
  By Language
all Classics books content using ISYS

Download this book: [ ASCII | HTML | PDF ]

Look for this book on Amazon

We have new books nearly every day.

﻿Title: Old and New Masters
Author: Lynd, Robert, 1879-1949
Language: English

*** Start of this Doctrine Publishing Corporation Digital Book "Old and New Masters" ***







   X. POPE




Mr. George Moore once summed up _Crime and Punishment_ as "Gaboriau with
psychological sauce." He afterwards apologized for the epigram, but he
insisted that all the same there is a certain amount of truth in it. And
so there is.

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the
last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost
always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like
the men and women one reads about in the police news. There are more
murders and attempted murders in his books than in those of any other
great novelist. His people more nearly resemble madmen and wild beasts
than normal human beings.

He releases them from most of the ordinary inhibitions. He is fascinated
by the loss of self-control--by the disturbance and excitement which
this produces, often in the most respectable circles. He is beyond all
his rivals the novelist of "scenes." His characters get drunk, or go mad
with jealousy, or fall in epileptic fits, or rave hysterically. If
Dostoevsky had had less vision he would have been Strindberg. If his
vision had been aesthetic and sensual, he might have been D'Annunzio.

Like them, he is a novelist of torture. Turgenev found in his work
something Sadistic, because of the intensity with which he dwells on
cruelty and pain. Certainly the lust of cruelty--the lust of destruction
for destruction's sake--is the most conspicuous of the deadly sins in
Dostoevsky's men and women. He may not be a "cruel author." Mr. J.
Middleton Murry, in his very able "critical study," _Dostoevsky_, denies
the charge indignantly. But it is the sensational drama of a cruel world
that most persistently haunts his imagination.

Love itself is with him, as with Strindberg and D'Annunzio, for the most
part only a sort of rearrangement of hatred. Or, rather, both hatred and
love are volcanic outbursts of the same passion. He does also portray an
almost Christ-like love, a love that is outside the body and has the
nature of a melting and exquisite charity. He sometimes even portrays
the two kinds of love in the same person. But they are never in balance;
they are always in demoniacal conflict. Their ups and downs are like the
ups and downs in a fight between cat and dog. Even the lust is never, or
hardly ever, the lust of a more or less sane man. It is always lust with
a knife.

Dostoevsky could not have described the sin of Nekhludov in
_Resurrection_. His passions are such as come before the criminal rather
than the civil courts. His people are possessed with devils as the
people in all but religious fiction have long ceased to be. "This is a
madhouse," cries some one in _The Idiot_. The cry is, I fancy, repeated
in others of Dostoevsky's novels. His world is an inferno.

talk is of actions more than of ideas. Dostoevsky's characters describe
Prince Myshkin, the Christ-like sufferer in _The Idiot_, narrates
characteristic Dostoevsky story put in the Prince's mouth:

     he was an honest man, in fact, and by a peasant's standard by no
     and when his friend had turned away, he approached him cautiously
     from behind, took aim, turned his eyes heavenwards, crossed
     himself, and praying fervently "God forgive me, for Christ's sake!"
     he cut his friend's throat at one stroke like a sheep and took his

obviously tainted with madness. Yet to Dostoevsky such aberrations of
conduct make a continuous and overwhelming appeal. The crimes in his
some seed of lunacy.

of Dostoevsky. That is why _Crime and Punishment_ belongs to a lower
range of fiction than _Anna Karénina_ or _Fathers and Sons_.
Raskolnikov's crime is the cold-blooded crime of a diseased mind. It
interests us like a story from Suetonius or like _Bluebeard_. But there
is no communicable passion in it such as we find in _Agamemnon_ or
_Othello_. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the
sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to
the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive me,
for Christ's sake!"

however, has created a whole flock of these abnormal characters and
grotesques as Dickens invents comic grotesques. In _The Brothers
Karamazov_ he reveals the malignance of Smerdyakov by telling us that he
was one who, in his childhood,

     was very fond of hanging cats, and burying them with great
     though it were a censer.

As for the Karamazovs themselves, he portrays the old father and the
eldest of his sons hating each other and fighting like brutal maniacs:

     strength, holding Dmitri in front.

     "Madman! You've killed him!" cried Ivan.

     "Serve him right!" shouted Dmitri, breathlessly. "If I haven't
     killed him, I'll come again and kill him."

It is easy to see why Dostoevsky has become a popular author. Incident
follows breathlessly upon incident. No melodramatist ever poured out
incident upon the stage from such a horn of plenty. His people are
energetic and untamed, like cowboys or runaway horses. They might be
described as runaway human beings.

And Dostoevsky knows how to crowd his stage as only the inveterate
melodramatists know. Scenes that in an ordinary novel would take place
with two or three figures on the stage are represented in Dostoevsky as
taking place before a howling, seething mob. "A dozen men have broken
in," a maid announces in one place in _The Idiot_, "and they are all
drunk." "Show them all in at once," she is bidden. Dostoevsky is always
ready to show them all in at once.

It is one of the triumphs of his genius that, however many persons he
introduces, he never allows them to be confused into a hopeless chaos.
His story finds its way unimpeded through the mob. On two opposite pages
of _The Idiot_ one finds the following characters brought in by name:
General Epanchin, Prince S., Adelaïda Ivanovna, Lizaveta Prokofyevna,
Yevgeny Pavlovitch Radomsky, Princess Byelokonsky, Aglaia, Prince
Myshkin, Kolya Ivolgin, Ippolit, Varya, Ferdyshchenko, Nastasya
Filippovna, Nina Alexandrovna, Ganya, Ptitsyn, and General Ivolgin. And
yet practically all of them remain separate and created beings. That is
characteristic at once of Dostoevsky's mastery and his monstrous

But the secret of Dostoevsky's appeal is something more than the
multitude and thrill of his incidents and characters. So incongruous,
indeed, is the sensational framework of his stories with the immense and
sombre genius that broods over them that Mr. Murry is inclined to regard
the incidents as a sort of wild spiritual algebra rather than as events
occurring on the plane of reality. "Dostoevsky," he declares, "is not a
novelist. What he is is more difficult to define."

Mr. Murry boldly faces the difficulty and attempts the definition. To
him Dostoevsky's work is "the record of a great mind seeking for a way
of life; it is more than a record of struggle, it is the struggle
itself." Dostoevsky himself is a man of genius "lifted out of the living
world," and unable to descend to it again. Mr. Murry confesses that at
times, as he reads him, he is "seized by a supersensual terror."

     For an awful moment I seem to see things with the eye of eternity,
     and have a vision of suns grown cold, and hear the echo of voices
     calling without sound across the waste and frozen universe. And
     those voices take shape in certain unforgettable fragments of
     dialogue that have been spoken by one spirit to another in some
     ugly, mean tavern, set in surrounding darkness.

Dostoevsky's people, it is suggested, "are not so much men and women as
disembodied spirits who have for the moment put on mortality."

     They have no physical being. Ultimately they are the creations, not
     of a man who desired to be, but of a spirit which sought to know.
     They are the imaginations of a God-tormented mind. ... Because they
     are possessed they are no longer men and women.

This is all in a measure true. Dostoevsky was no realist. Nor, on the
other hand, was he a novelist of horrors for horrors' sake. He could
never have written _Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar_ like Poe for the
sake of the aesthetic thrill.

None the less he remains a novelist who dramatized his spiritual
experiences through the medium of actions performed by human beings.
Clearly he believed that human beings--though not ordinary human
beings--were capable of performing the actions he narrates with such
energy. Mr. Murry will have it that the actions in the novels take place
in a "timeless" world, largely because Dostoevsky has the habit of
crowding an impossible rout of incidents into a single day. But surely
the Greeks took the same license with events. This habit of packing into
a few hours actions enough to fill a lifetime seems to me in Dostoevsky
to be a novelist's device rather than the result of a spiritual escape
into timelessness.

To say this is not to deny the spiritual content of Dostoevsky's
work--the anguish of the imprisoned soul as it battles with doubt and
denial and despair. There is in Dostoevsky a suggestion of Caliban
trying to discover some better god than Setebos. At the same time one
would be going a great deal too far in accepting the description of
himself as "a child of unbelief." The ultimate attitude of Dostoevsky is
as Christian as the Apostle Peter's, "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine
unbelief!" When Dostoevsky writes, "If any one could prove to me that
I shall prefer to stay with Christ and not with the truth," Mr. Murry
interprets this as a denial of Christ. It is surely a kind of faith,
though a despairing kind. And beyond the dark night of suffering, and
dissipating the night, Dostoevsky still sees the light of Christian
compassion. His work is all earthquake and eclipse and dead stars apart
from this.

Myshkin in _The Idiot_. But the truth is, it is by no means easy to
was--a man tortured by the eternal conflict of the devilish and the
divine in his own breast.

Vicomte de Vogüé described him as he saw him in the last years of his

     that still breathing forth the "cat-life." ... The face was that of
     sharp eyes deeply set, sometimes dark and gloomy, sometimes gentle
     of his face twitched nervously the whole time. When he became
     among vagabonds who passed their time begging before the prison
     meekness seen on the images of old Slavonic saints.

That is the portrait of the man one sees behind Dostoevsky's novels--a
his books will endure as the confession of the most terrible spiritual
and imaginative experiences that modern literature has given us.



women are essentially men and women of the fireside.

character who has not at least a thousand pounds. "People get so
horridly poor and economical in this part of the world," she writes on
one occasion, "that I have no patience with them. Kent is the only place
for happiness; everybody is rich there." Her novels do not introduce us
to the most exalted levels of the aristocracy. They provide us, however,
with a natural history of county people and of people who are just below
the level of county people and live in the eager hope of being taken
notice of by them. There is more caste snobbishness, I think, in Jane
Austen's novels than in any other fiction of equal genius. She, far more
than Thackeray, is the novelist of snobs.

How far Jane Austen herself shared the social prejudices of her
characters it is not easy to say. Unquestionably, she satirized them. At
the same time, she imputes the sense of superior rank not only to her
butts, but to her heroes and heroines, as no other novelist has ever
done. Emma Woodhouse lamented the deficiency of this sense in Frank
Churchill. "His indifference to a confusion of rank," she thought,
"bordered too much on inelegance of mind." Mr. Darcy, again, even when
he melts so far as to become an avowed lover, neither forgets his social
position, nor omits to talk about it. "His sense of her inferiority, of
its being a degradation ... was dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due
his suit." On discovering, to his amazement, that Elizabeth is offended
rather than overwhelmed by his condescension, he defends himself warmly.
"Disguise of every sort," he declares, "is my abhorrence. Nor am I
expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To
congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is
so decidedly beneath my own?"

It is perfectly true that Darcy and Emma Woodhouse are the butts of Miss
Austen as well as being among her heroes and heroines. She mocks
them--Darcy especially--no less than she admires. She loves to let her
wit play about the egoism of social caste. She is quite merciless in
deriding, it when it becomes overbearing, as in Lady Catherine de
Bourgh, or when it produces flunkeyish reactions, as in Mr. Collins. But
I fancy she liked a modest measure of it. Most people do. Jane Austen,
in writing so much about the sense of family and position, chose as her
theme one of the most widespread passions of civilized human nature.

She was herself a clergyman's daughter. She was the seventh of a family
of eight, born in the parsonage at Steventon, in Hampshire. Her life
seems to have been far from exciting. Her father, like the clergy in her
novels, was a man of leisure--of so much leisure, as Mr. Cornish reminds
us, that he was able to read out Cowper to his family in the mornings.
Jane was brought up to be a young lady of leisure. She learned French
and Italian and sewing: she was "especially great in satin-stitch." She
excelled at the game of spillikins.

She must have begun to write at an early age. In later life, she urges
an ambitious niece, aged twelve, to give up writing till she is sixteen,
adding that "she had herself often wished she had read more and written
less in the corresponding years of her life." She was only twenty when
she began to write _First Impressions_, the perfect book which was not
published till seventeen years later with the title altered to _Pride
and Prejudice_. She wrote secretly for many years. Her family knew of
it, but the world did not--not even the servants or the visitors to the
house. She used to hide the little sheets of paper on which she was
writing when any one approached. She had not, apparently, a room to
herself, and must have written under constant threat of interruption.
She objected to having a creaking door mended on one occasion, because
she knew by it when any one was coming.

She got little encouragement to write. _Pride and Prejudice_ was offered
to a publisher in 1797: he would not even read it. _Northanger Abbey_
was written in the next two years. It was not accepted by a publisher,
however, till 1803; and he, having paid ten pounds for it, refused to
publish it. One of Miss Austen's brothers bought back the manuscript at
the price at which it had been sold twelve or thirteen years later; but
even then it was not published till 1818, when the author was dead.

The first of her books to appear was _Sense and Sensibility_. She had
begun to write it immediately after finishing _Pride and Prejudice_. It
was published in 1811, a good many years later, when Miss Austen was
thirty-six years old. The title-page merely said that it was written "By
a Lady." The author never put her name to any of her books. For an
anonymous first novel, it must be admitted, _Sense and Sensibility_ was
not unsuccessful. It brought Miss Austen £150--"a prodigious
recompense," she thought, "for that which had cost her nothing." The
fact, however, that she had not earned more than £700 from her novels by
the time of her death shows that she never became a really popular
author in her lifetime.

She was rewarded as poorly in credit as in cash, though the Prince
Regent became an enthusiastic admirer of her books, and kept a set of
them in each of his residences. It was the Prince Regent's librarian,
the Rev. J.S. Clarke, who, on becoming chaplain to Prince Leopold of
Saxe-Coburg, made the suggestion to her that "an historical romance,
illustrative of the history of the august House of Coburg, would just
now be very interesting." Mr. Collins, had he been able to wean himself
from Fordyce's _Sermons_ so far as to allow himself to take an interest
in fiction, could hardly have made a proposal more exquisitely
grotesque. One is glad the proposal was made, however, not only for its
own sake, but because it drew an admirable reply from Miss Austen on the
nature of her genius. "I could not sit seriously down," she declared,
"to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life;
and, if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and never relax into
I had finished the first chapter."

Jane Austen knew herself for what she was, an inveterate laugher. She
belonged essentially to the eighteenth century--the century of the wits.
She enjoyed the spectacle of men and women making fools of themselves,
and she did not hide her enjoyment under a pretence of unobservant
good-nature. She observed with malice. It is tolerably certain that Miss
Mitford was wrong in accepting the description of her in private life as
"perpendicular, precise, taciturn, a poker of whom every one is afraid."
Miss Austen, one is sure, was a lady of good-humour, as well as a
novelist of good-humour; but the good-humour had a flavour. It was the
good-humour of the satirist, not of the sentimentalizer. One can imagine
Jane Austen herself speaking as Elizabeth Bennet once spoke to her
monotonously soft-worded sister. "That is the most unforgiving speech,"
she said, "that I ever heard you utter. Good girl!"

Miss Austen has even been accused of irreverence, and we occasionally
find her in her letters as irreverent in the presence of death as Mr.
Shaw. "Only think," she writes in one letter--a remark she works into a
chapter of _Emma_, by the way--"of Mrs. Holder being dead! Poor woman,
one cease to abuse her." And on another occasion she writes: "Mrs. Hall,
to look at her husband." It is possible that Miss Austen's sense of the
comic ran away with her at times as Emma Woodhouse's did. I do not know
of any similar instance of cruelty in conversation on the part of a
likeable person so unpardonable as Emma Woodhouse's witticism at the
expense of Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic. Miss Austen makes Emma
ashamed of her witticism, however, after Mr. Knightley has lectured her
for it. She sets a limit to the rights of wit, again, in _Pride and
Prejudice_, when Elizabeth defends her sharp tongue against Darcy. "The
wisest and best of men," ... he protests, "may be rendered ridiculous by
a person whose first object in life is a joke." "I hope I never ridicule
what is wise or good," says Elizabeth in the course of her answer.
"Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, _do_ divert me, I own,
and I laugh at them whenever I can." The six novels that Jane Austen has
left us might be described as the record of the diversions of a
clergyman's daughter.

The diversions of Jane Austen were, beyond those of most novelists, the
diversions of a spectator. (That is what Scott and Macaulay meant by
comparing her to Shakespeare.) Or, rather, they were the diversions of a
listener. She observed with her ears rather than with her eyes. With
her, conversation was three-fourths of life. Her stories are stories of
people who reveal themselves almost exclusively in talk. She wastes no
time in telling us what people and places looked like. She will dismiss
a man or a house or a view or a dinner with an adjective such as
"handsome." There is more description of persons and places in Mr.
Shaw's stage-directions than in all Miss Austen's novels. She cuts the
'osses and comes to the cackle as no other English novelist of the same
eminence has ever done. If we know anything of the setting or character
or even the appearance of her men and women, it is due far more to what
they say than to anything that is said about them. And yet how perfect
is her gallery of portraits! One can guess the very angle of Mr.
Collins's toes.

One seems, too, to be able to follow her characters through the trivial
round of the day's idleness as closely as if one were pursuing them
under the guidance of a modern realist. They are the most unoccupied
people, I think, who ever lived in literature. They are people in whose
lives a slight fall of snow is an event. Louisa Musgrave's jump on the
Cobb at Lyme Regis produces more commotion in the Jane Austen world than
murder and arson do in an ordinary novel. Her people do not even seem,
for the most part, to be interested in anything but their opinions of
each other. They have few passions beyond match-making. They are
unconcerned about any of the great events of their time. Almost the only
reference in the novels to the Napoleonic Wars is a mention of the
prize-money of naval officers. "Many a noble fortune," says Mr. Shepherd
in _Persuasion_, "has been made during the war." Miss Austen's principal
use of the Navy outside _Mansfield Park_ is as a means of portraying the
exquisite vanity of Sir Walter Elliott--his inimitable manner of
emphasizing the importance of both rank and good looks in the make-up
of a gentleman. "The profession has its utility," he says of the Navy,
"but I should be sorry to see any friend of mine belonging to it." He
goes on to explain his reasons:

     It is in two points offensive to me; I have two strong grounds of
     objection to it. First as being the means of bringing persons of
     obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours
     which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of; and,
     secondly, as it cuts up a man's youth and vigour most terribly; a
     sailor grows older sooner than any other man.

Sir Walter complains that he had once had to give place at dinner to
Lord St. Ives, the son of a curate, and "a certain Admiral Baldwin, the
most deplorable-looking personage you can imagine: his face the colour

     "In the name of heaven, who is that old fellow?" said I to a friend
     of mine who was standing near (Sir Basil Morley). "Old fellow!"
     to a degree, I know, it is the same with them all; they are all
     knocked about, and exposed to every climate and every weather, till
     the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin's age.

That, I think, is an excellent example of Miss Austen's genius for
making her characters talk. Luckily, conversation was still formal in
her day, and it was as possible for her as for Congreve to make middling
men and women talk first-rate prose. She did more than this, however.
She was the first English novelist before Meredith to portray charming
women with free personalities. Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse have
an independence (rare in English fiction) of the accident of being
fallen in love with. Elizabeth is a delightful prose counterpart of

Miss Austen has another point of resemblance to Meredith besides that
which I have mentioned. She loves to portray men puffed up with
self-approval. She, too, is a satirist of the male egoist. Her books are
the most finished social satires in English fiction. They are so perfect
in the delicacy of their raillery as to be charming. One is conscious in
them, indeed, of the presence of a sparkling spirit. Miss Austen comes
as near being a star as it is possible to come in eighteenth-century
conversational prose. She used to say that, if ever she should marry,
she would fancy being Mrs. Crabbe. She had much of Crabbe's realism,
indeed; but what a dance she led realism with the mocking light of her




It was Mr. Shaw who, in the course of a memorable controversy, invented
a fantastic pantomime animal, which he called the "Chester-Belloc." Some
such invention was necessary as a symbol of the literary comradeship of
Mr. Hilaire Belloc and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. For Mr. Belloc and Mr.
Chesterton, whatever may be the dissimilarities in the form and spirit
of their work, cannot be thought of apart from each other. They are as
inseparable as the red and green lights of a ship: the one illumines
this side and the other that, but they are both equally concerned with
announcing the path of the good ship "Mediaevalism" through the
dangerous currents of our times. Fifty years ago, when philology was one
of the imaginative arts, it would have been easy enough to gain credit
for the theory that they are veritable reincarnations of the Heavenly
Twins going about the earth with corrupted names. Chesterton is merely
English for Castor, and Belloc is Pollux transmuted into French.
Certainly, if the philologist had also been an evangelical Protestant,
he would have felt a double confidence in identifying the two authors
with Castor and Pollux as the

    Great Twin Brethren,
    Who fought so well for Rome.

A critic was struck some years ago by the propriety of the fact that Mr.
Chesterton and Mr. Belloc brought out books of the same kind and the
same size, through the same publisher, almost in the same week. Mr.
Belloc, to be sure, called his volume of essays _This, That, and the
Other_, and Mr. Chesterton called his _A Miscellany of Men._ But if Mr.
Chesterton had called his book _This, That, and the Other_ and Mr.
Belloc had called his _A Miscellany of Men_, it would not have made a
pennyworth of difference. Each book is simply a ragbag of essays--the
riotous and fantastically joyous essays of Mr. Chesterton, the sardonic
and arrogantly gay essays of Mr. Belloc. Each, however, has a unity of
outlook, not only an internal unity, but a unity with the other. Each
has the outlook of the mediaevalist spirit--the spirit which finds
crusades and miracles more natural than peace meetings and the
discoveries of science, which gives Heaven and Hell a place on the map
of the world, which casts a sinister eye on Turks and Jews, which brings
its gaiety to the altar as the tumbler in the story brought his cap and
bells, which praises dogma and wine and the rule of the male, which
abominates the scientific spirit, and curses the day on which Bacon was
born. Probably, neither of the authors would object to being labelled a
mediaevalist, except in so far as we all object to having labels affixed
to us by other people. Mr. Chesterton's attitude on the matter, indeed,
is clear from that sentence in _What's Wrong with the World_, in which
he affirms: "Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather
mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout." And
if, on learning some of the inferences he makes from this, you protest
that he is reactionary, and is trying to put back the hands of the
clock, he is quite unashamed, and replies that the moderns "are always
saying 'you can't put the clock back.' The simple and obvious answer is,
'You can.' A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored
by the human finger to any figure or hour." The effrontery of an answer
like that is so magnificent that it takes one's breath away. The chief
difficulty of Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, however, seems to be that
they want their clock to point to two different hours at the same time,
neither of which happens to be the hour which the sun has just marked at
Greenwich. They want it to point at once to 878 and 1789--to Ethandune
and the French Revolution.

Similar though they are in the revolutio-mediaevalist background of
their philosophy, however, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc are as unlike
as possible in the spirit in which they proclaim it. If Mr. Chesterton
gets up on his box to prophesy against the times, he seems to do so out
of a passionate and unreasoning affection for his fellows. If Mr. Belloc
denounces the age, he seems also to be denouncing the human race. Mr.
Chesterton is jovial and democratic; Mr. Belloc is (to some extent)
saturnine and autocratic. Mr. Chesterton belongs to the exuberantly
lovable tradition of Dickens; indeed, he is, in the opinion of many
people, the most exuberantly lovable personality which has expressed
itself in English literature since Dickens. Mr. Belloc, on the other
hand, has something of the gleaming and solitary fierceness of Swift and
Hazlitt. Mr. Chesterton's vision, coloured though it is with the colours
of the past, projects itself generously into the future. He is
foretelling the eve of the Utopia of the poor and the oppressed when he
speaks of

     the riot that all good men, even the most conservative, really
     dream of, when the sneer shall be struck from the face of the
     well-fed; when the wine of honour shall be poured down the throat
     of despair; when we shall, so far as to the sons of flesh is
     possible, take tyranny, and usury, and public treason, and bind
     them into bundles, and burn them.

There is anger, as well as affection, in this eloquence--anger as of a
new sort of knight thirsting to spill the blood of a new sort of
barbarian in the name of Christ. Mr. Belloc's attack on the barbarians
lacks the charity of these fiery sentences. He concludes his essay on
the scientific spirit, as embodied in Lombroso, for instance, with the
words, "The Ass!" And he seems to sneer the insult where Mr. Chesterton
would have roared it. Mr. Chesterton and he may be at one in the way in
which they regard the scientific criminologists, eugenists,
collectivists, pragmatists, post-impressionists, and most of the other
"ists" of recent times, as an army of barbarians invading the
territories of mediaeval Christendom. But while Mr. Chesterton is in the
gap of danger, waving against his enemies the sword of the spirit, Mr.
Belloc stands on a little height apart, aiming at them the more cruel
shafts of the intellect. It is not that he is less courageous than Mr.
Chesterton, but that he is more contemptuous. Here, for example, is how
he meets the barbarian attack, especially as it is delivered by M.
Bergson and his school:--

     In its most grotesque form, it challenges the accuracy of
     mathematics; in its most vicious, the processes of the human
     reason. The Barbarian is as proud as a savage in a top hat when he
     talks of the elliptical or the hyperbolic universe, and tries to
     picture parallel straight lines converging or diverging--but never
     doing anything so vulgarly old-fashioned as to remain parallel.

     The Barbarian, when he has graduated to be a "pragmatist," struts
     like a nigger in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to
     the gift of reason, etc., etc.

It would be unfair to offer this passage as an example of Mr. Belize's
dominating genius, but it is an excellent example of his domineering
temper. His genius and his temper, one may add, seem, in these essays,
to, be always trying to climb on one another's shoulders, and it is when
his genius gets uppermost that he becomes one of the most biting and
exhilarating writers of his time. On such occasions his malice ceases to
be a talent, and rises into an enthusiasm, as in _The Servants of the
Rich_, where, like a mediaeval bard, he shows no hesitation in housing
his enemies in the circles of Hell. His gloating proclamation of the
eternal doom of the rich men's servants is an infectious piece of
humour, at once grim and irresponsible:--

     Their doom is an eternal sleeplessness and a nakedness in the
     gloom.... These are those men who were wont to come into the room
     of the Poor Guest at early morning, with a steadfast and assured
     step, and a look of insult. These are those who would take the
     tattered garments and hold them at arm's length, as much as to say:
     "What rags these scribblers wear!" and then, casting them over the
     arm, with a gesture that meant: "Well, they must be brushed, but
     Heaven knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces!" would
     next discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class
     things, and notably loose tobacco....

     ... Then one would see him turn one's socks inside out, which is a
     ritual with the horrid tribe. Then a great bath would be trundled
     in, and he would set beside it a great can, and silently pronounce
     the judgment that, whatever else was forgiven the middle-class, one
     thing would not be forgiven them--the neglect of the bath, of the
     splashing about of the water, and of the adequate wetting of the

     All these things we have suffered, you and I, at their hands. But
     be comforted. They writhe in Hell with their fellows.

Mr. Belloc is not one of those authors who can be seen at their best in
quotations, but even the mutilated fragment just given suggests to some
extent the mixture of gaiety and malice that distinguishes his work from
the work of any of his contemporaries. His gifts run to satire, as Mr.
Chesterton's run to imaginative argument. It is this, perhaps, which
accounts for the fact that, of these two authors, who write with their
heads in the Middle Ages, it is Mr. Chesterton who is the more
comprehensive critic of his own times. He never fights private, but
always public, battles in his essays. His mediaevalism seldom
degenerates into a prejudice, as it often does with Mr. Belloc. It
represents a genuine theory of the human soul, and of human freedom. He
laments as he sees men exchanging the authority of a spiritual
institution, like the Church, for the authority a carnal institution,
like a bureaucracy. He rages as he sees them abandoning charters that
gave men rights, and accepting charters that only give them
prohibitions. It has been the custom for a long time to speak of Mr.
Chesterton as an optimist; and there was, indeed, a time when he was so
rejoiced by the discovery that the children of men were also the
children of God, that he was as aggressively cheerful as Whitman and
Browning rolled into one. But he has left all that behind him. The
insistent vision of a world in full retreat from the world of Alfred and
Charlemagne and the saints and the fight for Jerusalem--from this and
the allied world of Danton and Robespierre, and the rush to the
Bastille--has driven him back upon a partly well-founded and partly
ill-founded Christian pessimism. To him it now seems as if Jerusalem had
captured the Christians rather than the Christians Jerusalem. He sees
men rushing into Bastilles, not in order to tear them down, but in order
to inhabit the accursed cells.

When I say that this pessimism is partly ill-founded, I mean that it is
arrived at by comparing the liberties of the Middle Ages with the
tyrannies of to-day, instead of by comparing the liberties of the Middle
Ages with the liberties of to-day, or the tyrannies of the Middle Ages
with the tyrannies of to-day. It is the result, sometimes, of playing
with history and, sometimes, of playing with words. Is it not playing
with words, for instance, to glorify the charters by which medieval
kings guaranteed the rights and privileges of their subjects, and to
deny the name of charter to such a law as that by which a modern State
guarantees some of the rights and privileges of children--to deny it
simply on the ground that the latter expresses itself largely in
prohibitions? It may be necessary to forbid a child to go into a
gin-palace in order to secure it the privilege of not being driven into
a gin-palace. Prohibitions are as necessary to human liberty as permits
and licences.

At the same time, quarrel as we may with Mr. Chesterton's mediaevalism,
and his application of it to modern problems, we can seldom quarrel with
the motive with which he urges it upon us. His high purpose throughout
is to keep alive the human view of society, as opposed to the mechanical
view to which lazy politicians are naturally inclined. If he has not
been able to give us any very, coherent vision of a Utopia of his own,
he has, at least, done the world a service in dealing some smashing
blows at the Utopia of machinery. None the less, he and Mr. Belloc would
be the most dangerous of writers to follow in a literal obedience. In
regard to political and social improvements, they are too often merely
Devil's Advocates of genius. But that is a necessary function, and they
are something more than that. As I have suggested, above all the
arguments and the rhetoric and the humours of the little political
battles, they do bear aloft a banner with a strange device, reminding us
that organized society was made for man, and not man for organized
society. That, in the last analysis, is the useful thing for which Mr.
Chesterton and Mr. Belloc stand in modern politics. It almost seems at
times, however, as though they were ready to see us bound again with the
fetters of ancient servitudes, in order to compel us to take part once
more in the ancient struggle for freedom.


Mr. Belloc has during the last four or five years become a public man.
Before that he had been acknowledged a man of genius. But even the fact
that he had sat in the House of Commons never led any great section of
Englishmen to regard him as a figure or an institution. He was generally
looked on as one who made his bed aggressively among heretics, as a kind
of Rabelaisian dissenter, as a settled interrupter, half-rude and
half-jesting. And yet there was always in him something of the
pedagogue who has been revealed so famously in these last months. Not
only had he a passion for facts and for stringing facts upon theories.
He had also a high-headed and dogmatic and assured way of imparting his
facts and theories to the human race as it sat--or in so far as it could
be persuaded to sit--on its little forms.

It is his schoolmasterishness which chiefly distinguishes the genius of
Mr. Belloc from the genius of his great and uproarious comrade, Mr.
Chesterton. Mr. Belloc is not a humorist to anything like the same
degree as Mr. Chesterton. If Mr. Chesterton were a schoolmaster he would
give all the triangles noses and eyes, and he would turn the Latin verbs
into nonsense rhymes. Humour is his breath and being. He cannot speak of
the Kingdom of Heaven or of Robert Browning without it any more than of
asparagus. He is a laughing theologian, a laughing politician, a
laughing critic, a laughing philosopher. He retains a fantastic
cheerfulness even amid the blind furies--and how blindly furious he can
sometimes be!--of controversy. With Mr. Belloc, on the other hand,
laughter is a separate and relinquishable gift. He can at will lay aside
the mirth of one who has broken bounds for the solemnity of the man in
authority. He can be scapegrace prince and sober king by turns, and in
such a way that the two personalities seem scarcely to be related to
each other. Compared with Mr. Chesterton he is like a man in a mask, or
a series of masks. He reveals more of his intellect to the world than of
his heart. He is not one of those authors whom one reads with a sense of
personal intimacy. He is too arrogant even in his merriment for that.

Perhaps the figure we see reflected most obtrusively in his works is
that of a man delighting in immense physical and intellectual energies.
It is this that makes him one of the happiest of travellers. On his
travels, one feels, every inch and nook of his being is intent upon the
passing earth. The world is to him at once a map and a history and a
poem and a church and an ale-house. The birds in the greenwood, the
beer, the site of an old battle, the meaning of an old road, sacred
emblems by the roadside, the comic events of way-faring--he has an equal
appetite for them all. Has he not made a perfect book of these things,
with a thousand fancies added, in _The Four Men_? In _The Four Men_ he
has written a travel-book which more than any other of his works has
something of the passion of a personal confession. Here the pilgrim
becomes nearly genial as he indulges in his humours against the rich and
against policemen and in behalf of Sussex against Kent and the rest of
the inhabited world.

Mr. Chesterton has spoken of Mr. Belloc as one who "did and does humanly
and heartily love England, not as a duty but as a pleasure, and almost
an indulgence." And _The Four Men_ expresses this love humorously,
inconsequently, and with a grave stepping eloquence. There are few
speeches in modern books better than the conversations in _The Four
Men._ Mr. Belloc is not one of those disciples of realism who believe
that the art of conversation is dead, and that modern people are only
capable of addressing each other in one-line sentences. He has the
traditional love of the fine speech such as we find it in the ancient
poets and historians and dramatists and satirists. He loves a monologue
that passes from mockery to regret, that gathers up by the way anecdote
and history and essay and foolery, that is half a narrative of things
seen and half an irresponsible imagination. He can describe a runaway
horse with the farcical realism of the authors of _Some Experiences of
an Irish R.M._, can parody a judge, can paint a portrait, and can steep
a landscape in vision. Two recent critics have described him as "the
best English prose writer since Dryden," but that only means that Mr.
Belloc's rush of genius has quite naturally swept them off their feet.

If Mr. Belloc's love of country is an indulgence, his moods of
suspicion and contempt are something of the same kind. He is nothing of
a philanthropist in any sense of the word. He has no illusions about the
virtue of the human race. He takes pleasure in scorn, and there is a
flavour of bitterness in his jests. His fiction largely belongs to the
comedy of corruption. He enjoys--and so do we--the thought of the poet
in Sussex who had no money except three shillings, "and a French penny,
which last some one had given him out of charity, taking him for a
beggar a little way-out of Brightling that very day." When he describes
the popular rejoicings at the result of Mr. Clutterbuck's election, he
comments: "The populace were wild with joy at their victory, and that
portion of them who as bitterly mourned defeat would have been roughly
handled had they not numbered quite half this vast assembly of human
beings." He is satirist and ironist even more than historian. His
ironical essays are the best of their kind that have been written in
recent years.

Mr. Mandell and Mr. Shanks in their little study, _Hilaire Belloc: the
Man and his Work_, are more successful in their exposition of Mr.
Belloc's theory of history and the theory of politics which has risen
out of it--or out of which it has risen--than they are in their
definition of him as a man of letters. They have written a lively book
on him, but they do not sufficiently communicate an impression of the
kind of his exuberance, of his thrusting intellectual ardour, of his
pomp as a narrator, of his blind and doctrinaire injustices, of his
jesting like a Roman Emperor's, of the strength of his happiness upon a
journey, of his buckishness, of the queer lack of surprising phrases in
his work, of his measured omniscience, of the immense weight of
tradition in the manner of his writing. There are many contemporary
writers whose work seems to be a development of journalism. Mr.
Belloc's is the child of four literatures, or, maybe, half a dozen. He
often writes carelessly, sometimes dully but there is the echo of
greatness in his work. He is one of the few contemporary men of genius
whose books are under-estimated rather than over-estimated. He is an
author who has brought back to the world something of the copiousness,
fancy, appetite, power, and unreason of the talk that, one imagines, was
once to be heard in the Mermaid Tavern.


I cannot help wishing at times that Mr. Chesterton could be divided in
two. One half of him I should like to challenge to mortal combat as an
enemy of the human race. The other half I would carry shoulder-high
through the streets. For Mr. Chesterton is at once detestable and
splendid. He is detestable as a doctrinaire: he is splendid as a sage
and a poet who juggles with stars and can keep seven of them in the air
at a time. For, if he is a gamester, it is among the lamps of Heaven. We
can see to read by his sport. He writes in flashes, and hidden and
fantastic truths suddenly show their faces in the play of his sentences.

Unfortunately, his two personalities have become so confused that his
later books sometimes strike one as being not so much a game played with
light as a game of hide-and-seek between light and darkness. In the
darkness he mutters incantations to the monstrous tyrannies of old time:
in the light he is on his knees to liberty. He vacillates between
superstition and faith. His is a genius at once enslaved and
triumphantly rebel. This fatal duality is seen again and again in his
references to the tyrannies of the Middle Ages. Thus he writes: "It need
not be repeated that the case despotism is democratic. As a rule its
cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak." I confess I do not know
the "rule" to which Mr. Chesterton refers. The picture of the despot as
among the facts of history. The ordinary despot, in his attitude to the
common people suffering from the oppressions of their lords, is best
portrayed in the fable--if it be a fable--of Marie Antoinette and her
flippancy about eating cake.

I fancy, however, Mr. Chesterton's defence of despots is not the result
of any real taste for them or acquaintance with their history: it is due
simply to his passion for extremes. He likes a man, as the vulgar say,
to be either one thing or the other. You must be either a Pope or a
revolutionist to please him. He loves the visible rhetoric of things,
and the sober suits of comfortable citizens seem dull and neutral in
comparison with the red of cardinals on the one hand, and of caps of
liberty on the other. This, I think, explains Mr. Chesterton's
indifference to, if not dislike of, Parliaments. Parliaments are
monuments of compromise, and are guilty of the sin of unpicturesqueness.
One would imagine that a historian of England who did not care for
Parliaments would be as hopelessly out of his element as a historian of
Greece who did not care for the arts. And it is because Mr. Chesterton
is indifferent to so much in the English genius and character that he
has given us in his recent short _History of England_, instead of a
History of England, a wild and wonderful pageant of argument. "Already,"
he cries, as he relates how Parliament "certainly encouraged, and almost
certainly obliged" King Richard to break his pledge to the people after
the Wat Tyler insurrection:--

     Already Parliament is not merely a governing body, but a governing

The history of England is to Mr. Chesterton largely the history of the
rise of the governing class. He blames John Richard Green for leaving
the people out of his history; but Mr. Chesterton himself has left out
the people as effectually as any of the historians who went before him.
The obsession of "the governing class" has thrust the people into the
background. History resolves itself with him into a disgraceful epic of
a governing class which despoiled Pope and King with the right hand, and
the people with the left. It is a disgraceful epic patched with splendid
episodes, but it culminates in an appalling cry of doubt whether, after
all, it might not be better for England to perish utterly in the great
war while fighting for liberty than to survive to behold the triumph of
the "governing class" in a servile State of old-age pensions and
Insurance Acts.

This theory of history, as being largely the story of the evolution of
the "governing class," is an extremely interesting and even "fruitful"
theory. But it is purely fantastic unless we bear in mind that the
governing class has been continually compelled to enlarge itself, and
that its tendency is reluctantly to go on doing so until in the end it
will be coterminous with the "governed class." History is a tale of
exploitation, but it is also a tale of liberation, and the over-emphasis
that Mr. Chesterton lays on exploitation by Parliaments as compared with
exploitation by Popes and Kings, can only be due to infidelity in regard
to some of the central principles of freedom. Surely it is possible to
condemn the Insurance Act, if it must be condemned, without apologizing
either for the Roman Empire or for the Roman ecclesiastical system. Mr.
Chesterton, however, believes in giving way to one's prejudices. He says
that history should be written backwards; and what does this mean but
that it should be dyed in prejudice? thus, he cannot refer to the
Hanoverian succession without indulging in a sudden outburst of heated
rhetoric such as one might expect rather in a leading article in
war-time. He writes:--

     With George there entered England something that had scarcely been
     seen there before; something hardly mentioned in mediaeval or
     Renascence writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot--the
     barbarian from beyond the Rhine.

Similarly, his characterization of the Revolution of 1688 is largely a
result of his dislike of the governing classes at the present hour:--

     The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by
     gentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages,
     they are--factories of gentlemen when they are not merely factories
     of snobs.

Both of these statements contain a grain of truth, but neither of them
contains enough truth to be true. One might describe them as sweetmeats
of history of small nutritious value. One might say the same of his
comment on the alliance between Chatham and Frederick the Great:--

     eat other commonwealths, had entered Christendom.

How finely said! But, alas! the cannibal theory of a commonwealth
existed long before Chatham and Frederick the Great. The instinct to
exploit is one of the most venerable instincts of the human race,
whether in individual men or in nations of men; and ancient Hebrew and
ancient Greek and ancient Roman had exhausted the passion of centuries
in obedience to it before the language spoken either by Chatham or by
Frederick was born. Christian Spain, Christian France, and Christian
England had not in this matter disowned the example of their Jewish and
Pagan forerunners.

What we are infinitely grateful to Mr. Chesterton for, however, is that
he has sufficient imagination to loathe cannibalism wherever he sees it.
True, he seems to forgive certain forms of cannibalism on the ground
that it is an exaggeration to describe the flesh of a rich man as the
flesh of a human being. But he does rage with genius at the continual
eating of men that went on in England, especially after the spoliation
of the monasteries in the reign of Henry the Eighth gave full scope to
the greed of the strong. He sees that the England which Whig and Tory
combined to defend as the perfection of the civilized world in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an England governed by men whose
chief claim to govern was founded on the fact that they had seized their
country and were holding it against their countrymen. Mr. Chesterton
rudely shatters the mirror of perfection in which the possessing class
have long seen themselves. He writes in a brilliant passage:--

     It could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of another
     gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in
     aristocrat of romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a
     secret and a sort of blackmail.... His glory did not come from the
     Crusades, but from the Great Pillage.... The oligarchs were
     paradox of England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart.

     that, all through the eighteenth century, all through the great
     Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches
     about patriotism, through the period of Wandiwash and Plassey,
     through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was
     steadily going on in the central senate of the nation. Parliament
     was passing Bill after Bill for the enclosure by the great
     landlords of such of the common lands as had survived out of the
     pun, it is the prime political irony of our history that the
     Commons were destroying the commons.

It would be folly to suggest, however, that, conscious though Mr.
Chesterton is of the crimes of history, he has turned history into a
mere series of floggings of criminals. He is for ever laying down the
whip and inviting the criminals to take their seats while he paints
gorgeous portraits of them in all the colours of the rainbow. His praise
of the mighty rhetoricians of the eighteenth century could in some
passages scarcely be more unstinted if he were a Whig of the Whigs. He
cannot but admire the rotund speech and swelling adventures of those
days. If we go farther back, we find him portraying even the Puritans
with a strange splendour of colour:--

     They were, above all things, anti-historic, like the Futurists in
     Italy; and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that
     their very sacrilege was public and solemn, like a sacrament; and
     they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly
     considered, but a very secondary example of their strange and
     violent simplicity that one of them, before a mighty mob at

This last passage is valuable, not only because it reveals Mr.
Chesterton as a marvellous rhetorician doing the honours of prose to his
enemies, but because it helps to explain the essentially tragic view he
takes of English history. I exaggerated a moment ago when I said that to
Mr. Chesterton English history is the story of the rise of a governing
class. What it really is to him is the story of a thorn-bush cut down by
a Puritan. He has hung all the candles of his faith on the sacred thorn,
like the lights on a Christmas-tree, and lo! it has been cut down and
cast out of England with as little respect as though it were a verse
from the Sermon on the Mount. It may be that Mr. Chesterton's sight is
erratic, and that what he took to be the sacred thorn was really a
Upas-tree. But in a sense that does not matter. He is entitled to his
own fable, if he tells it honestly and beautifully; and it is as a
tragic fable or romance of the downfall of liberty in England that one
reads his _History_. He himself contends in the last chapter of the book
that the crisis in English history came "with the fall of Richard II,
following on his failures to use mediaeval despotism in the interests
of mediaeval democracy." Mr. Chesterton's history would hardly be worth
reading, if he had made nothing more of it than is suggested in that
sentence. His book (apart from occasional sloughs of sophistry and
fallacious argument) remains in the mind as a song of praise and dolour
chanted by the imagination about an England that obeyed not God and
despised the Tree of Life, but that may yet, he believes, hear once more
the ancestral voices, and with her sons arrayed in trade unions and
guilds, march riotously back into the Garden of Eden.




Dorothy Wordsworth--whom Professor Harper has praised not beyond reason
as "the most delightful, the most fascinating woman who has enriched
literary history"--once confessed in a letter about her brother William
that "his person is not in his favour," and that he was "certainly
rather plain." He is the most difficult of all the great poets whom one
reverences to portray as an attractive person. "'Horse-face,' I have
heard satirists say," Carlyle wrote of him, recalling a comparison of
Hazlitt's; and the horse-face seems to be symbolic of something that we
find not only in his personal appearance, but in his personality and his

His faults do not soften us, as the faults of so many favourite writers
do. They were the faults, not of passion, but of a superior person, who
was something of a Sir Willoughby Patterne in his pompous
self-satisfaction. "He says," records Lamb in one of his letters, "he
does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had a
mind to try it." Lamb adds: "It is clear that nothing is wanting but the

Leigh Hunt, after receiving a visit from Wordsworth in 1815, remarked
that "he was as sceptical on the merit of all kinds of poetry but one as
Richardson was on those of the novels of Fielding." Keats, who had
earlier spoken of the reverence in which he held Wordsworth, wrote to
his brother in 1818: "I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad
impression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity, and
bigotry." There was something frigidly unsympathetic in his judgment of
others, which was as unattractive as his complacency in regard to his
own work. When Trelawny, seeing him at Lausanne and, learning who he
was, went up to him as he was about to step into his carriage and asked
him what he thought of Shelley as a poet, he replied: "Nothing." Again,
Wordsworth spoke with solemn reprobation of certain of Lamb's
friendships, after Lamb was dead, as "the indulgences of social humours
and fancies which were often injurious to himself and causes of severe
regrets to his friends, without really benefiting the object of his
misapplied kindness."

Nor was this attitude of Johnny Head-in-Air the mark only of his later
years. It appeared in the days when he and Coleridge collaborated in
bringing out _Lyrical Ballads._ There is something sublimely egotistical
in the way in which he shook his head over _The Ancient Mariner_ as a
drag upon that miraculous volume. In the course of a letter to his
publisher, he wrote:--

     From what I can gather it seems that _The Ancyent Marinere_ has, on
     the whole, been an injury to the volume; I mean that the old words
     the volume should come to a second edition, I would put in its
     place some little things which would be more likely to suit the
     common taste.

It is when one reads sentences like these that one begins to take a
mischievous delight in the later onslaught of a Scottish reviewer who,
indignant that Wordsworth should dare to pretend to be able to
appreciate Burns, denounced him as "a retired, pensive, egotistical,
_collector of stamps_," and as--

     a melancholy, sighing, half-parson sort of gentleman, who lives in
     a small circle of old maids and sonneteers, and drinks tea now and
     then with the solemn Laureate.

One feels at times that no ridicule or abuse of this stiff-necked old
fraud could be excessive; for, if he were not Wordsworth, as what but a
fraud could we picture him in his later years, as he protests against
Catholic Emancipation, the extension of the franchise, the freedom of
the Press, and popular education? "Can it, in a _general_ view," he
asks, "be good that an infant should learn much which its _parents do
not know?_ Will not a child arrogate a superiority unfavourable to love
and obedience?" He shuddered again at the likelihood that Mechanics'
Institutes would "make discontented spirits and insubordinate and
presumptuous workmen." He opposed the admission of Dissenters to
Cambridge University, and he "desired that a medical education should be
kept beyond the reach of a poor student," on the ground that "the better
able the parents are to incur expense, the stronger pledge have we of
their children being above meanness and unfeeling and sordid habits."
One might go on quoting instance after instance of this piety of
success, as it might be called. Time and again the words seem to come
from the mouth, not of one of the inspired men of the modern world, but
of some puffed-up elderly gentleman in a novel by Jane Austen. His
letter to a young relation who wished to marry his daughter Dora is a
letter that Jane Austen might have invented:--

     If you have thoughts of marrying, do look out for some lady with a
     sufficient fortune for both of you. What I say to you now I would
     recommend to every naval officer and clergyman who is without
     prospect of professional advancement. Ladies of some fortune are as
     easily won as those without, and for the most part as deserving.
     Check the first liking to those who have nothing.

One is tempted to say that Wordsworth, like so many other poets, died
young, and that a pensioner who inherited his name survived him.

When one has told the worst about Wordsworth, however, one is as far as
ever from having painted a portrait of him in which anybody could
believe while reading the _Ode on Intimations of Immortality--Ode_ as
it was simply called when it was first published--or _I wandered lonely
as a cloud_, or the sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge. Nor does the
portrait of a stern, unbending egotist satisfy us when we remember the
life-long devotion that existed between him and Dorothy, and the fact
that Coleridge loved him, and that Lamb and Scott were his friends. He
may have been a niggard of warm-heartedness to the outside world, but it
is clear from his biography that he possessed the genius of a good heart
as well as of a great mind.

And he was as conspicuous for the public as for the private virtues. His
latest biographer has done well to withdraw our eyes from the portrait
of the old man with the stiffened joints and to paint in more glowing
colours than any of his predecessors the early Wordsworth who rejoiced
in the French Revolution, and, apparently as a consequence, initiated a
revolution in English poetry. The later period of the life is not
glossed over; it is given, indeed, in cruel detail, and Professor
Harper's account of it is the most lively and fascinating part of his
admirable book. But it is to the heart of the young revolutionary, who
dreamed of becoming a Girondist leader and of seeing England a republic,
that he traces all the genius and understanding that we find in the

"Wordsworth's connection," he writes, "with the English 'Jacobins,' with
the most extreme element opposed to the war or actively agitating in
favour of making England a republic, was much closer than has been
generally admitted." He points out that Wordsworth's first books of
verse, _An Evening Walk_, and _Descriptive Sketches_, were published by
Joseph Johnson, who also published Dr. Priestley, Horne Tooke, and Mary
Wollstonecraft, and whose shop was frequented by Godwin and Paine.
Professor Harper attempts to strengthen his case by giving brief
sketches of famous "Jacobins," whom Wordsworth may or may not have met,
but his case is strong enough without their help. Wordsworth's
reply--not published at the time, or, indeed, till after his death--to
the Bishop of Llandaff's anti-French-Revolution sermon on _The Wisdom
and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor_, was signed
without qualification, "By a Republican." He refused to join in "the
idle Cry of modish lamentation" over the execution of the French King,
and defended the other executions in France as necessary. He condemned
the hereditary principle, whether in the Monarchy or the House of Lords.
The existence of a nobility, he held, "has a necessary, tendency to
dishonour labour." Had he published this pamphlet when it was written,
in 1793, he might easily have found himself in prison, like many other
sympathizers with the French.

Wordsworth gives us an idea in _The Prelude_--how one wishes one had the
original and unamended version of the poem as it was finished in
1805!--of the extreme lengths to which his Republican idealism carried
him. When war was declared against France, he tells us, he prayed for
French victories, and--

    Exulted in the triumph of my soul,
    When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown,
    Left without glory on the field, or driven,
    Brave hearts! to shameful flight.

Two years later we, find him at Racedown planning satires against the
King, the Prince of Wales, and various public men, one of the couplets
on the King and the Duke of Norfolk running:--

    Heavens! who sees majesty in George's face?
    Or looks at Norfolk, and can dream of grace?

But these lines, he declared, were given to him by Southey.

By 1797 a Government spy seems to have been looking after him and his
friends: he was living at the time at Alfoxden, near Coleridge, who, in
the previous year, had brought out _The Watchman_ to proclaim, as the
prospectus said, "the state of the political atmosphere, and preserve
Freedom and her Friends from the attacks of Robbers and Assassins."
Wordsworth at a later period did not like the story of the spy, but it
is certain that about the time of the visit he got notice to quit
Alfoxden, obviously for political reasons, from the lady who owned the

Professor Harper's originality as a biographer, however, does not lie in
his narration of facts like these, but in the patience with which he
traces the continuance of French sympathies in Wordsworth on into the
opening years of the nineteenth century. He has altered the proportions
in the Wordsworth legend, and made the youth of the poet as long in the
telling as his age. This was all the more necessary because various
biographers have followed too closely the example of the official
_Life_, the materials for which Wordsworth entrusted to his nephew, the
Bishop, who naturally regarded Wordsworth, the pillar of Church and
State, as a more eminent and laudable figure than Wordsworth, the young
Revolutionary. Whether the Bishop deliberately hushed up the fact that,
during his early travels in France, Wordsworth fell in love with an
aristocratic French lady who bore him an illegitimate child, I do not
know. Professor Harper, taking a more ruthless view of the duties of a
biographer, now relates the story, though in a rather vague and
mysterious way. One wishes that, having told us so much, he had told us
a little more. Even with all we know about the early life of Wordsworth,
we are still left guessing at his portrait rather than with a clear idea
of it. He was a figure in his youth, a character in his old age. The
character we know down to the roots of his hair. But the figure remains
something of a secret.

As a poet, Wordsworth may almost be called the first of the democrats.
He brought into literature a fresh vision--a vision bathing the world
and its inhabitants in a strange and revolutionary light. He was the
first great poet of equality and fraternity in the sense that he
portrayed the lives of common country, people in their daily
surroundings as faithfully as though they had been kings. It would be
absurd to suggest that there are no anticipations of this democratic
spirit in English literature from Chaucer down to Burns, but Wordsworth,
more than any other English writer, deserves the credit of having
emancipated the poor man into being a fit subject for noble poetry. How
revolutionary a change this was it is difficult to realize at the
present day, but Jeffrey's protest against it in the _Edinburgh Review_
in 1802 enables one to realize to what a degree the poor man was
regarded as an outcast from literature when Wordsworth was young. In the
course of an attack on _Lyrical Ballads_ Jeffrey wrote:--

     The love, or grief, or indignation, of an enlightened and refined
     character is not only expressed in a different language, but is in
     radically and obviously distinct.... The poor and vulgar may
     apprehend, by any sentiments that are peculiar to their condition,
     and still less by any language that is peculiar to it.

When one takes sides with Wordsworth against Jeffrey on this matter it
is not because one regards Wordsworth as a portrait-painter without
faults. His portraits are marred in several cases by the intrusion of
his own personality with its "My good man" and "My little man" air. His
human beings have a way of becoming either lifeless or absurd when they
talk. _The Leech-Gatherer_ and _The Idiot Boy_ are not the only poems of
Wordsworth that are injured by the insertion of banal dialogue. It is as
though there were, despite his passion for liberty, equality, and
fraternity, a certain gaucherie in his relations with other human
beings, and he were at his happiest as a solitary. His nature, we may
grant, was of mixed aspects, but, even as early as the 1807 _Poems in
Two Volumes_ had he not expressed his impatience of human society in a

    I am not one who much or oft delight
    To season my fireside with personal talk--
    Of friends, who live within an easy walk,
    Or neighbours, daily, weekly, in _my_ sight:
    And, for my chance-acquaintance, ladies bright,
    Sons, mothers, maidens withering on the stalk,
    These all wear out of me, like forms, with chalk
    Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast-night.

    Better than such discourse doth silence long,
    Long, barren silence, square with my desire;
    To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,
    In the loved presence of my cottage fire,
    And listen to the flapping of the flame,
    Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon human
beings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth. He knew the birds of
the countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better than
the children. He noticed how light plays like a spirit upon all living
things. He heard every field and valley echoing with new songs. He saw
the daffodils dancing by the lake, the green linnet dancing among the
hazel leaves, and the young lambs bounding, as he says in an unexpected
line, "as to the tabor's sound," and his heart danced to the same music,
like the heart of a mystic caught up in holy rapture. Here rather than
in men did he discover the divine speech. His vision of men was always
troubled by his consciousness of duties. Nature came to him as a
liberator into spiritual existence. Not that he ceased to be a
philosopher in his reveries. He was never the half-sensual kind of
mystic. He was never a sensualist in anything, indeed. It is significant
that he had little sense of smell--the most sensual of the senses. It
is, perhaps, because of this that he is comparatively so roseless a

But what an ear he had, what a harvesting eye! One cannot read _The
Prelude_ or _The Ode_ or _Tintern Abbey_ without feeling that seldom can
there have been a poet with a more exquisite capacity for the enjoyment
of joyous things. In his profounder moments he reaches the very sources
of joy as few poets have done. He attracts many readers like a prospect
of cleansing and healing streams.

And he succeeds in being a great poet in two manners. He is a great poet
in the grand tradition of English literature, and he is a great poet in
his revolutionary simplicity. _The Idiot Boy_, for all its banalities,
is as immortal as _The Ode_, and _The Solitary Reaper_ will live side by
side with the great sonnets while the love of literature endures. While
we read these poems we tell ourselves that it is almost irrelevant to
mourn the fact that the man who wrote them gave up his faith in humanity
for faith in Church and State. His genius survives in literature: it was
only his courage as a politician that perished. At the same time, he
wished to impress himself upon the world as a politician even more
perhaps than as a poet. And, indeed, if he had died at the age at which
Byron died, his record in politics would have been as noble as his
record in poetry. Happily or unhappily, however, he lived on, a worse
politician and a worse poet. His record as both has never before been
set forth with the same comprehensiveness as in Professor Harper's
important and, after one has ploughed through some heavy pages,
fascinating volumes.


"Just for a handful of silver he left us." Browning was asked if he
really meant the figure in _The Lost Leader_ for Wordsworth, and he
admitted that, though it was not a portrait, he had Wordsworth vaguely
in his mind. We do not nowadays believe that Wordsworth changed his
political opinions in order to be made distributor of stamps for the
county of Westmoreland, or even (as he afterwards became in addition)
for the county of Cumberland. Nor did Browning believe this. He did
believe, however, that Wordsworth was a turncoat, a renegade--a poet who
began as the champion of liberty and ended as its enemy. This is the
general view, and it seems to me to be unassailable.

Mr. A.V. Dicey, in a recent book, _The Statesmanship of Wordsworth_,
attempts to portray Wordsworth as a sort of early Mazzini--one who "by
many years anticipated, thought out, and announced the doctrine of
Nationalism, which during at least fifty years of the nineteenth century
(1820-70) governed or told upon the foreign policy of every European
country." I think he exaggerates, but it cannot be denied that
Wordsworth said many wise things about nationality, and that he showed a
true liberal instinct in the French wars, siding with the French in the
early days while they were fighting for liberty, and afterwards siding
against them when they were fighting for Napoleonic Imperialism.
Wordsworth had not yet abandoned his ardour for liberty when, in 1809,
he published his _Tract on the Convention of Cintra._ Those who accuse
him of apostasy have in mind not his "Tract" and his sonnets of
war-time, but the later lapse of faith which resulted in his opposing
Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill, and in his sitting down
seriously to write sonnets in favour in capital punishment.

He began with an imagination which emphasized the natural goodness of
man: he ended with an imagination which emphasized the natural evil of
man. He began with faith in liberty; he ended with faith in restraint.
Mr. Dicey admits much of the case against the later Wordsworth, but his
very defence of the poet is in itself an accusation. He contends, for
instance, that "it was natural that a man, who had in his youth seen
face to face the violence of the revolutionary struggle in France,
should have felt the danger of the Reform Act becoming the commencement
of anarchy and revolution in England." Natural it may have been, but
none the less it was a right-about-turn of the spirit. Wordsworth had
ceased to believe in liberty.

There is very little evidence, indeed, that in his later years
Wordsworth remained interested in liberty at all. The most important
evidence of the kind is that of Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, author of
_The Purgatory of Suicides_, who visited him in 1846 after serving a
term in prison on a charge of sedition. Wordsworth received him and said
to him: "You Chartists are right: you have a right to votes, only you
take the wrong way to obtain them. You must avoid physical violence."
Referring to the conversation, Mr. Dicey comments:--

     At the age of seventy-six the spirit of the old revolutionist and
     of the friend of the Girondins was still alive. He might not think
     much of the Whigs, but within four years of his death Wordsworth
     was certainly no Tory.

There is no reason, however, why we should trouble our heads over the
question whether at the age of seventy-six Wordsworth was a Tory or not.
It is only by the grace of God that any man escapes being a Tory long
before that. What is of interest to us is his attitude in the days of
his vitality, not of his senility. In regard to this, I agree that it
would be grossly unfair to accuse him of apostasy, simply because he at
first hailed the French Revolution as the return of the Golden Age--

    Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very heaven!

--and ten or fifteen years later was to be found gloomily prophesying
against a premature peace with Napoleon. One cannot be sure that, if one
had been living in those days oneself, one's faith in the Revolution
would have survived the September massacres and Napoleon undiminished.
Those who had at first believed that the reign of righteousness had
suddenly come down from Heaven must have been shocked to find that human
nature was still red in tooth and claw in the new era. Not that the
massacres immediately alienated Wordsworth. In the year following them
he wrote in defence of the French Revolution, and incidentally
apologized for the execution of King Louis. "If you had attended," he
wrote in his unpublished _Apology for the French Revolution_ in 1793,
"to the history of the French Revolution as minutely as its importance
in that monstrous situation which rendered him unaccountable before a
human tribunal." In _The Prelude_, too (which, it will be remembered,
though it was written early, Wordsworth left to be published after his
death), we are given a perfect answer to those who would condemn the
French Revolution, or any similar uprising, on account of its incidental

                    When a taunt
    Was taken up by scoffers in their pride,
    Saying, "Behold the harvest that we reap
    From popular government and equality,"
    I clearly saw that neither these nor aught
    Of wild belief engrafted on their views
    By false philosophy had caused the woe,
    But a terrific reservoir of guilt
    And ignorance filled up from age to age.
    That would no longer hold its loathsome charge,
    But burst and spread in deluge through the land.

Mr. Dicey insists that Wordsworth's attitude in regard to the horrors
of September proves "the statesmanlike calmness and firmness of his
judgment." Wordsworth was hardly calm, but he remained on the side of
France with sufficiently firm enthusiasm to pray for the defeat of his
own countrymen in the war of 1793. He describes, in _The Prelude_, how
he felt at the time in an English country church:--

    When, in the congregation bending all
    To their great Father, prayers were offered up,
    Or praises for our country's victories;
    And, 'mid the simple worshippers, perchance
    I only, like an uninvited guest
    Whom no one owned, sate silent, shall I add,
    Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come.

The faith that survived the massacres, however, could not survive
Napoleon. Henceforth Wordsworth began to write against France in the
name of Nationalism and Liberty.

He now becomes a political thinker--a great political thinker, in the
judgment of Mr. Dicey. He sets forth a political philosophy--the
philosophy of Nationalism. He grasped the first principle of Nationalism
firmly, which is, that nations should be self-governed, even if they are
governed badly. He saw that the nation which is oppressed from within is
in a far more hopeful condition than the nation which is oppressed from
without. In his _Tract_ he wrote:--

     The difference between inbred oppression and that which is from
     without [i.e. imposed by foreigners] is _essential_; inasmuch as
     the former does not exclude, from the minds of the people, the
     feeling of being self-governed; does not imply (as the latter does,
     when patiently submitted to) an abandonment of the first duty
     imposed by the faculty of reason.

And he went on:--

     If a country have put on chains of its own forging; in the name of
     virtue, let it be conscious that to itself it is accountable: let
     it not have cause to look beyond its own limits for reproof:
     and--in the name of humanity--if it be self-depressed, let it have
     its pride and some hope within itself. The poorest peasant, in an
     unsubdued land, feels this pride. I do not appeal to the example of
     Britain or of Switzerland, for the one is free, and the other
     lately was free (and, I trust, will ere long be so again): but talk
     with the Swede; and you will see the joy he finds in these
     sensations. With him animal courage (the substitute for many and
     the friend of all the manly virtues) has space to move in: and is
     at once elevated by his imagination, and softened by his
     affections: it is invigorated also; for the whole courage of his
     country is in his breast.

That is an admirable statement of the Liberal faith. Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman was putting the same truth in a sentence when he said
that good government was no substitute for self-government. Wordsworth,
however, was not an out-and-out Nationalist. He did not regard the
principles of Nationalism as applicable to all nations alike, small and
great. He believed in the "balance of power," in which "the smaller
states must disappear, and merge in the large nations of widespread
language." He desired national unity for Germany and for Italy (which
was in accordance with the principles of Nationalism), but he also
blessed the union of Ireland with Great Britain (which was a violation
of the principles of Nationalism). He introduced "certain limitations,"
indeed, into the Nationalist creed, which enable even an Imperialist
like Mr. Dicey to look like a kind of Nationalist.

At the same time, though he acquiesced in the dishonour of the Irish
Union, his patriotism never became perverted into Jingoism. He regarded
the war between England and France, not as a war between angel and
devil, but as a war between one sinner doing his best and another sinner
doing his worst. He was gloomy as a Hebrew prophet in his summoning of
England to a change of heart in a sonnet written in 1803:--

    England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean
    Thy heart from its emasculating food;
    The truth should now be better understood;
    Old things have been unsettled; we have seen
    Fair seed-time, better harvest might have been
    But for thy trespasses; and, at this day,
    If for Greece, Egypt, India, Africa,
    Aught good were destined, thou wouldst step between.
    England! all nations in this charge agree:
    But worse, more ignorant in love and hate,
    Far, far more abject is thine Enemy:
    Therefore the wise pray for thee, though the freight
    Of thy offences be a heavy weight:
    Oh grief, that Earth's best hopes rest all with Thee!

All this means merely that the older Wordsworth grew, the more he became
concerned with the duties rather than the rights of man. The
revolutionary creed seems at times to involve the belief that, if you
give men their rights, they will perform their duties as a necessary
consequence. The Conservative creed, on the other hand, appears to be
based on the theory that men, as a whole, are scarcely fit for rights
but must be kept to their duties with a strong hand. Neither belief is
entirely true. As Mazzini saw, the French Revolution failed because it
emphasized the rights so disproportionately in comparison with the
duties of man. Conservatism fails, on the other hand, because its
conception of duty inevitably ceases before long to be an ethical
conception: duty in the mouth of reactionaries usually means simply
obedience to one's "betters." The melancholy sort of moralist frequently
hardens into a reactionary of this sort. Burke and Carlyle and
Ruskin--all of them blasphemed the spirit of liberty in the name of
duty. Mr. Dicey contends that Burke's and Wordsworth's political
principles remained essentially consistent throughout. They assuredly
did nothing of the sort. Burke's principles during the American War and
his principles at the time of the French Revolution were divided from
each other like crabbed age and youth. Burke lost his beliefs as he did
his youth. And so did Wordsworth. It seems to me rather a waste of time
to insist at all costs on the consistency of great men. The great
question is, not whether they were consistent, but when they were right.
Wordsworth was in the main right in his enthusiasm for the French
Revolution, and he was in the main right in his hatred of Napoleonism.
But, when once the Napoleonic Wars were over, he had no creed left for
mankind. He lived on till 1850, but he ceased to be able to say anything
that had the ancient inspiration. He was at his greatest an inspired
child of the Revolution. He learned from France that love of liberty
which afterwards led him to oppose France. Speaking of those who, like
himself, had changed in their feelings towards France, he wrote:--

     Though there was a shifting in temper of hostility in their minds
     as far as regarded persons, they only combated the same enemy
     opposed to them under a different shape; and that enemy was the
     spirit of selfish tyranny and lawless ambition.

That is a just defence. But the undeniable fact is that, after that
time, Wordsworth ceased to combat the spirit of selfish tyranny and
lawless ambition as he once had done. There is no need to blame him:
also there is no need to defend him. He was human; he was tired; he was
growing old. The chief danger of a book like Mr. Dicey's is that, in
accepting its defence of Wordsworth's maturity, we may come to disparage
his splendid youth. Mr. Dicey's book, however, is exceedingly
interesting in calling attention to the great part politics may play in
the life of a poet. Wordsworth said, in 1833, that "although he was
known to the world only as a poet, he had given twelve hours' thought to
the condition and prospects of society, for one to poetry." He did not
retire into a "wise passiveness" as regards the world's affairs until he
had written some of the greatest political literature--and, in saying
this, I am thinking of his sonnets rather than of his political
prose--that has appeared in England since the death of Milton.




Sir Sidney Colvin deserves praise for the noble architecture of the
temple he has built in honour of Keats. His great book, _John Keats: His
Life and Poetry; His Friends, Critics, and After-fame_, is not only a
temple, indeed, but a museum. Sir Sidney has brought together here the
whole of Keats's world, or at least all the relics of his world that the
last of a band of great collectors has been able to recover; and in the
result we can accompany Keats through the glad and sad and mad and bad
hours of his short and marvellous life as we have never been able to do
before under the guidance of a single biographer. We are still left in
the dark, it is true, as to Keats's race and descent. Whether Keats's
father came to London from Cornwall or not, Sir Sidney has not been able
to decide on the rather shaky evidence that has been put forward. If it
should hereafter turn out that Keats was a Cornishman at one remove,
Matthew Arnold's conjecture as to the "Celtic element" in him, as in
other English poets, may revive in the general esteem.

In the present state of our knowledge, however, we must be content to
accept Keats as a Londoner without ancestors beyond the father who was
head-ostler at the sign of the "Swan and Hoop," Finsbury Pavement, and
married his master's daughter. It was at the stable at the "Swan and
Hoop"--not a public-house, by the way, but a livery-stable--that Keats
was prematurely born at the end of October 1795. He was scarcely nine
years old when his father was killed by a fall from a horse. He was only
fourteen when his mother (who had re-married unhappily and then been
separated from her husband) died, a victim of chronic rheumatism and
consumption. It is from his mother that Keats seems to have inherited
his impetuous and passionate nature. There is the evidence of a certain
wholesale tea-dealer--the respectability of whose trade may have
inclined him to censoriousness--to the effect that, both as girl and
woman, she "was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her later
years she fell into loose ways, and was no credit to the family." That
she had other qualities besides those mentioned by the tea-dealer is
shown by the passionate affection that existed between her and her son
John. "Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be kept quiet
during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her
door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in." As she lay dying,
"he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody
to give her medicine, or even cook her food, but himself, and read
novels to her in her intervals of ease." The Keats children were
fortunately not left penniless. Their grandfather, the proprietor of the
livery-stable, had bequeathed a fortune of £13,000, a little of which
was spent on sending Keats to a good school till the age of sixteen, and
afterwards enabled him to attend Guy's Hospital as a medical student.

It is almost impossible to credit the accepted story that he passed all
his boyhood without making any attempt at writing poetry. "He did not
begin to write," says Sir Sidney Colvin, "till he was near eighteen." If
this is so, one feels all the more grateful to his old schoolfellow,
Cowden Clarke, who lent him _The Faëry Queene_, with a long list of
other books, and in doing so presented him with the key that unlocked
the unsuspected treasure of his genius. There is only one person,
indeed, in all the Keats circle to whom one is more passionately
grateful than to Cowden Clarke: that is Fanny Brawne. Keats no doubt had
laboured to some purpose--occasionally, to fine purpose--with his genius
before the autumn of 1818, when he met Fanny Brawne for the first time.
None the less, had he died before that date, he would have been
remembered in literature not as a marvellous original artist, but rather
as one of those "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" among whom Shelley
surprisingly placed him. Fanny Brawne may (or may not) have been the bad
fairy of Keats as a man. She was unquestionably his good fairy as a

This is the only matter upon which one is seriously disposed to quarrel
with Sir Sidney Colvin as a biographer. He does not emphasize as he
ought the debt we are under to Fanny Brawne as the intensifier of
Keats's genius--the "minx," as Keats irritably called her, who
transformed him in a few months from a poet of still doubtful fame into
a master and an immortal. The attachment, Sir Sidney thinks, was a
misfortune for him, though he qualifies this by adding that "so probably
under the circumstances must any passion for a woman have been." Well,
let us test this "misfortune" by its consequences. The meeting with
Fanny took place, as I have said, in the autumn of 1818. During the
winter Keats continued to write _Hyperion_, which he seems already to
have begun. In January 1819 he wrote _The Eve of St. Agnes_. During the
spring of that year, he wrote the _Ode to Psyche_, the _Ode on a Grecian
Urn_, the _Ode to a Nightingale_, and _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. In the
autumn he finished _Lamia_, and wrote the _Ode to Autumn_. To the same
year belongs the second greatest of his sonnets, _Bright star, would I
were steadfast as thou art_. In other words, practically all the fine
gold of Keats's work was produced in the months in which his passion for
Fanny Brawne was consuming him as with fire. His greatest poems we
clearly owe to that heightened sense of beauty which resulted from his
translation into a lover. It seems to me a treachery to Keats's memory
to belittle a woman who was at least the occasion of such a passionate
expenditure of genius. Sir Sidney Colvin does his best to be fair to
Fanny, but his presentation of the story of Keats's love for her will, I
am afraid, be regarded by the long line of her disparagers as an
endorsement of their blame.

I can understand the dislike of Fanny Brawne on the part of those who
dislike Keats and all his works. But if we accept Keats and _The Eve of
St. Agnes_, we had better be honest and also accept Fanny, who inspired
them. Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems belong
to the literature of the higher sensualism. They reveal him as a man not
altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who
was able to transmute it into perfect literature. He seems to have
admired women vulgarly as creatures whose hands were waiting to be
squeezed, rather than as equal human beings; the eminent exception to
this being his sister-in-law, Georgiana. His famous declaration of
independence of them--that he would rather give them a sugar-plum than
his time--was essentially a cynicism in the exhausted-Don-Juan mood.
Hence, Keats was almost doomed to fall in love with provocation rather
than with what the Victorians called "soul." His destiny was not to be a
happy lover, but the slave of a "minx." It was not a slavery without
dignity, however. It had the dignity of tragedy. Sir Sidney Colvin
regrets that the love-letters of Keats to Fanny were ever published. It
would be as reasonable, in my opinion, to regret the publication of _La
Belle Dame sans Merci_. _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ says in literature
merely what the love-letters say in autobiography. The love-letters,
indeed, like the poem, affect us as great literature does. They
unquestionably take us down into the depths of suffering--those depths
in which tortured souls cry out almost inarticulately in their anguish.
The torture of the dying lover, as he sails for Italy and leaves Fanny,
never to see her again, has almost no counterpart in biographical
literature. "The thought of leaving Miss Brawne," he writes to Brown
from Yarmouth, "is beyond everything horrible--the sense of darkness
coming over me--I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing." And
when he reaches Naples he writes to the same friend:--

     I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God!
     Everything that I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes
     cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I
     see her--I hear her.... O that I could be buried near where she
     To see her handwriting would break my heart--even to hear of her
     anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear.

Sir Sidney Colvin does not attempt to hide Keats's love-story away in a
corner. Where he goes wrong, it seems to me, is in his failure to
realize that this love-story was the making of Keats as a man of genius.
Had Sir Sidney fully grasped the part played by Fanny Brawne as, for
good or evil, the presiding genius of Keats as a poet, he would, I
fancy, have found a different explanation of the changes introduced into
the later version of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. Sir Sidney is all in
favour--and there is something to be said for his preference--of the
earlier version, which begins:--

    O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
      Alone and palely loitering!

But he does not perceive the reasons that led Keats to alter this in the
version he published in Leigh Hunt's _Indicator_ to:--

    Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,

and so on. Sir Sidney thinks that this and other changes, "which are
Hunt's suggestion, and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or
indifference." To accuse Hunt of wishing to alter "knight-at-arms" to
"wretched wight" seems to me unwarrantable guessing. Surely a much more
likely explanation is that Keats, who in this poem wrote his own
biography as an unfortunate lover, came in a realistic mood to dislike
"knight-at-arms" as a too romantic image of himself. He decided, I
conjecture, that "wretched wight" was a description nearer the bitter
truth. Hence his emendation. The other alterations also seem to me to
belong to Keats rather than to Hunt. This does not mean that the
"knight-at-arms" version is not also beautiful. But, in spite of this, I
trust the Delegates of the Oxford University Press will not listen to
Sir Sidney Colvin's appeal to banish the later version from their
editions of Keats. Every edition of Keats ought to contain both versions
just as it ought to contain both versions of _Hyperion_.

Nothing that I have written will be regarded, I trust, as depreciating
the essential excellence, power, and (in its scholarly way) even the
greatness of Sir Sidney Colvin's book. But a certain false emphasis here
and there, an intelligible prejudice in favour of believing what is good
of his subject, has left his book almost too ready to the hand of those
who cannot love a man of genius without desiring to "respectabilize"
him. Sir Sidney sees clearly enough the double nature of Keats--his
fiery courage, shown in his love of fighting as a schoolboy, his
generosity, his virtue of the heart, on the one hand, and his luxurious
love of beauty, his tremulous and swooning sensitiveness in the presence
of nature and women, his morbidness, his mawkishness, his fascination as
by serpents, on the other. But in the resultant portrait, it is a too
respectable and virile Keats that emerges. Keats was more virile as a
man than is generally understood. He does not owe his immortality to his
virility, however. He owes it to his servitude to golden images, to his
citizenship of the world of the senses, to his bondage to physical love.
Had he lived longer he might have invaded other worlds. His recasting of
_Hyperion_ opens with a cry of distrust in the artist who is content to
live in the little world of his art. His very revulsion against the
English of Milton was a revulsion against the dead language of formal
beauty. But it is in formal beauty--the formal beauty especially of the
_Ode on a Grecian Urn_, which has never been surpassed in
literature--that his own achievement lies. He is great among the pagans,
not among the prophets. Unless we keep this clearly in mind our praise
of him will not be appreciation. It will be but a sounding funeral
speech instead of communion with a lovely and broken spirit, the
greatest boast of whose life was: "I have loved the principle of beauty
in all things."


Matthew Arnold has often been attacked for his essay on Shelley. His
essay on Keats, as a matter of fact, is much less sympathetic and
penetrating. Here, more than anywhere else in his work, he seems to be a
professor with whiskers drinking afternoon tea and discoursing on
literature to a circle of schoolgirls. It is not that Matthew Arnold
under-estimated Keats. "He is with Shakespeare," he declared; and in
another sentence: "In what we call natural magic, he ranks with
Shakespeare." One may disagree with this--for in natural magic Keats
does not rank even with Shelley--and, at the same time, feel that
Matthew Arnold gives Keats too little rather than too much appreciation.
He divorced Keats's poetry too gingerly from Keats's life. He did not
sufficiently realize the need for understanding all that passion and
courage and railing and ecstasy of which the poems are the expression.
He was a little shocked; he would have liked to draw a veil; he did not
approve of a young man who could make love in language so unlike the
measured ardour of one of Miss Austen's heroes. The impression left by
the letters to Fanny Brawne, he declared, was "unpleasing." After
quoting one of the letters, he goes on to comment:--

     One is tempted to say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter
     of a surgeon's apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment
     without the training which teaches us that we must put some
     the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice, which one might

Applied to the letter which Arnold had just quoted there could not be a
more foolish criticism. Keats was dogged by a curious vulgarity (which
produced occasional comic effects in his work), but his self-abandonment
was not vulgar. It may have been in a sense immoral: he was an artist
who practised the philosophy of exquisite moments long before Pater
wrote about it. He abandoned himself to the sensations of love and the
sensations of an artist like a voluptuary. The best of his work is
day-dreams of love and art. The degree to which his genius fed itself
upon art and day-dreams of art is suggested by the fact that the most
perfect of his early poems, written at the age of twenty, was the sonnet
on Chapman's Homer, and that the most perfect of his later poems was the
_Ode on a Grecian Urn_. His magic was largely artistic magic, not
natural magic. He writes about Pan and the nymphs, but we do not feel
that they were shapes of earth and air to him, as they were to Shelley;
rather they seem like figures copied out of his friends' pictures.
Consider, for example, the picture of a nymph who appeared to

    It was a nymph uprising to the breast
    In the fountain's pebbly margin, and she stood
    'Mong lilies, like the youngest of her brood.
    To him her dripping hand she softly kist,
    And anxiously began to plait and twist

The gestures of the nymph are as ludicrous as could be found in an
Academy or Salon picture. Keats's human or quasi-human beings are seldom
more than decorations, but this is a commonplace decoration. The figures
in _The Eve of St. Agnes_ and the later narratives are a part of the
general beauty of the poems; but even there they are made, as it were,
to match the furniture. It is the same in all his best poems. Keats's
imagination lived in castles, and he loved the properties, and the men
and women were among the properties. We may forget the names of Porphyro
and Madeline, but we do not forget the background of casement and arras
and golden dishes and beautiful sensual things against which we see
them, charming figures of love-sickness. Similarly, in _Lamia_, we may
remember the name of the serpent-woman's lover with difficulty; but who
can forget the colours of her serpent-skin or the furnishing of her
couch and of her palace in Corinth:--

    That purple-lined palace of sweet sin?

In Keats every palace has a purple lining.

So much may be said in definition of Keats's genius. It was essentially
an aesthetic genius. It anticipated both William Morris and Oscar Wilde.
There is in Keats a passion for the luxury of the world such as we do
not find in Wordsworth or Shelley. He had not that bird-like quality of
song which they had--that happiness to be alive and singing between the
sky and the green earth. He looked on beautiful things with the intense
devotion of the temple-worshipper rather than with the winged pleasure
of the great poets. He was love-sick for beauty as Porphyro for
Madeline. His attitude to beauty--the secret and immortal beauty--is one
of "love shackled with vain-loving." It is desire of an almost bodily
kind. Keats's work, indeed, is in large measure simply the beautiful
expression of bodily desire, or of something of the same nature as
bodily desire. His conception of love was almost entirely physical. He
was greedy for it to the point of green-sickness. His intuition told him
that passion so entirely physical had in it something fatal. Love in his
poems is poisonous and secret in its beauty. It is passion for a Lamia,
for La Belle Dame sans Merci. Keats's ecstasies were swooning ecstasies.
They lacked joy. It is not only in the _Ode to a Nightingale_ that he
seems to praise death more than life. This was temperamental with him.
He felt the "cursed spite" of things as melancholily as Hamlet did. He
was able to dream a world nearer his happiness than this world of
dependence and church bells and "literary jabberers"; and he could come
to no terms except with his fancy. I do not mean to suggest that he
despised the beauty of the earth. Rather he filled his eyes with it:--

                Hill-flowers running wild
    In pink and purple chequer--


    The cloudy rack slow journeying in the West,
    Like herded elephants.

But the simple pleasure in colours and shapes grows less in his later
poems. It becomes overcast. His great poems have the intensity and
sorrow of a farewell.

It would be absurd, however, to paint Keats as a man without vitality,
without pugnacity, without merriment. His brother declared that "John
Ghost as Johnny Keats"--the Johnny Keats who had allowed himself to be
"snuffed out by an article." As a schoolboy he had been fond of
fighting, and as a man he had his share of militancy. He had a quite
healthy sense of humour, too--not a subtle sense, but at least
sufficient to enable him to regard his work playfully at times, as when
he commented on an early version of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_
containing the lines:--

    And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
      With kisses four.

"Why four kisses?" he writes to his brother:--

     Why four kisses--you will say--why four? Because I wish to restrain
     the headlong impetuosity of my Muse--she would have fain said
     "score" without hurting the rhyme--but we must temper the
     imagination, as the critics say, with judgment. I was obliged to
     speak truly I think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said
     seven, there would have been three and-a-half apiece--a very
     awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.

That was written nearly a year after the famous _Quarterly_ article on
_Endymion_, in which the reviewer had so severely taken to task "Mr.
senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)." It suggests that
Keats retained at least a certain share of good spirits, in spite of the
_Quarterly_ and Fanny Brawne and the approach of death. His observation,
too, was often that of a spirited common-sense realist rather than an
aesthete, as in his first description of Fanny Brawne:--

     She is about my height--with a fine style and countenance of the
     lengthened sort--she wants sentiment in every feature--she manages
     to make her hair look well--her nostrils are fine--though a little
     monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling
     style, and shall decline any more of it.

the second, not among the first poets.




disciples had the pleasure of feeling like persons initiated into
conflicting interpretations. He puzzled and exasperated even intelligent
hippopotamus picking up a pea.

Certainly he laboured over trifles as though he were trying to pile
it urged that he was the supreme incarnation of the Nonconformist
conscience, perpetually concerned with infinitesimal details of conduct.


     receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a

definitely marked to leave any of his work flavourless. His work
reading Henry James an exciting experience.

Knew_? Certainly, those autobiographical volumes, _A Small Boy and
most wonderful of the author's novels, are pervaded by exquisite
affections which to a pitiless nature would have been impossible.

Henry James is even sufficiently human to take sides with his

criticism to compare with his _Notes on Novelists_ has been published in
brought his critical and analytical faculty to bear upon human beings.
and Stevenson and even of Zola.

conscience or vicarious sacrifice" of a styleless literary age is the

society in which both speech and action have to be sifted with
scientific care before they will yield their grain of motive. The
the distinctive features of his genius.

outstanding character in his books. That fine and humorous collector of
special character, and will attract tiny but enthusiastic companies of
readers to them for many years to come.


Henry James's amanuensis, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, wrote an article a
"Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossibly
disconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsive
the construction until the whole thing was clearly before his mind's
compared with Zola's habit of writing long letters to himself about
overflow into talk of an artist's amorous plan."

Almost the chief interest of Henry James's two posthumous novels is the
rule, these preliminary soliloquies ran to about thirty thousand words,
ghosts--whether subjective or objective in their reality does not
he drew in long breaths of appreciation during his almost lifelong
wanderings in this hemisphere. For it is important to remember that

     However else this air might have been described it was signally not
     the light of freshness, and suggested as little as possible the
     element in which the first children of nature might have begun to
     take notice. Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions, had
     he might have seen at the theatre.

naturalist spying for patient hours upon birds in the hope of
service and charged with accumulated messages."

     wonder-working effigy of Mother and Son.

though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changeling
moment, the author announces:--

     possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the
     muchness with which they threaten me.

At a moment of less illumination he writes:--

     another admirable twist.

that solve his difficulties. And what tiny little animals he sometimes

     brass knocker.

moves, he cries to himself:--


At another stage in the story, he comments:--

     All that is feasible and convincing; rather beautiful to do being
     what I mean.

At yet another stage:--

     little I shall straighten everything out.

He discusses with himself the question whether Ralph Pendrel, in the
portrait, and confides to himself:--

     myself be scared, by a momentarily-confused appearance, an


     successive driving in of the successive silver-headed nails at the


     Can't possibly do anything so artistically base.

upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life."
instance, on the name of his heroine:--

     some bright combination with that; the essence of which is a
     is a little too much meaning.

Consciousness in artistry can seldom have descended to minuter details
well as in the greatest things.



     with immediate intensities of appreciation, as I may call the
     muffled accompaniment, for fear of almost indecently overnaming it.

he writes:--

     This doom of inordinate exposure to appearances, aspects, images,
     ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that circumstance in
     a perfect cloud of accompaniments.

museum, almost a museum of _bric-à-brac_. He was enthusiastic about the
illustration of the works of the English novelists.

Again and again in his reminiscences one comes upon evidence that Henry
because "every face was a documentary scrap."

     one's elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittance of

from Morley's Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of
social order in which every one wasn't hurled straight, with the
with cross-references.

     glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of
     decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures here and there,
     whether animate or no, quite groan under the accumulation and the
     weight of.

reminiscences. He is constantly describing his raptures: he only
occasionally describes the thing he was rapturous about. Almost all he
circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same breath with
Mr. Swinburne."

one of the most enrapturing things in the literature of autobiography.
being introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed about
accident in the West Indies, or, as Henry James characteristically
describes it:--

     considerably compromised.

air after his dash in quest of them":--

     back into our conveyance.

victim could not but enjoy it:--

     with visitor, or visitor with anything but the convenience of his
     ridding them of an unconsidered trifle; grudging, as they so
     justifiedly did, the impingement of such matters on their
     consciousness. The vivid demonstration of one's failure to
     penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which
     could scarcely have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom.

his guest:--

     He struck me as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge.

description of Tennyson on an occasion on which the ineffable Mrs.
Greville quoted some of his own verse to him:--

     He took these things with a gruff philosophy, and could always
     mint, since it _was_ a question of his genius.

Henry James ever retained a beautiful detachment of intellect, even



no more detestable sign of literary humbug than the pretence that
Browning was an optimist simply because he did not experience sorrow and
_Robert Browning: How to Know Him:--_

     should eat only what one really enjoyed, desire being the
     He would make a whole meal off mayonnaise."

Upon which the American professor comments with ingenuous humour of a
kind rare in professors in this hemisphere:--

     It is pleasant to remember that Emerson, the other great optimist
     of the century, used to eat pie for breakfast.

but, as Professor Phelps insists, Browning faced greater terrors than
through the virtues and the vices with the magnificent boldness of
else in English poetry outside the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer is
there such a varied and humorous gallery of portraits. Landor's often
quoted comparison of Browning with Chaucer is a piece of perfect and
essential criticism:--

          Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
    No man hath walked along our roads with step
    So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
    So varied in discourse.

a passion for living in other people's experiences. So impartially and
human nature that occasionally one has heard people speculating as to
forgetfulness of Browning's own answer, in _How it Strikes a
Contemporary_, to all such calumnies on poets.

murderer, lives in our imaginations as brightly as the idealistic lover
of Cristina.

The dramatic lyric and monologue in which Browning set forth the
varieties of passionate experience was an art-form of immense
the energy of imagination which is demanded of them before they are
astonished by its insight even more than by its recurrent banality.

     The commercial worth of _Pauline_ was exactly zero.


     that excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular
     examples of Heloise and Abelard, Aucassin and Nicolette, Paul and


     restrain him. Nothing is more characteristic of the youthful folly
     of aged folk than their impatient resentment of proffered hygienic

Even the interpretations of the poems sometimes take one's breath away,
as when, discussing _The Lost Mistress_, Professor Phelps observes that
the lover:--

     awkward situation easier for the girl by small talk about the
     sparrows and the leaf-buds.

When one has marvelled one's fill at the professor's phrases and
misunderstandings, however, one is compelled to admit that he has
written what is probably the best popular introduction to Browning in

Professor Phelps's book is one of those rare essays in popular criticism
commentary. It contains more than fifty complete poems of Browning
allowed as far as possible to be his own interpreter.

At the outset Professor Phelps quotes in full _Transcendentalism_ and
_How it Strikes a Contemporary_ as Browning's confession of his aims as
an artist. The first of these is Browning's most energetic assertion
that the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than with
philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulling
for the detailed and the concrete. In _Transcendentalism_ he bids a
Boehme with his subtle meanings:--

    Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,
    John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about.

compared with the philosopher of "thoughts":--

    And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
    Over us, under, round us every side,
    Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
    And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all--
    Buries us with a glory, young once more,
    Pouring heaven into this poor house of life.

splendid aestheticism with which he lights up prosaic words and
pedestrian details with beauty.


    Look out if yonder be not day again.
    Rimming the rock-row!


triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile
hands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning's
apprehension and the Tower itself appears:--

    The round squat tower, blind as the fool's heart.


      Came back again for that! before it left,
    The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
      The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
    Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay--

    Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled
      Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears,
      Of all the lost adventurers my peers--
    How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
    And such was fortunate, yet each of old
      Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

    There they stood, ranged along the hillside, met
      To view the last of me, a living frame
      For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
    I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
    Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set.


Christianity with respectability. Some readers are bewildered by his
hatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritual
things. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides in
_Apparent Failure_ than towards the vacillating and respectable lovers
most heroic imagination in contemporary literature. But he does not take
those through which it has but recently passed.



The most masterly piece of literary advertising in modern times was
ecstasies round the image of the golden playboy.

these obsessions and idolatries. Synge was an extraordinary man of
why he has an immensely more enthusiastic following among clever people
than among simple people.

its appeal, satisfying equally the artistic formula of Pater and the

exuberant joy in life so much as from excitement among the incongruities
of a lyric poet.

_The Playboy._

she "is the normal," and that

     Synge, with an originality more absolute than Wordsworth's,
     insisted that his readers should regain their poetic feeling for
     ordinary life; and presented them with Pegeen with the stink of

the last half-sentence leaves one meditating.

that he wrote most beautifully in the first enthusiasm of his discovery
after vitality. He exaggerated everything. He emptied bagfuls of wild
Synge wrote in the noon of his genius.

I cannot understand the special enthusiasm for _The Playboy_ except
form, and with sentimentality substituted for the tolerant but
Mephistophelean malice which Synge threaded into it, the genius and
originality are obvious enough. _The Playboy_ is a marvellous
Synge the immortal poet.



his conscience was also a little troubled because through lack of
poetry is not mere whining and whimpering of genius which occasionally
Swinburne defined the genius of Villon more imaginatively than Stevenson
when he addressed him in a paradoxical line as:

    Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn,

and spoke of his "poor, perfect voice,"

    That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers,

hint like a detached philosopher. Villon may never have achieved the
a jovial roysterer, as Henley makes it seem in his slang
translation--that the _Ballade de bonne Doctrine à ceux de mauvaise Vie_
falls, with its refrain of destiny:

    Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.

And the _Ballade de la Belle Heaulmière aux Filles de Joie_, in which
come, expresses no more joy of living than the dismallest _memento

literature of the nineteenth century. He had consorted with criminals
burglary, highway robbery, selling indulgences and false jewellery,
nearly such villains as our contemporary milk-adulterators and sweaters
dangerous company for an impressionable young man who had never been
which might have been expected to moderate the appeal of wildness and
chaplain of Saint Benoist--

    mon plus que père
    Maistre Guillaume de Villon,
    Qui m'a esté plus doux que mère;

altogether unresponsive to these good influences is shown by his
references to them in his _Grand Testament_, though Stevenson was
done a service to English readers interested in Villon by showing that
Stacpoole does by implication, the cold and beautiful Katherine de
mystery than to sentimentalize like Mr. Stacpoole:--

     she might have saved him from the catastrophe towards which he was
     moving, and which took place in the following December.

Testament_, and skipped from Paris.

Orléans, but there are few facts for a biographer to go upon during this
when Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orléans, for some cause or other,
three months' imprisonment in the pit, he experienced all that
tortured and haunted and old.

Not that he ever entirely resigns his carnality. His only complaint
tragic satires on the population of the tavern in the world's
literature. What more horrible portrait exists in poetry than that of
"la belle Heaulmière" grown old, as she contemplates her beauty turned
name with Villon's:--

    Ordure amons, ordure nous affuyt;
    Nous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuyt,
    En ce bordeau, où tenons nostre estat.

torment through his verse. No one has ever celebrated the inevitable
passing of loveliness in lovelier verse than Villon has done in the
Rossetti has translated the radiant beauty of this ballade into his
of the refrain,

    But where are the snows of yesteryear,

the translation, and you will see the difference between the sincere
Villon's beginning:--

    Dictes-moy où, n'en quel pays,
      Est Flora, la belle Romaine?
    Archipiade, ne Thaïs,
      Qui fut sa cousine germaine?

And here is Rossetti's jaunty English:--

    Tell me now in what hidden way is
      Lady Flora, the lovely Roman?
    Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thaïs,
      Neither of them the fairer woman?

One sees how Rossetti is inclined to romanticize that which is already
prose exactitude. Admittedly, however, translation of Villon is
least, for that intelligent portion of the general public which is
The Villon of Stevenson is little better than a criminal monkey of



him for "rascality" and goes on with characteristic irresponsibility to
damning morally, positively increase one's aesthetic delight."

of £300 a year out of the secret service money from his friend Craggs.

dull, because they are merely the literary exercises of a man
platitudinizing about virtues he did not possess. They have an
irrelevant scrawls which might as readily have been addressed to one

Whitwell Elwin declared that Pope "displayed a complication of
imposture, degradation, and effrontery which can only be paralleled in
correspondence with Wycherley, his contemporaries were amazed that the
used portions of his correspondence with Caryll and published them as
though they had been addressed to Wycherley. Wycherley had remonstrated
with Pope on the extravagant compliments he paid him: Pope had
remonstrated with Caryll on similar grounds. In the Wycherley
correspondence, Pope omits Wycherley's remonstrance to him and publishes

From that time onwards Pope spared no effort in getting his
disreputable actor disguised as a clergyman, to approach Curll, the
elaborate schemes of this kind without ultimately falling under
seriously discrediting Pope.

secretly published his correspondence with Swift and then set up a
wits in each other's company:--

    Pope has the talent well to speak,
      But not to reach the ear;
    His loudest voice is low and weak,
      The Dean too deaf to hear.

    Awhile they on each other look,
      Then different studies choose;
    The Dean sits plodding o'er a book,
      Pope walks and courts the muse.

Wortley Montagu went to Twickenham and became Pope's enemy. The reason
her different aspects agreed as ill with each other--

    As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock;
    Or Sappho at her toilet's greasy task
    With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask;
    So morning insects, that in muck begun,

His relations with his contemporaries were too often begun in
persuaded a publisher to get Dennis to write abusively of Addison's
abusively of Dennis, apparently vindicating Addison but secretly taking
Thus began the maniacal suspicion of Addison, which was expressed with

resent the intrusion of the commentator into the upper regions of
the entertainment. The _Danciad_ without footnotes is one of the
obscurest poems in existence: with footnotes it becomes a perfect epic
us little till we read in a delightful footnote:

     was entreated by him to give him something because he was almost
     famished with hunger, called him a "happy dog."

one of the most incessantly entertaining.

literature richer in the daintiness of malice than the _Epistle to
perfect woman:

    And mistress of herself, though china fall,

portrait in porcelain:

    Narcissa's nature, tolerably mild,
    To make a wash, would hardly stew a child;
    Has even been proved to grant a lover's prayer.
    Now deep in Taylor and the Book of Martyrs,
    Now drinking citron with his Grace and Chartres;
    Now conscience chills her and now passion burns;
    And atheism and religion take their turns;
    A very heathen in the carnal part,
    Yet still a sad, good Christian at the heart.


    Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour,
    Content to dwell in decencies for ever--
    So very reasonable, so unmoved,
    As never yet to love, or to be loved.
    She, while her lover pants upon her breast,
    Can mark the figures on an Indian chest;
    And when she sees her friend in deep despair,
    Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair!...
    Would Chloe know if you're alive or dead?
    She bids her footman put it in her head.
    Chloe is prudent--would you too be wise?
    Then never break your heart when Chloe dies.

passionate without ever ceasing to be witty. Pope has composed a
masterpiece of his vanities and hatreds. The characterizations of
Addison as Atticus, and of Lord Hervey as Sporus:

    Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk--




he did not stop at translating their words. He translated their
after a fantastic world which had been created by Swinburne and the
Parnassians and the old painters and the tellers of the _Arabian

in _Oak and Olive_ and _Brumana_ his spectatorial sensuousness at last
the "traitor pines" which

      sang what life has found
    The falsest of fair tales;

which had murmured of--

               older seas
    That beat on vaster sands,

and of--

    Where blaze the unimaginable flowers.

world from his mediocre version of _God Save the King_.

stirred his imagination from idleness among superficial fancies into a
extravagance with those favourite words and colours and images upon
which Mr. Squire comments:

     frequently in his poems.

Damascus sings of the sea beyond the sea:

                    when no wind breathes or ripple stirs,

in the nature of toys were the images with which Flecker's imagination

"meticulously," or makes his lost mariners say:

    How striking like that boat were we


classical tradition of poetry has been mocked and mutilated by many of
work, one has no alternative but to turn again to those
gorgeously-coloured verses which begin:

    I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep
    Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,
    With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep
    For Famagusta and the hidden sun
    That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;
    And all those ships were certainly so old--
    Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,
    Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
    The pirate Genoese
    Hell-raked them till they rolled
    Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.
    But now through friendly seas they softly run,
    Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green,
    Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.

priest of literature, an honest craftsman with words.



personality sensitive, affectionate, pitiful. There are some persons
biographical, as well as a critical, study.

are a great many facts recorded about him in the letters and
French book a description of Turgenev as a strange figure in the
mind who seemed bewildered by some of the barbarous jests of civilized
men of genius.

of the immense generosity of Turgenev to his contemporaries and rivals,
cannot recover," Turgenev wrote:--


One sometimes wonders how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky could ever have
quarrelled with a friend of so beautiful a character as Turgenev.
them that was intolerant of his almost feminine refinement. They were
And probably Turgenev was as impatient with the faults of their strength
something almost Sadistic in the manner in which Dostoevsky let his
strongly repelled by Dostoevsky's shrieking Pan-Slavism as by his
narrowness with which it has been too often associated.

This refusal was what destroyed his popularity in Russia, in his
truth applied to the portraiture of his contemporaries was felt like an
asked to look at themselves as real people instead of as the
master-pieces of a professional flatterer. When _Fathers and Children_
he wrote,

     sketched, carried it out not only without prejudice, but positively
     with sympathy.

compelled to exhibit numerous crooked features and faults in such a way
enemies. Artistic truth is as different from propagandist truth as
cowardice by uncompromising Radicals and Revolutionaries.... In an
access of self-reproach he once declared that his character was
regards both his own sensations and the sensations of his
_Fathers and Children_, to have regarded himself almost as the first
method to a world seething with ideas and with political and
always needed some groundwork on which I could tread firmly."

misshapenness in Dostoevsky when he praises the characters of Turgenev
menagerie, or damned souls knocking themselves about in the stuffy
curiously ineffectual human beings. He understood the Hamlet in man
his characters are as remarkable for their weakness as their unsuccess!
Turgenev was probably conscious of this pessimism of imagination in
appeal to his countrymen to "conquer their sluggishness, their weakness
With the majority of novelists, women are sexual or sentimental
I have always loved them."



gathered into the complete edition of his works shortly to be published
reasons which have made the writings of this mad Swede matter of
tenderness of soul, but to tenderness of nerves.

Other artists lay hold upon life through an exceptional sensibility.
Strindberg laid hold on life through an exceptional excitability--even
worries until they assumed mountainous proportions. He was the kind of
the unsatisfactoriness of a servant as a scarcely less tremendous evil
exaggeration Strindberg's want of the sense of proportion led him, you
Dream Play._

     My servant left me; my domestic arrangements were upset; within
     taste the whole bitterness of life without knowing why.


     again exactly forty days of fasting and pain had passed. There
     seemed, therefore, to be a secret legislature which promulgates
     clearly defined sentences. I thought of the forty days of the
     fast kept by Moses, Elijah, and Christ.

simply the dramatization of the conflict between man and the irritations
irritations never disappear from sight for long. His obsession by them
Daughter to complain of the dirt:

     THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I dreamed!

     the pot.

     THE DAUGHTER. But what sort of food?



     THE LAWYER. Why didn't you say so?


     sacrifices must be mutual.


     THE LAWYER. And it is expensive.

     THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I thought it!


And the symbolic representation of married life in terms of fish and
cabbage is taken up again a little later:--




     other one's pain.

The agonies and tortures arising from eating cabbage and such things
Strindberg is too anxious to make tragedy out of discomforts instead of
consumed Strindberg's peace of mind.

Strindberg deliberately wrote those words on his banner and held them
sufficiently free from the physical obsessions of sex to preach the
nineteenth century. He must either be praising her as a ministering
against the sins of women rather than subtly analyses and describes them


were hundreds of other little changing crosses, from persecution mania
regarded as entirely miserable. He obviously gets a good deal of
Julia_, "and my pleasure lies in knowing something and learning
inferno into a purgatory.

last achieves the simple faith of a Christian. He originally revolted
from this faith more through irritation than from principle. One feels
significant that we find him in _The Confession of a Fool_ reciting
Longfellow's _Excelsior_ to the first and worst of his wives. Strindberg
Longfellow sentiment, though, of course, his hungry intellectual
curiosity was something that Longfellow never knew. In his volume of
virtue well. His genius was the genius of frank and destructive
and original men of his time.



wretched poetry of Ronsard." Fénelon, as M. Jusserand tells us,

It was the romantic; revival of the nineteenth century that placed
Frenchmen who doubt whether their country has ever produced a great
greatest of French poets, replied: "Victor Hugo, hélas!" And in the days
It was necessary for the enthusiastic young romanticists to possess a
great indigenous figure to stand beside those imported idols
Ronsard anthology with a critical essay in 1828, showed them where to
look. After that, it was as though French literature had begun with
Ronsard. He was the "ideal ancestor." He was, as it were, a
re-discovered fatherland. But his praise since then has been no mere
task of patriotism. It has been a deep enthusiasm for literature. "You
cannot imagine," wrote Flaubert, in 1852, "what a poet Ronsard is. What
a poet! What a poet! What wings!... This morning, at half-past twelve, I
read a poem aloud which almost upset my nerves, it gave me so much
pleasure." That may be taken as the characteristic French view of
Ronsard. It may be an exaggerated view. It may be fading to some extent
before modern influences. But it is unlikely that Ronsard's reputation
in his own country will ever again be other than that of a great poet.

At the same time, it is not easy, on literary grounds, to acquiesce in
all the praises that have been heaped upon him. One would imagine from
Flaubert's exclamations that Ronsard had a range like Shelley's,
whereas, in fact, he was more comparable with the English cavalier
poets. He had the cavalier poet's gift of making love seem a profession
rather than a passion. He was always very much a gentleman, both in his
moods and his philosophy. A great deal of his best poetry is merely a
variation on _carpe diem._ On the other hand, though he never went very
deep or very high, he did express real sentiments and emotions in
poetry. Few poets have sung the regret for youth more sincerely and more
beautifully, and, with Ronsard, regret for the lost wonder of his own
youth was perhaps the acutest emotion he ever knew. He was himself, in
his early years, one of those glorious youths who have the genius of
charm and comeliness, of grace and strength and the arts. He excelled at
football as in lute-playing. He danced, fenced, and rode better than the
best; and, with his noble countenance, his strong limbs, his fair
beard, and his "eyes full of gentle gravity," he must have been the
picture of the perfect courtier and soldier. Above all, we are told, his
conversation was delightful. He had "the gift of pleasing." When he went
to Scotland in 1537 with Madeleine, the King's daughter, to attend as
page her tragic marriage with James V, James was so attracted by him
that he did not allow him to leave the country for two years. With every
gift of popularity and success, with the world apparently already at his
feet, Ronsard was suddenly struck down by an illness that crippled his
whole life. He became deaf, or half-deaf. His body was tortured with
arthritis and recurrent attacks of gout. His career as a courtier lay in
ruins before him.

Possibly, had it not been so, his genius as a poet would have spent
itself in mere politeness. The loss of his physical splendour and the
death of more than one of his companions, however, filled him with an
extreme sense of the transitoriness of the beauty of the world--of youth
and fame and flowers--and turned him both to serious epicureanism and to
serious writing. By the year 1550 he was leading the young men of France
in a great literary renaissance--a reaction against the lifeless jingle
of ballades and punning rhymes. Like du Bellay, he asked himself and his
contemporaries: "Are we, then, less than the Greeks and Romans?" And he
set out to lay the foundations in France of a literature as individual
in its genius as the ancient classics. M. Jusserand, in a most
interesting chapter, relates the story of the battles over form and
language which were fought by French men of letters in the days of La
Pléiade. In an age of awakenings, of conquests, of philosophies, of
discussions on everything under the sun, the literature of tricksters
was ultimately bound to give way before the bold originality and the
sincerities of the new school. But Ronsard had to endure a whole
parliament of mockery before the day of victory.

Of his life, apart from his work in literature, there is little to
tell. For a man who lived in France in days when Protestantism and
Catholicism were murderously at one another's throats, he had a
peculiarly uneventful career. This, too, though he threw himself
earnestly into the battle against the heretics. He had begun by
sympathizing with Protestantism, because it promised much-needed reforms
in the Church; but the sympathy was short-lived. In 1553, though a
layman, he was himself filling various ecclesiastical offices. He drew
the salaries of several priories during his life, more lowly paid
priests apparently doing the work. Though an earnest Catholic, however,
Ronsard was never faithless to friends who took the other side. He
published his kindly feelings towards Odet de Coligny, the Admiral's
cardinal brother, for instance, who had adopted Protestantism and
married, and, though he could write bloodily enough against his
sectarian enemies, the cry for tolerance, for pity, for peace, seems
continually to force itself to his lips amid the wars of the time. M.
Jusserand lays great stress on the plain-spokenness of Ronsard. He
praises especially the courage with which the poet often spoke out his
mind to kings and churchmen, though no man could write odes fuller of
exaggerated adulation when they were wanted. He sometimes counselled
kings, we are told, "in a tone that, after all our revolutions, no
writer would dare to employ to-day." Perhaps M. Jusserand over-estimates
the boldness with which his hero could remind kings that they, like
common mortals, were made of mud. He has done so, I imagine, largely in
order to clear him from the charge of being a flatterer. It is
interesting to be reminded, by the way, that one of his essays in
flattery was an edition of his works dedicated, by order of Catherine de
Medicis, to Elizabeth of England, whom he compared to all the
incomparables, adding a eulogy of "Mylord Robert Du-Dlé comte de
l'Encestre" as the ornament of the English, the wonder of the world.
Elizabeth was delighted, and gave the poet a diamond for his pretty

But Ronsard does not live in literature mainly as a flatterer. Nor is
he remembered as a keeper of the conscience of princes, or as a
religious controversialist. If nothing but his love-poems had survived,
we should have almost all his work that is of literary importance. He
fell in love in the grand manner three times, and from these three
passions most of his good poetry flowed. First there was Cassandre, the
beautiful girl of Florentine extraction, whom he saw singing to her
lute, when he was only twenty-two, and loved to distraction. She married
another and became the star of Ronsard's song. She was the irruptive
heroine of that witty and delightful sonnet on the _Iliad:--_

    Je veux lire en trois jours l'Iliade d'Homère,
    Et pour ce, Corydon, ferme bien l'huis sur moi;
    Si rien me vient troubler, je t'assure ma foi,
    Tu sentiras combien pesante est ma colère.

    Je ne veux seulement que notre chambrière
    Vienne faire mon lit, ton compagnon ni toi;
    Je veux trois jours entiers demeurer à recoi,
    Pour folâtrer après une semaine entière.

    Mais, si quelqu'un venait de la part de Cassandre,
    Ouvre-lui tôt la porte, et ne le fais attendre,
    Soudain entre en ma chambre et me viens accoutrer.

    Je veux tant seulement à lui seul me montrer;
    Au reste, si un dieu voulait pour moi descendre
    Du ciel, ferme la porte et ne le laisse entrer.

Nine years after Cassandre came Marie, the fifteen-year-old daughter of
an Angevin villager, nut-brown, smiling, and with cheeks the colour of a
May rose. She died young, but not before she had made Ronsard suffer by
coquetting with another lover. What is more important still, not before
she had inspired him to write that sonnet which has about it so much of
the charm of the morning:--

    Mignonne, levez-vous, vous êtes paresseuse,
    Ja la gaie alouette au ciel a fredonné,
    Et ja le rossignol doucement jargonné,
    Dessus l'épine assis, sa complainte amoureuse.

    Sus! debout allons voir l'herbelette perleuse,
    Et votre beau rosier de boutons couronné,
    Et vos oeillets aimés auxquels aviez donné
    Hier au soir de l'eau d'une main si soigneuse.

    Harsoir en vous couchant vous jurâtes vos yeux
    D'être plus tôt que moi ce matin éveillée:
    Mais le dormir de l'aube, aux filles gracieux,

    Vous tient d'un doux sommeil encor les yeux silléee.
    Ça, ça, que je les baise, et votre beau tetin,
    Cent fois, pour vous apprendre à vous lever matin.

Ronsard was old and grey--at least, he was old before his time and
grey--when he met Hélène de Sorgères, maid of honour to the Queen, and
began the third of his grand passions. He lived all the life of a young
lover over again. They went to dances together, Hélène in a mask. Hélène
gave her poet a crown of myrtle and laurel. They had childish quarrels
and swore eternal fidelity. It was for her that Ronsard made the most
exquisite of his sonnets: _Quand vous serez bien vieille_-a sonnet of
which Mr. Yeats has written a magical version in English.

It is in referring to the sonnets for Hélène that M. Jusserand calls
attention to the realism of Ronsard's poetry. He points out that one
seems to see the women Ronsard loves far more clearly than the heroines
of many other poets. He notes the same genius of realism again when he
is relating how Ronsard, on the eve of his death, as he was transported
from priory to priory, in hope of relief in each new place, wrote a poem
of farewell to his friends, in which he described the skeleton horrors
of his state with a minute carefulness, Ronsard, indeed, showed himself
a very personal chronicler throughout his work. "He cannot hide the
fact that he likes to sleep on the left side, that he hates cats,
dislikes servants 'with slow hands,' believes in omens, adores physical
exercises and gardening, and prefers, especially in summer, vegetables
to meat." M. Jusserand, I may add, has written the just and scholarly
praise of a most winning poet. His book, which appears in the _Grands
Ecrivains Français_ series, is not only a good biographical study, but
an admirable narrative of literary and national history.



Rossetti's great gift to his time was the gift of beauty, of beauty to
be worshipped in the sacred hush of a temple. His work is not richer in
the essentials of beauty than Browning's--it is not, indeed, nearly so
rich; but, while Browning served beauty joyously, a god in a firmament
of gods, Rossetti burned a lonely candle to it as to the only true god.
To Browning, the temple of beauty was but a house in a living world; to
Rossetti, the world outside the temple was, for the most part, a dead
world. _Jenny_ may, seem to stand in vivid contradiction of this. But
_Jenny_ was an exceptional excursion into life, and hardly expresses the
Rossetti that was a power in art and literature. Him we find best,
perhaps, in _The Blessed Damozel_, written when he was little more than
a boy. And this is not surprising, for the arrogant love of beauty, out
of which the aesthetic sort of art and literature has been born, is
essentially a boy's love. Poets who are sick with this passion must
either die young, like Keats, or survive merely to echo their younger
selves, like Swinburne. They are splendid in youth, like Aucassin, whose
swooning passion for Nicolette is symbolical of their almost painful
desire of beauty. In _Hand and Soul_, Rossetti tells us of Chiaro dell
Erma that "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately
persons." Keats's Odes express the same ecstasy of faintness, and
Rossetti himself was obviously a close nineteenth-century counterpart of
Chiaro. Even when he troubles about the soul--and he constantly troubles
about it--he never seems to be able altogether to escape out of what
may be called the higher sensationalism into genuine mysticism. His work
is earth-born: it is rich in earthly desire. His symbols were not wings
to enable the soul to escape into a divine world of beauty. They were
the playthings of a grown man, loved for their owft beauty more than for
any beauty they could help the spirit to reach. Rossetti belongs to the
ornamental school of poetry. He writes more like a man who has gone into
a library than like one who has gone out to Nature, and ornamentalism in
poetry is simply the result of seeing life, not directly, but through
the coloured glass of literature and the other arts. Rossetti was the
forerunner of all those artists and authors of recent times, who, in
greater or less degree, looked on art as a weaving of patterns, an
arrangement of wonderful words and sounds and colours. Pater in his
early writings, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and all those others who
dreamed that it was the artist's province to enrich the world with
beautiful furniture--for conduct itself seemed, in the philosophy of
these writers, to aspire after the quality of tapestry--are implicit in
_The Blessed Damozel_ and _Troy Town._ It is not that Rossetti could
command words like Pater or Wilde. His phrasing, if personal, is
curiously empty of the graces. He often does achieve graces of phrase;
but some of his most haunting poems owe their power over us to their
general pattern, and not to any persistent fine workmanship. How
beautiful _Troy Town_ is, for instance, and yet how lacking in beautiful
verses! The poet was easily content in his choice of words who could
leave a verse like:--

    Venus looked on Helen's gift;
            _(O Troy Town!)_
    Looked and smiled with subtle drift,
    Saw the work of her heart's desire:--
    "There thou kneel'st for Love to lift!"
            _(O Troy's down,
            Tall Troy's on fire!)_

Rossetti never wrote; a poem that was fine throughout. There is nothing
to correspond to _The Skylark_ or the _Ode to a Grecian Urn_ or _Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ in his work. The truth is, he was not a
great poet, because he was not a singer. He was capable of decorations
in verse, but he was not capable of song. His sonnets, it may be argued,
are more than decorations. But even they are laden with beauty; they are
never, as it were, light and alight with it, as are _Shall I compare
thee to a summer's day?_ and _Where lies the land to which yon ship must
go?_ They have flagging pulses like desire itself, and are often weary
before the fourteenth line. Only rarely do we get a last six lines

    O love, my love! if I no more should see
    Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
       Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,--
    How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
    The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
       The wind of Death's imperishable wing?

And, beautiful as this is, is not the imagery of the closing lines a
little more deliberate than we are conscious of in the great work of the
great singers? One never feels that the leaves and the winds in
themselves were sufficiently full of meaning and delight for Rossetti.
He loved them as pictorial properties--as a designer rather than a poet
loves them.

In his use of the very mysteries of Christianity, he is intoxicated
chiefly by the beauty of the designs by which the painters have
expressed their vision of religion. His _Ave_ is a praise of the beauty
of art more than a praise of the beauty of divinity. In it we are told
how, on the eve of the Annunciation,

    Far off the trees were as pale wands,
    Against the fervid sky: the sea
    Sighed further off eternally
    As human sorrow sighs in sleep.

The poem is not a hymn but a decorated theme. And yet there is a
sincere vain-longing running through Rossetti's work that keeps it from
being artificial or pretentious. This was no less real for being vague.
His work is an attempt to satisfy his vain-longing with rites of words
and colour. He always sought to bring peace to his soul by means of
ritual. When he was dying, he was anxious to see a confessor. "I can
make nothing of Christianity," he said, "but I only want a confessor to
give me absolution for my sins." That was typical of his attitude to
life. He loved its ceremonies more--at least, more vividly--than he
loved its soul. One is never done hearing about his demand for
"fundamental brainwork" in art. But his own poetry is poor enough in
brainwork. It is the poetry, of one who, like Keats, hungered for a
"life of sensations rather than of thoughts." It is the poetry of grief,
of regret--the grief and regret of one who was a master of sensuous
beauty, and who reveals sensuous beauty rather than any deeper secret
even in touching spiritual themes. Poetry with him is a dyed and
embroidered garment which weighs the spirit down rather than winged
sandals like Shelley's, which set the spirit free.

Yet his influence on art and literature has been immense. He, far more
than Keats or Swinburne, was the prophet of that ritualism which has
been a; dominant characteristic in modern poetry, whether it is the
Pagan ritualism of Mr. Yeats or the Catholic ritualism of Francis
Thompson. One need not believe that he was an important direct influence
on either of these poets. But his work as poet and painter prepared the
world for ritualism in literature. No doubt the medievalism of Scott and
the decorative imagination of Keats were also largely responsible for
the change in the literary atmosphere; but Rossetti was more
distinctively a symbolist and ritualist than any other English man of
letters who lived in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century.

People used to debate whether he was greater as a painter or as a poet,
and he was not always sure himself. When, however, he said to
Burne-Jones, in 1857: "If any man has any poetry in him, he should
paint; for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely
begun to paint it," he gave convincing proof that painting, and not
poetry, was his essential gift. He may be denounced for his bad drawing
and twenty other faults as an artist; but it is his paintings that show
him as a discoverer and a man of high genius. At the same time, how well
he can also paint in verse, as in those ever-moving lines on Jenny's
wanderings in the Haymarket:--

    Jenny, you know the city now.
    A child can tell the tale there, how
    Some things which are not yet enrol'd
    In market-lists are bought and sold,
    Even till the early Sunday light,
    When Saturday night is market-night
    Everywhere, be it dry or wet,
    And market-night in the Haymarket.
    Our learned London children know,
    Poor Jenny, all your pride and woe;
    Have seen your lifted silken skirt
    Advertise dainties through the dirt;
    Have seen your coach wheels splash rebuke
    On virtue; and have learned your look
    When wealth and health slipped past, you stare
    Along the streets alone, and there,
    Round the long park, across the bridge,
    The cold lamps at the pavement's edge
    Wind on together and apart,
    A fiery serpent for your heart.

In most of his poems, unfortunately, the design, as a whole, rambles.
His imagination worked best when limited by the four sides of a canvas.



Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author
than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people,
it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed
of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw. Mr. Shaw's gift of
infuriating people is unfailing. He is one of those rare public men who
can hardly express an opinion on potato-culture--and he does express an
opinion on everything--without making a multitude of people shake their
fists in impotent anger. His life--at least, his public life--has been a
jibe opposed to a rage. He has gone about, like a pickpocket of
illusions, from the world of literature to the world of morals, and from
the world of morals to the world of politics, and, everywhere he has
gone, an innumerable growl has followed him.

Not that he has not had his disciples--men and women who believe that
what Mr. Shaw says on any conceivable subject is far more important than
what _The Times_ or the _Manchester Guardian_ says. He has never founded
a church, however, because he has always been able to laugh at his
disciples as unfeelingly as at anybody else. He has courted unpopularity
as other men have courted popularity. He has refused to assume the
vacuous countenance either of an idol or a worshipper, and in the result
those of us to whom life without reverence seems like life in ruins are
filled at times with a wild lust to denounce and belittle him. He has
been called more names than any other man of letters alive. When all the
other names have been exhausted and we are about to become
inarticulate, we even denounce him as a bore. But this is only the
Billingsgate of our exasperation. Mr. Shaw is not a bore, whatever else
he may be. He has succeeded in the mere business of interesting us
beyond any other writer of his time.

He has succeeded in interesting us largely by inventing himself as a
public figure, as Oscar Wilde and Stevenson did before him. Whether he
could have helped becoming a figure, even if he had never painted that
elongated comic portrait of himself, it is difficult to say. Probably he
was doomed to be a figure just as Dr. Johnson was. If he had not told us
legends about himself, other people would have told them, and they could
scarcely have told them so well: that would have been the chief
difference. Even if Mr. Shaw's plays should ever become as dead as the
essays in _The Rambler_, his lineaments and his laughter will survive in
a hundred stories which will bring the feet of pilgrims to Adelphi
Terrace in search of a ghost with its beard on fire.

His critics often accuse him, in regard to the invention of the Shaw
myth, of having designed a poster rather than painted a portrait. And
Mr. Shaw always hastens to agree with those who declare he is an
advertiser in an age of advertisement. M. Hamon quotes him as saying:--

     Stop advertising myself! On the contrary, I must do it more than
     ever. Look at Pears's Soap. There is a solid house if you like, but
     every wall is still plastered with their advertisements. If I were
     to give up advertising, my business would immediately begin to fall
     off. You blame me for having declared myself to be the most
     remarkable man of my time. But the claim is an arguable one. Why
     should I not say it when I believe that it is true?

One suspects that there is as much fun as commerce in Mr. Shaw's
advertisement. Mr. Shaw would advertise himself in this sense even if he
were the inmate of a workhouse. He is something of a natural peacock.
He is in the line of all those tramps and stage Irishmen who have gone
through! life with so fine a swagger of words. This only means that in
his life he is an artist.

He is an artist in his life to an even greater extent than he is a
moralist in his art. The mistake his depreciators make, however, is in
thinking that his story ends here. The truth about Mr. Shaw is not quite
so simple as that. The truth about Mt. Shaw cannot be told until we
realize that he is an artist, not only in the invention of his own life,
but in the observation of the lives of other people. His Broadbent is as
wonderful a figure as his George Bernard Shaw. Not that his portraiture
is always faithful. He sees men and women too frequently in the
refracting shallows of theories. He is a doctrinaire, and his characters
are often comic statements of his doctrines rather than the reflections
of men and women. "When I present true human nature," he observes in one
of the many passages in which he justifies himself, "the audience thinks
it is being made fun of. In reality I am simply a very careful writer of
natural history." One is bound to contradict him. Mr. Shaw often thinks
he is presenting true human nature when he is merely presenting his
opinions about human nature--the human nature of soldiers, of artists,
of women. Or, rather, when he is presenting a queer fizzing mixture of
human nature and his opinions about it.

This may be sometimes actually a virtue in his comedy. Certainly, from
the time of Aristophanes onwards, comedy has again and again been a
vehicle of opinions as well as a branch of natural history. But it is
not always a virtue. Thus in _The Doctors Dilemma_, when Dubedat is
dying, his self-defence and his egoism are for the most part admirably
true both to human nature and to Mr. Shaw's view of the human nature of
artists. But when he goes on with his last breath to utter his artistic
creed: "I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the
blessed. Amen, Amen," these sentences are no more natural or
naturalistic than the death-bed utterances in one of Mr. G.R. Sims's
ballads. Dubedat would not have thought these things, he would not have
said these things; in saying them he becomes a mere mechanical figure,
without any admixture of humanity, repeating Mr. Shaw's opinion of the
nature of the creed of artists. There is a similar falsification in the
same play in the characterization of the newspaper man who is present at
Dubedat's death and immediately afterwards is anxious to interview the
widow. "Do you think," he asks, "she would give me a few words on 'How
it Feels to be a Widow?' Rather a good title for an article, isn't it?"
These sentences are bad because into an atmosphere of more or less
naturalistic comedy they simply introduce a farcical exaggeration of Mr.
Shaw's opinion of the incompetence and impudence of journalists. Mr.
Shaw's comedies are repeatedly injured by a hurried alteration of
atmosphere in this manner. Comedy, as well as tragedy, must create some
kind of illusion, and the destruction of the illusion, even for the sake
of a joke, may mean the destruction of laughter. But, compared with the
degree of reality in his characterization, the proportion of unreality
is not overwhelming. It has been enormously exaggerated.

After all, if the character of the newspaper man in _The Doctor's
Dilemma_ is machine-made, the much more important character of B.B., the
soothing and incompetent doctor, is a creation of the true comic genius.

Nine people out of ten harp on Mr. Shaw's errors. It is much more
necessary that we should recognize that, amid all his falsifications,
doctrinal and jocular, he has a genuine comic sense of character. "Most
French critics," M. Hamon tells us ... "declare that Bernard Shaw does
depict characters. M. Remy de Gourmont writes: 'Molière has never drawn
a doctor more comically "the doctor" than Paramore, nor more
characteristic figures of women than those in the same play, _The
Philanderer._ The character-drawing is admirable.'" M. Hamon himself
goes on, however, to suggest an important contrast between the
characterization in Mr. Shaw and the characterization in Molière:--

     In Shaw's plays the characters are less representative of vices or
     passions than those of Molière, and more representative of class,
     profession, or sect. Molière depicts the miser, the jealous man,
     the misanthrope, the hypocrite; whereas Shaw depicts the bourgeois,
     the rebel, the capitalist, the workman, the Socialist, the doctor.
     A few only of these latter types are given us by Molière.

M. Hamon's comparison, made in the course of a long book, between the
genius of Mr. Shaw and the genius of Molière is extraordinarily
detailed. Perhaps the detail is overdone in such a passage as that which
informs us regarding the work of both authors that "suicide is never one
of the central features of the comedy; if mentioned, it is only to be
made fun of." The comparison, however, between the sins that have been
alleged against both Molière and Mr. Shaw--sins of style, of form, of
morals, of disrespect, of irreligion, of anti-romanticism, of farce, and
so forth--is a suggestive contribution to criticism. I am not sure that
the comparison would not have been more effectively put in a chapter
than a book, but it is only fair to remember that M. Hamon's book is
intended as a biography and general criticism of Mr. Shaw as well as a
comparison between his work and Molière's. It contains, it must be
confessed, a great deal that is not new to English readers, but then so
do all books about Mr. Shaw. And it has also this fault that, though it
is about a master of laughter, it does not contain even the shadow of a
smile. Mr. Shaw is made an idol in spite of himself: M. Hamon's volume
is an offering at a shrine.

dramatic work Mr. Shaw is less a wit than a humorist:--

     In Shaw's work we find few studied jests, few epigrams even, except
     those which are the necessary outcome of the characters and the
     words.... Shaw's brilliancy does not consist in wit, but in humour.

characteristic of Mr. Shaw's plays. He is not content with witty
human society.

Dickens; but then neither was Molière's. As M. Hamon reminds us, Molière
gathered round the family. "Molière and Shaw," as he puts it with quaint
seriousness, "appear to be unaware of what a father is, what a father is

imaginary resemblance of his plays to Molière's. His joy and his misery
where they have revealed themselves with an unaccustomed and startling
controversialists and propagandists. He does not hesitate to wound and

It is this that has caused all the trouble about Mr. Shaw's writings on
was as anti-Prussian as M. Vandervelde's, a great number of people
thought he must be a pro-German.

The fact is, in war time more than at any other time, people dread the
vision of the satirist and the sceptic. It is a vision of only one-half
of the truth, and of the half that the average man always feels to be
more or less irrelevant. And, even at this, it is not infallible. This
is not to disparage Mr. Shaw's contributions to the discussion of
politics. That contribution has been brilliant, challenging, and humane,
and not more wayward than the contribution of the partisan and the
sentimentalist. It may be said of Mr. Shaw that in his politics, as in
his plays, he has sought Utopia along the path of disillusion as other
men have sought it along the path of idealism and romance.



Mr. Masefield, as a poet, has the secret of popularity. Has he also the
secret of poetry? I confess his poems often seem to me to invite the
admirably just verdict which Jeffrey delivered on Wordsworth's
_Excursion_: "This will never do." We miss in his lines the onward march
of poetry. His individual phrases carry no cargoes of wonder. His art is
not of the triumphant order that lifts us off our feet. As we read the
first half of his narrative sea-poem, _Dauber_, we are again and again
moved to impatience by the sheer literary left-handedness of the author.
There are so many unnecessary words, so many unnecessary sentences. Of
the latter we have an example in the poet's reflection as he describes
the "fiery fishes" that raced Dauber's ship by night in the southern

    What unknown joy was in those fish unknown!

It is one of those superfluous thoughts which appear to be suggested
less by the thing described than by the need of filling up the last line
of the verse. Similarly, when Dauber, as the ship's lampman and painter
is nicknamed, regards the miracle of a ship at sea in moonlight, and

    My Lord, my God, how beautiful it is!

we feel that he is only lengthening into a measured line the "My God,
how beautiful it is!" of prose. A line like this, indeed, is merely
prose that has learned the goose-step of poetry.

Perhaps one would not resent it--and many others like it--so much if it
were not that Mr. Masefield so manifestly aims at realism of effect. His
narrative is meant to be as faithful to commonplace facts as a
policeman's evidence in a court of law. We are not spared even the old
familiar expletives. When Dauber's paintings, for example--for he is an
artist as well as an artisan--have been destroyed by the malice of the
crew, and he questions the Bosun about it,

    The Bosun turned: "I'll give you a thick ear!

Similarly, when the Mate, taking up the brush, makes a sketch of a ship
for Dauber's better instruction,

    "God, sir," the Bosun said, "You do her fine!"
    "Aye!" said the Mate, "I do so, by the Lord!"

And when the whole crew gathers round to impress upon Dauber the fact of
his incompetence,

    "You hear?" the Bosun cried, "You cannot do it!"
    "A gospel truth," the Cook said, "true as hell!"

Here, obviously, the very letter of realism is intended.

Here, too, it may be added, we have as well-meaning an array of oaths as
was ever set out in literature. When Mr. Kipling repeats a soldier's
oath, he seems to do so with a chuckle of appreciation. When Mr.
Masefield puts down the oaths of sailors, he does so rather as a
melancholy duty. He swears, not like a trooper, but like a virtuous man.
He does not, as so many realists do, love the innumerable coarsenesses
of life which he chronicles; that is what makes his oaths often seem as
innocent as the conversation of elderly sinners echoed on the lips of
children. He has a splendid innocence of purpose, indeed. He wishes to
give us the prosaic truth of actual things as a kind of correspondence
to the poetic truth of spiritual things of which they are the setting
and the frame. Or it may be that he repeats these oaths and all the
rest of it simply as a part of the technicalities of life at sea.

He certainly shows a passion for technicalities hardly less than Mr.
Kipling's own. He tells us, for instance, how, in the height of the fury
of frost and surge and gale round Cape Horn,

                      at last, at last
    They frapped the cringled crojick's icy pelt;
    In frozen bulge and bunt they made it fast.

And, again, when the storm was over and Dauber had won the respect of
his mates by his manhood, we have an almost unintelligible verse
describing how the Bosun, in a mood of friendship, set out to teach him
some of the cunning of the sea:--

    Then, while the Dauber counted, Bosun took
    Eight foxes take, and stop the ends with thread.
    I've known an engineer would give his head
    To know square sennit." As the Bose began,
    The Dauber felt promoted to a man.

Mr. Masefield has generously provided six pages of glossary at the end
of his poem, where we are told the meaning of "futtock-shrouds,"
"poop-break," "scuttlebutt," "mud-hooks," and other items in the jargon
of the sea.

So much for Mr. Masefield's literary method. Let me be equally frank
about his genius, and confess at once that, in any serious estimate of
this, all I have said will scarcely be more relevant than the charge
against Burke that he had a clumsy delivery. Mr. Masefield has given us
in _Dauber_ a poem of genius, one of the great storm-pieces of modern
literature, a poem that for imaginative infectiousness challenges
comparison with the prose of Mr. Conrad's _Typhoon_. To criticize its
style takes us no nearer its ultimate secret than piling up examples of
bathos takes us to the secret of Wordsworth, or talking about maniacal
construction and characterization takes us to the secret of Dostoevsky.
There is no use pretending that the methods of these writers are good
because their achievements are good. On the other hand, compared with
the marvel of achievement, the faultiness of method in each case sinks
into a matter almost of indifference. Mr. Masefield gives us in _Dauber_
a book of revelation. If he does this in verse that is often merely
prose crooked into rhyme--if he does it with a hero who is at first
almost as bowelless a human being and as much an appeal for pity as
Smike in _Nicholas Nickleby_--that is his affair. In art, more than
anywhere else, the end justifies the means, and the end of _Dauber_ is
vision--intense, terrible, pitiful, heroic vision. Here we have in
literature what poor Dauber himself aimed at putting down on his
inexpert canvases:--

                                     A revealing
    Of passionate men in battle with the sea,
    High on an unseen stage, shaking and reeling;
    And men through him would understand their feeling,
    Their might, their misery, their tragic power,
    And all by suffering pain a little hour.

That verse suggests both the kind and the degree of Mr. Masefield's
sensitiveness as a recorder of the life of the sea. His is the witness
less of a doer than of a sufferer. He is not a reveller in life: he is
one, rather, who has found himself tossed about in the foaming tides of
anguish, and who clings with a desperate faith to some last spar of
beauty or heroism. He is a martyr to the physical as well as to the
spiritual pain of the world. He communicates to us, not only the horror
of humiliation, but the horror of a numbed boy, "cut to the ghost" by
the polar gale, as high in the yards Dauber fights against the ship's
doom, having been

             ordered up when sails and spars
    Were flying and going mad among the stars,

How well, too, he imparts the dread and the danger of the coming storm,
as the ship gets nearer the Horn:

      All through the windless night the clipper rolled
    In a great swell with oily gradual heaves,
      Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled,
    Clang, and the weltering water moaned like beeves.

And the next verse reiterates the prophecies of the moving waters:

            Like the march of doom
    Came those great powers of marching silences;
    Then fog came down, dead-cold, and hid the seas.

The night was spent in dread of fog, in dread of ice, and the ship
seemed to respond to the dread of the men as her horn called out into
the impenetrable wilderness of mists and waters:

    She bayed there like a solitary hound
    Lost in a covert.

Morning came, bringing no release from fear:

    So the night passed, but then no morning broke--
    Only a something showed that night was dead.
    A sea-bird, cackling like a devil, spoke,
    And the fog drew away and hung like lead.
    Like mighty cliffs it shaped, sullen and red;
    Like glowering gods at watch it did appear,
    And sometimes drew away, and then drew near.

Then suddenly swooped down the immense black fiend of the storm,
catching, as the Bosun put it, the ship "in her ball-dress."

    The blackness crunched all memory of the sun.

his task,

    Sick at the mighty space of air displayed
    Below his feet, where soaring birds were wheeling.

It was all a "withering rush of death," an orgy of snow, ice, and
howling seas.

    The sea-tops were cut off and flung down smashed;
    Tatters of shouts were flung, the rags of yells--

looks down from his scramblings among rigging and snapped spars, and
sees the deck

    Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow.

In that line we seem to behold the beautiful face of danger--a beauty
Dauber's soul, and the men who had been bullies in hours of peace reveal
themselves as heroes in stress and peril.

is a spiritual vision of life. It is a soul's confession. It is Mr.
Masefield's _De Profundis_. It is a parable of trial--a chant of the
soul that has "emerged out of the iron time." It is a praise of life,
go boldly forward again:--

    A great grey sea was running up the sky,
    Desolate birds flew past; their mewings came
    As that lone water's spiritual cry,
    Its forlorn voice, its essence, its soul's name.
    The ship limped in the water as if lame,
    Then, in the forenoon watch, to a great shout,
    More sail was made, the reefs were shaken out.

splendid and tragic dangers, but in its cruelty and pathetic
it to the proof. The worst passes, the best continues--that is the
secret enthusiasm of Mr. Masefield's song. Our final vision is of the
ship in safety, holding her course to harbour in a fair wind:--

    Shattering the sea-tops into golden rain.
    The waves bowed down before her like blown grain.

And as she sits in Valparaiso harbour, a beautiful thing at peace under
the beautiful shadow of "the mountain tower, snow to the peak," our
imagination is lifted to the hills-to where

                            All night long
    The pointed mountain pointed at the stars,
    Frozen, alert, austere.

It is a fine symbol of the aspiration of this book of men's "might,
their misery, their tragic power." There is something essentially
Christian and simple in Mr. Masefield's presentation of life. Conscious
though he is of the pain of the world--and aloof from the world though
this consciousness sometimes makes him appear--he is full of an
extraordinary pity and brotherliness for men. He wanders among them, not
with the condescension of so many earnest writers, but with the humility
almost of one of the early Franciscans. One may amuse oneself by
fancying that there is something in the manner of St. Francis even in
Mr. Masefield's attitude to his little brothers the swear-words. He may
not love them by nature, but he is kind to them by grace. They strike
one as being the most innocent swear-words in literature.




Mr. W.B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a
reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning
is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He
is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal. He
has a vision of real things, but in unreal circumstances. His poetry
repels many people at first because it is unlike any other poetry. They
are suspicious of it as of a new sect in religion. They have been
accustomed to bow in other temples. They resent the ritual, the
incantations, the unearthly light and colour of the temple of this
innovating high priest.

They resent, most of all, the self-consciousness of the priest himself.
For Mr. Yeats's is not a genius with natural readiness of speech. His
sentences do not pour from him in stormy floods. It is as though he had
to pursue and capture them one by one, like butterflies. Or, perhaps, it
is that he has not been content with the simple utterance of his vision.
He has reshaped and embroidered it, and has sung of passion in a mask.
There are many who see in his poetry only the mask, and who are
apparently blind to the passion of sorrowful ecstasy that sets _The Wind
Among the Reeds_ apart from every other book that has ever been written
in English. They imagine that the book amounts to little more than the
attitude of a stylist, a trifler with Celtic nomenclature and fairy

intellectual craftsmanship rather than of immediate genius, and that
here and there the originality of the poet's vision is clouded by
reminiscences of the aesthetic painters. But the greatest poems in the
book are a new thing in literature, a "rapturous music" not heard
before. One is not surprised to learn from Mr. Yeats's autobiographical
volume, _Reveries over Childhood and Youth_, that, when he began to
write poetry as a boy, "my lines but seldom scanned, for I could not
understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines
that, taken by themselves, had music." His genius, as a matter of fact,
draft of _Innisfree_ will remember how it gives one the impression of a
new imagination stumbling into utterance. Mr. Yeats has laboured his
verse into perfect music with a deliberateness like that of Flaubert in
writing prose.

_Reveries_ is the beautiful and fascinating story of his childhood and
youth, and the development of his genius. "I remember," he tells us,
"little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every year
of life, as though gradually conquering something in myself." But there
portraits of fantastically remembered relations and of stories of home
and school related with fantastic humour. It is difficult to believe
that Mr. Yeats as a schoolboy "followed the career of a certain
had won or lost," but here we see him even in the thick of a fight like
infinitely more influence over him than his school environment.

school to sing "Little drops of water," and who indignantly forbade him
stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats's
Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel "as
proud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise." He
remembers how one day he looked at his schoolfellows on the
playing-field and said to himself, "If when I grow up I am as clever
Another sentence about these days suggests what a difficult inarticulate
genius was his. "My thoughts," he says, "were a great excitement, but
balloon into a shed in a high wind."

games--"I cannot," he writes, "remember that I ever kicked a goal or
made a run"--he showed some promise as a naturalist, and used to look
on the Dublin coast, he "planned some day to write a book about the
changes through a twelvemonth among the creatures of some hole in the

These passages in his autobiography are specially interesting as
evidence to refute the absurd theory that Mr. Yeats is a mere vague
day-dreamer among poets. The truth is, Mr. Yeats's early poems show that
he was a boy of eager curiosity and observation--a boy with a remarkable
intellectual machine, as well as a visionary who was one day to build a
new altar to beauty. He has never been entirely aloof from the common
world. Though at times he has conceived it to be the calling of a man of
letters to live apart like a monk, he has mingled with human interests
to a far greater extent than most people realize. He has nearly always
been a politician and always a fighter.

At the same time, we need not read far in his autobiography to discover
why people who hate self-consciousness in artists are so hostile to him.

_Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is the autobiography of one who was
always more self-conscious than his fellows. Mr. Yeats describes himself
as a youth in Dublin:--

     sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet,
     and stopping at shop windows to look at my tie, gathered into a
     loose sailor-knot, and to regret that it could not be always blown
     out by the wind like Byron's tie in the picture.

Even the fits of abstraction of the young poet must often have been
regarded as self-conscious attitudinizing by his neighbours--especially
by the "stupid stout woman" who lived in the villa next to his father's,
and who, as he amusingly relates, mocked him aloud:--

     I had a study with a window opposite some window of hers, and one
     night when I was writing, I heard voices full of derision, and saw
     the stout woman and her family standing at the window. I have a way
     of acting what I write, and speaking it aloud without knowing what
     I am doing. Perhaps I was on my hands and knees, or looking down
     over the back of a chair, talking into what I imagined an abyss.

It will be seen that Mr. Yeats is as interesting a figure to himself as
he is to Mr. George Moore. If he were not he would not have troubled to
write his autobiography. And that would have been a loss to literature.
_Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is a book of extraordinary
freshness. It does not, like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, set forth the full
account of the great influences that shaped a poet's career. But it is a
delightful study of early influences, and depicts a dedicated poet in
his boyhood as this has never been done before in English prose.

Of all the influences that have shaped his career, none was more
important than the Irish atmosphere to which he early returned from
London. He is distinctively an Irish poet, though we find him in his
youth writing plays and poems in imitation of Shelley and Spenser.
Irish places have done more to influence his imagination even than the
masterpieces of English literature.

It was apparently while he was living in Sligo, not far from the lakes,
that he conceived the longing which he afterwards expressed with such
originality of charm in _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_:--

     My father had read to me some passage out of _Walden_, and I

     I thought that, having conquered bodily desire and the inclination
     of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Thoreau lived,
     seeking wisdom.

It is the little world of Sligo, indeed, that provides all the spacious
and twilit landscape in Mr. Yeats's verse. Here were those fishermen and
raths and mountains of the Sidhe and desolate lakes which repeat
themselves as images through his work. Here, too, he had relatives
eccentric and adventurous to excite his imagination, such as the

    Merchant skipper that leaped overboard
    After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay.

Mr. Yeats's relations seem in his autobiography as real as the
characters in fiction. Each of them is magnificently stamped with
romance or comedy--the hypochondriac uncle, for example, who--

     passed from winter to summer through a series of woollens that had
     always to be weighed; for in April or May, or whatever the date
     was, he had to be sure that he carried the exact number of ounces
     he had carried upon that date since boyhood.

For a time Mr. Yeats thought of following his father's example and
becoming a painter. It was while attending an art school in Dublin that
he first met A.E. He gives us a curious description of A.E. as he was

     He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some other image
     rose always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I remember),
     and already he spoke to us of his visions. His conversation, so
     lucid and vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, though now
     and again some phrase could be understood and repeated. One day he
     announced that he was leaving the Art Schools because his will was
     weak, and the arts or any other emotional pursuit would but weaken
     it further.

Mr. Yeats's memoirs, however, are not confined to prose. His volume of
verse called _Responsibilities_ is almost equally autobiographical. Much
of it is a record of quarrels with contemporaries--quarrels about Synge,
about Hugh Lane and his pictures, about all sorts of things. He aims
barbed epigrams at his adversaries. Very Yeatsian is an epigram "to a
poet, who would have me praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and

    You say, as I have often given tongue
    In praise of what another's said or sung,
    'Twere politic to do the like by these;
    But have you known a dog to praise his fleas?

In an earlier version, the last line was still more arrogant:--

    But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

There is a noble arrogance again in the lines called _A Coat_:--

    I made my song a coat,
    Covered with embroideries,
    Out of old mythologies,
    From heel to throat.
    But the fools caught it,
    Wore it in the world's eye,
    As though they'd wrought it.
    Song, let them take it,
    For there's more enterprise
    In walking naked.

Mr. Yeats still gives some of his songs the old embroidered vesture. But
his work is now more frankly personal than it used to be--at once
harsher and simpler. One would not give _Responsibilities_ to a reader
who knew nothing of Mr. Yeats's previous work. There is too much raging
at the world in it, too little of the perfected beauty of _The Wind
Among the Reeds_. One finds ugly words like "wive" and "thigh"
inopportunely used, and the retort to Mr. George Moore's _Hail and
Farewell_, though legitimately offensive, is obscure in statement.
Still, there is enough beauty in the book to make it precious to the
lover of literature. An Elizabethan might have made the music of the
first verse of _A Woman Homer Sung_.

And what splendour of praise and censure Mr. Yeats gives us in _The
Second Troy_:--

    Why should I blame her, that she filled my days
      With misery, or that she would of late
    Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways.
      Or hurled the little streets against the great,
    Had they but courage equal to desire?
      What could have made her peaceful with a mind
    That nobleness made simple as a fire,
      With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
    That is not natural in an age like this,
      Being high and solitary, and most stern?
      Was there another Troy for her to burn?

It is curious to note in how much of his verse Mr. Yeats repeats his
protest against the political passion of Ireland which once meant so
much to him. _All Things can Tempt Me_ expresses this artistic mood of
revolt with its fierce beginning:--

    All things can tempt me from this craft of verse;
    One time it was a woman's face, or worse,
    The seeming needs of my fool-driven land.

Some of the most excellent pages of _Reveries_, however, are those which
recall certain famous figures in Irish Nationalism like John O'Leary and
J.F. Taylor, the orator whose temper so stood in his way.

Mr. Yeats recalls a wonderful speech Taylor once made at a meeting in
Dublin at which a Lord Chancellor had apparently referred in a
belittling way to Irish nationality and the Irish language:

     Taylor began hesitating and stopping for words, but after speaking
     very badly for a little, straightened his figure and spoke as out
     of a dream: "I am carried to another age, a nobler court, and
     another Lord Chancellor is speaking. I am at the court of the first
     Pharaoh." Thereupon he put into the mouth of that Egyptian all his
     audience had listened to, but now it was spoken to the children of
     Israel. "If you have any spirituality as you boast, why not use our
     great empire to spread it through the world, why still cling to
     that beggarly nationality of yours? what are its history and its
     works weighed with those of Egypt?" Then his voice changed and
     sank: "I see a man at the edge of the crowd; he is standing
     listening there, but he will not obey"; and then, with his voice
     rising to a cry, "had he obeyed he would never have come down the
     mountain carrying in his arms the tables of the Law in the language
     of the outlaw."

That Mr. Yeats, in spite of his secession from politics, loves the old
passionate Ireland, is clear from the poem called _September, 1913_,
with its refrain:--

    Romantic Ireland's dead and gone
    And with O'Leary in the grave.

And to this Mr. Yeats has since added a significant note:--

    "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone" sounds old-fashioned
    now. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916. The
    late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one may say of its wisdom, will
    long be remembered for its heroism. "They weighed so lightly
    what they gave," and gave, too, in some cases without hope of

Mr. Yeats is by nature a poet of the heroic world--a hater of the
burgess and of the till. He boasts in _Responsibilities_ of ancestors
who left him

    That has not passed through any huckster's loin.

There may be a good deal of vanity and gesticulation in all this, but
it is the vanity and gesticulation of a man of genius. As we cannot have
the genius of Mr. Yeats without the gestures, we may as well take the
gestures in good part.


It is distinctly surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton and
Jeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does not
ask us to apply it at all points. There is a remoteness about Milton's
genius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reid
discovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats is
certainly a little remote. He is so remote that some people regard his
work with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing. The reason may
partly be that Mr. Yeats is not a singer in the ordinary tradition of
poets. His poems are incantations rather than songs. They seem to call
for an order of priests and priestesses to chant them. There are one or
two of his early poems, like _Down by the Sally Garden_, that might
conceivably be sung at a fair or even at a ballad-concert. But, as Mr.
Yeats has grown older, he has become more and more determinedly the
magician in his robes. Even in his prose he does not lay aside his
robes; it is written in the tones of the sanctuary: it is prose for
worshippers. To such an extent is this so that many who do not realize
that Mr. Yeats is a great artist cannot read much of his prose without
convincing themselves that he is a great humbug. It is easy to
understand how readers accustomed to the rationalism of the end of the
century refused to take seriously a poet who wrote "spooky" explanations
of his poems, such as Mr. Yeats wrote in his notes to _The Wind Among
the Reeds_, the most entirely good of his books. Consider, for example,
the note which he wrote on that charming if somewhat perplexing poem,
_The Jester_. "I dreamed," writes Mr. Yeats:--

     gave me a sense of illumination and exaltation that one gets from
     visions, while the second dream was confused and meaningless. The
     Blake would have said, "The authors are in eternity"; and I am
     quite sure they can only be questioned in dreams.

Why, even those of us who count Mr. Yeats one of the immortals while he
is still alive, are inclined to shy at a claim at once so solemn and so
irrational as this. It reads almost like a confession of witchcraft.

Luckily, Mr. Yeats's commerce with dreams and fairies and other spirits
has not all been of this evidential and disputable kind. His confessions
do not convince us of his magical experiences, but his poems do. Here we
have the true narrative of fairyland, the initiation into other-worldly
beauty. Here we have the magician crying out against


and attempting to invoke a new--or an old--and more beautiful world into

     The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told,

he cries, and over against the unshapely earth he sets up the "happy
townland" of which he sings in one of his later and most lovely poems.
It would not be easy to write a prose paraphrase of _The Happy
Townland_, but who is there who can permanently resist the spell of this
poem, especially of the first verse and its refrain?--

    There's many a strong farmer
    Whose heart would break in two,
    If he could see the townland
    That we are riding to;
    Boughs have their fruit and blossom
    At all times of the year;
    Rivers are running over
    With red beer and brown beer.
    An old man plays the bagpipes
    In a golden and silver wood;
    Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
    Are dancing in a crowd.

    The little fox he murmured,
    "O what of the world's bane?"
    The sun was laughing sweetly,
    The moon plucked at my rein;
    But the little red fox murmured,
    "O, do not pluck at his rein,
    He is riding to the townland
    That is the world's bane."

You may interpret the little red fox and the sun and the moon as you
please, but is it not all as beautiful as the ringing of bells?

But Mr. Yeats, in his desire for this other world of colour and music,
is no scorner of the everyday earth. His early poems especially, as Mr.
Reid points out, give evidence of a wondering observation of Nature
almost Wordsworthian. In _The Stolen Child_, which tells of a human
child that is enticed away by the fairies, the magic of the earth the
child is leaving is the means by which Mr. Yeats suggests to us the
magic of the world into which it is going, as in the last verse of the

    Away with us he's going,
    The solemn eyed:
    He'll hear no more the lowing
    Of the calves on the warm hillside;
    Or the kettle on the hob
    Sing peace into his breast,
    Or see the brown mice bob
    Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
    _For he comes, the human child,
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand,
    From a world more full of weeping than he can understand._

There is no painting here, no adjective-work. But no painting or
adjectives could better suggest all that the world and the loss of the
world mean to an imaginative child than this brief collection of simple
things. To read _The Stolen Child_ is to realize both that Mr. Yeats
brought a new and delicate music into literature and that his genius had
its birth in a sense of the beauty of common things. Even when in his
early poems the adjectives seem to be chosen with the too delicate care
of an artist, as when he notes how--

            in autumnal solitudes
    Arise the leopard-coloured trees,

his observation of the world about him is but proved the more
conclusively. The trees in autumn _are_ leopard-coloured, though a poet
cannot say so without becoming dangerously ornamental.

What I have written so far, however, might convey the impression that in
Mr. Yeats's poetry we have a child's rather than a man's vision at work.
One might even gather that he was a passionless singer with his head in
the moon. This is exactly the misunderstanding which has led many people
to think of him as a minor poet.

The truth is Mr. Yeats is too original and, as it were, secret a poet to
capture all at once the imagination that has already fixed the outlines
of its kingdom amid the masterpieces of literature. His is a genius
outside the landmarks. There is no prototype in Shelley or Keats, any
more than there is in Shakespeare, for such a poem as that which was at
first called _Breasal the Fisherman_, but is now called simply _The

    Although you hide in the ebb and flow
    Of the pale tide when the moon has set,
    The people of coming days will know
    About the casting out of my net,
    And how you have leaped times out of mind
    Over the little silver cords.
    And think that you were hard and unkind,
    And blame you with many bitter words.

There, in music as simple as a fable of Aesop, Mr. Yeats has figured the
pride of genius and the passion of defeated love in words that are
beautiful in themselves, but trebly beautiful in their significances.

Beautifully new, again, is the poem beginning, "I wander by the edge,"
which expresses the desolation of love as it is expressed in few modern

    I wander by the edge
    Of this desolate lake
    Where wind cries in the sedge:
    _Until the axle break
    That keeps the stars in their round
    And hands hurl in the deep
    The banners of East and West
    And the girdle of light is unbound,
    Your breast will not lie by the breast
    Of your beloved in sleep._

Rhythms like these did not exist in the English language until Mr. Yeats
invented them, and their very novelty concealed for a time the passion
that is immortal in them. It is by now a threadbare saying of Wordsworth
that every great artist has himself to create the taste by which he is
enjoyed, but it is worth quoting once more because it is especially
relevant to a discussion of the genius of Mr. Yeats. What previous
artist, for example, had created the taste which would be prepared to
respond imaginatively to such a revelation of a lover's triumph in the
nonpareil beauty of his mistress as we have in the poem that ends:--

    I cried in my dream, "_O women bid the young men lay
    Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair
    Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away_,"

One may doubt at times whether Mr. Yeats does not too consciously show
himself an artist of the aesthetic school in some of his epithets, such
as "cloud-pale" and "dream-dimmed." His too frequent repetition of
similar epithets makes woman stand out of his poems at times like a
decoration, as in the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, rather than
in the vehement beauty of life. It is as if the passion in his verse
were again and again entangled in the devices of art. If we take his
love-poems as a whole, however, the passion in them is at once vehement
and beautiful.

The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the passion that
has given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse. _The Wind Among the Reeds_ is a
book of love-poetry quite unlike all other books of love-poetry. It
utters the same moods of triumph in the beloved's beauty, of despair, of
desire, of boastfulness of the poet's immortality, that we find in the
love-poetry of other ages. But here are new images, almost a new
language. Sometimes we have an image which fills the mind like the image
in some little Chinese lyric, as in the poem _He Reproves the Curlew_:--

    O, curlew, cry no more in the air,
    Or only to the waters of the West;
    Because your crying brings to my mind
    Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
    That was shaken out over my breast:
    There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.

dominant theme of the poems, even in _The Song of Wandering Aengus_,
that poem of almost playful beauty, which tells of the "little silver
trout" that became

           --a glimmering girl
    With apple blossom in her hair,
    Who called me by my name and ran
    And faded through the brightening air.

What a sense of long pursuit, of a life's quest, we get in the
exquisite last verse--a verse which must be among the best-known of Mr.
Yeats's writings after _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_ and _Had I the
Heaven's Embroidered Cloths_:--

    Though I am old with wandering
    Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
    I will find out where she has gone,
    And kiss her lips and take her hands;
    And walk among long dappled grass,
    And pluck till time and times are done
    The silver apples of the moon,
    The golden apples of the sun.

human passions. It is a wonderful example, however, of Mr. Yeats's
genius for transforming passion into elfin dreams. The emotion is at
once deeper and nearer human experience in the later poem called _The
Folly of Being Comforted_. I have known readers who professed to find
I know no better example of the nobleness of Mr. Yeats's verse and his
incomparable music.




Perhaps the luckiest of all the Russian authors in this respect is
never been so wonderful an examination of common people in literature as
in the short stories of Tchehov. His world is thronged with the average
man and the average woman. Other writers have also put ordinary people
into books. They have written plays longer than _Hamlet_, and novels
longer than _Don Quixote_, about ordinary people. They have piled such a
heap of details on the ordinary man's back as almost to squash him out
of existence. In the result the reader as well as the ordinary man has a
sense of oppression. He begins to long for the restoration of the big
subject to literature.

Henry James complained of the littleness of the subject in _Madame
Bovary._ He regarded it as one of the miracles of art that so great a
book should have been written about so small a woman. _Tom Jones_, on
the other hand, is a portrait of a common man of the size of which few
people complain. But then _Tom Jones_ is a comedy, and we enjoy the
continual relief of laughter. It is the tragic realists for whom the
common man is a theme so perilous in its temptations to dullness. At the
same time he is a theme that they were bound to treat. He is himself,
indeed, the sole source and subject of tragic realism in literature.
Were it not for the oppression of his futile and philoprogenitive
presence, imaginative writers would be poets and romancers.

The problem of the novelist of contemporary life for whom ordinary
people are more intensely real than the few magnificent personalities is
how to portray ordinary people in such a way that they will become
better company than they are in life. Tchehov, I think, solves the
problem better than any of the other novelists. He sees, for one thing,
that no man is uninteresting when he is seen as a person stumbling
towards some goal, just as no man is uninteresting when his hat is blown
off and he has to scuttle after it down the street. There is bound to be
a break in the meanest life.

Tchehov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a
charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of
his sympathy. He does not run sympathy as a "stunt" like so many popular
novelists. He sympathizes merely in the sense that he understands in his
heart as well as in his brain. He has the most unbiassed attitude, I
think, of any author in the world. Mr. Edward Garnett, in his
introduction to Mrs. Garnett's translation of Tchehov's tales, speaks
admirably of his "profundity of acceptation." There is no writer who is
less inclined to use italics in his record of human life. Perhaps Mr.
Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all his
characters, watching them quietly and registering their circumstances
and feelings with such finality that to pass judgment on them appears
supererogatory." Tchehov's judgment is at times clear enough--as clear
as if it followed a summing-up from the bench. He portrays his
characters instead of labelling them; but the portrait itself is the
judgment. His humour makes him tolerant, but, though he describes moral
and material ugliness with tolerance, he never leaves us in any doubt as
to their being ugly. His attitude to a large part of life might be
described as one of good-natured disgust.

In one of the newly-translated stories, _Ariadne_, he shows us a woman
from the point of view of a disgusted lover. It is a sensitive man's
picture of a woman who was even more greedy than beautiful. "This thirst
for personal success ... makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold--to me,
to nature, and to music." Tchehov extends towards her so little charity
that he makes her run away to Italy with a bourgeois who had "a neck
like goose-skin and a big Adam's apple," and who, as he talked,
"breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and smelling of boiled
beef." As the more sensitive lover who supplanted the bourgeois looks
back, her incessant gluttony is more vivid in his thoughts than her

     to bring up something, for instance, roast beef, and she would eat
     night she would eat apples or oranges.

The story, it is only fair to say, is given in the words of a lover
dissatisfied with lust, and the judgment may therefore be regarded as
the lover's rather than as Tchehov's. Tchehov sets down the judgment,
however, in a mood of acute perceptiveness of everything that is jarring
and vulgar in sexual vanity. Ariadne's desire to please is never
permitted to please us as, say, Beatrix Esmond's is. Her will to
fascinate does not fascinate when it is refracted in Tchehov's critical

     She waked up every morning with the one thought of "pleasing." It
     was the aim and object of her life. If I told her that in such a
     in her power and reduced to a complete nonentity before her charms
     gave her the same sort of satisfaction that victors used to get in
     tournaments.... She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms;
     would, when she was angry, say all sorts of vulgar things taunting

A few strokes of cruelty are added to the portrait:

     read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.

As one reads _Ariadne_, one feels that those who say the artist is not a
judge are in error. What he must avoid becoming is a
prosecuting--perhaps even a defending--counsel.

Egoism seems to be the quality which offends Tchehov most. He is no more
in love with it when it masquerades as virtue than when it parades as
vice. _An Artist's Story_--a beautiful sad story, which might almost
have been written by Turgenev--contains a fine critical portrait of a
woman absorbed in the egoism of good works. She is always looking after
the poor, serving on committees, full of enthusiasm for nursing and
education. She lacks only that charity of the heart which loves human
beings, not because they are poor, but because they are human beings.
She is by nature a "boss." She "bosses" her mother and her younger
sister, and when the artist falls in love with the latter, the stronger
will of the woman of high principles immediately separates lovers so
frivolous that they had never sat on a committee in their lives. When,
the evening after the artist confesses his love, he waits for the girl
to come to him in the garden of her house, he waits in vain. He goes
into the house to look for her, but does not find her. Then through one
of the doors he overhears the voice of the lady of the good works:

     ... A piece of cheese ... Who's there?" she called suddenly,
     hearing my steps.

     "It's I."

     "Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to open this minute; I'm giving
     Dasha her lesson."

     "Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"

     cheese....' Have you written it?"

     I went into the hall and stared vacantly at the pond and the
     village, and the sound reached me of "A piece of cheese ... God
     sent the crow a piece of cheese."

     small boy who gave me a note.

     "I told my sister everything and she insisted on my parting from
     and I are crying!"

The people who cannot wound others--those are the people whose sharp
pangs we feel in our breasts as we read the stories of Tchehov. The
people who wound--it is they whom he paints (or, rather, as Mr. Garnett
suggests, etches) with such felicitous and untiring irony. But, though
he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than
not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background. In
_Anyuta_, the medical student and his mistress live in a room
disgusting in its squalor:

     Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, boots, clothes, a big
     filthy slop--pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette-ends
     purposely jumbled together in one confusion....

And, if the surroundings are no more beautiful than those in which a
great part of the human race lives, neither are the people more
beautiful than ordinary people. In _The Trousseau_, the poor thin girl
who spends her life making a trousseau for a marriage that will never
take place becomes ridiculous as she flushes at the entrance of a
stranger into her mother's house:

     Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with small-pox, turned red

I do not know if a blush of this sort is possible, but the thought of it
is distressing.

The woman in _The Darling_, who marries more than once and simply cannot
live without some one to love and to be an echo to, is "not half bad" to
look at. But she is ludicrous even when most unselfish and
adoring--especially when she rubs with eau-de-Cologne her little, thin,
yellow-faced, coughing husband with "the curls combed forward on his
forehead," and wraps him in her warm shawls to an accompaniment of
endearments. "'You're such a sweet pet!' she used to say with perfect
sincerity, stroking his hair. 'You're such a pretty dear!'"

Thus sympathy and disgust live in a curious harmony in Tchehov's
stories. And, as he seldom allows disgust entirely to drive out sympathy
in himself, he seldom allows it to do so in his readers either. His
world may be full of unswept rooms and unwashed men and women, but the
presiding genius in it is the genius of gentleness and love and
laughter. It is a dark world, but Tchehov brings light into it. There is
no other author who gives so little offence as he shows us offensive
things and people. He is a writer who desires above all things to see
what men and women are really like--to extenuate nothing and to set down
naught in malice. As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is
black without being bitter. I know no writer who leaves one with the
same vision of men and women as lost sheep.

We are now apparently to have a complete edition of the tales of Tchehov
in English from Mrs. Garnett. It will deserve a place, both for the
author's and the translator's sake, beside her Turgenev and Dostoevsky.
In lifelikeness and graciousness her work as a translator always reaches
a high level. Her latest volumes confirm one in the opinion that Tchehov
is, for his variety, abundance, tenderness and knowledge of the heart of
the "rapacious and unclean animal" called man, the greatest short-story
writer who has yet appeared on the planet.



It was Mr. Bernard Shaw who, in commenting on the rowdy reception of the
Irish players in some American theatres, spoke of Lady Gregory as "the
greatest living Irishwoman." She is certainly a remarkable enough writer
to put a generous critic a little off his balance. Equal mistress in
comedy and tragedy, essayist, gatherer of the humours of folk-lore,
imaginative translator of heroic literature, venturesome translator of
Molière, she has contributed a greater variety of grotesque and
beautiful things to Anglo-Irish literature than any of her

She owes her chief fame, perhaps, to the way in which, along with Mr.
G.A. Birmingham and the authors of _Some Experiences of an Irish R.M._,
she has kept alive the tradition of Ireland as a country in which
Laughter has frequent occasion to hold both his sides. She surpasses the
others in the quality of her comedy, however. Not that she is more
comic, but that she is more comprehensively true to life. Mr. Birmingham
has given us farce with a salt of reality; Miss Somerville and Miss
Ross, practical jokers of literature, turned to reality as upper-class
patrons of the comic; but Lady Gregory has gone to reality as to a cave
of treasure. She is one of the discoverers of Ireland. Her genius, like
Synge's, opened its eyes one day and saw spread below it the immense sea
of Irish common speech, with its colour, its laughter, and its music. It
is a sort of second birth which many Irish men and women of the last
generation or so have experienced. The beggar on the road, the piper at
the door, the old people in the workhouse, are henceforth accepted as a
sort of aristocracy in exile.

Lady Gregory obviously sought out their company as the heirs to a great
inheritance--an inheritance of imaginative and humorous speech. Not that
she plundered them of their fantastic tropes so greedily as Synge did.
She studied rather their common turn of phrase, its heights and its
hollows, its exquisite illogic, its passionate underflow of poetry. Has
she not herself told us how she could not get on with the character of
Bartley Fallon in _Spreading the News_, till one day she met a
melancholy man by the sea at Duras, who, after describing the crosses he
endured at home, said: "But I'm thinking if I went to America, it's long
ago I'd be dead. And it's a great expense for a poor man to be buried in
America." Out of sentences like these--sentences seized upon with the
genius of the note-book--she has made much of what is most delightful in
her plays. Her sentences are steeped and dyed in life, even when her
situations are as mad as hatters.

Some one has said that every great writer invents a new language. Lady
Gregory, whom it would be unfair to praise as a great writer, has at
least qualified as one by inventing a new language out of her knowledge
of Irish peasant speech. This, perhaps, is her chief literary peril.
Having discovered the beautiful dialect of the Kiltartan peasantry, she
was not content to leave it a peasant dialect--as we find it in her best
dramatic work, _Seven Short Plays_; but she set about transforming it
into a tongue into which all literature and emotion might apparently be
translated. Thus, she gave us Molière in Kiltartan--a ridiculously
successful piece of work--and she gave us Finn and Cuchullain in
modified Kiltartan, and this, too, was successful, sometimes very
beautifully so. Here, however, she had masterpieces to begin with. In
_Irish Folk-History Plays_, on the other hand, we find her embarking,
not upon translation, but upon original heroic drama, in the Kiltartan
language. The result is unreality as unreal as if Meredith had made a
farm-labourer talk like Diana of the Crossways. Take, for instance, the
first of the plays, _Grania_, which is founded on the story of the
pursuit of Diarmuid and Grania by Finn MacCool, to whom Grania had been
betrothed. When Finn, disguised as a blind beggar, visits the lovers in
their tent, Grania, who does not recognize him, bids him give Finn this
message from her:--

     Give heed to what I say now. If you have one eye is blind, let it
     be turned to the place where we are, and that he might ask news of.
     And if you have one seeing eye, cast it upon me, and tell Finn you
     saw a woman no way sad or afraid, but as airy and high-minded as a
     mountain-filly would be challenging the winds of March!

I flatly refuse to take the high-minded mountain filly seriously as a
tragic heroine, and I confess I hold Finn equally suspect, disguised as
a beggar though he is, when he speaks of himself to Grania as a hard
man--"as hard as a barren step-mother's slap, or a highway gander's
gob." After all, in heroic literature, we must have the illusion of the
heroic. If we can get the peasant statement of the heroic, that is
excellent; its sincerity brings its illusion. But a mere imitation of
the peasant statement of the heroic, such as Lady Gregory seems to aim
at giving us in these sentences, is as pinchbeck and unreal as
Macpherson's _Ossian_. It reaches a grotesque absurdity when at the
close of Act II Finn comes back to the door of the tent and, in order to
stir up Diarmuid's jealousy, says:--

     It is what they were saying a while ago, the King of Foreign is
     grunting and sighing, grunting and sighing, around and about the
     big red sally tree beside the stream!

To write like that is to use not a style but a jargon.

of Abbey-Theatre rhetoric, you have only to turn to Lady Gregory's own
notes at the end of _Irish Folk-History Plays_, where she records a
plays--in the tragic plays, at any rate--is the real "folk-history" of
_Kincora_, where some one tells of the Battle of Clontarf, in which
Brian Boru defeated the Danes:--

     the Brodericks are descended from, that put a dagger through
     Brian's heart, and he attending to his prayers. What the Danes left
     morning the country people will always say: "It is for Denmark they
     are crowing; crowing they are to be back in Denmark."

Lady Gregory reveals more of life--leaping, imaginative life--in that
She describes the former plays as "tragic comedies"; but in the first
and best of them, _The Canavans_, it is difficult to see where the
tragedy comes in. _The Canavans_ is really a farce of the days of
Elizabeth. The principal character is a cowardly miller, who ensues
nothing but his own safety in the war of loyalties and disloyalties
other. Consequently, he is at his wits' end when his brother Antony
comes seeking shelter in his house, after deserting from the English
brother has to impersonate him in the interview with the officer who
carries out the search. The situation obviously lends itself to comic
elaborations, and Lady Gregory misses none of her opportunities. She
later scene, where Antony disguises himself as Queen Elizabeth, supposed
turns the play from living speech into machinery. _The Canavans_,
from their historical setting.

_The White Cockade_, the second of the tragic comedies, is a play about
the flight of King James II after the Battle of the Boyne, and it, too,
is lifeless and mechanical in so far as it is historical. King James
himself is a good comic figure of a conventional sort, as he is
discovered hiding in the barrel; but Sarsfield, who is meant to be
heroic, is all joints and sawdust; and the mad Jacobite lady is a puppet
who might have been invented by any writer of plays. "When my _White
Cockade_ was produced," Lady Gregory tells us, "I was pleased to hear
that Mr. Synge had said my method had made the writing of historical
drama again possible." But surely, granted the possession of the
dramatic gift, the historical imagination is the only thing that makes
the writing of historical drama possible. Lady Gregory does not seem to
me to possess the historical imagination. Not that I believe in
archaeology in the theatre; but, apart from her peasant characters, she
cannot give us the illusion of reality about the figures in these
historical plays. If we want the illusion of reality, we shall have to
turn from _The White Cockade_ to the impossible scene outside the
post-office and the butcher's shop in _Hyacinth Halvey_. As for the
third of the tragic comedies, _The Deliverer_, it is a most interesting
curiosity. In it we have an allegory of the fate of Parnell in a setting
of the Egypt of the time of Moses. Moses himself--or the King's
nursling, as he is called--is Parnell; and he and the other characters
talk Kiltartan as to the manner born. _The Deliverer_ is grotesque and,
in its way, impressive, though the conclusion, in which the King's
nursling is thrown to the King's cats by his rebellious followers,
invites parody. The second volume of the _Irish Folk-History Plays_,
even if it reveals only Lady Gregory's talent rather than her genius, is
full of odd and entertaining things, and the notes at the end of both
of these volumes, short though they are, do give us the franchise of a
wonderful world of folk-history.



Mr. Cunninghame Graham is a grandee of contemporary literature. He is
also a grandee of revolutionary politics. Both in literature and in
politics he is a figure of challenge for the love of challenge more than
any other man now writing. Other men challenge us with Utopias, with
moral laws and so forth. But Mr. Graham has little of the prophet or the
moralist about him. He expresses himself better in terms of his
hostilities than in terms of visionary cities and moralities such as
Plato and Shelley and Mazzini have built for us out of light and fire.
It is a temperament, indeed, not a vision or a logic, that Mr. Graham
has brought to literature. He blows his fantastic trumpet outside the
walls of a score of Jerichos:--Jerichos of empire, of cruelty, of
self-righteousness, of standardized civilization--and he seems to do so
for the sheer soldierly joy of the thing. One feels that if all the
walls of all the Jerichos were suddenly to collapse before his
trumpet-call he would be the loneliest man alive. For he is one of those
for whom, above all, "the fight's the thing."

It would be difficult to find any single purpose running through the
medley of cosmopolitan "things seen" and comments grouped together under
a title in which irony lurks. Take the volume called _Charity_, for
of the sketches may be regarded as a challenge to the unco' guid (if
adultery. It is scarcely an accident that in _Charity_ a number of the
chapters relate to women who make a profession of sin.

in the human drama. It would be more accurate to say "as figures in the
human picture," for he is far more of a painter than a dramatist. But
grim or humorous, as the portraits in Chaucer are--acceptances of life
as it is--at least, of life as it is outside the vision of policemen and
for anything but two things--being successful (in the vulgar sense of
the term) or being a policeman.

Maupassant's _Boule de Suif_. Mr. Graham gloriously insists upon our
first cousins once removed rather than as brothers and sisters by the
grace of God.

He does more than this in his preface, indeed, a marvellous piece of
reality and irony which tells how a courtesan in Gibraltar fell madly in
love with a gentleman-sponger who lived on her money while he could, and
then took the first boat home with discreet heartlessness on coming into
a bequest from a far-off cousin. "Good God, a pretty sight I should have
looked...." he explained to a kindred spirit as they paced the deck of
the boat to get an appetite. "I like her well enough, but what I say is,
Charity begins at home, my boy. Ah, there's the dinner bell!" Mr. Graham
has a noble courtesy, an unerring chivalry that makes him range himself
on the side of the bottom dog, a detestation of anything like
bullying--every gift of charity, indeed, except the shy genius of pity.
For lack of this last, some of his sketches, such as _Un Autre
Monsieur_, are mere anecdotes and decorations.

Possibly, it is as a romantic decorator that Mr. Graham, in his art as
opposed to his politics, would prefer to be judged. He has dredged half
the world for his themes and colours, and Spain and Paraguay and Morocco
and Scotland and London's tangled streets all provide settings for his
romantic rearrangements of life in this book. He has a taste for uncivil
scenes, as Henley had a taste for uncivil words. Even a London street
becomes a scene of this kind as he pictures it in his imagination with
huge motorbuses, like demons of violence, smashing their way through the
traffic. Or he takes us to some South American forest, where the vampire
bats suck the blood of horses during the night. Or he introduces us to a
Spanish hidalgo, "tall, wry-necked, and awkwardly built, with a nose
like a lamprey and feet like coracles." (For there is the same note of
violence, of exaggeration, in his treatment of persons as of places.)
Even in Scotland, he takes us by preference to some lost mansion
standing in grotesque contrast to the "great drabness of prosperity
which overspreads the world." He is a great scene-painter of
wildernesses and lawless places, indeed. He is a Bohemian, a lover of
adventures in wild and sunny lands, and even the men and women are apt
to become features in the strange scenery of his pilgrimages rather than
dominating portraits. In his descriptions he uses a splendid rhetoric
such as no other living writer of English commands. He has revived
rhetoric as a literary instrument. Aubrey Beardsley called Turner a
rhetorician in paint. If we were to speak of Mr. Graham as a painter in
rhetoric, we should be doing more than making a phrase.

But Mr. Graham cannot be summed up in a phrase. To meet him in his books
is one of the desirable experiences of contemporary literature, as to
hear him speak is one of the desirable experiences of modern politics.
Protest, daring, chivalry, the passion for the colour of life and the
colour of words--he is the impersonation of these things in a world
that is muddling its way half-heartedly towards the Promised Land.




Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut and
plumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon as
he began to moult--and he had already moulted excessively by the time
Watts-Dunton took him under his roof--one saw how very little body
there was underneath. Mr. Gosse in his biography compared Swinburne to a
coloured and exotic bird--a "scarlet and azure macaw," to, be
precise--and the comparison remains in one's imagination. Watts-Dunton,
Putney, resolved to domesticate it. He watched over it as a farmer's
wife watches over a sick hen. He taught it to eat out of his hand. He
taught it to speak--to repeat things after him, even "God Save the
Queen." Some people say that he ruined the bird by these methods. Others
maintain that, on the contrary, but for him the bird would have died of
a disease akin to the staggers. They say, moreover, that the tameness
and docility of the bird, while he was looking after it, have been
greatly exaggerated, and they deny that it was entirely bald of its old
gay feathers.

There you have a brief statement of the great Swinburne question, which,
it seems likely, will last as long as the name of Swinburne is
remembered. It is not a question of any importance; but that will not
prevent us from arguing it hotly. The world takes a malicious joy in
jibing at men of genius and their associates, and a generous joy in
defending them from jibes. Further, the discussion that interests the
greatest number of people is discussion that has come down to a
personal level. Ten people will be bored by an argument as to the nature
of Swinburne's genius for one who will be bored by an argument as to the
nature of Swinburne's submissiveness to Watts-Dunton. Was Watts-Dunton,
in a phrase deprecated by the editors of a recent book of letters, a
"kind of amiable Svengali"? Did he allow Swinburne to have a will of his
own? Did Swinburne, in going to Putney, go to the Devil? Or did not
Watts-Dunton rather play the part of the good Samaritan? Unfortunately,
all those who have hitherto attempted to describe the relations of the
two men have succeeded only in making them both appear ridiculous. Mr.
Gosse, a man of letters with a sting, has done it cleverly. The others,
like the editors to whom I have referred, have done it inadvertently.
They write too solemnly. If Swinburne had lost a trouser-button, they
would not have felt it inappropriate, one feels, for the Archbishop of
Canterbury to hurry to the scene and go down on his knees on the floor
to look for it.... Well, no doubt, Swinburne was an absurd character.
And so was Watts-Dunton. And so, perhaps, is the Archbishop of

Most of us have, at one time or another, fallen under the spell of
Swinburne owing to the genius with which he turned into music the
enthusiasm of the heretic. He fluttered through the sooty and Sabbatic
air of the Victorian era, uttering melodious cries of protest against
everything in morals, politics, and religion for which Queen Victoria
seemed to stand. He was like a rebellious boy who takes more pleasure in
breaking the Sabbath than in the voice of nightingales. He was one of
the few Englishmen of genius who have understood the French zest for
shocking the bourgeois. He had little of his own to express, but he
discovered the heretic's gospel in Gautier, and Baudelaire and set it
forth in English in music that he might have learned from the Sirens
who sang to Ulysses. He revelled in blasphemous and licentious fancies
that would have made Byron's hair stand on end. Nowadays, much of the
blasphemy and licentiousness seems flat and unprofitable as Government
beer. But in those days it seemed heady as wine and beautiful as a
mediaeval tale. There was always in Swinburne more of pose than of
passion. That is why we have to some extent grown tired of him. But in
the atmosphere of Victorianism his pose was original and astonishing. He
was anti-Christ in a world that had annexed Christ rather than served
him. Nowadays, there is such an abundance of anti-Christs that the part
seems hardly worth playing by a man of first-rate ability. Consequently,
we have to remember the circumstances in which they were written in
order to appreciate to the full many of Swinburne's poems and even some
of the amusing outbursts of heresy in his letters. Still, even to-day,
one cannot but enjoy the gusto with which he praised
Trelawney--Shelley's and Byron's Trelawney--"the most splendid old man I
have seen since Landor and my own grandfather":--

     Of the excellence of his principles I will say but this: that I did
     think, by the grace of Saban (unto whom, and not unto me, be the
     glory and thanksgiving. Amen: Selah), I was a good atheist and a
     good republican; but in the company of this magnificent old rebel,
     a lifelong incarnation of the divine right of insurrection, I felt
     myself, by comparison, a Theist and a Royalist.

In another letter he writes in the same gay, under-graduatish strain of

     When I hear that a personal friend has fallen into matrimonial
     courses, I feel the same sorrow as if I had heard of his lapsing
     into theism--a holy sorrow, unmixed with anger; for who am I to
     judge him? I think at such a sight, as the preacher--was it not
     Baxter?--at the sight of a thief or murderer led to the gallows:
     "There, but for the grace of----, goes A.C.S.," and drop a tear
     over fallen man.

There was, it is only fair to say, a great deal in Swinburne's
insurrectionism that was noble, or, at least, in tune with nobleness.
But it is impossible to persuade oneself that he was ever among the
genuine poets of liberty. He loved insurrectionism for its own sake. He
revelled in it in the spirit of a rhetorician rather than of a martyr.
He was a glorious humbug, a sort of inverted Pecksniff. Even his
republicanism cannot have gone very deep if it is true, as certain of
his editors declare, that having been born within the precincts of
Belgravia "was an event not entirely displeasing to a man of his
aristocratic leanings." Swinburne, it seems, was easily pleased. One of
his proudest boasts was that he and Victor Hugo bore a close resemblance
to each other in one respect: both of them were almost dead when they
were born, "certainly not expected to live an hour." There was also one
great difference between them. Swinburne never grew up.

His letters, some of which Messrs. Hake and Compton Rickett have given
us, are interesting and amusing, but they do not increase one's opinion
of Swinburne's mind. He reveals himself as a sensitive critic in his
remarks on the proofs of Rossetti's poems, in his comments on Morris,
and in his references to Tennyson's dramas. But, as a rule, his
intemperance of praise and blame makes his judgments appear mere
eccentricities of the blood. He could not praise Falstaff, for instance,
without speaking of "the ever dear and honoured presence of Falstaff,"
and applauding the "sweet, sound, ripe toothsome, wholesome kernel" of
Falstaff's character as well as humour. He even defied the opinion of
his idol, Victor Hugo, and contended that Falstaff was not really a
coward. All the world will agree that Swinburne was right in glorifying
Falstaff. He glorified him, however, on the wrong plane. He mixed his
planes in the same way in his paean over Captain Webb's feat in swimming
the English Channel. "I consider it," he said, "as the greatest glory
that has befallen England since the publication of Shelley's greatest
poem, whatever that may have been." This is shouting, not speech. But
then, as I have said, Swinburne never grew up. He never learned to
speak. He was ever a shouter. The question that has so far not been
settled is: Did Watts-Dunton put his hand over Swinburne's mouth and
forcibly stop him from shouting? As we know, he certainly stopped him
from swearing before ladies, except in French. But, as for shouting,
Swinburne had already exhausted himself when he went to the Pines.
Meanwhile, questions of this sort have begun to absorb us to such a
degree that we are apt to forget that Swinburne after all _was_ a man of
genius--a man with an entrancing gift of melody--spiritually an echo,
perhaps, but aesthetically a discoverer, a new creature, the most
amazing ecstatician of our time.


Swinburne, says Mr. Gosse, "was not quite like a human being." That is
chiefly what is the matter with his poetry. He did not write quite like
a human being. He wrote like a musical instrument. There are few poets
whose work is less expressive of personal passions. He was much given to
ecstasies, but it is remarkable that most of these were echoes of other
people's ecstasies. He sought after rapture both in politics and poetry,
other. He has been described as one who, while conversing, even in his
later years, kept "bobbing all the while like a cork on the sea of his
enthusiasms." And, in a great deal of his rapture, there is much of the
levity as well as the "bobbing" quality of the cork. He who sang the
hymns of the Republic in his youth, ended his life as
rhetorician-in-chief of the Jingoes against the Irish and the Boers. Nor
does one feel that there was any philosophic basis for the change in his
attitude as there was for a similar change in the attitude of Burke and
Wordsworth in their later years. He was influenced more by persons than
by principles. One does not find any real vision of a Republic in his
work as one finds it in the work of Shelley. He had little of the
saintliness of spirit which marks the true Republican and which turns
politics into music in _The Masque of Anarchy_. His was not one of those
tortured souls, like Francis Adams's, which desire the pulling-down of
the pillars of the old, bad world more than love or fame. There is no
utterance of the spirit in such lines as:--

    Let our flag run out straight in the wind!
      The old red shall be floated again
    When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned,
      When the names that are twenty are ten;

    When the devil's riddle is mastered
      And the galley-bench creaks with a Pope,
    We shall see Buonaparte the bastard
      Kick heels with his throat in a rope.

It is possible for those who agree with the sentiments to derive a
certain satisfaction from verse of this sort as from a vehement leading
article. But there is nothing here beyond the rhetoric of the hot fit.
There is nothing to call back the hot fit in anybody older than a boy.

Even when Swinburne was writing out of his personal experience, he
contrived somehow to empty his verse of personality and to put
sentimentalism and rhetoric in its place. We have an instance of this in
the story of the love-affair recorded by Mr. Gosse. Swinburne, at the
age of twenty-five, fell in love with a kinswoman of Sir John Simon, the
pathologist. "She gave him roses, she played and sang to him, and he
conceived from her gracious ways an encouragement which she was far from
seriously intending." Swinburne proposed to her, and, possibly from
nervousness, she burst out laughing. He was only human in feeling
bitterly offended, and "they parted on the worst of terms." He went off
to Northumberland to escape from his wretchedness, and there he wrote
_The Triumph of Time_, which Mr. Gosse maintains is "the most profound
and the most touching of all his personal poems." He assured Mr. Gosse,
fourteen years afterwards, that "the stanzas of this wonderful lyric
represented with the exactest fidelity the emotions which passed through
his mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but the
infinite pity and the pain." Beautiful though the poem intermittently
is, however, it seems to me to lack that radiance of personal emotion
which we find in the great love poems. There is much decoration of music
of a kind of which Swinburne and Poe alone possessed the secret, as in
the verse beginning:--

    There lived in France a singer of old
      By the tideless, dolorous, midland sea.
    In a land of sand and ruin and gold
      There shone one woman and none but she.

But is there more than the decoration of music in the verses which
express the poet's last farewell to his passion?

    I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
      Fill the days of my daily breath
    With fugitive things not good to treasure,
      Do as the world doth, say as it saith;
    But if we had loved each other--O sweet,
      Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet,
    The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure,
      To feel you tread it to dust and death--

    Ah, had I not taken my life up and given
      All that life gives and the years let go,
    The wine and honey, the balm and leaven,
      The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?
    Come life, come death, not a word be said;
      Should I lose you living, and vex you dead?
    I shall never tell you on earth, and in heaven,
    If I cry to you then, will you care to know?

Browning, unquestionably, could have expressed Swinburne's passion
better than Swinburne did it himself. He would not have been content
with a sequence of vague phrases that made music. With him each phrase
would have been dramatic and charged with a personal image or a personal

Swinburne, however, was a great musician in verse and beyond
belittlement in this regard. It would be incongruous to attempt a close
comparison between him and Longfellow, but he was like Longfellow in
having a sense of music out of all proportion to the imaginative content
of his verse. There was never a distinguished poet whose work endures
logical analysis so badly. Mr. Arthur Symons, in a recent essay, refers
scornfully to those who say that "the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's
form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance." But
he produces no evidence on the other side. He merely calls on us to
observe the way in which Swinburne scatters phrases and epithets of
"imaginative subtlety" by the way, while most poets "present us with
their best effects deliberately." It seems to me, on the contrary, that
Swinburne's phrasing is far from subtle. He induces moods of excitement
and sadness by his musical scheme rather than by individual phrases. Who
can resist, for example, the spell of the opening verses of _Before the
Mirror_, the poem of enchantment addressed to Whistler's _Little White
Girl?_ One hesitates to quote again lines so well known. But it is as
good an example as one can find of the pleasure-giving qualities of
Swinburne's music, apart from his phrases and images:--

    White rose in red rose-garden
      Is not so white;
    Snowdrops that plead for pardon
      And pine from fright,
    Because the hard East blows
    Over their maiden rows,
      Grow not as thy face grows from pale to bright.
    Behind the veil, forbidden,
      Shut up from sight,
    Love, is there sorrow hidden,
      Is there delight?
    Is joy thy dower or grief,
    White rose of weary leaf,
      Late rose whose life is brief, whose loves are light?

The snowdrop image in the first verse is, charming as is the sound of
the lines, nonsense. The picture of the snowdrops pleading for pardon
and pining from fright would have been impossible to a poet with the
realizing genius of the great writers. Swinburne's sense of rhythm,
however, was divorced in large measure from his sense of reality. He was
a poet without the poet's gift of sight. William Morris complained that
Swinburne's poems did not make pictures. Swinburne had not the necessary
sense of the lovely form of the things around him. His attitude to
Nature was lacking, as Mr. Gosse suggests, in that realism which gives
coherence to poetry. To quote Mr. Gosse's own words:--

     Swinburne did not live, like Wordsworth, in a perpetual communion
     with Nature, but exceptional, and even rare, moments of
     concentrated observation wakened in him an ecstasy which he was
     careful to brood upon, to revive, and perhaps, at last, to
     exaggerate. As a rule, he saw little of the world around him, but
     what he did see was presented to him in a blaze of limelight.

Nearly all his poems are a little too long, a little tedious, for the
simple reason that the muzziness of vision in them, limelight and all,
is bewildering to the intelligence. There are few of his poems which
close in splendour equal to the splendour of their opening verses. _The
Garden of Proserpine_ is one of the few that keep the good wine for the
last. Here, however, as in the rest of his poems, we find beautiful
passages rather than beauty informing the whole poem. Swinburne's poems
have no spinal cord. One feels this even in that most beautiful of his
lyrics, the first chorus in _Atalanta in Calydon._ But how many poets
are there who could have sustained for long the miracle of "When the
hounds of spring are on winter traces," and the verse that follows? Mrs.
Disney Leith tells us in a charming book of recollections and letters
that the first time Swinburne recited this poem to her was on horseback,
and one wonders whether he had the ecstasy of the gallop and the music
of racing horses in his blood when he wrote the poem. His poems are
essentially expressions of ecstasy. His capacity for ecstasy was the
most genuine thing about him. A thunderstorm gave him "a more vivid
pleasure than music or wine." His pleasure in thunder, in the gallop of
horses, in the sea, was, however, one fancies, largely an intoxication
of music. It is like one's own enjoyment of his poems. This, too, is
simply an intoxication of music.

The first series of _Poems and Ballads_, it must be admitted, owed its
success for many years to other things besides the music. It broke in
upon the bourgeois moralities of nineteenth-century England like a
defiance. It expressed in gorgeous wordiness the mood of every
green-sick youth of imagination who sees that beauty is being banished
from the world in the name of goodness. One has only to look at the grey
and yellow and purple brick houses built during the reign of Victoria to
see that the green-sick youth had a good right to protest. A world that
makes goodness the enemy of beauty and freedom is a blasphemous denial
of both goodness and beauty, and young men will turn from it in disgust
to the praise of Venus or any other god or goddess that welcomes beauty
at the altar. The first volume of _Poems and Ballads_ was a challenge to
the lie of tall-hatted religion. There is much truth in Mr. Gosse's
saying that "the poet is not a lotus-eater who has never known the
Gospel, but an evangelist turned inside out." He had been brought up
Puritanically by his mother, who kept all fiction from him in his
childhood, but grounded him with the happiest results in the Bible and
Shakespeare. "This acquaintance with the text of the Bible," says Mr.
Gosse, "he retained to the end of his life, and he was accustomed to be
emphatic about the advantage he had received from the beauty of its
language." His early poems, however, were not a protest against the
atmosphere of his home, but against the atmosphere of what can only be
described by the worn-out word "respectability." Mrs. Disney Leith
declares that she never met a character more "reverent-minded." And,
certainly, the irreverence of his most pagan poems is largely an
irreverence of gesture. He delighted in shocking his contemporaries, and
planned shocking them still further with a volume called _Lesbia
Brandon_, which he never published; but at heart he never freed himself
from the Hebrew awe in presence of good and evil. His _Aholibah_ is a
poem that is as moral in one sense as it is lascivious in another. As
Mr. Gosse says, "his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum,
between the North and the South, between Paganism and Puritanism,
between resignation to the insticts and an ascetic repudiation of their
authority." It is the conflict between the two moods that is the most
interesting feature in Swinburne's verse, apart from its purely artistic
qualities. Some writers find Swinburne as great a magician as ever in
those poems in which he is free from the obsession of the flesh. But I
doubt if Swinburne ever rose to the same great heights in his later work
as in the two first series of _Poems and Ballads._ Those who praise him
as a thinker quote _Hertha_ as a masterpiece of philosophy in music, and
it was Swinburne's own favourite among his poems. But I confess I find
it a too long sermon. Swinburne's philosophy and religion were as vague
as his vision of the world about him. "I might call myself, if I
wished," he wrote in 1875, "a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake
and Shelley), but assuredly in no sense a Theist."

Mr. Gosse has written Swinburne's life with distinction and
understanding; but it was so eventless a life that the biographer's is
not an easy task. The book contains plenty of entertainment, however. It
is amusing to read of the author of _Anactoria_ as a child going about
with Bowdler's Shakespeare under his arm and, in later years, assisting
Jowett in the preparation of a _Child's Bible._



To have written books and to have died in battle has been a common
enough fate in the last few years. But not many of the young men who
have fallen in the war have left us with such a sense of perished genius
as Lieutenant T.M. Kettle, who was killed at Ginchy. He was one of those
men who have almost too many gifts to succeed. He had the gift of
letters and the gift of politics; he was a mathematician, an economist,
a barrister, and a philosopher; he was a Bohemian as well as a scholar;
as one listened to him, one suspected at times that he must be one of
the most brilliant conversationalists of the age. He lived in a blaze of
adoration as a student, and, though this adoration was tempered by the
abuse of opponents in his later years, he still had a way of going about
as a conqueror with his charm. Had he only had a little ordinariness in
his composition to harden him, he would almost certainly have ended as
the leading Irish statesman of his day. He was undoubtedly ambitious of
success in the grand style. But with his ambition went the mood of
Ecclesiastes, which reminded him of the vanity of ambition. In his youth
he adhered to Herbert Spencer's much-quoted saying: "What I need to
realize is how infinitesimal is the importance of anything I can do, and
how infinitely important it is that I should do it." But, while with
Spencer this was a call to action, with Kettle it was rather a call to
meditation, to discussion. He was the Hamlet of modern Ireland. And it
is interesting to remember that in one of his early essays he defended
Hamlet against the common charge of "inability to act," and protested
that he was the victim, not of a vacillating will, but of the fates. He
contended that, so great were the issues and so dubious the evidence,
Hamlet had every right to hesitate. "The commercial blandness," he
wrote, "with which people talk of Hamlet's 'plain duty' makes one wonder
if they recognize such a thing as plain morality. The 'removal' of an
uncle without due process of law and on the unsupported evidence of an
unsubpoenable ghost; the widowing of a mother and her casting-off as
unspeakably vile, are treated as enterprises about which a man has no
right to hesitate or even to feel unhappy." This is not
mere speciousness. There is the commonsense of pessimism in it too.

The normal Irish man of letters begins as something of a Utopian. Kettle
was always too much of a pessimist--he himself would have said a
realist--to yield easily to romance. As a very young man he edited in
Dublin a paper called _The Nationist_, for which he claimed, above all
things, that it stood for "realism" in politics. Some men are driven
into revolution by despair: it was as though Kettle had been driven into
reform by despair. He admired the Utopians, but he could not share their
faith. "If one never got tired," he wrote in a sketch of the
International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart in 1907, "one would always
be with the revolutionaries, the re-makers, with Fourier and Kropotkin.
But the soul's energy is strictly limited; and with weariness there
comes the need for compromise, for 'machines,' for reputation, for
routine. Fatigue is the beginning of political wisdom." One finds the
same strain of melancholy transmuting itself into gaiety with an epigram
in much of his work. His appreciation of Anatole France is the
appreciation of a kindred spirit. In an essay called _The Fatigue of
Anatole France_ in _The Day's Burden_ he defended his author's
pessimistic attitude as he might have defended his own:

     A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams, as a
     thundercloud is stabbed by lightning, is a type of spiritual life
     far from contemptible. A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music
     of consummate prose, is an attitude and an achievement that will
     help many men to bear with more resignation the burden of our

How wonderfully, again, he portrays the Hamlet doubts of Anatole France,
when, speaking of his bust, he says: "It is the face of a soldier ready
to die for a flag in which he does not entirely believe." And he goes

     He looks out at you like a veteran of the lost cause of intellect,
     to whose soul the trumpet of defeat strikes with as mournful and
     vehement a music as to that of Pascal himself, but who thinks that
     a wise man may be permitted to hearten himself up in evil days with
     an anecdote after the manner of his master Rabelais.

Kettle himself practised just such a gloom shot with gaiety. He did not,
however, share Anatole France's gaiety of unbelief. In some ways he was
more nearly akin to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, with his religion and his
love of the fine gesture. Had he been a Frenchman of an earlier
generation, he would have been famous for his talk, like Villiers, in
the cafés. Most people who knew him contend that he talked even better
than he wrote; but one gets a good enough example of his ruling mood and
attitude in the fine essay called _On Saying Good-bye._ Meditating on
life as "a sustained good-bye," he writes:

     Life is a cheap _table d'hôte_ in a rather dirty restaurant, with
     Time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.

     We were bewildered at school to be told that walking was a
     perpetual falling. But life is, in a far more significant way, a
     perpetual dying. Death is not an eccentricity, but a settled habit
     of the universe. The drums of to-day call to us, as they call to
     young Fortinbras in the fifth act of _Hamlet_, over corpses piled
     up in such abundance as to be almost ridiculous. We praise the
     pioneer, but we praise him on wrong grounds. His strength lies not
     in his leaning out to new things--that may be mere curiosity--but
     in his power to abandon old things. All his courage is a courage of

This meditativeness on the passing nature of things is one of the old
moods of mankind. Kettle, however, was one of the men of our time in
whom it has achieved imaginative expression. I remember his once saying,
in regard to some hostile criticisms that had been passed on his own
"power to abandon old things": "The whole world is nothing but the story
of a renegade. The bud is renegade to the tree, and the flower to the
bud, and the fruit to the flower." Though he rejoiced in change as a
politician, however, he bewaited the necessity of change as a
philosopher. His praise of death in the essay I have just quoted from is
the praise of something that will put an end to changes and goodbyes

     There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain
     our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death,
     normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without
     any of its horrors. The old woman--

an old woman previously mentioned who complained that "the only
bothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrong

     the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles
     beginning at the right end. We shall all bid our first real adieu
     to those brother-jesters of ours, Time; and Space; and though the
     handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat
     or defeat us. "However amusing the comedy may have been," wrote
     Pascal, "there is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a
     little dust in your face; and then all is over for ever." Blood
     there may be, but blood does not necessarily mean tragedy. The
     wisdom of humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we may have
     good lines and a timely exit; but, fine or feeble, there is comfort
     in breaking the parting word into its two significant halves, a
     Dieu. Since life has been a constant slipping from one good-bye to
     another, why should we fear that sole good-bye which promises to
     cancel all its forerunners?

There you have a passage which, in the light of events, seems strangely
prophetic. Kettle certainly got his "good lines" at Ginchy. He gave his
life greatly for his ideal of a free Ireland in a free Europe.

This suggests that underlying his Hamlet there was a man of action as
surely as there was a jester. He was a man with a genius for rising to
the occasion--for saying the fine word and doing the fine thing. He
compromised often, in accordance with his "realistic" view of things;
but he never compromised in his belief in the necessity of large and
European ideals in Ireland. He stood by all good causes, not as an
extremist, but as a helper somewhat disillusioned. But his
disillusionment never made him feeble in the middle of the fight. He was
the sworn foe of the belittlers of Ireland. One will get an idea of the
passion with which he fought for the traditional Ireland, as well as for
the Ireland of coming days, if one turns to his rhymed reply to a living
English poet who had urged the Irish to forget their history and gently
cease to be a nation. The last lines of this poem--_Reason in Rhyme_, as
he called it--are his testament to England no less than his call to
Europeanism is his testament to Ireland:

    Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease:
    Free, we are free to be your friend.
    And when you make your banquet, and we come.
    Soldier with equal soldier must we sit,
    Closing a battle, not forgetting it.
    With not a name to hide,
    This mate and mother of valiant "rebels" dead
    Must come with all her history on her head.
    We keep the past for pride:
    No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb:
    No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers,
    No rudest men who died
    To tear your flag down in the bitter years.
    But shall have praise, and three times thrice again,
    When at the table men shall drink with men.

That was Kettle's mood to the last. This was the mood that made him
regard with such horror the execution of Pearse and Connolly, and the
other leaders of the Dublin insurrection. He regarded these men as
having all but destroyed his dream of an Ireland enjoying the freedom
of Europe. But he did not believe that any English Government possessed
the right to be merciless in Ireland. The murder of Sheehy-Skeffington,
who was his brother-in-law, cast another shadow over his imagination
from which he never recovered. Only a week before he died he wrote to me
from France: "The Skeffington case oppresses me with horror." When I saw
him in the previous July, he talked like a man whose heart Easter Week
and its terrible retributions had broken. But there must have been
exaltation in those days just before his death, as one gathers from the
last, or all but the last, of his letters home:

     bombardment, destruction, and bloodshed are beyond all imagination,
     of leaving them--one on sick leave and one to take a staff job. I
     have chosen to stay with my comrades.

There at the end you have the grand gesture. There you have the "good
lines" that Kettle had always desired.



It would not have been easy a few years ago to foresee the achievement
was meant for mankind. Yet, on reading Mr. Squire's collected poems in
_Poems: First Series_, it is difficult not to admit that it was to write
serious verse even more than parody and political epigram that he was

so that we can follow the development of his powers and see him, as it
seemed to be labouring on unaccustomed wings towards the ether. What
other living poet has ever given a poem such a title as _Antinomies on
a Railway Station?_ What other has examined himself with the same X-rays
sort of realism as Mr. Squire has done in _The Mind of Man?_ The
see the same mood dominant even in the _Ode: In a Restaurant_, where the
poet suddenly breaks out:--

    Soul! This life is very strange,
    And circumstances very foul
    Attend the belly's stormy howl.

from another room and die again:--

    Like keen-drawn threads of ink dropped into a glass
    Of water, which curl and relax and soften and pass.

The _Ode: In a Restaurant_ is perhaps the summit of Mr. Squire's writing
of mud." He has already escaped into bluer levels in the poem, _On a
friend Recently Dead_, written in the same or the following year. Here
common and prosaic things he now charges them with significance for the
sit and talk:--

    Capricious friend!
    Here in this room, not long before the end,
    Here in this very room six months ago
    You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so.
    Beyond the window shook the ash-tree bough,
    You saw books, pictures, as I see them now.
    The sofa then was blue, the telephone
    Listened upon the desk and softly shone
    Even as now the fire-irons in the grate,
    And the little brass pendulum swung, a seal of fate
    Stamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and door
    These same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying ...
    And then you never had a thought of dying.

How much richer, too, by this time Mr. Squire's imagery has become! His
observation is both exact and imaginative when he notes how--

      the frail ash-tree hisses
    With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain.

the brevity of man's life:--

    Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over.

It was not, however, till _The Lily of Malud_ appeared that readers of
and of lovely imagery is revealed in the triumphant close of this

    Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then,
    Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin,
    Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony,
    Chip and grunt and do not see.

      But each mother, silently,
    For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air,
    A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed
    With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies.
    And stare softly at the ember, and try to remember
    Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seen
    Like an early evening star when the sky is pale green:
    A quiet silver tower that climbed in an hour,
    Or a ghost like a flower, or a flower like a queen:
    Something holy in the past that came and did not last,
    But she knows not what it was.

from the idealist's disgust to the idealist's exaltation. He has learned
agonizing earth. In _The Stronghold_ he summons up a vision of "easeful
temptations on his way:--

    But, O, if you find that castle,
    Draw back your foot from the gateway,
    Let not its peace invite you,
    Let not its offerings tempt you,
    For faded and decayed like a garment,
    Love to a dust will have fallen,
    And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow,
    And hope will have gone with pain;
    And of all the throbbing heart's high courage
    Nothing will remain.

introspective work; they are also more moving. Few of the "in memoriam"
poems of the war touch the heart as does that poem, _To a Bulldog_, with
its moving close:--

    And though you run expectant as you always do
      To the uniforms we meet,
    You will never find Willy among all the soldiers
      Even in the longest street.

    Nor in any crowd: yet, strange and bitter thought,
      Even now were the old words said,
    If I tried the old trick, and said "Where's Willy?"
      You would quiver and lift your head.

      And wait for the word to spring.
    Sleep undisturbed: I shan't say that again,
      You innocent old thing.

    I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa,
      While you lie there asleep on the floor;
    For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of,
      And he won't be coming here any more.

Of the new poems in the book, one of the most beautiful is _August
Moon_. The last verses provide an excellent example of Mr. Squire's gift
both as a painter of things and a creator of atmosphere:--


    In the water, tranquilly severing, joining, gold:
    Three or four little plates of gold on the river:
    A little motion of gold between the dark images
    Of two tall posts that stand in the grey water.
    A woman's laugh and children going home.
    A whispering couple, leaning over the railings,
    And somewhere, a little splash as a dog goes in.

    I have always known all this, it has always been,
    There is no change anywhere, nothing will ever change.

    I heard a story, a crazy and tiresome myth.

    Listen! Behind the twilight a deep, low sound
    Like the constant shutting of very distant doors.

    Doors that are letting people over there
    Out to some other place beyond the end of the sky.

The contrast between the beauty of the stillness of the moonlit world
suggested so expressively in any other poem.

of an original mind, of an original imagination, Mr. Squire has now
taken a secure place among the men of genius of to-day. _Poems: First
Series_, is literary treasure so novel and so abundant that I can no
longer regret, as I once did, that Mr. Squire has said farewell to the
brilliant lighter-hearted moods of _Steps to Parnassus_ and _Tricks of
the Trade._ He has brought us gifts better even than those.




1857; the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says 1856; Mr. Conrad himself
declares in his reminiscences that he was "nine years old or
his teens. Before he began to write _Almayer's Folly_ he "had written
imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself in the stillness and
immobility of a daydream."

Quixote_ and Dickens, and a great deal of history, poetry, and travel.
his autobiography suggests the first prophecy of his career so markedly
putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved
soul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secret
and monstrous fear? Many people regard _Heart of Darkness_ as his
greatest story. _Heart of Darkness_ surely began to be written on the
blank space of the map of Africa and prophesied.

determined fashion certain sudden intuitions, much as great generals and
_Typhoon_ and _Youth_ he has written of the triumph of the spirit of man
indeed, that the strain of creative effort necessary in imaginative
the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape
Sybarite, is what Mr. Conrad has done.

curious paradox that some deathless quality in the dying hero forbids us

moralist and is in more ardent imaginative sympathy with the duties of
and public dreams of his revolutionary countrymen, and found salvation
as an artist in the companionship of simple men at sea.

Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order that
very spendthrift of treasure--treasure of recollection, observation,
until he published _Chance_ that the world in general began to recognize
did for strange demons and goblins--that population of grotesque
That is why one reads the volume called _Youth_ for the third and fourth


doing gives a new significance to things. Occasionally he leaves us
old sense of the word, possessed.

discovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of the
everything down to descriptions of the weather. It can hardly be
questioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology from
ghost story, however--and _The Turn of the Screw_ is one of the great
ghost stories of literature--he remains supremely master of his
and compass.

the psychological progress of Mr. Conrad's _Under Western Eyes_, for
Henry James's birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens,
_Heart of Darkness_ is symbolic of his method as a writer. He goes on
suggesting a mysterious something hidden, something on the horizon, a
the narrator of _Chance_ begins one of his sentences; and it is not in
scone. His sensitiveness only becomes matter for enthusiasm, however,

Some of his best work is contained in the two stories _Typhoon_ and
quarrel with fate told with the Conrad sensitiveness, the dark Conrad
risks all, it invades and defeats the darkness. _Typhoon_ was, I fancy,
not consciously intended as a dramatization of the struggle between the
an unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angels
watching the agonies of the steamer.

     given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded
     struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon.

of Mr. Conrad's heroic philosophy of life.

     He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his

     a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of
     and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of
     thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing
     very, very far: "All right."

cheer out of the dark comes that wonderful scene in _The Secret Sharer_
hearts pause as the moment approaches when the captain ventures his ship
soul. Mr. Conrad, as we see in _Freya of the Seven Isles_ and elsewhere,
otherwise to represent fate as a monstrous spider, unaccountable, often
the bitter end. His _Youth_ is just such a comedy of the peacockry of
adventure amid the traps and disasters of fate.

His longer books would hold us better if there were some overmastering
characters in them. In reading such a book as _Under Western Eyes_ we
has not been used to spell a magnificent man.

awkwardly as an elephant being steered backwards through a gate. He
is stating but the romance of the circumstances in which somebody
discovered it. In _Chance_ and _Lord Jim_ he is not content to tell us a
harbours in search of mysterious clues. But the fatigue of
epic of description.





Mr. Kipling is an author whom one has loved and hated a good deal. One
has loved him as the eternal schoolboy revelling in smells and bad
that have disappeared under the ground. One has detested him, on the
other hand, as the evangelist with the umbrella--the little Anglo-Indian
Prussian who sing hymns of hate and Hempire.

Luckily, this last Kipling is allowed an entirely free voice only in
verse. If one avoids _Barrack Room Ballads_ and _The Seven Seas_, one
misses the worst of him. He visits the prose stories, too, it is true,
but he does not dominate them in the same degree. Prose is his easy
chair, in which his genius as a humorist and anecdotalist can expand.
Verse is a platform that tempts him at one moment into the performance
of music-hall turns and the next into stump orations the spiritual home
of which is Hyde Park Corner rather than Parnassus. _Recessional_
surprises one like a noble recantation of nearly all the other verse Mr.
Kipling has written. But, apart from _Recessional_, most of his
political verse is a mere quickstep of bragging and sneering.

His prose, certainly, stands a third or a fourth reading, as his verse
does not. Even in a world which Henry James and Mr. Conrad have taught
to study motives and atmospheres with an almost scientific carefulness,
Mr. Kipling's "well-hammered anecdotes," as Mr. George Moore once
described the stories, still refuse to bore us.

At the same time, they make a different appeal to us from their appeal
of twenty or twenty-five years ago. In the early days, we
half-worshipped Mr. Kipling because he told us true stories. Now we
enjoy him because he tells us amusing stories. He conquered us at first
by making us think him a realist. He was the man who knew. We listened
to him like children drinking in travellers' tales. He bluffed us with
his cocksure way of talking about things, and by addressing us in a
mysterious jargon which we regarded as a proof of his intimacy with the
barrack-room, the engine-room, the racecourse, and the lives of
generals, Hindus, artists, and East-enders. That was Mr. Kipling's
trick. He assumed the realistic manner as Jacob assumed the hairy hands
of Esau. He compelled us to believe him by describing with elaborate
detail the setting of his story. And, having once got us in the mood of
belief, he proceeded to spin a yarn that as often as not was as unlike
life as _A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_. His characters are
inventions, not portraits. Even the dialects they speak--dialects which
used to be enthusiastically spoken of as masterly achievements of
realism--are ludicrously false to life, as a page of Mulvaney's or
Ortheris's talk will quickly make clear to any one who knows the real
thing. But with what humour the stories are told! Mr. Kipling does
undoubtedly possess the genius of humour and energy. There are false
touches in the boys' conversation in _The Drums of the Fore and Aft_,
but the humour and energy with which the progress of the regiment to the
frontier, its disgrace and its rescue by the drunken children, are
described, make it one of the most admirable short stories of our time.

His humour, it must be admitted, is akin to the picaresque. It is
amusing to reflect as one looks round the disreputable company of Mr.
Kipling's characters, that his work has now been given a place in the
library of law and order. When _Stalky and Co._ was published, parents
and schoolmasters protested in alarm, and it seemed doubtful for a time
whether Mr. Kipling was to be reckoned among the enemies of society. If
I am not mistaken, _The Spectator_ came down on the side of Mr. Kipling,
and his reputation as a respectable author was saved.

But the parents and the schoolmasters were not nervous without cause.
Mr. Kipling is an anarchist in his preferences to a degree that no bench
of bishops could approve. He is, within limits, on the side of the
Ishmaelites--the bad boys of the school, the "rips" of the regiment. His
books are the praise of the Ishmaelitish life in a world of law and
order. They are seldom the praise of a law and order life in a world of
law and order. Mr. Kipling demands only one loyalty (beyond mutual
loyalty) from his characters. His schoolboys may break every rule in the
place, provided that somewhere deep down in their hearts they are loyal
to the "Head." His pet soldiers may steal dogs or get drunk, or behave
brutally to their heart's content, on condition that they cherish a
sentimental affection for the Colonel. Critics used to explain this
aspect of Mr. Kipling's work by saying that he likes to show the heart
of good in things evil. But that is not really a characteristic of his
work. What he is most interested in is neither good nor evil but simply
roguery. As an artist, he is a barn rebel and lover of mischief. As a
politician he is on the side of the judges and the lawyers. It was his
politics and not his art that ultimately made him the idol of the
genteel world.


Everybody who is older than a schoolboy remembers how Mr. Rudyard
Kipling was once a modern. He might, indeed, have been described at the
time as a Post-Imperialist. Raucous and young, he had left behind him
the ornate Imperialism of Disraeli, on the one hand, and the cultured
Imperialism of Tennyson, on the other. He sang of Imperialism as it was,
or was about to be--vulgar and canting and bloody--and a world that was
preparing itself for an Imperialism that would be vulgar and canting and
bloody bade him welcome. In one breath he would give you an invocation
to Jehovah. In the next, with a dig in the ribs, he would be getting
round the roguish side of you with the assurance that:--

    If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg behind the keeper's back,
      If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line,
    If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack,
      You will understand this little song o' mine.

This jumble--which seems so curious nowadays--of delight in piety and
delight in twopence-coloured mischiefs came as a glorious novelty and
respite to the oppressed race of Victorians. Hitherto they had been
building up an Empire decently and in order; no doubt, many
reprehensible things were being done, but they were being done quietly:
outwardly, so far as was possible, a respectable front was preserved. It
was Mr. Kipling's distinction to tear off the mask of Imperialism as a
needless and irritating encumbrance; he had too much sense of
reality--too much humour, indeed--to want to portray Empire-builders as
a company of plaster saints. Like an _enfant terrible_, he was ready to
proclaim aloud a host of things which had, until then, been kept as
decorously in the dark as the skeleton in the family cupboard. The
thousand and one incidents of lust and loot, of dishonesty and
brutality and drunkenness--all of those things to which builders of
Empire, like many other human beings, are at times prone--he never
dreamed of treating as matters to be hushed up, or, apparently, indeed,
to be regretted. He accepted them quite frankly as all in the day's
work; there was even a suspicion of enthusiasm in the heartiness with
which he referred to them. Simple old clergymen, with a sentimental
vision of an Imperialism that meant a chain of mission-stations (painted
red) encircling the earth, suddenly found themselves called upon to sing
a new psalm:--

               Ow, the loot!
               Bloomin' loot!
    That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot!
      It's the same with dogs an' men,
      If you'd make 'em come again.
    Clap 'em forward with a Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot!
    Whoopee! Tear 'im, puppy! Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Loot! Loot!

Frankly, I wish Mr. Kipling had always written in this strain. It might
have frightened the clergymen away. Unfortunately, no sooner had the
old-fashioned among his readers begun to show signs of nervousness than
he would suddenly feel in the mood for a tune on his Old Testament harp,
and, taking it down, would twang from its strings a lay of duty. "Take
up," he would sing--

    Take up the White Man's burden,
      Send forth the best ye breed,
    Go, bind your sons to exile,
      To serve your captives' need;
    To wait in heavy harness
      On fluttered folk and wild--
    Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
      Half-devil and half-child.

Little Willie, in the tracts, scarcely dreamed of a thornier path of
self-sacrifice. No wonder the sentimentalists were soon all dancing to
the new music--music which, perhaps, had more of the harmonium than the
harp in it, but was none the less suited on that account to its
revivalistic purpose.

At the same time, much as we may have been attracted to Mr. Kipling in
his Sabbath moods, it was with what we may call his Saturday night moods
that he first won the enthusiasm of the young men. They loved him for
his bad language long before he had ever preached a sermon or written a
leading article in verse. His literary adaptation of the unmeasured talk
of the barrack-room seemed to initiate them into a life at once more
real and more adventurous than the quiet three-meals-a-day ritual of
their homes. He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still more
exciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God. Every oath he
loosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; for
his characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new in
literature. One remembers the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which very
young men used to repeat to each other lines like the one in _The Ballad
of "The Bolivar_," which runs--


Not that anybody knew, or cared, what "rigging the winches aft" meant.
It was the familiar and fearless commerce with hell that seemed to give
literature a new: horizon. Similarly, it was the eternal flames in the
background that made the tattered figure of Gunga Din, the
water-carrier, so favourite a theme with virgins and boys. With what
delight they would quote the verse:--

     So I'll meet 'im later on,
     At the place where 'e is gone--
    Where it's always double drill and no canteen;
     'E'll be squattin' on the coals,
     Givin' drink to poor damned souls.
    An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!

Ever since the days of Aucassin, indeed, who praised hell as the place
whither were bound the men of fashion and the good scholars and the
courteous fair ladies, youth has taken a strange, heretical delight in
hell and damnation. Mr. Kipling offered new meats to the old taste.

    Gentlemen-rankers, out on the spree,
    Damned from here to eternity,

began to wear halos in the undergraduate imagination. Those "seven men
from out of Hell" who went

    Rolling down the Ratcliff Road,
    Drunk, and raising Cain,

were men with whom youth would have rejoiced to shake hands. One even
wrote bad verses oneself in those days, in which one loved to picture
oneself as

    Cursed with the curse of Reuben,
    Seared with the brand of Cain,

though so far one's most desperate adventure into reality had been the
consumption of a small claret hot with a slice of lemon in it in a
back-street public-house. Thus Mr. Kipling brought a new violence and
wonder, a sort of debased Byronism, into the imagination of youth; at
least, he put a crown upon the violence and wonder which youth had long
previously discovered for itself in penny dreadfuls and in its rebellion
against conventions and orthodoxies.

It may be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr.
Kipling's genius as a poet. He does something more in his verse, it may
be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the
language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature. That is quite
true. He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which he
talked adventure and talked "shop" to a generation that was
exceptionally greedy for both. He, more than any other writer of his
time, set to banjo-music the restlessness of the young man who would not
stay at home--the romance of the man who lived and laboured at least a
thousand miles away from the home of his fathers. He excited the
imagination of youth with deft questions such as--

    Do you know the pile-built village, where the sago-dealers trade--
    Do you know the reek of fish and wet bamboo?

If you did not know all about the sago-dealers and the fish and the wet
bamboo, Mr. Kipling had a way of making you feel unpardonably ignorant;
and the moral of your ignorance always was that you must "go--go--go
away from here." Hence an immense increase in the number of passages
booked to the colonies. Mr. Kipling, in his verse, simply acted as a
gorgeous poster-artist of Empire. And even those who resisted his call
to adventure were hypnotized by his easy and lavish manner of talking
"shop." He could talk the "shop" of the army, the sea, the engine-room,
the art-school, the charwoman; he was a perfect young Bacon of
omniscience. How we thrilled at the unintelligible jingle of the _Anchor
Song_, with its cunning blend of "shop" and adventure:--

      Heh! Tally on. Aft and walk away with her!
      Handsome to the cathead, now! O tally on the fall!
    Stop, seize, and fish, and easy on the davit-guy.
      Up, well up, the fluke of her, and inboard haul!

    Well, ah, fare you well for the Channel wind's took hold of us,
      Choking down our voices as we snatch the gaskets free,
            And its blowing up for night.
            And she's dropping light on light,
    And she's snorting and she's snatching for a breath of open sea.

The worst of Mr. Kipling is that, in verse like this, he is not only
omniscient; he is knowing. He mistakes knowingness for knowledge. He
even mistakes it for wisdom at times, as when he writes, not of ships,
but of women. His knowing attitude to women makes some of his
verse--not very much, to be quite fair--absolutely detestable. _The
Ladies_ seems to me the vulgarest poem written by a man of genius in our
time. As one reads it, one feels how right Oscar Wilde was when he said
that Mr. Kipling had seen many strange things through keyholes. Mr.
Kipling's defenders may reply that, in poems like this, he is merely
dramatizing the point of view of the barrack-room. But it is unfair to
saddle the barrack-room with responsibility for the view of women which
appears here and elsewhere in the author's verse. One is conscious of a
kind of malign cynicism in Mr. Kipling's own attitude, as one reads _The
Young British Soldier_, with a verse like--

    If your wife should go wrong with a comrade, be loth
    Make 'im take 'er and keep 'er; that's hell for them both,
      And you're shut o' the curse of a soldier.

That seems to me fairly to represent the level of Mr. Kipling's poetic
wisdom in regard to the relations between the sexes. It is the logical
result of the keyhole view of life. And, similarly, his Imperialism is a
mean and miserable thing because it is the result of a keyhole view of
humanity. Spiritually, Mr. Kipling may be said to have seen thousands of
miles and thousands of places through keyholes. In him, wide wanderings
have produced the narrow mind, and an Empire has become as petty a thing
as the hoard in a miser's garret. Many of his poems are simply miser's
shrieks when the hoard seems to be threatened. He cannot even praise the
flag of his country without a shrill note of malice:--

  Winds of the world, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro--
  And what should they know of England who only England know?

Mr. Kipling is a good judge of yelping.

poetry. His verses have brazen "go" and lively colour and something of




or that Lamb's plays are better than his essays. Mr. Hardy has
the tragic vision which is expressed in _Jude the Obscure_. He is not by
midge-like compared with his sense of everlasting frustration. The
conceptions in his novels are infinitely more poetic than the
conceptions in his verse. In _Tess_ and _Jude_ destiny presides with
something of the grandeur of the ancient gods. Except in _The Dynasts_
verse. And even in _The Dynasts_, majestic as the scheme of it is, there
in the poetry.

Truth to tell, Mr. Hardy is neither sufficiently articulate nor
Thus he writes in _I Found Her Out There_ of one who:--

          would sigh at the tale
    Of sunk Lyonesse
    As a wind-tugged tress
    Flapped her cheek like a flail.

There could not be an uglier and more prosaic exaggeration than is
word "domiciled" in the passage in the same poem about--

          that western sea,
    As it swells and sobs,
    Where she once domiciled.

called _At an Inn_:--

    When we, as strangers, sought
      Their catering care,
    Veiled smiles bespoke their thought
      Of what we were.

    They warmed as they opined
      Us more than friends--
    That we had all resigned
      For love's dear ends.

"Catering care" is an appalling phrase.

I do not wish to over-emphasize the significance of flaws of this kind.
But, at a time when all the world is eager to do honour to Mr. Hardy's
poems, it is surely well to refrain from doing equal honour to his
faults. We shall not appreciate the splendid interpretation of earth in
_The Return of the Native_ more highly for persuading ourselves that:--

    Intermissive aim at the thing sufficeth,

is a line of good poetry. Similarly the critic, if he is to enjoy the
best of Mr. Hardy, must also be resolute not to shut his eyes to the
worst in such a verse as that with which _A Broken Appointment_

    You did not come,
    And marching time drew on, and wore me numb,--
    Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
    Than that I thus found lacking in your make
    That high compassion which can overbear
    Reluctance for pure loving kindness' sake
    You did not come.

There are hints of the grand style of lyric poetry in these lines, but
phrases like "in your make" and "as the hope-hour stroked its sum" are
discords that bring it tumbling to the levels of Victorian commonplace.

What one does bless Mr. Hardy for, however, both in his verse and in his
prose, is his bleak sincerity. He writes out of the reality of his
experience. He has a temperament sensitive beyond that of all but a few
recent writers to the pain and passion of human beings. Especially is he
sensitive to the pain and passion of frustrated lovers. At least half
his poems, I fancy, are poems of frustration. And they, hold us under
the spell of reality like a tragedy in a neighbour's house, even when
they leave us most mournful over the emptiness of the world. One can see
how very mournful Mr. Hardy's genius is if one compares it with that of
Browning, his master in the art of the dramatic lyric. Browning is also
a poet of frustrated lovers. One can remember poem after poem of his
with a theme that might easily have served for Mr. Hardy--_Too Late,
Cristina, The Lost Mistress, The Last Ride Together, The Statue and the
Bust_, to name a few. But what a sense of triumph there is in Browning's
tragedies! Even when he writes of the feeble-hearted, as in _The Statue
and the Bust_, he leaves us with the feeling that we are in the presence
of weakness in a world in which courage prevails. His world is a place
of opulence, not of poverty. Compare _The Last Ride Together_ with Mr.
Hardy's _The Phantom Horsewoman_, and you will see a vast energy and
beauty issuing from loss in the one, while in the other there is little
but a sad shadow. To have loved even for an hour is with Browning to
live for ever after in the inheritance of a mighty achievement. To have
loved for an hour is, in Mr. Hardy's imagination, to have deepened the
sadness even more than the beauty of one's memories.

Not that Mr. Hardy's is quite so miserable a genius as is commonly
supposed. It is false to picture him as always on his knees before the
grave-worm. His faith in beauty and joy may be only a thin flame, but it
is never extinguished. His beautiful lyric, _I Look into my Glass_, is
the cry of a soul dark but not utterly darkened:--

    I look into my glass,
    And view my wasting skin,
    And say: "Would God, it came to pass
    My heart had shrunk as thin!"

    For then, I, undistrest,
    By hearts grown cold to me,
    Could lonely wait my endless rest
    With equanimity.

    But Time, to make me grieve,
    Part steals, lets part abide;
    And shakes this fragile frame at eve
    With throbbings of noontide.

That is certainly worlds apart from the unquenchable joy of Browning's
"All the breath and the bloom of the world in the bag of one bee"; but
it is also far removed from the "Lo! you may always end it where you
will" of _The City of Dreadful Night_. And despair is by no means
triumphant in what is perhaps the most attractive of all Mr. Hardy's
poems, _The Oxen_:--

    Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock,
      "Now they are all on their knees,"
    An elder said as we sat in a flock
      By the embers in hearthside ease.

    We pictured the meek mild creatures where
      They dwelt in their strawy pen,
    Nor did it occur to one of us there
      To doubt they were kneeling then.

    So fair a fancy few would weave
      In these years! Yet, I feel,
    If some one said on Christmas Eve,
      "Come; see the oxen kneel

    "In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
      Our childhood used to know,"
    I should go with him in the gloom,
      Hoping it might be so.

The mood of faith, however--or, rather, of delight in the memory of
faith--is not Mr. Hardy's prevailing mood. At the same time, his unfaith
relates to the duration of love rather than to human destiny. He
believes in "the world's amendment." He can enter upon a war without
ironical doubts, as we see in the song _Men who March Away_. More than
this, he can look forward beyond war to the coming of a new patriotism
of the world. "How long," he cries, in a poem written some years ago:--

    How long, O ruling Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels,
    Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these,
    That are as puppets in a playing hand?
    When shall the saner softer polities
    Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land,
    And Patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
    Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?

But, perhaps, his characteristic attitude to war is to be found, not in
lines like these, but in that melancholy poem, _The Souls of the Slain_,
in which the souls of the dead soldiers return to their country and
question a "senior soul-flame" as to how their friends and relatives
have kept their doughty deeds in remembrance:--

    "And, General, how hold out our sweethearts,
        Sworn loyal as doves?"
      "Many mourn; many think
      It is not unattractive to prink
    Them in sable for heroes. Some fickle and fleet hearts
        Have found them new loves."

    "And our wives?" quoth another, resignedly,
        "Dwell they on our deeds?"
      "Deeds of home; that live yet
      Fresh as new--deeds of fondness or fret,
    Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly,
        These, these have their heeds."

Mr. Hardy has too bitter a sense of reality to believe much in the glory
of war. His imagination has always been curiously interested in
soldiers, but that is more because they have added a touch of colour to
the tragic game of life than because he is on the side of the military
show. One has only to read _The Dynasts_ along with _Barrack-room
Ballads_ to see that the attitude of Mr. Hardy to war is the attitude of
the brooding artist in contrast with that of the music-hall politician.
Not that Mr. Kipling did not tell us some truths about the fate of our
fellows, but he related them to an atmosphere that savoured of beer and
tobacco rather than of eternity. The real world to Mr. Hardy is the
world of ancient human things, in which war has come to be a hideous
irrelevance. That is what he makes emphatically clear in _In the Time of
the Breaking of Nations_:--

    Only a man harrowing clods
      In a slow silent walk
    With an old horse that stumbles and nods
      Half asleep as they stalk.

    Only thin smoke without flame
      From the heaps of couch grass:
    Yet this will go onward the same
      Though Dynasties pass.

    Yonder a maid and her wight
      Come whispering by;
    War's annals will fade into night
      Ere their story die

It may be thought, on the other hand, that Mr. Hardy's poems about war
are no more expressive of tragic futility than his poems about love.
Futility and frustration are ever-recurring themes in both. His lovers,
like his soldiers, rot in the grave defeated of their glory. Lovers are
always severed both in life and in death:--

    Rain on the windows, creaking doors,
      With blasts that besom the green,
    And I am here, and you are there,
      And a hundred miles between!

In _Beyond the Last Lamp_ we have the same mournful cry over severance.
There are few sadder poems than this with its tristful refrain, even in
the works of Mr. Hardy. It is too long to quote in full, but one may
give the last verses of this lyric of lovers in a lane:--

    When I re-trod that watery way
    Some hours beyond the droop of day,
    Still I found pacing there the twain
      Just as slowly, just as sadly,
      Heedless of the night and rain.
    One could but wonder who they were
    And what wild woe detained them there.

    Though thirty years of blur and blot
    Have slid since I beheld that spot,
    And saw in curious converse there
      Moving slowly, moving sadly,
      That mysterious tragic pair,
    Its olden look may linger on--
    All but the couple; they have gone.

    Whither? Who knows, indeed.... And yet
    To me, when nights are weird and wet,
    Without those comrades there at tryst
      Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,
      That love-lane does not exist.
    There they seem brooding on their pain,
    And will, while such a lane remain.

And death is no kinder than life to lovers:--

    I shall rot here, with those whom in their day
          You never knew.
    And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay,
          Met not my view,
    Will in yon distant grave-place ever neighbour you.

    No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower,
          While earth endures,
    Will fall on my mound and within the hour
          Steal on to yours;
    One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

Mr. Hardy, fortunately, has the genius to express the burden and the
mystery even of a world grey with rain and commonplace in achievement.
There is a beauty of sorrow in these poems in which "life with the sad,
seared face" mirrors itself without disguise. They bring us face to face
with an experience intenser than our own. There is nothing common in the
tragic image of dullness in _A Common-place Day_:--

        The day is turning ghost,
    And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively,
        To join the anonymous host
    Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe,
        To one of like degree....

        Nothing of tiniest worth
        Since the pale corpse-like birth
    Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays--
        Dullest of dull-hued days!

        Wanly upon the panes
    The rain slides, as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet
        Here, while Day's presence wanes,
        He wakens my regret.

In the poem which contains these verses the emotion of the poet gives
words often undistinguished an almost Elizabethan rhythm. Mr. Hardy,
indeed, is a poet who often achieves music of verses, though he seldom
achieves music of phrase.

We must, then, be grateful without niggardliness for the gift of his
verse. On the larger canvas of his prose we find a vision more abundant,
more varied, more touched with humour. But his poems are the genuine
confessions of a soul, the meditations of a man of genius, brooding not
without bitterness but with pity on the paths that lead to the grave,
and the figures that flit along them so solitarily and so ineffectually.


In the last poem in his last book, _Moments of Vision_, Mr. Hardy
meditates on his own immortality, as all men of genius probably do at
one time or another. _Afterwards_, the poem in which he does so, is
interesting, not only for this reason, but because it contains
implicitly a definition and a defence of the author's achievement in
literature. The poem is too long to quote in full, but the first three
verses will be sufficient to illustrate what I have said:

    When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
      And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
    Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the people say:

      The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
    Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think:
      "To him this must have been a familiar sight"?

    If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
      When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
    Will they say: "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,

Even without the two other verses, we have here a remarkable attempt on
the part of an artist to paint a portrait, as it were, of his own

Mr. Hardy's genius is essentially that of a man who "used to notice such
things" as the fluttering of the green leaves in May, and to whom the
swift passage of a night-jar in the twilight has "been a familiar
sight." He is one of the most sensitive observers of nature who have
written English prose. It may even be that he will be remembered longer
for his studies of nature than for his studies of human nature. His days
are among his greatest characters, as in the wonderful scene on the
heath in the opening of _The Return of the Native_. He would have
written well of the world, one can imagine, even if he had found it
uninhabited. But his sensitiveness is not merely sensitiveness of the
eye: it is also sensitiveness of the heart. He has, indeed, that
hypersensitive sort of temperament, as the verse about the hedgehog
suggests, which is the victim at once of pity and of a feeling of
hopeless helplessness. Never anywhere else has there been such a world
of pity put into a quotation as Mr. Hardy has put into that line and a
half from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, which he placed on the
title-page of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_:--

    Poor wounded name, my bosom as a bed
    Shall lodge thee!

In the use to which he put these words Mr. Hardy may be said to have
added to the poetry of Shakespeare. He gave them a new imaginative
context, and poured his own heart into them. For the same helpless pity
which he feels for dumb creatures he feels for men and women:

    ... He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
    But he could do little for them.

It is the spirit of pity brooding over the landscape in Mr. Hardy's
books that makes them an original and beautiful contribution to
literature, in spite of his endless errors as an artist.

His last book is a reiteration both of his genius and of his errors. As
we read the hundred and sixty or so poems it contains we get the
impression of genius presiding over a multitude of errors. There are not
half a dozen poems in the book the discovery of which, should the
author's name be forgotten, would send the critics in quest of other
work from the same magician's hand. One feels safe in prophesying
immortality for only two, _The Oxen_ and _In Time of "the Breaking of
Nations"_; and these have already appeared in the selection of the
author's poems published in the Golden Treasury Series. The fact that
the entirely new poems contain nothing on the plane of immortality,
however, does not mean that _Moments of Vision_ is a book of verse about
which one has the right to be indifferent. No writer who is so concerned
as Mr. Hardy with setting down what his eyes and heart have told him can
be regarded with indifference. Mr. Hardy's art is lame, but it carries
the burden of genius. He may be a stammerer as a poet, but he stammers
in words of his own concerning a vision of his own. When he notes the
bird flying past in the dusk, "like an eyelid's soundless blink," he
does not achieve music, but he chronicles an experience, not merely
echoes one, with such exact truth as to make it immortally a part of all
experience. There is nothing borrowed or secondhand, again, in Mr.
Hardy's grim vision of the yew-trees in the churchyard by moonlight in

    The yew-tree arms, glued hard to the stiff, stark air,
      Hung still in the village sky as theatre-scenes.

Mr. Hardy may not enable us to hear the music which is more than the
music of the earth, but he enables us to see what he saw. He
communicates his spectacle of the world. He builds his house lopsided,
harsh, and with the windows in unusual places; but it is his own house,
the house of a seer, of a personality. That is what we are aware of in
such a poem as _On Sturminster Foot Bridge_, in which perfect and
precise observation of nature is allied to intolerably prosaic
utterance. The first verse of this poem runs:

    Reticulations creep upon the slack stream's face
        When the wind skims irritably past.
    The current clucks smartly into each hollow place
    That years of flood have scrabbled in the pier's sodden base;
      The floating-lily leaves rot fast.

One could make as good music as that out of a milk-cart. One would
accept such musicless verse only from a man of genius. But even here Mr.
Hardy takes us home with him and makes us stand by his side and listen
to the clucking stream. He takes us home with him again in the poem
called _Overlooking the River Stour_, which begins:

    The swallows flew in the curves of an eight
            Above the river-gleam
            In the wet June's last beam:
    Like little crossbows animate,
    The swallows flew in the curves of an eight
            Above the river-gleam.

    Planing up shavings made of spray,
            A moor-hen darted out
            From the bank thereabout.
    And through the stream-shine ripped her way;
    Planing up shavings made of spray,
            A moor-hen darted out.

In this poem we find observation leaping into song in one line and
hobbling into a hard-wrought image in another. Both the line in which
the first appears, however--

    Like little crossbows animate,

and the line in which the second happens--

    Planing up shavings made of spray,

equally make us feel how watchful and earnest an observer is Mr. Hardy.
He is a man, we realize, to whom bird and river, heath and stone, road
and field and tree, mean immensely more than to his fellows. I do not
suggest that he observes nature without bias--that he mirrors the
procession of visible things with the delight of a child or a lyric
poet. He makes nature his mirror as well as himself a mirror of nature.
He colours it with all his sadness, his helplessness, his (if one may
invent the word and use it without offence) warpedness. If I am not
mistaken, he once compared a bleak morning in _The Woodlanders_ to the
face of a still-born baby. He loves to dwell on the uncomfortable moods
of nature--on such things as:--

      ... the watery light
    Of the moon in its old age;

concerning which moon he goes on to describe how:

    Green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed
    Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave.

This, I fear, is a failure, but it is a failure in a common mood of the
author's. It is a mood in which nature looks out at us, almost ludicrous
in its melancholy. In such a poem as that from which I have quoted, it
is as though we saw nature with a drip on the end of its nose. Mr.
Hardy's is something different from a tragic vision. It is a desolate,
disheartening, and, in a way, morbid vision. We wander with him too
often under--

      Gaunt trees that interlace,
    Through whose flayed fingers I see too clearly
      The nakedness of the place.

And Mr. Hardy's vision of the life of men and women transgresses
similarly into a denial of gladness. His gloom, we feel, goes too far.
It goes so far that we are tempted at times to think of it as a
factitious gloom. He writes a poem called _Honeymoon Time at an Inn_,
and this is the characteristic atmosphere in which he introduces us to
the bridegroom and bride:

    At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn,
        The moon was at the window-square,
      Deedily brooding in deformed decay--
      The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze;
        So the moon looked in there.

There are no happy lovers or happy marriages in Mr. Hardy's world. Such
people as are happy would not be happy if only they knew the truth. Many
of Mr. Hardy's poems are, as I have already said, dramatic lyrics on the
pattern invented by Robert Browning--short stories in verse. But there
is a certain air of triumph even in Browning's tragic figures. Mr.
Hardy's figures are the inmates of despair. Browning's love-poems belong
to heroic literature. Mr. Hardy's love-poems belong to the literature of
downheartedness. Browning's men and women are men and women who have had
the courage of their love, or who are shown at least against a
background of Browning's own courage. Mr. Hardy's men and women do not
know the wild faith of love. They have not the courage even of their
sins. They are helpless as fishes in a net--a scarcely rebellious
population of the ill-matched and the ill-starred.

Many of the poems in his last book fail through a lack of imaginative
energy. It is imaginative energy that makes the reading of a great
tragedy like _King Lear_ not a depressing, but an exalting experience.
But is there anything save depression to be got from reading such a poem
as _A Caged Goldfinch_:--

    Within a churchyard, on a recent grave,
      I saw a little cage
    That jailed a goldfinch. All was silence, save
      Its hops from stage to stage.

    There was inquiry in its wistful eye.
      And once it tried to sing;
    Of him or her who placed it there, and why,
      No one knew anything.

    True, a woman was found drowned the day ensuing,
      And some at times averred
    The grave to be her false one's, who when wooing
      Gave her the bird.

Apart even from the ludicrous associations which modern slang has given
the last phrase, making it look like a queer pun, this poem seems to one
to drive sorrow over the edge of the ridiculous. That goldfinch has
surely escaped from a Max-Beerbohm parody. The ingenuity with which Mr.
Hardy plots tragic situations for his characters in some of his other
poems is, indeed, in repeated danger of misleading him into parody. One
of his poems tells, for instance, how a stranger finds an old man
scrubbing a Statue of Liberty in a city square, and, hearing he does it
for love, hails him as "Liberty's knight divine." The old man confesses
that he does not care twopence for Liberty, and declares that he keeps
the statue clean in memory of his beautiful daughter, who had sat as a
model for it--a girl fair in fame as in form. In the interests of his
plot and his dismal philosophy, Mr. Hardy identifies the stranger with
the sculptor of the statue, and dismisses us with his blighting aside on
the old man's credulous love of his dead daughter:

    Answer I gave not. Of that form
      The carver was I at his side;
    His child my model, held so saintly,
         Grand in feature.
         Gross in nature,
      In the dens of vice had died.

This is worse than optimism.

It is only fair to say that, though poem after poem--including the one
about the fat young man whom the doctors gave only six months to live
unless he walked a great deal, and who therefore was compelled to refuse
a drive in the poet's phaeton, though night was closing over the
heath--dramatizes the meaningless miseries of life, there is also to be
found in some of the poems a faint sunset-glow of hope, almost of faith.
There have been compensations, we realize in _I Travel as a Phantom
Now_, even in this world of skeletons. Mr. Hardy's fatalism concerning
God seems not very far from faith in God in that beautiful Christmas
poem, _The Oxen_. Still, the ultimate mood of the poems is not faith. It
is one of pity, so despairing as to be almost nihilism. There is mockery
in it without the merriment of mockery. The general atmosphere of the
poems, it seems to me, is to be found perfectly expressed in the last
three lines of one of the poems, which is about a churchyard, a dead
woman, a living rival, and the ghost of a soldier:

    There was a cry by the white-flowered mound,
    There was a laugh from underground,
    There was a deeper gloom around.

How much of the art of Thomas Hardy is suggested in those lines! The
laugh from underground, the deeper gloom--are they not all but
omnipresent throughout his later and greatest work? The war could not
deepen such pessimism. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hardy's war poetry is
more cheerful, because more heroic, than his poetry about the normal
world. Destiny was already crueller than any war-lord. The Prussian, to
such an imagination, could be no more than a fly--a poisonous fly--on
the wheel of destiny's disastrous car.

*** End of this Doctrine Publishing Corporation Digital Book "Old and New Masters" ***

Doctrine Publishing Corporation provides digitized public domain materials.
including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.

We also ask that you:

use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.

to Doctrine Publishing's system: If you are conducting research on machine
translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a

Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe.

About ISYS® Search Software
search solutions for business and government.  The company's award-winning
software suite offers a broad range of search, navigation and discovery
solutions for desktop search, intranet search, SharePoint search and embedded
search applications.  ISYS has been deployed by thousands of organizations
enforcement, financial services, healthcare and recruitment.