a year at Oxford a profligate could keep his horses and his whore and obtain what credit he pleased; that there were Justice Darlings even in those days ("I have travelled the circuit these forty years and never found a horse in my life ... thou art a lucky fellow ... for thou didst not only find a horse, but a halter too, I promise thee"); how to leave a restaurant without paying for one's food; how much more costly precious Burgundy used to be than simple claret; how philosophy elevates and steels the mind ("Men of true learning and almost universal knowledge always compassionate the ignorance of others; but fellows who excel in some little, low, contemptible art are always certain to despise those who are unacquainted with that art"); how the sane Englishman of the time regarded James II., and a thousand other things of equal interest.
And in spite of its apparent irrelevance, does not this episode develop our appreciation of the hero? Set against the misanthropic Man of the Hill, who sees marks of God's Power, Wisdom and Goodness everywhere but in his fellow-man, Tom Jones acts as an admirable foil.
"I have lived," he says, "but a short time in the world, and yet have known men worthy of the highest friendship, and women of the highest love."
It is by virtue of contrasts such as this just shown that Fielding would claim to be named among the geniuses.
"By genius I would understand that power, or rather those powers of the mind which are capable of penetrating into all things within our reach and knowledge, and of distinguishing their essential differences. These are no other than invention and judgment...."
Added to this there must be "conversation."
"So necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learnt only in the world."
He also requires of his ideal author "refinement, elegance and liberality of spirit." He must have a good heart and be capable of feeling. "The author who will make me weep," says Horace, "must first weep himself. No man can paint a distress well which he doth not feel while he is painting it.... I am convinced I never make my reader laugh heartily but where I have laughed before him."
Who would deny the interest or importance of digressions like these when they shed such a flood of light on to the author's attitude to his own work?
The sergeant who resented the imputation against his character conveyed by the words non sequitur ("You are another," cries the sergeant, "an you come to that. No more a sequitur than yourself. You are a pack of rascals, and I'll prove it, for I will fight the best man of you all for twenty pounds"); the lightning-like flash of inspiration which made Mrs Waters repeat the cry, "Rape! Rape!" when she is discovered in bed with Tom; the logic of the landlady of the inn ("So easy and good-humoured were they that they found no fault with my Worcestershire perry, which I sold them for champagne; and it, to be sure, is as well tasted, and as wholesome, as the best champagne in the kingdom, otherwise I would scorn to give it 'em; and they drank me two bottles. No, no, I will never believe any harm of such sober, good sort of people")—all these touches and thousands more are proofs of how much genius depends upon "conversation," or a practical knowledge of the world, the power of distinguishing essential differences.
Fielding seems to have distinguished these essential differences not only in people but in the life of his time on every side. Realising full well that posterity would read him, he also realised what were the things that posterity would like to hear about it. So we get that inimitable description of the puppet show where "The Provoked Husband" displaced "Punch and Judy," by the throwing out of which "such idle trumpery puppet-shows were," in the words of their master, "at last brought to be a rational entertainment."
"I would by no means degrade the ingenuity of your profession," answered Jones, "but I should have been glad to have seen my old acquaintance Master Punch for all that; and so far from improving, I think, by leaving him out and his merry wife Joan, you have spoiled your puppet show"—a sentiment that many of us to-day will heartily endorse.
It is a rare treat to be shown a performance of Hamlet in the eighteenth century with Partridge as critic, preferring Claudius to the rest of the actors because he spoke louder, and objecting to the gravediggers because of their lack of skill. Then there is the gypsies' wedding in the barn, with its sumptuous food and its Solomon-like judgment delivered by the king on the cuckold: "Me do order dat you have no money given you, for you deserve punishment, not reward; me do order, therefore, dat you be de infamous gipsy, and do wear a pair of horns upon your forehead for one month; and dat your wife be called de whore, and pointed at all dat time; for you be de infamous gipsy, but she be no less de infamous whore."
Running through it all is the delicious Partridge, resenting not at all attacks upon his honour, but up in arms at once when Tom casts aspersions on his parts of speech. "A child may sometimes teach his grandmother to suck eggs. I have lived to a fine purpose, truly, if I am to be taught my grammar at this time of day."
Truly Fielding invoked the comic spirit to some purpose: "Come, thou, that hast inspired thy Aristophanes, thy Lucian, thy Cervantes, thy Rabelais, thy Molière, thy Shakespeare, thy Swift, thy Marivaux, fill my pages with humour; till mankind learn the good nature to laugh only at the follies of others, and the humility to grieve at their own." The creator of Partridge is worthy to hold his own in the kingdom of humour with any of the octette.
No less successful is he when he leaves the broad highway and the rustic inns of the west for the fashionable life of the metropolis. The coquetry of Lady Bellaston and the gallantry of Lord Fellamar are as well portrayed as the poachers and squires of Somerset. Indeed with Hogarth on the one side and Fielding on the other as companions he must be extremely dull-witted who fails to get right behind the scenes of eighteenth-century England, when the devil was no longer believed in, and ladies of fashion curtsied low to their male friends, when nobody's manners were "over-nice," when a virtuous girl was almost as rare as a road safe from highwaymen, where "the highest life is much the dullest, and affords very little humour or entertainment" beyond "dressing and cards, eating and drinking, bowing and curtsying," where a country gentleman orders as a dinner for one at the Hercules' Pillars "a shoulder of mutton roasted, a spare rib of pork and a fowl and egg sauce," where the same country gentleman sends his daughter into the arms of her lover with a "Yoicks!" and a "Tally-ho!": "To her, boy! to her! Go to her! That's it, little honeys. O, that's it!" and a "Harkee, Allworthy, I'll bet thee five pounds to a crown we have a boy to-morrow nine months; but prithee tell me what wut ha'! Wut ha' Burgundy, champagne, or what? For, please Jupiter, we'll make a night on't."
We read Tom Jones, then, first and foremost because it is a "rattling good yarn" from start to finish, full of hair-breadth escapes, trials of, and misunderstandings between, hero and heroine, ending, after fickle Fortune has done everything in her power to prevent it, in the complete happiness of their union; we read it because in the course of our journey through it we make many new and life-long friends, find much to laugh at; tenderness and pity are roused in us for the unhappy, mirth at the discomfiture of the self-complacent hypocrites.
We read it in order to be transported to a healthier century than ours, when neurasthenia was unknown and people were tortured by nothing worse than colic and spleen; we read it to get away from people who think too much and live not at all, to people who think not at all and live every moment of their lives to the full, sinning, if they sin, splendidly, like the pagans they were.
We read it because it was written by a man of genius possessed of a fine, liberal-hearted spirit, a perfect command of his native tongue and a great lover of humanity.
"And now, my friend, I take this opportunity of heartily wishing thee well. If I have been an entertaining companion to thee, I promise thee it is what I have desired."
II
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
We read and reread Wuthering Heights because it is like no other book in the world. The nearest approach to it is not English at all, but Russian. Dostoievsky in The Brothers Karamazov has characters in some degree approximating to Heathcliff. In English fiction there is no one in the least like him.
Emily Brontë with her love of life, her passionate adoration of the earth, sweeps us off our feet. She plunges us into a world of elemental lusts and hates and cruelties. Heathcliff is treated brutally and revenges himself even more brutally. The frustrated passion of Catherine for Heathcliff and of Heathcliff for Catherine is scarcely distinguishable from hate; they repay each other with torture for torture, pang for hopeless pang. Judged by his deeds, Heathcliff is as much a monster of evil as Iago, but—and this is what makes Emily Brontë's genius so amazing—we never for a moment judge him by his deeds. The material event never seems to matter. In fact, so far as material actions go, Heathcliff is completely inert. He lets things take their course. His most striking, almost his only violent, action is his running away with Isabella. He does nothing to prevent Catherine from marrying Edgar Linton: his vengeance is completely removed from any material sphere and once accomplished rouses in him no satisfaction: he merely dies. The world of Heathcliff and Catherine is a world of spiritual affinities, of spiritual conflicts and loves. The whole book moves on a spiritual plane except for one lapse, the unwholesome physical passion of Isabella for her husband. "No brutality disgusted her," says Heathcliff. "I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefully back."
Catherine is completely innocent when she gives her body to Edgar while her soul belongs to Heathcliff. This is her unforgivable sin, the attempt to sunder the body from the soul.
"Nelly," she cries, "I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."
But out of the raging discord that Emily Brontë creates in the stupendous passion of Catherine and Heathcliff she wrings a strange and terrible harmony. One cannot help but gasp at the quiet, peaceful ending:
"I lingered round them under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."
In the union of the younger Catherine and the redeemed Hareton one is expected to feel that the souls of the two giant characters are appeased, but we are not interested in that. The deaths of Catherine and Heathcliff matter no more than the death of Cæsar in the play. Catherine is never so much in the picture as when she has passed out of it physically for ever. The whole tragedy is conducted on an invisible and immaterial plane: it is really all written round one line of Browning inverted:
"The passion that left the sky to seek itself in the earth."
We are introduced to it at the very beginning of the book when Lockwood hears and feels the ghost of Catherine: it begins with Heathcliff's passionate outburst at her death: "Oh, God, it is unbearable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
It continues without a break for eighteen years and by the side of it any passion that we have read of in modern English fiction seems so puny and frigid as to be almost laughable.
The fight of Catherine to get through to her lover, hampered by his flesh, forms really the great struggle of the book.
"I looked round impatiently"—it is Heathcliff's poignant cry—"I felt her by me—I could almost see her, and yet I could not!... She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the sport of that intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return; she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in her chamber—I was beaten out of that. I couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night—to be always disappointed! It racked me!... It was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years."
It is on reading passages like this that one realises the futility of trying to explain away genius. This could only have been written by one who had been whirled in a maelstrom of passion, racked and tortured on the wheel of life in a way that we know Emily Brontë was never called upon to endure, or—it is the result of a divine inspiration vouchsafed, one knows not how, irrespective of mortal experience.
This wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit is one of the most deeply tragic, most deeply moving ideas ever presented to man.
"In every cloud," he says at the end of the drama, "in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am devoured with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her...."
Again: "I am too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but do not satisfy itself...."
And again: "There is one who won't shrink from my company! By God! she's relentless. Oh, damn it! It's unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear—even mine."
No—the real ending of Wuthering Heights does not lie in any concluding words of benign skies and quiet earth.
The real end is the tale told by the shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the moor after Heathcliff is dead.
"I was going to the Grange one evening—a dark evening, threatening thunder—and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided.
"'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.
"'There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab,' he blubbered, 'un' I darenut pass 'em.'"
There is no question of redemption or moral problems here. She reveals a point of view above good and evil. In her artistry and technique she is thorough. The minor characters all preserve their individuality from Joseph, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, to Nelly Dean, the teller of the tale. Emily Brontë's accuracy in transcribing the Yorkshire dialect is astonishing. She certainly listened to those Haworth rustics to some advantage, even if she rarely exchanged a word with them. She is as well able to paint the civilised, over-refined type who inhabit Thrushcross Grange as she is to depict the primitive, half-savage inhabitants of Wuthering Heights.
The sensual sentimentalist Isabella rouses the devil in Catherine and loathing in Heathcliff; the illusion of refinement in Edgar results in the terrible divorce of Catherine's body from her soul.
In these two and many other instances we see an unerring psychology in Emily Brontë. Heathcliff's one solitary human feeling, as Charlotte Brontë realised, was not his love for Catherine, which was "a sentiment fierce and inhuman," but his "half-confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw—the young man whom he has ruined."
Seldom has the spirit of a place brooded over a book as does the spirit of the moors over Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë's descriptions of scenery are as famous as those of Thomas Hardy: they are even less laboured.
"Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights it always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw or a season of steady rain."
Exactitude marks her time, her scene and her depiction of passions and emotions.
Her faults are as glaring as her virtues. Probably there has never been a worse-constructed tale. It has to be read many times before one can grasp its great qualities. There is scene within scene, tale within tale of extraordinary intricacy. It is hard enough to remember who is speaking; it is trebly hard to remember who everyone is. But her genius is so all-powerful that once you are gripped by the story you simply don't notice the clumsiness or the creaking of the machinery.
Of a piece with her genius is her style. It is perfect in its simplicity, strength and beauty, very different from that of Charlotte with her "peruse" and "indite." Nor does Emily's dramatic instinct ever fail her: her scenes of passion follow nature and always ring true.
The picture we get of her personality from Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, the tall, the strong, the unconquerable, the lover of the moors and the lover of animals, makes her stand out from that book as of a heroic, lovable but altogether mysterious type.
It is to M. Maeterlinck, however, that we owe the last word on Emily herself. To him she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing soul, independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the insignificance of all "experience" as compared with the spirit.
"Not a single event," he writes, "ever paused as it passed by her threshold; yet did every event she could claim take place in her heart, with incomparable force and beauty, with matchless precision and detail. We say that nothing ever happened, but did not all things really happen to her much more directly and tangibly than with most of us, seeing that everything that took place about her, everything that she saw or heard was transformed within her into thoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of life?...
"If to her there came nothing of all that passes in love, sorrow, passion or anguish, still did she possess all that abides when emotion has faded away."
And what, you may well ask, has Emily's personality got to do with us who are concentrating our attention on Wuthering Heights? Let Swinburne supply the answer:
"The book is what it is because the author was what she was; this is the main and central fact to be remembered. Circumstances have modified the details; they have not implanted the conception.... The love which devours life itself, which devastates the present and desolates the future with unquenchable and raging fire, has nothing less pure in it than flame or sunlight. And this passionate and ardent chastity is utterly and unmistakably spontaneous and unconscious. Not till the story is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly absorbed and digested, does the reader even perceive the simple and natural absence of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion of a baser alloy in the ingredients of its human emotion than in the splendour of lightning or the roll of a gathered wave. Then, as on issuing sometimes from the tumult of charging waters, he finds, with something of wonder, how absolutely pure and sweet was the element of living storm with which his own nature has been for a while made one; not a grain in it of soiling sand, not a waif of clogging weed."
We read Wuthering Heights then for its exquisite purity of description:—"The snow has quite gone down here, darling, and I only see two white spots on the whole range of moors: the sky is blue, and the larks are singing, and the becks and brooks are all brim full"—the perfection of her style. "If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me, and if she be motionless, it is sleep," and "I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers," the stark-naked grandeur of its genius.
"Wuthering Heights," says Charlotte Brontë, "was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot."
III
CHARLES LAMB
Everything in the end comes back to a question of taste. Why should one prefer a Corona cigar to a "gasper," a turkey to tripe, a magnum of Mumm to a quart of "swipes," crêpe de Chine and georgette to ninon, Gerald du Maurier to a patter comedian in a suburban pantomime, Titian to Kirchner, or a Savile Row suit to a "reach-me-down"?
It isn't only a question of expense or even of comfort; it's more a question of palate; man needs must love the highest when he sees it. We are most of us too dull of vision and too vitiated by gross familiarity with the commonplace and the vulgar to "see" in the true sense of the word.
There are few benefactors so admirable as those who effect an introduction between our insignificant selves and some genius who has the power to translate us into realms undreamt of in our puny imagination.
Among these geniuses Charles Lamb stands out pre-eminently for one most important reason: he wears no august cloak of ceremony to frighten us away; of all great writers he is the most human and the most lovable. Begin by listening to his preface prefixed to The Last Essay of Elia. There you will hear from his own lips the kind of writing he undertakes to give you—"a sort of unlicked, incondite things—villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases."
Of himself we read with a grin of delight that "he never cared for the society of what are called good people" ... that "he herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself" ... that "his manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders."
He is more honest about his weaknesses than any other man of a like fame.
He was certainly not of the "unco' guid," which may have accounted partially for his dislike of Scotsmen, and he affected no indifferences. As a writer he matters just in so far as he felt "the difference of mankind—to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste.... I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices ... the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies."
The hatred with which he views death shows us how completely a lover of life he was:
"I am not content to pass away 'like a weaver's shuttle.' Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity, and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacles here. I am content to stand still, at the age to which I am arrived.... I do not want ... to drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of mine ... puzzles and discomposes me ... a new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with Life?"
If you can resist this, which to me is perhaps the most beautiful piece of English prose in existence, you must be a little less than human yourself. So you ask me again why you should read Lamb, and I answer: (1) because he has always something to say and conveys his thought "without smothering it in blankets"; (2) because in antique fancy, quip, oddity, whimsical jest, humour, wit and irony, rare gifts all, he is a supreme master; (3) because his limitations and tragedies were, like ours, many, but his courage in facing them, unlike ours, was cheerful and invincible; the best dramatic and literary critic of his time, he yet had no ear for music ("to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter"). He was prevented from becoming an actor by an impediment in his speech; drink went to his head at once and he was fond of it; himself the shining example of the sanity of true genius, his sister killed her father in a mad frenzy; holding women in reverence more than any man, he yet failed to marry the girl of his choice; designed by nature to be a scholar and an Oxford don, he was denied a university education and condemned to thirty-six years of drudgery in a city office ... the list of Life's little ironies in his case can be piled mountain high, but the supreme irony is that this sufferer at the hands of the malignant fates is our greatest humorist; and (4) because he takes the homely and familiar for his subjects and sheds fresh and beautiful light upon them, making even the most soured among us reconsider life and its possibilities.
IV
JAMES BOSWELL
Boswell is essentially a book for the pocket, to be opened at random while waiting for a train or a doctor or a dentist; busy men of affairs like Lord Rosebery have recognised it as the finest "night-cap" in the world. It is the fallacy of thinking that "skipping" is the sign of a shallow mind that has led to the avoidance of what is really the most absorbing study in the world, the revelation of the lives and characters of men of fame. And of all subjects for biography Dr Johnson stands easily first, because he embodies all the essential features of the English character; we see in him "our own magnified and glorified selves."
Furthermore, he has a genius for his biographer; as Sir Walter Raleigh says: "The accident which gave Boswell to Johnson and Johnson to Boswell is one of the most extraordinary pieces of good fortune in literary history."
It is mainly by his conversations that his character is depicted, and it is worth remembering that his mots are famous not only for their good sense and sound judgment, but for their freshness and unexpectedness.
"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned ... a man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." "Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves." "Even ill-assorted marriages are preferable to cheerless celibacy." "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." "A peace will equally leave the warrior and relater of wars destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie." "I am always for getting a boy forward with his learning ... I would let him at first read any English book ... because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book." "Sir, young men have more virtue than old men; they have more wit and humour and knowledge of life than we had; but then the dogs are not so good scholars."
Once started it is exceedingly difficult to avoid quoting extensively. One feels in all that he says that Dr Johnson had at any rate cleared his mind of cant and proved to the hilt the truth of his aphorisms. You will have noticed how clear-cut and simple they are, clothed in language poles removed from that which tradition has chosen to associate with the "sesquipedalian lexicographer." What sanity of outlook and healthiness of mind is expressed in such a robust sentence as "Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it"; or, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." What joy we feel in the thought that to appreciate such talk as his we need not be literary: it is enough to be English. "Books without the knowledge of life are useless; or what should books teach but the art of living?" We can trust a man who talks like that.
But it is not only for his superb common sense that we love Dr Johnson; it is for the complete portrait of a complex character, rich in virtue, human in its failings and limitations, that we owe Boswell an unpayable debt of gratitude. "Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history." How well do we all recall that exquisite summing up of Macaulay. No novelist would dare to give us so paradoxical a picture. Here is a man full of reverence and piety who yet touches the posts as he walks to avert evil; a man notorious for his brusquerie and lack of manners, who describes himself as "well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity," and of whom Goldsmith said that he had nothing of the bear but his skin; a man far more apprehensive of death than most of us, who yet took the knife out of the surgeon's hands in order to operate on himself; afflicted by terrible diseases, he was yet one of the most jovial and sociable men of his age; by nature sluggish and averse from work, he yet did more actual drudgery than any ten ordinary mortals.
Practically starving himself, he yet clothed, housed and fed a multitude of ingrates; the great literary dictator of his time, he failed almost entirely to appreciate poetry, and (most paradoxical of all) the great giant of letters of the eighteenth century he has yet left practically nothing that the ordinary man ever reads. "This is the greatness of Johnson, that he is greater than his works. He thought of himself as a man, not as an author ... duties and friendships and charities were more to him than fame and honour." But the wise man will not be content with the greatness of the man; "the reader who desires to have Johnson to himself for an hour, with no interpreter, cannot do better than turn to the notes on Shakespeare. They are written informally and fluently; they are packed full of observation and wisdom; and their only fault is that they are all too few."
It is hard to imagine that anyone who has read the noble preface to the Dictionary, the illuminating preface to and notes on Shakespeare, the thrilling Life of Richard Savage, and a selection of the sage essays in The Rambler and The Idler should rest content until he had read Johnson from end to end. This, then, is why one should read Boswell; you will get a full-length picture of the typical Englishman at his greatest, a lesson on the art of life, and an appetite to read the works of one of the sanest, "all-round" writers who ever lived.
V
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.... I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion," writes Charles Lamb to Robert Southey, but "I wish he would not quarrel with the world at the rate he does."
We read Lamb and Johnson and Pepys for their lovableness; we read Hazlitt for his intensity of passion, his vigorous hate, his sense of glorious enjoyment, his unstudied ease of manner, his healthy attitude to literature, his enduring freshness and his stimulating criticism.
There is little in his life history to endear him to us; he was unfortunate in his relations with the three women who came into his life: "I have wanted one thing only to make me completely happy, but lacking that I lack all"; he was an impossible friend; he even managed to quarrel with Lamb, and though he was an acute and brilliant lecturer, there was little sympathy between him and his audience. The early part of the nineteenth century was the worst possible time for a shy, over-sensitive and easily irritated writer to work in; the obscenities of the Blackwood's Magazine clique have left an ineradicable stain—but when they speak of Hazlitt "as rather an ulcer than a man," even after this lapse of time our gorge rises; one ceases to wonder at the vitriolic bitterness which he wastes on his enemies.
We read and admire Hazlitt because they never brought him to his knees; he was a born fighter, a true adventurer; he neither asked nor gave quarter.
Most of us have wondered why a nation so sports-mad as we are should have been content for so long with such inept accounts of mighty conflicts by field and river as we get in our newspapers. Bernard Shaw did his best to portray a boxing contest, but Hazlitt alone among writers has succeeded in expounding the philosophy of sport and making us live through every moment of a bygone fight as if we had actually witnessed it:
"Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his hands in the air, and with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death's head spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante's Inferno."
It is worthy of notice that he dedicates this description to the ladies: "nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the exploits of the brave."
Hazlitt is pre-eminently a fresh-air man. His essay On Going a Journey, as R. L. Stevenson said, "is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it." "Give me the clear blue sky over my head" (what joy it gives one merely to transcribe the well-known words), "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy." He brings just this naïve, fresh-air, healthy enthusiasm into all his critical work, and it is this quality that calls forth that noble panegyric of Professor Saintsbury which shows once and for all the reason for reading Hazlitt:
"To anyone who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to anyone who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language ... he is the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet."
That this is a bare statement of truth can be seen in the opening lecture on the English poets:
"Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for anything else ... it is not a branch of authorship: it is 'the stuff of which our life is made.'"
These are brave words and, as we should expect from so alert a pugilist, straight from the shoulder.
His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays is studded with gems of criticism. "It is the peculiar excellence of Shakespeare's heroines that they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure abstractions of the affections." He is the least derivative of all critics and quotes from one authority alone, himself: hence his conclusions are not those of the academic professors, and it delights our hearts to listen to him trouncing Henry V., that false idol of the mob, and extolling Falstaff at his royal master's expense: "Falstaff is the better man of the two."
And so you again ask me in one sentence why we should read Hazlitt and the answer is, in the words of George Sampson: "A fondness for Hazlitt is a fondness for health in literature" ... and there is room for health in the literature of to-day.
"Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt."
If you want to prove this, turn again to The Ignorance of the Learned. If only we could write like that!
VI
SAMUEL PEPYS
All girls in their teens and most boys keep what they call a diary, just as most undergraduates and all young unmarried women write what they imagine to be a novel: the value of each of these forms of expression would be considerably enhanced if the writers of either took any pains to learn the technique of their art. Of the ideal diarist two things are pre-eminently required: an all-round interest in life and a complete self-candour which is poles removed from the anæmic sickness of self-love and an effective antidote against it. No one should dare to keep a diary before reading Pepys from end to end, and few people will dare to do so after reading him.
The question is not why we should read Pepys, but why we cannot help reading Pepys. The answer is simple: No novelist would have the audacity to ask us to believe in a hero who was at the same time Secretary to the Admiralty, regenerator of the navy, Master of the Trinity House, master of a city company, Member of Parliament, President of the Royal Society, the friend and counsellor of kings and princes, and yet spent his spare time "picking up" girls in church or behind the counter, making love to his own maids and actresses, hiding his gold in the garden and digging it up again, expressing "mighty content" at the spectacle of men being hanged, drawn and quartered, alternately sulking with his wife and soothing her suspicions about his amours, continually making oaths not to get drunk and breaking them, gloating over his clothes like a peacock, lamenting every expense in the way of entertainment like a miser, frightened to death by fear of ghosts, burglars and the plague, chronicling the details of every delectable dinner that he ate, and every delectable wench that he saw or kissed—in short, expressing all the undignified weaknesses our flesh is heir to.
"No man," says the philosopher, "was ever written down but by himself."
Certainly no man ever wrote himself "down" more honestly than Pepys. Arnold Bennett was only speaking the bare truth when he said that none of us would ever have the pluck to lock ourselves in a room and commit to paper exactly what we have said or done or felt during the whole of one day, even if we knew that no eyes but our own should ever scan the page and that the manuscript should be burnt as soon as it was written. Compromise is an essential concomitant of civilisation: perfect sincerity even with ourselves is impossible. This explains at once the irresistible fascination of Pepys: here is a man who has actually achieved the impossible. Nine-tenths of our staple food in conversation is gossip, not only in suburban drawing-rooms and London clubs, but in every department of life. Scandal-mongering is as much a part and parcel of our life as it was in Lady Sneerwell's day.
These peeps behind the scenes in a man's private life make us much more lenient in our judgment of our own peccadilloes: thousands of men have, we feel, acted as he did and we have done, but only Pepys has had the temerity to confess: there is no entertainment so diverting as that of watching a man give himself away. Pepys does it on every page with an unconscious humour which adds a thousandfold to our enjoyment:
"To the Strand, to my booksellers, and there bought an idle, rogueish French book, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found." ... "This day, not for want, but for good husbandry, I sent my father, by his desire, six pair of my old shoes, which fit him, and are good."
"To St Dunstan's church where ... I stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got further and further from me; and at last, I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again—which, seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid, in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew."
Pretty good, this, for the Secretary to the Admiralty! We feel ourselves mighty superior fellows when we read confessions like this, don't we?
"My wife being dressed this day in fair hair, did make me so mad, that I spoke not one word to her, though I was ready to burst with anger ... in my way home discovered my trouble to my wife, swearing several times, which I pray God forgive me for, and bending my fist, that I would not endure it. She, poor wretch, was surprised with it, and made me no answer all the way home; but there we parted, and I to the office late, and then home, and without supper to bed, vexed ... up (next day) and by-and-by down comes my wife ... she promising to wear white locks no more in my sight, which I, like a severe fool, thinking not enough, begun to except against, and made her fly out to very high terms and cry, and in her heat, told me of (my) keeping company with Mrs Knipp (the actress), saying, that if I would never see her more—of whom she hath more reason to suspect than I had heretofore of Pembleton—she would never wear white locks more. This vexed me ... but to think never to see this woman—at least, to have her here more; and so all very good friends as ever."
"'And so to bed,' writes Mr Secretary Pepys a hundred times in his diary, and we may be sure that each time he joined Mrs Pepys beneath the coverlet he felt that the moment which marked the end of his wonderful day was one deserving careful record." So writes "W. N. P. Barbellion," the only modern diarist possessed in any degree of Pepys' complete self-candour, and, it is worthy of notice, the passage occurs in a book called Enjoying Life.
VII
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Because he always wrote prose like an artist Walter Savage Landor is worthy to be read at all times and in all moods.
"And through the trumpet of a child of Rome
Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece."
We all know what Swinburne thought about him: the trouble has been that so few people have taken any pains to go further and rediscover this great, imaginative artist for themselves. He is one of those unfortunates whose work we agree to take as read. If we only had a half his feeling for the value and weight of words the English tongue would be ten times richer than it is to-day, richer in harmony, richer in preciseness, richer in simplicity. He had a very definite sense of a writer's duty: "I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty and moroseness those that fit the thing." Surely when we find a man with so wide a range of thought, so filled with imagination, so much in love with heroism, beauty and freedom, with a prose style that is, of its kind, unrivalled, it is incumbent upon us to sink our prejudice against the classical and do the little extra work which is essential to a true appreciation of that salutary, clear-cut, highly disciplined art. His appeal is to the few who can enjoy the best literature for itself, but there is no reason why this circle should not be far wider than it is.
In his determination not to say anything superfluous he did at times fall into obscurity, but we forgive that in Browning: it is certainly not an all-obtrusive fault in Landor, especially in that later work of his, the Imaginary Conversations, on which his reputation now rests. Whether in those short and stirring scenes of emotion and action, or in the long and quiet ones of discussion and reflection, he shows an admirable insight into character, a fine dignity and urbanity, a mastery over delicate aphorisms on human nature, and a range of interest running from the earliest times to his own era. Take a few of the titles at random if you wish to gauge his range: "Peleus and Thetis," "Leofric and Godiva," "Mahomet and Sergius," "Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius IV.," "Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn," "Peter the Great and Alexis," "The Dream of Boccaccio," "The Dream of Petrarca."
Who is there among the narrators of old-time legends capable of charming us so much as the man who makes the slave-girl Rhodopè begin her life story thus:
"Never shall I forget the morning when my father, sitting in the coolest part of the house, exchanged his last measure of grain for a chlamys of scarlet cloth fringed with silver. He watched the merchant out of the door, and then looked wistfully into the corn-chest. I, who thought there was something worth seeing, looked in also, and, finding it empty, expressed my disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A faint and transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of mine. He unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before me, and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the glittering fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; I know not what flowers he gathered, but he gathered many; and some he placed in my bosom, and some in my hair...."
Godiva's one poignant cry to herself, "I hope they will not crowd about me so to-morrow," strikes a more effective note than the whole of Tennyson's poem on the same subject. Filippo Lippi's peerless description of his adventures in Barbary in the service of the corsair Abdul, where he met Almeida of the hazel eyes, Almeida, "cool, smooth and firm as a nectarine gathered before sunrise," is too well known to be quoted here, but is one of the first to be read by those who would see Landor in his natural element of beauty. "The clematis overtopped the lemon and orange trees ... white pigeons, and others in colour like the dawn of day ..."—this passage in particular is a masterpiece of descriptive writing. Not easily does one forget the pathetic figure of the discarded Anne Boleyn confronted in prison by her drunken husband. "Love your Elizabeth, my honoured Lord, and God bless you! She will soon forget to call me; do not chide her; think how young she is. Could I, could I kiss her, but once again! It would comfort my heart—or break it."
His sense of the dramatic is nowhere better shown than in that dialogue, though Spenser's announcement of his terrible loss to Essex goes near to equal it in pathos as does the appearance of Fiammetta to Boccaccio in his dream.
But to prove how absolutely the classical spirit can bring perfection to our native language what need is there of quoting more than this:
"Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall. We may enjoy the present while we are insensible of infirmity and decay: but the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past, and what is to come. There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodopè, that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last."
The white heat of austere, restrained passion is here, it is the sublimation of the Latin model. This surely is English as we would have her written, that which is rightly said and therefore sounds rightly. This is one of those certain occasions on which prose can bear a great deal of poetry: indeed there is more real poetry latent in the cadences of this paragraph than in many so-called poems of to-day.
Sir Sidney Colvin happily contrasts Landor's twilight with that more famous one of Keats:
"Within how few minutes has the night closed in upon us! Nothing is left discernible of the promontories, or the long irregular breakers under them. We have before us only a faint glimmering from the shells in our path, and from the blossoms of the arbutus."
"The presence of the twilight and its spell," he very justly comments, "are in the work of Landor not less keenly felt and realised than in the work of Keats, only they are felt and realised in a widely different manner."
This difference is simply that which lies between the romantic and the classical. Landor will never trust himself to go beyond a bare statement of fact, but beauty is no less implicit in the architecture of straight lines than in the architecture of adornments and embellishments. His aphorisms have passed into our common speech and men call up many beautifully coined phrases from the depths of their consciousness about life and death, forgetful of their source, which are attributable to Landor.
"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice, and protracts our sufferings"; "Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good"; "Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world"; "We often hear that such or such a thing 'is not worth an old song.' Alas! how very few things are! What precious recollections do some of them awaken! What pleasurable tears do they excite? They purify the stream of life; they can delay it on its shelves and rapids; they can turn it back again to the soft moss amidst which its sources issue."
"Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flamed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it never can be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious ones never."
Reading exquisite thoughts like these clothed in such a perfectly firm manner, we are led to think of the values of phrases and words which, like many of our blessings, lie unrecognised.
"How carelessly, for example, do we say, 'I am delighted to hear from you.' No other language has this beautiful expression, which, like some of the most lovely flowers, loses its charm for want of close inspection."
The classical method, you will notice again, of getting close to the object and keeping one's eyes on it, not moving away to such a distance that all the beauty lies in the vagueness and mystery of the scene. Just as in his dramatic and narrative conversations he springs easily from age to age, shedding a flood of new light on historical episodes, so in his reflective and discursive notes he touches on every topic of human interest, religion, fame, death, love, manners, society, politics, literature; as a critic he moves easily, with felicity of expression and breadth of survey, "the herald of the gods," with a sure sense of what is required of him.
"A perfect piece of criticism must exhibit where a work is good or bad; why it is good or bad; in what degree it is good or bad; must also demonstrate in what manner and to what extent the same ideas or reflections have come to others, and if they be clothed in poetry, why, by an apparently slight variation, what in one author is mediocrity, in another is excellence."
"To be useful to as many as possible is the especial duty of a critic, and his utility can only be attained by rectitude and precision. He walks in a garden which is not his own; and he neither must gather the blossoms to embellish his discourse, nor break the branches to display his strength. Rather let him point to what is out of order, and help to raise what is lying on the ground."
"When a writer is praised above his merits in his own times, he is certain of being estimated below them in the times succeeding."
"To constitute a great writer the qualities are, adequate expression of just sentiments, plainness without vulgarity, elevation without pomp, sedateness without austerity, alertness without impetuosity."
As we should expect, he lays most stress upon the virtues of moderation and composure. "Whoever has the power of creating has likewise the inferior power of keeping his creations in order. The best poets are the most impressive, because their steps are regular; for without regularity there is neither strength nor state. Look at Sophocles, look at Æschylus, look at Homer."
"There are four things requisite to constitute might, majesty and dominion in a poet: these are creativeness, constructiveness, the sublime, the pathetic. A poet of the first order must have formed, or taken to himself and modified, some great subject. He must be creative and constructive."
"It is only the wretchedest of poets that wish all they ever wrote to be remembered: some of the best would be willing to lose the most."
When he descends to the particular we find the same strong, sane, comprehensive attitude of criticism. What could be better than his note on Addison?
"I have always been an admirer of Addison, and the oftener I read him, I mean his prose, the more he pleases me. Perhaps it is not so much his style, which, however, is easy and graceful and harmonious, as the sweet temperature of thought in which we always find him, and the attractive countenance, if you will allow me the expression, with which he meets me upon every occasion. It is very remarkable, and therefore I stopped to notice it, that not only what little strength he had, but even all his grace and ease, forsake him when he ventures into poetry."
He defends the use of idiom ("Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language") and attacks the use of quotation: "Before I let fall a quotation I must be taken by surprise. I seldom do it in conversation, seldomer in composition; for it mars the beauty and unity of style; especially when it invades it from a foreign tongue. A quoter is either ostentatious of his acquirements, or doubtful of his cause. And, moreover, he never walks gracefully who leans upon the shoulder of another, however gracefully that other may walk."
Of his verse epigrams all the world knows Rose Aylmer and most people his of himself:
"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart."
It would be hard to improve upon the accuracy of that description or the artistry with which it is expressed.
"I shall dine late; but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select."
It is with the object of enticing you to join that group of eclectics that I have attempted to show you what manner of man he is who invites you to his table. The conversation will be rich, the viands delicious to an Epicurean palate, but if you have no taste and your talk is vulgar you will only be bored.
VIII
JOHN DONNE
Readers of Rupert Brooke will almost certainly have made the acquaintance of Donne the poet, admirers of Mr Logan Pearsall Smith will with equal certainty have dipped into the excellent selections which that versatile writer has made of Dr Donne's sermons.
But to search for a reason why everyone should read Donne we need go no further than George Saintsbury's words:
"For those who have experienced, or who at least understand, the ups-and-downs, the ins-and-outs of human temperament, the alternations not merely of passion and satiety, but of passion and laughter, of passion and melancholy reflection, of passion earthly enough and spiritual rapture almost heavenly, there is no poet and hardly any writer like Donne."
Our appetite for Donne was probably first whetted by Izaak Walton, who wrote so admirable a biography of him. His personality intrigues us from the start, his Marlowesque thirst for experience, experience of the intellect and experience of sensation, finds a sympathetic echo to-day in the minds of most of us. He knew a good deal about medicine, law, astronomy and physiology, as well as theology: he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596: he was ever adventuring in science, in love and in travel. At the age of forty-two, poverty-stricken and a failure, he took Orders and became one of the greatest preachers we have ever had. He poured his whole soul into his sermons, and held his congregations spellbound with his gorgeous prose, "perhaps never equalled for the beauty of its rhythm and the Shakespearean magnificence of its diction": he dwelt mainly on the subject of Sin (about which he knew a good deal from experience), Death, God, Heaven and Infinity. Listen to this on Eternity: "And all the powerfull Kings, and all the beautifull Queenes of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight, All in one Morning, in respect of this Day. In all the two thousand yeares of Nature, before the Law given by Moses, and the two thousand yeares of Law.... In all this six thousand, and in all those, which God may be pleased to adde, ... in this House of his Fathers, there was never heard quarter clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to turne." Or this personal confession (rarest of delights in sermons): "I throw my selfe downe in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I talke on, in the same posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should aske me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell; Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer. So certainely is there nothing, nothing in spirituall things, perfect in this world."
"If Donne," says Robert Lynd, "had written much prose in this kind, his Sermons would be as famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the Apostles."
If only more sermons contained such human touches as the following, the modern church-goers would be more plentiful:—
"I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to you, and yet I consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is likely you will say to one another, when I have done, you are not all here neither; you are here now, hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a better sermon somewhere else, of this text before."
But as an example of his highest power of eloquence and impassioned imagination I will quote a passage that can challenge any passage in the whole range of English prose:
"The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney, are no Epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; It tels me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons graves is speechlesse too, it sayes nothing, it distinguishes nothing: As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a Prince whom thou couldest not look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if the winde blow it thither; and when a whirle-winde hath blowne the dust of the Church-yard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre, and this the Yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran...."
But it is Donne the poet, the Donne who wrote
"Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought,"
the Donne of
"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who died before the God of Love was born,"
of
"I wonder by my troth what thou and I
Did till we loved?"
of the
"Bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"
that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.
In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to sermons: towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.
Donne is all the more important as a poet because he treats of the universal passion of love in more phases than any other poet. He was the complete experimentalist in love, both in actual life and in his work. He is frankly in search of bodily experiences:
"Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick."
He is brutal:
"For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love."
He is inconstant:
"I can love any, so she be not true."
He bewails the inconstancy of women:
"Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three."
His passion for sheer ugliness carries him away time after time:
"Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought
That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought."
Or again:
"And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand
The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand."
In his Elegies he tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full detail, satirically, sensually. In Jealousy we are given an exact picture of the deformed husband who,
"Swol'n and pampered with great fare,
Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair"
—so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to "play in another house," away from those "towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of jealousy."
In The Perfume we see the girl's "immortal mother, which doth lie still buried in her bed, yet will not die," who, fearing lest her daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try her longings: we see
"The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-man
That oft names God in oaths, and only then."
But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her "hydroptic father catechized."
There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy entitled To his Mistress Going to Bed, but it is healthily coarse, though scarcely quotable even in these times, which is a pity.
"There is no penance due to innocence."
But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.
In The Ecstasy we see him crying out against passionate friendship:
"But O alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?"
and makes an unanswerable point in this verse:
"So must pure lovers' souls descend
T'affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is the book."
And in The Anniversary he retracts all that he had once said about inconstancy:
"Here upon earth we are Kings, and none but we
Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we, where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two?
True and false fears let us refrain;
Let us live nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write three-score: This is the second of our reign."
There are few lovelier lyrics than Break of Day:
"Stay, O sweet, and do not rise;
The light that shines comes from thine eyes;
The day breaks not, it is my heart,
Because that you and I must part.
Stay, or else my joys will die
And perish in their infancy."
Or, to take a complete poem, none shows Donne in truer, finer light than The Dream:
"Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream;
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy.
Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet
My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.
Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams truths, and fables histories;
Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,
Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.
As lightning, or a taper's light,
Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me;
Yet I thought thee
—For thou lovest truth—an angel, at first sight;
But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,
And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and earnest then,
I must confess, it could not choose but be
Profane, to think thee anything but thee."