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VIEWS AND REVIEWS

VIEWS AND REVIEWS

ESSAYS IN APPRECIATION

By W. E. HENLEY

LITERATURE

LONDON

DAVID NUTT

17 GRAPE STREET, NEW OXFORD STREET, W.C. 1913

Third Edition

TO THE MEN OF 'THE SCOTS OBSERVER*

PREFATORY

Suggested by one friend and selected and com- piled by another, this volume is less a book than a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism. Thus, the notes on Longfellow, Balzac, Sidney, Tourneur, f Arabian Nights 'Entertainments,' Borrow, George Eliot, and Mr. Frederick Locker are extracted from originals in f London' — a print still remembered with affection by those concerned in it; those on Labiche, Champfleury, Richardson, Fielding, Byron, Gay, Congreve, Boswell, f Essays and ' Essayists/ Jefferies, Hood, Matthew Arnold, Lever, Thackeray, Dickens, M. Theodore de Banville, Mr. Austin Dobson, and Mr. George Meredith from articles contributed to ' The 'Athenaum'; those on Dumas, Count Tolsto'i's novels, and the verse of Dr. Hake from (The Satur- c day Review' ; those on Walton, Landor, and Heine from ' The Scots Observer,' ' The Aca- ' demy,' and ' Vanity Fair ' respectively ; while the ( Disraeli ' has been pieced together from ( Lon- ' don,' 'Vanity Fair,' and 'The Athenceum' ; the 'Berlioz' from 'The Scots Observer' and

viii NOTE

' The Saturday Review ' ; the { Tennyson ' from ( The Scots Observer' and f The Magazine of ' Art ' ; the f Homer and Theocritus' from ' Vanity Fair ' and the defunct ( Teacher ' ; the ' Hugo ' from ' The Athenceum,' ' The Magazine of Art,' and an unpublished fragment written for ' The f Scottish Church.' In all cases permission to reprint is hereby gratefully acknowledged; but the reprinted matter has been subjected to such a process of revision and reconstitution that much of it is practically new, while little or none remains as it was. I venture, then, to hope that the result, for all its scrappiness, will be found to have that unity which comes of method and an honest regard for letters.

W. E. H.

Edit* 8th May 1890

CONTENTS

PAGE

'REFATORY vii

)ICKENS ...... I

A ' Frightful Minus ' .- His Method : His De- velopment : His Results : Ave atque Vale.

-.CKERAY .N

, 'is Worship,

, 'is Worshippers : His Critics : Which is Right f His Style : His Mission.

DfSRAELI . . . . . . 2O

His Novels : A Contrast : His Backgrounds : His Men and Women : His Style : His Oratory : His Speeches as Literature : The Great Earl.

/DMAS . . -33

His Components : Himself : At Least : His Monument.

MEREDITH ...... 43

His Qualities : His Defects : Another Way : 'Rhoda Fleming ' : The Tragic Comedians : ' The Egoist ' : In Metre : The Fashion of Art.

BYRON/ .... -56

Byron and the World : Byron and Wordsworth.

HUGO ........ 63

His Critics : Some Causes and Effects : Environ- ment : Equipment and Achievement : His Diary : For and Against : What Lives of Him.

x CONTENTS

FADE

HEINE 79

The Villainy of Translation : The Proof of It.

His Verse : His Failure : His Triumphs : His	°J
Prose.
HOMER AND THEOCRITUS	92
' The Odyssey ' : Old Lamps and New.
RABELAIS	97
His Essence : If is Secret.
SHAKESPEARE*}	101
A Parallel.	104
His Expression of Life : His Fame.
TOURNEUR .	106
His Style : His Matter.
WALTON ......	108
• The. Comtleat Ansrler* : Master Piscator.
HERRICK	112
His Muse : His Moral : His Piety.
LOCKER	116
His Qualities : His Effect.
BANVILLE	118
His Nature : His Art.
DOBSON	121
Method and Effect.
BERLIOZ ......	124

The Critic : A Prototype : His Theory of Auto- biography.

j GEORGE ELIOT . . -130

The Ideal : The Real : Appreciations.

CONTENTS xi

PAGE

BORROW ...... 133

His Vocation : Ideals and Achievements : Him- self.

BALZAC 139

Under which King ? : The Fact.

LABICHE 143

Teniers or Daumier ? : Labiche.

CHAMPFLEURY 148

The Man : The Writer.

LONGFELLOW 151

Sea Poets : Longfellow.

TENNYSON^). . . . . -154

lSt. Agnes' Eve ' : Indian Summer : His Master- ship.

GORDON HAKE . . . , -159

Aim and Equipment.

LANDOR 162

Anti-Landor : His Drama.

HOOD 165

How Much of Him f : Death's Jest Book : His Immortal Part.

LEVER 171

How He Lived : What He Was : How He wrote.

JEFFERIES 177

His Virtue : His Limitation : The General : Last Words.

GAY 183

The Fabulist : The Moralist : After All.

ESSAYS AND ESSAYISTS N . . . 1 88

The Good of Them : Generalities : In Particular.

xii CONTENTS

PAGE

_, BOSWELL^} . «... 194

His Destiny : His Critic : Himself.

^ CONGREVE "^ . . . . . 201

-— His Biographers and Critics : The Real Cottgreve :

The Dramatist : The Writer.

4 ARABIAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENTS ' . 2o8

Its Romance^: Its Comedy : Sacer Vates.

RICHARDSON ^ . . . . . 2ic

His Fortune : ' Pamela ' : ' Grandisott ' .« • Clarissa.'

...... 223

The Man and the Artist : 'Ivan f Hitch' : / War and Peace.'

..... .229

TUutims : Facts .• Tht Worst of II.

VIEWS AND REVIEWS

VIEWS AND REVIEWS

DICKENS

Mr. Andrew Lang is delightfully severe on those who ' cannot read Dickens/ but in truth it is only by accident that he is not himself of ( that unhappy persuasion. For Dickens -u- • the humourist he has a most uncompro- mising enthusiasm'; for Dickens the artist in drama and romance he has as little sympathy as the most practical. Of the prose of David Copperfield and Our Mutual Friend, the Tale of Two Cities and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he disdains to speak. He is almost fierce (for him) in his denunciation of Little Nell and Paul Dombey ; he protests that Monks and Ralph Nickleby are ftoo steep,' as indeed they are. But of Bradley Headstone and Sydney Carton he says not a word ; while of Martin Chuxzlewit — but here he shall speak for himself, the italics being a present to him. ' I have read in ' that book a score of times,' says he ; f I never see

A

2 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

' it but I revel in it — in Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp ' and the Americans. But what the plot is all about, 1 what Jonas did, what Montague Tigg had to make ' in the matter, what all the pictures with plenty of 1 shading illustrate, I have never been able to com- f prehend.' This is almost as bad as the reflection (in a magazine) that Jonas Chuzzlewit is fthe ( most shadowy murderer in fiction/ Yet it is im- possible to be angry. In his own way and within his own limits Mr. Lang is such a thoroughgoing admirer of Dickens that you are moved to com- passion when you think of the much he loses by 'being constitutionally incapable* of perfect ap- prehension. f How poor,' he cries, with generous enthusiasm, ( the world of fancy would be, " hoM ' " dispeopled of her dreams," if, in some ruin of < the social system, the books of Dickens were lost ; ' and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Mr. ' Crinkle and Miss Squeers and Sam Weller, and ' Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, ' or to vanish with Menander's men and women ' ' We cannot think of our world without them ; and, ' children of dreams as they are, they seem more ' essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, f who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons ' and orders, gowns and uniforms/ Nor is this all. He is almost prepared to welcome f free education,' since ' every Englishman who can read, unless he 1 be an Ass, is a reader the more ' for Dickens. Does it not give one pause to reflect that the writer

DICKENS 3

of this charming eulogy can only read the half of Dickens, and is half the ideal of his own denuncia- tion.

Dickens's imagination was diligent from the out- set ; with him conception was not less deliberate and careful than development ; and so much he confesses when he describes himself as ' in the first stage of a new ' book, which consists in going round and round ' the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go about 'and about his sugar before he touches it/ 'I 1 have no means,' he writes to a person wanting advice, ' of knowing whether you are patient in 1 the pursuit of this art ; but I am inclined to ' think that you are not, and that you do not ' discipline yourself enough. When one is im- ' pelled to write this or that, one has still to ' consider : ' ' How much of this will tell for what e ' ( I mean ? How much of it is my own wild emo- ' " tion and superfluous energy — how much remains ' " that is truly belonging to this ideal character ' " and these ideal circumstances ? " It is in the ' laborious struggle to make this distinction, and ' in the determination to try for it, that the road 1 to the correction of faults lies. [Perhaps I may ' remark, in support of the sincerity with which I ( write this, that I am an impatient and impulsive

4 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

•*~x^

' person myself, but that it has been for many years ' the constant effort of my life to practise at my ' desk what I preach to you.] ' Such golden words could only have come from one enamoured of his art, and holding the utmost endeavour in its be- half of which his heart and mind were capable for a matter of simple duty. They are a proof that Dickens — in intention at least, and if in intention then surely, the fact of his genius being admitted, to some extent in fact as well — was an artist in the best sense of the term.

In the beginning he often wrote exceeding ill,

especially when he was doing his best to write

seriously. He developed into an

^ artist in words as he developed into Development

an artist in the construction and the

evolution of a story. But his development was his own work, and it is a fact that should redound eternally to his honour that he began in news- paper English, and by the production of an imi- tation of the novela picaresca — a string of adven- tures as broken and disconnected as the adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on to become an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew anything at all about the ' art for art ' theory — which is doubtful — he may

DICKENS

well have held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma — Dans I' art il faut sa peau—as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, under conditions that might have proved utterly demoral- ising had he been less robust and less sincere. He began as a serious novelist with Ralph Nickleby and Lord Frederick Verisopht; he went on to produce such masterpieces as Jonas Chuzzlewit and Doubledick, and Eugene Wrayburn and the im- mortal Mrs. Gamp, and Fagin and Sikes and Sydney Carton, and many another. The advance is one from positive weakness to positive strength, from ignorance to knowledge, from incapacity to mas- tery, from the manufacture of lay figures to the creation of human beings.

His faults were many and grave. He wrote

sonic nonsense ; he sinned repeatedly against taste ; he could be both noisy and vulgar;

he was apt to be ajcajd^JJj^jvhere

.... , Results

he should have been a. painter; he

was often mawkish and often extravagant ; and he was sometimes more inept than a great writer has ever been. But his work, whether bad or good, has in full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did ; and he meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representative

6 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

and national — as indeed he was ; he regarded his work as a universal possession ; and he deter- mined to do nothing that for lack of pains should prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned it was unadvisedly and unconsciously ; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You feel that as you read. The freshness and fun of Pickwick — a comic middle-class epic, so to speak — seem mainly due to high spirits; and perhaps that immortal book should be described as a first im- provisation by a young man of genius not yet sure of either expression or ambition and with only vague and momentary ideas about the duties and necessities of art. But from Pickwick onwards to Edwin Drood the effort after im- provement is manifest. What are Dombey and Dorrit themselves but the failures of a great and serious artist? In truth the man's genius did but ripen with years and labour ; he spent his life in developing from a popular writer into an artist. He extemporised Pickwick, it may be, but into Copperfield and Chuzzlewit and the Talc of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend he put his whole might, working at them with a passion of determi- nation not exceeded by Balzac himself. He had enchanted the public without an effort ; he was the best-beloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman ; and if all his life he never ceased from

DICKENS 7

self-education but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do other- wise. We have been told so often to train ourselves by studying the practice of workmen like Gautier and Hugo and imitating the virtues of work like Hernani and Quatre-Vingt-Treize and I'Education Sentimentale — we have heard so much of the aesthe- tic impeccability of Young France and the section of Young England that affects its qualities and reproduces its fashions — that it is hard to refrain from asking if, when all is said, we should not do well to look for models nearer home ? if in place of such moulds of form as Mademoiselle de Maupin we might not take to considering stuff like Rizpah and Our Mutual Friend ?

Yes, he had many and grave faults. But so had Sir Walter and the good Dumas ; so, to be candid, had Shakespeare himself —

Shakespeare the king of poets. To

V^diS myself he is always the man of his

unrivalled and enchanting letters — is always an incarnation of generous and abounding gaiety, a type of beneficent earnestness, a great expression of intellectual vigour and emotional vivacity. I love to remember that I came into tEe world

8 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

contemporaneously with some of his bravest work, and to reflect that even as he was the inspiration of my boyhood so is he a delight of my middle age. I love to think that while English literature en- dures he will be remembered as one that loved his fellow-men, and did more to make them happy and amiable than any other writer of his time.

THACKERAY

j IT is odd to note how opinions differ as to the greatness of Thackeray and the value of his books. Some regard him as the great- est novelist of his age and countr/^

. .. _ v Worshipped

and as one of the greatest of any

country and any age. These hold him to be not less sound a moralist than excellent as a writer, not less magnificently creative than usefully and delightfully cynical, not less powerful and com- plete a painter of manners than infallible as a social philosopher and incomparable as a lecturer on the human heart. They accept Amelia Sedley for a very woman jf they believe in Colonel New- come — ' by Don Quixote out of Little Nell ' — as in something venerable and heroic ; j they regard William Dobbin (and f Stunning ' Warrington\ as finished and subtle portraiture^ ; they think Becky Sharp an improvement upon Mme. Marneffe and Wenham better work than Rigby ; they are in love with Laura Bell, and refuse to see either cruelty or caricature in their poet's present- ment of Alcide de Mirobolant. j Thackeray's fun, Thackeray's wisdom, Thackeray's knowledge of

10 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

men and women, Thackeray's morality, Thack- eray's view of life, 'his wit and humour, his * pathos, and his umbrella,' are all articles of helief with them, r Of Dickens they will not hear ; Balzac they incline to despise ; if they make any comparison between Thackeray and Fielding, or Thackeray and Richardson, or Thackeray and Sir Walter, or Thackeray and Disraeli, it is to the disadvantage of Disraeli and Scott and Richardson and Fielding. All these were well enough in their way and day,; but they are not to be classed with Thackeray. I It is said, no doubt, that Thackeray could neither make stories nor tell them ; but he liked stories for all that, and by the hour could babble charmingly \of Ivanhoe and the Mousquetaires. I It is possible that he was afraid of passion, and had no manner of interest in crime. •'' But then, how hard he bore upon snobs, and how vigorously he lashed ! the smaller vices and the meaner faults ! It may be beyond dispute thathe was seldom good at romance, and saw most things — art arid nature included — rather prosaically and ill-naturedly, as he might see them who has been for many years a failure, and is naturally a little resentful of other men's successes ; but then, how brilliant are his studies of club humanity and club manners ! how thoroughly he understands the feelings of them that go down into the West in broughams ! If he writes by preference for people with a

THACKERAY 11

thousand a year, is it not the duty of everybody with a particle of self-respect to have that income? Is it possible that any one who has it not can have either wit or sentiment, humour or understanding ? Thackeray writes of gentlemen for gentlemen ; therefore he is alone among artists ; therefore he is 'the greatest novelist of his age.' That is the faith of the true believer : that the state of mind of him that reveres less wisely than thoroughly, and would rather be damned with Thackeray than saved with any one else. /

/ The position of them that wear their rue with a difference, and do not agree that all literature is contained in The Book of Snobs and _,^...,.^ Vanity Fair, is more easily defended/ His Critics"} They like and admire their Thackeray in many ways, but they think him rather a writer of genius who was innately and irredeem- ably a Philistine than a supreme artist or a great man. To them there is something artificial in the man and something insincere in the artist : some- thing which makes it seem natural that his best work should smack of the literary tour de force, f and that he should never have appeared to such advantage as when, in Esmond and in Barry Lyndon, he was writing up to a standard and upon a model

12 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

not wholly of his own contrivance. jThey admit his claim to eminence as an adventurer in 'the ' discovery of the Ugly' ; hut they contend that even there he did his work more shrewistily and more pettily than he might; and in this connection they go so far as to reflect that a snob is not only ' o^^Eho meanly admires mean things/ as his own definition declares., hut one who meanly detests mean things as well. They agree with Walter Ba- gehot that to he perpetually haunted by the plush behind your chair is hardly a sign of lofty literary and moral genius ; and they consider him narrow and vulgar in his view of humanity, limited in his outlook upon life, inclined to be envious, inclined to be tedious and pedantic, prone to repetitions, and apt in bidding for applause to appeal to the baser qualities of his readers and to catch their sympathy by making them feel them- selves spitefully superior to their fellow-men. They look at his favourite heroines — at Laura and Ethel and Amelia; and they can but think him stupid who could ever have believed them inter- esting or admirable or attractive or true. They listen while he regrets it is impossible for him to attempt the picture of a manf and, with Barry Lyndon in their mind's eye and the knowledge that Casanova and Andrew Bowes suggested no more than that, [they wonder if the impossibility was not a piece of luck for him. They hear him heaping contumely upon the murders and adulteries, the

THACKERAY 13

excesses in emotion, that pleased the men of 1830 as they had pleased the Elizabethans before them ; and they see him turning with terror and loath- ing from these — which after all are effects of vigorous passion — to busy himself with the elabo- rate and careful narrative of how Barnes New- come beat his wife, and Mrs. Mackenzie scolded Colonel Newcome to death, and old Twysden bragged and cringed himself into good society and an interest in the life and well-being of a little cad like Captain Woolcomb; and it is not amazing if they think his morality more dubious in some ways than the morality he is so firmly fixed to ridicule and to condemn, i They reflect that he sees in Beatrix no more than the makings of a Bernstein ; and they are puzzled, when they come to mark the contrast between the two portraitures and the difference between the part assigned to Mrs. Esmond and the part assigned to the Baroness, to decide if he were short- sighted or ungenerous, if he were inapprehensive or only cruel. / They weary easily of his dogged ane unremitting pursuit of the merely conventional man and the merely conventional woman ; they cannol always bring themselves to be interested in the cup- board drama, the tea-cup tragedies and cheque-book and bandbox comedies, which he regards as the stufl of human action and the web of human life ; and from their theory of existence they positively re- fuse to eliminate the heroic qualities of romance

14 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

and mystery and passion, which are — as they have only to open their newspapers to see — essentials \ of human achievement and integral elements of human character. They hold that his books contain some of the finest stuff in fiction : as, for instance, Rawdon Crawley's discovery of his wife and Lord Steyne/ and Henry Esmond's re- turn from the wars, and those immortal chapters in which the Colonel and Frank Castlewood pursue and run down their kinswoman and the Prince. But they hold, too, that their influence is dubious, and that few have risen from them one bit the better or one jot the happier.!

Genius apart, Thackeray's morality is that of a highly respectable British cynic ; his intelligence is x^'T^T^v largely one of trifles ; he is wise over . -j., y -' trivial and trumpery things. He de- lights in reminding us — with an air ! — that everybody is a humbug ; that we are all rank snobs ; that to misuse your aspirates is to be ridicu- lous and incapable of real merit ; that Miss Blank has just slipped out to post a letter to Captain Jones ; that Miss Dash wears false teeth and a wig ; that General Tufto is almost as tightly laced as the beautiful Miss Hopper; that there's a bum- bailiff in the kitchen at Number Thirteen ; that the

THACKERAY (^J5

dinner we ate t' other day at Timmins's is still to pay ; that all is vanity ; that there 's a skeleton in every house; that passion, enthusiasm, excess of any sort, is unwise, abominable, a little absurd ; and so forth. And side by side with these assurances are admirable sketches of character and still more ad- mirable sketches of habit and of manners — are the Pontos and Costigan, Gandish and Talbot Twysden and the unsurpassable Major, Sir Pitt and Brand Firmin, the heroic De la Pluche and the engaging Farintosh and the versatile Honeyman, a jprowd of vivid and diverting portraitures besides ; but they are not different — in kind at least — from the reflections suggested by the story of their several careers and the development of their several individualities. Esmond apart, there is scarce a man or a woman in Thackeray whom it is possible to love unre- servedly or thoroughly respect. That gives the measure of the man, and determines the quality of his influence. He was the average clubman plus genius and a style. And, if there is any truth in the theory that it is the function of art not to degrade but to ennoble — not to dishearten but to encourage — not to deal with things ugly and paltry and mean but with great things and beautiful and lofty — then, it is argued, his example is one to depreciate and to condemn.

16 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

f Thus the two sects : the sect of them that are with Thackeray and the sect of them that are s*~~-^ against him. Where both agree is in fiw /Sty/e} the fact of Thackeray's pre-eminence as a writer of English and the master of one of the finest prose styles in literature. His manner is the perfection of conversational writing, Graceful yet vigorous ; ^a3b~rajWj "artificial yet incomparably sound ; toucKeoT with modishness yet informed with distinction ; easily and happily rhythmical yet full of colour and quick with malice and with meaning ; instinct with urbanity and in- stinct with charm — it is a type of high-bred English, a climax of literary art. He may not have been a great man but assuredly he was a great writer ; he may have been a faulty novelist but assuredly he was a rare artist in words. Setting aside Cardi- nal Newman's, the style he wrote is certainly less open to criticism than that of any other modern Englishman. |He was neither super-eloquent like Mr. Ruskin nor a Germanised Jeremy like Carlyle ; he was not marmoreally emphatic as Landor was, nor was he slovenly and inexpressive as was the great Sir Walter/ he neither dallied with antithesis like Macaulay nor rioted in verbal vulgarisms y with Dickens ; he abstained from technology and what may be called Lord-Burleighism as carefully as George Eliot indulged in them, and he avoided conceits as sedulously as Mr. George Meredith goes out of his way to hunt for them. I He is a bett.ej>

THACKERAY 17

writer than any one of these, in that he is always a master of speech and of himself, and that he is always careful yet natural and choice yet seem- ingly spontaneous. He wrote as a very prince among| talkers, and he interfused and interpenetrated Eng- lish with the elegant and cultured fashion of the men of Queen Anne and with something of the warmth, the glow, the personal and romantic am hition, peculiar to the century of Byron and Keats of Landor and Dickens, of Ruskin and Tennyson and Carlyle. F Unlike his only rival,Jhe had learnt his art before he began to practise it. I Of the early work of the greater artist a good half is that of a man in the throes of education : the ideas, the thoughts, the passion, the poetry, the humour, are of the best, but the expression is sel^eonscious, strained, ignorant. Thackeray had no such blemish./ Hei/ wrote dispassionately, and he wait a born writer. \ In him there is no hesitation, no fumbling, no ! uncertainty, if The style of Barry Lyndon is better and stronger and more virile than the style of Philip; and unlike the other man's, whose latest writing is his best, their author's evolution was towards decay.

/ He is so superior a person that to catch him tripping is a peculiar pleasure. It is a satisfaction

18 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

apart, for instance, to reflect that he has (it must be owned) a certain gentility of mind. | Like the ^•^p^ M.P. in Martin Chuxzlewitt he re- . > presents the Gentlemanly Interest V.^_ That is his mission in literature, and

he fulfils it thoroughly. He appears sometimes as Mr. Yellowplush, sometimes as Mr. Fitzboodle, sometimes as Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but al- ways in the Gentlemanly Interest, fin his youth (as ever) he is found applauding the well-bred Charles de Bernard, and remarking of Balzac and Dumas that the one is ' not fit for the salon/ and the other f about as genteel as a courier. ' Balzac and Dumas are only men of genius and great artists : the real thing is to be ' genteel ' and write — as Gerfeuil (sic) is written — { in a gentleman-like ' style/ A few pages further on in the same pro- nouncement (a review of Jerome Paturot), I find him quoting with entire approval Reybaud's sketch of ' a ' great character, in whom the habitut of Paris will ' perhaps recognise a certain likeness to a certain ' celebrity of the present day, by name Monsieur ' Hector Berlioz, the musician and critic/ The description is too long to quote. It sparkles with all ttiefadaises of anti-Berliozian criticism, and the point is that the hero, after conducting at a private party (which Berlioz never did) his own ' hymn of ' the creation that has been lost since the days of the ' deluge/ ' called for his cloak and his clogs, and * walked home, where he wrote a critique for the

THACKERAY 19

f newspapers of the music which he had composed ' and directed. ' In the Gentlemanly Interest Mr. Titmarsh translates this sorry little libel with the utmost innocence of approval. It is The Paris Sketch-Book over again. That Monsieur Hector Berlioz may possibly have known something of his trade and been withal as honest a man and artist as himself seems never to have occurred to him. He knows nothing of Monsieur Hector except that he is a ( hairy romantic,' and that whatever he wrote it was not Batti, batti ; but that nothing is enough. ' Whether this little picture ( is a likeness or not,' he is ingenuous enough to add, ' who shall say ? ' But, — and here speaks the bold but superior Briton — ' it is a good caricature * of a race in France, where geniuses poussent as ' they do nowhere else ; where poets are prophets, 4 where romances have revelations/ As he goes on to qualifiy Jerome Paturot as a 'masterpiece,' and as ( three volumes of satire in which there is ' not a particle of bad blood,' it seems fair to con- clude that in the Gentlemanly Interest all is con- sidered fair, and that to accuse a man of writing criticisms on his own works is to be 'witty and ' entertaining,' and likewise 'careless, familiar, and 'sparkling' to the genteelest purpose possible in this genteelest of all possible worlds.

•\ \ " •

DISRAELI

To the general his novels must always be a kind of caviare ; for they have no analogue in letters,

hut are the output of a mind and ^B* Novels temper of singular originality. To

the honest Tory, sworn to admire and unable to comprehend, they must seem inexplic- p^, *-^A able as abnormal. To the professional Radical they are so many proofs of innate inferiority : for they are full of pretentiousness and affectation ; they teem with examples of all manner of vices, from false English to an immoral delight in dukes ; they prove their maker a trickster and a charla- tan in every page. To them, however, whose first care is for rare work, the series of novels that began with Vivian Grey and ended with En- dymion is one of the pleasant facts in modern letters. These books abound in wit and daring, in originality and shrewdness, in knowledge of the world and in knowledge of men; they contain many vivid and striking studies of character, both portrait and caricature ; they sparkle with speaking phrases and happy epithets ; they are aglow with the passion of youth, the love of love, the worship of physical beauty, the admiration of whatever is

DISRAELI 21

costly and select and splendid — from a countess to a castle, from a duke to a diamond ; they are radiant with delight in whatever is powerful or personal or attractive — from a cook to a cardinal, from an agitator to an emperor. They often remind you of Voltaire, often of Balzac, often of The Arabian Nights. You pass from an heroic drinking bout to a brilliant criticism of style ; from rhapsodies on bands and ortolans that re- mind you of Heine to a gambling scene that for directness and intensity may vie with the bluntest and strongest work of Prosper Merimee ; from the extravagant impudence of Popanilla to the senti- mental rodomontade of Henrietta Temple; from ranting romanticism in Alroy to vivid realism in Sybil. Their author gives you no time to weary of him, for he is worldly and passionate, jantas- tic and trenchant, cynical and ambitious, flippant and sentimental, ornately rhetorical and trium- phantly jsimple in a breath. He is imperiously egoistic, but while constantly parading his own personality he is careful never to tell you any- thing about it. And withal he is imperturbably good-tempered : he brands and gibbets with a smile, and with a smile he adores and applauds. Intellectually he is in sympathy with character of every sort; he writes as becomes an artist who has recognised that 'the conduct of men ' depends upon the temperament, not upon a ' bunch of musty maxims,' and that ' there is a

22 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

' great deal of vice that is really sheer inadver- ' tence.' It is said that the Monmouth of Coningsby and the Steyne of Vanity Fair are painted from one and the same original ; and you have but to compare the savage realism of Thackeray's study to the scornful amenity of the other's — as you have but to contrast the elaborate and extravagant cruelty of Thackeray's Alcide de Mirobolant with the polite and half-respectful irony of Disraeli's treatment of the cooks in Tancred — to perceive that in certain ways the advantage is not \vith ' the 1 greatest novelist of his time/ and that the Mon- mouth produces an impression which is more moral because more kindly and humane than the impres- sion left by the Steyne, while in its way it is every whit as vivid and as convincing. Yet another ex- cellence, and a great one, is his mastery of apt and forcible dialogue. The talk of Mr. Henry James's personages is charmingly equable and appropriate, but it is also trivial and tame; the talk in Anthony Trollope is surprisingly natural and abundant, but it is also commonplace and immemorable ; the talk of Mr. George Meredith is always eloquent and fanciful, but the eloquence is too often dark and the fancy too commonly inhuman. What Disraeli's people have to say is not always original nor pro- found, but it is crisply and happily phrased and uttered, it reads well, its impression seldom fails of permanency. His Wit and Wisdom is a kind of Talkers Guide or Handbook of Conversation. How

DISRAELI 23

should it be otherwise, seeing that it contains the

characteristic utterances of a great artist in life renowned for memorable speech ?

Now, if you ask a worshipper of him that was so long his rival, to repeat a saying, a maxim, a sentence, of which his idol is the author, it is odds but he will look A Contrast like a fool, and visit you with an evasive answer. What else should he do ? His deity is a man of many words and no sayings. He is the prince of agitators, but it would be im- possible for him to mint a definition of ' agitation ' ; he is the world's most eloquent arithmetician, but it is beyond him to epigrammatise the fact that two and two make four. And it seems certain, unless the study of Homer and religious fiction inspire him to some purpose, that his contri- butions to axiomatic literature will be still re- stricted to the remark that 'There are three courses open ' to something or other : to the House, to the angry cabman, to what and whomsoever you will. In sober truth, he is one who writes for to-day, and takes no thought of either yester- days or morrows. For him the Future is next session ; the Past does not extend beyond his last change of mind. He is a prince of journalists,

24 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

and his excursions into monthly literature remain to show how great and copious a master of the ' leader ' — ornate, imposing, absolutely insignificant — his absorption in politics has cost the English- speaking world.

i

Disraeli's imagination, at once practical and ex- travagant, is not of the kind that delights in plot

and counterplot. His novels abound His Back- . .

in action, but the episodes wear a

more or less random look : the impres- sion produced is pretty much that of a story of ad- renture. But if they fail as stories they are unex- ceptionable as canvases. Our author unrolls them with superb audacity ; and rapidly and vigorously he fills them in with places and people, with faces that are as life and words expressive even as they. Nothing is too lofty or too low for him. He hawks at every sort of game, and rarely does he make a false cast. It is but a step from the wilds of Lancashire to the Arabian Desert, from the cook's first floor to the Home of the Bellamonts ; for he has the Seven-League-Boots of the legend, and more than the genius of adventure of him that wore them. His castles may be of cardboard, his cataracts of tinfoil, the sun of his adjurations the veriest figment ; but he never lets his readers

DISRAELI 25

see that he knows it. His irony, sudden and reck- less and insidious though it be, yet never extends to his properties. There may be a sneer beneath that mask which, with an egotism baffling as imperturb- able, he delights in intruding among his creations ; but you cannot see it. You suspect its presence, because he is a born mocker. But you remember that one of his most obvious idiosyncrasies is an inordinate love of all that is sumptuous, glittering, radiant, magnificent ; and you incline to suspect that he keeps his sneering for the world of men, and admires his scenes and decorations too cordially to visit them with anything so merciless.

But dashing and brilliant as are his sketches of places and things, they are after all the merest accessories. It was as a student

of Men and Women that he loved

, , tj_ . A. . and Women

to excel, and it is as their painter

that I praise him now. Himself a worshipper of intellect, it was intellectually that he mastered and developed them. Like Sidonia he moves among them not to feel with them but to under- stand and learn from them. Such sympathy as he had was either purely sensuous, as for youth and beauty and all kinds of comeliness ; or purely intel- lectual, as for intelligence, artificiality, servility,

26 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

meanness. And as his essence was satirical, as he was naturally irreverent and contemptuous, it follows that he is best and strongest in the act of punishment not of reward. His passion for youth was beauti- ful, but it did not make him strong. His scorn for things contemptible, his hate for things hateful, are at times too bitter even for those who think with him ; but in these lay his force — they filled his brain with light, and they touched his lips with fire. The wretched Rigby is far more vigorous and life-like than the amiable Coningsby ; Tom Cogit — a sketch, but a sketch of genius — is in- finitely more interesting than May Dacre or even the Young Duke; Tancred is a good fellow, and very real and true in his goodness, but con- trast him with Fakredeen ! And after his knaves, his fools, his tricksters, the most striking figures in his gallery are those whom he has considered from a purely intellectual point of view : either kindly, as Sidonia, or coolly, as Lord Monmouth, but always calmly and with no point of passion in his regard : the Eskdales, Villebecques, Ormsbys, Bessos, Maraeys, Meltons, and Mirabels, the Bo- huns and St. Aldegondes and Grandisons, the Tadpoles and the Tapers, the dominant and sub- altern humanity of the world. All these are drawn with peculiar boldness of line, precision of touch, and clearness of intention. And as with his men so is it with his women: the finest are not those he likes best but those who interested him

DISRAELI 27

most. Male and female, his eccentrics surpass his commonplaces. He had a great regard for girls, and his attitude towards them, or such of them as he elected heroines, was mostly one of adoration — magnificent yet a little awkward and strained. With women, married women, he had vastly more in common : he could admire, study, divine, without having to feign a warmer feeling; and while his girls are poor albeit splendid young persons, his matrons are usually delightful. Edith Millbank is not a very striking figure in Coningsby ; but her appearance in Tancred — well, you have only to compare it to the resurrection of Laura Bell, as Mrs. Pendennis to see how good it is.

Now and then the writing is bad, and the thought is stale. Disraeli had many mannerisms, innate and acquired. His English was frequently loose and inexpressive ; he was apt to fe

trip in his grammar, to stumble over 'and which/ and to be careless about the con- nection between his nominatives and his verbs. Again, he could scarce ever refrain from the use of gorgeous commonplaces of sentiment and diction. His taste was sometimes ornately and barbarically conventional ; he wrote as an orator, and his phrases often read as if he had used them

28 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

for the sake of their associations rather than them- selves. His works are a casket of such stage jewels of expression as ' Palladian structure/ ' Tusculan 'repose,' 'Gothic pile,' 'pellucid brow/ 'mossy cell/ and ' dew-bespangled meads. He delighted in 'hyacinthine curls' and ' lustrous locks/ in 'smiling 'parterres' and ' stately terraces. ' He seldom sat down in print to anything less than a ; banquet ' , he was capable of invoking 'the iris pencil of ' Hope ' ; he could not think nor speak of the beauties of woman except as 'charms.' Which seems to show that to be ' born in a library/ and have Voltaire — that impeccable master of the phrase — for your chief of early heroes and exem- plars is not everything.

It is admitted, I believe, that he had many of the

qualities of a great public speaker : that he had

an admirable voice and an excellent

method ; that his sequences were logical

and natural, his arguments vigorous

and persuasive ; that he was an artist in style, and

in the course of a single speech could be eloquent

and vivacious, ornate and familiar, passionate and

cynical, deliberately rhetorical and magnificently

fantastic in turn ; that he was a master of all

oratorical modes — of irony and argument, of stately

DISRAELI 29

declamation and brilliant and unexpected anti- thesis, of caricature and statement and rejoinder alike ; that he could explain, denounce, retort, retract, advance, defy, dispute, with equal readi- ness and equal skill ; that he was unrivalled in attack and unsurpassed in defence; and that in heated debate and on occasions when he felt him- self justified in putting forth all his powers and in striking in with the full weight of his imperious and unique personality he was the most dangerous antagonist of his time. And yet, in spite of his mysterious and commanding influence over his followers — in spite, too, of the fact that he died assuredly the most romantic and perhaps the most popular figure of his time — it is admitted withal that he was lacking in a certain quality of tem- perament, that attribute great orators possess in common with great actors : the power, that is, of imposing oneself upon an audience not by argument nor by eloquence, not by the perfect utterance of beautiful and commanding speech nor by the enunciation of eternal principles or sympathetic and stirring appeals, but by an effect of personal magnetism, by the expres- sion through voice and gesture and presence of an individuality, a temperament, call it what you will, that may be and is often utterly com- monplace but is always inevitably irresistible. He could slaughter an opponent, or butcher a measure, or crumple up a theory with unrivalled

30 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

adroitness and despatch ; but he could not dominate a crowd to the extent of persuading it to feel with his heart, think with his brain, and accept his utterances as the expression not only of their common reason but of their collective sentiment as well. He was as incapable of such a feat as Mr. Gladstone's Midlothian campaign as Mr. Glad- stone is of producing the gaming scene in The Young Duke or the ' exhausted volcanoes ' paragraph in the Manchester speech.

As a rule — a rule to which there are some magnificent exceptions — orators have only to cease from speaking to become uninterest- ing. What has been heard with en- thusiasm is read with indifference

(18

or even with astonishment. You miss Literature .

the noble voice, the persuasive gesture,

the irresistible personality ; and with the emotional faculty at rest and the reason at work you are surprised — and it may be a little indignant — that you should have been impressed so deeply as you were by such cold, bald verbosity as seen in black and white the masterpiece of yesterday appears to be. To some extent this is the case with these speeches of Disraeli's. At the height of debate, amid the clash of personal and party animosities, with

DISRAELI jl

the cheers of the orator's supporters to give them wings, they sounded greater than they were. But for all that they are vigorous and profitable yet. Their author's unfailing capacity for saying things worth heeding and remembering is proved in every one of them. It is not easy to open either of Mr. Kebbel's volumes without lighting upon something — a string of epigrams, a polished gibe, a burst of rhetoric, an effective collocation of words — that proclaims the artist. In this connection the perorations are especially instructive, even if you consider them simply as arrangements of sonorous and suggestive words : as oratorical impressions carefully prepared, as effects of what may be called vocalised orchestration touched off as skilfully and with as fine a sense of sound and of the senti- ment to correspond as so many passages of instru- mentation signed ' Berlioz ' might be.

Fruits fail, and love dies, and time ranges ; and only the whippersnapper (that fool of Time) endur-

eth for ever. Moliere knew him well,

, , .,.,.,,,., ,. , The Great

and he said that Moliere was a liar and

a thief. And Disraeli knew him too,

and he said that in these respects Disraeli and

Moliere were brothers. That he said so matters as

3| VIEWS AND REVIEWS

little now as ever it did ; for though the whipper- snapper is immortal in kind, he is nothing if not futile and ephemeral in effect, and it was seen long since that in life and death Disraeli, as became his genius and his race, was the Uncommonplace in- carnate, the antithesis of Grocerdom, the Satan of that revolt against the yielding habit of Jehovah- Bottles the spirit whereof is fast coming to be our one defence against socialism and the dominion of the Common Fool. He was no sentimentalist : as what great artist in government has ever been ? He loved power for power's sake, and recognising to the full the law of the survival of the fittest he preferred his England to the world. He knew that it is the function of the man of genius to show that theory is only theory, and that in the House of Morality there are many mansions. To that end he lived and died; and it is not until one has comprehended the complete significance of his life and death that one is qualified to speak with understanding of such a life and death as his who passed at Khartoum.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

THE life of Dumas is not only a monument of en- deavour and success, it is a sort of labyrinth as well. It abounds in pseudonyms and dis-

guises, in sudden and unexpected ap-

"•_ Components pearances and retreats as unexpected

and sudden, in scandals and in rumours, in mysteries and traps and ambuscades of every kind. It pleased the great man to consider himself of more importance than any and all of the crowd of collaborators whose ideas he developed, whose raw material he wrought up into the achievement we know ; and he was given to take credit to himself not only for the success and value of a particular work but for the whole thing — the work in its quiddity, so to speak, and resolved into its original elements. On the other hand, it pleased such pain- ful creatures as MM. Querard and ( Eugene de Mire- ' court,' as it has since pleased Messrs. Hitchman and Fitzgerald to consider the second- and third-rate literary persons whom Dumas assimilated in such n,umbers as of greater interest and higher merit than Dumas. To them the jackals were far nobler than the lion, and they worked their hardest in the interest of the pack. It was their c

34 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

mission to decompose and disintegrate the magnifi- cent entity which M. Blaze de Bury very happily nicknames e Dumas-Legion/ and in the process not to render his own unto Caesar but to take from him all that was Caesar's, and divide it among the man- nikins he had absorbed. And their work was in its way well done ; for have we not seen M. Brunetiere exulting in agreement and talking of Dumas as one less than Eugene Sue and not much bigger than Gaillardet? Of course the ultimate issue of the debate is not doubtful. Dumas remains to the end a prodigy of force and industry, a miracle of cleverness and accomplishment and ease, a type of generous and abundant humanity, a great artist in many varieties of form, a prince of talkers and story-tellers, one of the kings of the stage, a bene- factor of his epoch and his kind ; while of those who assisted him in the production of his immense achievement the most exist but as fractions of the larger sum, and the others have utterly dis- appeared. ( Combien,' says his son in that excellent page which serves to preface le Fils Naturel — f com- ' bien parmi ceux qui devaient rester obscurs se sont ' eclaires et chauffes a ta forge, et si Theure des ' restitutions sonnait, quel gain pour toi, rien qu'a ' reprendre ce que tu as donne et ce qu'on t'a pris ! ' That is the true verdict of posterity, and he does well who abides by it.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS 35

He is one of the heroes of modern art. Envy and scandal have done their worst now. The libeller has said his say; the detec- tives who make a specialty of literary Himself forgeries have proved their cases one and all ; the judges of matter have spoken, and so have the critics of style ; the distinguished author of Nona has taken us into his confidence on the subject; we have heard from the lamented Granier and others as much as was to be heard on the question of plagiarism in general and the plagiarisms of Dumas in particular ; and Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has done what he is pleased to desig- nate the ' nightman's work' of analysing Antony and Kean, and of collecting everything that spite has said about their author's life, their author's habits, their author's manners and customs and character : of whose vanity, mendacity, immor- ality, a score of improper qualities besides, enough has been written to furnish a good-sized library. And the result of it all is that Dumas is recog- nised for a force in modern art and for one of the greatest inventors and amusers the century has pro- duced. Whole crowds of men were named as the real authors of his books and plays ; but they were only readable when he signed for them. His ideas were traced to a hundred originals; but they had all seemed worthless till he took them in hand and developed them according to their innate capa- city. The French he wrote was popular, and the

36 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

style at his command was none of the loftiest, as his critics have often heen at pains to show ; but he was for all that an artist at once original and exemplary, with an incomparable instinct of selec- tion, a constructive faculty not equalled among the men of this century, an understanding of what is right and what is wrong in art and a mastery of his materials which in their way are not to be paralleled in the work of Sir Walter himself. Like Napoleon, he was ' a natural force let loose ' ; and if he had done no more than achieve univer- sal renown as the prince of raconteurs and a com- manding position as a novelist wherever novels are read he would still have done much. But he did a vast deal more. A natural force, he wrought in the right direction, as natural forces must and do. He amused the world for forty years and more ; but he also contributed something to the general sum of the world's artistic experience and capacity, and his contribution is of permanent worth and charm. He has left us stories which are models of the enchanting art of narrative; and, with a definition good and comprehensive enough to include all the best work which has been produced for the theatre from .ZEschylus down to Augier, from the Choephora on to le Gendre de M. Poirier, he has given us types of the romantic and the domestic drama, which, new when he produced them, are even now not old, and which as regards essentials have yet to be improved upon. The form

ALEXANDRE DUMAS 37

and aim of the modern drama, as we know it, have been often enough ascribed to the ingeni- ous author of une Chatne and the Verre d'Eau ; but they might with much greater truth be ascribed to the author of Antony and la Tour de Nesle. Scribe invents and eludes where Dumas invents and dares. The theory of Scribe is one of mere dexterity : his drama is a perpetual chasst-croise at the edge of a precipice, a dance of puppets among swords that might but will not cut and eggs that might but will not break ; to him a situation is a kind of tight-rope to be crossed with ever so much agility and an endless affectation of peril by all his characters in turn : in fact, as M. Dumas fits has said of him, he is ( le Shakespeare des ' ombres chinoises/ The theory of Dumas is the very antipodes of this. f All I want,' he said in a memorable comparison between himself and Victor Hugo, fis four trestles, four boards, two actors, 'and a passion'; and his good plays are a proof that in this he spoke no more than the truth. Drama to him was so much emotion in action. If he invented a situation he accepted its issues in their entirety, and did his utmost to express from it all the passion it contained. That he fails to reach the highest peaks of emotional effect is no fault of his : to do that something more is needed than a perfect method, something other than a great ambition and an absolute certainty of touch; and Dumas was neither a Shakespeare nor an

38 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

-/Eschylus — he was not even an Augier. All the same, he has produced in la Tour de Nesle a romantic play which M. Zola himself pronounces the ideal of the genre and in Antony an achieve- ment in drawing-room tragedy which is out of all questioning the first, and in the opinion of a critic so competent and so keen as the master's son is probably the strongest, thing of its kind in modern literature. On this latter play it were difficult, I think, to bestow too much attention. It is touched, even tainted, with the manner and the affectation of its epoch. But it is admirably imagined and contrived ; it is very daring, and it is very new ; it deals with the men and women of 1830, and — with due allowance for differences of manners, ideal, and personal genius — it is in its essentials a play in the same sense as Othello and the Trachiniee are plays in theirs. It is the beginning, as I believe, not only of les lAonnes Pauvres but of TMrese Raquin and la Glu as well : just as la Tour de Nesle is the beginning of Patrie and la Haine.

And if these greater and loftier pretensions be

still contested ; if the theory of the gifted creature

who wrote that the works of the master

At Least wizard are f like summer fruits brought

( forth abundantly in the full blaze of

' sunshine, which do not keep ' — if this preposterous

ALEXANDRE DUMAS 39

fantasy be generally accepted, there will yet be much in Dumas to venerate and love. If Antony were of no more account than an ephemeral burlesque; if la Reine Margot and the immortal trilogy of the Musketeers — that 'epic of friend- ship'— were dead as morality and as literature alike; if it were nothing to have re-cast the novel of adventure, formulated the modern drama, and perfected the drama of incident; if to have sent all France to the theatre to see in three dimensions those stories of Chicot, Edmond Dantes, d'Artagnan, which it knew by heart from books were an achievement within the reach of every scribbler who dabbles in letters; if all this were true, and Dumas were merely a piece of human journalism, produced to-day and gone to-morrow, there would still be enough of him to make his a memorable name. He was a prodigy — of amia- bility, cleverness, energy, daring, charm, industry — if he was nothing else. Gronow tells that he has sat at table with Dumas and Brougham, and that Brougham, outfaced and out-talked, was forced to quit the field. ( J'ai conserve,' says M. Maxime du Camp, in his admirable Souvenirs litter aireSj fd'Alexandre Dumas un f souvenir ineffa9able ; malgre un certain laisser- ' aller qui tenait a 1'exuberance de sa nature, f c'etait un homme dont tons les sentiments tiaient ' eleves. On a e'te injuste pour lui ; comme il avait * e'norme'ment d'esprit, on 1'a accuse d'etre leger ;

40 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

f comme il produisait avec une facilite incroyable,

* on 1'a accuse de gacher la besogne, et, comme il ' etait prodigue, on 1'a accuse de manquer de tenue. ' Ces reproches m'ont toujours paru miserables.' This is much ; but it is not nearly all. He had, this independent witness goes on to note, 'une f gene'rosite naturelle qui ne comptait jamais ; il f ressemblait a une corne d'abondance qui se vide ( sans cesse dans les mains tendues ; la moitie,

* sinon plus, de I' argent gagne par lui a ete donnee. ' That is true ; and it is also true that he gave at least as largely of himself— his prodigious tempera- ment, his generous gaiety, his big, manly heart, his turn for chivalry, his gallant and delightful genius — as of his money. He was reputed a violent and luxurious debauchee ; and he mostly lived in an attic — (the worst room in the house and therefore the only one he could call his own) — with a camp-bed and the deal table at which he wrote. He passed for a loud-mouthed idler ; and during many years his daily average of work was fourteen hours for months on end. flvre de puissance/ says George Sand of him, but ' foncierement bon.' They used to hear him laughing as he wrote, and when he killed Porthos ht did no more that day. It would have been worth while to figure as one of the crowd of friends and parasites who lived at rack and manger in his house, for the mere pleasure of seeing him descend upon them from his toil of moving mountains and sharing in that pleasing half-

ALEXANDRE DUMAS 41

hour of talk which was his common refreshment. After that he would return to the attic and the deal table, and move more mountains. With intervals of travel, sport, adventure, and what in France is called ' 1'amour ' — (it is strange, by the way, that he was never a hero of Carlyle's) — he lived in this way more or less for forty years or so ; and when he left Paris for the last time he had but two napoleons in his pocket. ' I had only one when I came here first/ quoth he,/ and yet they call me a spend- thrift/ That was his way ; and while the result is not for Dr. Smiles to chronicle, I for one persist in regarding the spirit in which it was accepted as not less exemplary than delightful.

On M. du Camp's authority there is a charming touch to add to his son's description of him. f II ' me semble,' said the royal old

prodigal in his last illness, f«ue ie

. „ . Monument

' suis au sommet d un monument qui

f tremble comme si les fondations etaient assises ' sur le sable.' 'Sois en paix/ replied the author of the Demi-Monde : ' le monument est bien bati, ' et la base est solide.' He was right, as we know. It is good and fitting that Dumas should have a monument in the Paris he amazed and delighted and amused so long. But he could have done

42 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

without one. In what language is he not read ? and where that he is read is he not loved ? ' Exegi monumentum,' he might have said : ' and wherever romance is a necessary of life, there shall you look for it, and not in vain.'

GEORGE MEREDITH

To read Mr. Meredith's novels with insight is to find them full of the rarest qualities in fiction. If their author has a great capacity for unsatisfactory writing he has His Qualities capacities not less great for writing that is satisfactory in the highest degree. He has the tragic instinct and endowment, and he has the comic as well ; he is an ardent student of character and life ; he has wit of the swiftest, the most comprehensive, the most luminous, and humour that can be fantastic or ironical or human at his pleasure ; he has passion and he has imagina- tion ; he has considered sex — the great subject, the leaven of imaginative art — with notable auda- city and insight. He is as capable of handling a vice or an emotion as he is of managing an affecta tion. He can be trivial, or grotesque, or satirical, or splendid ; and whether his milieu be romantic or actual, whether his personages be heroic or sordid, he goes about his task with the same assur- ance and intelligence. In his best work he takes rank with the world's novelists. He is a companion for Balzac and Richardson, an intimate for Fielding and Cervantes. His figures fall into their place

44 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

beside the greatest of their kind ; and when you think of Lucy Feverel and Mrs. Berry, of Evan Harrington's Countess Saldanha and the Lady Charlotte of Emilia in England, of the two old men in Harry Richmond and the Sir Everard Romfrey of Beauchamp's Career, of Renee and Cecilia, of Emilia and Rhoda Fleming, of Rose Jocelyn and Lady Blandish and Ripton Thompson, they have in the mind's eye a value scarce inferior to that of Clarissa and Lovelace, of Bath and Western and Booth, of Andrew Fairservice and Elspeth Mucklebacket, of Philippe Bridau and Vautrin and Balthasar Clae's. In the world of man's creation his people are citizens to match the noblest ; they are of the aristocracy of the imagina- tion, the peers in their own right of the society of romance. And for all that, their state is mostly desolate and lonely and forlorn.

For Mr. Meredith is one of the worst and least attractive of great writers as well as one of the best and most fascinating. He is a His Defects sun that has broken out into innum- erable spots. The better half of his genius is always suffering eclipse from the worse half. He writes with the pen of a great artist in his left hand and the razor of a spiritual suicide

GEORGE MEREDITH 45

in his right He is the master and the victim of a monstrous cleverness which is neither to hold nor to bind, and will not permit him to do things as an honest, simple person of genius would. As Shakespeare, in Johnson's phrase, lost the world for a quibble and was content to lose it, so does Mr. Meredith discrown himself of the sovereignty of contemporary romance to put on the cap and bells of the professional wit. He is not content to be plain Jupiter : his lightnings are less to him than his fireworks ; and his pages so teem with fine sayings and magniloquent epigrams and gorgeous images and fantastic locutions that the mind would welcome dulness as a bright relief. He is tediously amusing ; he is brilliant to the point of being obscure ; his helpfulness is so extravagant as to worry and confound. That is the secret of his unpopularity. His stories are not often good stories and are seldom well told ; his ingenuity and , intelligence are always misleading him into treating mere episodes as solemnly and elaborately as main incidents ; he is ever ready to discuss, to ramble, to theorise, to dogmatise, to indulge in a little irony or a little reflection or a little artistic mis- demeanour of some sort. But other novelists have done these things before him, and have been none the less popular, and are actually none the less readable. None, however, has pushed the foppery of style and intellect to such a point as Mr. Mere- dith. Not infrequently he writes page after page

46 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

of English as ripe and sound and unaffected as heart could wish ; and you can but impute to wantonness and recklessness the splendid impertinences that intrude elsewhere. To read him at the rate of two or three chapters a day is to have a sincere and hearty admiration for him and a devout anxiety to forget his defects and make much of his merits. But they are few who can take a novel on such terms as these, and to read your [Meredith straight off is to have an indigestion of epigram, and to be incapable of distinguishing good from bad : the author of the parting between Richard and Lucy Feverel — a high-water mark of novelistic passion and emotion — from the creator of Mr. Raikes and Dr. Shrapnel, which are two of the most flagrant unrealities ever perpetrated in the name of fiction by an artist of genius.

On the whole, I think, he does not often say anything not worth hearing. He is too wise for

that: and, besides, he is strenuously Another .

___ in earnest about his work. He has a

Way

noble sense of the dignity of art and

the responsibilities of the artist ; he will set down nothing that is to his mind unworthy to be recorded ; his treatment of his material is distin- guished by the presence of an intellectual passion

GEORGE MEREDITH 47

(as it were) that makes whatever he does con- siderable and deserving of attention and respect. But unhappily the will is not seldom unequal to the deed : the achievement is often leagues in rear of the inspiration ; the attempt at completeness is too laboured and too manifest — the feat is done but by a painful and ungraceful process. There is genius, but there is not felicity : that, one is inclined to say, is the distinguishing note of Mr. Meredith's work, in prose and verse alike. There are magnificent exceptions, of course, but they prove the rule and, broken though it be, there is no gainsaying its existence. To be concentrated in form, to be suggestive in material, to say no- thing that is not of permanent value, and only to say it in such terms as are charged to the fullest with significance — this would seem to be the aim and end of Mr. Meredith's ambition. Of simplicity in his own person he appears incapable. The texture of his expression must be stiff with allusion, or he deems it ill spun; there must be something of antic in his speech, or he cannot believe he is addressing himself to the Immortals ; he has praised with perfect understanding the lucidity, the elegance, the ease, of Moliere, and yet his aim in art (it would appear) is to be Moliere's antipodes, and to vanquish by congestion, clotted- ness, an anxious and determined dandyism of form and style. There is something bourgeois in his in- tolerance of the commonplace, something fanatical

48 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

in the intemperance of his regard for artifice. ' Le dandy,' says Baudelaire, ' doit aspirer a etre • sublime sans interruption. II doit vivre et dormir ' devant un miroir.' That, you are tempted to believe, is Mr. Meredith's theory of expression. ' Ce qu'il y a dans le mauvais gout,' is elsewhere the opinion of the same unamiable artist in para- dox, 'c'est le plaisir aristocratique de deplaire.' Is that, you ask yourself, the reason why Mr. Meredith is so contemptuous of the general public ? — why he will stoop to no sort of concession nor permit himself a mite of patience with the herd whose intellect is content with such poor fodder as Scott and Dickens and Dumas? Be it as it may, the effect is the same. Our author is bent upon being ' uninterruptedly sublime'; and we must take him as he wills and as we find him. He loses of course ; and we suffer. But none the less do we cherish his society, and none the less are we interested in his processes, and enchanted (when we are clever enough) by his results. He lacks felicity, I have said; but he has charm as well as power, and, once his rule is accepted, there is no way to shake him off. The position is that of the antique tyrant in a commonwealth once republican and free. You resent the domina- tion, but you enjoy it too, and with or against your will you admire the author of your slavery.

GEORGE MEREDITH 49

Rhoda Fleming is one of the least known of the novels, and in a sense it is one of the most disagree- able. To the general it has always

, . j • -A • vi i Rhoda

been caviare, and caviare it is likely ™

Fleming to remain ; for the general is before

all things respectable, and no such savage and scathing attack upon i;he superstitions of respec- tability as Rhoda Fleming has been written. And besides, the emotions developed are too tragic, the personages too elementary in kind and too powerful in degree, the effects too poignant and too sorrowful. In these days people read to be amused. They care for no passion that is not decent in itself and whose expression is not re- strained. It irks them to grapple with problems capable of none save a tragic solution. And when Mr. Meredith goes digging in a very bad temper with things in general into the deeper strata, the primitive deposits, of human nature, the public is the reverse of profoundly interested in the outcome of his exploration and the results of his labour. But for them whose eye is for real literature and such literary essentials as character largely seen and largely presented and as passion deeply felt and poignantly expressed there is such a feast in Rhoda Fleming as no other English novelist alive has spread. The book, it is true, is full of failures. There is, for instance, the old bank porter Anthony, who is such a failure as only a great novelist may perpetrate and survive; who suggests (with some

D

50 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

other of Mr. Meredith's creations) a close, de- liberate, and completely unsuccessful imitation of Dickens : a writer with whom Mr. Meredith is not averse from entering into competition, and who, so manifest on these occasions is his superiority, may almost be described as the other's evil genius. Again, there is Algernon the fool, of whom his author is so bitterly contemptu- ous that he is never once permitted to live and move and have any sort of being whatever and who, though he bears a principal part in the in- trigue, like the Blifil of Tom Jones is so constantly illuminated by the lightnings of the ironical mode of presentation as always to seem unreal in him- self and seriously to imperil the reality of the story. And, lastly, there are the chivalrous Percy Waring and the inscrutable Mrs. Lovell, two gentle ghosts whose proper place is the shadow-land of the American novel. But when all these are re- moved (and for the judicious reader their removal is far from difficult) a treasure of reality remains. What an intensity of life it is that hurries and throbs and burns through the veins of the two sisters — Dahlia the victim, Rhoda the executioner ! Where else in English fiction is such a ' human oak log ' as their father, the Kentish yeoman William Fleming ? And where in English fiction is such a problem presented as that in the evolution of which these three — with a following so well selected and achieved as Robert Armstrong and Jonathan

GEORGE MEREDITH 51

Eccles and the evil ruffian Sedgett, a type of the bumpkin gone wrong, and Master Gammon, that type of the bumpkin old and obstinate, a sort of human saurian — are dashed together, and ground against each other till the weakest and best of the three is broken to pieces? Mr. Meredith may and does fail conspicuously to interest you in Anthony Hackbut and Algernon Blancove and Percy Waring; but he knows every fibre of the rest, and he makes your knowledge as intimate and comprehensive as his own. With these he is never at fault and never out of touch. They have the unity of effect, the vigorous simplicity, of life that belong to great creative art; and at their highest stress of emotion, the culmination of their passion, they appeal to and affect you with a force and a directness that suggest the highest achieve- ment of Webster. Of course this sounds excessive. The expression of human feeling in the coil of a tragic situation is not a characteristic of modern fiction. It is thought to be not consistent with the theory and practice of realism ; and the average novelist is afraid of it, the average reader is only affected by it when he goes to look for it in poetry. But the book is there to show that such praise is deserved ; and they who doubt it have only to read the chapters called respectively ' When the Night ' is Darkest ' and ' Dahlia's Frenzy ' to be convinced and doubt no longer. It has been objected to the climax of Rhoda Fleming that it is unnecessarily

62 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

inhumane, and that Dahlia dead were better art than Dahlia living and incapable of love and joy. But the book, as I have said, is a merciless impeach- ment of respectability ; and as the spectacle of a ruined and broken life is infinitely more discom- forting than that of a noble death, I take it that Mr. Meredith was right to prefer his present ending to the alternative, inasmuch as the painfulness of that impression he wished to produce and the potency of that moral he chose to draw are im- mensely heightened and strengthened thereby.

Opinions differ, and there are those, I believe,

to whom Alvan and Clotilde von Riidiger —

. ' acrobats of the affections ' they have

been called — are pleasant companions, Comedians * .

and the story of those feats in the

gymnastics of sentimentalism in which they lived to shine is the prettiest reading imaginable. But others not so fortunate or, to be plain, more honestly obtuse persist in finding that story tedious, and the bewildering appearances it deals with not human beings — not of the stock of Rose Jocelyn and Sir Everard Romfrey, of Dahlia Fleming and Lucy Feverel and Richmond Roy — but creatures of gossamer and rainbow, phan- tasms of spiritual romance, abstractions of remote, dispiriting points in sexual philosophy.

GEORGE MEREDITH 53

Just as Moliere in the figures of Alceste and Tartuffe has summarised and embodied all that we need to know of indignant honesty and the false fervour of sanctimonious The Egoist animalism, so in the person of Sir Wil- loughby Patterne has Mr. Meredith succeeded in expressing the qualities of egoism as the egoist appears in his relations with women and in his conception and exercise of the passion of love. Between the means of the two men there is not, nor can be, any sort of comparison. Moliere is brief, exquisite, lucid : classic in his union of ease and strength, of purity and sufficiency, of austerity and charm. In The Egoist Mr. Meredith is even more artificial and affected than his wont : he bristles with allusions, he teems with hints and side- hits and false alarms, he glitters with phrases, he riots in intellectual points and philosophical fancies; and though his style does nowhere else become him so well, his cleverness is yet so reckless and indomi- table as to be almost as fatiguing here as everywhere. But in their matter the great Frenchman and he have not much to envy each other. Sir Willoughby Patterne is a ' document on humanity' of the highest value; and to him that would know of egoism and the egoist the study of Sir Willoughby is indispensable. There is something in him of us all. He is a compendium of the Personal in man ; and if in him the abstract Egoist have not taken on his final shape and become classic and typical it is

64 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

not that Mr. Meredith has forgotten anything in his composition but rather that there are certain defects of form, certain structural faults and weak- nesses, which prevent you from accepting as con- clusive the aspect of the mass of him. But the Moliere of the futuye (if the future be that fortu- nate) has but to pick and choose with discretion here to find the stuff of a companion figure to Arnolphe and Alceste and Celimene.

His verse has all the faults and only some of

the merits of his prose. Thus he will rhyme you

off a ballad, and to break the secret

In Metre of that ballad you have to take to yourself a dark lantern and a case of jemmies. I like him best in The Nuptials of Attila. If he always wrote as here, and were always as here sustained in inspiration, rapid of march, nervous of phrase, apt of metaphor, and moving in effect, he would be delightful to the general, and that without sacrificing on the vile and filthy altar of popularity. Here he is suc- cessfully himself, and what more is there to say ? You clap for Harlequin, and you kneel to Apollo. Mr. Meredith doubles the parts, and is irresistible in both. Such fire, such vision, such energy on

GEORGE MEREDITH 55

the one hand and on the other such agility and athletic grace are not often found in combi- nation.

This is the merit and distinction of art : to be more real than reality, to be not nature but

nature's essence. It is the artist's

The Fashion function not to copy but to syn-

oj A.TI thesise : to eliminate from that

gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal. Always artistic, Mr. Meredith's work is often great art.

BYRON

Two obvious reasons why Byron has long been a prophet more honoured abroad than at home are

his life and his work. He is the most Byron and .

romantic figure in the literature of the World

the century, and his romance is of

that splendid and daring- cast which the people of Britain — c an aristocracy materialised and null, a 1 middle class purblind and hideous, a lower class ' crude and brutal ' — prefers to regard with suspicion and disfavour. He is the type of them that prove in defiance of precept that the safest path is not always midway, and that the golden rule is some- times unspeakably worthless : who set what seems a horrible example, create an apparently shameful pre- cedent, and yet contrive to approve themselves an honour to their country and the race. To be a good Briton a man must trade profitably, marry respect- ably, live cleanly, avoid excess, revere the estab- lished order, and wear his heart in his breeches pocket or anywhere but on his sleeve. Byron did none of these things, though he was a public character, and ought for the example's sake to have done them all, and done them ostentatiously. He lived hard, and drank hard, and played hard.

BYRON 67

He was flippant in speech and eccentric in attire. He thought little of the sanctity of the conjugal tie, and said so; and he married but to divide from his wife — who was an incarnation of the national virtue of respectability — under cir- cumstances too mysterious not to be discredit- able. He was hooted into exile, and so far from reforming he did even worse than he had done before. After bewildering Venice with his wicked- ness and consorting with atheists like Shelley and conspirators like young Gamba, he went away on a sort of wild-goose chase to Greece, and died there with every circumstance of publicity. Also his work was every whit as abominable in the eyes of his countrymen as his life. It is said that the theory and practice of British art are subject to the influence of the British school-girl, and that he is unworthy the name of artist whose achievement is of a kind to call a blush to the cheek of youth. Byron was contemptuous of youth, and did not hesitate to write — in Beppo and in Cain, in Manfred and Don Juan and the Vision — exactly as he pleased. In three words, he made himself offensively conspicuous, and from being infinitely popular became utterly contemptible. Too long had people listened to the scream of this eagle in wonder and in per- turbation, and the moment he disappeared they grew ashamed of their emotion and angry with its cause, and began to hearken to other and more melodious voices — to Shelley and Keats, to

68 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

Wordsworth and Coleridge and the ' faultless and f fervent melodies of Tennyson. ' In course of time Byron was forgotten, or only remembered with disdain; and when Thackeray, the representative Briton, the artist Philistine, the foe of all that is excessive or abnormal or rebellious, took it upon himself to flout the author of Don Juan openly and to lift up his heavy hand against the fops and fanatics who had affected the master's humours, he did so amid general applause. Mean- while, however, the genius and the personality of Byron had come to be vital influences all the world over, and his voice had been recognised as the most human and the least insular raised on Eng- lish ground since Shakespeare's. In Russia he had created ^ushkin and Lermontoff; in Germany he had awakened Heine, inspired Schumann, and been saluted as an equal by the poet of Faust himself; in Spain he had had a share in moulding the noisy and unequal talent of Espronceda ; in Italy he had helped to develop and to shape the melancholy and daring genius of Leopardi ; and in France he had been one of the presiding forces of a great aesthetic revolution. To the men of 1830 he was a special and peculiar hero. Hugo turned in his wake to Spain and Italy and the East for inspiration. Musset, as Mr. Swinburne has said — too bitterly and strongly said — became in a fashion a Kaled to his Lara, 'his female page * or attendant dwarf.' He was in some sort the

BYRON 59

grandsire of the Buridan and the Antony of Dumas. Berlioz went to him for the material for his Harold en Italic, his Corsaire overture, and his Episode. Delacroix painted the Barque de Don Juan from him, with the Massacre de Scio, the Marino Faliero, the Combat du Giaour et du Pacha, and many a notable picture more. Is it at all surprising that M. Taine should have found heart to say that alone among modern poets Byron 'atteint a la time'? or that Mazzini should have reproached us with our unaccount- able neglect of him and with our scandalous forgetfulness of the immense work done by him in giving a <( European role ... to English literature' and in awakening all over the Con- tinent so much ' appreciation and sympathy for England ' ?

He had his share in the work of making Matthew Arnold possible, but he is the antipodes of those men of culture and contemplation — those artists pensive and curious and sedately self-contained— whom Arnold Wordsworth best loved and of whom the nearest to hand is Wordsworth. Byron and Wordsworth are like the Lucifer and the Michael of the Vision of Judgment. Byron's was the genius of revolt, as

60 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

Wordsworth's was the genius of dignified and useful submission ; Byron preached the dogma of private revolution, Wordsworth the dogma of private apotheosis; Byron's theory of life was one of liberty and self-sacrifice, Wordsworth's one of self- restraint and self-improvement ; Byron's practice was dictated by a vigorous and voluptuous egoism, Wordsworth's by a benign and lofty selfishness; Byron was the ( passionate and dauntless soldier ' of a forlorn hope,' Wordsworth a kind of inspired clergyman. Both were influences for good, and both are likely to be influences for good for some time to come. Which is the better and stronger is a question that can hardly be determined now. It is certain that Byron's star has waned, and that Wordsworth's has waxed ; but it is also certain that there are moments in life when the Ode to Venice is almost as refreshing and as precious as the ode on the Intimations, and when the epic mockery of Don Juan is to the full as beneficial as the chaste philosophy of The Excursion and the Ode to Duty. Arnold was of course with Michael heart and soul, and was only interested in our Lucifer. He approached his subject in a spirit of undue deprecation. He thought it necessary to cite Scherer's opinion that Byron is but a coxcomb and a rhetorician : partly, it would appear, for the pleasure of seeming to agree with it in a kind of way and partly to have the satisfaction of distin- guishing and of showing it to be a mistake. Then,

BYRON 61

he could not quote Goethe without apologising for the warmth of that consummate artist's expres- sions and explaining some of them away. Again, he was pitiful or disdainful, or both, of Scott's estimate; and he did not care to discuss the sentiment which made that great and good man think Cain and the Giaour fit stuff for family reading on a Sunday after prayers, though as Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, in one of the wisest and subtlest bits of criticism I know, the sentiment is both natural and beautiful, and should assist us not a little in the task of judging Byron and of knowing him for what he was. That Arnold should institute a comparison between Leopardi and Byron was probably inevitable : Leopardi had culture and the philosophic mind, which Byron had not ; he is incapable of influencing the general heart, as Byron can ; he is a critics' poet, which Byron can never be; he was always an artist, which Byron was not; and — it were Arnoldian to take the comparison seriously. Byron was not inter- ested in words and phrases but in the greater truths of destiny and emotion. His empire is over the imagination and the passions. His personality was many-sided enough to make his egoism representative. And as mankind is wont to feel first and to think afterwards, a single one of his heart-cries may prove to the world of greater value as a moral agency than all the intellectual reflections that Leopardi contrived

62 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

to utter. After examining this and that opinion and doubting over and deprecating them all, Arnold touched firm ground at last in a dictum of Mr. Swin- burne's, the most pertinent and profound since those of Goethe, to the effect that in Byron there is a \f splendid and imperishable excellence which covers

* all his oifences and outweighs all his defects : 'the excellence of sincerity and strength.' With this ' noble praise ' our critic agreed so vigorously that it became the key-note of the latter part of his summing up, and in the end you found him declaring Byron the equal of Wordsworth, and asserting of this ' glorious pair' that 'when the ' year 1900 is turned, and the nation comes to ' recount her poetic glories in the century which ' has just then ended, the first names with her

* will be these/ The prophecy is as little like to commend itself to the pious votary of Keats as to the ardent Shelleyite : there are familiars of the Tennysonian Muse, the Sibyl of Rizpah and Vastness and Lucretius and The Voyage, to whom it must seem impertinent beyond the prophet's wont; there are — (but they scarce count) — who grub (as for truffles) for meanings in Browning. But it was not uttered to please, and in truth it has enough of plausibility to infuriate whatever poet- sects there be. Especially the Wordsworthians.

HUGO

To many Hugo was of the race of ^schylus and Shakespeare, a world-poet in the sense that Dante was, an artist supreme alike in genius and in accomplishment. To others he His Critics was hut a great master of words and cadences, with a gift of lyric utterance and inspira- tion rarely surpassed but with a personality so vigorous and excessive as to reduce its literary ex- pression— in epic, drama, fiction, satire and ode and song — to the level of work essentially subjective, in sentiment as in form, in intention as in, effect. The debate is one in which the only possible arbiter is Time ; and to Time the final judgment may be committed. What is certain is that there is one point on which both dissidents and devout — the heretics who deny with Matthew Arnold and the orthodox who worship with Mr. Swin- burne and M. de Banville — are absolutely agreed. Plainly Hugo was the greatest man of letters of his day. It has been given to few or none to live a life so full of effort and achievement, so rich in honour and success and fame. Born almost with the century, he was a writer at fifteen, and at his death he was writing still ; so that the record of

64 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

his career embraces a period of more than sixty years. There is hardly a department of art to a foremost place in which he did not prove his right. From first to last, from the time of Chateaubriand to the time of Zola, he was a leader of men ; and with his departure from the scene the un- divided sovereignty of literature became a thing of the past like Alexander's empire.

In 1826, in a second set of Odes et Ballades, he announced his vocation in unmistakeable terms.

He was a lyric poet and the captain Some Causes

of a new emprise. His genius was and Effects

too large and energetic to move at

ease in the narrow garment prescribed as the poet's wear by the dullards and the pedants who had followed Boileau. He began to repeat the rhythms of Ronsard and the Pleiad ; to deal in the richest rhymes and in words and verses tricked with new-spangled ore ; to be curious in cadences, careless of stereotyped rules, prodigal of inven- tion and experiment, defiant of much long re- cognised as good sense, contemptuous of much till then applauded as good taste. In a word, he was the Hugo of the hundred volumes we know : an artist, that is, endowed with a technical imagina- tion of the highest quality, the very genius of style,

HUGO 65

and a sense of the plastic quality of words un- equalled, perhaps, since Milton. The time was ripe for him : within France and without it was big with revolution. In verse there were the examples of Andre Chenier and Lamartine ; in prose the work of Rousseau and Diderot, of Bernardin de Saint- Pierre and Chateaubriand ; in war and politics the tremendous tradition of Napoleon. Goethe and Schiller had recreated romance and established the foundations of a new palace of art; their theory and practice had been popularised in the novels of Walter Scott ; and in the life and work of Byron the race had such an example of revolt, such an incitement to liberty and change, such a passionate and persuasive argument against authority and convention, as had never before been felt in art. Hugo like all great artists was essentially a child of his age : ' Rebellion lay ' in his way, and he found it/ In 1827 he published his Cromwell, and came forth as a rebel confessed and unashamed. It is an unapproachable pro- duction, tedious in the closet, impossible upon the stage ; and to compare it to such work as that which at some and twenty Keats had given to the world — Hyperion, for instance, or the Eve of St. Agnes — is to glory in the name of Briton. But it had its value then, and as an historical document it has its value now. The preface was at once a profession of faith and a proclamation of war. It is crude, it is limited, it is mistaken, in places it is E

66 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

even absurd. But from the moment of its appear- ance the old order was practically closed. It prepared the way for Albertus and for Antony, for Rolla and the Tour de Nesle ; and it was also the 'fiat lux ' in deference to which the world has accepted with more or less of resignation the partial eclipse of art and morals effected in Salammbo and I' Education sentimentale and the Egyptian darkness achieved in work like la Terre and une Vie and les Blasphemes. In its ringing periods, its plangent antitheses and aesthetic epigrams, it preluded and vindicated the excesses of whatsoever manifestations of roman- ticism mankind and the arts have since been called upon to consider and endure : from the humours of Petrus Borel to the experiments of Claude Monet and the ' discoveries ' of Richard Wagner.

It is too often forgotten that from the first Hugo was associated with men of pretensions and capa- cities not greatly inferior to his own, Environment and that in no direction was victory the work of his single arm. In painting the initiative had been taken years be- before the publication of the Cromwell manifesto by Gericault with the famous Radeau de la Meduse, and by Delacroix with the Dante et Virgile (1822) and the Massacre de Scio (1823). In music Ber-

HUGO 67

lioz, at this time a student in the Conservatoire, was fighting hard against Cherubini and the be- wigged ones for liberty of expression and leave to admire and imitate the audacities of Weber and Beethoven, and three years hence, in the year of Hernani, was to set his mark upon the art with the Symphonic fantastique. On the stage as early as 1824 Frederick and Firmin had realised in the personages of Macaire and Bertrand the grotesque ideal, the combination of humour and terror, of which the character of Cromwell was put forward as the earliest expression, and had realised it so com- pletely that their work has taken rank with the greater and the more lasting results of the move- ment. In the literature of drama the old order was ruined and the victory won on all essential points not in 1830 with Hernani but in 1829 with Henri Trois et sa Cour, the first of the innumerable successes of Alexandre Dumas, who determined at a single stroke the fundamental qualities of struc- ture and form and material, and left his chief no question to solve save that of diction and style. Musset's earlier poems date from 1828, the year of les Orientates, Gautier's from 1830 ; and these are also the dates of Balzac's Chouans and la Peau de Chagrin. Moreover, among the intimates of the young leader were men like Sainte-Beuve, who was two years his junior, and the brothers Deschamps : whose influence was doubtless exerted more fre- quently to encourage than to repress. Towards the

68 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

end we lost sight of all this, and saw in Victor Hugo not so much the most glorious survival of roman- ticism as romanticism itself, the movement in flesh and blood, the revolution in general ' summed up f and closed ' in a single figure. This agreeable view of things was Hugo's own. From the be- ginning he took himself with perfect seriousness, and his followers, however enthusiastic in admira- tion, had excellent warrant from above. ' II trone ' trop,' says Berlioz of him somewhere ; and M. Maxime du Camp has given an edifying account of the means he was wont to use to make himself beloved and honoured by the youth who came to him for counsel and encouragement. How per- fectly he succeeded in this the political part of his function is matter of history. Gautier's first visit to him was that of a devotee to his divinity ; and years afterwards the good poet confessed that not even in pitch darkness and in a cellar fathoms under ground should he dare to whisper to him- self that a verse of the Master's was bad. So far as devotion went there were innumerable Gautiers. Sainte-Beuve was not long a pillar of orthodoxy ; Dumas was always conscious of his own pre-emin- ence in certain qualities, and made light of Hugo's dramas as candidly as he made much of the style in which they are written ; and when some creature of unwisdom saluted Delacroix as 'the Hugo of ' painting/ the artist of the Marino Faliero and the Barque de Don Juan resented the compliment with

HUGO 69

bitterness. But these were exceptions. The youth of 1830 were Hugolaters almost to a man.

Their enthusiasm was not all irrational. Hugo's supremacy was not that he was the greatest artist in essentials, for here Dumas was immeasurably his superior. It was Equipment not that he knew best the heart and of man, or had apprehended most Achievement thoroughly the conditions of life ; for Balzac so far surpassed him in these sciences that comparison was impossible. It was not that he sang the truest song or uttered the deepest word, for Musset is the poet of Rolla and the Nuits in verse and the poet of Fantasia and Lorenzaccio and Carmosine in prose. But the epoch Hugo represented was interested in the manner rather than the substance of things : the revolution at whose front he had been set and whose most shin- ing figure he became was largely a revolution of externals. With an immense amount of enthusiasm there was, as Sainte-Beuve confessed, an incredible amount of ignorance — so that Cromwell was sup- posed to be historical ; and with a passionate delight in form there co-existed a strangely im- perfect understanding of material — so that Hernani

70 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

was supposed to be Shakespearean. To this ignor- ance and to this imperfect understanding Hugo owed a certain part of his authority; the other and greater he got from his unrivalled mastery of style, from his extraordinary skill as an artist in words. To the opposing faction his innovations were horrible : his verse was poison, his example an outrage, his prosody a violation of all laws, his rhymes and tropes and metaphors so many offences against Heaven and the Muse. But to the ardent youngsters who fought beneath his banner it was his to give a something priceless and unique — a something glorious to France and never before exampled in her literature. For the distichs of Boileau — 'strong, heavy, useful, like pairs of tongs/ — he found them alexandrines with the leap and sparkle of sea waves and the sound of clashing swords and the colours of sunset and the dawn. They were tired of whitewash and cold distemper ; and he gave them hangings of brocade and tapes- tries of price and tissues stiff with gold and glow- ing with new dyes. He flung them handfuls of jewels where his rivals scattered handfuls of marbles. And they paid him for his gifts with an intemper- ance of worship, a fury of belief, a rapture of admiration, such as no other man has known. The substance was striking, was peculiar, was novel and full of charm ; but the manner was all this and something besides — was magnificent, was in- toxicating, was irresistible; and Victor Hugo by

HUGO 71

virtue of it became the foremost man of literary France. The great battle of Hernani was merely a battle of style. From Dumas the artist of Henri Trois and Antony, the language of Boileau was safe enough ; and his triumph, all-important and significant as it was, seemed neither fatal nor abominable. It was another matter with Hernani. Its success meant ruin for the Academy and de- struction for the idiom of Delille and M. de Jouy ; and the classicists mustered in ibrce, and did their utmost to stay the coming wrath and arrest the impending doom. They failed of course ; for they fought with a vague yet limited apprehension of the question at issue, they had nothing to give in place of the thing they hated. And Victor Hugo was made captain of the victorious host,, while the men who might have been in a certain sort his rivals took service as lieutenants, arid accepted his ensign for their own.

All his life long he was addicted to attitude ; all his life long he was a poseur of the purest water. He seems to have considered the affectation of superiority an essential His Diary quality in art; for just as the cock in Mrs. Poyser's apothegm believed that the sun got up to hear him crow, so to the poet of the

72 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

Legende and the Contemplations it must have seemed as if the human race existed but to consider the use he made of his ' oracular tongue/ How tremendous his utterances sometimes were — in- formed with what majesty yet with what brilliance — is one of the things that every schoolboy knows. One no more needs to insist upon the merits of his best manner than to emphasise the faults of his worst. At his best as at his worst, however, he was always an artist in his way. His speech was nothing if not artificial — in the good sense of the word sometimes and sometimes in the bad. Sim- plicity (it seemed) was impossible to him. In the quest of expression, the cult of antithesis, the pursuit of effect, he sacrificed directness and plainness with not less consistency than com- placency. In that tissue of ' apocalyptic epigram ' which to him was style there was no room for truth and soberness. His Patmos was a place of mirrors, and before them he draped himself in his phrases like Frederick in the mantle of Ruy Bias. That this grandiosity was unnatural and unreal was proved by the publication of Choses Vues. When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct ? Hugo without rhetoric ? Hugo declining antithesis and content to be no gaudier than his neighbours? Hugo expressing

HUGO 73

himself in the fearless old fashion of pre-romantic ages? A page of commonplace from Mr. Meredith, a book for boarding-schools by M. Zola, were not more startling.

Some primary qualities of his genius are pretty evenly balanced by some primary faults. Thus,

for breadth and brilliance of concep-

For and

tion, for energy and sweep of imagi- nation, for the power of dealing as a master with the greater forces of nature, he is unsurpassed among modern men. But the concep- tion is too often found to be empty as well as spacious ; the imagination is too often tainted with insincerity ; in his dramas of the elements there are too many such falsehoods as abound in his dramas of the emotions. Again, he is some- times grand and often grandiose ; but he has a trick of affecting the grandiose and the grand which is constant and intolerable. He had the genius of style in such fulness as entitles him to rank with the great artists in words of all time. His sense of verbal colour and verbal music is beyond criticism ; his rhythmical capacity is something prodigious. He so revived and renewed the language of France that in his hands it became an instrument not unworthy to

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compete with Shakespeare's English and the German of Goethe and Heine ; and in the structure and capacity of all manner of French metrical forms he effected such a change that he may fairly be said to have received the orchestra of Rameau from his predecessors and to jtave^Jequeathed his heirs the orchestra of Berlioar On the other hand, in much of his later work his mannerisms in prose and in verse are discomfortably glaring; the outcome of his unsurpassable literary faculty is often no more than a parade or triumph of the vocables ; there were times when his brain appears to have become a mere machine for the production of antitheses and sterile conceits. What is perhaps more damning than all, his work is saturate in his own remarkable personality, and is objective only here and there. His dramas are but five-act lyrics, his epics the romance of an egoist, his history is confession, his criticism the opinions of Victor Hugo. Even his lyrics, the ' fine flower ' of his genius, the loveliest expression of the language, have not escaped reproach as a ' Psalter of Subjec- ' tivity.' Even his essays in prose romance — a form of art on which he has stamped his image and superscription in a manner all his own, the work by which he is best known to humanity at large — are vitiated by the same defect. For one that believes in Bishop Myriel as Bishop Myriel there are a hundred who see in him only a pose of Victor Hugo ; it is the same with Ursel and Javert, with

HUGO 75

Cimourdain and Lantenac and Josiane ; the very pieuvre of les Travailleurs is a Hugolater at heart. It is a proof of his commanding personality, that in spite of these objections he held in enchantment the hearts and minds of men for over sixty years. He is almost a literature in himself ; and if it be true that his work is as wholly lacking in the radiant sanity of Shakespeare's as it is in the ex- quisite good sense of Voltaire's, it is also true that he left the world far richer than he found it.

To select an anthology from his work were surely the pleasantest of tasks. One richer in grace and

passion and sweetness might be chosen

. _, What Lives

out of Musset ; one wrought more

truly of the finer stuff of humanity as well as more bountifully touched with tact and dignity and temper from the work of Tennyson. But the Hugo selection would combine the rarest technical merits with a set of interests all its own. It would give, for instance, the Stella of the Chdti- ments and the Pauvres Gens of the Ltgende. On one page would be found that admirable Souvenir de la Nuit du Quatre, which is at once the impeach- ment and the condemnation of the Coup d'Etat ; and on another the little epic of Eviradnus, with

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its immortal serenade, a culmination of youth and romance and love :

1 Si tu veux, faisons un reve. Montons sur deux palefrois. Tu m'emmenes, je t'enleve. L'oiseau chante dans les bois.

Allons-nous-en par 1'Autriche 1 Nous aurons 1'aube a nos fronts. Je serai grand et toi riche, Puisque nous nous aimerons.

Tu seras dame et moi comte. Viens, mon coeur s'epanouit. Viens, nous conterons ce conte Aux dtoiles de la nuit.1

Here, a summary of all the interests of romanticism, would be the complaint of Gastibelza :

' Un jour d'e^e", ou tout e"tait lumiere,

Vie et douceur, Elle s'en vint jouer dans la riviere

Avec sa soeur. Je vis le pied de sa jeune compagne

Et son genou . . . — Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne

Me rendra fou ! ' —

here the adorable Vieille Chanson du Jeune Temps :

' Rose, droite sur ses banches, Leva son beau bras tremblant Pour prendre une mure aux branches : Je ne vis pas son bras blanc.

Une eau courait, fraiche et creuse,

Sur les mousses de velours ;

Et la nature amoureuse

Dormait dans les grands bois sourds.' —

and here, not unworthy to be remembered with Proud Maisie, that wonderful harmony of legend

HUGO 77

and superstition and the facts and dreams of com- mon life, the death-song of Fantine :

' Nous acheterons de bien belles choses, En nous promenant le long de faubourgs.

La Vierge-Marie aupres de mon poele

Est venue hier, en manteau brode*, Et m'a dit : Voici, cache" sous mon voile,

Le petit qu'un jour tu m'as demande. Courez k la ville ; ayez de la toile,

Achetez du fil, achetez un de.

Les bluets sont bleus, les roses sont roses, Les bluets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.'

And from this masterpiece of simple and direct emotion, which to me has always seemed the high- water mark of Hugo's lyrical achievement as well as the most human of his utterances, one might pass on to masterpieces of another inspiration : to the luxurious and charming graces of Sara la Bai- gneuse ; to the superb crescendo and diminuendo of les Djinns ; to f Si vous n'avez rien a me dire,' that daintiest of songlets ; to the ringing rhymes and gallant spirit of the Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean :

' Sus, ma bete, De fagon Que je fete Ce grison ! Je te bailie Pour ripaille Plus de paille, Plus de son,

Qu'un gros frere, Gai, friand, Ne pent faire, Mendiant Par les places Ou tu passes, De grimaces En priant ! ' —

to the melodious tenderness of fSi tu voulais, Madelaine ' : to the gay music of the Stances a Jeanne :

78 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

1 Je ne me mets pas en peine Du clocher ni du beffroi. Je ne sais rien de la reine, Et je ne sais rien du roi.'—

to the admirable song of the wind of the

Quels sont les bruits sourds ? Ecoutez vers 1'onde Cette voix profonde Qui pleure toujours,

Quoiqu'un son plus claire Parfois 1'interrompe . . . Le vent de la mer Souffle dans sa trompe.'—

Et qui toujours gronde,

to the Romance Mauresque, to the barbaric fury of les Retires, to the magnificent rodomontade of the Romancero du Cid. f J'en passe, et des meilleurs," as Ruy Gomez observes of his ancestors. Here at any rate are jewels enough to furnish forth a casket

that should be one of the richest of its kind ! The

i

worst is, they are most of them not necessaries but . luxuries. It is impossible to conceive of life with- out Shakespeare and Burns, without Paradise Lost and the Intimations ode and the immortal pageant of the Canterbury Tales ; but (the technical ques- tion apart) to imagine it wanting Hugo's lyrics is easy enough. The largesse of which he was so prodigal has but an arbitrary and conventional value. Like the magician's money much has changed, almost in the act of distribution, into withered leaves ; and such of it as seems minted of good metal is not for general circulation.

HEINE

HEINE had a light hand with the branding-iron, and marked his subjects not more neatly than

indelibly. And really he alone were

, . . . ,. The Villainy

capable of dealing adequate vengeance

upon his translators. His verse has only „.

. , .f . ,.„ Translation violent lovers or violent foes ; indiffer- ence is impossible. Once read as it deserves, it becomes one of the loveliest of our spiritual acquisitions. We hate to see it tampered with ; we are on thorns as the translator approaches, and we resent his operations as an individual hurt, a personal affront. What business has he to be trampling among our borders and crushing our flowers with his stupid hobnails ? Why cannot he carry his zeal for topsy-turvy horticulture else- where ? He comes and lays a brutal hand on our pet growths, snips off their graces, shapes them anew according to his own ridiculous ideal, paints and varnishes them with a villainous compound of his contrivance, and then bids us admire th* effect and thank him for its production ! Is any name too hard for such a creature? and could any vengeance be too deadly ? If he walked into your garden and amused himself so with your

80 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

cabbages, you could put him in prison. But into your poets he can stump his way at will, and upon them he can do his pleasure. And he does it. How many men have brutalised the elegance, the grace, the winning urbanity of Horace ! By how many coarse and stupid fingers has Catullus been smudged and fumbled and mauled ! To turn Faust into English (in the original metres) is a fashionable occupation ; there are more perversions of the Commedia than one cares to recall ; there is scarce a great or even a good work of the human mind but has been thus bedevilled and deformed. Don Quixote, le Pere Gorict, The Frogs, The Decameron — the trail of the translator is over them all. Messrs. Payne and Lang and Swinburne have turned poor Villon into a citizen of Bedford Park, Fitzgerald and Florence Macarthy have Englished Calderon, Messrs. Pope, Gladstone and others have done their worst with Homer. If Rossetti had not suc- ceeded with la Vita Nuova, if Fitzgerald had not ennobled Omar, if Mr. Lang had not bettered upon Banville and Gerard de Nerval, the word 'trans- * lator* would be odious as the word ( occupy.' And ' occupy 'on the authority of Mrs. Dorothy Tear- sheet is an odious word indeed.

The fact is, the translator too often forgets the difference between his subject and himself; he is

HEINE 81

too often a common graveyard mason that would play the sculptor. And it is not nearly enough

for him to he a decent craftsman. To

_,- *> The Pro°f give an adequate idea of an artists

work a man must be himself an artist of equal force and versatility with his original. The typical translator makes clever enough verses, but Heine's accomplishment is remote from him as Heine's genius. He perverts his author as rhyme and rhythm will. No charge of verbal in- accuracy need therefore be made, for we do not expect a literal fidelity in our workman. Let him convey the spirit of his original, and that, so far as meaning goes, is enough. But we do expect of him a something that shall recall his author's form, his author's personality, his author's charm of diction and of style ; and here it is that such an interpreter as Sir Theodore Martin (say) fails with such assurance and ill-fortune. The movement of Heine's rhythms, simple as they seem, is not spon- taneous ; it is an effect of art : the poet laboured at his cadences as at his meanings. Artificial he is, but he has the wonderful quality of never seeming artificial. His verses dance and sway like the nixies he loved. Their every motion seems informed with the perfect suavity and spontaneity of pure nature. They tinkle down the air like sunset bells, they float like clouds, they wave like flowers, they twit- ter like skylarks, they have in them something of the swiftness and the certainty of exquisite

82 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

physical sensations. In such a transcript as Sir Theodore's all this is lost : Heine becomes a mere prentice-metrist; he sets the teeth on edge as surely as Browning himself; the verse that recalled a dance of naiads suggests a springless cart on a Highland road; Terpsichore is made to prance a hobnailed breakdown. The poem disappears, and in its place you have an indifferent copy of verses. You look at the pages from afar, and your impres- sion is that they are not unlike Heine ; you look into them, and Heine has vanished. The man is gone, and only an awkward, angular, clumsily arti- culated, entirely preposterous lay-figure remains to show that the translator has been by.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

IN every page of Arnold the poet there is some- thing to return upon and to admire. There are faults, and these of a kind this present age is ill-disposed to condone. The His Verse rhymes are sometimes poor ; the move- ment of the verse is sometimes uncertain and sometimes slow; the rhythms are obviously simple always ; now and then the intention and effect are cold even to austerity,, are bald to un- comeliness. But then, how many of the rarer qualities of art and inspiration are represented here, and here alone in modern work ! There is little of that delight in material for material's sake which is held to be essential to the com- position of a great artist; there is none of that rapture of sound and motion and none of that efflorescence of expression which are deemed insepar- able from the endowment of the true singer. For any of those excesses in technical accomplishment, those ecstasies in the use of words, those effects of sound which are so rich and strange as to impress the hearer with something of their author's own emotion of creation — for any, indeed, of the char- acteristic attributes of modern poetry — you shall

84 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

turn to him in vain. In matters of form this poet is no romantic but a classic to the marrow. He adores his Shakespeare, but he will none of his Shake- speare's fashions. For him the essentials are dignity of thought and sentiment and distinction of manner and utterance. It is no aim of his to talk for talking's sake, to express what is but half felt and half understood, to embody vague emotions and nebulous fancies in language no amount of rich- ness can redeem from the reproach of being nebulous and vague. In his scheme of art there is no place for excess, however magnificent and Shake- spearean— for exuberance, however overpowering and Hugoesque. Human and interesting in them- selves, the ideas apparelled in his verse are completely apprehended; natural in themselves, the experi- ences he pictures are intimately felt and thoroughly perceived. They have been resolved into their elements by the operation of an almost Sophoclean faculty of selection, and the effect of their presenta- tion is akin to that of a gallery of Greek marbles.

Other poets say anything — say everything that is in them. Browning lived to realise the myth of the

Inexhaustible Bottle; Mr. William His Failure Morris is nothing if not fluent and

copious ; Mr. Swinburne has a facility that would seem impossible if it were not a living

MATTHEW ARNOLD 85

fact; even the Laureate is sometimes prodigal of unimportant details, of touches insignificant and superfluous, of words for words' sake, of cadences that have no reason of being save themselves. Mat- thew Arnold alone says only what is worth saying. In other words, he selects : from his matter what- ever is impertinent is eliminated and only what is vital is permitted to remain. Sometimes he goes a little astray, and his application of the principle on which Sophocles and Homer wrought results in failure. But in these instances it will always be found, I think, that the effect is due not to the principle nor the poet's application of it but to the poet himself, who has exceeded his commission, and attempted more than is in him to accomplish. The case is rare with Arnold, one of whose quali- ties— and by no means the least Hellenic of them — was a fine consciousness of his limitations. But that he failed, and failed considerably, it were idle to deny. There is Merope to bear witness to the fact ; and of Merope what is there to say ? Evidently it is an imitation Greek play : an essay, that is, in a form which ceased long since to have any active life, so that the attempt to revive it — to create a soul under the ribs of very musty death — is a blunder alike in senti- ment and in art. As evidently Arnold is no dramatist. Empedocles, the Strayed Reveller, even the Forsaken Merman, all these are ex- pressions of purely personal feeling — are so many

86 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

metamorphoses of Arnold. In Merope there is no such basis of reality. The poet was never on a level with his argument. He knew little or nothing of his characters — of Merope or ^Epytus or Polyphontes, of Areas or Laias or even the Messenger ; at every step the ground is seen shift- ing under his feet ; he is comparatively void of matter, and his application of the famous principle is labour lost. He is winnowing the wind ; he is washing not gold but water.

It is other-guess work with Empedocles, the Dejan-

eira fragment, Sohrab and Rustum, the Philomela, his

better work in general, above all with

the unique and unapproached Balder Triumphs

Dead. To me this last stands alone in

modern art for simple majesty of conception, sober directness and potency of expression, sustained dig- nity of thought and sentimentand style, the com- plete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative : indeed for every Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here, for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness — the only true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation — for which the

MATTHEW ARNOLD 87

similitudes of the e Ionian father of his race ' are pre-eminently distinguished : —

' And as a spray of honeysuckle flowers Brushes across a tired traveller's face Who shuffles through the deep dew-moistened dust On a May evening, in the darken'd lanes, And starts him, that he thinks a ghost went by — So Hoder brushed by Hermod's side."

Here is Homer's direct and moving v because most human and comprehensive, touch in narrative : —

' But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose, The throne, from which his eye surveys the world ; And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven, High over Asgard, to light home the king. But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart ; And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came. And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets, And the Gods trembled on their golden beds Hearing the wrathful Father coming home — For dread, for like a whirlwind Odin came. And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left Sleipner ; and Sleipner went to his own stall ; And in Valhalla Odin laid him down.'

And here — to have done with evidence of what is known to every one — here is the Homeric manner, large and majestic and impersonal; of recording speech : —

1 Bethink ye, Gods, is there no other way ? — Speak, were not this a way, a way for Gods? If I, if Odin, clad in radiant arms, Mounted on Sleipner, with the warrior Thor Drawn in his car beside me, and my sons, All the strong brood of Heaven, to swell my train, Should make irruption into Hela's realm, And set the fields of gloom ablaze with light, And bring in triumph Balder back to Heaven ? '

88 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

One has but to contrast such living work as this with the ' mouldering realm ' of Merope to feel the difference with a sense of pain ;

' For doleful are the ghosts, the troops of dead, Whom Hela with austere control presides ' ;

while this in its plain, heroic completeness is touched with a stately life that is a presage of immortality. It is evident, indeed, that Arnold wrote Balder Dead in his most fortunate hour, and that Merope is his one serious mistake in literature. For a genius thus peculiar and introspective drama — the presentation of character through action — is im- possible ; to a method thus reticent and severe drama — the expression of emotion in action — is improper. ' Not here, O Apollo ! ' It is written that none shall bind his brows with the twin laurels of epos and drama. Shakespeare did not, nor could Homer ; and how should Matthew Arnold ?

1 He has opinions and the courage of them ; he has assurance and he has charm ; he writes with an

engaging clearness. It is very possible His Prose^ to disagree with him ; but it is difficult

indeed to resist his many graces of manner, and decline to be entertained and even interested by the variety and quality of his

MATTHEW ARNOLD 89

matter. He was described as fthe most un-English of Britons/ the most cosmopolitan of islanders ; and you feel as you read him that in truth his mind _ was French. He took pattern by Goethe, and was impressed by Leopardi ; he was judiciously classic, but his romanticism was neither hidebound nor inhuman ; he apprehended Heine and Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza and Sainte-Beuve, Joubert and Maurice de Guerin, Wordsworth and Pascal, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, Burke and Arthur Clough, Eliza Cook and Homer ; he was an autho- rity on education, poetry, civilisation, the Song of Roland, the love-letters of Keats, the Genius of Bottles, the significance of eutrapelos and eutrapelia. In fact, we have every reason to be proud of him. For the present is a noisy and affected age ; it is given overmuch to clamorous devotion and extra- vagant repudiation ; there is an element of swagger in all its words and ways ; it has a distressing and immoral turn for publicity. Matthew Arnold's function was to protest against its fashions by his own intellectual practice, and now and then to take it to task and to call it to order. He was not ^ particularly original, but he had in an eminent degree the formative capacity, the genius of shaping and developing, which is a chief quality of the French mind and which is not so common among us English as our kindest critics would * have us believe. He would take a handful of golden / sentences — things wisely thought and finely said

I

90 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

v%

by persons having authority — and spin them into an exquisite prelection ; so that his work with all the finish of art retains a something of the fresh- ness of those elemental truths on which it was his humour to dilate. He was, that is to say, an artist in ethics as in speech, in culture as in ambition. ' II est donne,' says Sainte-Beuve, { de ' nos jours, a un bien petit nombre, meme parmi ' les plus delicats et ceux qui les apprecient le ' mieux, de recueillir, d'ordonner sa vie selon ses ( admirations et selon ses gouts, avec suite, avec ' noblesse/ That is true enough; but Arnold was one of the few, and might ' se vanter d'etre ' reste iidele a soi-meme, a son premier et a son f plus beau passe/ He was always a man of culture in the good sense of the word ; he had many interests in life and art, and his interests were sound and liberal ; he was a good critic of both morals and measures, both of society and of literature, because he was commonly at the pains of understanding his matter before he began to speak about it. It is therefore not surprising that the part he played was one of considerable im- portance or that his influence was healthy in the main. He was neither prophet nor pedagogue but a critic pure and simple. Too well read to be violent, too nice in his discernment to be led astray beyond recovery in any quest after strange gods, he told the age its faults and suggested such remedies as the study of great men's work

MATTHEW ARNOLD 91

had suggested to him. If his effect was little that was not his fault. He returned to the charge with imperturbable good temper, and repeated his re- marks— which are often exasperating in effect — with a mixture of mischievousness and charm, of superciliousness and sagacity, and a serene dexterity of phrase, unique in modern letters.

HOMER AND THEOCRITUS

I THINK that of all recent books the two that have pleased me best and longest are those delight- ful renderings into English prose of The Odyssey the Greek of Homer and Theocritus, which we owe, the one to Messrs. Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang- and the other to Mr. Lang's unaided genius. To read this Odyssey of theirs is to have a breath of the clear, serene airs that blew through the antique Hellas ; to catch a glimpse of the large, new morning light that bathes the seas and highlands of the young heroic world. In a space of shining and fragrant clarity you have a vision of marble columns and stately cities, of men august in single-hearted- ness and strength and women comely and simple and superb as goddesses; and with a music of leaves and winds and waters, of plunging ships and clanging armours, of girls at song and kindly gods discoursing, the sunny-eyed heroic age is re- vealed in all its nobleness, in all its majesty, its candour, and its charm. The air is yet plangent with echoes of the leaguer of Troy, and Odysseus the ready-at-need goes forth upon his wanderings : into the cave of Polypheme, into the land of giants.

HOMER AND THEOCRITUS 93

into the very regions of the dead : to hear among the olive trees the voice of Circe, the sweet witch, singing her magic song as she fares to and fro before her golden loom ; to rest and pine in the islet of Calypso, the kind sea-goddess; to meet with Nausicaa, loveliest of mortal maids ; to reach his Ithaca, and do battle with the Wooers, and age in peace and honour by the side of the wise Penelope. The day is yet afar when, as he sailed out to the sunset and the mysterious

Sol con un legno, e con quella compagna Picciola, dalla qual non fue deserto,

the great wind rushed upon him from the new- discovered land, and so ended his journeyings for ever; and all with him is energy and tact and valour and resource, as becomes the captain of an indomitable human soul. His society is like old d'Artagnan's : it invigorates, renews, inspires. I had rather lack the friendship of the good Alonso Quijada himself than the brave example of these two.

With certain differences it is the same with our Theocritus. From him, too, the mind is borne back to a < happier age of gold/ ^ when the world was younger than now, and men were not so weary nor so jaded nor so highly civilised as they choose to think

94 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

themselues. Shepherds still piped, and maidens still listened to their piping. The old gods had not been discrowned and banished ; and to fishers drawing their nets the coasts yet kept a something of the trace of amorous Polypheme, the rocks were peopled with memories of his plaint to Galatea. Inland, among the dim and thymy woods, bee-haunted and populous with dreams of dryad and oread, there were rumours of Pan; and dwellers under thatch — the goatherd mending his sandals, the hind carving his new staff, the girls who busked them for the vintaging — were con- scious, as the wind went by among the beeches and the pines, and brought with it the sounds of a lonely and mysterious night, that hard by them in the starry darkness the divine Huntress was abroad, and about the base of ^Etna she and her forest maids drove the chase with horn and hound. In the cities ladies sang the psalm of Adonis brought back from ' the stream eternal of Acheron.1 Under the mystic moon love-lorn damsels did their magic rites, and knit up spells of power to bring home the men they loved. Among the vines and under the grey olives songs were singing of Daphnis all day long. There were junketings and dancings and harvest-homes for ever toward; the youths went by to the gymnasium, and the girls stood near to watch them as they went ; the cicalas sang, the air was fragrant with apples and musical with the sound of flutes and running water ; while

HOMER AND THEOCRITUS 95

the blue Sicilian sky laughed over all, and the soft Sicilian sea encircled the land and its lovers with a ring of sapphire and silver. To translate Theocritus,, wrote Sainte-Beuve, is as if one sought to carry away in one's hand a patch of snow that has lain forgotten through the summer in a cranny of the rocks of Mtna. : — ' On a fait trois pas a peine, que cette neige deja est fondue. On est heureux s'il en reste assez du moins pour donner le vif sentiment de la fraicheur.' But Mr. Lang has so rendered into English the graces of the loveliest of Dorian singers that he has earned the thanks of every lover of true literature. Every one should read his book, for it will bring him face to face with a very prince among poets and with a very summer among centuries. That Theocritus was a rare and beautiful master there is even in this English transcript an abun- dance of evidence. Melancholy apart, he was the Watteau of the old Greek world — an exquisite artist, a rare poet, a true and kindly soul ; and it is very good to be with him. We have changed it all of course, and are as fortunate as we can expect. But it is good to be with Theocritus, for he lets you live awhile in the happy age and under the happy heaven that were his. He gives you leave and opportunity to listen to the tuneful strife of Lacon and Comatas ; to witness the duel in song between Corydon and Battus; to talk of Galatea pelting with apples the barking dog of her love-lorn Poly-

96 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

pheme ; under the whispering elms, to lie drinking with Eucritus and Lycidas by the altar of Demeter, 'while she stands smiling- by, with sheaves and ' poppies in her hand/

It is relief unspeakable to turn from the dust and din and chatter of modern life, with its growing

trade in heroes and its poverty of Old Lamps . . .

, __ men, its innumerable regrets and and New

ambitions and desires, to this immense

tranquillity, this candid and shining calm. They had no Irish Question then, you can reflect, nor was theology invented. Men were not afraid of life nor ashamed of death ; and you could be heroic without a dread of clever editors, and hospitable without fear of rogues, and dutiful for no hope of illuminated scrolls. Odysseus disguised as Irus is still Odysseus and august. How comes it that Mr. Gladstone in rags and singing ballads would be only fit for a police-station ? that Lord Salisbury hawking cocoa-nuts would instantly suggest the purlieus of Petticoat Lane? Is the fault in our- selves? Can it be that we have deteriorated so much as that? Nerves, nerves, nerves ! . . . These many centuries the world has had neuralgia ; and what has come of it is that Robert Elsmere is an ideal, and the bleat of the sentimentalist might almost be mistaken for the voice of living England.

RABELAIS

RABELAIS is not precisely a book for bachelors and maids — at times, indeed, is not a book for grown men. There are passages not to be read without a blush and a sen- His Essence sation of sickness : the young giant which is the Renaissance being filthy and gross as Nature herself at her grossest and her most filthy. It is argued that this is all deliberate — is an effect of premeditation : that Rabelais had certain home- truths to deliver to his generation, and delivered them in such terms as kept him from the fagot and the rope by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at their wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not Rabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component in his mental fabric, an element in whose absence he would be not Rabelais but somebody else. It in- spires his practice of art to the full as thoroughly as it informs his theory of language. He not only employs it wherever it might be useful : he goes out of his way to find it, he shovels it o

98 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

in on any and every occasion,, he bemerds his readers and himself with a gusto that assuredly is not a common characteristic of defensive opera- tions. In him, indeed, the humour of Old France — the broad, rank, unsavoury esprit gaulois — found its heroic expression ; he made use of it because he must ; and we can no more eliminate it from his work than we can remove the quality of imagination from Shakespeare's or those of art and intellect from Ben Jonson's. Other men are as foul or fouler; but in none is foulness so inbred and so ingrained, from none is it so inseparable. Few have had so much genius, and in none else has genius been so curiously featured.

It is significant enough that with all this against him he should have been from the first a great moral and literary influence His Secret and the delight of the wisest and soundest minds the world has seen. Shakespeare read him, and Jonson ; Montaigne, a greater than himself, is in some sort his descendant ; Swift, in Coleridge's enlightening phrase, is ' anima Rabelaesii habitans in sicco ' ; to Sterne and Balzac and Moliere he was a constant inspiration ; unto this day his work is

RABELAIS 99

studied and his meanings are sought with almost religious devoutness ; while his phrases have passed into the constitution of a dozen languages, and the great figures he scrawled across the face of the Renaissance have survived the movement that gave them being, and are ranked with the monuments of literature. Himself has given us the reasons in the prologue to the first book, where he tells of the likeness between Socrates and the boxes called Sileni, and discourses of the manifest resemblance of his own work with Socrates. ( Opening this box/ which is Socrates, says he, 'you would have found within it a ' heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than 1 human understanding, an admirable virtue, ' matchless learning, invincible courage, inimit- ' able sobriety, certain contentment of mind, ' perfect assurance, and an incredible disregard of ' all that for which men cunningly do so much ' watch, run, sail, fight, travel, toil, and turmoil 1 themselves.' In such wise must his book be opened, and the c high conceptions ' with which it is stuffed will presently be apparent. Nay, more : you are to do with it even as a dog with a marrow- bone. 'If you have seen him you might have t remarked with what devotion and circumspection f he watches and wards it ; with what care he e keeps it; how fervently he holds it; how ' prudently he gobbets it ; with what affection he ' breaks it; with what diligence he sucks it.'

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And in the same way you f by a sedul jus lecture cand frequent meditation* shall break the bone and suck out the marrow of these books. Since the advice was proffered, generation after genera- tion of mighty wits have taken counsel with the Master, and his wisdom has through them been passed out into the practice of life, the evolu- tion of society, the development of humanity. But the ' prince de toute sapience et de toute ' comedie ' has not yet uttered his last word. He remains in the front of time as when he lived and wrote. The Abbey of Thelema and the education of Gargantua are still unrealised ideals ; the Ringing Isle and the Isle of Papimany are in their essentials pretty much as he left them; Panurge, ' the pollarded man, the man with every ' faculty except the reason,' has bettered no whit for the three centuries of improvement that have passed since he was flashed into being. We — even we — have much to learn from Master Alcofribas, and until we have learned it well enough to put it into practice his work remains half done and his book still one to study •

SHAKESPEARE

SHAKESPEARE and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and com- pelling the minds of men to combat

and discussion. About the English

Parallel poet a literature of contention has

been in process of accretion ever since he was dis- covered to be Shakespeare ; and about the Dutch painter and etcher there has gradually accumulated a literature precisely analogous in character and for the most part of equal quality. In such an age as this, when the creative faculty of the world is mainly occupied with commentary and criticism, the reason should not be far to seek. Both were giants ; both were original and individual in the highest sense of the words; both were leagues ahead of their contemporaries, not merely as regards the matter of their message but also in respect of the terms of its delivery ; each, more- over— and here one comes upon a capital point of contact and resemblance — each was at times pro- digiously inferior to himself. Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well ; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very

102 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill. There are passages in his work in which he reaches such heights of literary art as since his time no mortal has found accessible; and there are passages which few or none of us can read with- out a touch of that 'burning sense of shame' experienced in the presence of Mr. Poynter's Diadumenc by the British Matron of The Times newspaper. Now, we have got to be so curious in ideals that we cannot away with the thought of imperfection. Our worship must have for its object something flawless, something utterly with- out spot or blemish. We can be satisfied with nothing less than an entire and perfect chrysolite ; and we cannot taste our Shakespeare at his worst without experiencing not merely the burning sense of shame aforesaid but also a frenzy of longing to father his faults upon somebody else — Marlowe for instance, or Green, or Fletcher — and a fury of proving that our divinity was absolutely incapable of them. That Shakespeare varied — that the match- less prose and the not particularly lordly verse of As You Like It are by the same hand ; that the master to whom we owe our Hamlet is also re- sponsible for Gertrude and King Claudius; that he who gave us the agony of Lear and the ruin of Othello did likewise perpetrate the scene of Hector's murder, in manner so poor and in spirit so cynical and vile — is beyond all belief and patience;

SHAKESPEARE 103

and we have argued the point to such an extent that we are all of us in Gotham, and a mooncalf like the ascription of whatever is good in Shake- speare to Lord Bacon is no prodigy but a natural birth.

SIDNEY

SIDNEY'S prime faults are affectation and con- ceit. His verses drip with fine love-honey; but it has been so clarified in meta- physics that much of its flavour and swnofLtfe

sweetness has escaped. Very often,

too, the conceit embodied is preposterously poor. You have as it were a casket of finest gold elabo- rately wrought and embellished, and the gem within is a mere spangle of paste, a trumpery spikelet of crystal. No doubt there is a man's heart beating underneath ; but so thick is the envelope of buckram and broidery and velvet through which it has to make itself audible that its pulsations are sometimes hard to count, while to follow it throb by throb is impossible. And if this be true of that Astrophel and Stella series in which the poet outpours the melodious hey- day of his youth — in which he strives to embody a passion as rich and full as ever stirred man's blood — what shall be said of the Arcadia! In that fcold pastoral' he is trying to give breath and substance to as thin and frigid a fashion as has ever afflicted literature; and though he put a great deal of himself into the result, still every one has not the true critical insight, and to most

SIDNEY 105

of us, I think, those glimpses of the lofty nature of the writer which make the thing written a thing of worth in the eyes of the few are merely invisible.

In thinking of Sidney, Ophelia's lament for Hamlet springs to the lips, and the heart reverts to that closing scene at Zutphen with a blessed sadness of admiration and His Fame regret. But frankly, is it not a fact that that fine last speech of his has more availed to secure him immortality than all his verse ? They call him the English Bayard, and the French- man need not be displeasured by the comparison. But when you come to read his poetry you find that our Bayard had in him a strong dash of the pedant and a powerful leaven of the euphuist. Subtle, delicate, refined, with a keen and curious wit, a rare faculty of verse, a singular capacity of expression, an active but not always a true sense of form, he wrote for the few, and (it may be) the few will always love him. But his intellectual life, intense though it were, was lived among shadows and abstractions. He thought deeply, but he neither looked widely nor listened intently, and when all is said he remains no more than a brilliant amorist, too super-subtle for complete sincerity, whose fluency and sweetness have not improved with years.

TOURNEUR

TOURNEUB was a fierce and bitter spirit. The words in which he unpacked his heart are vitalised

with passion. He felt so keenly that His Style oftentimes his phrase is the offspring of

the emotion, so terse and vigorous and apt, so vivid and so potent and eager, it appears. As an instance of this avidity of wrath and scorn finding expression in words the fittest and most forcible, leaving the well-known scenes embalmed in Elia's praise, one might take the three or four single words in which Vindici (The Revenger's Tragedy), on as many several occasions, refers to the caresses of Spurio and the wanton Duchess. Each is of such amazing propriety, is so keenly discriminated, is so obviously the product of an imagination burning with rage and hate, that it strikes you like an affront : each is an incest taken in the fact and branded there and then. And this quality of verbal fitness, this power of so charging a phrase with energy and colour as to make it convey the emotion of the writer at the instant of inspira- tion, is perhaps the master quality of Pourneur's work.

TOURNEUR 107

They that would have it are many; they that achieve their desire are few. For in the minor artist the passionate — the elemental quality— is not often found : he being His Matter of his essence the ape or zany of his betters. Tourneur is not a great tragic. The Atheist's Tragedy is but grotesquely and extrava- gantly horrible ; its personages are caricatures of passion ; its comedy is inexpressibly sordid ; its in- cidents are absurd when they are not simply abomin- able. But it is written in excellent dramatic verse and in a rich and brilliant diction, and it contains a number of pregnant epithets and ringing lines and violent phrases. And if you halve the blame and double the praise you will do something less than justice to that Revenger's Tragedy which is Tourneur's immortality. After all its companion is but a bastard of the loud, malignant, antic muse of Marston; the elegies are cold, elaborate, and very tedious; the Transformed Metamorphosis is better verse but harder reading than Sordetto itself. But the Revenger's Tragedy has merit as a piece of art and therewith a rare interest as a window on the artist's mind. The effect is as of a volcanic landscape. An earthquake has passed, and among grisly shapes and blasted aspects here lurks and wanders the genius of ruin.

WALTON

I AM told that it is generally though silently admitted that, while Charles Cotton came of a

school of fishermen renowned for The Compleat .. . , .

accomplishment even now, his master

and friend was not in the modern or Cottonian sense a fisherman at all. There was in him, indeed, a vast deal of the philosopher and the observer of nature and still more, perhaps, of the artist in English; but there was also not a little of the cockney sportsman. He never rose above the low-lived worm and quill ; his prey was commonly those fish that are the scorn of the true angler, for he knew naught of trout and grayling, yet was deeply interested in such base creatures (and such poor eating) as chub and roach and dace ; and that part of his treatise which has still a certain authority — which may be said, indeed, to have placed the mystery of fly-fishing upon something of a scientific basis — was not his work but that of cmy most honoured friend, ' Charles Cotton, Esq.' Again, it is a character- istic of your true as opposed to your cockney sportsman that, unless constrained thereto by hunger, he does not eat what he has killed ; and

WALTON 109

it is a characteristic of Walton — who in this particular at least may stand for the authentic type of the cockney sportsman as opposed to the true one — that he delighted not much less in dining or supping on his catch than he did in the act of making it: as witness some of the most charming parts in a book that from one end to the other is charm and little besides. Indeed the truth — (with reverence be it spoken) — appears to be that the Compleat Angler is an expression in the terms of art of the cit's enjoyment of the country.

What Walton saw in angling was not that delight in the consciousness of accomplishment

and intelligence which sends the true

Master fisherman to the river and keeps him _

... Piscator

there, rejoicing in his strength,

whether he kill or go empty away. It was rather the pretext — with a worm and perhaps a good supper at one end and a contemplative man at the other — of a day in the fields : where the sky- lark soared, and the earth smelled sweet, and the water flashed and tinkled as it ran, while hard by some milk-maid, courteous yet innocent, sang as she plied her nimble fingers, and not very far away the casement of the inn-parlour gleamed comfortable

110 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

promises of talk and food and rest. That was the Master Piscator who, being an excellent man of letters, went out to ' stretch his legs up Tottenham ' Hill* in search of fish, and came home with immortal copy; and that was the Izaak Walton who ' ventured to fill a part ' of Cotton's ' margin ' with remarks npt upon his theory of how to angle for trout or grayling in a clear stream but ' by way ' of paraphrase for your reader's clearer under- * standing both of the situation of your fishing ' house, and the pleasantness of that you dwell '. in.' He had the purest and the most innocent of minds, he was the master of a style as bright, as sweet, as refreshing and delightful, as fine clean home-spun some time in lavender ; he called him- self an angler, and he believed in the description with a cordial simplicity whose appeal is more persuasive now than ever. But he was nothing if not the citizen afield — the cockney aweary of Bow Bells and rejoicing in 'the sights and sounds ' of the open landscape.' After all it is only your town-bred poet who knows anything of the country, or is moved to concern himself in anywise for the sensations and experiences it yields. Milton was born in Bread Street, and Herrick in Cheapside. Yet Milton gave us the Allegro and the Penseroso and the scenery in Comus and the epic; while as for Herrick — the Night-Piece, the lovely and immortal verses To Meadows, the fresh yet sump- tuous and noble To Corinna Going a-Maying,

WALTON 111

these and a hundred more are there to answer for him. Here Walton is with Herrick and Milton and many f dear sons of Memory ' besides ; and that is why he not only loved the country but was moved to make art of it as well.

HERRICK

IN Herrick the air is fragrant with new-mown hay ; there is a morning light upon all things ; long shadows streak the grass, and His Muse on the eglantine swinging in the hedge the dew lies white and brilliant. Out of the happy distance comes a shrill and silvery sound of whetting scythes ; and from the near brook-side rings the laughter of merry maids in circle to make cowslipballs and babble of their bachelors. As you walk you are conscious of fthe grace that morning meadows wear,' and mayhap you meet Amaryllis going home to the farm with an apronful of flowers. Rounded is she and buxom, cool-cheeked and vigorous and trim, smelling of rosemary and thyme, with an appetite for curds and cream and a tongue of ' cleanly wantonness. ' For her singer has an eye in his head, and exquisite as are his fancies he dwells in no land of shadows. The more clearly he sees a thing the better he sings it; and pro- vided that he do see it nothing is beneath the caress of his muse. The bays and rosemary that wreath the hall at Yule, the log itself, the Candle- mas box, the hock-cart and the maypole, nay,

' See'st thou that cloud as silver clear, Plump, soft, and swelling everywhere? Tis Julia's bed ! '-

HERRICK 113

And not only does he listen to the ' decking ' of his hen and know what it means: he knows too that the egg she has laid is long and white ; so that ere he enclose it in his verse, you can see him take it in his hand,, and look at it with a sort of boyish wonder and delight. This freshness of spirit, this charming and innocent curiosity, he carries into all he does. He can turn a sugared compliment with the best, but when Amaryllis passes him by he is yet so eager and unsophisticate that he can note that 'winning wave in the tempestuous f petticoat ' which has rippled to such good pur - pose through so many graceful speeches since. So that though Julia and Dianeme and Anthea have passed away, though Corinna herself is merely ' a { fable, song, a fleeting shade/ he has saved enough of them from the ravin of Time for us to love and be grateful for eternally. Their gracious ghosts abide in a peculiar nook of the Elysium of Poesy. There 'in their habit as they lived' they dance in round, they fill their laps with flowers, they frolic and junket sweetly, they go for ever may- ing. Soft winds blow round them, and in their clear young voices they sing the verse of the rare artist who called them from the multitude and set them for ever where they are.

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And Amaryllis herself will not, mayhap, be found

so fair as those younglings of the year she bears

with her in 'wicker ark' or 'lawny

( continent.' Herrick is pre-eminently

the poet of flowers. He alone were capable of

bringing back

1 Le bouquet d'Ophelie De la rive inconnue ou les flots I'ont laisse".

He knows and loves the dear blossoms all. He considers them with tender and shining eyes, he culls them his sweetest fancies and his fondest metaphors. Their idea is inseparable from that of his girls themselves, and it is by the means of the one set of mistresses that he is able so well to understand the other. The flowers are maids to him, and the maids are flowers. In an ecstasy of tender contemplation he turns from those to these, exampling Julia from the rose and pitying the hapless violets as though they were indeed not blooms insensitive but actually 'poor girls ' neglected.' His pages breathe their clean and innocent perfumes, and are beautiful with the chaste beauty of their colour, just as they carry with them something of the sweetness and sim- plicity of maidenhood itself. And from both he extracts the same pathetic little moral : both are lovely and both must die. And so, between his virgins that are for love indeed and those that sit silent and delicious in the 'flowery nunnery,' the old singer finds life so good a thing that he dreads

HER&ICK 115

to lose it, and not ,§11^ his piety can remove the passionate regret with which he sees things hasten- ing to their end.

That piety is equally removed from the erotic mysticism of Richard Crashaw and from the adora- tion, chastened and awful and pure, of Cowper. To find an analogue, you His Piety have to cross the borders of English into Spain. In his Noble Numbers Herrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of such men as Valdivielso, Ocafia, Lope de Ubeda; and there are versicles of his that in their homely mixture of the sacred and the profane, in their reverent familiarity with things divine, their pious and simple gallantry, may well be likened to the grace- ful and charming romances and villancicos of these strangers. Their spirit is less Protestant than Catholic, and is hardly English at all, so that it is scarce to be wondered at if they have remained unpopular. But their sincerity and earnestness are as far beyond doubt as their grace of line and inimitable daintiness of surface.

LOCKER

MR. LOCKER'S verse has charmed so wisely and

so long that it has travelled the full circle of

compliment and exhausted one part of

the lexicon of eulogy. As you turn qualities 8/ /

his pages you feel as freshly as ever

the sweet, old-world elegance, the courtly amia- bility, the mannerly restraint, the measured and accomplished ease. True, they are colourless, and in these days we are deboshed with colour ; but then they are so luminously limpid and serene, they are so sprightly and graceful and gay ! In the gallantry they affect there is a some- thing at once exquisite and paternal. If they pun, 'tis with an air: even thus might Chesterfield have stooped to folly. And then, how clean the English, how light yet vigorous the touch, the manner how elegant and how staid ! There is wit in them, and that so genial and unassuming that as like as not it gets leave to beam on unper- ceived. There is humour too, but humour so polite as to look half-unconscious, so dandified that it leaves you in doubt as to whether you should laugh or only smile. And withal there is a vein of well-bred wisdom never breathed but to the

LOCKER 117

delight no less than to the profit of the student. And for those of them that are touched with passion, as in The Unrealized Ideal and that lovely odelet to Mabel's pearls, why, these are, I think, the best and the least approachable of all.

For as English as she is, indeed, his muse is not to be touched off save in French. To think of her is to reflect that she is delicate, spirituelle, semillante — unefine mouche, His Effect alley! The salon has disappeared, — ' Iran, indeed, is gone, and all his rose ' ; but she was born with the trick of it. You make your bow to her in her Sheraton chair, a buckle shoe engagingly discovered ; and she rallies you with an incomparable ease, a delicate malice, in a dialect itself a distinction ; and when she smiles it is behind or above a fan that points while it dissembles, that assists effect as delightfully as it veils intention. At times she is sensitive and tender, but her graver mood has no more of violence or mawkishness than has her gallant roguery (or enchanting archness) of viciousness or spite. Best of all, she is her poet's very own. You may woo her and pursue her as you will ; but the end is invariable. ( I follow, follow still, but I shall never see her face.' Even as in her master's finest song.

BANVILLE

THE Muse of M. de Banville was born not naked but in the most elaborate and sumptuous evening wear that ever muse put on. To His Nature him, indeed, there is no nature so natural as that depicted on the boards, no humanity half so human as the actor puts on with his paint. For him the flowers grow plucked and bound into nosegays ; passion has no existence outside the Porte-Saint-Martin; the universe is a place of rhymes and rhythms, the human heart a supplement to the dictionary. He delights in babbling of green fields, and Homer, and Shakespeare, and the Eumenides, and the 'rire enorme' of the Frogs and the Lysistrata. But it is suspected that he loves these things rather as words than as facts, and that in his heart of hearts he is better pleased with Cassandra and Columbine than with Rosalind and Othello, with the studio Hellas of Gautier than with the living Greece of Sophocles. Heroic objects are all very well in their way of course : they suggest superb effects in verse, they are of incomparable merit considered as colours and jewels for well- turned sentences in prose. But their function is

BANVILLE 119

purely verbal ; they are the raw material of the outward form of poesy, and they come into being to glorify a climax, to adorn a refrain, to sparkle and sound in odelets and rondels and triolets, to twinkle and tinkle and chime all over the eight- and-twenty members of a fair ballade.

It is natural enough that to a theory of art and life that can be thus whimsically described we should be indebted for some of the best writing of modern years. Our His Art poet has very little sympathy with fact, whether heroic or the reverse, whether essential or accidental ; but he is a rare artist in words and cadences. He writes of ' Pierrot, ( I'homme subtil/ and Columbine, and ' le beau ' Leandre/ and all the marionettes of that pleasant puppet-show which he mistakes for the world, with the rhetorical elegance and distinction, the verbal force and glow, the rhythmic beauty and propriety, of a rare poet ; he models a group of flowers in wax as passionately and cunningly, and with as perfect an interest in the process and as lofty and august a faith in the result, as if he were carving the Venus of Milo, or scoring Beethoven's { Fifth/ or producing King Lear or the Ronde de Nuit. He is profoundly artificial, but he is simple and even

120 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

innocent in his artifice; so that he is often in- teresting and even affecting. He knows so well what should be done and so well how to do it that he not seldom succeeds in doing something that is actually and veritably art : something, that is, in which there is substance as well as form, in which the matter is equal with the manner, in which the imagination is human as well as aesthetic and the invention not merely verbal but emotional and romantic also. The dramatic and poetic value of such achievements in style as Florise and Diane au Bois is open to question ; but there can be no doubt that Gringoire is a play. There is an abund- ance of ' epical ennui ' in le Sang de la Coupe and les Stalactites ; but the ' Nous n'irons plus au bois ' and the charming epigram in which the poet paints a processional frieze of Hellenic virgins are high-water marks of verse. But, indeed, if Pierrot and Columbine were all the race, and the footlights might only change places with the sun, then were M. de Banville by way of being a Shakespeare.

DOBSON

His style has distinction, elegance, urbanity, pre- cision, an exquisite clarity. Of its kind it is as

nearly as possible perfect. You think ,

,. , Method and of Horace as you read ; and you think

of those among our own eighteenth century poets to whom Horace was an inspiration and an example. The epithet is usually so just that it seems to have come into being with the noun it qualifies ; the metaphor is mostly so appropriate that it leaves you in doubt as to whether it suggested the poem or the poem suggested it; the verb is never in excess of the idea it would convey; the effect of it all is that ' something has here got itself uttered,' and for good. Could anything, for instance, be better, or less laboriously said, than this poet's remonstrance To an Intrusive Butterfly? The thing is instinct with delicate observation, so aptly and closely ex- pressed as to seem natural and living as the facts observed :

' I watch you through the garden walks,

I watch you float between The avenues of dahlia stalks,

And flicker on the green ; You hover round the garden seat,

You mount, you -waver

122 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

Across the room in loops ofjlight I watch you wayward go ;

Before the bust you flaunt and./?//—

* * * *

"You pause, you poise, you circle up Among my old Japan.'

And all the rest of it. The theme is but the vagaries of a wandering insect ; but how just and true is the literary instinct, how perfect the literary savoir-faire ! The words I have italicised are the only words (it seems) in the language that are proper to the occasion ; and yet how quietly they are produced, with what apparent unconsciousness they are set to do their work, how just and how sufficient is their effect ! In writing of this sort there is a certain artistic good-breeding whose like is not common in these days. We have lost the secret of it : we are too eager to make the most of our little souls in art and too ignorant to do the best by them ; too egoistic and ' individual/ too clever and skilful and well informed, to be content with the completeness of simplicity. Even the Laureate was once addicted to glitter for glitter's sake ; and with him to keep them in countenance there is a thousand minor poets whose f little life ' is merely a giving way to the necessities of what is after all a condition of intellectual impotence but poorly redeemed by a habit of artistic swagger. The singer of Dorothy and Beau Brocade is of another race. He is fthe co-mate and brother in exile' of Matthew Arnold and the poet of The Unknown

DOBSON 123

Eros. Alone among modern English bards they stand upon that ancient way which is the best: attentive to the pleadings of the Classic Muse, heed- ful always to give such thoughts as they may breed no .iiore than their due expression.

BERLIOZ

ONE of the very few great musicians who have been ahle to write their own language with vigour and perspicuity, Berlioz was for many The Critic years among the kings of the feuille- ton, among the most accomplished journalists of the hest epoch of the Parisian press. He had an abundance of wit and humour ; his energy and spirit were inexhaustible ; within certain limits he was a master of expression and style ; in criticism as in music he was an artist to his finger- ends ; and if he found writing hard work what he wrote is still uncommonly easy reading. He is one of the few — the very few — journalists the worth of whose achievement has been justified by collection and republication. Louis Veuillot has been weighed in this balance, and found wanting ; and so has Janin prince of critics. With Berlioz it is otherwise. If you are no musician he appeals to you as a student of life ; if you are interested in life and music both he is irresistible. The Memoires is one of the two or three essays in artistic biography which may claim equal honours with Benvenuto's story of himself and his own doings ; the two volumes of correspondence rank with the most interesting M

BERLIOZ 125

epistolary matter of these times; in the Gro- tesques, the A Travers Chants, the Soirees de I'Orchestre there is enough of fun and earnest, of fine criticism and diabolical humour, of wit and fancy and invention, to furnish forth a dozen ordinary critics, and leave a rich remainder when all's done. These books have been popular for years; they are popular still; and the reason is not far to seek. Berlioz was not only a great musician and a brilliant writer ; he was also a very interesting and original human being. His writings are one expression of an abnormal yet very natural individuality; and when he speaks you are sure of something worth hearing and remembering.

Apart from Cellini's ruffianism there are several points of contact between the two men. Berlioz made the roaring goldsmith the hero of an opera, and it is not doubtful that he was in complete sympathy with his subject. In the Frenchman there is a full measure of the waywardness of temper, the impatience of authority, the resolute and daring humour, the passion of worship for what is great in art and of contempt for what is little and bad, which entered so largely into the composition of the

126 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

Florentine. There is not much to choose between the Berlioz of the Debats, the author of the Gro- tesques de la Musique and the A Travers Chants, and the Benvenuto who, as II Lasca writes of him,

' Senza alcun ritegno o barbazzale Delle cose malfatte dicea male.'

Benvenuto enlarges upon the joys of drawing from the life and expatiates upon the greatness of Michelangelo in much the same spirit and with much the same fury of admiration with which Berlioz descants upon the rapture of conducting an orchestra and dilates upon the beauty of Divinittg du Styx or the adagio of the so-called Moonlight Sonata. It is written of Benvenuto, in connection with Vasari's attack upon that cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore which himself was wont to call •the marvel of beautiful things/ that if he had lived to see the result,

1 Certo non capirebbe nelle pelle ; JS saltando, e correndo^ e fulminando^ S' andrebbe querelando, • »

E per tutto gridando ad alta voce Giorgitt cCArezzo meterebbe in croce, Oggi universalmente Odiato della gente Quasi publico ladro e assassino ' ;

and you are reminded irresistibly of Berlioz betrampling Lachnith and the ingenious Castil- Blaze and defending Beethoven against the de- structive pedantry of Fetis. And, just as the Vita is invaluable as a personal record of artist-life

BERLIOZ 127

in the Italy of the Renaissance, so are the Memoires invaluable as a personal record of the works and ways of musicians in the Paris of the Romantic revival. Berlioz is revealed in them for one of the race of the giants. He is the musician of 1830, as Delacroix is the painter ; and his work is as typical and as significant as the Sardanapale and the Faust lithographs.

To read the Memoires is to feelxthat in writing them the great musician deliberately set himself to win the heart of posterity. He

believed in himself, and he believed ~, Theory , . . , ,. . , ., . of AutoJo-

in his music: he divined that one ,

graphy

day or another he would be legen- dary as well as immortal ; and he took an infinite deal of pains to make certain that the ideal which was presently to represent him in men's minds should be an ideal of which he could thoroughly approve. It is fair to note that in this care for the good will and the good word of the future he was not by any means alone. The romantiques, indeed, were keen — from Napoleon downwards— to make the very best of themselves. The poet of the Ltgende des Sticks, for example, went early to work to arrange the story of his life and character at least as carefully as he composed

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the audiences of his premieres ; and he did it with so light a hand, and with such a sense of the importance of secrecy, that it is even now by no means so well and widely known as it should be that Victor Hugo raconte par un Temoin de sa Vie is the work of the hero's wife, and was not only in- spired but may also have been revised and prepared for publication by the hero himself. Again, the dramatist of Antony and the novelist of Bragelonne was never so happy as when he was engaged upon the creation of what he hoped would be the his- torical Dumas; he made volume after volume of delightful reading out of his own impressions and adventures ; he turned himself into copy with a frankness, a grace, a gusto, a persistency of egoism, which are merely enchanting. Berlioz, therefore, had good warrant for his work. It is more to the point, perhaps, that he would have taken it if he had not had it. And I hold that he would have done well ; for (in any case) a great man's notion of himself is, ipso facto, better and more agreeable and convincing, especially as he presents it, than the idea of his inferiors and admirers, especially as presented by them. Berlioz, it is true, was pro- digal in these Memoires of his of wit and fun and devilry, of fine humanity and noble art, of good things said and great things dreamed and done and suffered; but he was prodigal of invention and suppression as well, and the result, while con- siderably less veracious, is all the more fascinating,

BERLIOZ 129

therefor. One feels that for one thing he was too complete an artist to be merely literal and exact ; that for another he saw and felt things for him- self, as Milton did before him— Milton in the mind's eye of Milton the noblest of created things and to Mr. Saintsbury almost as unpleasing a spectacle as the gifted but abject Racine ; and for a third that from his own point of view he was right, and there is an end of it.

GEORGE ELIOT

IT was thought that with George Eliot the Novel- with-a-Purpose had really come to be an adequate

instrument for the regeneration of The Ideal humanity. It was understood that

Passion only survived to point a moral or provide the materials of an awful tale, while Duty, Kinship, Faith, were so far paramount as to govern Destiny and mould the world. A vague, decided flavour of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was felt to pervade the moral universe, a chill but seemly halo of Golden Age was seen to play soberly about things in general. And it was with confidence anticipated that those perfect days were on the march when men and women would propose — (from the austerest motives) — by the aid of scientific terminology.

To the Sceptic — (an apostate, and an undoubted

male) — another view was preferable. He held that

George Eliot had carried what he

The Real called the ' Death's-Head Style ' of art

a trifle too far. He read her books

jn much the same spirit and to much the same

GEORGE ELIOT 131

purpose that he went to the gymnasium and diverted himself with parallel bars. He detested her technology ; her sententiousness revolted while it amused him ; and when she put away her puppets and talked of them learnedly and with understanding — instead of letting them explain themselves, as several great novelists have beeL content to do — he recalled how Wisdom crieth out in the street and no man regardeth her, and per- ceived that in this case the fault was Wisdom's own. He accepted with the humility of ignorance, and something of the learner's gratitude, her woman generally, from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet. But his sense of sex was strong enough to make him deny the possibility in any stage of being of nearly all the governesses in revolt it pleased her to put forward as men ; for with very few excep- tions he knew they were heroes of the divided skirt. To him Deronda was an incarnation of woman's rights; Tito an 'improper female in breeches'; Silas Marner a good, perplexed old maid, of the kind of whom it is said that they have fhad a ' disappointment.' And Lydgate alone had aught of the true male principle about him.

Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is a handful about George

132 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

Eliot. It has been said of her books — ( f on several

' occasions') — that 'it is doubtful whether they

' are novels disguised as treatises, or

( treatises disguised as novels ' ; that,

' while less romantic than Euclid's

' Elements, they are on the whole a great deal

less improving reading ' ; and that ' they seem to

' have been dictated to a plain woman of genius

' by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has

been variously described : as ' An Apotheosis of

' Pupil-Teachery ' ; as ' George Sand plus Science

f and minus Sex ' ; as f Pallas with prejudices and

' a corset ' ; as • the fruit of a caprice of Apollo

for the Differential Calculus.' The comparison

of her admirable talent to ' not the imperial violin

' but the grand ducal violoncello ' seems suggestive

and is not unkind.

BORROW

THREE hundred years since Borrow would have been a gentleman adventurer : he would have dropped quietly down the river, and

steered for the Spanish Main, bent

_ . ' Vocation

upon making carbonadoes of your

Don. But he came too late for that, and falling upon no sword and buckler age but one that was interested in Randal and Spring, he accepted that he found, and did his best to turn its conditions into literature. As he had that admirable instinct of making the best of things which marks the true adventurer, he was on the whole exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing for Javan and Gadire ; but at home there were highways in abundance, and what is your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted of everything but sordidness ; but under that round-shouldered little tent at the bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath that kettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at graze hard by, are men and women more mysterious and more alluring to the romantic mind than any Mingo or Comanch that ever traded a scalp. While as for your tricks

134 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

of fence — your immortal passado, your punto re- verso — if that be no longer the right use for a gentleman, have not Spring and Langan fought their great battle on Worcester racecourse? and has not Cribb of Gloucestershire — that renowned, heroic, irresistible Thomas — beaten Molyneux the negro artist in the presence of twenty thousand roaring Britons ? and shall the practice of an art which has rejoiced in such a master as the illustrious Game Chicken, Hannibal of the Ring, be held degrading by an Englishman of sufficient inches who, albeit a Tory and a High Church- man, is at bottom as thoroughgoing a Republican as ever took the word of command from Colonel Cromwell ? And if all this fail, if he get nobody to put on the gloves with him, if the tents of the Romany prove barren of interest, if the king's highway be vacant of adventure as Mayfair, he has still philology to fall back upon, he can still console himself with the study of strange tongues, he can still exult in a peculiar superiority by quoting the great Ab Gwylim where the baser sort of persons is content with Shakespeare. So that what with these and some kindred diver- sions— a little horse-whispering and ale-drink- ing, the damnation of Popery, the study of the Bible — he can manage not merely to live but to live so fully and richly as to be the envy of some and the amazement of all. That, as life goes and as the world wags, is given to few.

BORROW 135

Add to it the credit of having written as good a book about Spain as ever was written in any lan- guage, the happiness of having dreamed and partly lived that book ere it was written, the perfect joy of being roundly abused by everybody, and the consciousness of being different from everybody and of giving at least as good as ever you got at several things the world is silly enough to hold in worship — as the Toryism of Sir Walter, or the niceness of Popery, or the pleasures of Society : and is it not plain that Borrow was a man uncommon fortu- nate, and that he enjoyed life as greatly as most men not savages who have possessed the fruition of this terrestrial sphere ?

He prepared his effects as studiously and almost as dexterously as Dumas himself. His instinct of the picturesque was rarely indeed at fault ; he marshalled his personages Ideals and and arranged his scene with some- Achieve- thing of that passion for effect which ments entered so largely into the theory of M. le Comte de Monte-Cristo. However closely disguised, himself is always the heroic figure, and he is ever busy in arranging discovery and triumph. To his chance-mates he is but an ec- centric person, an amateur tinker, a slack-baked gipsy, an unlettered hack ; to his audience he is his

136 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

own, strong, indifferent self: presently the rest will recognise him and he will be disdainfully content. And recognise him they do. He throws off his disguise ; there is a gape, a stare, a general conviction that Lavengro is the greatest man in the world ; and then — as the manner of Lesage commands — the adventure ends, the stars resume their wonted courses, and the self-conscious Tinker- Quixote takes the road once more and passes on to other achievements: a mad preacher to succour, a priest to baffle, some tramp to pound into a jelly of humility, an apple woman to mystify, a horse-chaunter to swindle, a pugilist to study arid help and portray. But whatever it be, Lavengro emerges from the ordeal modestly, unobtrusively, quietly, most consciously magnificent. Circum- stantial as Defoe, rich in combinations as Lesage, and with such an instinct of the picturesque, both personal and local, as none of these possessed, this strange wild man holds on his strange wild way, and leads you captive to the end. His dia- logue is copious and appropriate : you feel that like Ben Jonson he is dictating rather than re- porting, that he is less faithful and exact than imaginative and determined ; but you are none the less pleased with it, and suspicious though you be that the voice is Lavengro's and the hands are the hands of some one else, you are glad to surrender to the illusion, and you regret when it is dispelled. Moreover, that all of it

BORROW 137

should be set down in racy, nervous, idiomatic English, with a kind of eloquence at once primitive and scholarly, precious but homely — the speech of an artist in sods and turfs — if at first it surprise and charm yet ends by seeming so natural and just that you go on to forget all about it and accept the whole thing as the genuine outcome of a man's experience which it purports to be. Add that it is all entirely unsexual ; that there is none with so poor an intelligence of the heart as woman moves it ; that the book does not exist in which the relations between boy and girl are more miserably misrepresented than in Lavengro and The Romany Rye ; that that picaresque ideal of romance which, finding utterance in Hurtado de Mendoza, was pre- sently to appeal to such artists as Cervantes, Quevedo, Lesage, Smollett, the Dickens of Pick- wick, finds such expression in Lavengro and The Romany Rye as nowhere else; and the tale of Borrow is complete enough.

Despite or because of a habit of mystification which obliged him to jumble together the homely Real and a not less homely Ideal, Lavengro will always, I think, be Himself found worthy of companionship, if only as the one exemplary artist-tramp the race has yet achieved. The artist-tramp, the tinker who

138 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

can write, the horse-coper with a twang of Hamlet and a habit of Monte-Cristo — that is George Borrow. For them that love these differences there is none in whom they are so cunningly and quaintly blended as George Borrow; and they that love them not may keep the other side of the road and fare in peace elsewhither.

BALZAC

To Goethe it seemed that every one of Balzac's novels had been dug out of a suffering woman's

heart: but Goethe spoke not always . , , . ... .. ' Under which

wisely, and in this exacting world ?

there be some that not only have found fault with Balzac's method and results but have dared to declare his theory of society the dream of a mind diseased. To these critics Balzac was less observer than creator: his views were false, his vision was distorted, and though he had ' incomparable power ' he had not power enough to make them accept his work. This theory is English, and in France they find Balzac possible enough. There is something of him in Pierre Dupont; he made room for the work of Flaubert, Feydeau, the younger Dumas, Augier and Zola and the brothers Goncourt ; and to him Charles Baudelaire is as some fat strange fungus to the wine-cask in whose leakings it springs. Sainte-Beuve refused to accept him, but his f Pigault- ' Lebrun des duchesses ' is only malicious : he resented the man's exuberant and inordinate per- sonality, and made haste to apply to it some drops

140 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

of that sugared vitriol of which he had the secret. Taine is a fitter critic of the Comedie humaine than Sainte-Beuve ; and Taine has come to other con- clusions. Acute, coarse, methodical, exhaustive, he has recognised the greatness of one still more exhaustive, methodical, coarse, and acute than himself. English critics fall foul of Balzac's women; but Taine falls foul of English critics, and with the authority of a Parisian by profession declares that the Parisiennes of the Comtdie are everything they ought to be — the true daughters of their 'bon gros libertin de pere.' And while Taine, exulting in his Marneffe and his Coralie, does solemnly and brilliantly show that he is right and everybody else is wrong, a later writer — English of course — can find no better parallel of Balzac than Brownjng, and knows nothing in art so like the Pauline of la Peau de Chagrin as the Sistine Madonna. It is curious, this clash of opinions ; and it is plain that one or other party must be wrong. Which is it ? * Qui trompe-t-on fici?' Is Taine a better judge than Mr. Leslie Stephen or Mr. Henry James? Or are Messrs. James and Stephen better qualified to speak with authority than Taine ? It may be that none but a Frenchman can thoroughly and intimately apprehend in its inmost a thing so essentially French as the Comedie ; it is a fact that French- men of all sorts and sizes have accepted the Comedie in its totality ; and that is reason good

BALZAC 141

enough for any commonplace Englishman who is lacking in the vanity of originality to accept it also.

Balzac's ambition was to he omnipotent. He ^ would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic The Fact by a microscopic fulness of detail. His Hulot was to remain the Antony of modern romance, losing the world for the love of woman, and content to lose it; his Marneffe, in whom is incarnated the instinct and the science of sexual corruption, is Hulot's Cleopatra, and only dies because ' elle va faire le bon Dieu ' — as who should say ' to mash the Old Man ' ; Frenhoeffer, Philippe Bridau, Vautrin, Marsay, Rastignac, Grandet, Balthazar Claes, Beatrix, Sarrazine, Lousteau, Esther, Lucien Chardon — the list is, I believe, some thousands strong ! Also the argument is proved in advance : there is the Comedie itself— 'the new edition fifty volumes long/ Bad or good, foul or fair, impossible or actual, a mon- strous debauch of mind or a triumph of realisation, there is the Comedie. It is forty years since Balzac squared and laid the last stones of it ; and it exists — if a little the worse for wear : the bulk is enor- mous— if the materials be in some sort worm-eaten

142 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

and crumbling. Truly, he had 'incomparable 1 power/ He was the least capable and the most self-conscious of artists ; his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer ; he was a visionary and a fanatic ; he was gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and re- corded tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate suggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inor- dinate effects. He may be impossible ; but there is French literature and French society to show that he passed that way, and had 'incomparable ' power/ The phrase is Mr. Henry James's, and it is hard to talk of Balzac and refrain from it

LABICHE

To the maker of Poirier and Fabrice, of Sera- phine and Giboyer, of Olympe and the Marquis

d'Auberive, there were analogies

^ . /. T i • i j Teniers or

between the genius of Labiche and _ Q

Daumier ? the genius of Teniers. fCest au

f premier abord,' says he, ' le meme aspect de cari- ' cature ; c'est, en y regardant de plus pres, la meme f finesse de tons, la meme justesse d'expression, la c meme vivacite de mouvement.' For myself, I like to think of Labiche as in some sort akin to Honore Daumier. Earnestness and accomplish- ment apart, he has much in common with that king of caricaturists. The lusty frankness, the jovial ingenuity, the keen sense of the ridiculous, the insatiable instinct of observation, of the draughtsman are a great part of the equipment of the playwright. Augier notes that truth is everywhere in Labiche's work, and Augier is right. He is before everything a dramatist : an artist, that is, whose function is to tell a story in action and by the mouths of its personages ; and whimsical and absurd as he loves to be, he is never either the one or the other at the expense of nature. He is often careless and futile : he will squander — (as in Vingt-neuf Degres a I' Ombre and fAvare en Gants

144 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

Jaunes) — an idea that rightly belongs to the domain of pure comedy on the presentation of a most uproarious farce. But he is never any falser to his vocation than this. Now and then, as in Moi and le Voyage de M. Perrichon, he is an ex- cellent comic poet, dealing with comedy seriously as comedy should be dealt with, and incarnating a vice or an affectation in a certain character with impeccable justness and assurance. Now and then, as in les Petits Oiseaux and les Vivacitts du Capitaine Tic, he is content to tell a charming story as pleasantly as possible. Sometimes, as in Ctlimare le Bien-Aime (held by M. Sarcey to be the high- water mark of the modern vaudeville), le Plus Heureux des Trois, and le Prix Martin, he fights again from a humouristic point of view that trian- gular duel between the wife, the husband, and the lover which fills so large a place in the literature of France ; and then he shows the reverse of the medal of adultery — with the husband at his ease, the seducer haunted by the ghosts of old sins, the erring wife the slave of her unsuspecting lord. Or again, he takes to turning the world upside down, and — as in the Cagnotte, the Chapeau de Faille, and the Trente Millions — to producing a scheme of morals and society that seems to have been dictated from an Olympus demoralised by champagne and lobster. But at his wildest he never forgets that men and women are themselves. His dialogue is always right and appropriate, however extravagant it be.

LABICHE 145

His vivid and varied knowledge of life and character supplies him with touches enough of nature and truth to make the fortune of a dozen ordinary dramatists; and withal you feel as you read that he is writing, as Augier says of him, to amuse him- self merely, and that he could an if he would be solemn and didactic with all the impressiveness that a perfect acquaintance with men and things and an admirable dramatic aptitude can bestow. The fact that he is always in a good temper has done him some wrong in that it has led him to be to all appearances amusing only, where he might well have posed as a severe and serious artist. But he is none the less true for having elected to be funny, and there is certainly more genuine human nature and human feeling in such drolleries as the Chapeau de Faille and le Plus Heureux des Trois than in all the serious dramas of Ponsard (say) and Hugo put together.

Perhaps the most characteristic and individual part of his work is that in which he has given his invention full swing, and allowed his humour to play its maddest pranks Labiche at will. Moi is an admirable comedy, and De la Porch eraie is almost hideously egoistic ; the Voyage de M. Perrichon is delightful reading,

146 VIEWS AND REVIEWS

and Perrichon is as pompous an ass as I know; but the Chapeau de Faille, the Cagnotte, the Trente Millions, the Sensitive, the Deux Merles Blancs, the Doit-On le Dire, and their compeers — with them it is other-guess work altogether. In these whimsical phantasmagorias men and women move and speak as at the bidding of destinies drunk with laughing-gas. Time and chance have gone demented, fate has turned comic poet, society has become its own parody, everybody is the irrepres- sible caricature of himself. You are in a topsy- turvy world, enveloped in an atmosphere instinct with gaiety and folly, where burlesque is natural and only the extravagant is normal; where your Chimaera has grown frolic, your Nightmare is first Cousin to the Cheshire Cat, and your Sphinxes are all upon the spree; and where you have as little concern for what is real as you have in that hemisphere oi the great globe of Moliere— that has Scapin and Sganarelle for its breed-bates, and Pourceaugnac for its butt, and Pancrace and Marphurius for its scientific men, and Le'lie and Agnes for its incarnations of love and beauty. That the creator of such a world as this should have aspired to the Academy's spare arm-chair — that one above all others but just vacated by the respectable M. de Sacy — was a fact that roused the Revue des Deux Monde* even to satire. But if the arm-chair brought honour with it, then no man better deserved the privilege than Eugene

LABICHE 147

Labiche, for he had amused and kept awake the public for nearly forty years — for almost as long, that is, as the Revue had been sending it to sleep. There are times and seasons when a good laugh makes more for edification than whole folios of good counsel. ( I regarded him not/ quoth Sir John of one that would have moved him to sapience, 'and yet he talked wisely.' Now Sir John, whatever his opinion of the Revuey would never have said all that — the second part of it he might — of anything signed ' Eugene Labiche,' nor — so I love to believe — would his august creator either. For is not his work so full of quick, fiery, and delectable shapes as to be perpetual sherris ? And when time and season fit, what more can the heart of man desire ?

CHAMPFLEURY

CHAMPFLEURY — novelist, dramatist, archaeologist, humourist, and literary historian — belonged

to a later generation than that of The Man Petrus Borel and Philothe'e O'Neddy ;

but he could remember the production of les Burgraves, and was able of his own personal knowledge to laugh at the melancholy speech of poor Celestin Nanteuil — the famous fll n'y a ' plus de jeunesse' of a man grown old and incredulous and apathetic before his time : the lament over a yesterday already a hundred years behind. He had lived in the Latin quarter; he had dined with Flicoteaux, and listened to the orchestras of Habeneck and Musard; he had heard the chimes at midnight with Baudelaire and Murger, hissed the tragedies of Ponsard, applauded Deburau and Rouviere, and seen the rise and fall of Courbet and Dupont. If he was not of the giants he was of their immediate successors, and he had seen them actually at work. He had hacked for Balzac, and read romantic prose at Victor Hugo's; he had lived so near the red waistcoat of The'ophile Gautier as to dare to go up and down in Paris (under

CHAMPFLEURY 149

the inspiration of the artist of la Femme qui faille la Soupe) in fun habit en bouracan vert ' avec col a la Marat, un gilet de couleur f bachique, et une culotte en drap d'un jaune ' assez malseant/ together with f une triomphante ' cravate de soie jaune' — a vice of Baudelaire's inventing — and ' un feutre ras dans le gout de la f coiffure de Camille Desmoulins.' And having seen for himself, he could judge for himself as well. From first to last he showed himself to be out of sympathy with the ambitions and effects of romanticism. He was born a humourist and an observer, and he became a f realist ' as soon as he began to write.

His work is an antipodes not only of Hernani and Notre-Dame but of Sarrazine and la Cousine Bette and Beatrix as well. For the commonplace types and incidents, The Writer the everyday passions and fortunes, of the Aventures de Mariette and the Mascarade de la Vie Parisienne represent a reaction not alone against the sublimities and the extravagance of Hugo but against the heroic aggrandisement of things trivial of Balzac as well. True, they deal with kindred subjects, and they purport to be a record of life as it is and not of life as it

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ought to be. But the pupil's point of view is poles apart from the master's; his intention, his ambition, his inspiration, belong to another order of ideas. He contents himself with observing and noting and reflecting ; with making prose prosaic and adding sobriety and plainness to a plain and sober story; with being merely curious and intelligent; with using experience not as an intoxicant but as a staple of diet ; with considering fact not as the raw material of inspiration but as inspiration itself. Between an artist of this sort — pedestrian, good-tempered, touched with malice, a little cynical — and the noble desperadoes of 1830 there could be little sympathy ; and there seems no reason why the one should be the others' historian, and none why, if their historian he should be, his history should be other than partial and narrow — than at best an achievement in special pleading. But Champfleury's was a personality apart. His master quality was curiosity ; he was interested in every- thing, and he was above all things interested in men and women; he had a liberal mind and no prejudices; he had the scientific spirit and the scientific intelligence, if he sometimes spoke with the voice of the humourist and in the terms of the artist in words ; and his studies in roman- ticism are far better literature than his experiments in fiction.

LONGFELLOW

THE ocean as confidant, a Laertes that can neither avoid his Hamlets nor hid them hold their peace, is a modern invention. Byron and Shelley discovered it ; Heine took Sea Poets it into his confidence, and told it the story of his loves ; Wordsworth made it a moral influence ; Browning loved it in his way, hut his way was not often the poet's ; to Matthew Arnold it was the voice of destiny, and its message was a message of despair; Hugo conferred with it as with an humble friend, and uttered such lofty things over it as are rarely heard upon the lips of man. And so with living lyrists each after his kind. Lord Tennyson listens and looks until it strikes him out an undying note of passion, or yearning, or regret —

1 Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me ' ;

Mr. Swinburne maddens with the wind and the sounds and the scents of it, until there passes into his verse a something of its vastness and its vehemency, the rapture of its inspiration, the palpitating, many-twinkling miracle of its light; Mr. William Morris has been taken with the manner of its melancholy ; while to Whitman it

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has been fthe great Camerado' indeed, for it gave him that song of the brown bird bereft of his mate EH whose absence the half of him had not been told to us.

But to Longfellow alone was it given to see that stately galley which Count Arnaldos saw ; his

only to hear the steersman singing Longfellow that wild and wondrous song which

none that hears it can resist, and none that has heard it may forget. Then did he learn the old monster's secret — the word of his charm, the core of his mystery, the human note in his music, the quality of his influence upon the heart and the mind of man ; and then did he win himself a place apart among sea poets. With the most of them it is a case of Ego et rex meus : It is I and the sea, and my egoism is as valiant and as vocal as the other's. But Longfellow is the spokesman of a confraternity ; what thrills him to utterance is the spirit of that strange and beautiful freemasonry established as long ago as when the first sailor steered the first keel out into the unknown, irre- sistible water-world, and so established the founda- tions of the eternal brotherhood of man with ocean. To him the sea is a place of mariners and ships. In his verse the rigging creaks, the white sail fills and crackles, there are blown smells

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of pine. and hemp and tar; you catch the home wind on your cheeks ; and old shipmen, their eye- balls white in their bronzed faces, with silver rings and gaudy handkerchiefs, come in and tell you moving stories of the immemorial, incommunicable deep. He abides in a port ; he goes down to the docks, and loiters among the galiots and brigan- tines, he hears the melancholy song of the chanty-men; he sees the chips flying under the shipwright's adze ; he smells the pitch that smokes and bubbles in the caldron. And straightway he falls to singing his variations on the ballad of Count Arnaldos ; and the world listens, for its heart beats in his song.

TENNYSON

IN Keats's St. Agnes' Eve nothing is white but

the heroine. It is winter, and ' bitter chill ' ; the

, hare f limps trembling through the

' ' frozen grass ' ; the owl is a-cold for

all his feathers ; the beadsman's

fingers are numb, his breath is frosted ; and at

an instant of special and peculiar romance

' The frost-wind blows

Like Love's alarum, pattering the sharp sleet Against the window-panes. '

But there is no snow. The picture is pure colour : it blushes with blood of queens and kings ; it glows with ' splendid dyes/ like the ' tiger-moth's ' deep-damasked wings' — with 'rose bloom,' and ' warm gules/ and 'soft amethyst' ; it is loud with music and luxurious with 'spiced dainties/ with 1 lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon/ with ' manna ' and dates/ the fruitage of Fez and 'cedared ' Lebanon' and 'silken Samarcand.' Now, the Laureate's St. Agnes' Eve is an ecstasy of colourless perfection. The snows sparkle on the convent roof; the 'first snowdrop' vies with St. Agnes' virgin bosom ; the moon shines an ' argent round ' in the ' frosty